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  Not surprisingly, Tommy Karate was the guy who did the deed. Everything was arranged. Infanti was supposed to meet a guy at an empty office space in Ridgewood, Queens, unaware that Tommy Karate was there already, waiting. So was Frankie Lino, who waited outside as lookout while Robert’s father, Bobby Senior, waited inside in the dark. Cousins in crime. Frank saw Infanti driven up to the office in Queens by a Bonanno gangster named Louie, and he saw the two men walk into the building. Frank waited a minute or two, then followed them inside. There lay Gabriel Infanti on the floor of the empty office, blood pouring from a head wound. The guy Louie looked like he was going to wet himself. He’d been standing next to Infanti when he was shot. Tommy Karate was still holding the pistol with the silencer. They rolled Infanti up in a rug and carted him out to Arthur Kill Road.

  And here Infanti was, stretched out on the ground, no longer a man of honor. And there was Robert Lino, ready to help out his dad.

  It wasn’t going to be easy. The problem was obvious. It was December, and the earth of Staten Island was harder than Arctic ice. Tommy Karate and Kojak were banging away with their shovels. Frankie Lino tried for a bit. So did Bobby Senior. Now Robert Lino stepped in and took the shovel in his hand. The only light came from the headlights of the assembled cars.

  Robert Lino was a small guy—five feet two inches tall, squarish but not terribly bulked up. Little Robert, his uncles called him, mostly because of his father with the same name but also because of his size. He looked a lot like the other Linos—prominent nose, thick black eyebrows, hair black as a Lincoln. Here he stood, the youngest man in the group, ready to do his part. He swung the shovel and hit the ground and nothing came of it. Again and again. They all did. Tommy dug, Kojak dug, Frankie, Bobby Senior and Robert Lino—they all tried their best, chipping away at the hardened ground, all to no avail. It was like trying to clear a beach of sand with a tablespoon. You worked and worked and nothing seemed to change, and digging a hole the size of a man is a lot of work. Ideally you have to dig pretty deep so if the rain comes a hand or a leg or a head won’t come popping out of the ground. In December, with the ground frozen, getting the job done right could take a long time.

  And time was important on a job like this. For instance, it would not be a good idea to be standing out there with Gabriel Infanti lying on the permafrost when the sun came up and people started showing up to buy split rails or pickets or whatever they needed to fence in their little slice of Staten Island heaven. The men continued chipping away. In a few minutes, everybody was out of breath.

  Tommy Karate and Kojak said they would handle the job themselves. Tommy was a very practical guy. He had brought along a bucket of lye. The lye would go on Gabriel Infanti, and in no time at all, Gabriel would be all gone. For Tommy Karate, Gabriel Infanti was just another job. Standing there in the headlights, he and the bald guy, Kojak, began to joke about how scared Louie looked the moment Tommy shot Infanti in the head. Kojak cracked up thinking about how he’d fished $2,500 cash out of Infanti’s pants after Tommy had put a bullet in the guy’s brain. All that was easy. This business of making Gabriel Infanti disappear, this was anything but. They’d thought they’d come out here and dig a hole and dump in Gabriel and the lye and then everybody goes home to their nice warm beds. Who would have thought they’d still be out here after two miserable, frigid hours, with nothing to show for it but Gabriel still lying there and the sun coming up at any time?

  But they kept at it, and soon the hole was dug, the body dumped, the lye applied. The work was over. Robert Lino, the good son, said good night to his father, as if they had just watched a baseball game at Yankee Stadium and now it was time to go home. Bobby Senior and cousin Frankie drove off for a late dinner at one of their favorite restaurants, Villa Borghese in Brooklyn. They were hungry. That’s what you did when you were hungry. Robert didn’t quite have the appetite. He drove back to his home in Midwood, Brooklyn. The night’s work was done.

  It was different now for Robert. Now he was officially implicated. He was what the lawyers called an accessory after the fact, the fact being a homicide, the after being the digging part. And this was because of his own father. This was how the father wanted it for his son. In murder, if you’re there when they bury the body and you don’t run to the police, you’re an official accomplice. A co-conspirator. That was Robert Lino’s new relationship with his father; instead of “Hey Dad,” or “Hey son,” they could say, “Hey co-conspirator.” Perhaps the father thought this would bring him closer to the son. Perhaps the father did not think at all.

  In a few hours, the sun rose on Arthur Kill Road. Off the gravel road by the Island Wholesale Fence warehouse, a mound of freshly dug dirt could be seen—if you knew where to look. The crew had done a good job of making Infanti disappear. He was hidden by rotting wrecks and weeds and concrete barriers. Customers would show up and buy their wares, and business would be transacted as it had been yesterday and the day before. In a few days, Gabriel Infanti’s wife in New Jersey would report Infanti as a missing person. She’d tell the police that he’d left the house with a big pile of cash. He was going to buy a car from a guy. That was all she knew. That was pretty much the extent of what she knew in general about her husband. He was always going off to see a guy about a thing. She was upset, but for the Bonanno crime family, it was as if nothing had happened at all. Christmas was coming, and Gabriel Infanti would be spoken of no more.

