Part 4 (1/2)

He called himself a financial adviser now. Stock promoter just didn't sound prestigious enough. It was too P.T. Barnum. Financial adviser had a ring of old money to it. And he'd achieved a kind of balance between his personal and business lives. It hadn't been easy.

First he'd first had to resolve problems that surfaced with Andrea. She'd had some addiction issues and than become involved with a guy who was involved in dealing narcotics. This had created a certain amount of intra-sibling friction, to say the least. She was now telling him she'd gone straight, but she still was unable to hold a real job for more than a few weeks. She would call him at least once a day, usually more. They had always had a strange relations.h.i.+p, since the time when he was ten and she was eight and he was helping her get off to school each morning in that big old empty Oyster Bay house. Now their relations.h.i.+p was even stranger. They were supposed be both brother and sister and also mother and father. They had s.h.i.+pped Erin up to New York and put her in a boarding school in a rural county as far away from the city as Cary could manage. It was a lot of work, this parenting business.

There were rewards. When Erin first arrived, she was not used to being told what to do. She got used to it, and once she had settled into school in Orange County, New York, and was learning to grow up a little bit, she made it clear that Cary was a kind of savior. They overcame age differences. He made sure she went to school and took care of herself. In one letter in which she refers to herself in the third person, she wrote, ”Well aside from G.o.d, I do believe she wouldn't have turned around so glorious if it hadn't been for the care and concern of her older brother, Cary Cimino. She can thank him every day for the dedication he put towards her in having a better life and there will never be enough grat.i.tude she can show to him. However sad this may seem, it is 100% true-he has given me more than our own mother has.”

Sometimes Andrea was able to help out as well, in other ways. In the spring of 1994, Andrea took up with a new guy, an older silver-haired married guy from Brooklyn named Sal Piazza. Andrea was thirty-two; Sal was in his mid-fifties. He called himself a businessman, an owner of Doc.u.ment Management Network, a fax company he owned with another guy. Piazza had seen that Wall Street was beginning to rebound and he wanted to get in on that. He proposed turning Doc.u.ment Management Network into DMN Capital. He put it in his wife's name. He was actually quite soft-spoken and pretty savvy about business, and he and Cary got along quite well. One evening when the three were socializing, Sal mentioned a guy he knew, his new business partner, who might be interested in talking with Cary about a deal he was working up. Sal had mentioned to this guy that Cary was a registered stockbroker with plenty of connections to heavyweight investors and other stockbrokers. The guy was less interested in the investors and more interested in the stockbrokers. The guy's name was Jeffrey Pokross.

Cary couldn't believe what a small world it was indeed.

They met at the offices of DMN, in an office tower on Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan, a block or two from Wall Street. Cary was less than impressed. DMN was just unfinished office s.p.a.ce with a couple of desks, some phones and computer monitors, and empty coffee cups strewn about the badly carpeted floor. It was, Jeffrey made clear when he greeted Cary at the door, just a start-up.

Cary hadn't seen Jeffrey in years, but he looked exactly the same. His hair was thinner and he was a little thicker at the middle, but he still had those hungry little eyes and the rodentlike mustache.

”We're going to be rich,” Jeffrey said. ”Let me tell you about s.p.a.ceplex.”

When Cary Cimino got involved in a business deal, he liked to know all the details. When Cary Cimino walked into DMN Capital in late 1994, he definitely did not know all of the details.

He did know some. The partners included Sal Piazza, the guy who was dating his sister. Sal he knew. Jeffrey Pokross he also knew. Cary was vaguely aware that there were issues with Jeffrey, but he could live with that. He did not see Jeffrey Pokross as a man with a problematic history who could drag him into the tar pit of criminal conspiracy. He looked at Jeffrey Pokross as a solution to his many personal problems.

”Jeffrey was a bombastic, caustic, arrogant man who bullied people, who literally threatened people, bullied people and a.s.serted himself in a methodology I didn't appreciate. But I was being substantially rewarded for bad behavior. The term is 'easy money,' and Jeffrey provided product, had contacts, and I had substantial distribution. It was, again, a meeting of the minds.”

