Nothing But Money

by Smith, Greg

  February 12, 1997

  The shiny black cars pulled into the parking lot at the pier in the far end of Brooklyn. It was dark and the wind whipped in off New York Harbor. This was miles from Little Italy. This was Canarsie, which is an Indian name, though there hadn’t been too many Indians in the neighborhood for a while. Two groups of men exited the black cars and greeted each other in the parking lot before turning and heading into a restaurant called Abbraciemento’s.

  The restaurant was perfect for a sit-down. It was located on a pier that jutted out into the swirling mouth of New York Harbor, a no-exit cul-de-sac that allowed patrons to sit with their backs against the water and see anybody coming into the lot. It was not A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Arsenic and Old Lace or even Dog Day Afternoon Brooklyn. It was a part of Brooklyn that hadn’t found its way to the silver screen, and probably wouldn’t anytime soon.

  The receptionist at Abbraciemento’s was accommodating in every possible way. Both groups of men were ushered quickly to a corner table where there was enough room for the Bonanno crime family of New York to sit across from the Genovese crime family of New York. It was time for a little gangster détente.

  Robert and Frank Lino were there with a six foot four inch associate named Eugene Lombardo. They were there to represent the interests of the Bonanno group. Representing the interests of the Genovese group was Ernest Montevecchi and two of his associates. Nobody called him Ernest. Everybody called him Butch. The matter at hand was simple: who gets what on Wall Street.

  When Robert Lino first showed up on Wall Street as a silent partner at DMN, Jeffrey Pokross had promised that only a handful of wiseguys knew about the money to be made there. He’d mentioned Philly Abramo and claimed the other families were clueless. That was true, as far as it went, and for a time it was one golden opportunity after another for the up-and-coming organized crime family named after the disgraced boss Joe Bonanno. It was surely a way for the only Mafia family in history to allow an FBI agent to infiltrate its ranks to recover its good name in the underworld. Wall Street was the hills of California in 1849, and it was all theirs. This was, for a time, good news for Robert Lino. Robert Lino was convinced he’d found El Dorado, and so he enthusiastically convinced his captain and cousin, Frank, to get involved in the Wall Street miracle.

  But Robert was ambitious. He’d found another brokerage called Meyers Pollock Robbins through one of his second cousins, Eugene Lombardo, the six foot four inch street guy with the knee-length leather jacket. Eugene believed himself to be a man of finance. He carried at least two cell phones at all times, and was on one or both at any given moment. Lombardo was not an actual member of an organized crime family, although he yearned to be one. He was just a lowly associate, but he had found Meyers Pollock all by himself, and he saw it as a way to win himself a promotion into the Bonanno crime group. Meyers Pollock had all the trappings of a legitimate brokerage house. Headquarters on the ninety-first floor of the World Trade Center, branch offices at 100 Wall Street and in suburban New Hyde Park. It was perfect, and now the Bonanno family had two guys in two Wall Street houses, pumping and dumping to their hearts content.

  It was too good to last. In months, it was clear to Robert Lino that just about every tiny brokerage house with a WASP name had a guy named Tony or Vinnie working behind the scenes. They were everywhere: Joseph Stephens, White Rock Partners, J. W. Barclay, A. R. Baron, D. H. Blair & Co. At any given moment, wiseguy brokers both licensed and otherwise would drift from one of these firms to the other, leaving when they got too many customer complaints. There were more wiseguys wandering in and out of these firms than at the Ravenite. It was clear that soon conflict would visit Meyers Pollock.

  The problem with Meyers Pollock was Eugene Lombardo. Most of the time he was all bluster and blather, but he had an unfortunate habit of throwing his weight around in front of people. He seemed to believe that humiliating a subordinate was not effective if it was done in private. Lombardo became an issue when Pollock was having problems with a stockbroker named Jonathan who ran Meyers’s office in New Hyde Park. Jonathan didn’t seem to understand that the company he was now working for was run by gangsters. He certainly was happy to pocket the cash bribes forwarded his way, but he did not like to be lectured by guys he believed to be inferior to him. They were farther down the evolutionary scale; he was at the top. He operated under the misconception that intellectual superiority trumps physical threat. All he wanted was to be left alone to make money and keep his end of the scam running.

