Catching the Wolf of Wall Street

It was for all those reasons that, as I now sat with Dave in Caracalla restaurant, I felt like the world’s biggest louse. I wore dark-blue Levi’s, which concealed OCD’s devilish little Nagra, and beneath my black cotton sweater was OCD’s ultrasensitive microphone, which was rising up my sternum and coming to rest just to the right of my breaking heart.

Although it would be just the two of us this evening, we were sitting at a table for four, set for four, with a starchy-white tablecloth, bone-white china, and gleaming silverware. Dave was sitting just to my left, less than two feet away—so close, I thought, that OCD’s microphone would pick up the sound of his breathing. He wore a navy sport jacket over a white T-shirt—typical dress for Dave Beall—and on his large, handsome face he wore the most innocent of expressions: a lamb waiting to be slaughtered.

After a few minutes of small talk, he handed me a stack of papers. “You mind taking a look at these?” he asked. “I’m thinking about going into the currency-trading business. People are making a fortune in it.”

“Sure,” I replied—and Jesus Christ! I thought. How terribly simple this is going to be! This so-called currency-trading business was the latest scam floating around, and I had no doubt that I could get Dave to incriminate himself in under a minute. Still, this had nothing to do with what OCD and the Bastard were interested in; rather, they wanted to know about the brokerage firm Dave had worked for after Stratton closed. Whatever the case, it would be just as easy to get Dave to spill the beans about that.

So I spent a few moments pretending to look at his papers, which had words like yen and deutsche mark plastered on them as I snuck peeks around the restaurant out of the corner of my eye. Caracalla was a small place, with maybe fifteen or twenty tables. At eight p.m. on a Wednesday, only a few of them were occupied. It was mostly middle-aged couples, none of whom had any idea of the utter deceit that was transpiring just a few yards away. OCD and the Mormon were waiting for me in the parking lot of a local movie theater, so it was just Dave and me…. the man who’d saved my life… the only friend who’d stood by me.…Our children were friends… our wives were friends… we were friends!… How could I do this?

I couldn’t.

Without even thinking, I put down the papers, excused myself from the table, and headed for the bathroom. On the way, I stopped at a waiters’ station and snatched a pen. Inside the bathroom, concealed by a stall, I grabbed a paper towel out of a dispenser, leaned it on the wall, and in big block letters I wrote: DON’T INCRIMINATE YOURSELF! I’M WIRED!

I looked at the note for a second, my heart beating out of my chest. If OCD and the Bastard found out about this, I would be dead meat. They would break my cooperation right on the spot, and I’d be sentenced without a 5K letter. Thirty f**king years! I thought. I did the calculations: I would be sixty-six years old! I took a deep breath and tried to steel myself. There was no way OCD could ever find out. I was certain of it.

Emboldened by that thought, I exited the bathroom and headed back to the table, my eyes darting around the restaurant, like a jackrabbit’s. No one looked suspicious. The coast was clear; there were no government agents.

The moment I reached the table, I placed my left hand on Dave’s shoulder and put my right forefinger to my lips, in the sign that says: “Shhh!” In my left hand was the note, folded in half. I removed my hand from his shoulder, unfolded the note with my fingers, and then placed it on the table in front of him.

As I sat down, I watched his blue eyes literally pop out of his beefy skull, like hat pegs, as he read the note to himself. Then he looked at me, dumbfounded. I looked back, stone-faced. Then I nodded slowly. He nodded back.

“Anyway,” I said, “as far as the currency-trading business goes, I think it’s a good thing, but you need to be careful. There’s a lot of cash floating around there—at least that’s what I hear; everyone’s taking kickbacks. I mean, it was one thing when you and I did it, but it’s different when there’re strangers involved.” I lowered my voice for effect. “Let me ask you a question,” I whispered. “You never deposited any of the cash I gave you, did you?”

He looked at me wide-eyed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m broke right now.”

“I understand that,” I whispered, “but I’m not talking about right now. I’m talking about two years ago. I’m worried about the quarter million I gave you. What did you do with the cash?”

A bead of sweat began running down his thick brow. “I think you were stoned back then, big guy! I’m broke right now….”

