Nothing But Money

by Smith, Greg

  Usually Robert Lino didn’t stop down to DMN Capital more than once a week. The narrow streets around Broad and Wall were not exactly familiar territory for Robert from Avenue U. There he looked more like a janitor than a man of respect, with all these college guys in suits and ties and the whole attitude of exclusivity that hung in the money-driven air. Usually he’d drop in just once a week, on Thursday afternoon, make a little small talk, see how things were going, pick up the envelope of $1,500 cash. Sometimes he’d check up on the people he’d recommended for jobs there. There were some brokers he knew of through other members of the Bonanno family who were working there at his recommendation, and he needed to know that they were holding up their end. Usually a visit to DMN was an uneventful affair, a session of listening to Jeffrey’s list of minor complaints and applying common sense to resolve them.

  Until now Wall Street had been nothing but money for Robert Lino. The disputes were tiny. A broker claims he hasn’t been paid by a stock promoter. A promoter claims a broker isn’t holding up his end by pushing the bogus stock they’re trying to pump up. That sort of thing happened every day down there. It was no big deal. The big deal would be some guy from another one of the families laying claim to specific brokers or stock promoters, or another family screwing around with the schemes of DMN by manipulating the stock DMN was trying to manipulate for its own ends. So far Robert had had only a few interactions with members of other organized crime families, and all had resulted in solutions both sides could live with.

  Now that was changing. Until now only a handful of wiseguys out there had figured out what Wall Street had to offer, and that had been good for DMN and Robert Lino. Most wiseguys really weren’t cut out for it anyway. Most had barely made it halfway through high school before dropping out, and they were usually overwhelmed when confronted with quarterly reports and understanding when a company was overleveraged or undervalued. Robert Lino himself had made it only through sixth grade; he hadn’t come close to basic algebra and was nowhere near the calculus required of an MBA.

  Recently, however, Robert had become aware that there were other guys from the neighborhood out there who did understand the numbers game. In fact, more and more of these guys were showing up.

  It started with Philly Abramo. He was a captain in the wannabe family from New Jersey, the DeCavalcante group. He claimed to be the father of the pump and dump scam, which was nonsense but sounded impressive. Pump and dump had actually been around since the 1980s, when a handful of gangsters made some money hyping bogus stock. Regardless, practically everyone in the underworld knew that Philly Abramo had mastered the art of keeping pump and dump below the radar. That, of course, was the key. You didn’t actually have to know everything about Wall Street to play the game. You just had to appear to know what you were talking about. It was the magician’s trick—misdirection. Make the audience pay attention to your left hand while your right hand is robbing them blind. Philly Abramo was the Harry Houdini of Mafia Wall Street.

  And now he wasn’t alone. It had long been rumored he was making millions—not thousands, not tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands. Millions, all on Wall Street. And he didn’t have to pull out a gun, shove in a knife, chop up a body, pour in the concrete—none of that messy business. He surrounded himself with guys who could do that, but even they rarely had to make a guy disappear. Mostly the scheme worked with a mere threat, and that was easy. These Wall Street guys—even the corrupt ones—were pushovers. Just talk about putting them inside a fifty-five-gallon drum and they’d do whatever you wanted. Fear without blood. That was a good deal. And now everybody had heard of Philly Abramo and his millions and it was clear that Philly Abramo was no longer going to be the only gangster on Wall Street.

  As a result of Philly Abramo and his reputation for pulling down millions, Robert Lino had received a telephone call from Pokross about a guy showing up at DMN’s office on Liberty Street who didn’t belong there. This wouldn’t have been a problem if the guy was just another stock promoter, but this guy was claiming to be with the Lucchese crime family and had announced that DMN was now going to be his.

  Robert Lino did not need this aggravation. Here he was, a married man now, his wife a college-educated administrative assistant for a big corporation in New Jersey (and the daughter of a gangster). They were planning on having children. This was the new Robert Lino: family man. Unfortunately the old Robert Lino, Robert of Avenue U, had to surface occasionally to ensure the provider could provide.

