by David Howard
Over the past few months, Fuller had devoured Wedick and Brennan’s reports and was astounded by their audacity. “Most people go through their careers only doing what’s been done before, so they’re kind of in a box,” he later said. “These two guys, they saw the world as a candy store.”
Now they were sitting across from him, describing Pro and Trident and the scheme to acquire Brookhaven. There’s a gold mine on Central Park South, they said.
Fuller pondered this. The FBI in New York had recently begun aggressively pursuing the city’s five major crime families, and Trident was a potential point of entry. Word was that Pro was an associate of Philadelphia crime boss Angelo “the Gentle Don” Bruno. And Fuller had heard of Joe Trocchio, a “knuckle dragger” henchman connected to four different families. Trocchio had been arrested in February for trying to sell $2.5 million in stolen federal treasury and mortgage bonds. He’d also been convicted in 1975 for possession of stolen Swiss traveler’s checks.
The question for Fuller was: What was the best way in? Soon enough, Jack and J.J. would follow Kitzer out of town, so he needed his own method for probing Trident. Fuller had one creative, ambitious idea that would take serious effort, and weeks or maybe months would pass before it produced any results. But if any case called for thinking big, this was it.
—
Four months into her pregnancy, Becky Brennan looked forward to the times when Jack would roll in from the road. He hadn’t fully moved back in, though it would’ve been hard to tell even if he had, he was traveling so much.
Sometimes Jack brought J.J. over and she spent time with them as they depressurized. Seizing the chance to relax away from the office, the agents played with little John and Chris, then drank Scotch after the kids went to bed and told stories about their travels, leaving out any meaningful details. They talked about Tokyo at night, and walking through the Frankfurt airport past guards wielding machine guns.
They also talked about what might come next. The Brennans dreamed of owning a farm, and J.J. called Becky “Sunnybrook,” after the title character in the children’s novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Sometimes, telling stories about the Bronx, he would pantomime driving an eighteen-wheeler, bouncing in his seat and turning a huge wheel and “talking New York,” as Becky put it. “It was so real, we would just be in hysterics laughing.”
Becky found it remarkable that the partnership Jack and J.J. had formed for the undercover operation had blossomed into a solid friendship. They were like television’s iconic comedy pairing, Felix and Oscar. “The Odd Couple,” she said, “is the perfect description.”
When they left the next morning, Becky sat on the steps outside to wave as they pulled out. John pedaled a tricycle up and down the sidewalk. Inside the car, J.J. turned to his friend and said, “Jack, do you know what you’re doing here?”
Jack stared back at him. The entire landscape of his life—Phil and the travel and the FBI and this shattered and reconstructed family—was too complex to map out in his head. There was no telling if, as with rebuilding a TV, the disparate parts could be made to fit into a whole. He turned away and buckled his seat belt, and J.J. started the car and pulled out.
Left on her own, Becky dug into her reserves of strength, pushing through from one day to the next. Their younger son was now mobile, meaning that she was chasing two kinetic toddlers around. There was only so much of a brave face she could put on. Churned by the uncertainty of their situation and a roiling stew of hormones, she endured stretches of black loneliness. Sometimes she climbed into bed after the boys were down for the night and surrendered to tears.
When sleep finally came, it was a blessing.
16
The Rhinestone Cowboys
MAY 18, 1977
Phil Kitzer sat at the bar in the Shaker House Motor Hotel, chatting, drinking, and smoking. He’d been in Cleveland for several days, chewing over schemes with Armand Mucci, Bob Bendis, and Andrew D’Amato, who had cleared up his situation with the mob and was no longer shadowed by Mark Iuteri. Mucci was a good host. To keep the hotel on the threshold of bankruptcy, he allowed the promoters to stay for free. The food and liquor were also gratis.
D’Amato walked into the bar looking distraught. He explained that he owed $17,000 on his home in Connecticut and the bank was making noises about foreclosure. He was worried about his wife and three daughters.
