Free Nothing But Money by Greg Smith Page B

Brooklyn. He wore an uncomfortable suit in the summer swelter. It was June. The summer of 1989 lay ahead like the bejeweled blue Atlantic twinkling off of Coney Island. It was the end of the eighties. The stock market boom had crashed. The country was heading for a recession and was being led by a country club Republican who talked about “a thousand points of light” and then raised your taxes. America was marching toward the millennium, and the Brooklyn that Robert Lino had grown up in was changing dramatically. Indians and the Chinese were beginning to move into Italian Bensonhurst. Who knew where it was all headed? Robert Lino had a lifetime ahead of him and no father to lead the way. Now it was just Robert Lino against the rest of the world.

CHAPTER EIGHT

    The Nineties

     
    Cary Cimino was back. The eighties were so over, the ski slopes of Aspen beckoned. He was now driving a Ferrari, flying first class, spending as fast as he earned. He was enjoying yet another long weekend on the slopes, playing hard and ordering only the best of everything. Everything he bought he laid off on his clients anyway, so what the hell? His partner, Jeffrey, did the same thing. And jetting away from New York for a weekend in the winter was always a good idea. Especially this year. This had not been the best of years for Wall Street or for the city itself.

    The 1990s already looked like the kind of decade in New York that would never be regarded in the sentimental glow of nostalgia. The forties had the abstract expressionists, the fifties had the Dodgers, the sixties had the World’s Fair. The nineties were beginning to look like the seven-ties, with “Ford to New York: Drop Dead,” Son of Sam and the garbage piling up in the streets. Just like those sordid days, the 1990s were all about chaos and anarchy in the streets. Murders were way up, surpassing two thousand in one year for the first time since the New York City Police Department bothered counting. Crack cocaine was killing certain poverty-wracked neighborhoods, turning ordinary people into raging sociopaths. The more out of control the city appeared, the more out of control it became. A tourist from Utah was stabbed in Midtown on the way to a tennis tournament in Queens. A new street name had sprung up for the innocent people shot while walking down the street: “mushrooms.” The squeegee man reigned, shaking down motorists at stoplights all over. Hundreds of homeless people took over Penn Station every night. Activists were distributing free sanitized needles to drug addicts to halt the spread of AIDS. Time magazine ran a front page proclaiming New York City the “Rotten Apple.”

    The glory days of New York seemed distant and remote, like a great baseball pennant race that would never happen again.

    Down on Wall Street, the 1980s were definitely over, but a new economy was emerging. Perhaps it was the general atmosphere of criminality pervading the city or a creeping belief that New York was no longer governable, but as the Dow recovered and the pace of trading again began to increase, a new white collar underworld began to emerge. As the Dow began to rise again, people like Jeffrey Pokross abandoned their car lease scams and check kiting operations and Ponzi schemes and set up shop on Wall Street. If money was to be made, they were going to be part of the party.

    For Cary Cimino, the return of the Dow meant a second chance. This time, however, he was going to do things differently.

    Considering the circumstances, Cary was doing pretty well. The end of the eighties had turned into a head-on collision for his career. He’d exhausted any currency he’d accumulated in the industry, jumping from firm to firm, swallowing up-front bonus after up-front bonus, failing to produce while amassing mountains of debt. Job offers had stopped coming in. Headhunters no longer called. A legitimate firm was simply no longer an option for Cary Cimino. He had gone from being a partner