Nothing But Money (32 page)
Authors: Greg B. Smith
Besides wondering about all the ramifications of losing one’s esophagus, the most common question that occurred to people when confronted with Claudio and the drain cleaner was simple—why had this occurred? Was it possible he feared prison so much he was willing to ingest sulfuric acid in the hopes that he would somehow survive but be so maimed as to avoid spending any time behind bars? If that were true, he couldn’t have thought too much about what life would be like without an esophagus. Ultimately the doctors would have to sew his stomach directly into his windpipe, which would allow him to survive, in a way, but would make his life an endless misery. And how could he have been sure it wouldn’t just kill him? Or perhaps he didn’t care.
Perhaps it was a suicide attempt. It was likely that Claudio was depressed. The government had charged him with numerous counts of securities fraud and was trying to seize every dollar he owned. They even put a lien on his thirty-two-foot Powerplay speedboat. He was on several tapes making threats. He and Eugene Lombardo were practically the stars of the FBI’s show. They had both implicated several members of organized crime. Even if he got a good plea deal and did a few years in prison, how could he walk the streets again without thinking that someday some guy would come up behind him and put five in his brain? Perhaps getting the job done right now would save everyone a whole lot of aggravation.
The other scenario was that someone did this to him. The FBI was very interested in this possibility and asked a lot of questions. This wasn’t your usual Wall Street fraud case, after all.
Only Claudio knew for sure, and he was no longer able to speak.
Jimmy Labate, Sal Piazza and Jeffrey Pokross were sitting in the conference room at DMN talking about deals. As was always the case, the smallest guy in the room—Jeffrey Pokross—was the guy doing the most talking. He was a catalog of schemes. Every day he thought up new ways to steal. His newest brainstorm involved bribing the guys who ran some of the union locals to dump their members’ pension funds into stock DMN was pushing. He wanted to start with the pension fund of Production Local 100, a union he believed would soon be available as a kind of piggy bank. It was controlled by a guy they knew, Frank Persico. Pokross had noticed a change regarding Frank Persico. When Persico’s name first came up, it was no big deal. Lately—or more precisely, after the Meyers Pollock arrests—Pokross noticed that Robert Lino and Jimmy Labate would get worked up when Frank Persico’s name popped up.
Jimmy stood up and said, “Just a second.” He walked over and turned up CNBC on the TV in the corner.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s better.”
After Robert Lino’s cousin, Frank, and all the rest were arrested in the Meyers Pollock mess, for some reason DMN Capital had managed to stay off the radar. That was somewhat surprising, considering that Jeffrey Pokross and Robert Lino had spent a considerable amount of time dealing with Meyers Pollock in the months preceding the arrests. Yet DMN Capital did not appear to interest the FBI. It seemed that Robert Lino, Jeffrey Pokross, Sal Piazza, Jimmy Labate—all of them had dodged the bullet. That was good news, because the market was taking off.
Tech stocks were the mantra. The profits were mind-boggling. The Internet was spawning dozens of new company concepts each week. Everybody was dropping run-of-the-mill jobs with real paychecks to sign up for a start-up with not much in the way of wages but plenty in the way of stock options. You could sell anything by just plopping a dot-com on to the end of your idea. You wanted to use the Internet to sell pet supplies? Kitchen cabinets? Truck parts? No problem. In fact, you could now sell anything you wanted through the Internet. Sure it was really just another way to advertise and attract buyers. Who cared? Just create a company and you’re off.
In so many ways, the stars had aligned for the forces of DMN Capital. The day they busted everybody at Meyers Pollock, the feds eliminated DMN’s competition. Now DMN could sell everything. Spaceplex was a lousy amusement park on Long Island. Beachport was a bunch of ice shows. Country World was a ratty old casino in Colorado. Monolite supposedly made parts for semis—supposedly. Take ’em public, make a mint. Watch the profits soar. Sure you could lose money, but mostly you didn’t. Nobody had seen anything quite like it. Certainly not the gangsters of Wall Street, who knew they had a good thing going as the market took off for the heavens.
That didn’t mean it couldn’t all go to hell.