Then there was this other guy, Jimmy Labate. There was no way this guy went to the Wharton School. Jimmy was probably six feet, two fifty, a young hotheaded guy with thinning reddish hair who was built like a refrigerator with a head. He wore knee-length leather jackets. He carried rolls of bills, drove a Lincoln and was able to craft unique combinations of epithets without even trying. He would say, ”f.u.c.k you, you f.u.c.king f.u.c.k,” and not even appreciate the alliteration. He was a partner in DMN.

Cary stayed away from Jimmy.

Instead, he listened to Jeffrey. Jeffrey had a plan. The company was called s.p.a.ceplex. They were going to take it public. The company's formal name was s.p.a.ceplex Amus.e.m.e.nt Centers International Ltd., and although it was certainly not international, it was fair to call it limited. s.p.a.ceplex was actually a small company in Las Vegas that owned absolutely nothing, but had obtained a contract to buy a small family amus.e.m.e.nt park on Long Island. Pokross had found s.p.a.ceplex after getting a call from an old client, a German guy named Goebel who ran the U.S. securities division for one of the biggest German banks in existence. Pokross claimed this German called him to say he had a childhood friend named Ulrich who had control of a bunch of German boiler rooms.

As Pokross remembered it, ”Mr. Goebel wanted to know if I could come up with a stock in the U.S. that I can identify and handle the trading of that security and he would pump it out with his friend Ulrich at these various German boiler rooms where they were going to be paying cash bribes to the owners . . . and the stockbrokers. I started looking right away.”

After a number of calls to various corrupt brokers looking for a patsy company, Pokross came up with s.p.a.ceplex. The president of the company was a guy named Manas, whom everybody called ”Mr. Fingers.” Jeffrey didn't bother to explain how Manas had earned such a nickname, but Cary wasn't that interested anyway. Pokross said the owner ”was looking for stock promotion and to get some money in the company. He was looking for somebody to drive the price of his stock up because he was a big shareholder and he wanted to raise some additional money.” If Mr. Fingers was interested in actually running an amus.e.m.e.nt park, Pokross didn't say.

Working with a corrupt broker named Andy Mann, Pokross said the scheme was to pay off other corrupt brokers and stock promoters like himself with cash and free stock from other companies Mann held in his offsh.o.r.e brokerage firms. He already had the boiler rooms in Germany waiting to begin pumping up s.p.a.ceplex stock. All they needed now was to go out and recruit brokers for the U.S. sales pitch. Once they got the stock where they wanted it, all the insiders would dump en ma.s.se and they'd all be rich. Pump and dump. Pokross would be paying Cary an off-the-books commission of 30 percent, which he could chop up and distribute to his brokers in whatever manner worked for him.

At the time Cary had his sit-down with Jeffrey, he didn't make it known that, as usual, he was swimming in debt. He did, however, borrow $3,000 from Jeffrey, a guy he hadn't seen in five years, and then he agreed to promote s.p.a.ceplex. He told Jeffrey he was working for Diversified Investments, which happened to be run by the president of the Upper East Side co-op where he was currently in residence. Actually he wasn't really working for Diversified; it was more that he was working with Diversified. He claimed to Jeffrey that Diversified had him on salary, that they had leased him yet another Mercedes, this time a 600 S30 (not in his name) and that he was getting cash ”incentives” on the side. He told him they could use Diversified as a cover to make ”incentive” payments to the other brokers they recruited.

”It made the paying of the other brokers mellifluous. It made it liquid. It made it easier. It hid the business we were doing. It hid it from every regulator. It hid it from the IRS as well. I could be making large sums of money and not paying taxes.”

He was aware that he was discussing avoiding detection by legal authorities. He knew all about pump and dump. He was aware that he was involved in criminal activity. But he was also aware that so was just about everybody else he came into contact with on a daily basis in the world of Wall Street. And more importantly, it wasn't just Cary Cimino that really needed the money. Now Cary had another reason to get ”flexible” with the law. He had Erin.

