by David Howard
Vernon Presley had also handed over the $338,000 for upgrades, which Pro divvied up among his co-conspirators. “I didn’t put one nut, bolt, or screw to anything [on] the JetStar,” he later said.
Each of Pro’s lease checks to Presley bounced. He provided a string of convoluted excuses over the subsequent six months—stalling an exasperated Presley while flying the JetStar around the country as a prop for other cons. Pro’s only regret was that he and Phil never met the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. Not because they were fans—just because it would have made the story that much richer.
About eight months passed before Vernon Presley finally sat down with the FBI. “You know what I got to thinking,” he said to the agents. “Maybe that this guy, the reason he was wanting upgrading money was to use it himself, not to—this might have been a planned deal all the way through.”
—
Jack was still dozing early the next morning when a loud knock rattled him awake. He cracked open the door of room 1103A and saw Phil waiting outside. “I’m gonna have to talk to Gabe about you guys,” Phil said after stepping in. Cicale had called that morning about the Junior G-Men.
“He thinks you’re too quiet,” Phil said, “and you listen too much.”
The agents dressed and went downstairs, and Phil told them to wait in the lobby. Jack and J.J. felt only mildly concerned. With each day together, Phil became more adamant in vouching for them—they were not only future officers of First National City Bank of Haiti, they were his friends. Phil told other promoters that if they refused to deal with the Junior G-Men, they couldn’t deal with him. The agents were struck by the potency of his word. (Norman Howard would later be asked whether Phil had traveled with Paul Chovanec because he wanted an errand boy. “You want me to answer that truthfully?” Howard would say. “Phil Kitzer don’t run with errand boys.”)
J.J. sensed other dynamics bubbling under the surface. In New York, people seemed more wary of them. Cicale, for example. Maybe he or Jack had asked a question that made Cicale wonder whether he’d said too much. There was a kind of culture clash between the promoters—always boasting about their exploits—and the mob, which operated much more on a code of silence. Joe Pistone, operating in the city in the same time using the name Donnie Brasco, noted that it was all about “playing this game of trying to be noticed without being noticed, slide into the badguy world and become accepted without drawing attention. You push a little here and there, but very gently….You cannot seem eager to meet certain people, make certain contacts, learn about certain scores.” Mob guys operated by the omertà, a code of silence and secrecy when it came to anyone in law enforcement, and breaking it was a death sentence. The previous night, Cicale had probably run the conversation through a finer filter in his memory, looking for a phrase or answer that was too revealing.
J.J. and Jack had to learn to calibrate accordingly. But by the time they met again, J.J. believed, Cicale had already crossed over to a different place psychologically. Cicale had said so much during that first meeting that he didn’t want to believe his worst nightmare, which was that he’d run his mouth in front of an FBI agent. Now the agents’ job was to help him get to the place where his mind naturally wanted to go, which was: We’re fine. These guys are fine. J.J. hoped for an opportunity to look Cicale in the eye and say, “Yeah, if I’m an FBI agent, then everybody’s busted. It’s a damn good thing for your sake that I’m not.”
Still. For the agents, these reassuring thoughts went only so far in New York, where everyone studied them a little harder, asked more questions about their backgrounds, and seemed less credulous. These anxieties churned through J.J.’s mind when Phil returned about ten minutes later to announce that he’d smoothed everything over.
When they sat down together again, Cicale seemed different. He and Phil talked about partnering on DITCO, the bogus offshore mutual fund, and First National City Bank of Grenada, which they ran from December 1974 through 1975. When they made plans to fly somewhere, they would run ads in a local newspaper in advance, claiming to be film producers holding auditions. They would then rent a room at a five-star hotel—like the Plaza in New York—and when women showed up, Phil and Cicale would invent a storyline and drop the names of a couple of Hollywood stars, then ask them to read lines. The ones they liked they would try to cajole into stripping before sending them on their way. The two men boomed with laughter describing it. Cicale clearly liked hitching onto Phil’s portable party.
In 1975, they had laid plans for First National City Bank of Haiti, but they’d decided to shelve it for a while after the Grenada edition blew up. But Cicale still had the charter, which he had obtained through contacts inside Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s government. Phil said the next step would be to go to Haiti to get the bank up and running, which would mean bribing government officials to ensure that the briefcase bank would run with minimal interference.