This was the thought that ate away at Jimmy Labate when he turned up the TV in the conference room. Since the Meyers Pollock busts, he had become increasingly paranoid. Every time Pokross would begin discussing investing the detective’s union pension funds or Frank Persico over at Production Local 100, Jimmy would jump up and turn up the TV. Jimmy would tell anybody who asked that there were bugs everywhere, FBI agents on every corner and, more likely than not, an informant in their midst. He couldn’t prove it. He just sensed it.
He was particularly sensitive about Frank Persico. Down at DMN Capital on Liberty Street, Robert Lino and Jeffrey Pokross understood one mission above all when it came to keeping the money flowing—keep the contraption off the regulatory radar. Now that Meyers Pollock had collapsed and DMN was free and clear, they needed to keep things low-key. Keep the wiseguys behind oak veneer walls. Keep the investors believing that they were dealing with graduates of the Wharton School, not graduates of the Brooklyn waterfront. Robert Lino and Jeffrey Pokross both knew that Frank Persico was going to make that mission a challenge.
Frank Persico was the cousin of Alfonse Persico, the more-or-less boss of the Colombo crime group. Alfonse was the son of Carmine Persico, the real boss of the family, but Carmine was behind bars for the rest of his life and he’d designated as acting boss his son, a college graduate who’d once had his minions shoot a guy in the testicles for messing around with his wife. Cousin Frank Persico was Allie Boy’s official designate on Wall Street, and he’d really gotten into the role in a serious way. For instance, though Frank looked like a Teamsters foreman with his no-neck fireplug physique and nylon jogging suit wardrobe, Frank himself was an actual registered stockbroker legally approved to buy and sell stocks to the trusting public.
How Frank Persico had obtained his license was not clear. In the early 1990s, regulators had discovered a number of individuals like Frank who’d paid others to take the exam under their name. Some—but not all—were caught. Frank—whose only experience eligible for listing on a résumé was “trucking assistant”—had some made it through the Series 7 exam and was now listed as a registered broker for one esteemed brokerage house after another: Joseph Stephens, William Scott, White Rock, State Street. All sounded quite legitimate. All were as rancid as fish left lying too long in the sun. It was a mystery worth investigation that would remain unsolved why anyone would buy stock from Frank Persico, but many an investor did.
Frank Persico’s real job was to represent the interests of the Colombo crime family and his cousin, Alfonse, and when Jeffrey Pokross was looking for brokers to push one of his bogus stocks, he’d heard only good things about Frank and his registered brokers’ license. Jeffrey had asked Frank to come aboard to help hype Beachport stock, and at first, the marriage of the Bonanno and Colombo families had gone swimmingly.
Then the marriage careened toward divorce. Persico had a problem with his emotions, plus he was not too swift with numbers. He blew up his relationship at William Scott, so Lino, Labate, Piazza and Pokross discussed putting him at another brokerage they controlled, First Liberty. They put him in there, and he helped them push a deal called 1-800--TRAVEL. Usually these things work out well for all concerned. This time it was different. After Persico booked the stock into client accounts, the deal went up for about a day or two and then went straight down to $1.
Persico was furious, and because the deal came from a Bonanno wiseguy, he blamed DMN. He became convinced that DMN had set him up, that they were shorting the 1-- 800-TRAVEL stock just to screw him. All of his brokers suffered, their clients suffered, and now he was having a tough time calling customers and raising money for other house stocks.
More disputes between DMN and Persico erupted. Persico got it into his mind that a $40,000 copy machine at DMN was really his. Many citizens might have pursued the matter through litigation in small claims court or taken their dispute to a TV judge and hashed it out in front of a national audience. Frank Persico had a different approach. He came into the DMN office and demanded stock as compensation for the copy machine. Jimmy Labate gave him forty thousand personal shares of whatever they were about to pump up, but did so with the promise that Persico would give Jimmy back the money at cost after he sold the shares at profit. Persico apparently forgot about the back end of the deal, and Jimmy got not a dime. Jimmy estimated Persico owed him $80,000; ill will between the two followed.
