by JJ Partridge
“Cadwalader was great but I like being plaintiff’s counsel. And this firm has a great reputation and a client list that is top shelf. I’ve found my niche.” She paused. “You’re getting married!” she exclaimed, her voice giving away a touch of insinuation that I might be getting too old to be tethered.
I felt coerced to recite Nadie’s resume: Radcliffe, research fellowship at Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania for a doctorate in psychology, through which Jocelyn’s knowing smile gave away that she had previously researched my fiancée.
“A psychologist! No place to hide, Algy. She’ll have your number,” she said with a voice that suggested poor Algy.
Our initial skirmish concluded, I was guided to a small, plainly furnished conference room. Seated across a polished oval table, Joseph P. Civittolo was a slim figure in a dark suit, white shirt, loose red tie in an unbuttoned collar. His black curly hair was too long to be fashionable, his eyes so dark their pupils were lost, a prominent nose held thick, black framed eyeglasses. The full lips and a weak, square chin reminded me of the sneering nephew on The Sopranos.
Jocelyn introduced me and said her client had been a senior vice president of Ravensford Capital until two weeks ago. “I ran the equity trading desk,” Civittolo said, his accent very New Yorkese, his tired, unsympathetic eyes taking me in. “Domestic stocks only. No bonds, no international, not the hedge fund investments. Plain vanilla trading.”
Jocelyn interrupted him. “Not that it is relevant, but I’ve explained to Joe that you and I have had a … prior relationship. I’ve also explained that he’s under no compulsion to talk to you or to describe the way Ravensford Capital ran its business or anything that might relate to your client’s investment. Joe, will you confirm that?”
“Yeah, you two were married?” His tired face tried a smile but didn’t make it past a sneer. “How about that.”
I sat at the table facing him and took a yellow pad with my briefing notes out of my valise. Jocelyn sat at his right, her expression told me she was going to grade my performance. “Those bastards took me. I gave them twenty plus years, had over three million locked up there, what they owe me on bonuses, my severance arrangements, my deferred comp. The sons of bitches … .”
Jocelyn touched her client’s wrist as his fingers clenched into fists. She said, “My client became suspicious when the partners—there are four, including one based in Garden City—held an emergency meeting. With the turmoil in the markets, stocks taking a dive, bonds down, investors getting antsy, some clients were making demands for funds. The next day, a lot of money was shuffled around, some accounts were liquidated, money moved offshore. The partners cashed out, leaving just statutorily required working capital, and the only reason Joe found out was that he is … friendly … with one of the administrative assistants to a partner who, supposedly, was Joe’s long-time buddy. At first, Joe got a line, then was offered a bonus to keep quiet, then was told that if he didn’t, he’d be fired, threatened as well, with a hint that certain clients would be very upset if he complained. He confided in a friend who had a friend at Champlin & Burrill and the referral came here. Joe’s status is as a statutory whistle blower for fraud, violation of SEC and FinRA regulations. We’ve sued the firm and its principals. Joe is also talking to the SEC and with the US Attorney.”
“I know the account your guy had. I should say accounts.” His fingers slid away from his lawyer’s touch. “The first one was an A-4 account, the other was like an A-4 account but wasn’t.”
“A-4? What does that stand for?”
“Nothing I know of. Just how accounts for connected people were set up.”
Being from Providence, I knew the connotation of connected.
“A-4 accounts were worked differently. Only partners ran them. They needed special handling, access to liquidity, online to accounts in Europe, a few to Hong Kong. An A-4 might balloon overnight in investments from overseas or right here; an A-4 might get closed quickly. That’s why all A-4s were invested with Sugarman. No waits with Bernie. Bernie paid out on a phone call. Funds available same day on the wire. Didn’t matter when the ticket went in, Bernie paid off. We called him Bernie T-bill because redemptions were so easy. Ideal for an A-4 account.”
“Could you be more precise?” I asked. “Before his trust account arrived at Ravensford from Smith Barney, Palagi had another account?”
