Linda Fairstein - Hell Gate

“Who’s in the club?”

“I told you, it’s been disbanded.”

“Why’d that happen?”

“A few of our original members-uh-had some problems.”

“Hit the skids?” Mike asked. “Who were they?”

“Moses and Ethan Leighton, of course, were the founders of it. Ethan invited me to join, along with a couple of our other law school friends who were also at big firms. I’ll give you their names if you think it matters. One of them was convicted of insider trading, so he was the first to go.”

“A classmate of yours?”

“Yes. And a year later, one of the men was a suicide-jumped out the window of a hotel room where he’d been holed up doing drugs. Had a problem with crystal meth and male prostitutes.”

“Guess the screening for club standards was a little loose,” Mike said. “Was Kendall Reid in the club?”

Donny rubbed his hands together as he answered. “No. But Reid was around the Leightons all the time back then. Working for Moses, I think, before he became Ethan’s aide. He wasn’t in on these dinners. Probably because he was just considered staff by the Leightons. That may be why he’s so resentful about all this, telling you about me, like I’d done something wrong.”

“Did Ethan ever bring a woman to any of these meetings?” I asked.

“Not once. Nobody did. Don’t get me wrong, Alex. No reason it couldn’t have been that way. Nothing improper. It was just a throwback to the old boys’ club kind of thing that Moses Leighton thought would be amusing every now and then.”

“Which politicians were involved?” Mike asked.

“We had some councilmen from each of the boroughs, a congressman from Queens. And we had the former police commissioner, before he crashed and burned.”

“Bernie Kerik?”

“Yes. A real gent,” Donny said, sarcasm dripping from his words. “The guy was a misfit in that group from the first time I met him. You got that feeling his big disgrace was just around the corner, if you could only put a finger on it. When the feds arrested Kerik, that was like the third strike for the Leighton tontine.”

“Running clean out of gentlemen, huh?”

“Ethan told his father it was time to let it go. We actually raised a good amount of money for these historic trusts.”

“Where had you met?”

“The first dinner was at Gracie Mansion, of course. Bloomberg wasn’t involved, but he let us use the dining room, since that house is the real star of the trust-the most elegant of the old estates. I think our next dinner was in the Bronx, at the Bartow-Pell Mansion on Pelham Bay.”

I knew the fashionable old property, renowned for its Greek Revival details and its extraordinary gardens.

“And others?” Mike asked.

“King Manor.”

“The Kings of Queens?”

Donny tried to smile. “Yes, Chapman. Rufus King was a member of the Continental Congress. He was a senator from New York and later ambassador to Great Britain. I hadn’t known anything about him.”

“Where’s the manor?”

“It’s not grand, like Gracie. It’s an old farmhouse, off Jamaica Avenue. King was an early and outspoken opponent of slavery.”

Donny thought he was lulling Mike into a history lesson, and while he was testing the information, Mike was leading his charge exactly where he wanted.

“Was the Hamilton Grange one of your meeting places?”

“Yes. Yes, it was.”

“But Kendall Reid had nothing to do with that evening?”

“I don’t remember ever seeing him at dinner.”

“A little odd that the phantom funds that Reid’s alleged to have stolen are for a fictitious Save the Grange organization. Or was that part of a Moses Leighton plan?”

“Odd, how?”

“That your all-boys club was about getting money for this handful of fancy old houses, and Kendall Reid’s council scam arose out of the same concept.”

“Hey, maybe that’s between Reid and the Leightons,” Donny said. “Maybe that’s exactly where Reid got the idea for his own swindle, from a corruption of the plan that Moses Leighton had. I’m sure Paul Battaglia will figure that out without your help, Chapman.”

“I’ll just leave it alone, Mr. Baynes. I won’t even breathe the word tontine to the district attorney.”

“You know why it was named that? I’ll tell you. It had nothing to do with schemes and swindles,” Donny said, standing up and staring out the window, over the seaport of lower Manhattan. “Right down there, at the corner of Water and Wall streets. That’s where the old Tontine Coffee House was located. Ever heard of it?”

Neither Mike nor I had.

“I was a securities litigator before I joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office, handling stock frauds, among other things. The Tontine Coffee House is where the New York Stock Exchange was organized, two hundred years ago. It was built by the merchants of the Tontine Association-Archibald Gracie was a charter member-as a daily meeting place.”

“Legal and aboveboard?” Mike asked.

“Absolutely. Gracie, Rufus King, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr-the prominent leaders of the time met there from twelve to two, almost every day, when they were in town.”

“All the guys who owned your fancy houses.”

“And more. It’s where the merchants and power brokers of New York gathered, the hub of politics and business. It’s the part of the city’s history Leighton wanted to recapture. That’s why he used the name Tontine, because the coffeehouse was the most important gathering of the city’s men in its day. That and the fact that these very men whose homes he wanted to preserve were the original members of the association.”

“I’ll have to start making house calls,” Mike said. “History’s my thing.”

“Gracie owned a large oceangoing fleet, as you probably know. The coffeehouse had a bell system and a spyglass, so the members could watch the great merchant ships arriving in New York Harbor, look for their own men coming back from sea.”

There was no stopping Donny Baynes now. He liked being in charge of the information flow.

“As soon as a ship’s captain reached the docks, he was required to come in to the Tontine to register his cargo. All the companies that outfitted, insured, and owned the boats had agents waiting here, just like Gracie, to account for their goods.”

“Coffee, tea, sugar, cloth,” Mike started to list the inventory of imports.

“Fine furniture, cotton, molasses,” Donny said.

“Blackbirders too?”

“Sorry?”

“Did they track their black ivory?” Mike asked, looming over Baynes’s chair.

“I don’t get it, Chapman.”

“You should, Donny. Being in charge of human trafficking and all. Those very same merchant ships carried slaves to the port of New York. Men, women, and children. Their human cargo was referred to as black ivory, in case you didn’t know it. And the snakeheads of the day were known as blackbirders.”

Baynes’s jaw slackened.

“The Wall Street Slave Market was at the very same intersection of Water and Wall streets. The Meal Market across the street from your coffeehouse, I guess, was the place where the enslaved Africans were sold.”

“I-I had no idea.”

“It’s helpful to know how your gentlemen’s club came to be, Donny. That original Tontine Association? It must have thrived on human trafficking.”

“Now you’ve got something to give Battaglia,” Mike said. “It’s the perfect time to call him and tell him you were tagged with a GPS. He’ll lose all interest in you once you explain how much ground we’ve covered.”

We had walked out the door of the U.S. Attorney’s Office just after six o’clock and made the left turn that put us directly in front of police headquarters.