Nothing But Money

by Smith, Greg

  And he wasn’t going to be like his father. He was going to provide. He was going to succeed on his own terms. He hadn’t married rich; he’d decided he would be the source of his own success. He figured with the market headed in the direction it was heading, he’d soon be clearing upper six figures and be able to buy a bigger place on Fifth Avenue or down in Soho. In fact, he expected this. He believed in this. He planned to send Warry off to prep school, just as he had been, and then on to the college of his choice. He would probably buy a second home in the Hamptons. Or maybe at Telluride. Who was to say where the horizon ended? That was the only way to look at things. You had to make yourself see unlimited opportunity.

  As he stepped away from his glorious view of the wondrous toy and dumped himself into bed, Francis Warrington Gillet III knew in his heart that he would make it after all.

  He couldn’t remember his dream when he awoke suddenly to the sound of pounding at his front door. He looked at his watch—7 a.m. Who the hell would bang on your door at this hour? He stumbled out of bed and toward the door, blinking and trying to understand what some guy was hollering out in the hall.

  “FBI! Open the door! Now!”

  Warrington hastily ran to the front door, all the while pleading, “I’m here! I’m coming!” He had seen so many TV shows he was sure they were about to bust down the door and charge into his tiny studio, guns drawn and breathing hard with adrenaline. He slid back the door and stood facing a man he recognized immediately.

  The guy he was looking at was Nick Vito. He was a stockbroker working out of a small office in the World Trade Center with whom Warrington had tried to do a deal. They’d discussed ways to wire money into a Bahamas account so that both could reap the benefits of the 1996 bull market. Warrington still had his business card: Nick Vito, Thorcon Capital. It looked like a real business card presented by a real stockbroker who worked in a real office. Only none of it was real. Reality struck Warrington hard: Nick Vito was actually the FBI, standing in Warrington’s doorway at an ungodly hour holding up a different kind of business card—a gold badge that said “Special Agent D. True Brown.” Nick Vito/True Brown was reciting TV banter about how Warrington had the right to remain silent and all that, but Warrington was mostly trying to remember as much as he could about Nick Vito and what he might have said that would give True Brown reason to put him in handcuffs.

  It was tough to remember. Most of it seemed so innocuous. Warrington had been introduced to Nick by a colleague. The colleague said he knew of an aggressive young broker with plenty of big-money clients looking to take new companies public. He just needed a little encouragement, usually in cash. The guy’s outfit, Thorcon, was small, but he would be happy to chat with Warrington. It all sounded like a win-win proposition, so Warrington had done what any hungry stockbroker would have done and tracked down Nick Vito to see if they could work something out.

  First they talked by phone. Then they met face-to-face at Nick’s office in the World Trade Center. Nick seemed like a decent guy, maybe a little stiff. He was certainly knowledgeable about the market, and they soon were able to work out the details. There would be discounted stock handed over to Nick as commission. There would be money wired to an account in the Bahamas. The arrangement was essentially a bribe, but Warrington felt it was, at that time, an extremely common practice among small brokerage houses that dealt with over-the-counter stock. You could even argue it was leaning toward legal, or at least hidden behind a façade clever enough to fool the average drone at the NASD.

  But perhaps not the FBI. Here Warrington stood in his underwear in his fabulous studio apartment, unable to remember precisely what he’d said to Nick Vito or Special Agent D. True Brown or whoever was standing right there in front of him. It had been nearly a year since Warrington had last seen the guy, so remembering what he’d said wasn’t so easy. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more confused he became.

  Warrington alternated between anger at himself and a growing sense of dread. The anger came from the fact that the deal he’d discussed ad infinitum with Nick Vito, with the Bahamas bank accounts and free restricted shares, hadn’t even gone through. Discovery Studios was a big bust. But it was difficult to escape the fact that the conversations about said deal had, in fact, taken place. And when Nick Vito, now Special Agent D. True Brown, began reading off a description of the charge filed against Warrington, the sense of dread began to overwhelm Francis Warrington Gillet III. The anger morphed into raw fear.

  “Francis Warrington Gillet III did conspire, confederate and agree together with others to commit offenses against the United States,” Special Agent True Brown intoned. “To wit, to commit wire fraud in violation of Sections 1343 and 1346 of Title 18 of the United States Code . . .”

  And so on and so on.

  The phrases floated by. “Commercial bribery.” “Part and object of the conspiracy.” “Unlawfully, willfully and knowingly.” Each was like a shovelful of dirt on a coffin. Here he stood in his own apartment, a privileged son of affluence and influence now facing up to five years in prison for committing a crime. Several crimes. And the documents Agent Brown was reading even made a point of alleging that his actions were “against the United States.”

  As far as he could tell, Francis Warrington Gillet III was still standing in his own apartment in his own country. He had always believed in the system of checks and balances. He’d always embraced the idea of a criminal justice system that protected those who worked hard and paid their taxes from the seething, blood-seeking criminal hordes. Until this very moment, the police, the judges, the prosecutors—they were all on his side. They were all his friends. Now here he stood, on the other side. He could think many things. Whose fault was it? What if he’d done things differently? Suppose he’d never met Cary or Jeffrey or James “Jimmy” Labate or Sal Piazza or any of the rest of them? He thought of these things but he kept coming back to another, darker, more impenetrable question that buzzed and whined inside his skull like a gnat. And that question was this: What would his family think when they learned the truth about Francis Warrington Gillet III?

