All I could hear at first was a low hum, then a crackling sound, and then my own voice, which always sounded strange to me when I heard it on tape. “… the risk is of James Loo smuggling my million dollars overseas,” my voice was saying. “What if he gets stopped at Customs?”
Now came the Chef's voice: “Eh, whaddaya whaddaya? Don't worry about it! He's got his ways, James. All you gotta know is that the money's gonna get there. You give it him, he gives it to his people, and badabeep badabop badaboop… schhhwiitttt”—a sharp clap of the Chef's hands!—”it's all done! There's no—”
Alonso hit the stop button and shook his head slowly, as if he were deeply troubled. OCD rolled his eyes, preparing for the pain. I braced myself too. Finally Alonso started muttering, “ Schhhwiitttt—he keeps using this word.” He let out one of his trademark deep, troubled breaths. “I don't get it.”
OCD shook his head and sighed. “We've been through this before, Alonso. It just means ‘that's all she wrote.’ Like, schhhwiitttt! That's all she wrote.” OCD looked at me with desperation in his eyes. “Right?”
“Pretty much,” I said, nodding.
“Ahh, pretty much,” declared Alonso, raising his finger in vindication, “but not always! Depending on the context it could mean something different.” He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “Right?”
I nodded slowly, wearily. “Yeah, it could. Sometimes he uses it when he's looking to tie up the loose ends of a cover story. Like, he'll say schhhwiitttt to mean: And with that latest phony document we've created, the government will never be able to figure things out!’ But most of the time it means just what Greg said.”
Alonso shrugged noncommittally. “And what about the clapping sound? Does that affect the meaning of the schhhwiitttt?”
OCD sagged visibly, like an animal that'd just taken a bullet. “I gotta take a break,” he said, and without another word he left the debriefing room, closing the door gently behind him, muttering something under his breath.
Alonso looked at me and shrugged. “Tough times,” he said.
I nodded in agreement. “Yeah, especially for Gaito. I still can't believe he's taking this to trial. It makes no sense.”
“Nor to me,” he agreed. “I don't think I've ever seen a more airtight case than this. It's suicide for Gaito. Someone's giving him some very bad advice.”
“Yeah, like Brennan,” I said. “It's gotta be.”
Alonso shrugged again. “He has something to do with it, I'm sure, but it's gotta be more than that. Ron Fischetti is one of the best defense lawyers in the business, and I can't believe he would let Gaito go through with this just because Brennan told him so. I feel like I'm missing something here. You know what I'm saying?”
I nodded slowly, resisting the urge to tell him what I truly thought—that the Blue-eyed Devil was going to try to bribe one of the jurors. And that was all Gaito needed: one juror to hold out, and then Gleeson would be forced to declare a mistrial.
Of course, I had no proof of this, but stories like this had swirled around the Blue-eyed Devil for years—disappearing files, witnesses recanting testimony, judges making surprise rulings in his favor, prosecutors quitting on the eve of trial. But I kept those thoughts to myself and said, “My guess is that Fischetti is gonna try to focus on me, not the facts. Like, if he can get the jury to truly hate me or, better yet, to literally despise me, then they'll acquit on general principles.” I shrugged. “So he's gonna try to paint me as a drug addict, a whoremonger, a compulsive liar, a born cheater— you know, all the good things in life.”
Alonso shook his head. “He won't get the chance, because I'm gonna do it first. And don't take it personally when I do; I'm going to be pretty tough on you when you're up there. I won't pull any punches, especially when it comes to your personal life.” He cocked his head to one side. “You know what I'm referring to?”
I nodded sadly. “Yeah, what happened on the stairs with Nadine.”