  His job was to push a company called HealthTech, which purported to run a string of upscale workout gyms in Texas and Arizona. It traded under the symbol GYMM. To pump up GYMM, Jonathan had recruited a number of brokers who weren’t controlled by Lombardo. They far outproduced those under Lombardo’s wing. He then tried to fire Lombardo’s brokers. Jonathan the broker insisted that he had the “right” to fire unproductive brokers. Lombardo’s response was simple. He leaned his six-foot-four frame forward in the conference room of Meyers Pollock in front of a roomful of people and slapped Jonathan the broker in the face.

  Jonathan the broker did not pull out a .38 and shoot Eugene Lombardo in the forehead. He did not reach for a baseball bat or pull a shiv to avenge his compromised manhood. He sucked it up, for the moment. Eugene Lombardo was a big guy, allegedly backed up by an organized crime family. Jonathan the broker knew that. But something had to be done. He couldn’t let this insult go. The solution was obvious. If a big guy smacks you, get another big guy to smack him back.

  Jonathan the broker made a decision. He reached out to another guy he knew who was with the Genovese crime family. That guy’s name was Butch.

  Now, in a corporate setting, this would be like going over your boss’s head to complain about your boss. It was a maneuver fraught with danger. But Jonathan the broker decided his manhood was worth it, and so he called upon Butch Montevecchi, a soldier in the Genovese crime family, to fix things up. A sit-down was arranged at Abbracie mento’s in Canarsie.

  Pleasantries were exchanged. Butch Montevecchi was an affable silver-haired guy from the West Side who was known for his connections to Russian organized crime. He was considered tough but reasonable. The Bonannos were coming into this little dispute at an advantage because they already had control of Meyers Pollock, but it was always better to have control of something nobody else knew about. And the Genovese family was not to be taken lightly. They were considered the stealth family, run by the quietly ruthless old boss Gigante. Now that Jonathan the broker had let them know all about Meyers Pollock, the Genovese family wasn’t going anywhere.

  In between the plates of antipasto and gnocchi, a compromise emerged. It would be simple: both families would chop up Meyers Pollock, bleed it dry, and walk away. Jonathan the broker would think he’d received some form of retribution because Eugene Lombardo would be told to stay away from him. Now Jonathan was put with the Genovese family, who could treat him however they wished. In a way, there was even more pressure on Jonathan because he now had not one but two mob families looking to make money, which only meant that more money needed to be made.

  Soon the conference at Abbraciemento’s was over. Everybody shook hands all around. The Linos and Eugene Lombardo went their way, Butch and his associates went the other way. Everybody was happy. The gangsters had achieved a first—a brokerage house selling stock to unsuspecting investors across America was now attached to not one but two separate sets of organized criminals. It was just a new version of the New York/New Jersey waterfront being divided up. That was the whole reason organized crime was organized—to eliminate unnecessary conflict so everybody got his share. There was plenty for all. Wall Street was an endless supply of other people’s money.

  June 6, 1997

  At 2:45 in the afternoon on a beautiful June day, Eugene Lombardo had one of his ubiquitous cell phones pressed to his ear. His friend, Claudio Iodice, was boiling like a tea-kettle down in Boca.

  “Where are you now
?” Lombardo asked.

  “Where am I now?” Iodice screeched. “I’m in the middle of the biggest fucking aggravation, motherfucker. We’re going to Arizona. As soon as I get this guy’s home address, we’re on a plane to Arizona.”

  Eugene had heard this kind of thing before from Claudio, who was a fairly emotional guy. Claudio didn’t know much about doing things in moderation. He owned a 1997 thirty-two-foot Powerplay speedboat and had made millions with a bogus consulting firm in Boca Raton called Equities Consulting Group. Pretty much anything could set him off. Eugene was considered a bit of a hothead, but compared to Claudio Iodice, he was Gandhi.