Civittolo became impatient. “Yeah, as I said, an A-4 account. Look, this is how it went down. Your professor had two accounts. Both out of Hempstead on the Island, where the firm started. A lot of Italo-Americans on the South Shore, like the partners. Your guy must have had some connection there because that’s how and where his first account came in, as an A-4. Was there almost as long as me. At least a couple of bricks—millions—in the account, all with Bernie. Sometimes, there was more but every so often some got cleaned out, just like the other A-4s. Later, his trust account came over from Smith Barney, a plain vanilla, my kind of account. I wanted the trades but it stayed with the partner, and was run like an A-4, right into Bernie’s shop. Everything’s fine until the rumors on Bernie began.”
His voice caught and rose in pitch. His eyes left me and stared out of a window. “Having two accounts with the same name was a problem. I remember a screw up about some money going into the first A-4 account when it should have gone into the second, and Palagi is furious, calling the partner on the account who went ape shit. On the Smith Barney account, the second account, we sent monthly statements. On A-4 accounts like the first, we didn’t.”
“When did the A-4 accounts get liquidated?”
He grunted. “Right after the partner meeting on Sugarman, wired out, mostly to Italy. Cash came from Bernie. The second account, your account, didn’t get liquidated because it wasn’t a real A-4. It got stuck at Bernie’s like all the rest. If your client asked for it to be liquidated, it was too late. Frozen. Sugarman wasn’t redeeming anymore.”
Jocelyn, no longer smiling, lawyerly summarized her client’s description of Palagi’s involvement with Ravensford Capital. “Both accounts were invested with Sugarman. The first account was an A-4 account that got liquidated, funds wired to Italy or wherever, when rumors began. The other, the second account, your trust account, invested like an A-4 account but not one, that account didn’t get liquidated before the firm closed.”
Civittolo interrupted her, his voice and face angry, impatient, and unsympathetic. “All I’m telling you is that one of your guy’s accounts, the one from Smith Barney, didn’t make the cut. Your guy got screwed!”
As I walked back to Champlin & Burrill in a blustery raw wind, I considered the disgruntled Mr. Civittolo. Jocelyn will earn her fee in representing this guy. Then, more about Jocelyn. Outside the reception area, Jocelyn brushed my cheek with a kiss and asked me if I was in town long enough for a drink after work at Clover’s Lounge on East 34th Street, our long ago special place. I declined. But her invitation triggered memories. Her classy lawyer image was replaced by one of her barefoot in the sand at the South Hampton beach where we first met, gorgeous in a pink sundress billowing in the breeze, her hair swept back from her tan face, her eyes cool, her smile dazzling.
I shook my head to get rid of her image. Back to Mr. Civittolo. Bizarre interview but why would he lie? Nothing in it for him. And I could place the timing of when Palagi knew the trust account was in trouble. If before meeting Father Pietro on the Saturday before his death, he would have said so or it would have been on his recording. If he found out about the Ponzi after, it had to be between that Saturday morning and the following Wednesday evening. It could have been an impetus to suicide.
Upon my return to Champlin & Burrill, I was informed that Ravensford Capital would file for liquidation in the morning, any attempt at injunctions or attachments would be ineffective, the principals of the firm had scattered, and tomorrow a trustee was likely to be appointed by the court to sort out the mess. In other words, as Civittolo well said, Italo Palagi, and now Car
ter University, was screwed.
15
IT WAS TWO FORTY-FIVE and I thought Nadie must be in Brooklyn by now. I texted her that I was out of my meeting, sorry it was so late, and to my surprise she replied she was at Bloomies only a few blocks away. There was nothing for it and I was soon in the back seat of the black Lincoln limo provided to Champlin & Burrill clients. A doorman held a huge umbrella over her as she dashed into the limo loaded with shopping bags. She wore a new lipstick color, darker, almost purple, and maybe a blush. “Success,” she exclaimed as she settled in. Her wedding dress fittings were over, Vera Wang personnel were wonderful, she purchased a jacket and pants at the Celine boutique, had a facial and a makeup treatment after lunch with a college roommate who had organized Nadie’s bachelorette weekend in Manhattan beginning on Friday. She expressed no curiosity about my meeting other than a casual “How did it go?”