After Cicale left, John Calandrella entered the Mayflower’s coffee shop. He’d called the previous day from Washington, D.C., where he was trying to raise money he owed Phil for Seven Oak paper. Calandrella had kept the entire $3,500 payment on a previous deal, citing high overhead. Phil had subsequently heard only excuses for Calandrella’s failure to pay up—the IRS had frozen Calandrella’s bank account, and so on. And now Calandrella had arrived empty-handed.
The agents were surprised that Phil would still give him an audience. But Phil explained that, in fact, many brokers owed him money. “You can’t expect to collect on each and every instance,” he later explained. “You will win some, you will lose some….I never dealt with a broker-promoter that paid you all the time he was supposed to pay. You keep hoping he’ll get a deal, and you can even up. Stop doing business with him, you’ll never get your money.”
By this point, Jack and J.J. had grown accustomed to the blizzard of half-truths, deceptions, and outright lies the promoters told their clients and one another—and no one was more skilled at this than Phil. Instead of pressing Calandrella to pay up, he began to detail the exciting new possibilities of First National Haiti. He told Calandrella that, in fact, FNCB was a legitimate Port-au-Prince bank where he’d bribed an officer into issuing guarantees on Seven Oak paper. Calandrella was electrified: That was exactly what he needed, a genuine financial institution backing up the paper he’d been peddling, he said. He had a fat portfolio of potential scams, including a $5 million loan guarantee for the Color Chrome Corporation of Traverse City, Michigan. Calandrella once again promised that he would round up the money he owed.
—
The establishment was located at 128 Central Park South, one of the world’s more expensive streets, in a row of apartment buildings and hotels overlooking Frederick Law Olmsted’s masterpiece. Phil and his two companions stepped onto an elevator in the early evening and pushed the button for the fourth floor.
A sign on apartment 4B read TRIDENT CONSORTIUM. APPOINTMENT MANDATORY. The front door opened into a reception area jammed full with overstuffed furniture; two secretaries sat at desks. Pro, who was wearing an ascot, showed them around the one-bedroom apartment he’d converted into his office. There was also a kitchenette, a telex machine, some sophisticated-looking phones. Pro lived in the apartment across the hall, where he was in the process of installing a sauna.
The previous year, when he was casting about for new work, he had hit on the name Trident Consortium, basing it on the chewing gum. Having decided that he wanted to open an advance-fee business, he’d called Phil.
Pro paid for Phil and Paul Chovanec to fly to London to acquire Seven Oak, then flew over himself for a respite from Vernon Presley’s increasingly urgent inquiries. Phil and Fred flew home from England together. Following the sun west through an endless afternoon, Phil walked his friend through the promoter business: how Pro would take money and create paper, how to talk to clients. “In the five-hour flight,” Phil said, “I explained to [Fred] the best I could how that worked.”
Trident Consortium would o
perate differently from Kitzer’s vehicles. Pro would tell clients that the consortium was controlled by seven banks located around the world that sought to provide financing to a high-end clientele. Before making any loans, Trident required “good faith” payments up front—a phrase that in this context radiated irony. Pro called it a CIA business: cash in advance. The more common label for that type of operation—advance-fee scam—was beneath him. They didn’t use traditional con-man language like “mark” and “grift.” They saw themselves more as business professionals. “We are a little more sophisticated than that,” Pro said. “We disguised that terminology.”
Pro initially opened Trident in the Mayflower, where he rented a room and conducted business in the restaurant. He made a few contacts and printed some phony Seven Oak CDs to sell; Phil was happy to take a cut by sending confirmation telexes from England. Pro then began issuing pre-advice commitments, instructing clients that he had obtained preliminary approval for financing.
Trident Consortium launched at a fortuitous time. During the first half of 1977, after several years of economic hardship and inflation, banks were stingy with loans. Pro built a network of brokers to solicit clients and soon was overwhelmed, taking about 150 calls a day, the phone ringing from eight a.m. until midnight. In the early days, Pro called Phil nine, ten, sometimes twenty times a day, seven days a week, at all hours, asking what he should say to clients and how much money to ask for. Phil traveled often to New York to offer his counsel.
