Nothing But Money (34 page)
Authors: Greg B. Smith
Since Jeffrey Pokross had decided to secretly cooperate with the U.S. government against all his friends, the FBI had come up with a little system to keep track of their new star informant. When he arrived at work in the morning, he’d beep his agent with a code—the number one. If he left the office for a sandwich at lunch, he’d put in a different number, and do it again when he returned. He had another number for when he left for the day. Sometimes agents listening in would want to get in touch with Jeffrey to get him to bring up specific subjects or press for answers on something they believed they’d heard. They would call a cell phone Jeffrey had that was always turned off. He would check his messages repeatedly during the day, and if there was a message he would create a reason to leave the office. Then he’d call the agents from his cell phone. Every night he’d write up e-mails for the FBI summarizing the day’s activities, including who was likely to visit the next day. Once a week he’d meet the agents at a diner somewhere near the office. It was risky. Somebody could have seen. But Jeffrey seemed to like it that way. It was real James Bond stuff.
“I was posing as a corrupt investment banker and as best as possible without blowing that cover. [I was to make] sure it was clear to the participants that we were engaged in illegal activity as best I could under the circumstances.”
He was supposed to try and prevent violence before it happened, but he was also supposed to stay in character, like any good liar or actor, and not appear to behave in any law-abiding way.
He was now working undercover twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He couldn’t take time off. There was no vacation for Secret Agent Pokross. He had to keep the story line going. So far he’d done pump and dump with the Bonanno family and the Colombo family. He was constantly trying to invent new schemes that wouldn’t end up with Jimmy Labate putting some broker’s head in a vise. At the end of the 1990s there was the Globus deal, then Innovative Medical.
“We manipulated the stock upward and brokers put it out to their retail clients and they made undisclosed commissions that were never reported to the clients,” he said.
DMN set the size of the chop. Investors in Globus lost $3 million. Pokross personally made $100,000. Pokross made $150,000 on Innovative Medical. He estimated that by 2000, he’d done fifteen corrupt deals at DMN that cost investors $20 million in losses and put $1.6 million in his pocket strictly from stock fraud. That was on top of the $1 million he made legitimately from non-manipulated stocks. He did not file income tax returns, despite his pledge to the United States government that he was on their team. He was aware of certain inconsistencies in his logic.
“Under my agreement with the government, it says that I’m not supposed to commit any illegal activity. So by not filing those tax returns, it was an illegal activity not filing those on time.” It added up. By 2000, he owed $900,000 in state, local and federal taxes, plus another $500,000 in penalties.
Always he was watching his back. The gangsters constantly believed somebody was following them or listening in on the phone. Everybody around was a potential rat. Nobody could be trusted. If you hadn’t committed an actual crime in front of their eyes, you were suspect. Even if you had, you might still have a secret arrangement. Pokross walked a narrow line.
“If I was talking about Frank Persico or Steve Gardell from the detectives union or any mob activity on the phone, they’d go wild,” Pokross said. “Labate, Lino, to an extent Piazza, would look at me like I was crazy. Because those things in that world are not mentioned on the telephone. Because I know Lino and Labate. They are very surveillance conscious. They were always checking for bugs and tails and people following them. They would turn up the radio. They thought everything was wiretapped . . . Once, I’m sitting in the conference room with Labate and Frank Persico discussing the union activities,” he recalled. “And then it starts to get a little more serious and detailed into the conversation and Labate says, ‘Let’s turn up the TV.’ ”
April 11, 2000
In the conference room, Jimmy Labate was telling Jeffrey Pokross something he’d learned from his friend and neighbor Detective Gardell that indicated DMN might have a little problem.
“He told me unequivocally the phones are tapped,” Labate said.
“What would lead him to that conclusion?” Pokross asked.
“I haven’t the slightest idea. He says, ‘Have you ever had the phones swept?’ I says, ‘For what? We only do legitimate business.’ ”
“It’s true.”
