Most days it was painful to watch my mother in the role of Richard’s wife, struggling to run the business with him. Not long after she’d left the hospital for her kidney infection, she developed a syndrome called fibromyalgia. Most doctors relate it to depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, where your body has chronic, widespread pain. I knew it was because of all the untouched grief inside of her—the same reason that I had ended up in the hospital. On the days when she wasn’t at the factory, she’d be lying on the couch or sleeping in bed. I tried hard on a daily basis to forgive her for the choices she’d made, because even though I couldn’t feel it yet, I knew that someday I would have more understanding of the truth. Of her truth. So I started by asking questions.
My mother and I sat across from each other at the cheap sushi place on Larchmont Boulevard.
“Mom, I need to ask you about Dad,” I said, pouring more sake into her glass.
She looked uneasy. “What do you want to know?”
“I want to know if there were signs. There had to have been signs, Mom.”
She paused and looked down at her plate of sashimi. “You know,” she began, “your father and I created a beautiful life. It really was a fairy tale . . .”
“I know,” I replied, even when now I suspected it wasn’t true.
My mother took a deep breath. “Are you sure you want to talk about this?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” She took another sip of saki. “Well, there were little signs here and there that I . . . looking back . . . I think I chose to ignore or didn’t think much of—red flags, I guess you would say. Like when we’d go to a dinner party, and he would tell people he went to Harvard, when he had only gone for a summer program one year. He went to Howard, the all-black university. But he would phrase it in such an ambiguous way that if you were to catch him in the lie, he could spin it and tell you something making you believe that you were the one who was mistaken.
“And there were other times I’d catch him in little lies. Nothing big, but things like, I’d ask him if he had paid the gardener, and he would tell me that he did, but then I’d find out later that he didn’t. Or that we were late paying this bill or that bill. We were always late on our payments for things. He was always pushing the envelope, always wanting more even when we couldn’t afford it. And I felt I was always trying to keep up, always trying to keep everyone in the community happy who may have been upset with him, usually over money that we owed. I always felt I had to be perfect. But he never let me look at our finances. He never let me see the money. He treated me like one of you girls.
“And, you know . . . I was happy with that. I was happy to be Mom and organize ballet lessons, and pack your lunches, and plan benefits, and raise money for charity without having to worry about our own money, because I trusted him. I loved him. We married very young, and I always had believed that he would be a good husband and father in providing for me and for you girls. He always promised me that. And he did. But then things just seemed to get bigger and bigger, our balloon of wealth . . . it just felt, to me . . . it began to feel so out of control. But I had no control. You know, sweetie, I’m just a small-town girl from Long Beach. I would have been happy with a little house and white picket fence, but your dad, his dreams were bigger.”
When she said these things to me, I remembered that it was around the year 2000—right before the dot-com crash—when my father upgraded from a Beechcraft Barron twin-engine prop plane to the King Air, swapped his Porsche for the 911 Turbo, bought another Range Rover, and traded my mother’s BMW for a Jaguar. And the year before that, he’d taken my mother to Paris, along with Joan and Bernie Carl. It must have been at the same time as the French Grand Prix, where my father and Bernie drove their vintage Ferraris, racing across the country while Mom and Joan followed in a limousine behind them. My parents were sitting at the top of the Eiffel Tower when my father handed my mother the jewelry box, the same jewelry box that held her ring all those years ago. Inside was a gold Baldwin key to the Nantucket house at 44 Liberty Street. A Victorian house that sat on an acre of land right near Main Street. We had always rented, but now, we owned. It was also around that time that my mother got her upgraded nine-carat diamond from Tiffany.
“So why didn’t you leave him?” I asked.
“Why are you asking me all of this?”
“Because I want to know the truth.”
“Well”—she looked at me, treading lightly—“I did think about leaving him. But I was afraid to.”
“What happened?” I felt I was getting closer to something.
“Do you remember the summer in Nantucket? It must have been around ’94 or ’95, when we took you girls down to the docks and showed you that enormous yacht that came to town? The one everyone on the island was in a tizzy over because of how big it was?”