Pro claimed to have colleagues stationed in Geneva, London, the Middle East—whatever locale was “fashionable at the time.” He intended to open branches overseas so he could have Trident representatives send confirmation telexes from around the world. Trident, he told people, “generally didn’t deal in anything less than a million-dollar loan.”
Pro moved into 128 Central Park South within a few months, spending lavishly on the offices and living space, though he rented everything—furniture, phones, even plants—figuring that he would leave it all behind when the business inevitably blew up. But money kept flowing in, and he hired a limousine and a driver, and as spring arrived he spent $100,000 to renovate his apartment and install the sauna. Female visitors flowed in and out.
Pro suggested they go to Studio 54, the celebrity-packed nightclub and disco that had opened on West Fifty-fourth Street to great acclaim earlier that year. J.J. immediately said no way—the lines to get in were notoriously long. But Pro was insulted: “You think I’d invite you there and make you wait in line?”
He’d talked with Studio 54 management about financing and forged some kind of relationship. When a taxi dropped them off under the marquee, a bouncer greeted them at the velvet rope and said, “Welcome, Mr. Pro.” Fred peeled off a hundred-dollar tip and waved his friends through. Inside, the place was all pulsing lights and throbbing music. The agents and Phil found themselves next to comedian David Brenner, a frequent guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Phil began dancing flirtatiously with his date. As the evening rolled on, Jack went upstairs and saw people sitting at tables snorting lines of cocaine.
Phil was proud of his pupil, that Pro “was able to take down this kind of money in New York so quickly after entering the business.”
Pro, naturally, was interested in First National City Bank of Haiti and offered to kick in start-up expenses. That day in his office, he handed Phil $5,000 in fifties and hundreds so he could be the first promoter in line for paper when the vehicle got off the ground. He had a project in mind for the paper: For the past eighteen months, he’d been working with a mobster named Joe Trocchio to acquire the Brookhaven Servicing Corporation, a Long Island–based firm that originated and bought and sold mortgages. The idea was to help the Mafia take over the firm’s $150 million portfolio of mortgages so its thugs could burn down buildings for fraudulent insurance claims, run loan-sharking activities, and launder money for the Lucchese and Gambino crime families. When it was no longer useful to them, they would bust it out.
—
The higher stakes, the velocity, the voltage—all of it seemed to drive Phil to greater heights of grandiosity. When Pro boasted the next night about his successes, Phil stopped him. “Whenever we do a deal, Fred, the money always goes from you to me,” Kitzer said. “It never goes from me to you. Ever. Don’t forget that.”
The same went for women they met. They always left with him, Phil said. Normally an indomitable braggart, Pro fell into a grumpy silence.
One night, heading out for dinner, Phil commandeered a horse-drawn carriage at the Plaza Hotel for a ride through Central Park to the Upper East Side. He had corralled several women to join them, and he decided in mid-ride that he wanted to hold the reins, so he sat up in front with the driver, chatting away. At the restaurant, the women couldn’t settle on what to order. They fretted over the prices, even after Phil invited them to get anything they wanted. Finally, when the deliberations showed no sign of abating, Phil signaled for the waiter. “Bring us one of everything on this menu,” he said.
The waiter fixed him with an inquisitive look. There were around twenty entrées, ranging in price from the mid-teens into the mid-twenties, plus a slate of appetizers, salads, and desserts.
Phil nodded and held up the menu. “One of everything.”
The soups and salads came first, barely fitting on the table. For the entrées, the waitstaff dragged an empty table over and loaded it with full plates, as if Phil had arranged for his own buffet. The agents and the women ate, feeling conspicuous and awkward, while Phil picked contentedly at a chateaubriand, seeming oblivious to the stares from around the room. Eventually he allowed the plates to be removed to make room for dessert. The check would total $500 (equivalent to nearly $2,100 in 2017), but Phil was heedless. As he made a show of sampling a freshly torched crème brûlée, he called the waiter over. “I ordered one of everything on this menu,” he said.
The waiter again looked lost.
Phil indicated the plates and said, “Do you see any spumoni out here?”