Then Persico brought in a hustler named Albert Alain Chalem, a day trader from New Jersey who always wore baseball caps and did not seem to have a job. He claimed he’d made millions after selling a printing business in Queens and was now playing the stock market for fun and profit. He was also a friend of Alfonse Persico, the son of the boss of the Colombo family. Chalem and the Persicos hung out in Fort Lauderdale on Chalem’s fifty-five-foot Hatteras, the
Miss Boombastic
. Nothing this guy owned was in his name. Frank Persico promised that Chalem would turn lead into gold, so he was allowed to work at DMN on certain deals. Soon it became obvious that Chalem was hustling everybody. He had worked with Meyers Pollock, with Philly Abramo, and now with DMN, and appeared to be playing one off the other. The rumor was he was shorting DMN house stocks in a big way. Frank Persico’s latest contribution to DMN was asked to leave. That was the last time Robert Lino and Jeffrey Pokross saw Albert Alain Chalem and his baseball cap.
Miss Boombastic
. Nothing this guy owned was in his name. Frank Persico promised that Chalem would turn lead into gold, so he was allowed to work at DMN on certain deals. Soon it became obvious that Chalem was hustling everybody. He had worked with Meyers Pollock, with Philly Abramo, and now with DMN, and appeared to be playing one off the other. The rumor was he was shorting DMN house stocks in a big way. Frank Persico’s latest contribution to DMN was asked to leave. That was the last time Robert Lino and Jeffrey Pokross saw Albert Alain Chalem and his baseball cap.
Now they sat in the conference room discussing the problems of Frank Persico with the TV set turned up loud. They had come to realize that Frank was short in both the temperament and intellect departments, and the deficit was causing certain frictions. He was the cousin of the boss’s son, and he had come to believe his last name allowed him to tell other people what to do.
Suddenly they heard a loud
Pop!
at the front of the office. They bolted out of the conference room.
Pop!
at the front of the office. They bolted out of the conference room.
They found the front door open and the receptionist cowering under her desk. There was smoke coming out of a computer monitor. The receptionist was weeping.
She said Frank had come into the office and started ranting and raving about a copy machine. She didn’t know what he was talking about. He’d pulled out a gun. She didn’t see much else because she dove under the desk, but when she came back up she had figured it all out. Frank had gone and shot the computer and stormed out.
It was difficult to imagine such a scene at Bear Stearns.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
December 1, 1999
After midnight the phone crew wearing AT&T jackets stepped out of the elevator on the eighteenth floor of an office building a few blocks from Wall Street. To the left they approached an office upon which was the title “DMN CAPITAL” in brushed, embossed steel letters. They had a key. Inside they quickly entered the office of Jeffrey Pokross and removed the plate covering a phone jack about knee-high next to his desk. They quickly installed a tiny device about the size of a pencil eraser and replaced the cover. One of the technicians used another device to test the bug installed in the wall. Then they moved to a conference room, where they repeated their task with another phone jack right next to the fax machine. The technicians looked around to make sure they hadn’t left a mess, and then out the door they went.
The New York City detective and his girlfriend stood in the elevator, waiting for the number 18 to light up. He was in his fifties, silver-haired, Irish-American, the proud owner of a storied career in the New York Police Department. She was a few years younger, a divorcee with a teenaged son. She was going to marry the detective soon. He was, after all, a hero. He’d been written about in the papers, truly one of New York’s finest. Fifteen years ago, he’d run an investigation of a disturbed man who’d mailed a booby-trapped book to his own mother. The mother had opened the book, and flying shrapnel, sent by her own flesh and blood, had ripped into her. The papers worried about a new mad bomber; no motive was apparent. Detective Stephen Gardell tracked down the lunatic offspring.
Detective Gardell had worked his way up through the ranks, spent too much time humping up and down urine-soaked stairwells in housing projects. He was tired of the job. That was why he and his bride-to-be were down here in the anonymous office world of Wall Street, a man and woman clearly out of their element.
The couple stepped into the lobby on the eighteenth floor of 5 Hanover Square and observed all the accoutrements of the typical small brokerage on Wall Street: the oak-paneled walls, a Federalist end table with white porcelain vase and pale blue plastic hydrangeas, an oil painting of a wild ocean at dawn. Furnishings implying old money. They noted that the fixtures were polished brass, the name-plate on the door:
“DMN CAPITAL” in a tasteful brushed steel.
The detective and his fiancée entered the office and were greeted by Lucille the receptionist, the gatekeeper who knew that anybody she didn’t recognize who tried to come into the office was not making it past the door.
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