Nothing But Money (7 page)
Authors: Greg B. Smith
Bobby Senior’s heartfelt wish was that his youngest son, Robert, should carry on the traditions he had embraced his entire adult life. His eldest, Vincent, was gone, the victim of the drugs Bobby Senior himself sold in the neighborhood. Females weren’t eligible. Robert was all that was left.
This was not a choice every father would make. Some of the old-timers felt that the whole point of
la cosa nostra
was that it was a springboard to legitimacy, a starting point to raise a little cash and then be able to participate with the Rockefellers and the Duponts on a level playing field. Look at Joe Kennedy. He started out as a bootlegger. Ideally you do what you have to do so that your children don’t have to. Carlo Gambino never wanted his son, Tommy, in the life. Tommy was a bright businessman, on his way to being a multimillionaire in the garment trade. Why did he need the aggravation of kicking up to the boss, the sit-downs, the walk-talks? Vincent Gigante shook his head in disgust when John Gotti proudly boasted that his boy, John A. Gotti, had just got his button and was now a member of the Gambino family. Of course, Tommy Gambino ended up in the mob when his father died, and Chin Gigante’s son An-drew would end up running a union in Miami and pleading guilty to extortion.
la cosa nostra
was that it was a springboard to legitimacy, a starting point to raise a little cash and then be able to participate with the Rockefellers and the Duponts on a level playing field. Look at Joe Kennedy. He started out as a bootlegger. Ideally you do what you have to do so that your children don’t have to. Carlo Gambino never wanted his son, Tommy, in the life. Tommy was a bright businessman, on his way to being a multimillionaire in the garment trade. Why did he need the aggravation of kicking up to the boss, the sit-downs, the walk-talks? Vincent Gigante shook his head in disgust when John Gotti proudly boasted that his boy, John A. Gotti, had just got his button and was now a member of the Gambino family. Of course, Tommy Gambino ended up in the mob when his father died, and Chin Gigante’s son An-drew would end up running a union in Miami and pleading guilty to extortion.
The allure was strong. In many ways, it made sense to have your own family next to you. A wiseguy needed somebody around he could trust, given that just about everybody else would cut your throat faster than you could say, “Leave the gun, take the cannolis.” Who could Bobby Lino trust more than his own flesh and blood, his son Robert, a quiet, reliable kid?
Of course there was that part during the induction ceremony when you swore allegiance to your Mafia family above all else—even your blood family. That meant that if you were ordered to do so, you’d have to kill your own. And what if you were caught? Of course, you’d say nothing. Being a rat was worse than being dead. But maybe there would be reasons to be a rat and not be dead, and then you’d be facing a tough choice. The deal with the federal government was always the same: you tell all or you get nothing. So, for instance, if you called your son up in the middle of the night to come out and help dispose of a murder victim, you’d have to bring that up. You’d have to inform on your own son.
All of that was pretty abstract. Bobby Senior was asking his own blood relation, his cousin Frank, to do him this one last favor before he died. Frank was the perfect one to ask. He had a son, too, Joseph. Frank had taken him under his wing, put him in his own crew. So if anybody could understand, it was Frank.
“Sure, Bobby,” Frank said. “I’ll take care of it.”
CHAPTER SIX
When he was out on the street, hounded by banks and credit card companies, facing repossession of his car, Cary Cimino had done what any grown man in his position would do. He found a rich girlfriend and moved right in. Her name was Jane, and—for a change—Cary’s timing was perfect.
“Jane paid for everything for me to move my life forward and get myself back on my feet. I had had it. I had no interest in working hard anymore. I had an interest in getting healthy and playing hard.”
It’s difficult to judge couples. Cary and Jane seemed a mysterious combination indeed. She was a respected daughter of wealth, with a second home in Aspen and access to plenty of family money. He was a failed stock picker, bouncing from employer to employer, hustling to keep himself from Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code. It was easy to see what Cary was getting out of the relationship: “She took care of me. Didn’t judge me and probably was one of the few examples in my life of selfless unconditional love. I guess I didn’t even know what that was. She supported me through thick and thin. Both emotionally, financially and intellectually. She was a marvelous and still is a marvelous person.”
It was not so clear what Jane was getting out of the deal. It was probably very easy to see where it would all end up.
