Scores

  As fate would have it, Harvey jumped into his car and drove to Brooklyn to find our mutual friend and Scores ownership nominee, Blitz Bilzinsky. Knowing Blitz dined every evening at the same time in the same restaurant, he headed directly to that establishment.

  Blitz happened to be in the company of a Scores investor, Marcus Woodall, when Harvey arrived in a whirlwind of angry emotion. Ignoring Woodall, Harvey described his earlier confrontation with Pearlstein, vowing to collect what was owed to him. He then unthinkingly made a statement of potentially monumental significance: “Hey, Blitz, I wonder how Andrew would like it if I called Sergio and told him Andrew was cooperating with the feds against him!”

  At that precise moment, Blitz was called from the table for an emergency telephone call. The call was from me: intuiting Harvey may have headed over to see Blitz, I wanted to ensure that Harvey learned the loan problem had been resolved between Andrew and myself and he would be repaid shortly. Blitz assured me that Harvey had in fact safely arrived, and promised to calm him down.

  When Blitz returned to the table, Woodall excused himself. As Blitz shared the “good news” from the call, Woodall headed to the basement level of the restaurant where he picked up one of the public telephones, dialed Mike Sergio’s number, and told Sergio he had just learned from Osher that Pearlstein—and so probably yours truly as well—was cooperating with federal authorities against him.

  As all this was happening, I was working late in the office, alone and plodding my way through a mountain of paperwork. When my phone rang, I almost didn’t answer it but, as the insistent ringing persisted, I picked up the receiver. It was Mike Sergio.

  “Are you gonna be there for a while?”

  “At least a couple of hours. Why?”

  “I’m gonna leave from the Bronx right now. I need to talk to you about something important.”

  I stared at the clock on the desk, reading the time to be 6:45 PM. After thinking things through, I decided I would film the unexpected encounter. Doing some quick calculations about a trip from the Bronx, I decided to turn on the cameras at around 7:10.

  Less than three minutes later, with no time to activate the ceiling equipment, Mike Sergio walked into the office. No smile, no handshake, just an angry stare.

  The call had obviously been a ruse. He wanted to know if I was in the firm, and he didn’t want me to have time to prepare anything, I thought to myself. To Sergio I said, “I thought you said you were in the Bronx.”

  “I thought you were my friend.”

  “Listen, Mike, what’s this about?”

  Sergio pulled down the zipper of the light yellow jacket he was wearing. Reaching to his waist, he pulled out a gun and placed it on the desk.

  Feeling the now-familiar ring of anxiety radiating through me, not knowing whether to try to grab the gun, or run out of the office, or throw a paperweight at Sergio, I just sat frozen in time.

  Sergio stood and started pacing. “Michael, I’m from the old school. You know I believe you not only kill cooperators, you kill their family and friends too. I don’t go for this shit about leaving the others alone. Know what I mean?”

  I didn’t respond. Without knowing the source of Sergio’s anger, I feared I might make things worse by guessing.

  Sergio reached for his weapon, picked it up, and pointed it at me. “If what I heard on the phone is true, we’re all dead men. But you’re going to be the first.”

  I stayed still, afraid any sudden move might jump his trigger finger. “Mike, just tell me what you heard.”

  His eyes flared in intensity. “I just heard Andrew Pearlstein is a federal cooperator.”

  The words emptied my lungs, but I knew I had to maintain control. Crinkling my forehead in disbelief, shaking my head, and lifting my eyes to the ceiling, I said, “If Andrew were a cooperator, I’d know. We’re codefendants in Florida and they’d have had to reveal that information to me.”

  “Listen, Michael.” Sergio sat again. “If that’s true, great. But that’s exactly what you’d say if you were cooperating alongside him. And if you two are rats, I’m dead because I vouched for you with the family.”

  It was clear Sergio didn’t want to believe we were cooperating, but he’d need more than words to turn aside his strong tide of suspicion. I also knew I needed to glean more information to attempt to make things right.

