by Smith, Greg
It was a delicate little dance. As usual, the biggest pressure was to keep the customer from trying to sell before it was time. This was the trickiest aspect of pump and dump. You didn’t want a furious investor whining to the NASD that his broker wouldn’t sell stock when he was told to. So if a customer insisted, DMN had a solution that put the pressure back on the broker. Sell the stock, but find a buyer.
Pokross called this “crossing the stock”: “In other words, if a broker has got client A that wants to sell the stock and that’s demanding to sell the stock, that broker couldn’t go and give it to the trader and say sell it. That broker had to find customer B. So effectively he had to sell it from Customer A to Customer B directly.”
The effect of this was to make it appear as if Spaceplex was a hot commodity, a must-buy. And it worked. They started lining up with buy orders. There were amateurs and pros, big money and small. Even some institutional investors jumped on Spaceplex. They came from all over. There was Carmen Campisi of Howard Beach, Queens, and Astaire & Partners Ltd. of Queen Street, London. A firm in Germany invested $300,000; another in Switzerland committed $500,000. An Italian invested $482,000; a wealthy guy from Pueblo, Colorado, dumped in $221,000. Warrington got the Bank of Monaco to put in another $285,000. All told in 1995, more than two hundred investors sunk $3.5 million into Spaceplex. It’s probably a safe bet that none of these investors had seen the Spaceplex Family Amusement Center in Garden City, Long Island. If they had they might have thought twice.
While this was going on, Cary Cimino and his band of corrupt stockbrokers did no good but did quite well. Jeffrey was writing Cary checks for 35 percent commission and expecting him to chop up 20 percent for the brokers. These payments were straight-ahead bribes; none were disclosed to investors. Sometimes they were by check, sometimes by wire transfer to an overseas account, sometimes by cash. The checks were always made out for less than $10,000, the amount that requires banks to report transactions to oversight authorities looking for money laundering.
Most importantly for Cary Cimino, the checks cleared. Investors actually believed the nonsense the brokers were saying about Spaceplex. And this was why Cary didn’t feel so bad about it. Warrington at first expressed some reservations and dabbled in guilt, but soon he, too, embraced Cary’s credo that investors were just as greedy as the rest of us. They bought the craziness about “the next Six Flags” or “the next McDonald’s” or “the next Starbucks” because they wanted to buy it. Their choice to buy was not bovine inspiration. It was a choice. They listened, they chose to stay on the phone and not slam it down in disgust. They authorized a stranger to spend their money. So if they got burned, that was their problem, not yours.
As it happened, DMN principals Pokross, Labate and Piazza made a killing. The suckers out there in the hinterlands lost out big-time: $3.5 million—pretty much everything they put in.
May 1995
On some Friday afternoons, Cary would stop by DMN Capital and spend hours sitting and listening to Jimmy Labate. It was better than TV. The nicknames: Patty Muscles, Joey Goggles, Frankie the Bug, Scooch. And the local color—the El Caribe in Brooklyn, the social club on McDonald Avenue, some abandoned lot in Staten Island where some bodies might be buried. Cary had no idea what was truth and what was fiction. He didn’t care. After months of working with DMN, Cary had taken to calling the place “the circus,” but it was clear he loved being part of the act.
He was now dropping gangster language into his conversation. Some of the models liked that. Everybody used language for their own purposes, of course. He’d been using the euphemisms of psychology for years with his “methodology” and “process” references. Jeffrey used business language to show how smart he was, dropping in “reverse splits” and “yield burning” whenever he could. Of course, Pokross—who was born in Kentucky and grew up in New Jersey—also had taken to dropping into mob-speak. It was infectious.