  Once again Claudio was having problems with the CEO of HealthTech, a guy named Gordon Hall. Gordon was very frustrating. Eugene was pretty sure HealthTech was going to make everybody a lot of money. It was a good scheme. They were using a string of workout gyms in Texas and Arizona and Oregon to claim they were selling the next Bally’s. At the time, national workout chains were burning up the market. All they had to do was overstate the assets a bit, such as by 80 percent, and soon they would all be rich. That, anyway, was the plan as imagined by Eugene Lombardo.

  Meyers Pollock had handled all the brokers and promoters, cold-calling senior citizens and plastering the bulletin boards on the Internet with hyperventilation about HealthTech. On New Year’s Eve, 1997, HealthTech was selling for 87 cents per share. A day later it was selling for $1.34 per share. The trading volume had jumped 250 percent. Only a month before 642,000 shares of HealthTech were traded. In January 1997, the number blasted to the sky—2.3 million shares traded under the SIC code GYMM. In exchange, HealthTech’s CEO, Gordon Hall, had transferred two hundred thousand shares of HealthTech to a fake consulting company owned by Lombardo called N.A. Promotional Services—free of charge. Another one hundred thousand shares showed up in the accounts of N.A. Promotional in February 1997. Lombardo and Iodice, who was responsible for recruiting corrupt brokers in Florida to pump up HealthTech, split the profits. N.A. Promotional allowed Lombardo to claim he’d been hired by HealthTech as a financial consultant, when in reality he was more an organized crime consultant.

  For Lombardo, this was better than hijacking truckloads of women’s bathrobes out at Kennedy Airport or milking the proceeds of Joker Poker. Between January and April, he sold all 200,000 shares of his free HealthTech stock for $430,000 in pure profit, kicking up a percentage to the Bonanno family as required. He and his partners then repeated the scam with HealthTech warrants, with Lombardo, Iodice and another co-conspirator selling off warrants they’d received for free for a breathtaking profit of $900,000.

  “Let’s forget everybody,” Iodice was saying. “Let’s go right to his house. That’s it. He can’t pull that stock certificate. There’s no money. They got a buy in there on Wednesday. That’s it. The whole game is over.”

  “What happened now?” Lombardo replied. “Tell me what happened.”

  The problem was Gordon Hall, who was sick of dealing with Claudio and Eugene and had ripped up half the certificates for the warrants he’d gifted to the two of them.

  “And there’s nothing you could do?”

  “Forget about it,” Iodice complained. “I’m gonna end up getting them thrown in jail for this today. I told the other guy, you don’t find him in fifteen minutes, I said, ‘Do yourself a favor. I’m on my way to Arizona. Keep yourself outta the office because even if I just see you, you’re fucking getting hit.”

  Lombardo did his best to calm down Iodice. He was aware that this kind of behavior, this paying visits to people’s houses, was sometimes necessary but almost always bad policy. And at the very least, he needed to let the Linos know what was going on before anything unusual happened out in Arizona. This would not be easy. Iodice was steaming.

  “I don’t really care anymore,” he said. “These fucking people are not making me out to be a fucking jerkoff. I’m tired of it. I ain’t no fucking jerkoff! I never was somebody’s jerkoff. I’m going to Arizona. I’m not going to his office. I’m going to his family’s house.”

  “When do you want to go?”

  “I wanna go today. I want to knock on his wife’s door, kick it in, and fucking hold him hostage.”

  “You can’t do that. Relax. You’re flipping . . .”

  “Oh you can’t do that. Let me do that . . . I’m gonna fucking knife his family. He took away something I like, I’m taking away something he likes.”

  “Relax. Come on, relax.”

  “I’ll call you back in a half hour when I got my tickets. If you want to come, you come. That’s where I’m going. I got the address.”

  “Will you please calm down?”

  Iodice hung up.

