“There was a lot of paranoia at the time,” Billy remembers, “because nobody knew how this was all going to work. Even Columbia Records was unclear—can we legally release this album? That’s when I hired John Eastman to be my attorney, and he got the label to sign off on the album and put it out.”
Storm Front would become further evidence that Billy had reached a commercial plateau from which he’d never really descend. The Billboard charts welcomed, to varying degrees, all seven singles that the album spawned between September 1989 and January 1991, as well as the album itself, which knocked Milli Vanilli out of first place for a while.
With Billy’s career stakes upped by that very success, John Eastman, in concert with Ed London of Billy’s accounting firm, Gelfand, Rennert & Feldman, reviewed the books kept by Billy’s former accountants for the previous eight years. In July 1989, John terminated Frank via letter. He hired the seasoned entertainment litigator Leonard Marks, then filed the suit in late September.
The suit cited Frank’s risky—though occasionally lucrative, to him and rare other investors—investments in the various tax shelters and addressed how the investments had been financed. According to the complaint: “Weber took more monies from the revenues produced by some of Joel’s tours and recordings than Joel himself received.” One alleged tax dodge even involved a shell game with Billy’s song copyrights.
Frank pushed back against the accusations. At one stage in his long battle over civil suits, in which he was alternately plaintiff and defendant, he wrote a letter to the presiding judge calling certain allegations “outrageous and distorted.”
THE FINAL WEEK of September 1989 marked the nadir of an extremely tough period for Billy. Storm Front was set to be released in a month, and Billy was going to kick off an extended stretch of touring with a visit to London to promote the European leg. En route to JFK on September 24 to catch the Concorde, he began getting brutal, stabbing pains in his abdomen, and after a quick phone consultation with his doctor, he asked the driver to head straight for the hospital. He was having a kidney stone attack, something that had been dogging him on and off since childhood. He was operated on at NYU Medical Center. (Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose, yet another in the long line of fans Billy had no idea were among his listeners, sent a get-well card—accompanied by a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.)
The next day, as Billy lay in the hospital, the lawsuit against Frank, charging that he had squandered or illegally diverted $30 million of Billy’s earnings, was filed. In addition to the compensatory $30 million, it asked for $60 million in punitive damages. Billy’s lawyers had it served to Frank around seven A.M. on Weber’s birthday, September 25, 1989.
The story made news in the main national dailies and of course in the trade papers. “Billy Joel Sues Former Manager for $90 Million,” said the headline of Variety’s September 26 story, which cited the charges of “fraud, breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and federal racketeering statute violations.” The sums involved were “believed to be the largest judgment a pop star has sought against a former manager.”
The story pointed out that Frank’s sister was Billy’s ex, and that Weber was also the godfather of Joel’s four-year-old daughter. It also revealed that the eighty-three-page filing alleged that $2.5 million in loans had been given without Joel’s knowledge or authorization to various horse-breeding and real-estate partnerships and other businesses controlled by Weber; that Weber had lost more than $10 million of Joel’s money in investments of a highly speculative nature, many of which involved Weber’s own companies; that Weber had double-billed Joel for his music videos, cheated him on expenses including travel and accounting fees, and mortgaged Joel’s copyrights for $15 million without disclosing it on Joel’s financial statements; and that Weber caused phony financial statements to be issued to Joel, which painted an unrealistic picture of his finances.
The Los Angeles Times piece expanded on the allegations against other defendants, Grubman and Indursky, quoting the charge that “the Grubman firm ‘repeatedly breached’ its duties to Joel by failing to inform him of financial irregularities involving Weber.” Other claims cited included allegations that the Grubman firm paid kickbacks to Weber-controlled companies and invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Weber partnerships in the 1980s in return for assurances of retaining Billy’s business, which brought more than $750,000 in fees to the firm in 1981. The claim also alleged that “at Weber’s behest, the Grubman firm repeatedly sought large advances and interest-free loans instead of higher royalty rates when negotiating Joel’s contracts with CBS,” adding that CBS subsequently took a lien on the copyrights to Joel’s compositions. “Joel also accuses the Grubman firm of failing to inform him that it also represented CBS. Because of that conflict, the suit alleges, the Grubman firm said nothing to Joel when Weber loaned $300,000 of the singer’s money to an unnamed CBS executive”—who turned out to be Al Teller, though subsequent to the loan, he’d been bounced in 1988 after conflicts with Yetnikoff—“for an apartment renovation.”