All the hours of headache and heartache he'd experienced as a pseudo father to his much younger half-sister had brought with it a kind of benefit he hadn't foreseen. The more he'd thought about it, the more he came to see there might be some upside to Erin. Perhaps there was something to all this altruism. There was something powerful about having a motive to earn money that was connected to someone else's well-being. If he was choosing to bend or even break rules, he was only doing it for his baby sister, and who could argue with that? He had obtained a certain lifestyle that he needed to maintain, but now he had a reason quite pure for getting and having. It wasn't just about Cary. Cary the pseudo father could say for the first time that his pursuit of wealth was now about so much more.

Of course making tons of money was not guaranteed.

While he was there, Sal Piazza stopped by and said h.e.l.lo. They got to talking and the subject of enforcement came up. Enforcement was a critical issue in pulling off a pump and dump scheme. In order for the scam to work, the clueless investors couldn't be allowed to sell their stock before the insiders sold theirs. Otherwise the price wouldn't rise and perhaps the whole thing would never get off the ground. In pump and dump, brokers had to keep their customers in line. And the insiders had to keep the brokers in line. Sometimes persuading the brokers to stay on program involved a certain amount of physical force. Cary knew all about this and until now had never really had to think about enforcement. Enforcement usually required the name of one of a certain group of five families.

”Not a problem,” Jeffrey a.s.sured him. ”I'm with a guy named Robert Lino. Everybody calls him Robert from Avenue U.”

CHAPTER TWELVE.

January 2, 1990

No studies have been presented to learned colleagues in vaunted journals about the amount of time the average gangster spends sitting in restaurants, but it's fair to a.s.sume it's about 50 percent of his waking hours. The gangster, of course, has no office. There's no conference room from which to transact teleconference calls with clients. There's just the corner banquette at the local diner. The day after New Year's Day on the second day of the new decade, Frank Lino and two gangster friends sat in a Middle Eastern restaurant on McDonald Avenue and Avenue N way out there in Brooklyn, waiting. It was a nasty cold night, and all the holidays were officially over. People were taking down Christmas trees and dumping the dried out skeletons on the sidewalk, the silver tinsel s.h.i.+vering in the wind. This was the bleak stretch of winter. The fun was over. The weeks of January and February stretched out ahead like so many miles of arctic tundra.

Frank and his pals sat in the restaurant waiting for his cousin, Robert Lino, who was always on time. Tonight Robert from Avenue U was late.

For Frank Lino, the twentieth century-the gangster's century-hadn't been so bad. Here he was at age fifty-two, a Lafayette High School dropout by tenth grade, married at age nineteen to a girl not yet sixteen, five kids and a divorce behind him. He'd tried legitimate work, but it didn't really suit him. He was handling dice games and running sports book by the time he was a teenager, and he never looked back or thought twice about where he was headed. He did have some doubts along the way. For a time, he insisted he wouldn't carry a gun when they hijacked trucks out near Kennedy Airport. Often he thought everyone was out to get him and that the next sit-down would be his last. But he was still around. He'd been inducted into the Bonanno group in 1977 on his fortieth birthday and elevated to captain in 1983. By the second day of the last decade of the twentieth century, he was a veteran. He made a fortune from a thriving gambling operation. He dabbled in drugs and did quite well. He'd bought up p.o.r.nographic videos in the 1970s when they were still called ”French films” and resold them in Las Vegas for hefty profits. Now people paid him money just to use his name. As in ”I'm with Frank.” Everybody was happy with Frank Lino. He made money for himself and the bosses, who did not understand the concept of enough, and in this life-the life of the made man-he'd done almost no time. This had truly been the gangster's century. From a street gang in the alleyways of Lower Manhattan, an unwanted import from Sicily, the schemes had grown and grown, the power extended to the highest reaches of business. And Frank Lino was a part of all that.