  Somewhere in New York, an FBI agent wrote down in a log, “Wire 5105, Tape 38A, Call 49.” Participants were listed as “Eugene Lombardo and Claudio Iodice.” Anything they couldn’t make out was listed as “UI” for unintelligible. The log was filled with similar notations, all of them involving conversations taking place over Eugene Lombardo’s busy cell phones.

  The more Lombardo talked, the more the FBI listened.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  July 1996

  The day Cary Cimino learned that all the charges were going to be dropped he made sure to reach out to Jeffrey. It had gone just as Jeffrey had predicted. Jeffrey had told him to stick it out, that the case was weak, and then he’d proved it. He may have been arrested, a criminal complaint with his name on it had been drafted, but now it was as if nothing had ever occurred. It was tabula rasa. Clean slate. If he was filling out some job form and they asked him if he’d ever been convicted of a crime, he could say no.

  Jeffrey had gone right back to work at DMN, the day after his arrest, and he hadn’t stopped since. Cary couldn’t do that. He’d truly been spooked by the entire procedure with the FBI agents and the court appearances and the long conversations with his criminal defense lawyer. He was just a little gun shy. He decided to stay away from DMN and only communicate by phone. No more hanging out hearing the stories of Jimmy Labate. Now it was strictly business. If Jeffrey needed people to push a stock, he could help. No matter how optimistic Jeffrey was about the whole thing, Cary’s plan was to ease his way out of DMN within a year.

  Besides, Jeffrey was swimming in deals. On most days at DMN, Jimmy Labate and his Mafia pals might stop in once or twice a week. Robert Lino would drop by weekly for his envelope. Brokers Jeffrey worked with would stop by to complain or demand more money. But everybody who stopped in to DMN was just passing through. The only one who was there each and every day from before seven in the morning until after eight at night was Jeffrey Pokross, the hardest working guy in the place.

  Usually he worked two phones at once. Routinely he screamed at his sister, his partners, anybody who walked into his office. That was how he did business. Never talking, always screaming. Nothing was ever going right for him. The amount of time to execute a sale, the spreadsheet information handed to him by an assistant, the presence of too much cream in his coffee—all of this made him irritable, even more so than before he was arrested.

  Sure he’d walked away from the ordeal with nothing on his record. He’d told Sal and Jimmy that even if he’d been forced to plead guilty, the amount of money was low enough that the rules governing prison sentences would have allowed him to receive a sentence of probation only. He wouldn’t have had to do a day in jail no matter what. But he felt the charges were bogus and demanded that they be dismissed. He’d advised Cary Cimino to do the same. Surprising nearly everyone, they prevailed. All the charges against both Jeffrey and Cary were dropped by prosecutors in the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s white collar crime unit.

  The Wall Street Journal reporter was a young girl named Peggy something, probably straight out of journalism school. The idea she was pitching to Cary was this: there were a lot of single guys working on the Street with money to burn, and she was interested in how they were burning it.

  Cary took her on a tour of hi
s new 2,100-square-foot Upper East Side condo, the one he was renovating. He claimed he planned to spend $700,000 to fix the place up. In the living room, he pointed out that the wall fixtures were candelabra that had been wired and fitted with lights. In the dining room, he showed her his Christofle china and silver for formal settings and his Wedgwood china for informal affairs. He made sure to let her know he had a separate set for his deck, which offered a stunning view of the island of Manhattan stretching all the way to the source of his wealth, Wall Street.

  In his bedroom, he pointed out the antique box that held his TV set bolted into the ceiling. He mentioned that his girlfriend “loves everything,” which gave him an opportunity to drop in that he owned Pratesi sheets. He showed off the rack of Brooks Brothers suits, the drawers of crisp white shirts, the wall of silk ties with designer names easily recognized by readers of the Wall Street Journal. The Boston University biology major presented a tour of his art collection. Cary was comfortable with conspicuous consumption, though it was likely a phrase he did not remember from economics 101.

  “No one wants to live like they did in college. We are finding ourselves in our thirties and forties, single, with the means to live well,” he said as the reporter scribbled furiously. “Everything in the den is Louis the Eighteenth and Charles the Tenth.”