  CHAPTER TWO

  October 19, 1987

  The young man of means awoke in his thirty-eighth-floor Manhattan aerie high above the East River. Below he watched the sun rise up over Queens and spread across the towers of the Upper East Side. He could see the millions just beginning to awaken. The lights on the 59th Street Bridge still twinkled in the gray dawn, and one by one, the good people of Manhattan were rising to face the day. Lights went on all around him. He was up at 5:30 a.m. every weekday, out the door by 6:30, at his desk by 7. He embraced his early morning enthusiasm. He couldn’t wait to get to work. He was going to make money, lots of money, more money than a young man of twenty-seven deserved to make. This was it. He had arrived. He stepped into the shower and prepared to march forward.

  He told people he lived on Sutton Place, an address synonymous with wealth and Upper East Side taste. He told people he lived down the street from the secretary general of the United Nations, who lived in a house built for the daughter of J. P. Morgan. Henry Kissinger was his neighbor.

  Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller once lived within these city blocks of exclusivity. Sutton Place was a place unto itself, blocks from the subway but attractive to people who wouldn’t think of riding the A train. Buildings designed by architects famous twenty years ago. A “TAXI” light from the 1940s on the corner of Sutton and 57th Street that hadn’t stopped a cab in years. This was Sutton Place, a neighborhood that stubbornly clung to Old New York. An address steeped in old money. A place where guys who wanted everybody to know they’d made it might choose to live.

  Of course, he really didn’t live on Sutton Place.

  Actually he lived a block away, on East 54th Street and First Avenue. But he still had the views, and for somebody who didn’t know the difference, he could keep the line going. Sutton Place was where he lived, as far as he was concerned. And Sutton Place or not, he had come a long way.

  When he started out, he had almost nothing. He had come to believe that, through sheer force of will and a good story line, he could do anything he wanted to do and be anyone he wished to be. Women inevitably loved him. Men wanted to be him. He was handsome in a predictable way. People often told him he looked like the actor Mickey Rourke, with square jaw and sly smile turned up at the corner. He was always tan—summer, winter, spring or fall. He knew how to turn on the boyish charm. He was a Wall Street buccaneer, the lone rider on the plains of Capitalism with no attachments, no real responsibilities other than to continue making money for people who already had plenty. He was up with every sunrise and ready to be at his
desk at Oppenheimer by seven. That was the Wall Street way.

  This was the 1980s. This was Reagan and supply-side and trickle-down. This was a market trading in the thousands after trading in the hundreds for decades. Money was the new frontier. Every day the heroes of Wall Street came up with new ways to make more and more money. And there was so much money floating around, you couldn’t spend it all. There weren’t enough hours in the day. Maybe the old guard still took the subway to work, but the new guard knew better. Why hide success? Screw the subway. Hire a limo. Order top-shelf, smoke Cubans, collect Italian suits. Spending theatrically sent a message, made a statement, proclaimed that you were a man of substance who spent only what he’d earned. Excess was acceptable, even expected. The young man’s apartment may have been a block from Sutton Place, but the suits and the guy waiting to drive him down to Broad Street were real enough. They were what was required if you wanted to be somebody down on Wall Street.

  Getting ready for the office, the young man was quite aware that he was the luckiest guy in the world. Ten years earlier a lot of guys his age would have been struggling to work their way up the ladder, nowhere near this wealthy this soon. His timing had been impeccable. He lived top-of-the-line, in a high-rise with a twenty-four-hour doorman in an old-money section of Midtown Manhattan perched over FDR Drive and inhabited by people whose money dated back to the robber barons of the last century. Some of these people had been born into it, but some had had to scrape their way up to be allowed to live on Sutton Place (or at least near it). Many of these people would have been shocked at all that the young man had assembled in such a short period of time.

  There was the art collection. He knew almost nothing about art, but understood its ability to create credibility. He’d bought matching black Mercedes convertibles for himself and his sister. He owned a $500 Rolex. He visited a tanning salon once a week, no exceptions. The stove in his apartment was top-of-the-line, but he never turned it on. He ate out every night and placed himself in nightclubs and bars frequented by models. Models were part of the deal. You let models know you were a Wall Street guy and that got their attention. The sound of money always got attention. They may have had a hard time naming the president or filling out a customs form, but they well understood the ramifications of the Wall Street hurricane of the 1980s. In fact, all of America knew about the Wall Street buccaneers and the glamour and the glory. They worked hard, they played hard. They were doing lines of coke at midnight and were back at the office by seven, ready to reap the rewards they believed they so richly deserved.

