“Marty, I’m not stupid. This is brilliant, but it’s a Ponzi scheme,” Donatello finally told him. “They’re going to kill us.”
“Would you rather tell them you are out of money?”
“No, but they’re going to figure this out, we can’t keep…”
“Why not? You and I are smarter than all of their bookkeepers put together. As long as more money keeps coming in, I would not worry. Play to their greed. Give them their checks, and they will not give a damn how you are doing it.”
With Martijn’s “creative accounting,” the operation appeared to be awash in cash. Considered one of New Jersey’s most eligible bachelors, Donatello Carbonari lived in an opulent penthouse on the top floor of the Bimini Bay hotel. It gave him an unsurpassed view of the oceanfront, the city, and most of south Jersey. Like Donatello himself, his rooftop perch was unassailable. He even became a licensed helicopter pilot and bought a Sikorsky S76C helicopter, which he parked on his new helipad next to the pool and the penthouse. It was the very expensive commercial version of the Army’s Blackhawk. Donatello loved to fly it from the Bimini Bay to his new Park Avenue condominium in New York, where he polished his public image by being seen in the city’s most exclusive clubs and restaurants and serving on the boards of a number of museums and high-profile charities. Life was good.
Never one for pasta, open collar shirts, sharkskin jackets, or gold chains, Donatello’s preferences ran to the best London-tailored suits, gourmet food and wine, and athletic, delicate young men. Like good food and good wine, they were a “taste” he acquired in the bars and coffee houses in the Castro District of San Francisco, while he attended Stanford. Now back on the East Coast, he knew to be more circumspect. He only “hooked up” with his “special friends” at several very private, very discreet men’s clubs in SoHo or Greenwich Village, or in his penthouse. The time might be long past when young men in most professions were hesitant to come out of the closet, but that was hardly the case for a young, ambitious Mafioso. “Our thing” remained a very conservative fraternity with rigid, nineteenth-century traditions and taboos He knew his rivals and numerous enemies would jump on the slightest hint that he was gay like a flock of vultures. With beaks and talons flashing, they would tear him to pieces.
When he took over, he considered most of his father’s contemporaries to be cretins and beneath his intelligence. Perhaps it was that disdain that allowed him to become even more arrogant and vicious than the worst of them. He never asked for approval or the blessing of anyone, especially not the Commission in New York, before he “whacked some moke,” as his old man would have put it. Like any smart CEO, he began by cleaning out the unproductive deadwood and anyone who had their hand too deep in his till. Rumor was, he personally added nine new oil drums to his father’s underwater collection off Brigantine Beach north of Atlantic City. If any of the dons in New York had any objections, he simply increased their monthly take, and the objections vanished.
Success soon followed success, making him more powerful than his father ever dreamt of becoming. The New York City bosses even began calling him The Chinaman, because no one could launder things better than Donatello Carbonari. He even thought he had become bullet-proof, and he no longer saw himself merely as the Don of Atlantic City, a niche player in a second-tier city. Being a student of the mob history, he understood that the power “Lucky” Luciano and Meyer Lansky were able to consolidate in the 1930s was based on their ability to make money for others. He also understood the others had never allowed another crime boss to become that powerful ever since. The center of that power was the five families in New York City and the Commission, which they controlled. For now, Donatello’s goal was a chair at that table. Eventually, he wanted the center chair, and then the entire table. He wanted to be the Capo di tuti Capi — the Big Don.
Aspirations such as that had gotten many young, ambitious Mafiosi dumped in the East River. As they said back in the day, “If you go for the king, you better not miss; or you’re a dead man.” Still, Donatello wasn’t worried. Time was on his side. He was twenty or thirty years younger than any of them, and he had two secret weapons. First, he had a brilliant computer expert named Martijn Van Gries. Second, he let Van Gries bring in the most sophisticated data analysis video and security system south of the Pentagon or the CIA headquarters in Langley, which produced the most elaborate blackmail, extortion, identity theft, and computer fraud scheme anyone ever dreamed of, and few knew about. It was the real cash cow that kept the operation afloat and lined his pockets and Martijn’s.
Ironically enough, Donatello got the idea from a comment his father once made to him. “Hey, college boy, you know why J. Edgar Hoover stuck around Washington so long? It wasn’t ’cause he was smarter or a harder worker than anybody else. No. Nobody could touch dat old bastard, ’cause he kept freakin’ files on everyone, and he knew how to use them. Dat’s what power’s all about, Donnie: havin’ it, and knowin’ how to use it.”