The waiter scanned the dishes and conceded that he didn’t. Other waitstaff hovered now, and the agents tried to intercede. “Phillip, forget it,” Jack said. “This is fine.” As it was, much of the food sat there untouched.
“I want the spumoni,” Phil told them. He took out a cigarette and loaded it into his filter.
Phil was also annoyed at a couple sitting nearby who kept glancing over with disdainful looks. Phil told Jack and J.J. he wanted them out of there.
“All right, Phil, whatever,” J.J. said.
“No,” Phil said. “These people are blowing up our operation.”
Then, turning toward the offending table, he said, louder, “What, you don’t like that woman?”
The couple looked over, startled.
Before J.J. could stop him, Phil pointed at Wedick and continued: “He doesn’t like you, lady. He just said you’re ugly.”
The couple stood, the man red-faced but uncertain. He was a patrician gentleman who didn’t look like the fighting type. They gathered their things, murmured their outrage to the maître d’, and huffed out. The waiter returned, and Phil smiled and thanked him and turned back to the table, where everyone was now gaping at him.
“All right,” he said. “Who wants some spumoni?”
—
Bernard Baker was thinking big. A dry-land farmer from Leoti, Kansas, he had, by his middle forties, mastered the intricacies of growing crops in arid climates. He planned to use that expertise to get rich.
The previous year, a Denver-based real estate agent had clued him in on an opportunity up north, in Idaho Falls, Idaho, called South Slope Farms. Baker saw in the farm’s 7,570 acres the chance to become an entrepreneur. He purchased an option on the property, figuring he could install irrigation wells and pumps and sprinklers—creating conditions in which crops could be easily grown—then sell off parcels to other farmers. Baker had owned five or six farms before, but this was his first real business venture. That aut
umn he retained two Colorado-based brokers to help him locate $5.5 million to do the deal, but they struck out on conventional sources of financing.
In May, as Phil and the Junior G-Men roamed New York, Baker flew to Idaho Falls to meet Billy Hicks, an Arkansas resident who owned land in Idaho. Hicks said he had a source in New York City who had generated loans that had helped him build a multimillion-dollar salvage business.
Baker sent his financial statement and an appraisal of South Slope Farms to Trident Consortium Funding Corporation. Over the phone, Fred Pro told Baker that he could secure the loan for a fee of $330,000—6 percent of $5.5 million. And he required $110,000 up front.
In Kansas, Baker borrowed the $110,000 from the First National Bank of Tribune and bought a plane ticket to New York to personally deliver the money order. He hoped that after a year of chasing a loan, he was finally in business.
Pro had a term for people like Baker. He called them DMs, short for desperate men.
—
The evening of May 9, after leaving Pro’s office, Jack and J.J. invented some errands so they could slip free of Phil. They headed across Manhattan to the FBI offices on Third Avenue and Sixty-ninth Street. Their four days in New York had exposed a hive of high-end con-man activity, and they hoped to find a local agent who might take the reins of an investigation.
New York was the FBI’s largest, most aggressive office, and the brass there was pushing forward with new undercover initiatives. The previous year, Joe Pistone had assumed the identity of Donnie Brasco and begun the long, slow process of infiltrating the Mafia. To safeguard the operation, only a handful of FBI officials knew what he was doing—and several years would pass before his work bore fruit, though he occasionally helped agents in other parts of the country making early undercover forays into mob families.
J.J. and Jack were unsure how two upstarts from “Nowhere, Indiana,” as one agent put it, would be received. But by chance, Myron Fuller was still in. Fuller had an unusual background: He was an Arkansas native who had attended Berkeley on a National Science Foundation grant in physics. Fortuitously, he was one of the few special agents there who could fathom what Kitzer and Pro were capable of. Several years earlier, he’d met an informant working with U.S. Customs who’d explained how con men traveled between countries, moving phony paper. This informant had later alerted Fuller to an airline passenger flying into JFK carrying stolen German war bonds. Fuller recovered a suitcase full of pilfered securities, and his mentor, an agent named John Hauss, told him, “Go through that. There’s about twenty trips for you in there.” Fuller emerged from that episode with a number of open cases and a newfound appreciation for the quiet way promoters swindled people out of massive amounts of money.