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Authors: Greg B. Smith

BOOK: Nothing But Money
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The reaction to Bonnie and Clyde revealed a Midwood symptom: sometimes the mob becomes the criminal justice system it seeks to subvert. It is as much a part of the neighborhood as Nathan’s Hot Dogs and Uncle Louie G’s Italian ices. So when Bonnie and Clyde were shot in the head at a stoplight as they were driving home a station wagon filled with Christmas presents, there was no surprise and not a whole lot of effort to find out who did it. This was the correct ending to a peculiarly Brooklyn tale.
The way people from the neighborhood figured it, the crazy couple had ripped off the gangsters, so the gangsters were justified in killing the crazy couple. The gangsters had every right to, and in fact, under the rules of Midwood, they were obligated to do this. They had no choice. End of case. With certain residents of Midwood, the notion of what was criminal was relative. If you asked somebody if they thought it was a crime to murder your obnoxious upstairs neighbor, they’d say, “Of course.” If you asked them if they thought it was a crime to murder a man and woman burglary team who had made a point of robbing Mafia social clubs, they’d respond, “What’d they expect?” There was common sense in it, and it was this Midwood logic—the “you get what you deserve” school—that Robert Lino carried around with him.
The Midwood logic shaped opportunities. In Robert Lino’s world, where drugs killed your brother and were killing your sister, you had to get out or get with the program. You joined the army or got a job at the post office or ran a pizza parlor. Or you dealt drugs or became a gangster. With the last two choices, it was important to note the distinction. The drug dealer was a lowlife. The gangster was a man of honor. These options were clear in a neighborhood where you started off a few steps behind the starting line.
College was not an option. In school Robert sometimes had problems reading all the words. In class, he had a hard time sitting still. He wasn’t the biggest kid, so football wasn’t an option. He made it only as far as sixth grade. He never learned algebra or chemistry or the history of Western civilization. He dropped out of middle school when he was thirteen years old and nobody blinked. He wasn’t expected to stick it out through high school. His father hadn’t. His cousins Eddie and Frank hadn’t. Few of the wiseguys he knew took school seriously at all. If anything, they derided it as a waste of time. What was the point? What did you learn there that you couldn’t learn on the street? They knew where they were headed and school was not in the picture. The idea that you graduated high school, went off to college away from the neighborhood, got a big-money job and earned a real salary—it was all a big joke. Only losers and the kids whose fathers could afford to send them to military school or Poly Prep did that. For Robert Lino, stepping forward into late twentieth-century America with only a sixth-grade education was just something that was meant to be. There wasn’t much you could expect to do about it except find another way.
So while other kids learned calculus, Robert Lino learned Mafia math—the best way to figure the line on college football; the quick way to calculate points of the vig when helping your cousins track the money they put out on the street. He was the kid who was always around, available to do the work nobody else was willing to do. He was the caddy, the ball boy, the sorcerer’s apprentice. And these guys, these made men, they were his heroes. They were part of something special, something outside of the usual banal life of the dollars-per-hour working sad-sack drone. He believed that the myth of
The Godfather
was real. He believed that gangsters only hurt rats and dead-beats, only stole from people who could afford it, and did it all to feed their wives and children. He swore allegiance to the ritual of
omerta
, saw “the life” as a calling. Other teenagers memorized batting averages or spent all their unscheduled hours skateboarding. By the time Robert was a teenager, he knew the entire induction ceremony by heart—the business with the burning saint, the pin in the trigger finger, everything. “If you prick my finger, will I not bleed?”
From the first day his father had him collect bets from his lowlife bookmaking customers, Robert Lino knew where he was headed.