  I leaned forward. “Mike, just tell me where all this nonsense is coming from.” I then held my breath, hoping the source wouldn’t be law enforcement or defense lawyers, hoping it would be someone impeachable.

  Seeming to decide on his next move, he answered, “I just got a call from Marcus Woodall; he said he was having dinner with Blitz and Harvey when Harvey blurted out Andrew was cooperating with the feds.”

  I felt as if I had been hit with a bolt of lightning. Realizing this was surely not any form of betrayal, but more likely a remark spoken in anger, my mind recognized some possible wiggle room. I understood what I had to make happen.

  “Mike, let’s call Woodall together right now. I want to hear it for myself so I can put this crap to rest.”

  Sergio wanted to be convinced the story was bogus; I could feel it with every fiber of my being. He actually seemed pleased at my request for a confrontation.

  He read out Woodall’s cell number and I dialed it on my speakerphone. When Woodall came on the line, I told him I was with Sergio and we both wanted him to repeat exactly what happened.

  Woodall nervously told the story and ended with the quote from Osher: “I wonder how Andrew would like it if I called Mike Sergio and told him Andrew was cooperating undercover with the feds against him.”

  I felt myself going into cross-examination mode. “Marcus, you know don’t you, Harvey had come to the restaurant directly from a fight with Andrew?”

  “That’s true; that’s what he said.”

  “And he was still really angry at Andrew, wasn’t he?”

  “I think he could’ve killed Andrew if he was there.”

  “So, was he saying he knew Andrew was cooperating or he could get Andrew in big trouble by saying he was cooperating?”

  There was a long pause before Marcus said, “To tell you the truth, it could have been either, but it was more likely just a spiteful remark.”

  Knowing my questions had just destroyed Woodall’s credibility, I glanced over at Sergio and frowned. He drew his pointer finger under his neck, signaling for me to end the call.

  For the next fifteen minutes, we talked matters over and the meeting, which began as an assassination plan, ended up as a lovefest.

  As Sergio departed, he added, “I’d rather you didn’t mention this to Andrew; I don’t want to look stupid.”

  Once Mike left, I was annoyed I hadn’t captured the confrontation on tape. But on reconsideration, I realized it was actually another lucky turn of events. In fact, I counseled myself, I couldn’t even mention this Sergio confrontation to the FBI. I needed to pretend nothing had happened as the telling, of even a cleaned-up version, would raise “danger” issues and possibly terminate the investigation. Anyway, without a taped confirmation, the information would be of no significance to the government.

  “Almost died for nothing,” I mused out loud to the empty room.

  Deciding to call it a night, I rose and packed my briefcase; I was feeling very sad, overwhelmingly dejected, and quite alone. More alone than I’d ever felt in all my days.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Descent into Madness

  I’d lost count of how many times I’d strapped on that F-Bird, how many times I’d flipped the recording switches in my office. I’d lost track of how many dangerous conversations I’d conducted, how many times I’d narrowly escaped death.

  And I was struggling with personal loss. Over a period of eighteen months, I’d buried my mother, my father, and my brother-in-law: three funerals, three eulogies, three blows to the heart. I never had time to truly grieve; the undercover investigation had been underway and m
y focus was on simple survival.

  I’d reached my limit. I hadn’t experienced a day of absolute peace since the illegal purchase of National Heritage in Orlando in 1990. Stress and fear were my life now, and my thoughts spiraled destructively. I thought endlessly about how I’d be executed by the mob: Would it be a bullet, a knife, or a pair of cement shoes? Everyone’s luck eventually runs out, everyone craps out and throws that seven even after the roll of a lifetime. How many narrow escapes does one Jewish kid from Brooklyn get?

  Through all of this, I’d outwardly maintained my composure and the mafia suspected nothing; the FBI kept telling me I was a “natural.” And I did manage to keep my head in very dangerous situations. But the truth is, I was going crazy. I wasn’t the “good little soldier” marching mindlessly and unscathed from one undercover episode to the next: fearless, reckless, indestructible. Away from the mobsters and the feds, when the cameras were off and the tape wasn’t rolling, fear and loneliness overwhelmed me, and my behavior became increasingly erratic.