  CHAPTER TEN

  May 1976

  Warrington awoke in a stranger’s house, as he did every school day morning. It was not his house, and it was not his choice. Warrington was seventeen, in his junior year at the Gilman School, an exclusive all-boy prep school located on sixty-eight acres in an affluent corner of the city of Baltimore. It used to be called the Gilman Country School for Boys, but the trustees—in an effort to make the school seem a bit less pretentious—dropped the “Country.” It was one of those schools that made a point of wearing its history on its sleeve, rhapsodizing about its founders and insisting that it catered to students “from all backgrounds and segments” when it really served only the sons of the affluent and influential. They were Warrington’s classmates, and—truth be told—he fit right in.

  He and his peers were being prepared “for college and a life of honor and service.” This was not a matter of choice. They were to become “men of character,” although the type of character was never specified. They would learn to go out and conquer the world, or at least acquire as much of it as possible. Some of Warrington’s peers had started Gilman in kindergarten and were planning on making it all the way through to the bitter end, spending twelve of their most formative years lugging satchels of books across the rolling green lawns that took them from grade to grade. Warrington was one of the Gilman lifers.

  He and his 971 classmates all wore identical navy blue suit coats, white shirts and school ties, usually accompanied by khakis and Top-Siders without socks. Some—like Warrington—had their initials monogrammed in shirt cuffs. They were the sons of senators, CEOs, tycoons, moguls, big-time lawyers, big-money doctors. There was lots of old money and even a little new. He fit right in. He was just like nearly all his classmates—white, wealthy and without restrictions to opportunity. Nearly every one of them saw the world as his for the taking.

 
; Like everybody else at Gilman, Warrington read the entire Lord of the Rings cycle, smoked massive quantities of dope and listened to Neil Young records day and night.

  But Warrington also knew he was unlike his classmates. Almost every student came and went to school every day, being that it was a day school. Only two students actually lived on the Gilman grounds, in a little apartment that was part of the headmaster’s home. One of those two was Francis Warrington Gillet III. Warrington was aware that the other kids got to go home and see their moms and dads and siblings and dogs every night. All the other kids were well aware that Francis and his roommate, the son of a United States congressman, did not.

  The symbolism of his involuntary living arrangements sometimes gnawed at Warrington’s very soul. Mostly he tried not to think about it, especially on these days in the middle of the 1970s when he was late once again for the morning chore known as algebra II.

  Every junior had to take it. Warrington hated it. It did not highlight his strengths. It was unpleasant. He was pretty lousy at it. The combination of waking up alone in the headmaster’s house and the prospect of wrestling around with algorithms was enough to make him want to hide back under the covers and stay there for the day. But he could not. He was, after all, a Gillet.

  Being a Gillet could be something of a chore. It seemed, on its face, quite impressive. Often people assumed he was the heir to the guy who invented the razor blade, or something like that. He was not. He was, instead, the great-stepgrandson of the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. On his mother’s side were two United States senators, Millard Tydings and Joseph Tydings. His father’s father was a big war hero in World War I. His stepfather, John Schapiro, owned racetracks and lived with his mother and siblings on an enormous horse-farm estate. Warrington’s home was not just a home; it was Tally Ho Farms in Worthington Hills, four hundred acres of stark white fences and green, with the Schapiro/Gillet family horses cantering in the misty dawn. It was a lot, this image of impregnability. And what was worse? It was just that—an image.

  There was a part of Warrington that was happy that he lived at the headmaster’s little apartment. He was aware that if he were, in fact, living at home like all the other kids, he’d never see his mother and stepfather anyway.

  They were always away at events—fox hunting, charity parties, that sort of thing. His stepfather preferred to spend his time at his racetracks rather than at Tally Ho. Whenever Warrington ate dinner at home, he’d sit down at the table with his real sister and stepbrother and the food would be prepared and presented by servants. Mom and Dad simply weren’t part of that scene. Even calling them Mom and Dad seemed wrong. Thus Warrington had convinced himself that staying at the Gilman School was not such a bad thing. At least you didn’t have to confront the empty chairs every night at the dinner table. At least you could pretend that you didn’t really care.

  “Those values did not get instilled,” Warrington said. “Everybody’s busy on a highfalutin lifestyle. They’re too busy. The kids of these types of families get lost in the shuffle. The parents are too busy to sit down for three hours to do math homework . . . Rich people do not have time to run around with children, to run around to Little League and soccer and football. On the weekend, you’d go fox hunting. You were misled into thinking that you were just like everybody else.”

  Of course, not caring wasn’t so easy on this particular morning. The schism between the Gillet family image and the Gillet family reality had hit home hard the previous weekend. At the age of seventeen, Warrington III had met Warrington Junior for the first time in his life.

