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  The reverse merger was Jeffrey Pokross’s idea. The first time he pitched it, Cary had to ask him to slow down. When Jeffrey was pitching he often dropped into business jargon and cranked up the speed. He’d start jabbering like a chipmunk, presenting ideas as sure bets, big wins, profits guaranteed. This particular sure thing started with a reverse merger and relied heavily on Chinese action films.

  Here the pitch could make your head swim. The company was to be called MPSC for Motion Picture Service Company. It would offer one-stop-shopping for making movies. You want to make a movie? You come to MPSC and they hand you a producer, a director, a film editor, a casting agent and everybody but the actors. Jeffrey claimed he was putting together heavyweight investors. MPSC would make a quick killing and he and Cary would walk away like lottery winners. There was nothing to it. They had two guys involved in producing and directing a TV crime show signed up. They even had a guy who’d directed some of the old Lost in Space TV episodes with the robot and “Danger Will Robinson!” and all that. They just needed a few more big-money types willing to commit some money up front so they could all be rich by Wednesday. Something like that.

  But to reel in the big checkbooks, they needed Jeffrey Pokross to remain out of sight. They couldn’t offer even a hint of Jeffrey Pokross. That was where Cary came in. He could still claim to be a high-powered broker with a real broker’s license. He could still claim to be a former partner at Bear Stearns, a graduate of Stanford University. When you met him, you might think he was a paragon of legitimacy. Here was a guy, you might think, who knew what he was doing. Here was a guy who could bring in the serious investors who have the good sense to jump on an opportunity when it presents itself. Three million dollars would be great, $3.5 million would be better.

  The fact that MPSC had absolutely no assets to speak of was not a problem. Jeffrey Pokross proposed a classic bit of “lead into gold” legerdemain—the reverse merger. Cary—the guy with the broker’s license—was learning from the guy who’d taken a few graduate business courses at Monmouth College, home of the Fighting Scots. He listened and learned.

  Jeffrey’s plan went like this: They started with a publicly traded company called Unicom Distributors that owned 250 Chinese martial arts movies and sold its stock in the loosely regulated, highly speculative over-the-counter market. Unicom had a key piece of paper necessary when creating the aura of legitimacy—an audit signed off on by Arthur Andersen, claiming the Chinese action flicks were worth $38 million. Step one complete.

  Step two: Unicom “bought” MPSC, a company that existed only in the minds of Jeffrey Pokross and Cary Cimino and possibly the guy who directed the robot who says “Danger Will Robinson!” Now MPSC was a wholly owned subsidiary of the heretofore nonexistent company that was really just Unicom. Now MPSC could claim Unicom’s $38 million in assets as its own and MPSC could borrow against that to build up the company’s appearance before taking the company public and then selling MPSC as a separate entity. Unicom—the money behind the façade—told investors it was going to make a killing in the emerging video market by putting its entire kung fu collection on video.

  Step three was where Cary’s girlfriend and her rich parents came in. The family’s purchase of Lowenthal was specifically intended to generate more fees for Cary and Jeffrey and all the others involved in the deal. Lowenthal was to be the financial underwriter that would handle the reverse merger of Unicom and MPSC.

  There was only one problem: in 1990, the market for Chinese action movie videos was going nowhere. The only “assets” behind the whole Potemkin Village were useless, worthless. The company behind the company was losing money and credibility. MPSC went bust about seven months after it was born.

  “Well you had delusions of grandeur back then,” Cary recalled. “Of course Jeffrey and I were deluding ourselves that eventually we were going to spin off MPSC into its own and we were going to make millions of dollars. Unicom acquired MPSC and the deal died on the vine. The Chinese films weren’t selling. MPSC backed out. Then Lowenthal also went out of business—a loss for Jane and her family.”

  Under most circumstances, such a drubbing might undermine the relationship between a future son-in-law and his future family. Jane’s parents, for one, would certainly have had good reason to encourage their daughter to dump the loser and find herself an orthodontist or bankruptcy attorney right away. They had, after all, lost thousands of dollars on a deal presented to them by their trusting future son-in-law as easy money. When the Chinese kung fu movies took a dive, so, too, did the future son-in-law’s credibility.