And that was how the evening went down.

An hour later, when I handed OCD the tape, I felt a slight twinge of guilt, but only a slight twinge. After all, if OCD were to find out about this, he would understand. Ohhh, he would still have no choice but to throw me in jail for the next thirty years; but he wouldn’t take my betrayal personally. He would agree that there’s only so low a man can stoop before he’s no longer a man, and, tonight I had reached that point, and, yes, tonight I had acted like a man.

On my way back to Southampton, I realized that I had found something very important this evening, something that I had lost many years ago, on that very first day I had walked into the Investors’ Center and saw the spreads.

My self-respect.

CHAPTER 15

THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF KARMA

t was karma, I thought.

After all, what other explanation could there possibly be that, within three days of slipping Dave Beall the note, the Duchess called me to reconcile? Actually, it wasn’t a. full reconciliation, but it was a major step in the right direction.

“So,” said my luscious Duchess, walking arm in arm with me along the water’s edge, “if you buy me a house in the Hamptons, I think it’ll be really good for us. We’d get rid of the Old Brookville house and see each other all the time again. Who knows what’ll happen from there, right?”

I nodded and smiled warmly as we walked in silence for a few moments. We were walking west, toward the setting sun, and in spite of it being April, it was still warm enough at five o’clock that our matching blue windbreakers were all we needed to protect us against the salty breeze.

“Anyway,” continued the Duchess, “I was really mad at you for a while. I never really got over what happened on the stairs. I mean, I thought I did, but I just kind of buried it under the rug, along with a lot of other things.” She paused for a moment, squeezing my arm tighter. “But I’m as much to blame as you for that. You see, all those years I thought I was helping you, I was actually killing you.” She shook her head sadly. “But how was I to know? I was so codependent at the time, I didn’t know which way was up anymore.”

“Yeah,” I said softly, “you’re right; but only about the last part. What happened with the drugs wasn’t your fault; it wasn’t really anyone’s fault; it just kind of happened. It slowly, insidiously crept up on us.”

She nodded but said nothing. I soldiered on, in an upbeat tone: “Anyway, I was a drug addict and you were a codependent, and together we made a mess of things. But at least we made it out alive, right?”

“Yeah—barely,” she said. “I’ve had to work really hard on myself over the last six months. You know, codependency is a terrible disease, Jordan”—she shook her head gravely—”a terrible, terrible disease, and I was about as classically codependent as you can get.”

“Yeah,” I said solemnly—and what a f**king joke! I thought. Codependency, shmodependency… blah, blah, blah! The whole thing was f**king laughable. Yes, the Duchess had been codependent, but to actually seek out a self-help group that had the audacity to call itself Codependents Anonymous? Still, when the Duchess had first started talking about it, I wanted to have an open mind. In fact, I even asked George if he’d ever heard of such a group, and, surprisingly, he told me he had. Yes, they existed, he said, but no one took them seriously. It was a man-haters club more than anything, a place where they turned meek women into pit bulls. In short, he concluded, they were dangerous.

But that was the Duchess: always aspiring to be perfect at something, and this was her latest gig—to be perfectly codependent. So I had no choice but to go along with it, to pretend that codependency was the latest rage. On the plus side, though, anything that motivated her to put away her prospecting shovel was fine with me.

Just then I felt a playful nudge. “What are you thinking about? I see those wheels of yours turning.”

“Nothing,” I replied. “I was just thinking how much I still love you.”

“Well, I love you too,” she said. “I’ll always love you.”

Shit! The second half of her statement was not encouraging! After all, by saying that she would always love me, she was inferring that her love was not of a wifely nature, which is to say of a spread-your-legs nature. Instead, it was of a you’re-the-father-of-my-children nature or a we-share-history-together nature, both of which were unacceptable to me. I wanted wifely love. I wanted lusty love. I wanted the sort of love that we used to share—before I’d been dumb enough to get myself indicted! Still, this was a beginning, a starting point from which I could maneuver her accordingly. “Well,” I said confidently, “as long as we still love each other we can work the rest out, right?”