He nodded back. “And what happened afterward too, with your daughter. I'm gonna bring up everything—all the dark stuff. And you can't try to minimize it or rationalize it. You just say, ‘Yes, I kicked my wife down the stairs,’ and, ‘Yes, I drove my car through a garage door with my daughter in the front passenger seat, unbuckled,’ because, trust me, if you do try to minimize it, Fischetti will rip you a new a**hole during cross-examination. He'll say, ‘Oh, so what you're saying, Mr. Belfort, is that you didn't actually kick your wife down a flight of stairs, because she was only on the third step as opposed to the top. And, wait, forgive me, Mr. Belfort, you didn't actually kick her; you pushed her, which is a whole other story. So, to sum it up, what you're saying is that it's all right for a man to push his wife down three individual steps and then risk his daughter's life by throwing her into the passenger seat of his ninety-thousand-dollar Mercedes and driving through a garage door while high on coc**ne and Quaaludes?’” Alonso smiled. “You get the picture?”
“Yeah, I got it, but I don't want it.”
“None of us wants it,” he agreed, “but those are the facts we're stuck with.”
I nodded in resignation. Alonso continued: “But, on the bright side, we'll get to spend some time talking about how you went to rehab and got sober. And then you can also bring up how you go to high schools now and give antidrug lectures to the kids.” He smiled reassuringly. “Believe me, as long as you're honest, it'll work out fine. Drug addiction is a disease, so people will forgive you for it.” He shrugged. “Now, if only whoremongering were a disease too, then we would really be in business!” He started laughing. “Funny, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling—f**king hysterical! I would have to admit, under oath, to banging a thousand hookers of all shapes and sizes. The only question was if it would end up in the news paper. It was just the sort of tawdry gossip that the New York Post lived for.
Alonso reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a fresh pack of Marlboros and a cheap Bic lighter. “You know, I don't make it a habit of breaking the law,” he said, “but in spite of this being a smoke-free building I'm gonna light up anyway.” And he did just that, taking a rather shallow, halfhearted pull that so much as said, “I'm not really a smoker; I just do this when I'm stressed out.”
I remained silent and let him smoke in peace. I understood this was important—to be able to partake in a simple manly pleasure without being interrupted by idle chatter. My father, one of the world's all-time great smokers, had explained this to me on numerous occasions. “Son,” he'd say, “if I want to kill myself with these f**king cancer sticks, then at least let me kill myself in f**king peace, for Chrissake!”
Alonso smiled at me and said, “Sooo… how are you, Jordan?”
I cocked my head to the side and stared at him for a moment. “How am I?” I asked. “Are you being sarcastic, Alonso?”
He turned the corners of his mouth down and shook his head slowly. “No, not at all. I just want to know how you are.”
I shrugged. “Well, it's been a long time since someone's asked me that, so I need to think about it for a second.” I paused for about a tenth of a second, then said, “Uh, I suck! How you doin’, Alonso?”
He ignored my last few words and said, “Things will get better; you just gotta give it some time. After the trial is over, we can make a motion to get your ankle bracelet taken off.” A brief pause, then: “I'm sure Gleeson will approve it once he hears you testify. It definitely comes through how remorseful you are.”
I nodded. “Well, I am remorseful. More than you can imagine.”
He nodded. “I know that; I've been doing this long enough to know when someone's full of shit. But that aside, you still haven't answered my question.”
“About what: How am I?”
“Yeah. How are you?”
I shrugged. “I got problems, Alonso. I'm facing years in jail, I'm engaged to a woman I'm not in love with, I have no career path, my kids live on the other side of the country, I'm wearing a f**king ankle bracelet, I've betrayed my closest friends, they've betrayed me, and, to top it all off, I'm on the verge of running out of money and I don't have a way to make any more right now.”
“You'll be rich again,” he said knowingly. “I don't think anyone in their right mind would bet against it.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, well, you're probably right about that, but I won't be rich for a long time. I'm in the middle of a bad luck streak, and until it runs its course, there's nothing I can do. Anyway, my real goal here is to move out to California to be near my kids. That's it. I swore an oath to my daughter that I would do that, and I'm not going to let her down. I'd like to move out there before I get sentenced. You think that's realistic?”