  His real father had just shown up, out of the blue. He might as well have been the last emperor of China. Here he was presenting himself to his son, who was by now a junior in high school and who had not seen his father during his entire conscious existence. Kindergarten, elementary school, junior high school, almost all of high school—no father. Now here he was, this stranger with the same name, blown up on the doorstep like a guy with a subpoena. Of course when Warrington saw his father for the first time in seventeen years, he knew immediately who he was. This stemmed in part from the fact that Warry Junior looked exactly like Warry III.

  He was a handsome guy, this stranger, with a Kirk Doug las chin and all his hair at age forty-five. The man had perfect posture for a tall guy, and even more perfect teeth. He wore a very nice suit jacket but no tie and appeared self-confident and yet informal at once. He was charm personified. He was the prodigal dad.

  Warrington couldn’t really call him Dad. He knew the man solely through washed out photographs and bitter stories told by his mother. When he was a toddler, probably two years old, his mother had discovered that Big Warry was screwing around as much as possible with as many women as he could track down. Warrington’s mother, herself the daughter of money and privilege, wasn’t going for that. Out the door went Big Warry, and off to Palm Beach he slithered, living la dolce vita without so much as a post-card home to his namesake or anybody else at the Tally Ho Farms that Warrington called a home.

  Seeing his father out of the blue was like a shot to the chin.

  Here was a guy his mother referred to as “the bon vivant playboy-about-town who never worked a legitimate day in his life.” The closest his father came to actual work was at one point becoming president of the Game Conservancy USA, a nonprofit effort to support wildlife conservation and raise money for anti-poaching efforts in Tanzania. Otherwise he spent his days hanging around other people’s houses and trolling for a wealthy woman who might want to marry him. It was difficult to explain why Warrington would even give the man a second thought, but he did. His explanation would have been that he’d always wanted a father, even one who forgot about him for nearly his entire childhood.

  His stepfather, John Schapiro, didn’t really count. Granted the man wasn’t abusive. In the two years after he moved into Tally Ho, he hadn’t beaten Warrington or sent him to bed without supper even. He just wasn’t what Warrington imagined a father was supposed to be. He owned racetracks and spent nearly all his time there. When he was home, he could speak passionately about only one subject—information contained in the Racing Form. He got Warrington—who’d begun riding at an early age—reading it by the sixth grade. There was some connection. They could talk horses, which to Warrington were about sport and to Schapiro were about money. Sometimes his stepfather would pick him up at Gilman and take him to the Pimlico Racetrack for the day. He’d let him use his allowance to place bets. He put Warrington in touch with one of his bookies to bet on the football spread. Twice he flew Warrington and his siblings out to Las Vegas and let Warry roll the dice at the craps table. Warry, his stepfather explained, was lucky.

  “The last thing a real father would do—the last thing I would do with my child—is let him call a bookie on the telephone. But if I was married to some babe with renegade kids, you wouldn’t care about them. They’re not your kids.”

  For Warry, the equestrian kinship with his stepfather ended there. In all the years from middle school into high school that Warrington competed in steeplechase, he could not remember his stepfather (or his mother for that matter) showing up to cheer him on. They were elsewhere, along with his real father and any sense that he would be allowed to have a family life that involved actual family.

  Yet when his real father showed up, Warrington could not simply turn away. He wanted to. It would have been justified. He could not. On this morning, he should have tried to forget the entire weekend. He was late for algebra II. Thinking about algebra II was somehow more inviting than thinking about his father’s visit. He knew he had to focus and couldn’t be distracted by familial sideshows. Every year about 10 percent of the class would not make it to the next year, and each year Warrington wondered if he would make the cut. He’d gotten almost all the way through junior year, and figured he could stick it out to the end. But as he dressed himself for class, he couldn’t help remembering one particularly strange moment during Dad’s sudden
weekend visit to Tally Ho.

  The two were alone, and Warrington suddenly realized that this guy in front of him was trying to give him advice. That was strange, given that the guy had forgotten he had a son through three presidential administrations and Wa tergate. But there it was, his father—his real father—giving Warrington advice. Was it about how to become a man of character? Did it involve a “life of honor and service”? Not quite.

  “Son,” he said, “never marry for beauty. Always marry for money. With money, you can always get beauty on the side.”

  May 20, 1978

  Preakness Day at Pimlico, the biggest race in Maryland. This wasn’t your average day at the track. This wasn’t just a back alley crap game. This wasn’t three-card monte. This was Pimlico, where the United States House of Representatives once adjourned for the only time in its history to attend a horse race. Nobody remembered the horses—Parole, Ten Broeck and Tom Ochiltree—but everybody called that day the Great Race. And the Preakness was the Great Race on an annual basis. It was the high church of high stakes. It reeked of history, from its place as the second jewel in the Triple Crown to the tradition of painting the wrought iron horse-and-rider weather vane atop the Old Clubhouse cupola the colors of the victorious horse’s silks as soon as the race was run. On this day odds were the painter was going to be dipping into his cans of pink and black—the colors of Affirmed, a three-year-old Thoroughbred out of Harbor View farms who was favored to win.