  When it comes to Cary Cimino, some women just don’t know where to look. Jane stood by her man. Somehow Cary convinced her father that he had other sure deals. There were medical companies that weren’t anything like the movie business. For sure, medical investments were just starting to look hot on Wall Street. Not-so-plain Jane’s family didn’t kick Cary out into the street.

  If only Jane had checked the ownership of her brand-new red 1989 Jeep Laredo, a present from her one and only, sort of. He’d found it and set it up so her father could buy it, but it was an amazing deal. After MPSC and the kung fu movies went away, Cary and Jane took a little well-deserved ski vacation to Aspen, paid for by Jane. While they were there, she learned that the Laredo she was driving was in fact a stolen vehicle. The bank owned it, not Cary’s good friend Jeffrey Pokross.

  She was furious. Her father agreed to buy the Jeep for her from the bank, but it was incredibly embarrassing. Cary suddenly remembered he had a business meeting he had to attend. He flew back to New York, leaving Jane in Aspen.

  While Jane was still in Aspen, Cary quickly moved all his belongings out of her apartment and into his own. He was making enough money from his many stock promotion deals. He obviously felt he didn’t need Not So Plain Jane anymore. He moved out without telling her he was going to do it. When she returned from Aspen, he was gone.

  “I destroyed her emotionally, being careless with my relationship with her. By leaving her,” he said. “This was my methodology of repaying a woman back who was nothing but kind and considerate to me.”

  Not long after he ditched Jane and left her family absorbing the trail of debt he’d created while passing through, Cary walked out to the private garage where he kept his prize 1989 Mercedes 580SL. The space was empty.

  The repo man had cometh.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  June 7, 1989

  Bobby Lino Senior was dead. The wake took place at Cu somano and Russo’s in Brooklyn. Because Bobby Senior was a made man, the scene attracted a parade of wiseguys from most of the families. There were guys from the Genovese family and guys from the Lucchese family. John Gotti showed up with a crew. At the time, he was still the Dapper Don, the Teflon Don, the boss of the most powerful mob family in America, the Gambinos. He became boss by arranging to kill his boss and had beaten prosecutions again and again. He was riding high, talking to his underlings about how his “public” needed him and wallowing in his brief status as a national celebrity. It was all very strange, considering that the American Mafia was supposed to be a secret society that existed below the radar screen of law enforcement. This guy was running around with a target on his back, shouting, “I’m a gangster! Come and get me!” And here he was, strutting around Bobby Lino’s funeral like a rock star, all the sycophants lined up to kiss his ring.

  Outside, across from the parking lot, the FBI had brought along plenty of film.

  The family of Bobby Senior—what was left of it—was assembled in grief. His wife was gone, and so was his eldest son, Vincent. All that was left was Grace Ann and Robert—a drug addict and a wannabe gangster. There were many ways to view this. Some might say Bobby Senior was a lousy father, maybe even the worst ever. He was a drug dealer whose eldest son died of a drug overdose and whose daughter was now deeply involved in destroying herself with the substance he’d sold to make money. He had shot Sonny Black and helped bury Bobby C and Gabriel Infanti. He had cheat
ed and lied and made these choices while raising a family. But sometimes, when you thought about him, it was tough to suppress a smile.

  Robert Lino believed his father had tried—in his own way—to be a father. Sitting here at Cusomano’s Funeral Home, with the organ music and the flowers and the silk-suit parade passing by, it was easy to look back and smile at just how crazy his father could be. It was way back in 1979, Robert remembered, that the incident with his sister and the guy everybody knew as Mikey Bear occurred.

