CHAPTER 18
FU MANCHU AND THE MULE
It was a gorgeous Saturday afternoon in Westhampton Beach, on Labor Day weekend, and we were lying in bed, making love, just like any other husband and wife—sort of. The Duchess was lying flat on her back with her arms extended over her head and her head resting upon a white silk pillow, the perfect curve of her face framed by her luxurious mane of golden blond hair. She looked like an angel sent down from heaven just for me. I was lying on top of her with my arms extended like hers, and I was holding down her hands with my hands, our fingers interlaced. A thin film of perspiration was all that separated us.
I was trying to use the full weight of my skinny body to keep her from moving. We were pretty much the same size, so we fit together like bookends. As I breathed in her glorious scent, I could feel her nipples pushing against mine, and I could feel the warmth of her luscious thighs against my thighs, and I could feel the silky smoothness of her ankles rubbing against mine.
But in spite of being soft and slender, and ten degrees hotter than a raging campfire, she was stronger than an ox! Hard as I tried, I couldn’t seem to keep her in one spot. “Stop moving!” I sputtered, with a mixture of passion and anger. “I’m almost done, Nae! Just keep your legs together!”
Now the Duchess’s voice took on the tone of a child about to throw a temper tantrum: “I’m—not—comfortable! Now—let—me—up!”
I tried kissing her on the lips, but she turned her head to the side and all I caught was a high cheekbone. I craned my head and tried catching her from a side angle, but she quickly turned her head to the other side. Now I had the other cheekbone. It was so chiseled I almost cut my lower lip.
I knew I should release her—that would be the right thing to do—but I wasn’t up for a location change right now, especially when I was so close to the Promised Land. So I tried changing tactics. In the tone of the beggar, I said, “Come on, Nae! Please don’t do this to me!” I offered her a pout. “I’ve been a perfect husband for two weeks now, so stop complaining and let me kiss you!”
As the words escaped my lips, I took great pride in the fact that they were actually true. I had been a near-perfect husband since the day I’d arrived home from Switzerland. I hadn’t slept with one prostitute—not even one!—not to mention the fact that I hadn’t even been staying out late. My drug intake was down—way down!—cut by more than half, and I’d even skipped a few days. In fact, I couldn’t recall the last time I’d entered the drool phase.
I was in the middle of one of those brief interludes where my outrageous drug addiction seemed somewhat under control. I’d had these periods before, where my uncontrollable urge to fly higher than the Concorde was greatly diminished. And during these periods even my back pain seemed less severe, and I would sleep better. But, alas, it was always temporary. Something or someone would set me off on a rampage—and then it would be worse than before.
With a bit of anger slipping out, I said, “Come on, God damn it! Hold your head still! I’m almost ready to come, and I want to kiss you while I’m coming!”
Apparently the Duchess didn’t appreciate my selfish attitude. Before I realized what was happening, she had placed her hands on my shoulders and with one swift movement of her slender arms she thrust upward—and my penis quickly disinserted itself and I was flying off the bed, heading for the bleached-wood floor.
On my way down, I caught a pleasant glimpse of the dark blue Atlantic Ocean, which I could see through a solid wall of plate glass that ran the entire length of the back of the house. The ocean was about a hundred yards away, but it looked much closer. Just before I hit the dirt I heard the Duchess say, “Oh, honey! Watch out! I didn’t mean—”
BOOM!
I took a deep breath and blinked, praying for no broken bones. “Ughhhhhhhhhhh…why’d you do that?” I groaned. I was now lying flat on my back, stark naked, with my erect penis glistening in the early-afternoon sunlight. I tilted my head up and took a moment to regard my erection…. It was still intact. That lifted my spirits a bit. Had I thrown my back out?…No, I was pretty sure I hadn’t. But I was too dazed to move a muscle.
The Duchess poked her blond head over the side of the bed and stared at me quizzically. Then she pursed those luscious lips of hers, and in a tone that a mother would normally use on a child who’d just taken an unexpected tumble in the playground, she said, “Oh, my poor little baby! Come back into bed with me, and I’ll make you feel all better!”
Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I ignored her use of the word little and rolled over onto all fours and stood up. I was about to climb back on top of her when I found myself mesmerized by the incredible sight before me: not just the luscious Duchess but also the $3 million in cash she was lying upon.
Yes—it was $3 million on the nose. The big three-O!
We had just finished counting it. It was wrapped in stacks of $10,000, and each stack was about an inch thick. There were three hundred stacks, and they were spread out over the entire length of the king-size mattress—one atop the other, a foot and a half in the air. At each corner of the bed, an enormous elephant tusk rose up three feet, setting the motif for the room, which was an African safari come to Long Island!
Just then Nadine scooted over to the side of the bed, sending $70 or $80,000 onto the floor. It joined another quarter million or so that had gone flying off the bed along with me. Still, it didn’t make a dent in the picture. There was so much green on the bed it looked like the floor of the Amazon rain forest after a monsoon.
The Duchess fixed me with a warm smile. “I’m sorry, sweetie! I didn’t mean to throw you off the bed…I swear!” She shrugged innocently. “I just had this terrible cramp in my shoulder, and I guess you don’t weigh that much. Let’s go into the closet and make love there. Okay, love-bug?” She flashed me another lubricious smile, and with one athletic move she popped her naked body right out of bed and stood beside me. Then she crooked her mouth to the side and started chewing on the inside of her own cheek. It was something she did whenever she was having trouble making sense of something.
After a few seconds, she stopped chewing and said, “Are you sure this is legal, ’cause I don’t know. There’s something about it that seems…wrong.”
At this particular moment I had little desire to lie to my wife about my money-laundering activities. In fact, my only current desire was to bend her over the side of the bed and fuck her brains out! But she was my wife, which meant she had earned the right to be lied to. With the utmost conviction, I said, “I told you, Nae—I took all the cash out of the bank. You’ve seen me do it. Now, I’m not denying that Elliot hasn’t given me a few dollars here and there”—a few dollars? Try $5 million!—“but that has nothing to do with this money. All this money is strictly legit, and if the government were to come charging in here right now, I would simply show them my withdrawal slips, and that would be that.” I put my arms around her waist and pressed my body against hers and kissed her.
She giggled and pulled away. “I know you took the cash out of the bank, but it just seems illegal. I don’t know…having this much cash…well, I don’t know. It just seems weird.” She started chewing on the inside of her mouth again. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
I was slowly losing my erection, which deeply saddened me. It was time for a location change. “Just trust me, sweetie. I got it under control. Let’s go in the closet and make love. Todd and Carolyn are gonna be here in less than an hour, and I wanna make love without rushing. Please?”
She narrowed her eyes at me, then all at once she took off into a run and said over her shoulder, “I’ll race you to the closet!”
And off we went—without so much as a care in the world.
There was no denying that some very wacky Jews had fled from Lefrak City in the early 1970s.
But none of them was wackier than Todd Garret.
Todd was three years older than me, and I can still remember the first time I l
aid eyes on him. I had just turned ten years old, and Todd was standing in the one-car garage of the garden apartment he had moved into with his two wacky parents, Lester and Thelma. His older brother, Freddy, had recently died of a heroin overdose, the rusty needle still in his arm when they’d found him sitting on the toilet bowl, two days postmortem.
So, relatively speaking, Todd was the normal one.
Anyway, he was kicking and punching a white canvas heavy bag—wearing black kung fu pants and black kung fu slippers. Back then, in the early seventies, there weren’t karate centers in every local shopping center, so Todd Garret quickly developed a reputation as being somewhat of an oddity. But at least he was consistent: You could find him in his tiny garage, twelve hours a day, seven days a week—kicking and punching and kneeing the bag.
No one took Todd seriously until he turned seventeen. It was then that Todd found himself standing in the wrong bar somewhere in Jackson Heights, Queens. Jackson Heights was only a few miles away from Bayside, but it might just as well have been on another planet. The official language was broken English; the most common profession was unemployment; and even the grandmas carried switchblades. Anyway, inside the bar, words were exchanged between Todd and four Colombian drug dealers—at which point they attacked him. When it was all over, two of them had broken bones, all four had broken faces, and one had been stabbed with his own knife, which Todd had taken from him. After that, everyone took Todd seriously.