The way Jimmy saw it, Detective Gardell’s warning was all the proof he needed to become a full-time paranoid. A few months back the U.S. government had filed misde- meanor charges against him for not reporting income from his construction business. He owed more than $180,000 in back taxes, but so did a lot of guys like him. Why had they singled him out for such pathetic charges? Now there was this business about bugs at DMN. Of course, a bug in DMN’s office meant there was an active investigation under way, which probably meant there was an informant floating around and it could be just about anybody. Then the preppy stockbroker, Francis Warrington Gillet III, had shown up at DMN with a tape of the stock promoter Cary Cimino making threats. He claimed he hadn’t made any other tapes, but who knew if he made that one and if there were any more? Then two of the executives at Spaceplex had pleaded guilty a few months earlier and were probably cooperating. Until now DMN Capital hadn’t surfaced on any radar screen. Now everybody had good reason to be paranoid. It was the only healthy thing to do.
“I says, ‘Listen to me, Steve, my family doesn’t want me to have nothing to do with organized crime,’ ” Labate was saying. “Matter of fact, when my name comes up, my cousin jumps in anybody’s face that asked about me because I don’t have nothing to do with street shit. So whoever’s telling you this, get that delusion outta your fuckin’ head. I don’t go to no coffee clubs. I don’t go to no sit-downs. I don’t go to no meetings, no nothing. It gets nipped in the bud before it ever comes to me.’ He says, ‘Yeah, I heard that.’ I says, ‘So then, why do you ask?’ ”
“Why was he asking?” Pokross wanted to know.
“How do I know?” Jimmy replied, clearly agitated. “I can’t have Steve up here no more.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
August 3, 1999
At 4:20 p.m. Jeffrey Pokross stepped out of a yellow cab into the summer heat of Midtown Manhattan. From there he crossed the most famous piece of sidewalk in the city and entered the air-conditioned bar of Sparks Steakhouse, a restaurant known the world over for the gangster who’d died where Jeffrey had just tread.
Pokross was supposed to be meeting Cary Cimino, and Cary had picked the locale. He certainly had a crude sense of humor. Nearly fourteen years earlier, around Christmas 1985, the then boss of the Gambino crime family, Paul Castellano, had had a dinner reservation at Sparks. He didn’t quite make it. On the sidewalk in front, four men wearing long white coats and black Russian hats shot down Big Paulie and his driver while shoppers with bags of Christmas gifts in hand dove for cover. There lay Big Paulie on the cold ground in his expensive winter coat, blood oozing, his reign finished and Sparks’s reputation sealed. Guides on tourist buses pointed it out. Effete restaurant guides described it as a “macho bastion” with “too much testosterone,” but Cary loved the place. It was real New York, not Tribeca or Soho or all those other precious neighborhoods where people like his former best friend, Francis Warrington Gillet III, hung out. This was where real men ate red meat and drank red wine and reveled in the success they had achieved on their own terms—not because Daddy gave them a trust fund.
Pokross was vaguely aware of his mission. Cary had asked for the meeting because of certain concerns he had about being arrested at any minute. As usual, all the concerns involved Francis Warrington Gillet III. Cary was convinced that Warrington was a cooperating witness. Cary barely spoke on the phone anymore and never to Warrington. He had recently become convinced somebody was following him on the street. After Cary requested the meeting, the FBI wired up Pokross and tasked him with exploring Cary’s Warrington-phobia.
At the Sparks bar, Pokross ordered Absolut on the rocks with a twist of lime. This was a Tuesday in August and Manhattan wasn’t its usual bustling self. The people who could afford it were already out in the Hamptons. The rest were waiting for the weekend to do the same. Still the bar was unusually crowded and Cary was late. Pokross chatted with the bartender and checked his cell phone voice mail. There he discovered a message from Cary saying he was sitting at the bar at Sparks. Pokross looked down the bar.
