“You're not that short,” he replied, staring down at the top of my head, as if I were a midget. “I think you have a complex.” He reached down and placed his large hand on my shoulder. “In fact, when all this is over, I think you should seek help.”
I expelled a gust of air. “Yeah, well, I'll take it up with the prison shrink when I'm not busy getting butt-fucked by Bubba the Bull-queer.” I shook my head in frustration. “Anyway, I didn't bury any money in my backyard, Greg, or anywhere else, for that matter.”
“That's fine,” said Magnum, taking his seat. “You have nothing to worry about, then. Joel has to write you the 5K letter, even if he doesn't believe you. He can only withhold the letter if he catches you in an outright lie. But you are going to have to give him a financial statement.” He paused for a brief instant. “And it's going to have to include any cash you might have. If something should surface down the road”—he rolled his eyes—”it would be very bad for you; very, very bad. How much cash are you sitting on right now?”
“Not much,” I replied. “Maybe a million, slightly less.”
“That's it?”
“Yeah, that's it. Maybe you're forgetting about all the cash I smuggled overseas. Why the f**k do you think I'm sitting here, for a traffic violation?”
“I understand you smuggled money overseas, but that doesn't account for all of it.” He paused and rolled his long, rangy neck, eliciting half a dozen dull vertebral cracks. Then he said, “Listen, I'm just playing devil's advocate here, trying to anticipate what Joel might think, and I think he might be skeptical.”
I shook my head in consternation. “Let me explain something, Greg: For the last four years I didn't actually own a brokerage firm. I was just controlling them from behind the scenes, right?”
He nodded.
“Right, so follow me for a second: Since I didn't actually own the brokerage firms, it was me who was getting shares in hot new issues, and it was me who was kicking back cash to the owners.” I paused, searching for a simple way to explain to Magnum (who wasn't a crook) how things went down in a crooked world. “In other words, in the early nineties, back when I owned Stratton, I was the one who was getting the cash kickbacks. But after I was thrown out of the brokerage business and was operating from behind the scenes, the whole process reversed itself, and I was the one who was paying the kickbacks—paying off the owners of the brokerage firms. You understand?”
He nodded again. “Yes, I do,” he said confidently. “That makes perfect sense to me.”
I nodded back. “Good, because it happens to be the truth.” I shrugged. “Anyway, I don't even have the million dollars. My mother-in-law is holding it for me.”
“Why is that?” asked Magnum, taken aback.
How naive! I thought. Magnum was a fine lawyer, but he didn't think like a true criminal. I would just have to educate him. “Because the night I was arrested, I thought Coleman would come back with a search warrant. So I told Nadine to give the cash to her mother for safekeeping. But I can get it back anytime I want. You think I should?”
“Yes, you should. And if the subject of cash comes up again, you should offer that information proactively. Remember, as long as you're honest, you can't get into trouble.” He reached into his suit-jacket pocket and pulled out a single sheet of yellow legal paper that had been folded lengthwise, into thirds. Then he smiled and raised his eyebrows three times in rapid succession and placed the sheet of paper on the conference table. He slipped on a pair of reading glasses and unfolded the precious document and said, “This is the list of people you said you have information on. There are ninety-seven names on it, and some of them are pretty damn juicy.” He shook his head. “Did you really commit crimes with all these people?” he asked incredulously. “It seems almost impossible.”
I pursed my lips and nodded slowly. Then I sat down beside him and took a moment to study this esteemed list, which read like a who's who of Wall Street villains. And accompanying the villainous Wall Streeters were some corrupt politicians, some crooked police officers, a corrupt judge or two, a handful of mobsters, and some accountants and lawyers and CEOs and CFOs, and then a dozen or so civilians—people who weren't actually in the brokerage business but had acted as my nominee, which was Wall Street lingo for front man.
With a sinking heart, I said, “What a f**king shame this is.” I scanned the list, shaking my head in despair. “This is really ugly, Greg, really f**king ugly. I thought you were gonna leave some of these names off, some of my friends like Lipsky… and Elliot Lavigne… and… uh, Andy Greene?”