From there, Todd made the logical leap into big-time drug dealing, where through a combination of fear and intimidation, along with a healthy dose of street smarts, he quickly rose to the top. He was in his early twenties—making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. He spent his summers in the south of France and the Italian Riviera—and his winters on the glorious beaches of Rio de Janeiro.
All was going well for Todd until one day five years ago. He was lying on Ipanema Beach and got bitten by an unidentified tropical insect—and just like that, four months later, he found himself on the waiting list for a heart transplant. In less than a year he was down to ninety-five pounds, and his five-foot ten-inch frame looked like a skeleton’s.
After Todd spent two long years on the waiting list, a six-foot six-inch lumberjack, who apparently had two left feet and an unusually short lifeline, fell from a California redwood tree and plunged to his death. And, as they say, one man’s curse was another man’s blessing: His tissue type was a perfect match for Todd.
Three months after his heart transplant Todd was back in the gym; three months after that he was back at full strength; three months after that, Todd became the biggest Quaalude dealer in America; and three months after that, he found out that I, Jordan Belfort, the owner of the fabled investment-banking firm of Stratton Oakmont, was addicted to Quaaludes, so he reached out to me.
That was more than two years ago, and since then Todd had sold me five thousand Quaaludes and given me five thousand more—free—in exchange for all the money I was making him in Stratton new issues. But as the profits on the new issues soared into the millions, he quickly realized that he couldn’t possibly reciprocate with Quaaludes. So he began asking me if there was anything he could do for me, anything at all.
I had resisted the impulse to have him beat up every kid who had looked at me wrong since the second grade, but after the three thousandth time of him saying, “If there’s anything I could ever do for you, even if it means killing someone, you just let me know,” I finally decided to take him up on the offer. And the fact that his new wife, Carolyn, happened to be a Swiss citizen made things seem that much more natural.
At this particular moment Todd and Carolyn were standing in my master bedroom doing what they always did: arguing! At my urging, the Duchess had gone into town to do some shopping. After all, I didn’t want her to see the very insanity that was now transpiring before me.
The very insanity: Carolyn Garret was wearing nothing but white silk panties and white Tretorn tennis sneakers. She was standing less than five feet from me, with her hands clasped behind her head and her elbows cocked out to the side, as if a policeman had just screamed, “Put your hands behind your head and freeze, or I’ll shoot!” Meanwhile, her enormous Swiss breasts hung like two overfilled water balloons slapped onto her thin-boned, five-foot two-inch frame. A lusty mane of bleached-blond hair went all the way down to the crack of her ass. She had a set of terrific blue eyes, a broad forehead, and a face that was pretty enough. She was a bombshell, all right—a Swiss bombshell.
“Tahad, you are zdupid fool!” said the Swiss Bombshell, whose thick accent dripped with Swiss cheese. “You are hutting me weeth zees tape, you ahhs-zole!” Hurting me with this tape, you asshole.
“Shut up, you French wench,” replied her loving husband, “and stay fucking still, before I slap you!” Todd was circling his wife, holding a roll of masking tape in his hand. With each complete revolution, the $300,000 of cash already taped to her stomach and thighs grew that much tighter.
“Who do you call wench, you imbecile! I have the right to smash you one for making such a comment at me. Right, Jordan?”
I nodded. “Definitely, Carolyn—you go right ahead and smash his face in. The problem is, your husband’s such a sick bastard that he’ll probably enjoy it! If you really want to piss him off, why don’t you go around town telling everyone how kind and nice he is, and how he likes to lie in bed with you on Sunday mornings and read the Times?”