Later that evening, Phil ran into Mucci. “Armand, is this true about Andy’s mortgage?” he asked.
Mucci nodded, adding that he, too, was in a bind: When he’d paid off the balance of Phil’s fee for Seven Oak paper back in February, he’d taken the $4,000 out of a client’s trust account. Now the client was pressuring him about the money. Kitzer had an idea to help both of them: He would introduce D’Amato’s Euro-Afro-Asiatic Trust to Fred Pro.
Phil had mentioned the Eurotrust back in New York, and Pro was intrigued. Once Pro took clients’ money, they naturally expected him to produce. Since he had no intention of ever actually facilitating a loan, he instead began “bridging” his customers—essentially, stalling. This involved “a lot of phony papers and fancy paperwork.”
These tactics were central to Trident’s success. Pro took pride in his lavish, multipart excuses, the language he would unleash in his baroquely worded missives—he called them “intellectual masturbation letter[s].” That year happened to be the twenty-fifth anniversary of Elizabeth II’s accession to England’s throne, and he used the queen’s Silver Jubilee to great effect, explaining that he couldn’t access funds in the United Kingdom because banks were shut down for the festivities. Pro might also attribute delays to drops in the dollar’s value, or increases in gold prices, or a Mexican holiday, or Europeans’ tendency to take holiday for all of August.
He also placated clients by arranging for other promoters to send bank telexes indicating that the promised financing was imminent. But the vehicles he tapped for such documents occasionally burned out. As a result, he said, “I always look for a fresh artificial lending source.”
And that, naturally, often involved Kitzer. “I would call Phil,” he said, “and Phil would supply a fresh one for me or use one of his own, because Phil always had a bagful.”
Kitzer thought Pro might pay $30,000 to have the Eurotrust stall some particularly impatient customers. “I’ll make a phone call and set up a deal in New York,” he told Mucci. “If I set it up using EAAT, the trust, can you get Andy to do the deal?”
“Phil, if you set up any kind of a deal to get us $30,000 using that trust,” Mucci replied, “I’ll make Andy sign if I have to kill him to do it.”
That wouldn’t be the last time one promoter threatened to murder another one over a deal Phil conjured up.
—
Three days later, on Saturday, May 21, Kitzer, D’Amato, Bendis, and Mucci wove through the maze of overstuffed furniture clogging the offices of Trident Consortium and found seats. (Wedick and Brennan were still in Indiana.) Waiting for them were Pro and his associate, Silas Yoakum Guthrie III, an old-time promoter Pro had hired earlier that year. Guthrie, whom everyone called Sy, was appealing a wire-fraud conviction that had resulted in a two-year prison sentence. Guthrie had come to admire Pro months earlier after introducing him to a boxing promoter interested in staging a fight between Muhammad Ali and Michael Spinks. The promoter had already invested heavily in the project, but he needed money to extend an option he held with Ali. “Mr. Pro offered a series of rash promises, promises that I knew Mr. Pro could not fulfill,” Guthrie said.
Pro took in the assemblage of talent that May morning and declared the event to be a summit meeting. Initially, things proceeded auspiciously. D’Amato delivered his Eurotrust presentation, flashing his copies of million-dollar CDs, which Pro found highly promising. The trust, Pro judged, “appeared very fashionable, and I thought it would be easy to use with my customers.”
D’Amato also showed off a copy of a takeout commitment that looked better than Trident’s—and was
“almost as good as the quality of Phillip Kitzer’s handiwork,” Pro said.
Pro was particularly impressed with D’Amato’s verbiage. The work featured “a certain diarrhea of words…he used in telexes that I thought would be very attractive. He had great expertise in writing beautiful letters.”
Not to be outdone, Pro delivered a florid presentation on Trident, sprinkling his sentences with words like “colloquialism” and “multiplicity” and highlighting his own nearly unparalleled talents with “the mystic”—his term for the ability to con a person out of five- or six-figure quantities of money. Pro pulled out his passport—he “unfolded it like an accordion,” Bendis later recalled. “He had been all over the world so many times…doing tremendous deals, making all kinds of money, and going on and on about that.” Pro said he no longer even granted meetings unless potential clients arrived with a check in hand.