The first sign was the formation of NSPJ Financial Group. The acronym stood for Not So Plain Jane, Inc., something Cary had dreamed up himself, and it was to be founded by Cary but funded solely by Jane. She would appear on paper as the sole owner of Not So Plain Jane, Inc. Cary made it clear he needed to be in the background only. It was better for business that way. He still had his broker’s license, but it had acquired a certain tarnish. The luster was diminished. His relationship with the prestigious world of finance had changed.
Working with Jeffrey Pokross had changed things for Cary. He was making money, but he was now burdened with a certain reputation that wasn’t helping him get work at the big-name firms of Wall Street. If he was going to continue working in the securities world and scouring the earth for whatever goodwill he hadn’t yet willed away, he’d have to do so behind the scenes. If there was anything he had learned in the eighties, it was that you could screw up and get caught and still make money on the Street. It wasn’t easy, but it could be done. Not So Plain Jane, Inc., was to be Cary Camino’s solution to this problem of reputation.
The idea was perfect: with Jane’s family money, he would create from nothing a stockbrokerage company, and almost no one besides Cary would know what it was really all about. In corporate filings it was to be listed as the NSPJ Financial Group, which sounded as impressive as the rest of the scam brokerage houses that were again cropping up around Wall Street. It would seek out and reel in investors, promote hot stocks, make millions for everybody. Mostly it would make millions for Cary Cimino. Whenever Cary did any business, he would do it through Not So Plain Jane.
All the checks he would write or have written to him would come from or go through NSPJ. He would be called a consultant. His car was to be leased by NSPJ. His rent would come through there. His one gesture to Jane was to lease her a new red 1989 Jeep Laredo from Three Star, with her family’s money, of course. NSPJ was the disguise that Cary the biology major would use to make his way in the world without the hassle of being seen. The Securities and Exchange Commission wouldn’t see him. The United States Internal Revenue Service wouldn’t see him. The banks and the credit card companies wouldn’t see him. They wouldn’t see him, but he would be there.
“Jane paid for everything. I used NSPJ Financial Group as a means to conduct business. Checks were written to NSPJ for consulting work when I worked with Jeffrey. I started expanding my consulting business and started taking checks in as I started to raise money for other start-up deals.”
In truth, Jeffrey Pokross was the real genius behind Not So Plain Jane. Partnered with Cary, Jeffrey had now branched out into the stock promotion business, specializing in start-ups, companies that were just about to go public. Jeffrey knew all about the stock promotion business. The way Jeffrey planned it, Cary, with his broker’s license, would look for people to make insider commitments on these companies, including his girlfriend’s rich family. Cary had no problem getting them to invest in Jeffrey Pokross’s once-in-a-lifetime deal, without having to explain details or let them know that Jeffrey hadn’t made money legally since he quit his paper route at age ten.
The deal had started at the Vertical Club when Jeffrey and Cary ran into a broker named John who was a senior partner in something called Lowenthal Financial Services. Cary would say he and John formed what he termed “a tacit partnership, and what I mean by tacit, we never had anything formally in writing. It was a handshake partnership.” Translation: his girlfriend’s family also bought Lowenthal Financial Group. His girlfriend’s family took the risk—not Cary. Thus did Cary’s girlfriend and her family become central to a little performance choreographed by Jeffrey Pokross. What is clear is that the purpose of Lowenthal from the day it was purchased was to act as a fig leaf to cover up something Cary and Jeffrey didn’t want everyone to see. It was covering up a reverse merger.
“I had no idea in 1989 what a reverse merger was,” Cary said. “I was trying to get myself up on the yield curve, so to speak. On different methodologies available to me to raise money.”
The reverse merger was Jeffrey Pokross’s idea. The first time he pitched it, Cary had to ask him to slow down. When Jeffrey was pitching he often dropped into business jargon and cranked up the speed. He’d start jabbering like a chipmunk, presenting ideas as sure bets, big wins, profits guaranteed. This particular sure thing started with a reverse merger and relied heavily on Chinese action films.
Here the pitch could make your head swim. The company was to be called MPSC for Motion Picture Service Company. It would offer one-stop-shopping for making movies. You want to make a movie? You come to MPSC and they hand you a producer, a director, a film editor, a casting agent and everybody but the actors. Jeffrey claimed he was putting together heavyweight investors. MPSC would make a quick killing and he and Cary would walk away like lottery winners. There was nothing to it. They had two guys involved in producing and directing a TV crime show signed up. They even had a guy who’d directed some of the old
Lost in Space
TV episodes with the robot and “Danger Will Robinson!” and all that. They just needed a few more big-money types willing to commit some money up front so they could all be rich by Wednesday. Something like that.
