Nothing But Money

by Smith, Greg

  The hours ticked by. At ten minutes before four in the afternoon, after he’d spent nine hours sitting in various anonymous offices, Warrington was escorted by a U.S. marshal into the magistrate’s courtroom on the fifth floor of the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York. This was it. This was his public debut.

  An older guy with thinning hair sat in a black robe behind a big hunk of oak. An American flag hung off a pole to his right. A young Asian guy in a blue suit with striped tie was handing up a piece of paper to the guy in the robe. A middle-aged woman announced his name, as in, “United States versus Francis Warrington Gillet III, 97 M 1278.” He seemed to detect a hint of contempt in her voice, but he couldn’t be sure. His lawyer, a guy he’d never met before in his life, told him to sit down. He was unbelievably nervous, but he did as he was told. He looked behind him and noticed that the courtroom seemed empty.

  He tried to read the paper as fast as he could. It consisted of a series of sentences outlining one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud. The details were somewhat vague but also somehow familiar to Warrington. He knew what they were talking about. Their arrival was not a complete mystery. The guy in the robe said he was a magistrate and asked him if he’d seen the complaint filed against him. He whispered to his lawyer that he had not, but the lawyer stood up and said, “Yes, Your Honor. We waive its reading at this time.”

  As the hearing progressed, Warrington began to understand that the young Asian guy was the prosecutor handling his case, Assistant United States Attorney Bruce Ohr. He and his lawyer for the day had worked out a plan so that Warrington could get out of jail that day. He would not have to return to the room with the bars on the door. He just had to scare up some cosigners for a $100,000 bail bond by the end of the next week and he’d be free and clear. They even said they’d allow him to travel abroad for work if he had to. Assistant United States Attorney Ohr waived the government’s usual practice of demanding the passports of accused criminals.

  And then prosecutor Ohr gave Warrington the greatest gift of all—he let him know that as he had stood there, naked in his shame to the entire world, the room had been emptied of spectators. The government had ordered the courtroom sealed. Warrington had been arrested and accused of a serious crime, and, for the most part, nobody knew.

  When the hearing ended and he finished filing out more paperwork, the reason for the government’s generosity became known to him. Warrington was a perfect candidate to take on one of the most important but reviled roles in the criminal justice system—the cooperating informant. The United States Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York wanted Warrington to secretly join their team. They had kept his arrest and appearance in court a secret so they could use him to catch more criminals just like him. He was, as far as the world knew, still just Francis Warrington Gillet III, stockbroker, able to mix and mingle with potential codefendants.

  Prosecutors, of course, never see just one defendant. Somebody like Warrington means more defendants might be coming soon. The sealing of the courtroom was the first step in the little seduction. In truth, they could do pretty much what they wanted with him. It was now up to Warrington to decide how to proceed.

  Outside of court, Warrington’s brother, Joseph, finally showed up. Warrington could tell by his brother’s look of utter disgust that he was just beginning a journey of humiliation and shame. He was just beginning to examine the paradox of what would better suit his needs—regret or remorse. He had to choose. He couldn’t make up his mind. He stepped out into the Manhattan afternoon, with all the people going about their business as if nothing had changed. There they were, glancing at watches, trying to beat the light at the crosswalk, cursing the idiot taxi drivers, acting as if the world was a normal place. Warrington had been just like them yesterday. Today he looked at them and thought, What the hell do they know? They’re all lucky and they don’t even know it. Francis Warrington Gillet III was a man transformed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Jeffrey Pokross had learned some disturbing things about Warrington Gillet. First, there was talk that Little Warry was about to hop a plane for elsewhere. Guys like this were always a problem. Then he learned that Warrington was going to be arrested. Then Cary Cimino learned of Warrington’s actual arrest and came to DMN to talk about it with Pokross. In the office, Cary mentioned the fact that Warrington’s arrest was sealed. This began a series of frantic inquiries by Jeffrey and Cary. Soon they learned that Warrington had met with prosecutors, and then they learned Warrington had mentioned a specific dollar figure that Cary had made on a deal. The implication was clear. Warrington was cooperating with the FBI.