Of course, Frank still had to sit in restaurants in the middle of the night waiting for things to happen that would never ever happen on time.

Usually Robert was pretty good about these things. He was Frank's star pupil. Like Frank, he'd dropped out of high school, which was good. Some of these guys who went on to college were a pain in the a.s.s. Robert had embraced the life. He was disinclined to get a real job under any circ.u.mstances. The bosses had put him with Frank, and he was happy to be there. He was obeying his father's wishes. And he did whatever Frank wanted. He helped him track his bookmaking, collect on his shylock loans, enforce protection collection. He took messages to people. He watched Frank's back. He was an apprentice, learning the players and all their tricks. In a way, now that Bobby Senior was gone, Frank was Robert's new father.

Frank was old-school gangster. He'd survived a nasty bit of business in 1981 when he and three captains were invited to a meeting at a social club in Brooklyn and walked into a shotgun attack. The three captains were blown to pieces, and Frank-for reasons he had never quite figured out-had been allowed to leave alive and breathing. Subsequently he'd been welcomed back into the newly aligned Bonannos' loving embrace. He immediately set to ingratiating himself with the bosses by handling another nasty piece of work, the unfortunate and untimely death of Sonny Black. By 1990 Frank Lino was an established player in the family, and Robert Lino was at his side. And late.

As it happened, Frank had to cut Robert some slack. By 1990, after thirteen years as a gangster, Frank was immersed in middle age. Not retirement age, just slowing-down age. Robert was a young man. Frank was tired of tracking money he put on the street, so he put Robert in charge of that. Frank was less interested in day-to-day occurrences within his crew, so Robert helped out, letting Frank know about internal disputes petty and otherwise. Robert quietly made it his business to know everything. As 1990 arrived, Frank knew that Robert Lino was on his way to becoming a made man at a time when the Bonanno crime family was on the rise. There was, however, a bit of a speed b.u.mp. It was the reason Frank was sitting in the restaurant on McDonald Avenue.

The problem at hand was Louis Tuzzio, a low-level wannabe who someone with not very much sense had a.s.signed the task of killing a guy named Gus Farace. Farace was a lowlife drug dealer who happened to have some Mafia friends. He was heavily involved in selling as much dope as he could and using as much as he could handle, too. He was essentially out of control, and in his drug-addled state he had made a major-league mistake. Perhaps the biggest mistake you can make. During a drug sale in Brooklyn he decided he didn't like the guy doing the buying, so he shot him to death. How could he have known that the buyer was really a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) undercover agent and family man? The federal government was furious. They rousted mob social clubs, letting everybody in every family know that until the shooter came forward, life would be h.e.l.l for la cosa nostra la cosa nostra in New York City. Gus Farace thus became marked as a dead man in every way. in New York City. Gus Farace thus became marked as a dead man in every way.

The job of finding and shooting Gus Farace right away fell to the Bonanno crime group, mostly because Gus Farace was dating the daughter of a Bonanno family soldier. She was seen as the way to get to Gus. As it was told to Frank Lino, Louis Tuzzio got the job because Tuzzio knew Farace and was as close to a friend as a guy like Farace could expect. Tuzzio had set up a meeting, and Farace was supposed to show up solo. Tuzzio pulled up in a van with three other guys, to a spot in the middle of nowhere Brooklyn, and-naturally-Farace was not alone. He was with a guy named Sclafani who happened to be the son of a Gambino soldier. Louis Tuzzio decided on the spot not to call off the job. Instead, he got in a shoot-out with Gus Farace, and Farace wound up dead. Unfortunately for Louis Tuzzio, Sclafani, the son of the Gambino soldier, also ended up shot and badly wounded.