  Back then heroin was king in certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn, thanks in part to Bobby Lino. Some of that heroin wound up with a guy associated with the Colombo family everybody called Mikey Bear. Mikey had been selling drugs all over Brooklyn, and one of his customers wound up being Grace Ann, Bobby Senior’s little girl. Sometimes they would use drugs together. It was an ugly time, and the two would spend days inside Mikey’s run-down apartment near Avenue C off Ocean Parkway in Flatbush. They’d cook it up and shoot it up and go off into that Alice in Wonderland world, unaware of anything or anyone around them. Bobby Senior got wind of Mikey Bear and didn’t see the connection between the fact that he personally smuggled kilos of this stuff into his own neighborhood and the fact that his daughter had wound up hooked on it, spiraling into a self-destructive, claustrophobic state of permanent pain. The issue wasn’t heroin. The issue was Mikey Bear. As Bobby Senior saw it, if Mikey were removed from the equation, there wouldn’t be a problem anymore. The solution was that simple.

  One of Bobby Lino’s partners in Pizza Park was a guy named Nicky Black. Nicky was a Colombo soldier and professed to disapprove of drugs, although he was in favor of extortion, loan-sharking and, on occasion, murder. Bobby told Nicky all about Mikey Bear and his daughter and the drugs, and Nicky, too, agreed that the solution was simple. From that moment, Mikey Bear was no longer an associate of the Colombo organized crime family of Brooklyn. Bobby and Frank Lino had permission and so they set to work.

  The lesson of Mikey Bear was this: clipping someone you don’t really know is much more difficult than clipping someone you do know. The Lino cousins had to figure out Mikey Bear’s schedule, which often consisted of scoring drugs and then spending weeks at a time holed up in his rancid apartment. They watched him to learn his patterns and discovered he had none. The only way to get him was to lure him outside. Two of Mikey’s friends, the guy Kojak with the bald head and another guy named Vito, made some calls and a meeting was arranged. Mikey would emerge from his hellish little hole and hook up with Kojak and Vito on the corner of Avenue C and Ocean Parkway. It would be safe because it was a well-trafficked area with working people coming and going.

  The day of the job there were three cars filled with guys and guns cruising along Ocean Parkway. Bobby Senior was in the crash car, the car that pulls in front of the cops if they show up. Cousin Frank was a backup shooter in the car a few parking spots away from the sidewalk meeting locale. The third car contained the two shooters, the Ronnie who shot Sonny Black, and Tommy Karate, at the time both wannabe gangsters who were itching to become made men. Kojak and Vito stood on the corner of Avenue C and Ocean Parkway, waiting for Mikey Bear.

  Soon Mikey emerged from his apartment and could be seen shuffling up Ocean Parkway. This was a major street in Brooklyn, with lots of cars and numerous bus routes and shops and people all over. Lots of people. Here comes Mikey Bear toward Kojak and Vito and here comes Ronnie and Tommy Karate with guns drawn and they pull up next to him and shout out, “Hey Mikey!” He looks over and it’s too late. Tommy shoots at the Bear’s massive body, but his gun jams. Ronnie pumps several bullets into Mikey. He slumps to the pavement. An older couple, a man and woman who just happened to be walking by, observe the entire proceeding from about ten feet away. The shooters screech away. Mikey Bear lies on a crowded sidewalk in Brooklyn.

  Mike Bear is alive.

  For days the Lino cousins and all the rest of the hit team are unhappy fellows. Mikey Bear is lying in his hospital bed, still breathing, and Bobby Senior wants to get somebody in there to finish up what was started on Ocean Parkway. He had done this for his daughter, and he had to make sure his daughter never again saw this Mikey Bear. One day passed and then a second, and Mikey Bear still lived. Word was out that one of the cars had been identified and confiscated by the police. Perhaps all of this helping your own wasn’t really worth the trouble. Then Mikey Bear decided to die, and everything was all right again. The job was done. The problem was solved. Bobby Senior had accomplished what any loving father would seek to accomplish—coming to the rescue of the beautiful daughter he’d raised from a baby.

  Of course, Robert Lino knew better. His sister, sitting next to him now in the funeral parlor, still had problems with drugs, long after Mikey Bear had gone to that great rehab clinic down below. Grace Ann just seemed to deteriorate more and more. A few months before, Robert, the dutiful son, had signed a form that gave him power of attorney over Grace Ann’s affairs. She was a grown woman who could no longer take care of herself. Robert was now, in effect, her father.