  This was when Cary asked Pokross if he could assist in giving Warrington what Cary coyly called “a dirt lunch.”

  “You know,” Cary said. “Bury him face-first in the dirt.”

  Pokross replied, “I don’t think we’re going to want to do that, and don’t bring it up with Jimmy.”

  Pokross was aware that Jimmy Labate was not crazy about Cary Cimino. After Cary’s charges had been dismissed, Jimmy began to suspect Cary was a cooperator. Jeffrey did not believe Cary was cooperating, although he was quite sure that Warrington was. This put him in a difficult spot. The gangsters also suspected Warrington was a rat, and if they decided this was true, they might just go and put Warrington in a trunk. Pokross did what he could.

  At one point, he, Sal Piazza and Jimmy Labate discussed potential harm caused by Warrington if he was cooperating. Piazza noted that Warrington knew quite a lot about Monitor and DMN. Warrington had been right in the middle of both the Spaceplex scheme and the Beachport debacle. Jimmy thought the guy with his pedigree and prep school ways was a joke. He called him “the blitherer,” and said no professional member of law enforcement would take the guy seriously.

  November 25, 1997

  Frank Lino sat in the same fifth-floor courtroom in Lower Manhattan Warrington had recently visited, surrounded by the chaos of criminal justice in action. He leaned back in his chair, smiling broadly at the spectacle unfolding around him. He wore a purple Super Bowl jersey over his gray sweatshirt, which was generally the kind of thing you wore when you were awakened at your home by the FBI at 6:16 a.m. He folded his hands over his chest and yawned. Dozens of lawyers milled about in the well while the magistrate on his bench perused paper and courtroom personnel called out the names of Italian-Americans. The proceeding appeared to be like a large-scale Broadway revue where every single actor and actress went on stage and forgot his or her part all at the same time.

  That morning Frank had joined a long list of friends and colleagues taken into custody by the federal government.

  There were agents all over Brooklyn, picking up everybody involved in Meyers Pollock Robbins Inc. They picked up the broker who’d caused all the trouble between the two families, Jonathan. They got one of Frank’s soldiers, Boobie Cerasani. They got Eugene Lombardo out in Las Vegas, and Claudio Iodice down in Boca. Butch Montevecchi they got upstate. Nineteen guys in all. It was a big headache for Frank, and it was also a big headache for federal magistrate’s court.

  The prosecutors went on about how this was the biggest example in history of the mob’s infiltration of Wall Street. They were saying the infiltration was “relatively isolated” and did not “threaten the overall stability of our markets,” but it demonstrated “efforts by members of organized crime and their associates to extend their unlawful activities to the federal securities markets.”

  Nevertheless, Frank Lino was relaxed. He sat back as if poolside, skimming the paperwork with the confidence of a man who does not see the term “life imprisonment” anywhere on the page. It was a pretty unusual piece of paper for a gangster case. There was, of course, the usual racketeering and conspiracy and extortion, but there was no gambling, no labor shakedown, no shylock charges, no allegations of murders or murder attempts or even beatings with office chairs. There were all these allegations having to do with securitie
s fraud and wire fraud. It was almost embarrassing.

  While the bureaucrats in the crowded room moved about with files and the magistrate wrote notes to himself, Frank Lino joked with Boobie Cerasani. It looked like the agents had given Boobie time to put on his best gangster ensemble when they dragged him out of bed at 6 a.m.—he wore a black turtleneck under a black suit coat and had a face like Don Rickles in a bad mood. Boobie had been one of the few guys who really spooked the FBI agent, Joe Pis-tone, when he pretended to be Donnie Brasco. Donnie believed Boobie had been involved in a number of murders, and had made a point of staying away from Boobie. Frank and Boobie went way back. Here they were, arrested by the FBI and sitting in court, but they could have been hanging out at the social club for all the anxiety they displayed.