CHAPTER FOUR
June 1989
 
Post-crash, the Vertical Club on the Upper East Side remained popular among Wall Streeters. Those who paid the exorbitant monthly fees toned up abs and pecs and worked on keeping themselves fit and trim and in good enough shape to make more and more and more. They worked out whenever they could fit it in. The club was open from five in the morning until midnight, and there’d be people there when the doors opened and people there when they closed. It was a desirable place to be because more often than not there was the potential to make a connection that could lead to a deal or a commission or some transaction that ended with more money in your bank account. Between sets with the free weights and the four miles on the treadmill, if you weren’t talking business, there was something wrong with you. After all, what else was there but getting and having? Or in the case of Cary Cimino, keeping.
In less than two years the market had recovered somewhat, leveling out and then beginning a crawl upward. The federal government had picked up some press indicting some of the innovators in the market like Michael Milken and Drexel Lambert, and a handful of brokers had been led off the floor in handcuffs, a true low point. Now everyone was cautious. Money was still there, only you weren’t supposed to flaunt it. Investors had become conservative and regulators had become emboldened. Wall Street simply wasn’t as glamorous and fun, but for most of those who worked in Lower Manhattan, it was no longer a scary experience going off to work in the morning. If you had work. At the moment, Cary technically had work. Technically.
It wasn’t work that any government agency would know about, and it was extremely occasional. After the Crash of ’87 he’d left Oppenheimer for what he thought was a better job with a six-figure sign-up bonus at Prudential Bache, but that lasted exactly nine months before the partners asked him to leave due to what they termed “lack of production.” Then he got himself evicted from his apartment near Sutton Place for forgetting to pay the rent. Now he was constantly exhausted and depressed, running a fever, staying in bed all day because he didn’t want to get up and face the world he’d created. And he’d become exhausted by the play-hard, work-hard life. He was popping every kind of antibiotic available, plus a myriad of antidepressants. His own good fortune was slowly killing him. “I was seeing a doctor twice a week,” he said, proving that whatever ailed him was certainly physical and could never be a matter of personal choice.
No longer was he working hard. Playing hard was a different matter. Playing hard was mostly a way of not dealing with certain big issues such as career, a sense of purpose, growing up. The best way to avoid these things was to focus on little things, like a car.
“Summer was starting,” he said. “I mean, I’m not going to have my convertible repossessed, God forbid.”
Specifically, Cary was trying desperately to keep possession of his brand-new leased 1989 Mercedes 580SL convertible with the white leather seats and polished black exterior. Sometimes it was better to focus on the little things when the big things were getting you down. Maintaining possession of the 580SL convertible certainly qualified. If Cary concentrated on the car issue, he wouldn’t have to look at the job issue. Or the housing issue. Or the girlfriend issue. The car issue was something he could get his brain around.
One morning when Cary was working out at the Vertical Club—Cary called it “a social club masquerading as a gym”—the solution to his car woes became apparent. A broker named Howie was there, who Cary didn’t really know too well, although he’d done a couple of deals with him and made some money. Howie was telling him about this guy he knew, Jeffrey, who operated a car lease company with his father. Howie figured Jeffrey could help Cary work something out with the Mercedes. Howie made it clear that you didn’t ask too many questions about Jeffrey, and you didn’t need to know anyway. Jeffrey had a knack for getting things accomplished. In the locker room after their workout, Howie told Cary he’d get in touch with Jeffrey and get the two of them together.
At the time, Mercedes had demanded that Cary return the 580SL immediately. Again. The last time he’d managed to hold on to his vehicle by cobbling together enough cash to make a few back payments. But pretty soon the payments had stopped again, and now Mercedes was done with Cary Cimino and his many excuses. They wanted the car back. Although it was just a car, the idea that he might lose it was too much for Cary. It was the ultimate indignity.
Cary met Jeffrey for the first time in person at the offices of Three Star Leasing, the company Jeffrey was running with his father in New Jersey. The guy was maybe five foot six, a bit overweight and balding, with a nasty little mustache that looked like a leach lurking on his lip. He had tiny black eyes and it was hard to tell his age. He could have been thirty, but he looked forty. He cursed and talked a mile a minute, faster than Cary even. He threw around business words the way Cary dealt in the commodity of psychobabble. When he walked, the guy had a kind of side-to-side manner that he would call swagger and others would call waddle. He looked like a penguin with a criminal record.