  Every day I struggled with the compulsion to find a hidden corner and cry my eyes out or, at least, call the agents and insist on an end to the madness. The ones who loved me had no inkling what was truly going on, and the ones “using” me couldn’t give a rat’s ass about my emotional health. Believe me, if I were killed, the agents and prosecutors would feel sorely aggrieved, but mostly because their precious investigation would be mightily inconvenienced.

  But at the same time, I didn’t want the investigation to ever end. The day the plug was pulled would be the day I died, the day I morphed from undercover operative to witness, the day I bid farewell to all I knew. I ruminated endlessly on what it would be like to actually lose everything: identity, family, and friends. The more I dwelled on these thoughts, the more panic set in. Yet how could I complain? I’d agreed to all of this.

  I started asking myself: Why am I saving money? The government will take it all anyway, except the club. What can I do to help myself? What can I do to have some happiness in the brief space left to me? I was on Death Row, but I was free and rich. That potent combination allowed me to plunge as deeply as I could stand into waters of the grotesque. I began a feverish implosion of conduct aimed at exhausting any potential way of staying alive; filling my remaining time with satisfaction, and avoiding my guilt and regret at hurting and disappointing those I treasured.

  Driven by loss, guilt, and fear, I passed the point of no return before realizing I had lost myself. My fear of eventually losing my identity caused me, for a time, to throw it away.

  I’d hosted an AM radio call-in show for many years, first on WOR and then WEVD, with my psychic friend, Ron Bard. The show, named Psychic Eye, was a one-hour exploration of all things spiritual, alien, and otherworldly. Ron would give telephone “readings” and counsel each caller about the three never-varying topics of psychic interest: love, money, and health.

  After I made the decision to start cooperating and the undercover assignments were underway, my attempts at detached analysis began to seriously erode. I couldn’t resist questioning each weekly guest psychic about my future. At each show I would squirrel myself away in a private office at the station during a commercial break with an unsuspecting guest and seek out his or her intuition about my nonspecific “legal problems.”

  Slowly but surely I became an obsessed psychic groupie. With psychic advice pouring in from every quarter of the Big Apple, I engaged in bizarre ritualistic endeavors, and the deeper I traveled into the world of the self-deluded unknown, the more of myself I left behind.

  Following instructions from a renowned psychic, I purchased a large eggplant and spent days holding it and meditating my fears out of myself and into the vegetable. I next drove a hundred miles to a point on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean and tossed that eggplant into the waters; supposedly all my problems were thus deposited into the recesses of the deep.

  I attended private sessions at which chickens were sacrificed for my well-being, their blood smeared on my face.

  On a cold night in February, I visited a small cemetery in New Jersey at midnight and selected the gravesite of a military man. I left an offering, enlisting him in the spirit war against those seeking me harm in the living world.

  Covens of witches were charged with casting spells to foil those seeking injustice against me.

  I took baths in disgusting, foul-smelling liquids to purge my aura and cast out demons.

  I submitted myself to spiritual cleansings performed by groups of obese Jamaican female seers. They sang, laid on hands, scrubbed the air over me, and prayed.

  I was advised to obtain a pure-white dove and interact with it in my home for several hours. I was then to release the bird—along with my woes—from the balcony of my apartment on the fifty-sixth floor. I followed the instructions to the letter and threw this poor unsuspecting animal into the air. We must have developed a deeper relationship than I realized because that dove wouldn’t leave the premises. For days it prowled my balcony and windowsills, leaving mounds of green shit behind in its wake. It was only with the kind assistance of the city’s emergency animal control service that the dove and I ever parted company.

  I knew these activities stretched the credible, and I was certainly too embarrassed to share them with any of my intimates. But if there was even the slightest possibility a ritual could influence the outcome of my fate, I wanted to invoke it. I can see now that I could barely tell reality from insanity.