Cary learned quickly that for a group that was about breaking the law, there were a lot of rules in the mob. A soldier couldn’t speak to another crew’s captain. His own captain had to do that. The captains weren’t supposed to bring disputes directly to the boss or underboss, but could reach out to the consigliere. A made guy could only be introduced as a made guy to another made guy by a made guy. It was worse than Robert’s Rules of Order. But Jimmy made it sound kind of fun. And there was also the added benefit that if people knew you were with one family or another, they couldn’t try to play games with you. You were a man of respect. Fear had that effect on people. It was probably inevitable, then, that Cary began to think that he himself was a gangster. He’d grown up in suburbia and even started well-heeled, but time and circumstance can do pretty much anything.
He started using terms like “whack” as in “whack a guy” or “bounce” as in “go out bouncing.” It was kind of ridiculous. Here was a guy who had a weekly appointment at a tanning salon and who injected himself with growth hormones to keep looking fit talking about “the vig.” But there it was, and thus did Cary come up with a solution to a problem that he must have found in the pages of a Mario Puzzo novel.
The problem was a guy named Herman. Cary had known Herman for years. He and Herman, a fellow stockbroker turned stock promoter, had traveled the country doing dog and pony shows on different companies their firms were plugging. At one show in Orlando, Cary remembered how he and Herman—both avid Star Trek fans—paid some guy a couple thousand so that they could be part of a Star Trek episode as extras. Herman was one of the brokers Cary had paid to hype stock before he came to DMN. Herman always insisted on cash, and that turned into a big headache for all concerned.
Cary believed that Herman owed him $40,000. Herman insisted he did not. Cary claimed that he had paid Herman the cash bribe when he sold two hundred thousand shares of a company Cary was promoting. Unfortunately, the customer had five days to actually pay for the sale, and during that time, the stock tanked. Thus the customer refused to pay, and Cary was stuck with the fact that he’d paid his good Star Trek buddy Herman $40,000 in untraceable bills for absolutely nothing.
Cary was, understandably, furious. After Cary moved on to DMN, Herman stopped returning his calls. Cary tried to look at the situation reasonably: “I don’t believe that Herman’s efforts were to just take the $40,000 and run, because I had an established relationship with Herman . . . [But] Herman was, based on the rules of the game, based on the established parameters that we worked within, Herman was responsible, solely responsible.”
Then out of the blue, in the middle of the Spaceplex scheme, after dodging Cary’s phone calls for months, Herman suddenly called Cary looking for product to push. Herman suggested he could make amends for the $40,000 by buying a hundred thousand shares of Spaceplex. Only just for now, he needed to do it on credit. It’s not entirely clear who was most offended by this arrangement—Cary or Jeffrey Pokross. Both insist it was the other’s idea to call Herman for a meeting at J.D.’s, a respectable restaurant in Midtown Manhattan frequented by brokers and lawyers and office workers.
When Herman showed up at J.D.’s, he found Cary and Jeffrey Pokross sitting at a crowded bar, two well-dressed stockbroker types sipping Scotch and blending right in with the crowd of professionals. He didn’t at first notice the two other guys with them, mostly because they looked so different. One was a big, square guy with reddish close-cropped hair who looked kind of like a psychotic version of Curly of the Three Stooges. The other was a heavyset dark-haired guy with tinted glasses who looked like he spent a lot of time at Belmont Raceway. He didn’t know it yet, but Herman was getting his first introduction to Jimmy Labate and one of Jimmy’s pals, a guy named Bobby. Neither had business cards, but if they had, Jimmy’s would have said, “Associate, Gambino Crime Family,” and Bobby’s would have said, “Associate, Genovese Crime Family.”
Herman and Cary exchanged banalities, and Cary introduced Jeffrey. Later Cary would claim Jeffrey laced into Herman about moneys owed, while Jeffrey would
say Cary was the screamer. Either way, after a few minutes of furious rhetoric, Herman was told he was going to take a walk outside J.D.’s with two gentlemen whose names he was not provided.
The bar happened to be at a window looking out onto the street, so Cary and Jeffrey could observe what was occurring as if they were watching a TV show. Jimmy and Bobby were standing very close to Herman on the street, one on each side. Jimmy was gesticulating and hollering in Herman’s face, while Bobby stood right behind Herman like a backstop, silent. Herman looked like he was going to puke; the crowd of New Yorkers passing by acted as if the three men did not exist, going about their business, eyes averted.