D’Amato and Pro sketched out a deal. For $30,000, D’Amato would help stall five Trident clients.
Pro sifted through sixty legal-sized file folders piled around him, one for each mark. He made two piles: one for deals he wasn’t concerned about, the other for clients currently pressuring him. Occasionally he reached into one pile and thumbed through it, then moved a folder to the other pile.
The conversation became scattered and chaotic. D’Amato, Mucci, and Bendis began talking about various deals they were working on, and Pro occasionally interrupted to explain the details of one of his schemes, only to be interrupted by someone else. Phil suggested to him that no one cared about the details—they just wanted him to hand over the thirty grand.
Pro seemed wounded. “I do my homework on these deals,” he said. That was why, unlike some others in the room, he hadn’t been indicted yet, he said.
Phil shot back, “Well, Fred, with the bullshit that is going down in this office, you had better say ‘yet,’ because the indictments are coming down here.”
He thought Pro was crazy to spend so much money on his living quarters; by planting himself in one spot, he was an easy target. Everyone knew where to find him.
“Hey, let’s not talk about indictments,” Guthrie chimed in. “I’ve had enough of those things to last me a lifetime.”
Pro quieted the crowd long enough to make a presentation about the Iverson Cycle Corporation, which had recently entered Chapter 11. The manufacturer generated revenues of $80 million globally, and Pro believed that if he could take control, he could drain out about $20 million worth of assets. That would allow him to refund any clients who were bringing heat and still walk away with a gargantuan payday. He passed around a color brochure of the Iverson line, explaining that the company was a candidate to provide bicycles for the 1980 Olympics (although that seemed unlikely if Pro took the helm).
Busting out Iverson, Pro explained, was “our own in-house cherished proposition.”
Pro wanted the Eurotrust to furnish paper to Iverson’s largest creditor, Ambassador Factors Corporation, to persuade the bankruptcy court to make him debtor in possession. If this gambit was successful, he promised to pay D’Amato and the others another $250,000.
The room finally aligned behind the Iverson proposal, but Pro couldn’t make up his mind about which of his other packages he wanted help with—partly because his list of outraged clients would look different by the time D’Amato’s paperwork came through. Eventually D’Amato gave Pro a generic Eurotrust letter that he could use with any five.
Phil said, “Okay, Fred, now where is the money—the thirty thousand?”
“You can’t expect me to have thirty thousand dollars on Saturday,” Pro replied. “I’ll have the money for you on Monday.”
The promoters decided to stick around for two more days.
—
When they all returned to Trident on Monday morning, May 23, Pro still didn’t have their payment but promised that it would arrive imminently. Mucci and D’Amato were incensed. Both had quick tempers, and D’Amato had been agitated about his imperiled mortgage all weekend. Pro described him as “a wild man.”
Phil and the others walked to the Mayflower coffee shop. D’Amato revealed that he had another reason for being restless: He had Eurotrust clients waiting for him in London. They had even bought him an airline ticket, but he’d cashed in the ticket and spent the money. These clients were now calling daily. Exasperated, D’Amato said he wanted to kill the Trident deal.
“All right, Andy, if you want to forget the deal, just forget it,” Phil said. “Let’s quit right now.”
“Fine,” D’Amato said. He stood from the table and walked out.
Mucci stood, but Phil stopped him: “Leave him go. He’ll be back.”
As predicted, D’Amato returned a few minutes later. He said he still wanted to do the Pro deal, but his London situation was giving him fits, which gave Phil another idea. Pro was keen to get the Iverson deal moving; the bankruptcy court hearing was in two weeks. Phil called Pro and asked him to provide two airline tickets to London, plus expenses, for D’Amato and Bendis. He said that everyone was sure he would come up with the $30,000 and liked the way he operated, and D’Amato wanted to get to London fast so he and Bendis could push the Eurotrust to make everything happen.