  Comfort from the psychic world soon found itself accompanied by pleasures of the flesh. Before my cooperation began, I lived a quiet, semi-closeted, gay lifestyle; it had taken me most of my life to understand what I now know to be my genetically inherited sexual preference. I spent many quiet years building a group of intimate friends whom I loved with all my heart.

  But now, my feelings of loss, regret, and fear drove me to mindlessly seek out an astounding number of sexual encounters with virtual strangers. At my insistence, friends began introducing me to those of their friends who’d caught my eye. For the first time in my life I began frequenting gay bars, picking up strangers, and answering personal ads. I gained a reputation among visiting models as a generous gay businessman seeking one-night stands. I became a regular at The Gaiety, a club featuring amazing nude men dancing onstage. As the owner of Scores, there was never a night when two or three performers could not be cajoled back to the club and then on to my condo for private parties.

  I indulged myself recklessly, trying to fill my life with enough sex for a lifetime in each passing month. Alas, my quest to drown my pain in the loving arms of the world’s most beautiful specimens was a complete and total bust. I was feeling no better at the end of each day, probably worse; in the end, it brought me no solace or comfort. In fact, it led me to neglect the friends I’d loved for years, leaving me with a growing fear that without the endless array of bodies prancing before me, I would be utterly alone. I’d abandoned reason for absurd rituals and genuine friendship for mindless sex. I needed to get hold of myself, but I didn’t know how.

  Sitting in my living room, looking out over the most awe-inspiring skyline in the history of mankind, I had no idea how to make things right, or if they could ever be made right again. I could confide in no one, and everything I did to heal myself only made me feel worse. I could find no pleasure in acts of pleasure. I spurned advice, offered no explanations to anyone for my moods or behavior, and could not exert control over my raw impulses outside the spheres of daily work and nightly FBI tasks.

  I was burning up in a silent, invisible protest that no one could hear, and not even I could understand.

  I’d just completed yet another F-Bird operation, this time at Willie Marshall’s wedding, which had a guest list that read like a “Who’s Who” of the Westchester County mob. When the usual debriefing exercises were at an end, Karst put his hand on my shoulder. “You’d better sit down for this next part.”

  Cold white fear rose instantly through my entire bo
dy, as I instinctively knew my world was about to be forever destroyed.

  “Michael, the investigation is over as of this minute. We’re not happy about it, but the prosecutors have pulled the plug. You have three days to pack up and move out of the city, and you need to be in Orlando by that time for a proffer. We’re all going to assist you and Andrew in every way, including relocation money, and in finding safe houses to live in until the indictments are issued and the trials completed. Don’t think now, we’ll go over everything tomorrow.”

  The room started spinning. Did he say “pack up”? We were promised at least another year. Pack up what in three days? Pack up my life?

  “It can’t be done, Jack, I won’t do it! I want to talk to Carol and Marjorie!”

  “You will,” Karst retorted, wearing a hard stare. “You knew this day would come, and within three days the mafia will know about your tapes. You can either stay free and work with us, or they’ll make a motion to revoke your bail and ship you off to witness jail for your own protection.”

  “Holy shit.” Those were the only words that would come to my numbed and frozen mind.

  PART FOUR

  Becoming Irrelevant

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Shock and Awe

  NOVEMBER 1997

  After eleven months, 110 taped conversations with twenty-three mafia targets, and hundreds of additional hours expended in briefings, debriefings, and proffers, the New York undercover investigation was history. We now needed to be packed, out of New York City forever, and on our way to Orlando for proffer interviews as the first step to becoming witnesses in the Heritage insurance fraud case—all in three days!

  During this new proffer process in Florida, we would be under the exclusive supervision of the FBI in a sort of unofficial Witness Security Program. We’d be hiding in plain sight with new identities, and would so remain until the cooperation in New York and Florida was complete, including the trials. Only at that point would we surrender into federal custody to serve whatever minimal jail sentence was imposed by the Florida court. After that, we’d enter the official WITSEC program run by the United States Marshals Service, and begin new, anonymous lives.