Nothing But Money Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THE BRAINS . . .

  Cary Cimino would supply the Wall Street experience;

  Jeffrey Pokross, the brilliant plan.

  THE BRAWN . . .

  Robert Lino would offer the aid of organized crime.

  The Mob would enforce.

  THE BUSINESS . . .

  The buyers on the stock market would never know

  what hit them.

  Berkley Titles by Greg B. Smith

  NOTHING BUT MONEY

  MOB COPS

  MADE MEN

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  NOTHING BUT MONEY

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley mass-market edition / June 2009

  Copyright © 2009 by Greg B. Smith.

  All rights reserved.

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-06006-3

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  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Long before U.S. taxpayers began bailing out Wall Street with billions of their hard-earned dollars, there was the original Black Friday of 1869. It was spectacular and disastrous and caused millions in losses to investors from coast to coast, and it was mostly the work of one man—Jay Gould. When he died of tuberculosis at age fifty-six, one of his peers told reporters assembled on the doorstep of his Fifth Avenue mansion, “Wall Street has never seen his equal and never will.”

  In 1869 Gould was one of the richest men in America, a man who controlled one out of every ten miles of railroad in the nation. Although he was truly a very wealthy man, wealth has a way of making its owners believe there is always a little more just down the road. The source of just a little more, Gould decided, was gold.

  His scheme was simple but inspired. He would run up the price of gold, which would, in turn, pump up the price of wheat. Western wheat farmers would then sell their wheat as fast as they could, which would require wheat to be transported East over Gould’s railroads. He was counting on fear and greed to line his pockets. It was a clever idea, and therefore, it turned into one of the worst financial disasters in Wall Street history.

  Gould and his co-conspirators began buying up gold, inspiring others who saw his investment choices as a bellwether to jump in, too. The price of gold began to rise at an alarming pace, awakening the administration of Ulysses S. Grant from its slumber. President Grant then tried to put the brakes on the runaway train, ordering a major sell-off of government gold.

  The sell-off had a different effect. That morning gold had reached a peak of $162. The White House “sell” message reached Wall Street at five minutes past noon that Friday, September 24, 1869, and within 15 minutes the price of gold had dropped to $133. In the words of the Brooklyn Eagle, “Half of Wall Street was ruined.”

  In a system that relies on self-interest, these things are bound to happen. Gould had his reasons and explanations for his behavior, and he sought to make the case that he was just doing what capitalism demanded. Of course, this was not to be the final Black Friday or Unholy Thursday or Bloody Monday or whatever other modifier the press could dream up to illustrate the shock and horror of a sudden and allegedly unexpected crash. There would be many more, and although results of these market “corrections” were often different—sometimes the crash lasted awhile, sometimes there was a quick rebound—the underlying explanation often seemed quite similar. Everybody saw a run-up and wanted to get their’s before the money stopped flowing. Sometimes that involved cutting corners here and there. Sometimes that involved breaking laws. But the logic of Wall Street was consistent—if everybody else is doing it, I’d be a fool not to.

  Such was the case during the dot-com craze of the late 1990s, a time of irrational exuberance that, looking back, now seems merely irrational. This was a time when small “companies” with absolutely no assets went public and money fell from the sky. This was the dawn of “pump and dump,” when the American Mafia decided it was time to take what they could out of Wall Street. It didn’t last long. Just as Jay Gould’s brilliant idea became Black Friday back in 1869, the party ended in a bad way. But if you were there when it all took off, for a while it seemed like there was nothing bu
t money.

  Greg B. Smith

  March 9, 2009

  CHAPTER ONE

  December 17, 1987

  Arthur Kill Road is the far end of nowhere in New York City. Running along the western edge of New York’s smallest borough, Staten Island, it is not what you’d call a tourist destination. The camera-wielding busloads that flood Manhattan religiously check out the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge. These are icons meant for collecting. Tourists might even hop the ferry to Staten Island, but then—immediately—return to Manhattan. If any out-of-towner found himself on the winding curves of Arthur Kill Road heading into the heart of Staten Island, the borough of landfills and subdivisions, he would only be there because he got lost. Very extremely lost. There is really no reason to go there if you are a tourist, or even a regular person. There are no pleasant sights to see. There are no hip restaurants, no cutting-edge galleries, no timeless museums. This is the working edge of New York. This is where people dump things.

