Nothing But Money (33 page)
Authors: Greg B. Smith
“Stephen Gardell,” the detective said, not bothering to mention his rank in the New York City Police Department. He nodded toward his fiancée and said, “This is Sharon Kilcoin.”
He did not have a warrant. He was not there to ask questions. This was no cop on the job. He was there to do business at DMN. He was expected.
Lucille the receptionist smiled and got Jeffrey Pokross on the phone in his office. She told the detective to go right into the conference room.
Detective Gardell and Sharon Kilcoin walked past the cubicles with brokers working phones, TVs with CNBC on all day long, a coffeepot eternally filled with burned coffee, a water cooler, file cabinets. There were doors leading to offices but no names on them. This was a place where business occurred with anonymity.
Jeffrey Pokross welcomed the couple into the room. Detective Gardell shook his hand and introduced his beloved. There were smiles all around. Jimmy Labate strolled in and embraced Gardell like a lost brother.
“If this fund works out right and you can open up doors for more funds, you won’t have to work as long as you live,” Jimmy said.
“I know,” said Gardell.
“This is a hell of a parachute,” Pokross said.
“I know that,” Gardell said. “What they hell you think I’m going out there for? I’m not a traveler. Jimmy thinks I’m going out there for a vacation. I’m not. I don’t like to travel. She does. I don’t.”
Pokross was a pragmatist. Some of the gangsters at DMN hated the idea of involving a cop in all of this, but Pokross had an intuitive sense that this particular cop wasn’t really a cop. He was a crook with a badge, which had certain advantages. Such as the fact that Stephen Gardell was at the top of the union pension fund for New York City’s detectives. One of his jobs was to invest all that money. Jeffrey Pokross and the gangsters at DMN were going to help him with this.
Gardell said he was supposed to fly out to San Francisco to meet with a new money manager who was going to handle some deal he was trying to set up. As Jeffrey Pokross saw it, the deal was going to be the future of DMN and the Bonanno crime family’s piece of Wall Street.
The idea was to tap into the huge pool of money in union pension funds. Gardell was treasurer of the Detectives Endowment Association, one of the union officers responsible for deciding how to invest the DEA’s $175 million pension fund. Frankie Persico was bringing in another union the Colombo family was controlling, Production Workers Local 400. They had maybe $120 million sitting in various funds and accounts. The Mafia had used unions for their own benefit at construction sites and on the waterfront, why not use them in pump and dump schemes as well? Union pension funds were the wave of the future. They were going to make them all rich—the cop, the fiancée and all the gangsters in the conference room at DMN.
It was strange to have a cop hanging around the office with all those members of the Bonanno crime family coming and going, but Gardell had adopted an odd interpretation of the thin blue line. Gardell didn’t really see the need for a thin blue line. He believed that it was every man for himself. You took care of your own and you worried about the rest later. Anybody who was a victim was really just a sucker. He had a sticker attached to his phone to remind him: “RATS TALK ON PHONES.” That way he could remember to say nothing important over the phone, because with phones you never knew for sure who you were talking to.
Jimmy Labate had brought Gardell to DMN. He’d met the detective through his neighbor in Staten Island, Tom Scotto, the head of the detectives union. Gardell viewed the DEA’s pension fund as his ticket to the good life. He’d worked hard his entire life. Sure he’d been dubbed a hero by the papers, but what did that contribute to the bottom line? He’d risked his life for the civilian world and what did he have to show for it? The union had been his road to opportunity. He’d locked up a good job with the DEA that let him kick back as he wound up his twenty years. He was going to get the pension, then settle into semiretirement and the good life in Boca. He had it all planned out.
Jimmy Labate was going to make it happen. He’d known Jimmy for years. He was in construction on Staten Island just like his father. He was possibly connected. Possibly. Jimmy never said and Detective Gardell didn’t ask. It was better not to know. When Jimmy introduced him to Jeffrey and Jeffrey started talking about all the opportunities that were available to him because of his influence in the union, Detective Gardell had promised he could steer the union pension fund’s board toward hiring a brokerage controlled by DMN to manage the fund’s bounteous assets.
Detective Gardell was a regular guy, for a detective.
In order for this to work, DMN needed to stay out of the picture. They needed a legitimate-looking money manager up front to set up a plan of investment for the DEA fund. It would be mostly prudent, conservative investments, but it would also involve setting aside a little to buy DMN house stocks. That was where Gardell would benefit. Jeffrey had arranged to get Gardell some private shares. Detective Gardell, after all, wasn’t doing this for his health.
None of this arrangement was ever discussed out in the open. Jeffrey would say only, “We may be able to do something.” Instead of saying that DMN was out and out bribing Gardell, Jeffrey would say, “We would do the right thing with him, if we got a piece of that money—putting him into some things like house stock. Some of our stuff.”
The day’s meeting at DMN was to make it all happen. There were issues. Getting Gardell “some of our stuff” wasn’t turning out to be quite so simple. The first brokerage they tried to use was First Liberty. First Liberty planned to invest $10 million of the DEA pension fund. The investment strategy seemed reasonable: mostly conservative, a few modest risks. It promised big returns in Wall Street’s best run-up ever, and promised those returns fast. There was only one problem: First Liberty was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Gardell the detective had found out all about the investigation and that was the end of First Liberty.
Now they had a new front firm in San Francisco and were hoping to be back on track for big bucks.
“If they’ve got the numbers, if they can produce, then we’ve got a done deal,” Gardell said, trying to sound like he knew a spreadsheet from a rap sheet.
“They got ’em,” Pokross promised. “If we’ve got a done deal, then we all do wonderfully.”
“Okay,” Gardell said. “I won’t have to work Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday.”