  Today’s problem was the Padulo brothers, Vito and Vinnie. The two were registered stockbrokers in their late thirties who’d bounced from one boiler room to another and were now pushing stock for DMN. Jeffrey Pokross had invited them in to push a couple of new stocks DMN was selling, and was paying them bribes to do it. The two companies were called Beachport Entertainment, which allegedly put on ice shows, and International Nursing, which owned a couple of nursing homes on Long Island but was pretending to be a multimillion-dollar operation caring for seniors coast to coast. For weeks Jeffrey wrote checks to the Padulo brothers to hype both Beachport and International Nursing. As far as he knew the Padulo brothers were not affiliated with any particular crime family. Jeffrey was wrong. He realized his mistake the morning a guy with glasses called Joe Baudanza showed up at the offices of DMN along with ten of his own personal brokers without a legitimate license between them. Baudanza announced that they were setting up shop at DMN, as the Padulo brothers had requested.

  A broker named Robert Gallo was there when it happened and he called Jeffrey Pokross, who right away called Robert Lino. Robert Gallo knew this Joey Baudanza from the neighborhood. He called him “the kid with the glasses.”

  “This kid with the glasses, he’s up there with a whole crew,” he told Pokross. “What’s he doing up there? It’s Robert’s place.”

  Now Robert Lino was forced to drive over to DMN, and it wasn’t even a Thursday. He went into Pokross’s office and took this guy, Baudanza, with him. They came out a few minutes later and Lino went into another room with Pokross.

  “How could you let this happen?” he said. Robert said he’d take care of it, and when he left, he wasn’t smiling.

  This was a big problem. It was like one group of pirates coming upon another group right after they’d opened the map and saw the big “X” in the middle. It meant the Bonanno family would have to sit down with the Lucchese family and figure out a way to divide up the spoils without seeming weak. This did not seem right considering that the spoils had been created by the Bonanno family in the first place. And it raised questions about the loyalty of the Padulo brothers. Who, precisely, had told them bringing in another Mafia family to DMN was a good idea in the first place?

  A few days later Baudanza, the kid with the glasses with the Lucchese group, was out of DMN. That took care of the Lucchese group. Then the Colombo group showed up. This time it was the Padulo brothers again, whining about money. They had a different math than Jeffrey Pokross. They claimed DMN owed them $160,000 more in retroactive bribes, and they wanted it because they were out the door and headed for a boiler room operated by the Colombo family. Again Pokross called Robert Lino; again Robert Lino had yet another sit-down, this time with the Colombo family. Again he prevailed, and DMN didn’t have to pay the Padulo brothers a cent. Out the door they went, leaving Robert from Avenue U with a bad feeling about Wall Street.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  January 19, 1996

  By seven thirty in the morning, the crusaders of Wall Street marched toward the New York Stock Exchange, resolute in their pursuit of the Grail. The streets of Lower Manhattan were alive with the bustle of ambition: Broad Street, Wall Street, Beaver Street, Exchange Place, Maiden Lane. Each teemed with crusaders assigned their mission. These knights were called stockbrokers, investment bankers, financial analysts, each the product of years of training. Instead of learning the skills of archery or fencing or hand-to-hand combat, these knights had immersed themselves in the pr
incipals of accounting, the language of economists, the calculus of profit. None wore a steel mail leotard or cast-iron helmet. They wore Burberry topcoats, Brooks Brothers suits, crisp white shirts, silk ties. None carried a broadsword or lance or shield. They wielded shiny leather suitcases with gold monogrammed initials, stuffed with earnings reports and 10-Qs. Their noble steed amounted to the Seventh Avenue IRT subway line.

  In the crowd one soldier of fortune pressed forward, wrapped in winter coat and scarf, head bowed against the January wind. His name was Robert Grant, stock picker, and he pressed forth with the purpose of one who believed he would surely be richer by day’s end. He was headed for his job at the Monitor Investment Group, and he didn’t want to be late. When you’re on a crusade, being late is simply not an option.