  On this day, the young man hoped for a little more reaping, although he was painfully aware that this Monday might be anything but a sure bet. The previous Friday had sort of been dubbed Black Friday. It was really kind of ridiculous, but it had spooked a lot of normally intelligent people. The Dow had gone and fallen more than one hundred points (108 points precisely), a feat it had never accomplished before in its history. The percentage drop, 11.7 percent, was not as bad as the 12.8 percent drop of the Crash of ’29, and that disastrous moment in U.S. history had kept going for two days and then started a depression. This time the young man hoped it would be different. The Dow had been slowing since August, when it peaked at 2,700. It was down to 2,200 by the end on Friday, which meant a lot of the young man’s colleagues had spent the entire weekend obsessing about what was going to happen come Monday morning. The young man tried to ignore it and go about his business.

  Now here it was, Monday morning. He knew rewards required risk, and make no mistake, the rewards were endless. Just look at the numbers. He was making mad money. Crazy money. And there was no reason to believe he would not make more. Nobody had seen trading like this in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. No one had seen so many people getting rich so fast—even ordinary people investing their savings and pensions. Risk was good for the soul. Wall Street of the 1980s was spreading the wealth, and the young man was part of the mission. Here he was, a mere twenty-seven years old and already he had acquired and then walked away from a high-six-figure partnership at Bear Stearns—the biggest brokerage house on the Street. He would make a point of bringing this up and reciting the perks in detail as proof of worth.

  “I came over to Bear Stearns as a vice president,” he’d tell people. “It was right around my twenty-fifth birthday. I was given a private office. I was given a secretary. I was given a trading assistant. At one point in time, I had three trading assistants, and in the 1986 partnership announcements right before my twenty-sixth birthday, I was made partner at Bear Stearns.”

  He had a unique way of describing things. The language wasn’t exactly Wharton School. He’d say he “purposely pushed the back of the envelope.”

  He wore his hair in a ponytail. He’d show up in the partners’ dining room without socks. They called him “the kid” because he was the one who could spout financial judgments like he was at a spelling bee. They’d say, “Let’s get the kid’s opinion on where the market’s going.” At least, that was what he thought. It didn’t last.

  For some, leaving Bear Stearns would have been devastating. For the young man, it was just a means toward a more lucrative end. He knew things weren’t working out as he’d planned at Bear Stearns. The lack of socks in the executive dining room, the ponytail—all of that was okay when he was making judgment calls that resulted in profit. But the calls weren’t going his way of late, and “the kid” was now more of a nuisance than an asset. The partners were bored with the kid. He began to look around until he found a new spot—a tabula rasa opportunity at Oppenheimer.

  Now on this unseasonably warm October Monday, he was headed into work at Oppenheimer, the black car picking him up outside his apartment for the slog from the Upper East Side through downtown traffic to Wall Street. It was good that Oppenheimer had made him a senior vice president, let him write daily financial futures reports and given him a one-year payout that came to more than anything Bear Stearns had ever offered. It was a great job—better than Bear Stearns. It was the kind of job he could talk about to friends and family, let them see just how well he was doing. He looked forward to going to work every single day, even if it was the Monday after Black Friday.

  The young man arrived at the office before his secretary and checked his messages. Usually he’d check prices for commodities like wheat and soy and look at overseas markets, where this stuff was sold, to see whether any new wars or coups or assorted panics had screwed around with price. Then he’d look at gold and silver and how the U.S. dollar was holding up. Lately the dollar hadn’t been doing too well. There were a lot of people out there worried that foreign investors were getting tired of its slow spin toward the abyss and would start getting out of the American stock market. This was something to think about in his latest line of work—derivatives.

  At Oppenheimer, the young man was paid to foretell the future, so he had to weigh all manner of factors. He was working as an analyst now, so he didn’t have to deal with that intense buy-sell nonsense of his early years, but he surely paid attention to it. Dealing with derivatives was tougher. You had to predict correctly all the time, and people tracked your percentages. If your batting average hit a slump, you could be out the door. If you were good at guessing, the client was able to sell his futures contract when the per-pound or per-ounce price was up, and everybody was happy and the Christmas bonus was in the bank. If anything unexpected or just plain random happened, profit could go out the window and then anything could happen.

  In his office, the young man sat back, prepared. He waited for the opening bell the way the bullfighter waits for the bull.

  One thing was clear: the young man certainly needed Black Friday to turn into Sunshine Monday. He had much to lose. He’d come so far and didn’t want to go back. He hadn’t grown up like the exclusive residents of Sutton Place. He hadn’t been immersed in affluence, comforted by a sense of entitlement, possessing only an abstract notion of what it was like to have nothing. The young man had e
xperienced living with no means of support before and was not interested in revisiting that period of his life. Anything good that had come his way, he had put there himself. And he knew one thing above all—everything you have acquired over years of hard work can go away in the time it takes for some fool out there to begin yelling “Sell!” at precisely the wrong moment.