“Hey, Cary,” he said, pushing his way through the crowd to the other end of the bar.
“How long you been sitting there?” Cary asked, startled.
“Five minutes,” Pokross said. “You got to be kidding. You were sitting over there?”
They both laughed, and Cary lied about how he was turning thirty-nine in a month.
“You gotta be forty-two,” Jeffrey said.
“Why?”
“Because you gotta be a year older than me ’cause your vision is worse than mine.”
Pokross sipped his vodka and asked Cary what he was up to.
Cary said, “Disappearing to L.A. for six months, then I’m going to move off to London, then I’ll disappear into an Eastern European country like Prague or Hungary for a year or two, let it all blow over. I’m not fleeing the law because I’m not under indictment,” he said. “There’s no warrant for my arrest, so if I’m in a different country, I’m not on the lam.”
“What do you expect a problem from?” Jeffrey asked.
Cary replied, “Anything we’ve done in the past. It’s going to come up and bite us in the ass.”
Pokross had heard the concerns before. They had come up quite often with Cary, who could not seem to understand that fearing imminent arrest was just part of the game when you’re a full-time criminal. He knew, more or less, where this was going.
The two men ordered and joked and argued about moneys owed and waited for the waiter to leave before continuing their talk. The restaurant was full and loud, and it would be very difficult to hear the substance of what Cary and Jeffrey were discussing, but any observer could tell this was not a conversation filled with laughter and good feeling. Pokross mentioned a CEO named Manas in one of their schemes who’d pleaded guilty and was testifying against others they knew.
“The U.S. attorney, fuck them,” Pokross said.
“USDA,” Cary joked. “Department of Agriculture.”
“Fish and Wildlife,” Pokross said, laughing. “In your case, it’s Fish and Wildlife, the filthy animal that you are.”
Pokross said he’d heard their names had come up in the other case. They discussed getting the court transcripts and splitting the cost. “This is hot off the presses,” he said. “Jeffrey and Cary were the promoters. Or Cary and Jeffrey. You and I are joined like brothers.”
“I like that,” Cary said, scribbling something on some paper.
“You’re writing down quotes now?”
“My biography,” Cary said. “My life story.”
Pokross asked Cary if he’d approached any of his friends to see if they’d been questioned.
“What do you mean?” Cary asked.
“Well Warrington has vanished,” Jeffrey said. “Where’s Warrington? Down at his folks’ farm?”
“Yeah. Why don’t you call him?”
“Why don’t you call him?”
“I don’t speak with him anymore,” Cary said. “We had a huge fight.”
Jeffrey knew all about Cary and Warrington. He’d heard the original tape, which he’d turned over to the FBI, and he also suspected (but did not know for sure) that Warrington was, like him, cooperating. He’d heard all kinds of things. Warrington had fled New York after his arrest, even while his case was still pending. He’d moved back to his mother’s horse farm in Maryland, and despite his rich upbringing, he was actually desperate for money. Pokross pointed to his glass and ordered another Absolut, this time with tonic. Cary ordered a Diet Coke.
“Do you think it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie with him or what do you wanna do?” Jeffrey asked.
“Why don’t you call him?”
“And ask him what?”
“Has he been approached by the Feds? He got arrested. It was sealed.”
Pokross: “What happens when something gets sealed?”
Cimino leaned forward and answered, “ ’Cause he’s cooperating.”
“Then why would you want to call him?”
“Right.”
Pokross handed Cary two recent news releases from the Dow Jones newswire, about two stock promoters who’d been convicted of securities fraud in the Spaceplex deal. They discussed what Pokross called “our mutual exposure points.” This was another name for anybody involved in their schemes who might now be talking to the FBI. Warrington was a “mutual exposure point.”
“Let’s go over Warrington for a minute.”
“There’s nothing to go over,” Cary said. “He’s about to turn state’s evidence. He’s untouchable. Unless you want to whack him.”
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