  Like most crusaders, Robert Grant had trained for years to get to this place. He’d completed undergraduate studies and then obtained a master’s in business administration. He believed he knew what he was doing. He could have gone to law school or med school or run a restaurant, but he chose Wall Street because that was where you made the most amount of money the fastest. Unlike for the knights of yore, this Grail was within reach, if you knew how to get it.

  This was the time of year when everybody was done with the business of Christmas and Hanukah. This was January, that bleak series of dark days before the February trip to St. Bart’s. The big fir in front of the Exchange was gone, and the statue of George Washington a block away at the old Federal Hall looked particularly frozen. The idea was to get from the subway into your office as quickly as possible, even if all you had to look forward to the first thing in the morning was yet another wretched meeting. That was Robert Grant’s mission this morning. He’d been told to be on time.

  Robert Grant was one of the new recruits at Monitor Investment Group’s new office at 30 Broad Street, just a block from the Exchange. Here was the heart of moneymaking in America, and as 1996 dawned, boy was there money to be made.

  The Street was hot. The tech-stock boom was creating an atmosphere of adventure. When the wild 1980s came screeching to a halt in the Crash of ’87, Wall Street was seen as a volatile game of roulette, a kind of casino run by blue bloods. Now everybody had forgotten about that. Now Wall Street was the place to be. Innovation was rampant. All the way down in Mississippi Bernie Ebbers’s World-Com was buying up little phone companies created by the breakup of AT&T at a pace fast enough that Bernie got himself on the front page of Fortune dressed like a cowboy. Ken Lay of Enron made the front page as a visionary, his new Houston-based company that bought and sold energy touted as the company of the next century. CEOs were celebrities.

  And once again, stockbrokers were kings. The old masters of the universe from the eighties were now much cooler, mostly because everybody had become an investor. Not just old money capital but new money capital: the guy who owned the bagel store. The owner of the nail salon. The retired postal supervisor. The Kmart stock clerk. Cable TV was devoting entire channels just to stock market gyration, and people were watching. In barbershops, on the rows of TVs at the mall retail stores, at the airports. Forget baseball. Forget politics. Forget what’s happening in Afghanistan.

  Money was the new Crusade.

  It all seemed so easy. It was practically guaranteed that if you paid attention, you could make 1,000 percent profit overnight. The returns were astonishing. You just had to act quickly. Your neighbor the hairstylist just made in one week $10,000 betting on Amazon. How could you ignore that? And in order to make real money you had to risk real money. Why not take a chance on a margin account? Sure, they could call it at any time, but what was the risk when the market was so bullish? If your neighbor the hairstylist could do it, so could you.

  But for the troops out there slogging in the trenches along Broad Street and Wall Street and Exchange Place, the actual making of money, the job itself—it could be so profoundly tedious. Especially during meetings. This was what Robert Grant had to look forward to: a roomful of guys bored out of their skulls trying to stay awake through the latest pitch, the newest shtick, the most up-to-date patter. Each new strategy was supposed to produce more customers willing to buy product, which was supposed to mean more commissions. But mostly the newest pitch was just a warmed up version of the previous pitch. It was all pretty much the same. Keep the customers moving. Keep them believing that they must act fast. Momentum was the key. Never get too specific with numbers. Most of the material Grant had been given about the companies he pushed was pretty vague anyway. There wasn’t a whole lot of detail about assets. It was hard to tell from the prospectuses whether any of the companies had any real track records to speak of. But from the perspective of the broker working the customer, it really didn’t matter. Just keep the monologue going. Overwhelm them with the urge to make money fast. Robert Grant didn’t need a meeting to tell him that. All he needed to do was get on the phone with a potential client and throw that slider over the plate.