He shook his head slowly. “I couldn't do it,” he said gravely. “It would make matters worse. If I left one of your friends off the list, it would pique the government's interest that much more.”
I nodded in resignation, knowing that Magnum was right. Only yesterday, when we'd made the list, it'd seemed like no big deal. We'd even had a few laughs over it, finding humor in how people from all walks of life could be corrupted by the allure of fast money on Wall Street. It seemed that greed, in the shape of instantaneous profits, knew no strangers. It crossed over all ethnic lines, infecting all age groups. On the list were blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, Indians (dots, not feathers), Indians (feathers, not dots), the young, the old, the healthy, the infirm, males, females, homosexuals, bisexuals, you name it. It seemed that no one could resist the temptation of making hundreds of thousands of dollars with no risk. What a sad commentary, I thought, on the state of twentieth-century capitalism.
Five minutes later, the list was still lying on the conference table, although it had a much larger audience now. The Bastard, the Witch, OCD, and the Mormon were back in the room, all of them hunched over in their armchairs, staring down at the list as if it were the Holy Grail.
“This is a pretty inclusive list,” marveled the Bastard. Then he looked up and smiled a reasonably friendly smile at me and said, “If this is a sign of things to come, Jordan, then everything should work out very well for you.” He looked down at the list again and kept muttering, “Very well, indeed… this is excellent…”
I smiled dutifully and tuned out. And as the Bastard kept fawning over my list, I found myself wondering what he would be thinking right now if I'd left all the hookers on the list. There must have been a thousand of those, or at least five hundred. What would the Witch think of that? Would she try to cast an impotence spell on me? She had heard the stories, no doubt, of how we Strattonites classified our hookers like stocks—with the best hookers being Blue Chips and the skankiest hookers being Pink Sheeters (the Pink Sheets was where stocks of little or no value were listed). And somewhere, occupying some murky middle ground, were the NASDAQs, who were either fallen Blue Chips or had never been hot enough to qualify for true Blue Chip status.
“… best place to start is from the beginning,” said the Bastard, who'd finally stopped his muttering. He picked up a cheap Bic pen and said, in a dead-serious tone: “Where did you attend grade school?”
“P.S. One Sixty-nine,” I replied.
He nodded a single time, then scribbled down my answer on a yellow legal pad. “And that was in Bayside?”
“Yes. Bayside, Queens.”
He scribbled that down too and then stared at me, as if he were expecting me to say more. But I didn't. I remained silent, waiting for him to ask the next question.
“Feel free to expand on your answers,” the Bastard said. “Less is not more in this situation.” He smiled thinly.
I nodded in understanding. “Sure,” I said, and I said no more.
I wasn't even trying to give the Bastard a hard time; it was just that, over the years, I'd been trained to give brief answers during legal inquisitions. In point of fact, I had been deposed no less than fifty times—mostly by the NASD (in customer arbitrations), but also by the SEC and the Senate Ethics Committee, the latter of which had been conducting a bribery investigation into one of their less esteemed senators.
Whatever. I'd been conditioned to give only yes or no answers— to offer no extraneous information based on what I thought my interrogator wanted to hear. And while I was aware that the ground rules were different now, old habits died hard.
A few more moments of silence passed, then the Bastard finally said, “You were an A student in grade school?”
“Yes,” I said proudly. “Straight A's all the way.”
“Any disciplinary problems?”
“None to speak of, although I did get in trouble once for pulling a girl's hat off her head on the way home from school.” I shrugged. “It was in the third grade, though, so it didn't end up on my permanent record.” I thought back for a moment. “You know, it's funny, but I can trace pretty much every problem I've ever had in my life back to a female.” Or, more accurately, I thought, to the pursuit of p**sy.
There was silence, and then more silence. Finally I took a deep breath and said, “Do you want me to tell you the story of my life? Is that what you're looking for?”