“Okay. Lots to do,” I said and thought maybe the best course of action was not to mention my ex-wife.
On the ride down Broadway and into Chinatown, across the Brooklyn Bridge, on to Flatbush Avenue, Pashto music leaked from the ear buds of our turbaned, head bobbing Afghani driver who ignored his passengers complaints as he navigated the congested traffic. Horns blared at the Kabul kamikaze’s lane shifts in what had become a windswept, steady rain. Nadie was busy texting when not glaring at the back of the driver’s turban. In between, she said, “Zelda called me to make sure I’m coming. Not like her.”
“If it’s another change …”
“I won’t let that happen.”
Which I had reason to doubt. Zelda Winokur’s snits and demands also had the unfortunate effect of focusing Nadie’s interest in my prior marriage. Her questions about Jocelyn came at odd times, like when we were having dinner. “Did Jocelyn cook?”—or in bed—no need to be precise here. It peaked when weeks ago, I brought up a prenuptial agreement.
Nadie’s reaction to a prenup urged by my brother Nick and common in our family was that she was being treated as a bartered bride and aggravated the issue of our families’ disparate wealth and, as Nadie saw it, social class differences, an early impediment in our relationship, even more problematic than our poles-apart political and social views. Eventually, begrudgingly, rationally, she agreed. We exchanged list of assets—mine took six typed pages and hers fit on a single sheet—and she ignored my request to have the agreement reviewed for her by a lawyer at my expense. “Did Jocelyn sign one?”
“No. The whole thing was accidental. No planning, a quick trip to Maryland, a justice of the peace …”
“She could have cleaned your clock if she wanted to. She must have had her own reasons not to. You were lucky. That’s what this is about.”
No explanation of family responsibilities inherent in the protection of generational wealth would quiet the nerve I struck.
Our driver found curb space in front of a brick façade, a fiftyish apartment building on Ocean Avenue. We interrupted his music with shoulder taps, emphasizing in near shouts that he was to wait for us. That took several tellings. We left him, unsure if he would be there, and took a cranky elevator to the fourth floor. Nadie used her key, called out “Zelda” and we were immediately assaulted by wails from beyond the hallway. Nadie’s mother rushed to the door and in astonishment threw her arms around … me. “Algy! It’s you! Look, Ida, look! It’s Algy!”
“Ida …?” Nadie eyes widened. Ida was Aunt Ida Gershowitz, her mother’s sister and always a speck in Nadie’s eye.
Mrs. Winokur herded us through to the kitchen, the place of mourning. Aunt Ida, neither made up nor coiffured, in a faded housedress, slumped at a dinette table. Her reddened eyes brimmed with tears. “Mortie’s money is gone!” she shrieked. “Same for the homes’! It’s … gone!”
Through heaving sighs and outbursts of anger, her story emerged. Mortie, her late husband, the founder and operator of the nine Gershowitz Funeral Homes in Brooklyn and Queens, had deeply ensnared the family in Bernie Sugarman’s ever widening Ponzi scheme. As she finished, Mrs. Winokur soothed, “Ida, Ida,” and grasped her sister’s trembling hands, “it’ll be alright. You have the boys.”
That set off a screech that tinkled pendants on the chandelier over the dining room table. “Mortie, Mortie, you died not knowing.” Aunt Ida’s hands were unleashed to stretch to heaven in supplication. “You left us penniless. You trusted that, that …”
“For a Jew to do this to Jews,” Mrs. Winokur complained to me. “In the old country, they’d take off his clothes, throw him out of the village, say shiva for him like he was dead.”
Nadie and Mrs. Winokur sat next to Aunt Ida at the dinette table. I pulled out a chair by Nadie’s side.