  Bobby Senior was dead. Robert now officially took up the role as head of the family. He would turn twenty-four in two months. It’s hard to say how many choices he had about the journey he was about to embark upon. His bearings were determined by locale. His context was organized criminals. He’d done poorly in school; he could barely read. He had not graduated high school, never mind college. He was not really Robert Lino, anyway. He was Robert from Avenue U. His cousin Eddie was a gangster. His cousin Frank was a gangster. His father died a gangster and told anybody who’d listen that his dying wish was for Robert to embrace the life he’d led. Robert was like a boat on a strong current, headed for the cataract. Most who knew him felt he was basically a decent guy. He had his own set of rules within the rules. He was quite aware that plenty of gangsters, including his late father, rest his soul, were involved in selling drugs, but he would have nothing to do with that. He saw shylocking as a necessary evil. People needed money and somebody had to provide it. It was just capitalism at work. He could see nothing wrong with gambling. Taking sports bets was a way of life where he grew up, like getting married or hating the Red Sox. And when a piece of work had to get done, it was always for a reason. Usually it was a rat, an informant, some guy who was betraying his friends and denying his colleagues the ability to provide for their wives and children. That, anyway, was the thinking.

  His father’s wake came to an end. John Gotti and his entourage were long gone, even the FBI agents had packed it in. Robert Lino and his sister stepped out onto West 6th Street deep in the heart of Brooklyn. He wore an uncomfortable suit in the summer swelter. It was June. The summer of 1989 lay ahead like the bejeweled blue Atlantic twinkling off of Coney Island. It was the end of the eighties. The stock market boom had crashed. The country was heading for a recession and was being led by a country club Republican who talked about “a thousand points of light” and then raised your taxes. America was marching toward the millennium, and the Brooklyn that Robert Lino had grown up in was changing dramatically. Indians and the Chinese were beginning to move into Italian Bensonhurst. Who knew where it was all headed? Robert Lino had a lifetime ahead of him and no father to lead the way. Now it was just Robert Lino against the rest of the world.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Nineties

  Cary Cimino was back. The eighties were so over, the ski slopes of Aspen beckoned. He was now driving a Ferrari, flying first class, spending as fast as he earned. He was enjoying yet another long weekend on the slopes, playing hard and ordering only the best of everything. Everything he bought he laid off on his clients anyway, so what the hell? His partner, Jeffrey, did the same thing. And jetting away from New York for a weekend in the winter was always a good idea. Especially this year. This had not been the best of years for Wall Street or for the city itself.

  The 1990s already looked like the kind of decade in New York that would never be regarded in the sentimental glow of nostalgia. Th
e forties had the abstract expressionists, the fifties had the Dodgers, the sixties had the World’s Fair. The nineties were beginning to look like the seven-ties, with “Ford to New York: Drop Dead,” Son of Sam and the garbage piling up in the streets. Just like those sordid days, the 1990s were all about chaos and anarchy in the streets. Murders were way up, surpassing two thousand in one year for the first time since the New York City Police Department bothered counting. Crack cocaine was killing certain poverty-wracked neighborhoods, turning ordinary people into raging sociopaths. The more out of control the city appeared, the more out of control it became. A tourist from Utah was stabbed in Midtown on the way to a tennis tournament in Queens. A new street name had sprung up for the innocent people shot while walking down the street: “mushrooms.” The squeegee man reigned, shaking down motorists at stoplights all over. Hundreds of homeless people took over Penn Station every night. Activists were distributing free sanitized needles to drug addicts to halt the spread of AIDS. Time magazine ran a front page proclaiming New York City the “Rotten Apple.”

  The glory days of New York seemed distant and remote, like a great baseball pennant race that would never happen again.

  Down on Wall Street, the 1980s were definitely over, but a new economy was emerging. Perhaps it was the general atmosphere of criminality pervading the city or a creeping belief that New York was no longer governable, but as the Dow recovered and the pace of trading again began to increase, a new white collar underworld began to emerge. As the Dow began to rise again, people like Jeffrey Pokross abandoned their car lease scams and check kiting operations and Ponzi schemes and set up shop on Wall Street. If money was to be made, they were going to be part of the party.