She nodded slowly. “Over time, yeah, but we need to become friends first. We were never really friends, Jordan. In the beginning, all we did was have sex; I mean, we hardly came up for air, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said gravely—and what the f**k was wrong with that? I thought. Those were the best times of my life, for Chrissake! All those lazy afternoons we made love in the closet, all those nights on the beach, the way we did it doggie-style in the back of the limousine, that time in the movie theater, during Interview with the Vampire, while that old couple one row up rolled their eyes. Who could ask for anything more?

“Yeah is right,” added the Duchess. “We were like two sex maniacs!” Suddenly she stopped and turned to me. Her back was to the ocean now, her blond hair shimmering brilliantly in the afternoon sunlight. She looked like an angel, my angel! “So what do you think, honey? Will you buy me the house?” She puckered up her lips into an irresistible pout.

“I’m not against it,” I replied quickly, debating whether or not to nail her with a kiss, “but with everything that’s going on right now, don’t you think it would make more sense for you to move in here?” I motioned toward the dunes. “Let’s give it a shot and see what happens, Nae! If it doesn’t work, I’ll buy you the house in two seconds flat.”

She shook her head sadly. “I can’t do that yet; I’m not ready.” Then, nervously, she added, “Is it the money? Is the government hassling you?”

I shook my head. “No, I can still spend what I want, as long as it’s reasonable.”

“Well, what does Greg say?”

I smiled. “Greg who? Greg my lawyer or the other Greg?”

“Greg your lawyer!”

I smiled again. “He doesn’t say much, Nae. He’s trying to negotiate the best deal he can, that’s about it. But the good news is that he thinks”—thinks!—“we can keep the houses for a while, at least until I get sentenced, and that won’t be for another four years or so. So we have some time.”

Not letting go: “Where does that leave me? Will you buy me the house or not? It’s only a million dollars, Jordan. It’s a lot less than Old Brookville, so I’m sure the government will be happy with that, no?”

I shrugged. “One would think, although I would still have to get it approved.” Just then something odd occurred to me. “You already found a house, Nae?”

She shrugged innocently. “No, well… not really. I mean, I did see something that would be perfect for the kids and me”—then, as an afterthought—”and maybe perfect for you too one day!” She smiled eagerly. “So what do you think, honey? Will you buy it for me?”

I smiled back, thinking how wonderful it would be to live with the Duchess and with the kids again! No more Jewish blow-job queens and Russian Natashas; how wonderful that would be! “I think we should go look at the house right now,” I said, smiling, but what I didn’t say was: “Before I actually buy it for you, Duchess, I’m gonna make damn sure you’re not playing me like a fiddle!”

“She’s playing you like a fiddle,” snapped my longtime private investigator, Richard “Bo” Dietl, sitting across from me at a table for two at Caracalla. “I’m certain of it, Bo.”

“Maybe so,” I replied, “but I need to know for sure. You know, I was just starting to get over her when she called, and now she’s got me back on the hook again.” I paused, and shook my head angrily. “But this is it, Bo; if she f**ks me over this time, I’m done for good.”

“That’s fair enough,” Bo said skeptically, “but I still think it’s bad karma, this planatation of yours. And it ain’t so legal either.”

I shrugged noncommittally, amazed at how well I understood Bo-speak, which required that you not only disregard Bo’s odd habit of calling everyone around him Bo (in spite of his own nickname being Bo) but that you also disregard the ending atation, when he chose to add it onto an unsuspecting noun. So a plan could be a planatation, and lunch would be lunchatation. Still, Bo was smarter than a whip, and he happened to be the best private investigator in the business.

“I’m not too worried about the bad-karma part,” I replied casually, “because I’ve done some damn good things lately.” I smiled knowingly, resisting the urge to explain to Bo that the reason I’d chosen Caracalla was because I’d created so much good karma last time I was here (by slipping Dave Beall the note) that I was certain it would offset any bad karma I might create with my latest plan, which was: to bug the Duchess’s Codependents Anonymous meeting. “So I’m pretty much bursting at the seams with good karma, Bo.”

“That’s fair enough,” he said, “but I still can’t bug the roomatation for you. If we get caught, they’ll throw us both in jail for that.”