“Yeah, I think it is. I'll do what I can to help you, but you have to be patient for a while. The next year is going to be hectic; there are trials pending, indictments looming; a lot of things are still up in the air. But there should be a window toward the end. From a logistical standpoint, though, I don't know how much sense it makes to move before you do your time. I mean, what are you going to do: rent a house and then go to jail right after you rent it?”
I smiled and winked. “You bet your ass I am! Before I go to jail, I want my kids to know that I officially moved out to California; this way, they'll know I'll be coming back there when I get out. And I want to spend my last night of freedom with them in a house that's ours, not in a hotel. And we're all gonna sleep in the same bed that night, one of them under each arm.” I paused for a moment, relishing the thought. “That's how I want to spend my last night of freedom.”
Just then the door swung open, and in walked OCD. He took a few suspicious sniffs and then looked at the metal wastepaper basket, where Alonso had tossed his cigarette. Then he looked back at Alonso and said, “So how far did you guys get without me? It's getting kinda late here.”
With great enthusiasm, Alonso said, “No, we're still in the same spot. We got sidetracked.” Alonso compressed his lips, suppressing a cackle.
I suppressed my own cackle as the last traces of color left OCD's face.
Unlike Law & Order, where the excitement is heart-palpitating and the tension is so thick you can literally cut it with a knife, the real-life happenings in a federal courtroom are quite the opposite. Judge Gleeson, for example, sits high on his bench, sometimes looking interested, sometimes looking bored, occasionally looking amused—but always in complete control. There are no outbursts or arguments or people questioning the wisdom of his decisions or anything that might cause him to rise out of his chair and lean forward over his vast desk and point his finger and scream, “You're out of order, Counselor! Now sit back down or I'm holding you in contempt!”
I testified for three days—three unremarkable days—during which I found Fischetti to be fairly competent, but not overly so. Oh, he looked pretty spiffy, in his $2,000 gray silk suit and fancy gray necktie, but that was about it. His lines of questioning seemed boring and long-winded. If I had been sitting in the jury box, I would have fallen asleep.
Alonso, however, had been brilliant: organized, eloquent, persuasive, thorough. He had left Fischetti nowhere to go but in circles, double-talking and triple-talking, and the more he talked, the guiltier his client seemed. Danny testified too, as did a handful of others, although just who and how many I wasn't sure. The less I knew, the better, explained Alonso. I was not on trial, after all; I was only a witness.
A month later, I was sitting in my Swiss hunting lodge beneath the outraged moose's head when a call came in from an even more outraged OCD. “It's a mistrial,” he sputtered. “I can't f**king believe it! How could that jury not convict? It makes no sense.”
“Did you poll the jury afterward?” I asked.
With disgust: “Yeah, why?”
I said, “Well, let me guess, there was only one holdout, right?”
Dead silence at first, then: “How the f**k did you know that?”
“Just a hunch,” I said. “And you want to hear my second hunch?”
“Yeah,” he replied cautiously.
“The holdout was that bastard in the front row, the one with the handlebar mustache, right?”
“It was, actually,” said OCD. “You're just guessing, though, right?”
“Not exactly,” I replied, and I told him my thoughts—namely, that while I had no proof of it, this very mistrial had the Blue-eyed Devil's fingerprints all over it.
“No shit!” he snapped. “You really think so?”
“Yeah, I really do. Again, I have no proof, but, I don't know—I mean, did you see Gaito just sitting there so calm, cool, and collected? He looked almost smug about the whole thing, and Gaito is not a smug man. If anything, he's humble. Maybe I'm crazy, but the whole scene just struck me as odd, especially that juror; he seemed disinterested, like he'd already made up his mind beforehand.”
OCD agreed—as did Alonso when I shared my thoughts with him a few minutes later, via conference call. Still, there was no way to prove it, and Alonso refused to investigate, considering it to be the act of a sore loser. Besides, he hadn't actually lost; a mistrial simply meant that Gaito would have to stand trial again, which he did, precisely six months later.
And during those six months, from December 2000 to May 2001, I burned through most of the cash I had left, as well as what little patience I had with KGB. She, I was certain, held me in as much contempt as I held her. Unfortunately, I'd never been good at getting out of relationships, and, apparently, neither was she. So we remained engaged, passing our days having angry sex and bitter arguments, the latter of which had to do mostly with moon landings and such.