Over the course of some thirty depositions Billy would give in a complex series of suits against Frank, Allen Grubman’s firm, and various accountants, some truths finally emerged in the knotted dispute.
Curtly and cluelessly, Billy had dismissed Walter Yetnikoff’s attempts to warn him over dinner in 1988. “Billy was selling his apartment in New York for about four million dollars,” Walter says, “and he was waiting for Sting to buy it. And he said he’s got this beast in the East, one of his places in the Hamptons, not that expensive—maybe ten million—with a lot of land and it was on the ocean. And he said, ‘Well, I can’t really close on that deal until I get Sting to close on this apartment.’ I said, ‘You need money from Sting to buy a house in the Hamptons? You should have fifty million in cash. What’s wrong with you? Do you know how many records you’ve sold? You shouldn’t need Sting. Something is wrong. Get an auditor to come in and check what the story is. You shouldn’t be worried about money. If you want to have three houses in the Hamptons, maybe it would be a terrible idea, but you should be able to do it.’ And he told me to screw off, that he trusted Frank, and I was pestering him.
“And then I went to Allen Grubman and I said, ‘You should take a look at this. Something’s wrong here. Why doesn’t he have money? Where did it go?’
“He said, ‘I can’t do that.’
“I said, ‘Why?’
“He said, ‘I’m only his music lawyer.’
“So I said, ‘Don’t give me that bullshit. You’re his lawyer and you have an obligation.’ And he said, ‘Well, my client is really Frank, and if I do that then I’ll lose a client.’
“I said, ‘You might. You might lose a client. But you might also be able to sleep at night.’ And he refused.
“After it all came down, I saw Billy at Sal Anthony’s on Eighteenth Street, and he’d just had the kidney stones, and we hadn’t seen each other for a while. I said to him, ‘You still want me to fuck off, huh?’
“He said, ‘No, no, you were right—I’m sorry.’ ”
“I tend to be trusting,” says Billy. “I tend to err on the side of loyalty rather than suspicion. That’s just my nature.
“But at this point in my life, I’ve become very cynical.”
CHAPTER 12
THE RIVER OF DREAMS
One day in February 1990, FBI agent Tim Crino was sitting at his desk at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, where the bureau had three of the upper floors. He picked up a phone call from authorities at one of the country-club federal prisons where his investigative targets, generally white-collar criminals, often ended up. Crino, then thirty-two, had been educated upstate at St. Bonaventure, spent a few years as an accountant, and then brought his skills over to the FBI.
He’d apprenticed in the three-man Topeka, Kansas, office before coming east and racking up an enviable track record of convictions exposing many millions of dollars in fraudulent deals. One notable case led to the 1985 conviction
of a garment business con man named Irwin Feiner, a genial grifter who also dabbled in suspect if not quite prosecutable racehorse transactions. In this case Feiner was prosecuted by then U.S. attorney Rudolph Giuliani. Crino laid out Feiner’s complex invoicing scam—a kind of bookkeeping swindle manipulating the advances banks gave apparel brokers. Feiner was sent away for five years—he’d won a reduced sentence by funneling information about other players in the scam to the feds.
