“We need to slow down with the hookers too, Dan. It’s getting pretty disgusting already.” I started shaking my head to drive my point home. “I mean, this last girl was pretty hot. You shoulda seen her. I think she was six-one, or maybe even taller! I felt like a newborn baby sucking on his mother’s tit—which was kind of a turn-on, actually.” I shifted in my seat uncomfortably, taking the pressure off my left leg. “Black girls taste a little different than white girls, don’t you think? Especially their pussies, which taste like…uhhhhmm…Jamaican sugar cane! Yeah, it’s very sweet, a black girl’s pussy! It’s like…well, it doesn’t really matter. Listen, Dan—I can’t tell you where to stick your dick, that’s your own affair, but I, myself, am done with hookers for a while. Seriously.”
Danny shrugged. “If my wife looked like yours, maybe I’d slow down too. But Nancy’s a real fucking nightmare! The woman just sucks the life out of me! You know what I’m saying?”
I resisted the urge to bring up genealogy and smiled sympathetically. “Maybe the two of you should get a divorce. Everyone else seems to be doing it, so it won’t be a big deal.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Anyway, I don’t mean to dismiss the importance of your personal problems with your wife, but we need to talk business now. We’re gonna be at the bank in a couple of minutes, and there’s a couple things I want to go over with you before we get there. First, you know to let me do the talking, right?”
He nodded. “What do you think, I’m the fucking Blockhead?”
I smiled. “No, your head’s not square enough, and, besides, it has a brain in it. But, listen—in all seriousness—it’s important that you sit back and observe. Try to figure out what these Frogs are thinking. I can’t pick up anything from their body language. I’m starting to think they don’t have any. Anyway, however it goes this morning, no matter how perfect the whole thing turns out to be, we’re gonna leave this meeting saying we’re not interested. That’s a must, Danny. We say that it doesn’t fit with what we’re doing back in the States and we’ve decided it’s not for us. I’ll come up with some logical reason after they tell me a little bit more about the legal issues, okay?”
“No problem,” he replied, “but why?”
“Because of Kaminsky,” I said. “He’s gonna be there at the first meeting, and I trust that toupeed bastard about as far as I can throw him. I’ll tell you—I’m really negative about this whole Swiss thing as it is. I’ve got bad vibes for some reason. But if we dodecide to do this, there’s no way Kaminsky can ever know. That would defeat the whole purpose. Maybe we’ll use a different bank if we decide to go forward, or maybe we can still use this one. I’m sure they have no loyalty to Kaminsky.
“Anyway, the most important thing is that no one in the States knows about this. I don’t care how stoned you are, Danny, or how many Ludes you’ve taken or how much coke you’ve snorted. This one never slips out. Not to Madden, not to your father, and especially not to your wife—okay?”
Danny nodded. “Omerta, buddy. To the very end.”
I smiled and nodded and then looked out the window without saying a word. It was a signal to Danny that I was no longer in the mood for conversation, and Danny, being Danny, picked up on it immediately. I spent the remainder of the limousine ride gazing out the window at the immaculate streets of Geneva—marveling at how there wasn’t so much as a speck of garbage on a sidewalk or a brush-stroke of graffiti on a wall. Pretty soon my mind began to wander, and I started wondering why on earth I was doing this. It seemed wrong, it seemed risky, and it seemed reckless. One of my first mentors, Al Abrams, had warned me to steer clear of overseas banking. He said it was a prescription for trouble, that it raised too many red flags. He said that you could never trust the Swiss—that they would sell you down the river if the U.S. government ever put any real pressure on them. He explained that all Swiss banks had branches in the U.S., which made them vulnerable to governmental pressure. All of Al’s points were valid. And Al was the most careful man I had ever met. He actually kept old pens in his office, dating back ten or fifteen years, so if he had to backdate a document, the age of the ink would hold up to an FBI gas chromatograph. Talk about your careful criminals!
In the early days, back when I was getting started, Al and I would meet for breakfast at the Seville Diner, a mile or so down the road from Stratton’s then-headquarters at 2001 Marcus Avenue, just a stone’s throw away from its current location. He would offer me a cup of coffee and a Linzer torte, along with a historical analysis on the evolution of the federal securities laws. He would explain why things were the way they were; what mistakes people had made in the past; and how most of the current securities laws were written in consequence of past criminal acts. I soaked it all up. I took no notes. After all, writing things down was forbidden. Business with Al was done strictly on a handshake. His word was his bond. And he never broke it. Yes, papers were exchanged, if absolutely necessary, but only ones that had been carefully manufactured by Al with even more carefully chosen pens. And, of course, every document firmly supported a notion of plausible deniability.
Al had taught me many things, the most important of which was that every transaction—every securities trade and every wire transfer, whether from a bank or brokerage firm—left a paper trail. And unless that paper trail exonerated you from guilt—or, if not that, supported some alternative explanation that granted you plausible deniability—then sooner or later you’d find yourself on the ass end of a federal indictment.
And so it was that I’d been careful. From the earliest days of Stratton Oakmont, every trade I had consummated, and every wire transfer Janet had made on my behalf, and every questionable corporate finance deal I had participated in, had been dressed up—or padded, as the term went on Wall Street—with various documents and time stamps, even certified letters, which together yielded an alternative explanation that alleviated me of criminal liability. There would be no head shots at the Wolf of Wall Street; I would not get caught between their crosshairs. Al Abrams had taught me well.
But now Al was in jail or awaiting sentencing for, of all things, money laundering. As careful as he’d been, he had been ignorant of one law, namely, withdrawing cash from a bank account in increments slightly less than $10,000, as a means of avoiding filing a form with the IRS. It was a law designed to foil drug dealers and Mafioso types, but it still applied to all U.S. citizens. Another thing Al had taught me was that if I ever received a phone call from a business associate—current or former—and they tried getting me to discuss past dealings, there was a ninety percent chance they were cooperating. And that included him. So when I received a call from Al, and that strange squeaking voice of his uttered those fateful words, “Remember the time,…” I knew he was in trouble. Shortly thereafter I received a phone call from one of Al’s attorneys, who informed me that Al had been indicted and that it would be much appreciated if I bought him out of all the private investments we held together. His assets had been frozen and he was running short of cash. Without hesitation I bought him out of everything, at five times the current market value, funneling millions to him in cash. And then I prayed. I prayed that Al wouldn’t give me up. I prayed that Al would stand up to questioning. I prayed that in spite of the fact that he was cooperating, he would give up everyone but me. But when I checked with one of New York’s top criminal lawyers, I was told there was no such thing as partial cooperation; either you cooperated against everyone or you didn’t cooperate at all. My heart dropped to my stomach.