Nothing But Money (30 page)
Authors: Greg B. Smith
He was taken to a room in Lower Manhattan, a section of the city he rarely visited. It was sort of near some clubs he’d partied in, but he hadn’t spent any time here. His only experience with courts until this morning was jury duty. He remembered that. You put your life on hold for a day or two, then begged and whined until they let you go home. It was annoying but essentially harmless. This was certainly not going to be jury duty.
Inside a windowless room he answered questions about his background, his family, his financial assets. He was asked if he had ever been arrested and he practically laughed out loud. He confessed that he’d once had his license suspended when he’d twice made rights after stopping at a red light in Manhattan, something that’s allowed in most places but not in New York. That was the extent of his experience with the criminal justice system in his thirty-seven years on the planet. No felonies, no misdemeanors. Not even a trace of youthful folly was evident in the file of Francis Warrington Gillet III. There was no file.
He was taken to another room with a sign on the glass door, “United States Marshal,” and fingerprinted and photographed for the first time in his life. He tried to imagine what the photo looked like. Did he look like John Dillinger?
John Gotti? He hadn’t shaved and was barely awake before dropping in on the United States marshals, so he had to assume he looked like Keith Richards after a tough night. He shuddered to think of that mug shot running in the newspaper for his mother and father to see.
He could fight the power. That would mean pleading not guilty and keeping his mouth shut. He’d have to hire an expensive lawyer and work out a deal where you write a check to the Securities and Exchange Commission, promise never to trade securities again and go back to acting school with a student loan. That was an option. But suppose there was no deal? Suppose they made you go to trial, and you faced a jury of angry Social Security recipients furious at their lousy investments. Suppose they found you guilty of all charges—even some you weren’t aware of—and the judge sent you away to prison for forty years. Visions of old prison movies came to him.
Birdman of Alcatraz
. He’d end up like that guy, talking to sparrows. He nearly retched.
Birdman of Alcatraz
. He’d end up like that guy, talking to sparrows. He nearly retched.
There was also option two: admit to everything you’ve done in your life and beg the court for mercy. Immerse yourself in remorse. This was much more complex than regret. If you admitted you’d done something terrible or bad or just stupid, and you even said it out loud to yourself while taking a shower or sitting alone drinking Scotch in the dark, you’d have made enormous progress. You’d have taken a huge step. But of course much more was required. To make it official, you had to make the admission in a public place, and ultimately to people you love. You must say it out loud and with simple noun-verb syntax—“I did something wrong.”
But did he? When he was having those talks with Nick Vito/D. True Brown about a possible deal, it was all just possible, wasn’t it? Had he really done anything that any other normal stock picker would not have done under the very same circumstances? He could certainly admit to whatever they needed him to admit to, just to avoid jail time, but then he’d have to live with himself. Was the great-stepgrandson of Marjorie Merriweather Post really a felon? The more he thought about it, the more confused he became.
Suddenly he thought of the original Francis Warrington Gillet.
Francis Warrington Gillet III, of course, was hardly an original. His grandfather was the original Francis, followed by his father, Francis Junior, and ultimately by his son, Francis the Fourth. His name had implications. He was burdened with the legacy of it; encouraged not to bring shame upon it. It wasn’t easy. His grandfather—born on a frigid November day in 1895 in the port city of Baltimore, Maryland—set the bar high.
On April Fool’s Day, 1917, the original Francis signed up for the United States Air Service. He wanted to learn how to fly. At the time, the United States had successfully stayed out of the great conflict raging from England to Russia. But that conflict wasn’t going so well for the Allied Powers, and the United States was finding it more and more difficult to justify staying out of the mess. German submarines were making a regular practice of shooting at anything that tried to float across the Atlantic. Still, on April Fool’s Day, the United States had yet to actually declare war against Germany. That wouldn’t come for another week. The original Francis could not wait. He joined up.
