James Grippando - Money to Burn

The judge gaveled him down. “I told you that this is not going to be a mini-trial. The time will come for you to rebut these allegations, but for now I will grant the motion and prohibit Mr. Cantella from making any further sales or transfers of assets valued at more than five hundred dollars. Mr. Cantella has five days to submit to the court a full accounting of all assets transferred from his accounts within the last forty-eight hours.”

“That’s impossible,” I whispered to Kevin.

“Judge,” Kevin said, “that’s-”

“That’s my ruling. We’re adjourned.”

With one final bang of the gavel, it was over-or, as the expression on Highsmith’s face suggested, we were just getting started.

“All rise!” called the bailiff.

As the judge stepped down from the bench, I heard a muffled noise from the rear of the courtroom-someone else rising from the wooden bench seats in the gallery. I turned and looked. It was Ivy’s mother.

A sickening feeling came over me. Olivia wasn’t just helping the FBI.

Could she be helping Mallory?

Kevin pulled me out of Judge Stapleton’s courtroom and into the men’s room across the hall. He checked the stalls to make sure we were alone, and then he tore into me.

“I want the truth: Were you having an affair?”

“No.”

“Are you working with someone to hide your assets from Mallory?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Then who is JBU, and why does he or she want to meet with you in secret?”

“I don’t know for sure. It’s hard to explain.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about those other two e-mails?”

I breathed in and out, wary of his reaction. “Because I knew that you and I would not see eye to eye on them.”

He folded his arms and leaned against the paper-towel dispenser, as if he had more than enough time for the whole story. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m all ears.”

“On the first e-mail-the one that says ‘I can help’-I had no idea who JBU was. But it hit me immediately when the second one came in. It was hard to ignore the fact that the meeting place was the Rink Bar at Rockefeller Center, the table right in front of the gold statute of Prometheus.”

Kevin shrugged. “What about it?”

“That was where Ivy and I had our first date.”

“Oh, no,” he said, groaning.

I could see that I was losing him. I continued, “Ivy and I had a business relationship before I asked her out. If things between us didn’t work out, she didn’t want the hedge fund she was working for to exclude her from deals involving Saxton Silvers. That’s why she chose the Rink Bar for our first date, a tourist attraction where we were less likely to see anyone we knew. But we hit it off, partly because we discovered that we were both fans of Norman Brown.”

“Who?”

“He’s a jazz guitarist, and he happened to be playing at the Blue Note the following week. We agreed to make his show on our second date, but we also agreed to keep the fact that we were dating ‘Just Between Us,’ which was the title to Brown’s debut album.”

“JBU,” said Kevin.

“Right. It wasn’t someone’s initials.”

He was with me-sort of. A look of concern came over his face. “But you don’t think that-”

“That the e-mails came from Ivy?” I said, finishing his thought. I could almost see his head throbbing.

“Please, Michael. Don’t tell me we’re going down this Ivyis-alive path again.”

I said nothing, knowing he would resist.

Kevin suddenly dug into his briefcase, as if an idea had come to him. He pulled out a hard copy of another e-mail-the one from Mallory that had transmitted the happy birthday video and planted the spyware on my computer.

“Just as I thought,” said Kevin. “This e-mail from Mallory has that song title in the subject line. It says ‘Just Between Us.’ Mallory is JBU.”

“I told you we wouldn’t see eye to eye on this.”

Kevin scoffed. “Don’t you get it? The e-mails came from Mallory, who is scheming-probably with Highsmith’s help-to create a bogus paper trail that makes it look like you have a mistress.”

“I don’t think Mallory would do that.”

“Oh, get a grip, will you?”

“I’m serious. Mallory has a lot of resentment toward me-enough to put spyware on my computer. But make up evidence? That isn’t even close to the woman I married.”

Kevin came toward me, laying his hand on my shoulder. “Michael, Ivy is dead. She is not JBU.”

“There’s one way to find out.”

He knew what I meant. “If you go to the Rink Bar at four o’clock, you will be playing right into Highsmith’s hands. He will cite it as proof that you have a lover, and that the two of you are plotting to hide your assets from Mallory. As your lawyer, I absolutely forbid you to go.”

“I don’t care,” I said, looking him in the eye. “I’m going.”

A FEW MINUTES BEFORE FOUR P.M., TONY GIRELLI WAS SEATED ALONE at a café table at the Rink Bar outside Rockefeller Center.

Every spring when the ice melted and the Zamboni went into storage, the famous skating rink in front of the gold statue of Prometheus became a popular lunch and happy-hour destination. A scattering of brightly colored umbrellas shaded tables for about six hundred margarita-loving patrons. Above them at street level, the year-round swarm of tourists stood at the rail, people watching. Girelli took it all in. His boss had extensive commercial real estate holdings, and Girelli wondered if he owned a piece of this place.

Real estate, however, was a sore subject for Girelli.

“Sparkling water,” he told the waiter. “With lemon.”

Girelli still carried a copy of a certain blast e-mail in his wallet, one that he-and hundreds of guys like him-had received last fall from a trader at the residential mortgage desk at Saxton Silvers. As per Michael Cantella, it read, we will no longer be purchasing NINA loans. Please do not call. No exceptions will be granted. At the time of that announcement, Girelli had been pulling down $125,000 in commissions-a month. He and his buddies would go into Miami Beach clubs almost every night, order four or five bottles of Cristal champagne at $1,500 a pop, and think nothing of it. Not bad for a guy who had once been flat broke but who was determined never to return to the world of a leg-breaking, brass-knuckled debt collector for the mob. He’d been shooting pool at a bar one night when a buddy had asked, “Wanna be a mortgage broker?” and he’d jumped on it.

Girelli’s specialty had been NINA loans-“no income, no assets”-for, as he put it, “people who didn’t have a pot to piss in.” He’d load up an eight-dollar-an-hour housekeeper with a million dollars in mortgages on six houses, one for everyone in her family, including two sisters who were still trying to get here from Mexico. And what self-respecting taxi driver should be without three or four pre-construction-priced condos on Miami Beach? The loans were destined to go into default, of course, but that wasn’t Girelli’s problem. He teamed up with a buddy at Sunpath Bank, and they borrowed at a 30 to 1 ratio-$100 million against $3 million in capital-to fund all the subprime loans they wrote. Then Sunpath bundled all the subprimes together and sold them up the daisy chain to Wall Street, paying back Sunpath’s lenders with Wall Street’s money and keeping the profit. What a hoot. What a party. Until the e-mail:

As per Michael Cantella…

Never mind that Sunpath had already funded yet another $100 million in subprime loans in “business as usual.” Never mind that there was no way to pay back Sunpath’s lenders unless Wall Street bought the bundles. Girelli and his partner tried other investment banks, but Wall Street firms were like sheep: The minute a leader like Saxton Silvers decided to stop buying NINA loans, they all followed suit. Funny thing was, no one in the subprime pipeline had ever heard of this asshole Michael Cantella. The guy didn’t even have direct supervision over the residential mortgage desk at Saxton Silvers. Some even said that the e-mail’s attribution, “As per Michael Cantella,” was just Kent Frost and his subprime factory taking a swipe at Cantella for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. Whatever the case, the plug was pulled. Sunpath closed its doors in a week. Three hundred employees lost their jobs. The people at the top lost everything. Michael Cantella didn’t even know their names.