Nothing But Money (10 page)

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Authors: Greg B. Smith

BOOK: Nothing But Money
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Martina was a Swedish model. She was gorgeous in a way that made people—both men and women—stop and stare when she strolled into a room. They were a beautiful couple. He was a handsome fellow, a good-natured guy who liked to have a good time and could charm people simply with the warmth of his ebullient self-confidence. When Martina got pregnant, Warrington hesitated. He wasn’t sure if he had what it took to be a father. Look at his experience with fathers. His real father was a guy who sometimes confused philanthropy with philandering, and his stepfather wouldn’t know if he was jailed, bailed or dead unless it was printed on the front page of the
Racing Form
. Nevertheless, Warrington proposed; he and Martina were married in a matter of months. By May, little Warry the Fourth had joined the entourage, and Francis Warrington Gillet III became a new man.
Of course there was still time for discovering which bar made the best martinis on Thursday nights. On this night, Martina was on vacation in Europe with Warry the Fourth. His progeny and namesake was now about fourteen months in this world, and although Warrington loved him to the core of his soul, little Warry the Fourth could wear you down with his caterwauling all around the apartment. And the apartment didn’t help. No, not at all.
Truth be told, Apartment 14N with the drop-dead views of Central Park was, in fact, tiny. Sure, when you mentioned the address—240 Central Park South—people stopped yammering on about themselves and actually listened. Central Park South was a big deal. Not just anybody could land there. Of course, rarely did he invite people up. In fact, never did he invite people up. And he certainly never told any of his good buddies down on Wall Street that he lived with wife and child in a studio apartment. Not two bedrooms, or one bedroom and a half, where the sophisticated Manhattanite pretends a closet is a bedroom. No, this was
no
bedrooms. One room. A kitchen, living room, dining room, den, master bedroom, child’s bedroom—all in one room. Only the bathroom had a separate space with a real door and everything. His castle was a studio. It was a cold, hard fact.
Even though he was making a million dollars investing other people’s fortunes, Warrington was quite aware that you never know what can happen. It was always a question of maintaining the net. Warrington had rented a studio because he was never sure if fortune would take her smile away from him. Sure he was making good money, but in a year, he could be on the street. He’d been unemployed twice in the last three years. He’d handled a couple of major deals, but that was it. Although the market was trending in the right direction, it all could change. You had to be a fool to think otherwise. That was why he got the studio.
And he wasn’t going to be like his father. He was going to provide. He was going to succeed on his own terms. He hadn’t married rich; he’d decided he would be the source of his own success. He figured with the market headed in the direction it was heading, he’d soon be clearing upper six figures and be able to buy a bigger place on Fifth Avenue or down in Soho. In fact, he expected this. He believed in this. He planned to send Warry off to prep school, just as he had been, and then on to the college of his choice. He would probably buy a second home in the Hamptons. Or maybe at Telluride. Who was to say where the horizon ended? That was the only way to look at things. You had to make yourself see unlimited opportunity.
As he stepped away from his glorious view of the wondrous toy and dumped himself into bed, Francis Warrington Gillet III knew in his heart that he would make it after all.
 