  The magistrate was getting the tedious job of arraignment and bail done by groups of four. The script was the same for everybody—you’re escorted in, you’re told you’re a notorious Wall Street criminal, your lawyer argues for bail. In cases like this, everybody gets out, because there is no violence in the paperwork. This would go on into the afternoon, with codefendant after codefendant—all of whom weren’t used to getting up at 6 a.m.—milling groggily about the courtroom, waving at relatives and trying to find a marshal to get them their belongings so they could go home.

  When it was his turn, Frank Lino expected to be labeled a “danger to the community” and a “risk of flight.” It was not to be. Today Frank was just a respectable captain in the Bonanno crime family involved in clean criminal activity on Wall Street that was clearly a danger to the community but not that kind of danger. A different kind of danger. An acceptable kind of danger, economic in nature and mostly detrimental to the senior citizens who’d invested their life savings in Meyers Pollock’s many scam over-the-counter stocks. Under these circumstances, the criminal master-mind usually gets to walk out the door after promising to put up his house as collateral in case he decides to take a quick unscheduled trip.

  For Frank Lino, this was quite a bit different from the time he was busted back when he was a kid, when the New York Police Department of the 1950s went after him with the lit cigarettes in the dirty basement room. This was a civilized affair. The FBI agents were polite. The bail seemed steep—$1 million—but it wasn’t real bail. It was bail bond. He just had to scare up four relatives to sign over their homes and that was that. He was even free to go before they signed. His lawyer made a point of telling the judge that Frank was a hardworking telephone company salesman with nine grandchildren, but the bail didn’t budge. The prosecutor stopped his argument, Frank’s lawyer stopped his, and they all filed out to the clerk’s office to sign papers and turn in Frank’s passport. It was all quite amazing, what with all the “with all due respects” and “if it pleases the courts.”

  Outside court, while Frank signed more paperwork, his lawyer talked to the small group of reporters scratching their pens back and forth.

  “We’re very confident that we will be victorious,” he said, which was lawyer-speak for “We’ll work out a deal where my guy pleads guilty to lesser charges and does less than five years.”

  “He doesn’t own any stocks,” the lawyer was saying. “My client doesn’t even know where Wall Street is.”

  December 14, 1997

  The border between Brooklyn and Queens was difficult to discern. Brooklyn had always been older, a place where people lived forever. Queens always seemed more transient, like a rest area on the way to the real suburbs in Long Island. Figuring out where one started and the other stopped was impossible. There were certain neighborhoods where you couldn’t tell where you were, and in one such locale—Maspeth, on the Brooklyn/Queens border—the Bonanno crime family was holding its annual Christmas party at an Italian restaurant called Casablanca.

  The party was taking place less than three weeks after the big arrests of Frank Lino, Boobie Cerasani, Eugene Lombardo, Claudio Iodice and all the rest, so they were likely a topic of conversation at Casablanca. Everybody was out on bail, so nobody would be spending the holidays at the Metropolitan Detention Center. Generally speaking there was a feeling that Wall Street arrests were somehow different.

  No one seemed very concerned. The potential prison time hovered around five years, and pretty much everybody concerned was willing to do that kind of time and then get back on the street. Frank was in such a good mood he was hosting the party.

  On paper the Casablanca was owned by a guy named Anthony. In reality it was owned by Joseph Massino, the boss of the Bonanno crime family. The Christmas party was an event that allowed all the members and associates of the Bonanno family to stop by and bring envelopes of Christmas cash for the boss. It was always well attended.

  This year, when everybody was making money, the event was crowded. It started in the afternoon and went into the night.

  The players paraded through: Boobie Cerasani showed up with his girlfriend and child in his usual black turtleneck/ black suit coat. Dirty Danny brought his wife. Frank’s son, Joey, whom Frank had brought into the life of organized criminals, was there. Gene Lombardo showed up without his cell phones. There was a guy, Joe, who owned a school bus company, who brought his whole family. T.G. from the Bronx represented the Lucchese family; a guy named Georgie was there for the Colombo family. There was even a guy named Tutti.