“Everybody we know had something with Bernie.” Aunt Ida, having quickly recovered, ignored the peeved look on her niece’s face and directed her complaints to me. “Everybody knows that Mortie knew Bernie. I know Bernie. I play cards with his sister Rachel in Palm Beach. For years, Mortie played golf with him. His father was buried by Mortie. And Mortie gave him everything to invest. Even the burial trust.” I must have looked quizzical at burial trust because she explained, “People pre-pay for their funerals; we invest it in a trust and provide the service they contract for when they die. Bernie had that money, too. Suppose people ask for an accounting? Or their money back? How are we going to do that?” Her solid body began to sway as her fists pounded the table. “What will we do, Zelda?” and the sisters rocked back and forth in an embrace.
It was quite a show, so different than my first encounter with Aunt Ida last spring, a formal meet-the-family in her over-furnished, wall-space-covered penthouse apartment in a Brooklyn high rise next to one of the largest Gershowitz funeral homes. From a parlor sofa under an original or good copy of a Chagall, her hair carefully colored and piled high, in an expensive blue dress with a pearl choker that could keep Mikimoto’s polishers busy for a week, she deigned to grant me occasional smiles while her sons, Arnie, the business son, and Simon, the face of the funeral homes in the community, both dressed in dark ‘undertaker’ suits, were friendly to the point of unctuousness. Somehow Nadie and I got through two hours of too much information about the funeral home business and dry tea cakes.
I asked Aunt Ida if she had consulted her lawyer. Aghast, she spat out, “Jack Rabinowitz? I have to tell Jack Rabinowitz what we lost? I can’t do that,” she explained, “you can’t trust lawyers.” Nadie winced. “His clients are our clients. What’s he going to do? He’ll tell them,” and her hand swept the table. “When they finally think of it, those with money in the burial trust, they’re gonna want to know.” Her eyes went blank as she confronted the ungrateful hoards of Gershowitz Funeral Home clients. “They’ll ask cute questions, then make gossip, then ‘Ida, how’s my money I gave to Mortie?’, ‘Ida, can I be in peace?’, ‘Ida, you didn’t invest my money with Bernie, did you?’ Everybody’s going to want their money back.” Then, to her sister, “We’re ruined, Zelda, ruined!”
“Surely,” I said, “the homes can get a loan.”
“A bank?” Aunt Ida stopped pounding the Formica long enough to focus her glare at me. “They would have to know, right?” Why was I, the rich goyim, so dumb? “Look, here it is. Our business is all reputation. It’s rabbis and families, and … Oy vey!” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Not even our best friends, could we tell. Yes, we would say we had a loss. We did! But they got to think Mortie mostly got out a long time ago, kept some in for old times’ sake. If he didn’t leave some in, they’d think he knew something and didn’t tell them! But all?” She shrugged away from her sister’s fingers kneading her shoulders. “Zelda, how can we hold our heads high?” This from someone Nadie once remarked was chauffeured across the street. “The business will be gone, the boys ruined, I’ll have to put the apartment on the market, sell Palm Beach. I’ll never go back. And you, my sister, if you go south, where are you going to stay? In some miserable room in Hollywood?”
Mrs. Winokur’s so
rrowful face went from her sister to Nadie, and finally, to me. “What can we do?”
The we in her question hung for a few seconds too many. Nadie’s hand pressed my knee, her expression perplexed. Unless the Gershowitz family was righted, our wedding would have the gaiety of a morgue. Mrs. Winokur added plaintively, “What a disgrace. And you, Algy, coming into the family.”
Aunt Ida’s eyes rose abruptly to mine. They cleared and I got the drift. I was being asked to do something. For the family. The Winokur-Gershowitz, nee Zuckerman, sisters were nobody’s fools. What did they want? A discrete attorney who could handle the claims against Sugarman without tipping off New York’s Jewish community? No, I concluded, more than that. In the face of calamity, I was expected to be a mensch.
“Maybe my brother could look into the possibility of a private loan,” I began, “to carry the business and the trust until things straightened out, to tide you over.”
Aunt Ida dabbed her eyes, which widened considerably; Mrs. Winokur smiled and embraced me, and revealed the plot. “See, Ida, I told you. Algy would find a way.”