“Yes,” the Bastard answered, nodding his head slowly, “that's exactly what we're looking for.” He put his pen down, leaned back in his seat, and said, “I'm sure some of the last few questions seemed a bit ridiculous to you, but I assure you they're not. When you're on the witness stand, the defense is going to try to paint you as a career criminal, a born liar who'll say anything to get himself off the hook. And wherever they think there's dirt—even if it's in your childhood—that's where they'll dig. They'll use whatever they find to try to discredit you.”
“Joel's correct,” added Magnum. “They'll dredge up anything and everything. And the way the prosecution counters that is by disclosing your misdeeds to the jury before the defense even gets a chance. In other words, we air your dirty laundry proactively, as if it's no great secret, entirely irrelevant to the proceedings.”
“Exactly,” chirped the Bastard. “We leave the defense nowhere to go.”
Now OCD chimed in: “What we can't afford are surprises. That serves none of our purposes. We need to know the most intimate details about your life—anything and everything you've done for as long as you can remember.”
And now the Witch said, “And that includes not only your drug use but also your fondness for prostitutes, both of which have been duly noted in the press,” to which the Bastard added, “And both of which are certain to be exploited by a good defense attorney.”
After a few moments of awkward silence, I said, “That's all fine and good, but I was under the impression”—I resisted the urge to stare directly into Magnum's eyes and shoot death rays at him— “that people rarely go to trial in these cases, that they usually plea-bargain. Or, if not that, cooperate.”
The Bastard shrugged. “For the most part, that's true, but I wouldn't count on it. In the end, there's always one holdout, someone who takes it all the way to trial.”
Everyone nodded in unison, including Magnum, who was now in the process of revising history. Well, f**k it! I thought. It was time for the chips to fall where they may. “You know,” I said casually, “I might be only thirty-six years old, but I've had a very full life. This could take a very long time.”
OCD smiled wryly. “I've been trying to make sense of your life for the last five years,” he said. “I, personally, have as much time as it takes.”
“Yeah, let's hear it,” added the Bastard.
“It's your only hope of getting a reduced sentence,” snapped the Witch.
I ignored the Witch and looked at the Bastard and said, “Fine; since you've already brought up the subject of Bayside, let's start there. It's as good a place to start as any, considering that's where most of the early Strattonites came from.” I paused, thinking back for a moment. “And even the ones who didn't actually come from Bayside ended up moving there after the firm got started.”
“Everyone moved to Bayside?” the Bastard asked skeptically.
“Not everyone,” I replied, “but most everyone. You see, moving to Bayside was a way of proving your loyalty to the firm, a way of showing that you were truly a Strattonite. I know it sounds slightly absurd—that moving to a certain neighborhood could make that much of a statement—but that was how it was back then. We were like the Mafia, always looking to keep outsiders out.” I shrugged my shoulders. “When you worked at Stratton, you socialized only with other Strattonites, and that's what living in Bayside was all about. You were blocking out outsiders, proving that you were part of the cult.”
“You're saying Stratton was a cult?” sputtered the Witch.
“Yes,” I said calmly. “That's exactly what I'm saying, Michele. Why do you think it was so hard to penetrate?” Now I looked at OCD. “How many doors you think you knocked on over the years—just a ballpark?”
“At least fifty,” he replied. “Probably more.”
“And every last one of them was slammed in your face, right?”
“Pretty much,” he said wearily. “No one would talk to me.”
“A big part of that was that everyone was making so much money, no one wanted to upset the applecart.” I paused, letting my words sink in. “But it was more than that: What was at the very core of it was protecting the Stratton way of life. That's what everyone was doing: protecting the Life.”
“Define ‘the Life,’” said the Bastard, with a hint of sarcasm.