Which was why a few months later Frank Lino received word that John Gotti, imperious boss of the Gambino crime group and a guy who truly believed he was the boss of everyone, had let it be known that he was apoplectic. He wanted everybody involved in the shooting of the Sclafani kid dead. Everybody. This was his way. He frequently wanted everybody guilty of one or another perceived slight dead. Now the Bonanno group had a big John Gotti headache, and Frank Lino wound up as the guy chosen to administer the medicine. At the time, Frank was feeling somewhat vulnerable. In fact, he was constantly worrying about becoming a victim himself. He felt sure that at any time he would go to a meeting and never come back. This was due in part to his experience inside the social club when his three friends had been shotgunned to death in front of him and he'd been allowed to leave. This event cast a certain shadow over Frank's life. He needed to make things right, and the way to do that would be to resolve the big John Gotti headache. It was natural that Frank Lino would turn to his cousin Robert for help.

Gotti had demanded the deaths of the three non-made members in the van when Sclafani was shot. Members of the Bonanno family-including Frank Lino-were extremely upset about this. They felt this was unfair, given that Sclafani was only one guy and he'd survived and Gotti was saying three guys had to go. This was bad math. This was, at best, three for the price of one. The Bonanno group and Gotti came up with the usual compromise-one guy for one guy. Maybe that was what Gotti had wanted in the first place. Regardless, Louis Tuzzio, more or less by default, became the one guy.

As Frank sat in the restaurant on McDonald Avenue, the plan-his plan-was already unfolding. A Bonanno a.s.sociate named Dirty Danny was childhood friends with Tuzzio. Dirty Danny was also childhood friends with Robert Lino, so the two were a.s.signed the job of luring Tuzzio to a meeting, where he would be shot in the head adequately to kill him. Everyone involved knew this would not be a simple task. Tuzzio was in a high state of paranoia. Recently another crew tried to convince Tuzzio to show up at a lonely garage in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, owned by a guy named Patty Muscles. On the appointed day, the a.s.signed hit man had a heart attack, so that didn't work out. Next they tried luring Tuzzio to a meeting in a residential area of Bay Ridge, but he showed up with another Bonanno soldier who was not clued in on the matter. Now here it was, the day after New Year's, and Frank Lino and two gangster friends sat in the Middle Eastern restaurant on McDonald Avenue waiting for Robert Lino, Dirty Danny and Louis Tuzzio to pull up in a Camaro.

The story they'd thought up to get Tuzzio to go along was this: Frank was going to rea.s.sure Tuzzio that the business with Gus Farace was, in fact, understandable given Gus Farace's many problems. Frank would tell Louis that he was about to get his b.u.t.ton, to become a made member of the Bonanno crime family. This would be a great honor for Louis. In fact, it would be the biggest day of his life, the thing he'd always wanted, the dream come true. That was the story they figured would work to get a paranoid guy like Louis Tuzzio to show up for his own a.s.sa.s.sination.

And then here they were. The Camaro pulled up with Tuzzio at the wheel. Frank watched Tuzzio get out of the car, apparently relaxed, still believing he might live to collect Social Security. Tuzzio strolled into the restaurant with his childhood friend, Dirty Danny, Robert Lino, and-a surprise for Frank-another guy not on the guest list. The guy was Frank Ambrosino, a friend of Robert's since childhood. They all entered the restaurant and Tuzzio sat down with Frank. Everybody else went to a separate table.

Frank went to work with his avuncular act. He understood why Tuzzio might think that all this talk about him becoming a made guy was not real, what with the other guy with the Gambinos getting shot and all that. But Louis had to know the context. Frank rea.s.sured him that the bosses all considered Louis to be a capable guy for his work on Gus Farace. Sure there had been a bit of mess to clean up, but it had all worked out. Law enforcement seemed far more enthusiastic about finding Farace than about finding Farace's killers, and-sure enough-after Farace was clipped, the feds backed off. Frank began instructing Tuzzio on what to expect at the induction ceremony, how it was important to pretend you didn't know what was what when they asked if you knew why you were there. He went through the list of rules that everybody knew and everybody broke on a regular basis and gave the kid Tuzzio a gentle slap to the cheek. Frank Lino told the kid everything would be fine.

”Relax,” he said. ”This time next week you're a man of respect.”