His father was dumb as a doorknob on most things, but he understood power.
The Bimini Bay’s Self Park ramp posed a more difficult security challenge than the casino. The area around the entry doors was well lit, but the rest of the garage was dimly lit and had far too many shadows between the rows of parked cars where someone could hide. As soon as they left in the casino, he motioned for the girls to stop.
“You two stay here,” he told them as he scanned the garage. “I’ll get the car.”
“Aren’t we becoming a little paranoid?” Linda joked.
Before he could answer, Patsy did. “You didn’t see them, Linda; you don’t know what they’re like. They’re animals.”
He jogged off toward his car. When he got there, he checked the doors and even dropped to his knees to look under the car; but he saw nothing suspicious. Finally, he got in, drove back, and picked up the girls. He wasted no time racing down the switchback ramps to ground level and out onto Maryland Avenue, turning south toward the Boardwalk.
“Where are we going?” Linda asked.
“They wouldn’t take the cashier’s check. I have to get the Citicorp branch to do it.”
“What about Vinnie?”
“They let me take Patsy, but they’re keeping Vinnie as ‘collateral’ on his notes.”
“You don’t trust them, do you?”
“About as much as I trust Vinnie not to do something really stupid before we get back.” As he drove, he kept one eye on the road and one eye on the rearview mirror. By the time he reached Mediterranean Avenue, a black Lincoln Town Car had come up behind and started tailing them. It remained a hundred yards back, but it was definitely following them. When he reached Atlantic Avenue, he turned right and said, “Let’s face it, our boy didn’t do himself any favors. Those aren’t the kind of people you want to owe money to, much less double down on, lose even more, and then get in a fight with.”
When Linda saw him looking into the rearview mirror again, she turned and looked back too. “Sheesh, not another Lincoln Town Car?” she moaned. “Those guys have zero originality. It’s like somebody requisitioned Gumbahs from central casting.”
“Except those are the real ones and they have Vinnie,” Patsy moaned.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get him back,” Bob reassured her as he saw the sign for the Citicorp branch bank up ahead. When he slowed and turned into its parking lot, the black Lincoln also slowed, but did not turn in. It passed the parking lot entrance and continued down Atlantic. As it did, he saw two men in dark suits and sunglasses sitting in the front seat, looking in his direction. “And you’re right, central casting.”
He circled the lot and found a parking space near the bank’s front door, opened the car door, and grabbed his empty briefcase. “Come on, let’s get this done.”
With Martijn Van Gries in tow, Donatello Carbonari walked to the rear of the casino, along the long service corridor, through a fire door, and down the emergency stairs to the basement. At the bottom stood a recessed, gray st
eel door with a small sign that read “Maintenance.” However, this was no ordinary service door. The panels were made of quarter-inch steel plates secured to the doorframe by four large industrial-grade hinges and a pair of sophisticated magnetic locks, one at the upper and one at the lower corner of the door, each powerful enough to hold back a bull elephant. To the right of the door was a digital keypad with a fingerprint reader. Other than Donatello Carbonari, Martijn Van Gries, and a handful of Martijn’s data technicians, no one else ever got inside.
From the outside, the small maintenance building appeared to be little more than a cheap, one-story, cinder block addition on the rear of the casino. Inside, the building actually had two floors. The lower, basement level held a sophisticated array of computers, servers, and telecommunications equipment. The upper floor, at ground level, contained a ring of windowless offices, secure storerooms, and a conference room, which fronted on a central atrium. Outside, two unusually large cooling compressors sat in the center of the maintenance building’s roof, operating independently from the hotel and casino’s main air conditioning system. Anyone vaguely familiar with commercial air conditioning would know that even one of those monsters could cool a space several times as large as the Maintenance Building appeared to be. That made no sense, unless you were one of a handful of people who knew that the maintenance building was in fact a state-of-the-art data center for the Bimini Bay, its sister casinos, and Donatello Carbonari’s other criminal activities.
The building stood at the corner of the casino’s loading dock. It was blocked from view from the driveways and parking lots by a retaining wall and a huge, industrial-sized trash compactor, all of which was covered by four high-resolution security cameras. Carbonari also owned the city’s only trash hauling business and was the sole operator of the city’s landfill, located ten miles inland. Those were lucrative in their own right, and the strong trash compactor proved useful to get rid of all sorts of unwanted trash.