In the nineties, new money started rolling in on the island. Forget the old modest Victorians and cottages owned by local fishermen; compounds were being built for the families of bankers and tech executives. Flying into town on their Gulfstreams and Learjets. I remembered that trip down to the docks well. I was around nine years old when I stood next to my father, staring up at the Naomi.
“Girls, over here!” he yelled. The 167-foot yacht glistened in the afternoon sun as Mara, Chloe, and I carried bags of fudge from Aunt Leah’s, the local candy store. As we walked down the dock to get a closer look, my mother explained how everyone on the island was gossiping about how tacky they thought it was and not representative of the island’s humble beginnings. But my father loved it. “This is where Mom and I are going to party tonight,” he said, and then, “I’m going to buy one for Mom, and we’re going to call it Gayle Winds—get it?” My mother whacked him playfully in the chest. He never did get the chance to buy her the yacht.
“I remember that,” I said.
“Well, a man named Jordan Belfort owned it. He had a party there that night, and I had never seen more cocaine, diamonds, and drugs in my entire life, and it scared me. Something felt off. And later that night, your father and I got into a huge fight about it. I told him I didn’t want that man anywhere near you girls. Ever. I mean, this was a man who took us to dinner at the Chanticleer and threw twenty thousand dollars at the maître d’ because he had forgotten to make a reservation. Everyone was high on quaaludes or something.”
“Were you?” I asked.
“No, I’m way too much of a prude for that. You know I like my Chardonnay. The guys were ordering Jerry Bombs all night. The total bill was around forty thousand dollars.”
“Jesus,” I said and shot the rest of my sake.
“It felt sleazy to me. And then a few years later, all those guys ended up in prison, and it was shortly after that that the government started investigating your dad.”
“So Jordan Belfort was the guy they flew out to testify against Dad? The reason Dad took the plea deal?”
“Yep.”
“Do you think Dad knew he was a bad guy? I mean, what if Dad was conned by this guy?” I was still willing to justify and defend Dad. I still wanted to believe there was a possibility I’d be proved wrong.
“Honey, I’m tired. My fibromyalgia is flaring up. I need to talk about something else now.” My mother looked deflated. She had never talked about this before, and I got more out of her than I thought I would. It was as if she had handed me a Norman Rockwell painting of my childhood. Yet behind it, an X-ray of hairline fractures could finally be seen—fractures that had been there all along, hidden beneath the perfect family portrait.
-26-
A Wedding and the New York Federal Courthouse
It was 2012. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom around the tidal basin below the memorials of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln. It was still cold for April in Washington, DC. I quit the factory before I left. Richard and I had gotten into an argument over pieces of furniture. He blamed me for being behind schedule again. He called screaming on the othe
r end of the phone. “Bloody hell, Christina, you can’t do anything right!” I hung up. This was no different than depending on Josh or Liam. I was done living anybody else’s life but my own. This was not my calling. This was not going to be my life. I had to stop depending on everyone and anyone but myself to create any semblance of a stable anything. Not to mention the fact that I was a terrible factory worker.
I left everything on my desk. And I walked out.
I went back to Washington, DC, for the wedding of Molly Palmer, the daughter of Nancy and John Palmer. I had decided that after the wedding, I would take the bus to New York City and once and for all figure out the truth.
Alan Greenspan’s frail frame made me nervous, like he could collapse at any moment. I stared at him and his wife, journalist Andrea Mitchell, at the table across from me—the perfect Washingtonian couple. We were in the ballroom of the Chevy Chase Club overlooking the golf course, and I tried not to feel uncomfortable inside the old cave dweller, A-lister stomping grounds. It was my first time back in the social whirl of Washington, DC, and I was awestruck by it all. As I had been living with Ellie, I felt so far away from it even though the guests were gracious and kind. So many years had gone by that the faces I did recognize—those who’d once mingled at parties with my parents—looked aged. And though it had been a part of my childhood, and I had to accept that, I knew I didn’t belong there, and there was a reason I felt I never did.