  In a building across the street, FBI Special Agent James Meskill sat at the window with a video camera, trying to identify as many members and associates of New York’s five organized crime families as he could. He would write down the suspected name and the time shown on the video. It was all part of an ongoing procedure. It was an investigation that never ended.

  For Frank Lino, it was a good holiday season. His lawyer was already working on an arrangement with the federal government that would get Frank out in forty-seven months, and by now he and his cousin, Lombardo, had made so much money, what were a few years in a comfortable federal prison? This wasn’t state time. All around, the atmosphere at Casablanca was one of conviviality and general good cheer. The Wall Street bust was seen as a speed bump. Of course, nobody was too happy about Cousin Eugene. In fact, just about everybody wanted to kill him, the Genovese family in particular. By now everybody knew that the investigation was made up almost entirely of conversations on Cousin Eugene’s many cell phones. Some of these conversations went on for hours and were quite detailed, with names and ranks and all the rest.

  Then there was the business with Claudio Iodice and the drain cleaner. Nobody quite knew what to make of that. Claudio had been acting increasingly erratic in the days leading up to the arrest. He was picked up the same morning as everyone else, retained a lawyer and then got himself released on bail. There had been some reluctance to let him out, given the FBI tapes of him threatening to track down and stick a knife into the HealthTech CEO and his entire family, but a solution had been crafted and he was allowed to go. The only caveat was that he was required to wear a special electronic monitoring bracelet around his ankle that allowed court personnel to track his whereabouts. He was ordered to stay inside his air-conditioned home in Boca and was allowed to visit only his lawyer and his doctor. Really it wasn’t so bad.

  A few days after he snapped on the bracelet, the police received a 911 call. When they broke into his home, they found Claudio lying on the floor of his bathroom, passed out and very near death. At the hospital, the doctors were somewhat puzzled by what they discovered. Somehow Claudio Iodice was still alive, but he no longer had an esophagus. Some substance had been poured into Claudio—either by himself or by others—that had essentially eaten it up. It was gone. Since Claudio couldn’t speak, the police who looked into the matter were the ones to determine that he had ingested a modest but effective amount of drain cleaner.

  This material is essentially sulfuric acid. It is not meant to enter one’s throat. It effectively burned his esophagus away.

  The complications were endless and, in a certain way, fascinating. The loss of his esophagus l
eft Claudio unable to swallow anything. This caused enormous problems because on any given day, normal human beings swallow pints of spit. This spit wound up getting into Claudio’s body cavity and causing untold numbers of internal infections. In the weeks after his interaction with the drain cleaner, it was clear Claudio was going to be spending a lot of time at the hospital.

  Besides wondering about all the ramifications of losing one’s esophagus, the most common question that occurred to people when confronted with Claudio and the drain cleaner was simple—why had this occurred? Was it possible he feared prison so much he was willing to ingest sulfuric acid in the hopes that he would somehow survive but be so maimed as to avoid spending any time behind bars? If that were true, he couldn’t have thought too much about what life would be like without an esophagus. Ultimately the doctors would have to sew his stomach directly into his windpipe, which would allow him to survive, in a way, but would make his life an endless misery. And how could he have been sure it wouldn’t just kill him? Or perhaps he didn’t care.

  Perhaps it was a suicide attempt. It was likely that Claudio was depressed. The government had charged him with numerous counts of securities fraud and was trying to seize every dollar he owned. They even put a lien on his thirty-two-foot Powerplay speedboat. He was on several tapes making threats. He and Eugene Lombardo were practically the stars of the FBI’s show. They had both implicated several members of organized crime. Even if he got a good plea deal and did a few years in prison, how could he walk the streets again without thinking that someday some guy would come up behind him and put five in his brain? Perhaps getting the job done right now would save everyone a whole lot of aggravation.