 
He couldn’t remember his dream when he awoke suddenly to the sound of pounding at his front door. He looked at his watch—7 a.m. Who the hell would bang on your door at this hour? He stumbled out of bed and toward the door, blinking and trying to understand what some guy was hollering out in the hall.
“FBI! Open the door! Now!”
Warrington hastily ran to the front door, all the while pleading, “I’m here! I’m coming!” He had seen so many TV shows he was sure they were about to bust down the door and charge into his tiny studio, guns drawn and breathing hard with adrenaline. He slid back the door and stood facing a man he recognized immediately.
The guy he was looking at was Nick Vito. He was a stockbroker working out of a small office in the World Trade Center with whom Warrington had tried to do a deal. They’d discussed ways to wire money into a Bahamas account so that both could reap the benefits of the 1996 bull market. Warrington still had his business card: Nick Vito, Thorcon Capital. It looked like a real business card presented by a real stockbroker who worked in a real office. Only none of it was real. Reality struck Warrington hard: Nick Vito was actually the FBI, standing in Warrington’s doorway at an ungodly hour holding up a different kind of business card—a gold badge that said “Special Agent D. True Brown.” Nick Vito/True Brown was reciting TV banter about how Warrington had the right to remain silent and all that, but Warrington was mostly trying to remember as much as he could about Nick Vito and what he might have said that would give True Brown reason to put him in handcuffs.
It was tough to remember. Most of it seemed so innocuous. Warrington had been introduced to Nick by a colleague. The colleague said he knew of an aggressive young broker with plenty of big-money clients looking to take new companies public. He just needed a little encouragement, usually in cash. The guy’s outfit, Thorcon, was small, but he would be happy to chat with Warrington. It all sounded like a win-win proposition, so Warrington had done what any hungry stockbroker would have done and tracked down Nick Vito to see if they could work something out.
First they talked by phone. Then they met face-to-face at Nick’s office in the World Trade Center. Nick seemed like a decent guy, maybe a little stiff. He was certainly knowledgeable about the market, and they soon were able to work out the details. There would be discounted stock handed over to Nick as commission. There would be money wired to an account in the Bahamas. The arrangement was essentially a bribe, but Warrington felt it was, at that time, an extremely common practice among small brokerage houses that dealt with over-the-counter stock. You could even argue it was leaning toward legal, or at least hidden behind a façade clever enough to fool the average drone at the NASD.
But perhaps not the FBI. Here Warrington stood in his underwear in his fabulous studio apartment, unable to remember precisely what he’d said to Nick Vito or Special Agent D. True Brown or whoever was standing right there in front of him. It had been nearly a year since Warrington had last seen the guy, so remembering what he’d said wasn’t so easy. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more confused he became.
Warrington alternated between anger at himself and a growing sense of dread. The anger came from the fact that the deal he’d discussed ad infinitum with Nick Vito, with the Bahamas bank accounts and free restricted shares, hadn’t even gone through. Discovery Studios was a big bust. But it was difficult to escape the fact that the conversations about said deal had, in fact, taken place. And when Nick Vito, now Special Agent D. True Brown, began reading off a description of the charge filed against Warrington, the sense of dread began to overwhelm Francis Warrington Gillet III. The anger morphed into raw fear.
“Francis Warrington Gillet III did conspire, confederate and agree together with others to commit offenses against the United States,” Special Agent True Brown intoned. “To wit, to commit wire fraud in violation of Sections 1343 and 1346 of Title 18 of the United States Code . . .”
And so on and so on.
The phrases floated by. “Commercial bribery.” “Part and object of the conspiracy.” “Unlawfully, willfully and knowingly.” Each was like a shovelful of dirt on a coffin. Here he stood in his own apartment, a privileged son of affluence and influence now facing up to five years in prison for committing a crime. Several crimes. And the documents Agent Brown was reading even made a point of alleging that his actions were “against the United States.”
As far as he could tell, Francis Warrington Gillet III was still standing in his own apartment in his own country. He had always believed in the system of checks and balances. He’d always embraced the idea of a criminal justice system that protected those who worked hard and paid their taxes from the seething, blood-seeking criminal hordes. Until this very moment, the police, the judges, the prosecutors—they were all on his side. They were all his friends. Now here he stood, on the other side. He could think many things. Whose fault was it? What if he’d done things differently? Suppose he’d never met Cary or Jeffrey or James “Jimmy” Labate or Sal Piazza or any of the rest of them? He thought of these things but he kept coming back to another, darker, more impenetrable question that buzzed and whined inside his skull like a gnat. And that question was this: What would his family think when they learned the truth about Francis Warrington Gillet III?
CHAPTER TEN
May 1976
 