After the father-daughter dance, Nancy pulled me aside to ask how I was doing. She must have known those moments were the most painful. It didn’t matter where I was—I could be in line at the Coffee Bean, watching a father and daughter chatting together, and I’d burst into tears once I got back in the car. I knew that Nancy and my father had kept in touch through letters while he was in prison, but I didn’t know whether she had spoken to him since he had dropped out of my life completely.
“Have you spoken to your father, honey?” she asked, never one to shy away from the truth, which is why I liked her so much. I told Nancy that I hadn’t spoken to or heard from my father in three years. I could see from the look she gave me that she hadn’t spoken to him either.
“I’m so proud of you, honey. You’re so strong, you know,” she said. The wind might as well have blown me off my feet. Proud? Strong? For what? For abusing drugs? For losing friends? For not holding down a job? For being incapable of loving anyone? I didn’t feel proud, and I didn’t feel strong, but Nancy’s kindness was the only reason I still felt as though I belonged. Nancy didn’t know the things I had done to survive.
She didn’t have an opinion of my father either; whether she believed he was innocent or guilty. She and John, as journalists, made me feel welcome. They never judged me or judged our family. I think those who were close to my father felt just as confused as I did about how all of this could have happened, what a tragedy it was, and how strange it was that he had been MIA since 2009.
The day after the wedding, I bought a cheap bus ticket to New York City, where I would retrace my father’s steps at the very beginning.
I hopped off the J train at Chambers Street and headed to the federal courthouse. It wasn’t the way I remembered it eight years ago. The entrance, the steps—everything—seemed mixed around, as though I were trapped inside a Picasso painting. The Occupy Wall Street protestors had been silenced, the barricades surrounding the steps of the US Southern District Court of New York now vacant and lonely. I wore a black blouse, black skirt, and brown boots, my hair was wild and long, and I carried a journal in one hand and my purse in the other.
The security line was empty at eleven in the morning. I walked up to the metal detectors, ready to pass through, when the security guard stopped me. “You have to walk through the zigzagged ropes to pass through,” he said. I looked around me. No one was waiting. He was on a power trip, and it made my chest feel tight, but I did as he asked. He was wearing a bulletproof vest. When I placed my purse on the conveyor belt, a hefty middle-aged woman sitting behind the security monitor asked, “You have a cell phone or anything electronic on you?”
“I have a cell phone,” I said.
“You don’t have an iPod?” I took this to mean she was dumbfounded by the fact that someone like me didn’t own an iPod or think to bring one.
“Nope. Don’t own an iPod.”
“Really?” she asked.
“Really.”
Another large security guard with dark hair and a Brooklyn accent asked me to take off my boots.
“Oh, it’s like the airport now,” I said, casually making conversation. He didn’t acknowledge me.
“Have to check your cell phone first; no electronics allowed upstairs,” said another security guard, standing to my left.
“Okay, I just need to write a few things down from my phone.” I sat down in a chair against the wall next to the conveyor belt and whipped out my journal. I jotted down Dad’s case number, a few telephone numbers, and the floor and suite number of the records office where I was going.
“Records office is in room 370, right?” I asked, just to be sure.
“Yes,” said the security officer.
As I was jotting down the numbers in my journal, a man in a black suit strolled out of the office where you have to check your cell phones, then he casually strolled back inside.
“Hurry that up. Boss isn’t happy about whatever you’re doing there,” the security officer said. Security was irritated that I took the time to sit down and write down numbers and information from my phone before turning it in. It made them nervous, my jotting down things in a journal, observing everything as though I were a ticking time bomb they didn’t have the code to disarm.
The room was empty but for a few wooden desks and a copy machine. Behind the counter, a girl in gold hoops and curly black hair pulled back in a messy bun, filed paperwork in a library that looked like it hadn’t been touched since the nineties. Stacks of boxes and papers stood everywhere. It was amazing they could keep track of anything.