I shrugged. “Well, among other things, it meant driving the fanciest car, eating at the hottest restaurants, giving the biggest tips, wearing the finest clothes.” I shook my head in amazement. “I mean, we did everything together. We spent every waking moment together. And not just at work, but at home too.” I looked at the Witch, staring into her black-as-night eyes. “That's why Stratton was a cult, Michele. It was all for one and one for all, and lots for oneself, of course. And there were no outsiders around—ever.” I looked around the room. “Understand?”
Everyone, including the Witch, nodded.
The Bastard said, “What you're saying makes sense, but I thought most of your early recruits came from Long Island, from Jericho and Syosset.”
“About half of them did,” I replied quickly. “And there's a reason for that, but we're jumping ahead here. It would be best to take things in order.”
“Please,” said the Bastard. “This is very productive.”
I nodded, gathering my thoughts. “So back to Bayside, then. It's rather ironic, considering that when I was a teenager I swore I'd leave Bayside as soon as I struck it rich. I was about fifteen when I first realized there was a different kind of life out there—a better life, I thought at that time—meaning, a life of wealth and affluence. Remember, I didn't grow up with money, so extravagances like mansions, yachts, private jets—things that people now associate me with—were all completely foreign to me then. Bayside was strictly middle class, especially the part I was raised in.” I smiled nostalgically. “It happened to be a wonderful place to grow up. There wasn't an ounce of crime there, and everyone knew everyone. Everyone had moved there from the Bronx or from other parts of Queens, from neighborhoods that had… you know… turned. My parents moved there from the South Bronx, from a place that's a real shithole now—and you're not writing any of this down, Joel.”
“Anything I write down, I have to turn over to the defense, whoever that ultimately might be.” The Bastard smiled conspiratorially. “So, in my particular case, less is more. Anyway, just keep talking; I have an excellent memory.”
I nodded. “All right. Well, my parents moved to Bayside to spare me the heartache of growing up in the Bronx. We lived in a six-story apartment building in one of those planned communities that were springing up like hotcakes back then. And it was beautiful; there were grassy fields to play ball on, playgrounds, concrete walking paths, trees for tree houses, bushes for hide-and-seek. But, most importantly, there were hundreds of kids, which meant there were lots of future Strattonites to recruit from. And they were all getting good educations”—I paused, reconsidering my words— “although the education part was sort of a double-edged sword.”
“Why is that?” asked OCD, who seemed to be getting a kick out of me.
“Well,” I said, “by the time we hit our teens we were educated enough to know how little we actually had. In other words, we knew that, yeah, maybe we weren't starving like the kids in Africa, but there was definitely more out there.” I paused for effect. “That's how everyone in my neighborhood thought. There was a sense of unlimited hope—or a sense of entitlement, you might call it—that one day we would all strike it rich and move out to Long Island, where the real money was, where people lived in houses and drove Cadillacs and Mercedes.”
“Alan Lipsky grew up in the same apartment building as you, didn't he?” asked OCD.
“Yes,” I said, “on the same floor. And Andy Greene, who you probably know as Wigwam, lived only a few blocks away. Although no one called him Wigwam back then; he didn't actually go bald until the eleventh grade.” I shrugged. “He didn't get his first toupee until he was in his junior year of college. That's when he became Wigwam.” I shrugged again, wondering if Andy Greene would be sitting in this very room in the not-too-distant future. After all, he had been the head of Stratton's Corporate Finance Department, responsible for finding deals to take public and getting them cleared at the SEC. He was a good man, although he would be devastated if he had to go to jail and was forced to take his toupee off—despite the fact that he had the worst toupee this side of the former Iron Curtain.
“Anyway,” I said, “Alan lived in apartment Five-K and I lived in Five-F, and we've been best friends since diapers. I'm sure you're all aware of the fact that I provided Alan with training and financing and that I showed him how the game works.” Everyone nodded. “And, in return, he and Brian paid me upward of five million a year in royalties, in sort of a quid pro quo. But I'm jumping ahead again; that happened many years later.”
The Bastard nodded. “You said before that you never had any disciplinary problems growing up: You had no arrests? No history of juvenile delinquency?”