Sadly, Gaito was convicted this time, with the jury reaching a verdict in only a single day. I was home when I got the news, and at that very moment I felt like the lowest scum on earth. I had betrayed a friend, who would now be going to jail for the better part of a decade because he refused to betray one of his friends.
Danny, meanwhile, had already gone to jail; in fact, he never even had a chance to testify at the second trial. He had gotten himself arrested in Florida on an unrelated charge—something about telemarketing fraud with sports memorabilia—and Gleeson remanded him in early April.
When the summer came, I blew what few dollars I still had left on the kids. That was appropriate, I thought, considering they were the only good thing in my life, anyway. And when I kissed them good-bye on Labor Day, I cried inwardly, because I knew I wouldn't be seeing them again for a long time. In spite of Alonso keeping his word—getting me off house arrest and granting me unrestricted travel to California—I could no longer afford to go there.
That, however, was about to change.
CHAPTER 28
FROM OUT OF THE ASHES
t was less than a week after 9/11, as the country readied for war, when my bad luck streak finally ended. I was glued to the TV set when an old friend called from out of the blue and started asking me for advice about something he kept referring to as the refi boom.
Home-mortgage rates had just fallen to record lows, and Americans were refinancing in droves.
“Can you do me a quick favor?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “What is it?”
“I need you to write me a cold-calling script. There's a fortune to be made telemarketing for refis right now.”
Interesting, I thought, but that was all I thought. I was so down on my luck at this point that his words, in regards to my own plight, blew past me like a gust of wind. “All right,” I said. “Tell me a little bit about your business, and I'll write you one this afternoon.” And, with that, he went about explaining the ins and outs of refinancing to me.
It was elegantly simple. Virtually all homeowners currently held mortgages with rates between eight and ten percent, while today's rates were hovering near six percent. So all a mortgage broker had to do was secure a new loan (at the lower interest rate) to pay off the old loan, and a person's monthly mortgage payment would plummet. And while there were some minor costs involved—the so-called closing costs—you could roll them into the new mortgage by making it slightly larger than the old one, which meant no out-of-pocket fees for the borrower. Better still, the closing costs were a mere pittance compared to the long-term savings, which could be hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the size of the loan.
“Hmmm,” I muttered, “it sounds pretty basic. You got leads to call?”
“Yeah, I bought a list of homeowners who are paying eight percent or higher. I'm telling you—it'll be like taking candy from a baby!”
“All right,” I said. “Give me a few hours, and I'll e-mail you a script.” Then, as an afterthought: “And why don't you send me over a few leads while you're at it to test it out with—just to make sure it flows.”
And that was how it started.
He e-mailed me the leads, I wrote a script, and halfway through my first sales pitch, a very animated Haitian woman cut me off in mid-sentence by saying, “This sounds too good to be true! When can you come over to do the paperwork?”
Right this damn second! I thought. Although, not wanting to sound like a desperate salesman, I replied, “Well, it just so happens I'm going to be in your area tomorrow”—I looked at her address and noticed she lived in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, a dangerous place. Why would I be in her area? What plausible explanation?— “refinancing one of your neighbors,” I quickly added. “I can be there around noon. Does that sound okay?”
“Perfect!” she answered. “I'll make snacks.”
The next day I found myself driving through the war zone of east Brooklyn, marveling at how a lack of money can make a man brave. The woman's house was a two-story frame affair on a grimy two-way street. From the outside it looked like a crack den. Inside, it smelled like boiled fish and mildew. There were no less than twelve Haitians living there.
She offered me a seat at her turd-green Formica kitchen table, where she immediately began serving me beans and rice and boiled fish—refusing to talk about her mortgage until I cleaned my plate. Meanwhile, I kept hearing an ungodly shriek coming from one of the upstairs bedrooms. It sounded like a small child. “Is everything okay up there?” I asked, forcing a smile.