Dennis Gaito was, indeed, a chef, although not in the traditional sense of the word. It was a nickname born out of love and affection and one that had been earned as a result of his natural propensity to cook the books. He was a man's man, calm, cool, collected. He lived for world-class golf courses, Cuban cigars, fine wines, first-class travel, and enlightened conversation, especially when it had to do with figuring out ways to fuck over the IRS and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which seemed to be his life's foremost mission.
In his mid-fifties now, the Chef had been cooking the books since the early seventies, while I was still in grade school, cutting his teeth under the watchful eye of Bob Brennan, one of the greatest stock jockeys of all time. Bob's nickname was the Blue-eyed Devil—a testament to his steel-blue eyes, devilish trading strategies, and the icy-cool blood that ran through his veins, which was rumored to be two degrees cooler than liquid nitrogen.
The Blue-eyed Devil was the founder of First Jersey Securities, which in the late seventies and early eighties had been a penny-stock operation of unprecedented scope and scale. The Chef had been the Devil's accountant, as well as his chief confidant. As a team, they were legendary, leaving a swarthy trail of unadulterated stock fraud in their wake. And unlike mostpenny-stock guys, the Blue-eyed Devil had walked away with all the marbles, nearly a quarter billion of them.
Therein lay the rub: The Blue-eyed Devil had gotten away with it. He'd outwitted the regulators every step of the way, and there was nothing that the Bastard wanted more than the head of the Blue-eyed Devil on a platter.
Just then the voice of Monsoir snapped me back to the present. “This traffic is brutal!” he declared. “It is a wonder we will ever make it back to Brookville. Don't you think, boss?”
“Monsoir,” I said gently, “you happen to be a damn good driver. You never call in sick, you never get lost, and, being a Muslim and all, I don't think you can even drink!” I nodded in admiration. “That's why I have two kind words for you.”
“Oh, yeah, boss, what's that?”
“Fuck—off!” I snarled, and I pushed a button on the overhead console and watched the babbling Pakistani's head disappear behind a felt-covered divider. I stared at the rich blue felt for a good few seconds, and my eyes lit on three gold-colored letters—an N,a J,and a B—which stood for Jordan and Nadine Belfort. The letters had been embroidered onto the felt, in 18-karat-gold thread, written in Gothic-style script. What a fucking mockery!I thought. Such reckless spending! Such wanton excess! And all so meaningless now….
My mind went roaring back to the Blue-eyed Devil and the Chef. In truth, I hadn't really danced with the Devil, so I couldn't implicate him in any wrongdoing, at least not directly. The Chef, however, was a different story. We had cooked up a thousand nefarious schemes together, too many to even count. Ironically, I had decided to exclude him from my Swiss activities, fearful at the time that his relationship with the Blue-eyed Devil would bring heat to me.
Alas, four years later—which is to say, a few hours ago—the Bastard and OCD had found this exclusion difficult to swallow. It made no sense, the Bastard argued. “Why would you keep the Chef out of this?” he'd asked skeptically. “You include him in everything else and leave him out of this? It doesn't jive—unless, of course, you didinclude him and you're just trying to protect him!” With that, the Bastard had pulled out a stack of old travel records relating to a trip I'd taken to Switzerland back in the summer of 1995, and, by no coincidence, it was a trip the Chef had accompanied me on. Even more incriminating was that after we'd departed Switzerland, rather than flying back to the United States, we made a brief pit stop behind the former Iron Curtain, in Czechoslovakia. According to the Bastard's records, we'd stayed there for less than eighteen hours, literally flying in and out. Something about that didn't sit right with the Bastard; after all, for what possible reason would we do that, other than to drop off cash or open a secret account or cook up a scheme? Whatever we'd done, the Bastard knew I was hiding something, and he wanted to know what it was.
Meanwhile, I could only scratch my head. The Bastard was so far off the mark it was literally mind-boggling. Having no other choice, though, I recounted that excursion in intimate detail, starting with Switzerland, explaining that my sole purpose for being there was to do damage control. I had been trying to wind down the latest in a series of horrific debacles, the sum of which had landed me in the room in which I was now sitting. Thisparticular debacle had to do with the untimely death of the Duchess's lovely aunt Patricia, who, unbeknownst to the Duchess, I'd recruited into the heart of my money-laundering scheme.
I had convinced my wife's favorite aunt—a sixty-five-year-old retired British schoolteacher who'd never broken a single law in her entire life—to break more than a thousand of them in one swift swoop, by acting as my Swiss nominee. And the moment she agreed, I began stashing millions of dollars in numbered accounts tied to her name. Then, without warning, she died of a stroke, throwing those millions into limbo.
At first I'd thought her death would cause me great problems, the most obvious of which was that my money would be tied up in the seedy underbelly of the Swiss banking system for all eternity. But I had been wrong, because the Swiss were adept at such matters. To them, the death of a nominee was a huge positive, something to which one cracks open a bottle of champagne. After all, the best nominee is a dead nominee, or so I was told by my blubbery Swiss trustee, Roland Franks, 1*an affable three-hundred pounder with a voracious appetite for sweets and an unworldly gift for creating forged documents that supported a notion of plausible deniability. And when I had asked my Master Forger why that was so, he shrugged his fat shoulders and said, “Because dead men tell no tales, my young friend, nor do dead aunts!”
Meanwhile, as I had recounted all this sordidness to my captors, I had focused in on the fact that the Chef and I weren't alone on the trip; we'd brought company with us, in the form of Danny Porush, my erstwhile partner-in-crime, and Andy Greene, my loyal and trusted attorney, who was better known as Wigwam.
I had freely admitted that Danny hadbeen my partner in all this. “He's as guilty as I am,” I'd declared to the Bastard, and then I swore to him that Wigwam and the Chef had had no part in it. They were merely coming along for the ride to Czechoslovakia, I said, which was our next stop on the trip. Neither of them knew that Danny and I had already smuggled money to Switzerland; they just thought we were there to scope things out for future reference.
By this point in the story, the Bastard and OCD seemed to be buying into it, so I plunged into the next leg of our excursion, to Czechoslovakia, explaining how our venture there was part of a failed attempt to corner the market in Czech vouchers, which the new government had recently issued to its citizens as a means of privatizing the economy. Yet, beyond that, I found myself unable to come completely clean with my captors. After all, what had transpired in Czechoslovakia was so utterly decadent that they would never have understood. So, instead, I gave them a calmer, more watered-down version of things, lest they view me as a complete social deviant, who was not worthy of a 5K letter. It was only now, two hours later, that I could fully relish the insanity that had defined that leg of the journey.
It had all started inside the private jet, which was a Gulfstream III. Like all Gulfstreams, this one had a plush, roomy cabin finished in mellow beige tones. The seats were as big as thrones, and the twin Rolls-Royce engines had been fitted with the latest Hushkits, making the ride so quiet that all you could hear was the gentle hum of turbofans as air swept past the fuselage at 550 knots.