The prison official who called Crino, exploiting the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ right to record inmate calls, had by chance heard Billy Joel’s name come up in one of Feiner’s conversations. The party on the other end, to whom Feiner was trying to sell a Gulfstream jet in order to collect some kickback money, was one Francis X. Weber. Fraudulent elements on the face of the scheme got the agent’s attention (given Feiner’s proven effectiveness as an informant), but the amusing thing, according to Crino, was that “this guy, Frank, is talking about Billy Joel and saying he has to be careful making the airplane deal—‘I got to tread slowly because I don’t want to disrupt the golden goose.’ ”
Crino was assigned as case agent and soon had a young assistant U.S. attorney for the criminal division of the Southern District of New York, James J. McGuire, on board. A Yale grad who had won a Rhodes scholarship, played pro hoops in Europe, and gone to Harvard Law, McGuire was aggressive, impressive, and so feisty that he would later seek to have his own boss, U.S. attorney Otto Obermaier, prosecuted, claiming he’d solicited campaign money from a securities firm in New York on behalf of Senator Alphonse D’Amato. The charges didn’t wash, and McGuire, having run afoul of the party machine, would end up working in the private sector.
The case Crino hoped to make for a time overlapped with the ongoing IRS investigation of Frank, and his scrutiny of Frank’s dealings would lead him to interview Grubman and Indursky—one of many twists in the case that can be reconstructed from available court documents. But despite the recordings of Frank musing over the plane purchase—Crino theorized that Feiner proposed that Frank would get “an under-the-table sales commission no one had to know about” if he could sell Billy on the deal—Billy says, his reaction then was “What am I going to do with a plane?”
Gradually the case Crino and the IRS hoped to build crumbled over questions of venue and jurisdiction, as much of the alleged fraud by Weber and Feiner was located in the Eastern District of Long Island, and any indictments would be hard to shuttle from the Southern District to the Eastern. “We were looking under every rock,” says Crino, “because we knew—we really felt, let me put it that way—that Frank was doing Billy Joel wrong, but we couldn’t prove it. At the end of the day, we could not prove any criminal wrongdoing.” What Crino was left with was a set of head-smacking water cooler anecdotes and a sense that Weber had the guts of a burglar.
One of the maneuvers by Frank, who had helped Billy prepare a postnuptial agreement with Christie not long after their marriage in 1985—as we have seen, she increasingly mistrusted Frank as she studied his subsequent moves—was to set up a conflict between Billy and Christie as they upgraded their new $2.9 million Hamptons mansion on Further Lane in Amagansett. “Frank started to come up with a plan to cause tension between them to the point they weren’t talking,” relates Crino. “He felt he had the best chance of not being found out if he could keep those two from putting their heads together. So Christie wanted a certain kind of stone for the front of the house, really expensive, and as they were deciding, Weber told Christie ‘that Billy has a lot of money in the bank right now, it’s just sitting there, he’s in really good shape. Go out and buy [the stone].’ In the meantime, he goes to Billy Joel and says, ‘Your wife is out of control, I keep telling her you’ve got money problems right now, you’re cash poor but …’ ”
According to Crino’s recollection, the stone went in. Frank also made a pitch to Christie that instead of the inexpensive fruit tree saplings she had been eyeing, she should just buy up the mature orchard that a farmer down the road was willing to let go—at, Crino says, “six times the cost.” Although the FBI investigation would be joined by an IRS investigation, for which Christie gave her bill of particulars against Frank, and Attorney McGuire would get testimony from Billy to help build a case for fraud and tax evasion, in the end no federal charges were brought.
All the scrutiny by law enforcement, however, did bring considerable heat to bear on Frank as he fought off Billy’s lawyers’ civil suit, as well as on Grubman and Indursky—they, too, were targeted by Billy’s aggressive hired litigator Leonard Marks, a sometime assistant U.S. attorney himself. The Grubman firm’s dealings with Weber were still of interest to the federal prosecutors when it was first summoned to Federal Plaza, and though the firm was never charged, Marks gained considerable fuel for his later civil complaint against it.
The available record of the Grubman-Indursky interview by Crino is in the form of notes Marks made during the meeting, which was billed as an information session, though the interviewees did bring their lawyer. Very soon after it began, the grilling brought out some sweaty palms as Crino slid the paper evidence of correspondence and financial transactions between Weber and the duo onto the table between them. “They tried to downplay it until I started pointing out a lot of checks—‘What’s this one for?’ That’s how the game is played in white-collar crime. If you’re holding a good hand, you don’t have to come on real strong.”