Jimmy and Bobby began slapping Herman right there on the crowded sidewalk in the middle fifties in Manhattan.
From inside the bar, Cary and Jeffrey watched as Herman crumpled to the ground and Jimmy shouted something down at him. Then they picked him back up, brushed off his suit, and escorted Herman—the side of his face a bright red from the slap—back into J.D.’s to continue their civilized conversation over a Scotch. Pokross realized right away that the whole incident had been a mistake.
“Why did you do this?” Herman whined to Cary, never looking directly at Jimmy or Bobby. “I don’t owe you money.”
“You didn’t hold it like you were supposed to. You know your obligation.”
“I paid for some plastic surgery for you,” Herman said. “I really don’t owe you money.”
The mood shifted.
Plastic surgery? Associates of New York’s Mafia were hanging around with a guy who got plastic surgery? Jimmy and Jeffrey were looking at Cary, waiting for an explanation. Cary kept insisting the guy owed him money, but it didn’t sound right. Pokross said, “The meeting ended with Bobby and Labate being nice to Herman. They were looking at Cary like, ‘Why did we do this when this guy really didn’t owe the money?’ ”
It was a bad move all around. It wasn’t that Jimmy felt bad about beating on Herman the Star Trek fan in the middle of the sidewalk. He would do it again on the weekend if asked. It was just that doing things like that brought attention, and Jeffrey was trying to keep a low profile at DMN.
A few weeks later when Bobby came to Labate and Pokross to say Cary had another Herman-like problem and was requesting a Herman-like solution. Jeffrey was not pleased. Cary wanted Jimmy to enforce the no-sale policy on another deal Cary was doing outside DMN. Even Jimmy Labate thought that was a bad idea.
“You’re not going to be running around being the John Gotti of Wall Street,” he said, and Bobby did nothing more.
To make the point clear to Cary that they preferred he act like a stockbroker and not like a wannabe gangster, Jeffrey and Sal and Jimmy hired Herman to work with him on other jobs. Cary thought that was hilarious.
“Herman gets slapped and then works for Jeffrey and Jimmy,” he said. “Herman works for these guys in a happy-go-lucky fashion.”
Business is business. Cary shut his mouth, went back to work. What could he say, as long as those checks kept clearing and the envelopes of cash showed up on his desk?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
May 1992
The historians will one day acknowledge that the guys from the neighborhood did not figure out the lesson of John Gotti right away. Here was a guy who taunted the FBI every day to come and get him. He’d whacked a boss on a crowded Manhattan sidewalk, in front of civilians buying Christmas presents, and strutted around Little Italy like Macbeth, making a public display of his power. He’d required his captains to meet with him regularly, guaranteeing that each and every one would wind up in an FBI photo album. Everybody but the janitor was in there: his underboss, his consigliere, and all the captains and soldiers and hangers-on. There were crowds of them on the Mulberry Street sidewalk, milling about with the tourists passing by. It was a wiseguy convention, and it was very bad for business. It was obvious that this was more than a bunch of guys from the neighborhood getting together to play casino. Hours of video had played out in federal court, along with the hours of tape-recorded conversations inside an apartment above the club, and together with the sudden transformation of the second-in-command, Gravano, from sociopath to the federal government’s employee of the month, Gotti had been convicted the month previous and now faced the likelihood of dying inside a federal facility. One might have thought that the brilliant tacticians of New York City gang-land would thus have second thoughts about the parade in and out of social clubs and institute an immediate ban on going anywhere near these places. Not a chance. The meetings continued, the walk-talks went on as if nothing had changed. It was always the same thing: they won’t catch me because I’m smarter than they are.