“Can I help you?” the girl asked.
“Yes, I’m looking for the records of Thomas Prousalis Jr.,” I said, not knowing what to ask for or how it worked.
“What’s the case number?”
I fumbled through my purse and pulled out my journal.
“It’s 03 Cr. 1509.”
“Okay, what file do you need?”
“What file?” I had no idea what file I needed. “All of them,” I guessed.
“All of them?” She looked down at me like I was insane.
“Yeah. All of them.”
“Okay,” she sighed. “Driver’s license, please.”
A few minutes later, she came out pushing a metal cart filled with a half dozen file boxes.
“Return everything when you’re done. Copy machine is over there.”
“Thanks.” I couldn’t believe how easy that was. And all for free.
I riffled through Dad’s court records for hours. Nothing was organized.
The first document I examined was exhibit 6: the floor plan of our house in Virginia. I looked at the drawing and saw the upstairs level, including my bedroom and the bathroom. Then below that, the family room, and below that, our playroom. The next document listed comparable houses in the neighborhood—houses I remembered, like the Fabianis’ across the street from the Kennedys’ Hickory Hill estate. Next to each house was its address and appraisals on how much it was worth. In 2004 the homes were worth somewhere between $7 million and $15 million. I wondered what they were worth now.
Then I came to “Community Contacts”: a list of things that reminded me how good Dad looked on paper: 1970, College of William & Mary; 1977, Howard Law School; 1975, White House law clerk; 1970, Officer Candidate School, Lackland AFB; 1973 (reserves), US Air Force; 1980, Decorations: Presidential National Defense Expert, honorable discharge; 1977, married to Gayle Lee McDowell by Malcolm L. Lucas, former US district judge and chief justice of CA Supreme Court and family friend.
Did all of these things about him—all of these things that made him a “good man”—matter anymore?
I flipped through documents titled “Octagon” and “Czech Industries Inc,” with the name Stratton Oakmont labeled across the bottom. The dates on these documents indicated that my father conducted his first IPO with Stratton Oakmont after Jordan Belfort had already been barred from the securities industry. Wouldn’t this suggest that my father willingly worked with a man he knew was a crook? I found copies of Belfort’s business calendar from the 1990s and saw my father’s name written in it, as well as reminders such as “helicopter lesson” and “cancel Rabbi Greenman.”
Then I pulled out a document titled “Appearance Bond: United States District Court Eastern District of Virginia”—when I looked at it, my father had gone through it and made note of every single grammatical error, including dotting the T for his middle initial, and adding commas and semicolons. After having just been arrested—his entire life and livelihood on the line—he still had time to shame someone’s grammar. My father was always trying to be funny in light of all the dark. Or maybe he was just desperately trying to fix whatever he could.
Then I came across a letter that Bernie Carl had written to Judge Cote begging her to grant my father leniency during his sentencing: “I believe I understand the motivation behind Mr. Prousalis’s wrongdoing. It was not, as the government might suggest, a taste for high living or personal greed—rather, it was a desire to shield his family from all the things going wrong in his life. . . . As a man about to lose even his family home, he was desperate. He cut corners to get the deal done. He made fatal mistakes. . . . I am convinced that, while Mr. Prousalis may have facilitated a criminal scheme, he was neither its primary author nor its primary beneficiary.”
What? I had believed, sitting at the trial at nineteen years old, that Bernie believed my father to be innocent. But Bernie knew all along that he had committed a crime. He threw my father under the bus, and he felt guilty about it. But my father conned him, didn’t he? Why was Bernie so quick to forgive him? As I continued flipping through documents, I wondered why I could not find anything else written about any other victim. I wanted to know who the rest were. What happened to them? Did they lose their homes like we did? Could they pay their bills? It was frustrating not to know. I wondered if maybe the reason was because they were wealthy like Bernie and still had plenty of money in their bank accounts; maybe they weren’t, in fact, left in financial ruin.
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