  In the frigid darkness of almost midnight, there were no cars of any type—save one. A lone driver made his way down the road, his headlights knifing into the December darkness. He couldn’t see it, but out there, just a few yards away, dividing New York from New Jersey, was the Arthur Kill, a fetid river that had been polluted by the captains of industry since the nineteenth century. The fish were dead; birds avoided the place. The water was the color of black coffee, and on this night, its petroleum content kept it from freezing. The driver passed refineries with peppery smells and midnight fires. He passed a ship graveyard where the sad skeletons of freighters and tugboats named after somebody’s mother or girlfriend were left to rot. Nobody else was in sight. He was happy the road was so lonely. He could see if he was being followed. He passed an auto graveyard, capturing it in his headlights, and then, finally, a lone sign—“Island Wholesale Fence.” The driver, Robert Lino, dutiful son of a hopelessly corrupt father, had arrived.

  Robert Lino was twenty-two years old, and he had barely finished the sixth grade. His writing was like that of a fourth grader. He had spent his entire life in the middle of Brooklyn, where he learned what he learned and never thought that there might be another way to live. While other kids from Brooklyn thought about basketball scholarships or nailing their Regents exams in high school to go on to a decent college and all the rest, Robert Lino acquired different expectations. Robert Lino was going to be part of the American Mafia. This was an almost unstoppable destination. He had grown up surrounded by it. His father was in the Mafia, his father’s brother, his father’s cousin. All were made members of organized crime, the way that some fathers were vice presidents of international banks or partners in law firms or professors of French literature.

  Robert assumed his father was already at the spot on Arthur Kill Road where Robert had been told to show up. His father was Robert Lino Sr.—Bobby Senior. He was a drug dealer. He dabbled in loan-sharking, collected protection payments, ran sports betting. He could also be called upon to shoot you in the head and roll you up in a rug. He had an official title in one of New York’s five crime families, the Bonanno group. He was what they called a soldier, although the concept of rank and hierarchy was pretty flexible within the Bonanno group. Bobby Senior earned that title by being as devoted to a life of perfidy and deceit as a priest is to his order. Getting over was his religion. He loved the life, and he was hoping his son, Robert, would someday follow in his footsteps. That was why the father had phoned the son late on this December night and asked him to drive out to this desolate spot on the edge of the edge, on Arthur Kill Road in Staten Island.

  It was heading toward midnight, and Robert Lino had to know what was about to occur. He was twenty-two years old now. No longer just a kid taking bets for his dad’s sports-bookmaking operation. This was more than getting coffee for the guys at the social club. This ride in the middle of the night, this was the real deal. He knew his father well. He knew his father’s friends and cousins. He knew that when they called him to come out here like this, he was now officially on his way to becoming just like them.

  There was cousin Frankie Lino. Officially, he was another honored soldier in the legion of deceit named after Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonanno. Frankie was a made guy ten years in now, one of the originals. He was famous among a certain set for a photograph in the newspaper from a long time ago. There he was being led by two detectives in that great New York tradition known as the perp walk, and Frankie was leering into the camera, his eyes black-and-blue, his cheek bruised, his hair wild. He was the very image of the stand-up guy. The New York City Police Department had dragged him to the precinct to ask him some questions about the shooting of a cop. This was 1962, and Frankie had said nothing, even when they enthusiastically applied cigarettes to his genitals. When Frankie limped out of court with his arm in a sling and his face all black-and-blue, Frankie’s brother, Anthony, had hollered out for the benefit of the assembled press, “Lookit what they did!” Frank had dutifully scowled and muttered, “Shut up, you moron-ya!” and walked away. This experience with the cops and the cigarettes had a profound effect on Frankie. From that day, he would be unable to control nervous blinking, earning him a second nickname, “Blinky,” among a small number of acquaintances from the neighborhood.

  Then there was cousin Eddie Lino. Officially he was a proud member of the Gambino organized crime family, run by the world’s most famous gangster, John Gotti. Eddie was considered a big deal within the Lino family. The FBI had told everyone that Gotti was Public Enemy Number One and that the Gambinos were the worst of the worst, more powerful than Bechtel or IBM. And Eddie was one of them. He told people John Gotti was one of his close personal friends. Plus Eddie was known to be crazy. He once decided to shoot a man in the head because the man said something nasty about the wife of one of cousin Eddie’s friends. Actually Eddie shot the guy because he just didn’t like him. In a few years Eddie would be found sitting in his Lincoln, shot in his own head, but for now he and Robert Lino’s father and cousin Frankie were the best of friends. They broke all the laws they could find together—New York Penal Code, Federal Criminal Code, you name it.