Lost in Space
TV episodes with the robot and “Danger Will Robinson!” and all that. They just needed a few more big-money types willing to commit some money up front so they could all be rich by Wednesday. Something like that.
But to reel in the big checkbooks, they needed Jeffrey Pokross to remain out of sight. They couldn’t offer even a hint of Jeffrey Pokross. That was where Cary came in. He could still claim to be a high-powered broker with a real broker’s license. He could still claim to be a former partner at Bear Stearns, a graduate of Stanford University. When you met him, you might think he was a paragon of legitimacy. Here was a guy, you might think, who knew what he was doing. Here was a guy who could bring in the serious investors who have the good sense to jump on an opportunity when it presents itself. Three million dollars would be great, $3.5 million would be better.
The fact that MPSC had absolutely no assets to speak of was not a problem. Jeffrey Pokross proposed a classic bit of “lead into gold” legerdemain—the reverse merger. Cary—the guy with the broker’s license—was learning from the guy who’d taken a few graduate business courses at Monmouth College, home of the Fighting Scots. He listened and learned.
Jeffrey’s plan went like this: They started with a publicly traded company called Unicom Distributors that owned 250 Chinese martial arts movies and sold its stock in the loosely regulated, highly speculative over-the-counter market. Unicom had a key piece of paper necessary when creating the aura of legitimacy—an audit signed off on by Arthur Andersen, claiming the Chinese action flicks were worth $38 million. Step one complete.
Step two: Unicom “bought” MPSC, a company that existed only in the minds of Jeffrey Pokross and Cary Cimino and possibly the guy who directed the robot who says “Danger Will Robinson!” Now MPSC was a wholly owned subsidiary of the heretofore nonexistent company that was really just Unicom. Now MPSC could claim Unicom’s $38 million in assets as its own and MPSC could borrow against that to build up the company’s appearance before taking the company public and then selling MPSC as a separate entity. Unicom—the money behind the façade—told investors it was going to make a killing in the emerging video market by putting its entire kung fu collection on video.
Step three was where Cary’s girlfriend and her rich parents came in. The family’s purchase of Lowenthal was specifically intended to generate more fees for Cary and Jeffrey and all the others involved in the deal. Lowenthal was to be the financial underwriter that would handle the reverse merger of Unicom and MPSC.
There was only one problem: in 1990, the market for Chinese action movie videos was going nowhere. The only “assets” behind the whole Potemkin Village were useless, worthless. The company behind the company was losing money and credibility. MPSC went bust about seven months after it was born.
“Well you had delusions of grandeur back then,” Cary recalled. “Of course Jeffrey and I were deluding ourselves that eventually we were going to spin off MPSC into its own and we were going to make millions of dollars. Unicom acquired MPSC and the deal died on the vine. The Chinese films weren’t selling. MPSC backed out. Then Lowenthal also went out of business—a loss for Jane and her family.”
Under most circumstances, such a drubbing might undermine the relationship between a future son-in-law and his future family. Jane’s parents, for one, would certainly have had good reason to encourage their daughter to dump the loser and find herself an orthodontist or bankruptcy attorney right away. They had, after all, lost thousands of dollars on a deal presented to them by their trusting future son-in-law as easy money. When the Chinese kung fu movies took a dive, so, too, did the future son-in-law’s credibility.
When it comes to Cary Cimino, some women just don’t know where to look. Jane stood by her man. Somehow Cary convinced her father that he had other sure deals. There were medical companies that weren’t anything like the movie business. For sure, medical investments were just starting to look hot on Wall Street. Not-so-plain Jane’s family didn’t kick Cary out into the street.
If only Jane had checked the ownership of her brand-new red 1989 Jeep Laredo, a present from her one and only, sort of. He’d found it and set it up so her father could buy it, but it was an amazing deal. After MPSC and the kung fu movies went away, Cary and Jane took a little well-deserved ski vacation to Aspen, paid for by Jane. While they were there, she learned that the Laredo she was driving was in fact a stolen vehicle. The bank owned it, not Cary’s good friend Jeffrey Pokross.
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