A graduate of the University of Virginia and a son of privilege, the original Francis tried desperately to make it into the elite world of the flying ace. It was not to be. At that time you could learn to fire a gun, don a gas mask and slog it out in the trenches at the age of twenty-one, but you could not fly. He was declared too young to be commissioned, and so he did what many other young men of his time did—he headed for Canada, not to dodge but to seek the life of the soldier. He joined the Royal Flying Corps by telling a lie. He was no longer the original Francis. Now he was Frederick Warrington Gillet.
Now a lie is a lie is a lie, but it could be argued that there is such a thing as a good lie. The original Francis clearly had nothing but good intentions when he pretended to be someone else so he could participate in the mighty battle against evil. He was committing a lie for the greater good. And as a result, he was allowed to join and learn to fly. Off he went to England to begin training as a pilot.
In the horrendous March of 1918, with General Persh ing in France and headed for Chateau-Thierry, Frederick Warrington Gillet was assigned to the 79th Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps, posted to France. His machine was the legendary one-man Sopwith Dolphin, with two Vick ers machine guns to score kills. And score he did. In the next eight months before the War to End All Wars came to a bloody end, he registered twenty kills. That would include 14 Fokker D VIIs, the same plane flown by the Red Baron, and three kite balloons. And he did it all as a Canadian named Frederick Warrington Gillet, of the Royal Flying Corps. He was, in truth, a hero. On November 2, 1918, exactly nine days before Armistice Day, the
London Gazette
misspelled Frederick the temporary Canadian’s last name as Gillett and described a key and final battle against a German two-seater as he attempted to attack a kite balloon.
London Gazette
misspelled Frederick the temporary Canadian’s last name as Gillett and described a key and final battle against a German two-seater as he attempted to attack a kite balloon.
“Lieut. Gillett shot the machine down and turning to the balloon which was being rapidly hauled down he dropped two bombs at the winch and fired a drum into the balloon, which deflated but did not catch fire.”
He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Three months later, he was described as “a pilot of great dash and skill” who had destroyed twelve hostile aircraft. In one September 1918 battle he attacked three Fokkers at once, driving one down “in flames.” When the war finally ended two short months later, on November 11, 1918, with 10 million dead and 20 million wounded, the original Francis was still alive. He returned to his native Baltimore and began the legacy that would haunt his grandson Francis Warrington Gillet III for the rest of his life.
The original Francis died at his home in Glyndon, Maryland, four days before Christmas 1969, when Warrington was just eleven. Francis Warrington Gillet III officially inherited the legacy of the man who lied to become a hero. No matter what else he did in his life, the original Francis would always be a war hero. He would always be the guy with twenty kills. When all was said and done, the original Francis was a tough guy to live up to. Even worse for Warrington III, his grandfather’s life proved there was such a thing as an admirable lie. The original Francis was proof that there is no such thing as black and white—only gray.
Gray made everything more difficult. It was brutal, this decision. The hardest part of moving from regret to remorse was that you had to know in your heart the difference between right and wrong. You had to know that what you had done wasn’t just some little technical violation, some misunderstanding of complex regulations or an action taken after receiving really bad advice. It had to be that you, personally, understood that you—as a grown-up—made specific choices after weighing facts and came out on the wrong side. You maliciously chose to do a wrong thing. You acted willfully, with specific intent.
In order to understand that he’d really done something wrong, he’d have to translate his actions into plain English. Instead of saying he’d violated a section of a federal law that he’d never actually seen in print, he’d have to say straight-out that he’d wanted something so badly he was just going to take it away from someone else. Or he hated someone so much he had to destroy them, or at least their reputation. Call it what you will—pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy or sloth. The Seven Capital Sins were merely explanations for the same thing—a wrongful act. An unethical act in disobedience to a personal god.
There were whole libraries filled with books describing the nuances of sin. There were sins that cry out to heaven: willful murder, oppression of the poor, defrauding a la borer of his wages. There was the sin of the angels: pride. Some believed actions were either good, indifferent or sinful, others said there was no such thing as an indifferent act—just good or sinful. Some divided sins into categories—mortal and venial. Mortal sins were committed with conscious intent, venial were committed without the perpetrator’s conscious knowledge. Where was Warrington on the spectrum of sin? Why wasn’t it clear to him, even as he was brought to a room called “Pre-Trial Services” and asked questions about his brother’s middle name and the year he finished junior high?