  Driving in Staten Island in the dark hours before dawn, Robert Lino knew what was coming. He pulled off Arthur Kill Road into the fence company parking lot he’d been instructed to find. His tires growled on the gravel, the spokes of his headlights swimming through a sea of blackness. The Island Wholesale Fence sign was the only object providing light, a ghostly presence in the claustrophobic blackness. There was nothing else out here but the lonely Outerbridge Crossing, the southernmost bridge in New York City that took you out of Staten Island and into the wilds of New Jersey. In the headlight beams, Robert could make out a beat-up white trailer, probably the fence company’s office, stacks of concrete barriers choked with weeds, rusting rows of abandoned vehicles with leering gap-toothed grills. And then he saw what he was looking for—a group of men standing around, rubbing their hands and stomping their feet against the cold. In the center of the group something lay on the ground, unmoving.

  Robert Lino now knew precisely what he would be doing for the next hour. He got out of the car, and there was his father and cousin Frankie. There was also a guy everybody called Kojak because he’d shaved his head, along with a friend of Frankie’s named Ronnie, and worst of all, a guy named Tommy “Karate” Pitera. Robert knew all of these guys, but sometimes wished he didn’t know Tommy Karate. Tommy was the kind of guy who liked to kill people, really enjoyed it. Plus he liked what happened after, when he would personally cut up his victims into pieces convenient for disposal. He was known to have his own method. He’d shoot you in your house, drag you to your own bathtub, slit your throat to drain the blood, cut off your head and hands to eliminate identification issues, then go to work with a hacksaw to create four or five bagfuls of parts. On this night, however, Tommy Karate apparently did not have access to a bathtub because there, on the frozen ground, was Gabriel Infanti—de
ad, but in one piece.

  This was the reason the father had summoned the son in the middle of the night. Not to take in a baseball game. Not to help paint the living room. Not to spend some quality time chatting about the best way to land a striper or who was the best athlete of all time, Babe Ruth or Muhammad Ali or Michael Jordan. This was an unusual father-son outing, one chosen by the father. And the son had done his part. He’d shown up. He had not questioned the father. Something needed to be done, and like any good son, Robert Lino did what he was told.

  It was just a job. It was like everything else about this life. There was a problem; you fixed it. Take the guy on the ground, Gabriel Infanti. For years, Infanti was not a problem. He was a go-to guy within the family Bonanno, doing a piece of work when requested, kicking tribute up the ladder, the whole thing. He was one of the guys, a man of honor. Now he was just a problem. First he had failed what would appear to have been a fairly simple assignment. He’d been told to dispose of the body of yet another colleague. The colleague had been placed inside a metal drum and concrete poured in with him, and Infanti was supposed to make sure the drum and its contents disappeared. It didn’t work out as planned, and the New Jersey State Police discovered this special little package inside a warehouse in New Jersey days after the homicide. Strike one against Infanti. Then, during another bad day at the office, Infanti—the only made guy on the scene—was supposed to be present when another victim was dispatched. If Infanti had been where he was supposed to be, he would have had the authority to call off the hit because the victim was waiting to meet another guy who wasn’t supposed to be a victim. As it turned out, Infanti got nervous before the job and stepped out for coffee at Nathan’s. As a result, the hit went forward, and now they had to kill two guys—the guy they were supposed to kill and the guy who showed up without making an appointment. All of this caused much anxiety for the leadership down at Bonanno corporate headquarters, plus it raised doubts about Infanti’s commitment to the cause. If a person is a participant in a murder conspiracy, that person is as vulnerable as everyone else. He is a part of the team. If that person chooses to step out for coffee at Nathan’s at just the right moment, questions are raised as to motive. The implications are that a person is attempting to extricate himself from criminal activity, something that implies the person may actually and truly be secretly cooperating with other organizations. Specifically, the FBI. The bosses of the Bonanno family decided Infanti was about to sign up as an informant and go on the government payroll, so it was decided that Infanti had to go.