Warrington awoke in a stranger’s house, as he did every school day morning. It was not his house, and it was not his choice. Warrington was seventeen, in his junior year at the Gilman School, an exclusive all-boy prep school located on sixty-eight acres in an affluent corner of the city of Baltimore. It used to be called the Gilman Country School for Boys, but the trustees—in an effort to make the school seem a bit less pretentious—dropped the “Country.” It was one of those schools that made a point of wearing its history on its sleeve, rhapsodizing about its founders and insisting that it catered to students “from all backgrounds and segments” when it really served only the sons of the affluent and influential. They were Warrington’s classmates, and—truth be told—he fit right in.
He and his peers were being prepared “for college and a life of honor and service.” This was not a matter of choice. They were to become “men of character,” although the type of character was never specified. They would learn to go out and conquer the world, or at least acquire as much of it as possible. Some of Warrington’s peers had started Gilman in kindergarten and were planning on making it all the way through to the bitter end, spending twelve of their most formative years lugging satchels of books across the rolling green lawns that took them from grade to grade. Warrington was one of the Gilman lifers.
He and his 971 classmates all wore identical navy blue suit coats, white shirts and school ties, usually accompanied by khakis and Top-Siders without socks. Some—like Warrington—had their initials monogrammed in shirt cuffs. They were the sons of senators, CEOs, tycoons, moguls, big-time lawyers, big-money doctors. There was lots of old money and even a little new. He fit right in. He was just like nearly all his classmates—white, wealthy and without restrictions to opportunity. Nearly every one of them saw the world as his for the taking.
Like everybody else at Gilman, Warrington read the entire
Lord of the Rings
cycle, smoked massive quantities of dope and listened to Neil Young records day and night.
But Warrington also knew he was unlike his classmates. Almost every student came and went to school every day, being that it was a day school. Only two students actually lived on the Gilman grounds, in a little apartment that was part of the headmaster’s home. One of those two was Francis Warrington Gillet III. Warrington was aware that the other kids got to go home and see their moms and dads and siblings and dogs every night. All the other kids were well aware that Francis and his roommate, the son of a United States congressman, did not.
The symbolism of his involuntary living arrangements sometimes gnawed at Warrington’s very soul. Mostly he tried not to think about it, especially on these days in the middle of the 1970s when he was late once again for the morning chore known as algebra II.
Every junior had to take it. Warrington hated it. It did not highlight his strengths. It was unpleasant. He was pretty lousy at it. The combination of waking up alone in the headmaster’s house and the prospect of wrestling around with algorithms was enough to make him want to hide back under the covers and stay there for the day. But he could not. He was, after all, a Gillet.
Being a Gillet could be something of a chore. It seemed, on its face, quite impressive. Often people assumed he was the heir to the guy who invented the razor blade, or something like that. He was not. He was, instead, the great-stepgrandson of the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. On his mother’s side were two United States senators, Millard Tydings and Joseph Tydings. His father’s father was a big war hero in World War I. His stepfather, John Schapiro, owned racetracks and lived with his mother and siblings on an enormous horse-farm estate. Warrington’s home was not just a home; it was Tally Ho Farms in Worthington Hills, four hundred acres of stark white fences and green, with the Schapiro/Gillet family horses cantering in the misty dawn. It was a lot, this image of impregnability. And what was worse? It was just that—an image.
There was a part of Warrington that was happy that he lived at the headmaster’s little apartment. He was aware that if he were, in fact, living at home like all the other kids, he’d never see his mother and stepfather anyway.
They were always away at events—fox hunting, charity parties, that sort of thing. His stepfather preferred to spend his time at his racetracks rather than at Tally Ho. Whenever Warrington ate dinner at home, he’d sit down at the table with his real sister and stepbrother and the food would be prepared and presented by servants. Mom and Dad simply weren’t part of that scene. Even calling them Mom and Dad seemed wrong. Thus Warrington had convinced himself that staying at the Gilman School was not such a bad thing. At least you didn’t have to confront the empty chairs every night at the dinner table. At least you could pretend that you didn’t really care.

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