He had no idea what to do. The expression of remorse was usually enough to stop the lies you tell yourself when you get up in the morning. It was the best part of remorse, but it was difficult to remember that when the ramifications of the declaration were swirling around you like a maelstrom, pulling you and your good family name down into the abyss. People say there are good acts and bad acts. Some go so far as to say there are good people and bad people. In theory, it should be pretty simple to tell the difference.
For Francis Warrington Gillet III, discerning the difference was a difficult if not impossible task.
Warrington sat in a government-leased van with other accused criminals. Outside the window he could see they were being transported a mere three blocks to a white marble courthouse for more process and procedure. He realized this was going to take all day. He dreaded what lay ahead. He had been allowed his one phone call and called his half brother, Joseph, to get a lawyer and come down and bail him out. His brother was furious at being forced to interrupt his busy schedule. He said he’d see what he could do. Now Warrington dreaded having to look his own brother in the eye.
At the courthouse, he and his peers were herded inside a windowless room with a number of other strangers. A United States marshal wearing a suit and leather gloves closed the door. Only it wasn’t a door. It was iron bars.
For the first time in history, as far as he could tell, a member of the storied Gillet family was sitting inside a prison cell looking out. The thought made his stomach quail.
The hours ticked by. At ten minutes before four in the afternoon, after he’d spent nine hours sitting in various anonymous offices, Warrington was escorted by a U.S. marshal into the magistrate’s courtroom on the fifth floor of the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York. This was it. This was his public debut.
An older guy with thinning hair sat in a black robe behind a big hunk of oak. An American flag hung off a pole to his right. A young Asian guy in a blue suit with striped tie was handing up a piece of paper to the guy in the robe. A middle-aged woman announced his name, as in, “United States versus Francis Warrington Gillet III, 97 M 1278.” He seemed to detect a hint of contempt in her voice, but he couldn’t be sure. His lawyer, a guy he’d never met before in his life, told him to sit down. He was unbelievably nervous, but he did as he was told. He looked behind him and noticed that the courtroom seemed empty.
He tried to read the paper as fast as he could. It consisted of a series of sentences outlining one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud. The details were somewhat vague but also somehow familiar to Warrington. He knew what they were talking about. Their arrival was not a complete mystery. The guy in the robe said he was a magistrate and asked him if he’d seen the complaint filed against him. He whispered to his lawyer that he had not, but the lawyer stood up and said, “Yes, Your Honor. We waive its reading at this time.”
As the hearing progressed, Warrington began to understand that the young Asian guy was the prosecutor handling his case, Assistant United States Attorney Bruce Ohr. He and his lawyer for the day had worked out a plan so that Warrington could get out of jail that day. He would not have to return to the room with the bars on the door. He just had to scare up some cosigners for a $100,000 bail bond by the end of the next week and he’d be free and clear. They even said they’d allow him to travel abroad for work if he had to. Assistant United States Attorney Ohr waived the government’s usual practice of demanding the passports of accused criminals.
And then prosecutor Ohr gave Warrington the greatest gift of all—he let him know that as he had stood there, naked in his shame to the entire world, the room had been emptied of spectators. The government had ordered the courtroom sealed. Warrington had been arrested and accused of a serious crime, and, for the most part, nobody knew.
When the hearing ended and he finished filing out more paperwork, the reason for the government’s generosity became known to him. Warrington was a perfect candidate to take on one of the most important but reviled roles in the criminal justice system—the cooperating informant. The United States Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York wanted Warrington to secretly join their team. They had kept his arrest and appearance in court a secret so they could use him to catch more criminals just like him. He was, as far as the world knew, still just Francis Warrington Gillet III, stockbroker, able to mix and mingle with potential codefendants.
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