“Will I have to work?” the fiancée chimed in. “I don’t want to work.”
“All right,” said her betrothed.
“We’ll all do wonderfully,” Pokross enthused.
“We need a new car,” said the bride-to-be.
“Well if this one gets pulled off, should we start looking for a convertible?” Pokross said.
“I know what I want,” said the bride. “I want a Mercedes truck.”
“She wants Jimmy’s Mercedes,” Gardell said.
“Whose name are we putting this under?” Pokross asked.
“We can put this under not the same name as mine,” Gardell said, laughing.
“I got a different last name,” said the bride.
“I’ll use it for a parachute then,” Gardell said.
“If this gets done, go get a vacation house,” Pokross said.
“I got to take care of my mother,” Gardell said. “She’s poor.”
“Your mother’s got plenty,” said the bride-to-be.
Jimmy Labate was explaining why having a cop hanging around was a good idea. He was in the conference room at DMN with CNBC on in the background, talking to Jeffrey Pokross and John Black, an associate of the Lucchese crime family. Black was a registered stockbroker who’d been working with DMN to pump up certain house stocks, and Jimmy was mentioning that his good friend and neighbor Detective Stephen Gardell of the New York City Police Department had access to these parking permits that were very useful.
“You want one?” Labate asked Black.
“I could have used one this morning going out of the Holland Tunnel,” Black said.
The permits come from the Detectives Endowment Association and offer many opportunities besides free parking wherever you want on the streets of New York. If you get pulled over, the permits are a sign that you’re a friend of law enforcement.
“If I give it to you, you can’t abuse it,” Labate said.
“You put it on your dashboard. And when they see it, just salute, and if they ask where you got it, just say you work with the Endowment Association. Every year we donate $8, $9, $10,000 a year at Christmas for all the widows and orphans, yadda, yadda, yadda.”
“All right,” Black said. “Okay.”
“If you get pulled over, you have to keep my phone number with you in case something happens. You’re drunk and you get pulled over with it, they’re gonna bring you in the station house, you’re gonna call me and I’m gonna have you taken out of the station house.”
Black laughed at that one.
“I’m serious. How do you think we got Mikey help? Mike was going to jail.”
Mikey had hit a stock promoter in the head with a pool cue. It was a big mess and he was charged with assault, which with his previous record of many other assaults would mean that Mikey would go directly to jail.
“Do you understand that Mikey’s on probation, that he would have did the eighteen months plus three years for a second felony offense,” Jimmy said.
“He’s crazy,” Black said. “I told him, ‘What the hell are you doing, punching a guy?’ ”
When Black left, Labate was alone with Pokross. Labate said he’d just spent more than four hours with Detective Gardell, and that the experienced officer of the law seemed to know something about other gangster families and their increasing involvement in Wall Street stock schemes.
“How does he know that type of business?” Pokross asked.
“Every cop’s feedin’ him information, every detective’s feedin’ him information. You’re out of your mind and if you think there’s not half a dozen wiseguy rats talking to him.”
The way Jimmy saw it, Gardell had been nothing but positive for DMN. He’d scared up city parking permits and he’d let them know that First Security was under investigation. Once, he warned them about an upcoming bust of Bonanno family gangsters, and the very next day there was an arrest. He was always hearing about ongoing investigations and was happy to let them know what was up.
So far all Jimmy and Sal and Jeffrey had to do in return was arrange to comp the guy and his girlfriend at the Paris hotel in Vegas. They picked up some swag fur coat for the girlfriend, and arranged to have an aboveground swimming pool built for the guy. They’d promised him secret insider shares on some house stock deals once the union hired DMN’s front firm. Sometimes when Jimmy looked at how much time it was taking to set up this union deal, he wasn’t sure Gardell was worth all the hassle.
“I didn’t say I don’t like him, I just keep saying the same thing. I think that we give, give, give, give and get very little back. It’s an observation,” he’d told Sal Piazza. But on most days, Jimmy believed Gardell had proved to be a valuable asset to DMN.
“He asked me a funny question,” Labate said. “Am I a gangster? I said, ‘Do I know people? I know a lot of people.’ ”
“Why does he want to know if you’re a gangster?” Pokross asked.
“So I won’t jeopardize him,” Labate said.
The more time they spent thinking about the potential money involved in these unions, the more excited they got. Besides the detectives union and Production Local 400, Labate was now bringing up yet another union, this one representing the officers who maintain order and decorum in New York City’s courts. Pokross claimed to know the union’s president and thought that pension fund would be fertile ground for upcoming scams. The more he thought about it, the less he was sure who was worse—the criminals like himself trying to skim cash from the pensions of hardworking civil servants, or the hardworking civil servants like Detective Stephen Gardell who were put in charge of the pension fund.
“When Mr. Gardell gets his three hundred thousand dollars at the cage in the Palace Casino in Nassau under his girlfriend’s name, let him run amok,” Pokross laughed. “Even though a lot of these union guys are fucking gangsters and sitting there and making tons of money running these unions, it is protocol that they gotta put these things out in advance.”
Labate agreed.
Pokross said, “They won’t pretenderize, meaning they’re not going to go for the hard sell. They’re pre-sold.”
Then it was time for Jimmy to go, and Jeffrey waited a bit before punching a beeper number into his phone. When the beeper picked up, he put in a special number code and left the office. He took the elevator downstairs and walked down the block to a diner. There he sat in a booth until another man walked in without speaking and sat down across from him. The two men leaned toward each other and spoke quietly. Frequently Jeffrey looked around to see if anyone he knew was walking by. He was pretty sure none of his gangster business partners would recognize the guy he was sitting with, but he was still a bit rattled during these meetings. He fully understood the consequences if they figured out he was sipping coffee with the FBI.
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