Pro agreed. Iverson was his kryptonite; he would do almost anything to latch onto the imperiled bike company. He walked to a travel agency on Forty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue and bought two round-trip tickets on TWA, then gave Bendis $1,000 for expenses. He also handed Bendis a check for $25,000—strictly to flash, as an inducement for the Eurotrust to furnish the requested paper. Pro said the check would bounce if Bendis tried to cash it, but he would make it good if the trust came through.
But Pro’s promises felt hollow. By the time D’Amato and Bendis flew out that night, he still hadn’t handed over the $30,000. He assured them that it was coming the next afternoon, but when afternoon arrived, he said it would be the next morning—only to put them off again until the following afternoon. Mucci, who hadn’t even brought a change of clothes from Cleveland, smoldered.
On Thursday, Pro guaranteed that he would pay them the next morning. At eleven a.m. on Friday, Mucci and Kitzer took seats at a table in the empty Essex House bar. Sy Guthrie arrived first and apologized about the delays, but said that Pro really had the money this time. Mucci, who’d known Guthrie for years, said he was relieved that Pro was finally paying—the money would help a lot, and they’d be able to do more business together in the future.
As they talked, Pro walked in and stood over the table. “You and your goddamn friends,” he yelled at Guthrie. He threw a stack of bills down, and everyone watched as they drifted across the table and floor.
“What is the problem?” Guthrie said.
Pro said that D’Amato had tried, against his orders, to cash the check for $25,000 he’d sent to London—“and because of my good, good relationships with Barclays Bank, Barclays gave them the cash, twenty-five thousand without calling me. I went over to Barclays to get these cashier’s checks and they told me to close our account. They didn’t want us in the bank anymore.”
“Fred, you didn’t get the money?” Phil asked.
“No,” Pro said.
Mucci curled his hands into fists and glowered.
Phil told Guthrie, “Get Armand out of here.”
Guthrie led Mucci out into the morning sun, where he growled, “I’ll kill him.”
Phil and Pro stared at each other. Kitzer didn’t know it yet, but the encounter had been staged. Pro still didn’t have the $30,000, and as a way to deflect attention, he’d dreamed up this confrontation. It had come to him a few days earlier, after Barclays had sent him a certified letter informing him that it was closing Trident’s account. Pro had called Guthrie over and laid out his idea. It was the only way he could think of to deal with a hostile Mucci, who earlier in the week had told Guthrie that Pro was “a windbag and full of shit.”
Pro and Guthrie “rehearsed a little song and dance act,” as Guthrie called it. Pro figure
d he would further divert Mucci’s attention by doing “the most dramatic thing I could do, [which] was to give some of the magic ingredient.”
He’d sent an assistant to withdraw $1,000 in tens and twenties, “so it looked like a big lump of money. Then I walked into the Essex House and I started my soft-shoe.” He thought the money would “be like a tranquilizer pill and keep everything under control.”
Pro started picking up the bills, but Phil stopped him. “You leave that money,” Kitzer said. “Just get out of here.”
Phil collected the $1,000 and paid everyone’s bill at the Mayflower; then he and Mucci left town.
By the time Pro finally came up with the $30,000, this performance would cost him much more.
—
Myron Fuller was on a mission to take down Trident Consortium—and he was willing to try something new to do it. In 1968, Congress had passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which established a system for law enforcement officers to apply for the use of a previously unavailable tool: a wiretap. Over the subsequent eight years, the FBI had generally avoided deploying Title III, the part of the law that regulates wiretaps, because of uncertainty over how it would hold up in court. (Tapping phones was also politically sensitive because of illegal bugging incidents during the Nixon years.) Agents instead tracked organized-crime activities using a “trap and trace” system, which allowed them to view the phone numbers of the parties involved but not to listen in on the call.