Robert Lino had a different idea about all of this. Robert from Avenue U stayed the hell away from Avenue U, and from all of Brooklyn for that matter. John Gotti’s loss of Teflon sobered him right up. The streets of Gravesend and Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge and Maspeth were crawling with federal agents, guys with cameras sitting inside vans for hours at a time, day and night, never going home to see their families. This was not a convenient arrangement for meeting your crew. If you dropped by social clubs near McDonald Avenue or anywhere else in that part of Brooklyn, it was almost guaranteed you’d show up on some videotape that would later be used against you in a court of law. Robert Lino figured the best place to be was in a place nobody would think to go—across the East River in an innocuous Manhattan neighborhood known as Murray Hill.
Murray Hill was a middle-class high-rise neighborhood with little flower stalls and barbershops somewhere between the Upper and Lower East Side. It was neither here nor there. In fact, it wasn’t really a neighborhood. It had no real personality. There were no Italian cafes or bocce courts or social clubs with ridiculous names like the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club or the Hawaiian Friends Society. It was banal. It was a perfect little rabbit hole into which Robert Lino from Avenue U could disappear.
His choice of venue was a Murray Hill restaurant called Katrina’s owned by a childhood friend, Frankie Ambrosino. Despite the ownership’s family history, the restaurant served only Polish food. It was ideal. Robert from Avenue U could come and go without being observed. Katrina’s was not on the federal radar. Robert’s friend Frankie had long ago made it clear that he didn’t want anything to do with the gangster life. He didn’t mind Robert and his crew hanging out in the back room of his restaurant, but that was as close as he was willing to get. He was quite straightforward about it. He never wanted to become a gangster, just a gangster’s friend. Therefore not only were the feds unaware of Katrina’s, they were also unaware of its owner.
Operating out of Katrina’s was a sound idea. Robert Lino favored the notion that a secret society of organized criminals should endeavor to remain secret. In the old days, that had been much easier. People who signed up for the program stayed in the program and never strayed. Over forty years, there had only been a handful of exceptions. Joe Va lacci. Fish Cafarro. Jimmy the Weasel. These were guys who’d decided that, for whatever reason, informing on your friends and family was worth the risk that someday while walking alone along the streets of Phoenix or Seattle some guy might come up behind you and put five in your cranium. That was when becoming an informant was highly unusual. The shame of being labeled a rat was powerful. Now something had changed. Now there was Gravano, a top boss of the most powerful Mafia family in America, an allegedly stand-up guy, who had one day awakened to discover that it was time to become a friend of the United States government.
Robert from Avenue U was the kind of guy who believed in the whole movie script, that when you swore an oath you swore an oath, that there really were men of honor, that the concept of omerta was to be taken seriously. Guys like Robert Lino were at a loss to explain why Sammy the Bull had flipped over to the government’s team. That was why Robert truly favored the notion of spending his days in anonymous old Murray Hill. To have this Gravano turn rat, that was a profoundly disturbing moment for a society of criminals who’d long clu
ng to the ancient notion that telling on your friends was worse than killing them. Once somebody that high up went over to the other side, the whole contraption was on shaky ground.
In fact, the Gravano defection was beginning to look like a virus. A month after Gravano turned, Little Al D’Arco, acting boss of the Lucchese family, walked into the FBI even before he was asked. And the federal government’s pursuit of Gotti had ramifications for all the five families, especially those who were videotaped meeting with Gotti and his crew. Only those who stayed away preserved the ability to survive the storm caused by Gotti. The bad habits of the self-proclaimed boss of bosses were not going to be mimicked by Robert Lino and the Bonanno family.
In the back room of Katrina’s, Robert’s associates dropped by weekly with envelopes and complaints. He would count money first, then listen to complaints. That was what soldiers did. They collected as much money as they could from as many sources as possible—loan-sharking debtors, gambling debtors, protection debtors—and kicked up a percentage to the skipper, in Robert’s case his cousin Frank Lino. In turn Frank kicked up a percentage to the hierarchy. Each week Robert with the sixth-grade education carefully chopped the money up. This was math he could handle. Some weeks were good, some weeks weren’t so good.