  The big push at Monitor the past few weeks was a company called Reclaim, which allegedly recycled roofing shingles. Environmental spin was always effective. Somehow it was easier to sell the idea of profiting while saving the planet. There were dozens of companies like this one out there. Monitor was pushing Reclaim under the symbol ROOF. Grant’s job was to cold-call, often to seniors, usually in the Midwest. He was handed a list of names. He didn’t ask where they got it. He didn’t really think that these people could be his own grandparents. He just made the calls and performed the pitch.

  By the time he arrived on the scene, Monitor had already paid off the market makers to drive up the price, guaranteeing them against a loss. The Monitor insiders were buying Reclaim at 25 cents a share, buying them up through offshore shells, knowing they could sell after forty days. The market makers drove the price up to $2.50, then Grant and the other brokers at Monitor went to work in the retail market. The brokers were paid by cash or check to pump it up further. This was going on in New York and overseas. There were rumors that suitcases filled with cash were coming and going from Germany. When they got it to $6, everybody on the inside was going to dump as fast as they could.

  So far as he knew, Robert Grant was holding up his end, snagging customers across the nation. The only warning sign he’d experienced was the repeated admonition not to let his customers unload their Reclaim. Not yet. If they insisted, Robert had to find somebody to sell it to. It was as simple as that.

  Robert Grant and another broker, a sometime friend named Eric, arrived at Monitor around 7:45 a.m., right on time. Both were told to report to the conference room immediately. They hustled in even before they had their coffee.

  The minute he opened the door to the room, Grant realized this was not the usual pitch meeting. Mostly he realized this because once he stepped into the conference room, he was immediately whacked in the face with an office chair.

  Robert Grant went down on the carpet and curled up in a fetal position. The guy with the chair was named Bobby Gallo.

  Robert Grant knew Bobby Gallo only as some creep from Brooklyn who seemed to hang around the office. The guy didn’t actually work, as far as anyone could see. He was from a different world than Robert Grant. He hadn’t bothered with the abstract knowledge of the MBA. He hadn’t spent any time in school at all. His knowledge came from the streets of Brooklyn. While Robert Grant was learning about the Laffer curve, Bobby Gallo was learning how to coldcock a guy so he couldn’t get up. Robert Grant used a calculator; Bobby Gallo used fists. The rumor was Bobby Gallo had actually passed his Series 7 exam, but Robert Grant couldn’t believe such a thing was possible. He could believe that Bobby Gallo was now hitting him about the face and back with an office chair.

  As he flailed away, Gallo kept screaming something about taking money from a man’s family. Then he’d swing again with the chair. He was also kicking Robert Grant in the sides, in the back, in the legs, wherever he could. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Grant could see that a couple of other guys built more o
r less like Gallo were also kicking at Eric, who was also on the carpet, writhing and howling in pain.

  Robert Grant managed to slide himself under the conference table and come up on the other side. Maybe it would have been better if he had learned archery or swordsman ship or hand-to-hand combat like a real knight, but here he was, slinking his way out of the conference room and into the women’s bathroom.

  He slammed the door behind him. There he lay, bleeding, his chest heaving, his face bruised, his sides and back racked with searing pain.

  It had all happened so fast.

  He remembered screaming, “What the hell are you doing?” over and over, but couldn’t remember what Gallo and the other guys were yammering on and on about as they went to work on Robert and Eric. Something about trying to take customers away from Monitor to jump to another firm. He had no idea what they were talking about.

  This kind of behavior was not something he’d expected to find on Wall Street. He didn’t remember the use of office chairs being discussed in business school. He didn’t know guys like Gallo were part of this world. He’d been told Wall Street was all college guys, lots of preppies, plenty of fraternity brothers. But this? This was a version of Animal House he hadn’t thought existed.

  Lying on the floor of the women’s bathroom, Robert Grant figured a guy like Bobby Gallo hadn’t thought up the idea of busting up his morning himself, so he decided to make a plan. He’d get the hell out of Monitor, go directly to Beekman Hospital and make sure they took some good photos of his injuries. Then he’d make three phone calls.