Todd flashed me an evil smile, and I couldn’t help but wonder how a Jew from Lefrak could end up looking so much like Fu Manchu. The simple fact was that his eyes had become slightly slanted and his skin had turned slightly yellow and he had a beard and mustache that made him a dead ringer for Fu Manchu. Todd always wore black, and today was no exception. He had on a black Versace T-shirt, with an enormous black leather V on the front, and black Lycra bicycle shorts. Both the shirt and the shorts hugged his heavily muscled body like a second skin. I could see the outline of a gun, a .38 snub-nose that he always carried, bulging out from beneath his bicycle shorts over the small of his back. On his forearms was a thick coating of coarse black hair that looked like it belonged on a werewolf.
“I don’t know why you encourage her,” muttered Todd. “Just ignore her. It’s much easier.”
The Bombshell gritted her white teeth. “Oh, go ignore yourself, you douche-a-bag-a!”
“It’s douche bag,” snapped Todd, “not douche-a-bag-a, you Swiss nitwit! Now shut the fuck up and don’t move. I’m almost done.”
Todd reached over to the bed and picked up a handheld metal detector—the kind used when you pass through airport security. He began sweeping it up and down the full length of the Bombshell’s body. When he reached her enormous breasts, he paused…and both of us took a moment to regard them. Well, I was never really much of a breast man, but she did happen to have an unusually fine pair of jugs.
“You see, I tell you,” said the Bombshell. “It make no sound! This is paper money, not silver. Why you think metal detector make difference, huh? You just feel like wasting money buying zdupid device, after I tell you no, dog-man!”
Todd shook his head in disgust. “The next dog-man is your last dog-man, and if you think I’m kidding then just go ahead and say it. But to answer your question, every hundred-dollar bill has a thin strip of metal in it, so I just wanted to make sure that when they were all wrapped together it wouldn’t set off the detector. Here, look.” He slid a single hundred-dollar bill from one of the stacks and held it up to the light. Sure enough, there it was: a thin metal strip, perhaps a millimeter wide, that ran from the top of the bill to the bottom.
Pleased with himself, Todd said, “Okay, genius? Don’t ever doubt me again.”
“Okay, I give you this one, Tahad, but nothing more. I will tell you that you need to treat me better, because I am nice girl and I could find other man. You big show-off in front of your friend, but me wear the pants in this family and that…”
And the Swiss Bomb
shell went on and on about how Tahad mistreated her, but I stopped listening. It was becoming painfully obvious that she alone couldn’t smuggle nearly enough cash to make a real dent in things. Unless she was willing to stick the cash in her luggage, which I considered too risky, it would take her ten roundtrips to get the full $3 million there. That would mean clearing Customs twenty times, ten on each side of the Atlantic. The fact that she was a Swiss citizen all but assured she would slip into Switzerland without incident, and the chances of her being stopped on the way out of the United States were virtually nil. In fact, unless someone had tipped off U.S. Customs, there was no chance whatsoever.
Still, to keep sticking your hand in the cookie jar over and over again seemed reckless—almost bad karma. Eventually something had to go wrong. And $3 million was just what I was starting with; if all went well, I was planning to smuggle five times that.
I said to Tahad and the Swiss Bombshell, “I hate to interrupt you guys from killing each other, but, if you’ll excuse me, Carolyn, I need to take a walk on the beach with your husband. I don’t think you can bring enough cash there alone, so we need to rethink things, and I’d prefer not to talk in the house.” I reached over to the bed, picked up a pair of sewing scissors, and handed them to Todd. “Here—why don’t you cut her loose and then we’ll go down to the beach.”
“Fuck her!” he said, handing his wife the scissors. “Let her uncut herself. It’ll give her something to do besides complain. That’s all she ever does, anyway—shop and complain, and maybe spread her legs once in a while.”
“Oh, you funny man, Tahad. Like you such great lover! Hah! That is big joke. Go, Jordan—you take big shot to beach so I have moment of peace. I unwrap myself.”
With skepticism, I said, “Are you sure, Carolyn?”
Todd said, “Yeah, she’s sure.” Then he looked Carolyn right in the eye and said, “When we bring this money back to the city, I’m gonna recount every dollar of it, and if there’s so much as one bill missing, I’ll slit your throat and watch you bleed to death!”
The Wolf of Wall Street Page 23