“Jeffrey Pokross,” he said, reaching out a hand.
Cary liked him immediately.
“Jeffrey had a rapier wit. Extremely quick. Extremely intelligent. He was one of the few individuals that I could banter with. He had a vast source of knowledge, a jack of all trades and master of none. I could see he had never done a legitimate day of work in his life.”
Cary had a feeling that Jeffrey Pokross and his Three Star Leasing were not all they seemed. The place looked like a real business—there were secretaries and computer screens and telephones—but there was something odd about it all. When Jeffrey described what Three Star did, he was somewhat vague. He claimed the company arranged long-term leases of luxury cars for customers through banks. That was his story, anyway. The customer would lease the car through Three Star, which would obtain the lease from the car company and sell it to a bank. The bank would then assume responsibility for collecting the money and Three Star would get a fee. That was fine when the eighties were in full swing and people on the Street were a bit freer with their money. Now that was all over and Three Star was having a tougher time. Jeffrey still had his Wall Street customers, but far fewer, and now he was getting customers from different walks of life. Some didn’t have the best credit ratings. At first, this meant Three Star had to say no to these people, but Three Star didn’t say no anymore. They needed the business. They began offering a new service, which they never really put down on paper as a real service. It was referred to as “credit adjustment.” This meant turning into a fiction writer when filling out lease applications. Cary could relate to that.
Three Star began to get even more creative. They came up with a new idea—one that Jeffrey did not mention to Cary. They were quietly selling cars they did not own to customers. The banks would raise a fuss and Jeffrey Pokross would funnel over a few payments from new customers to the bank to shut them up for a while before closing up shop and heading for another bank. It was a classic Ponzi scheme with Mercedes and Bentleys and Porsches as bait.
When they began talking about Cary’s precarious Mercedes 580SL, Jeffrey assured him they could work something out. Cary was aware that Jeffrey Pokross and Three Star were not UNICEF, but he didn’t much care. This was business, and he needed money. In business you sometimes cut corners to keep the operation running. You do it to help out the employees. They have babies to feed, car payments to make, mortgages to abide. Just because Jeffrey Pokross did some things that maybe weren’t kosher every single minute, well, everybody’s got something to hide, right?
Including, of course, Cary himself. He did not mention to Jeffrey certain aspects of his situation. Such as the fact that he was unemployed. Or that he was mooching free rent off his girlfriend. Instead, he told Jeffrey he was an independent financial adviser who’d quit Prudential because he’d felt cramped and unable to realize his full potential. He still had possession of his stockbroker’s license, so he could wave that around, and he made mention that he had access to plenty of clients who’d invested millions of dollars with him over the years and trusted him like a priest. He dropped in his onetime employment as a Bear Stearns partner without mentioning how it all had ended up over there. Now he was claiming he’d gone to Stanford, without mentioning Boston University. BU had been replaced by the Ivy League and all its implications, without all the hassle of graduation. And, if it wasn’t too much of a problem, could he borrow $3,000? He was having a little cash flow issue, temporary of course. No problem, said Jeffrey. And do you know about our “credit adjustment” feature we offer all our customers?
Whether Jeffrey Pokross believed anything Cary told him did not matter even a little, because he must have known that Cary was a guy just like him—a guy who looked at people to see what they had to offer. Cary was aware of this.
“I didn’t come into that relationship with Jeffrey painting a true picture,” Cary would admit. “I didn’t tell Jeffrey, well, I’m totally broke and destitute. Jeffrey had an understanding that I was having financial problems, but Jeffrey is intelligent enough to know that I brought something to the table, which was—at that point in time—a legitimate résumé.” Everybody involved knew it was a relationship based entirely on self-interest: “We both saw in the other individual an opportunity to make money together. I mean, to leverage off one another.”

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