I shrugged again and then took a moment to regard Bo.

As always, he was dressed impeccably, with his two-hundred-pound, five-foot-ten-inch frame swathed in a $2,000 gray pinstripe suit with a size-fifty chest, a crisp white dress shirt with an eighteen-inch neck, and a solid gray crepe de chine necktie, knotted flawlessly in the Windsor style. On his left hand he wore a diamond pinky ring that looked heavy enough to do wrist curls with, and, along with the rest of him—that gorilla-size neck, those broadly handsome features, his perfectly coiffed grayish beard, that slightly thinning head of hair—it gave off the regal whiff of a classy mobster.

Of course, Bo was not a mobster; he had simply grown up around them, raised in that section of Ozone Park, Queens, where an Irish-Italian kid like Bo had only two possible career paths: to become a cop or a mobster. So Bo became a cop—rising quickly through the ranks of the NYPD and earning his gold shield at a remarkably young age. He then retired young and used his connections, on both sides of the law, to build his company, Bo Dietl and Associates, into America’s most well-respected private-security firm.

Over the years, Bo had been a tremendous asset to me—doing everything from protecting my family to investigating the companies I took public to scaring away the occasional low-level mobster who’d made the mistake of trying to muscle his way into Stratton’s business. Right now, however, Bo had no idea that I was cooperating; perhaps he suspected it, I thought, but he was too professional to ask. Besides, when it came down to it, Bo was my friend, and, like any friend, he didn’t want to put me in a position where I had to lie to him.

“I understand what you’re saying,” I said to Bo, “but I’m not asking you to bug the room.”

He shrugged. “So what are you asking me to do, then: hide in the f**king closet?”

I smiled warmly. “No, no, no; I would never ask you to do anything so sneaky and underhanded. What I want you to do is wire up one of your female operatives and have her infiltrate the meeting.” I winked. “As long as the bug is on her, it’s legal in this state, right?”

Bo stared at me, astonished. I continued: “Anyway, I’m pretty sure that a recorded conversation with one side consenting is perfectly legal.” I chose not to tell him why I was so sure. “So as long as we keep the bug on her, we’re in the clear!” I gave my eyebrows two quick up and downs. “It’s a pretty good plan, don’t you think, Bo?”

“Jesus,” muttered Bo. “You—are—one—twisted—fuck, my friend!”

I shrugged. “I’ll take that as a compliment from a guy like you. Anyway, I can only imagine what these women say in these meetings. I mean, think about it: We’ll be like two flies on the wall. If nothing else, it’ll be the laugh of the century!”

Bo, the caveman: “What the f**k does this codependent shit mean anyway? It sounds like a boatload of crap to me.” He shook his head in disbelief. “I bet you some of those women could benefit from some time in a mental ward. You know what I’m saying, Bo?”

I nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I know exactly what you’re saying, but this is the Duchess’s latest trip: She’s an aspiring codependent, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Anyway, will you do this for me, Bo? Will you ride this out with me to the bitter end?”

“Yeah,” he answered unenthusiastically. “I’ll ride it out with you, Bo. But if your wifeatation ever finds out about this, she’s gonna crucify you!”

I dismissed his concern with a flap of the back of my hand in the air. “Don’t even worry about that, Bo. I’m not gonna tell her and you’re not gonna tell her, so how the hell is she ever gonna find out?”

Just then a tall, thin waiter came over with our drinks. He wore a red waiter’s bolero, a black bow tie, and no expression. He handed Bo a snifter of Jack Daniel’s, and me a Coke. Bo looked up at the waiter and said, “Bring me another one of these drinkatations, Bo, will ya?”

The waiter stared at Bo, confused. Bo pressed on: “What’s wrong, Bo?”

I said to the waiter, “He’d like another one, please.”

The waiter nodded and walked off.

Bo shook his head in disgust. “Fucking guy,” he muttered. “He don’t barely speak English and they got him serving us lunchatation. It’s a f**king travesty.” With that, Bo lifted his glass. “Any ways, I hope you get the answer you’re looking for, Bo, because my experience with these things is that a woman’s secret thoughts are never pretty.”