In addition to Grubman and Indursky, Crino would interview Sony Music president Tommy Mottola (who reigned over Columbia via Sony’s acquisition of the CBS Records label in 1987) in 1992, after Grubman admitted that Mottola had informed him of Frank’s scheme to “burn horses”—something Frank has steadily denied. (Mottola was also quoted by Grubman as calling Frank “crazy.”) Frank’s Silver W Stables, for example, would insure certain horses, which then mysteriously died. One notably was named Vers la Caisse, which might roughly translate as “to the bank”; the other, Raisin Taxes, bore a moniker almost more suspicious. Grubman’s firm, in fact, had lent the stable a quarter million dollars in February 1986, which Frank used to buy a horse that, as it happened, died soon afterward. Once Marks directed reporters to the court exhibit containing his notes on Crino’s interrogation of the law partners, the Daily News ran the headline, “FBI Told Nasty Horse Tale by Billy Joel’s Lawyer,” and The Hollywood Reporter somewhat misleadingly blared, “Plaintiff Joel Calls In the F.B.I.”
The defendants in each case had their rebuttals working, of course, and mounted a vigorous series of legal arguments contending that most, if not all, of the moves were designed to help protect Billy from onerous taxes and to further add to his bottom line via investments. Insiders say certain of the ventures, such as Lincoln Road Associates, with its investment in a patch of Miami real estate that was about to greatly increase in value, had positive outcomes. Music business mandarin and Grubman client David Geffen came to Grubman’s defense, telling American Lawyer, in a March 1999 piece titled “Good Press, Bad Law,” that “the idea of blaming Allen for Frank Weber is crazy.”
Frank tried to fight back further with legal kidney punches, filing a breach-of-contract suit against Billy in what he presumably thought was a friendlier jurisdiction—Billy got served papers just before he went onstage in Atlanta. Frank also aimed one at Christie, for $12 million, claiming that her malice toward him had led her to “entice” Billy to repudiate him. (The latter was thrown out in 1992, because any such conversations were protected by the state’s marital privilege laws.)
One of the rare comical twists that emerged from all the suits was that Allen Grubman was apparently incensed that he hadn’t been invited to Billy’s wedding to Christie, and he blamed Frank. Whatever blandishments the Grubman firm funneled to Frank, the money flowed the other way as well: in 1986, Grubman Indursky got $450,000 from Frank for helping restructure Billy’s deal with CBS.
Finally, in March 1990, Billy saw the beginning of the end. A state court judge ruled that he was ent
itled, for a start, to $2 million in repayment of bogus loans that Frank had taken out. However, Billy received only about a tenth of that when Frank filed for bankruptcy. In yet another ironic twist, even that payment was drawn from funds that should have been coming in as revenue to Billy.
When it was later discovered that the law firm had also paid Frank something in the substantial six figures for “financial consulting and tax planning,” although he had no real expertise in those areas, Billy’s attorneys added a malpractice suit, using the term kickbacks, in September 1992.
Grubman and Indursky hired veteran law firm Paul, Weiss as well as Bert Fields to fight the two suits, and Billy spent the first week of August 1993 giving depositions in the Weiss offices, at times with an audience of Grubman or Indursky or even Frank, who at one point, farcically unrepentant, whistled a passage from Billy’s song “Honesty.”
The flood of paperwork, as well as the aggravations of being deposed and testifying and paying lawyer fees, were by now becoming wearying to all parties. Meanwhile, Billy was on a tear, having come off Storm Front with considerable momentum that he would bring to his next album, River of Dreams. Hoping to continue his success, senior people at the label and in Billy’s camp began to share a more pragmatic mindset: Why prolong a fight over past malfeasances by an incorrigible, disenfranchised (and bankrupt) player like Frank Weber when Billy’s near future was glowing brightly?
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