The maintenance building was the exclusive domain of Martijn Van Gries, who had managed to integrate the Gold Club membership and gambling records with hotel history and reservations, and the video and audio systems he had installed in a dozen of the hotel suites. As Martijn later explained to Donatello, it was truly amazing what personal and financial information people would voluntarily enter on an application form for a casino Gold Club Card, if you gave them $50 in free slot play, entry to the Gold Room, or some other silly perk or bonus. How stupid could people be, he wondered. That information allowed him to create thousands of personal dossiers containing names, employment, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, credit card numbers, social security numbers, and photographs.
Using their bank account numbers and dozens of public and private databases, he could glean everything there was to know about them, steal their identities, and make fraudulent charges or withdrawals. Coupling that with the hotel and casino’s gambling records, his system instantly recognized “high rollers” and people with large incomes and assets, politicians, executives of large corporations, bank loan officers, account managers at investment houses, and many other useful clients, invite them down for free stays, and automatically “comp” them for free food, rooms, and women. When the “right” guest stayed at the Bimini Bay a second time, the system immediately assigned him to one of a dozen “special” fifth floor rooms, which contained hidden video cameras and microphones, making Van Gries’s integrated intelligence system the ultimate blackmail and extortion tool.
In the end, this elaborate system only worked because Donatello and Martijn were perfect complements for each other. Both men were scary smart. Donatello Carbonari was uniquely positioned to satisfy Van Gries’s cravings for various illicit or exotic chemicals and white powders. On the other hand, in addition to his technical expertise, Van Gries knew how to satisfy Carbonari’s far-ranging sexual appetites. As the Dutchman quipped late one night as they sat naked in Carbonari’s rooftop hot tub finishing another bottle of Crystal champagne and line of cocaine, “Ours is a match made in Heaven, isn’t it, Donatello?”
“Or in Hell,” Carbonari answered with a sly grin.
“Hell, you say?” Van Gries laughed as he switched on his elaborate data and audiovisual system, running the feed to a 60-inch HD TV monitor adjacent to the hot tub. Sometimes he ran Donatello’s favorite gay porn. Other times, he ran his own “special” videos from the rooms.
“You’ve seen those ads that say, ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.’ With my system, what happens in Atlantic City can go viral anytime we choose.” With that, he turned on a theater-quality video of a sweating, grunting, sixty-year-old Federal Appeals Court judge in bed with an underage prostitute. The “action” was shown split screen, with feeds from four separate video cameras and surround-sound audio.
“I have two more disks that I can show you from last weekend, which are way hotter,” Van Gries laughed. “One features that investment analyst from Goldman who you comp’d. The other has that US senator and his ‘nephew’ doing a couple of lines of coke and some wonderfully athletic sex, complete with leather, handcuffs, and toys.”
“Really?” Carbonari beamed. “Show me that one.”
“I was afraid that would be the one you would choose.”
“Why?” he turned toward the Dutchman and asked.
“Because I did not want you to get any ‘new’ ideas. I am getting too old for moves like that, Donnie… and so are you.”
“We’ll see, Sweet Cakes. Now, cue the video, if you please,” Carbonari said as he ran his fingers through Van Gries’s hair. “I’m feeling randy.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
There was nothing special about this Citibank branch. See one, you’ve seen them all, Bob quickly concluded, as he ushered the two girls inside. There were glass-walled offices along the front and right side for the junior-assistant managers, a long counter along the far wall that opened onto a set of automated drive-through lanes, and a big vault in the corner held safe deposit boxes. The vault had a massive stainless steel door with huge hinges and six-inch locking pins. Bob smiled, wondering why they even bothered to close the damned thing, given that all the average suburban family kept in their boxes were legal documents and other useless crap. The lobby contained homey groupings of early American furniture that would do Ethan Allen proud, a bright red, serve-yourself popcorn wagon, and a half dozen ceiling-mounted security cameras. John Dillinger was long gone now, and robbing bank branches had been dumbed down to the crime du jour of a kid in a hoodie with his finger in his pocket, who grabbed the cash from a teller’s drawer and ran like hell. As a return on investment, the popcorn machine was more valuable than the security cameras or that big steel vault door.
When Linda stepped into the branch lobby and saw the bright-red wagon, she made a quick detour and grabbed a heaping bag for herself and Patsy. Bob smiled.
“Don’t look at me in that tone of voice, Robert Burke,” Linda told him. “I haven’t had anything to eat since that bag of stale pretzels on the airplane.”
“I’ll buy you a big dinner.”
“That’s then, now’s now. I’m starved, and you know how ‘love machines’ like me need to carb-up for peak performance.”
He rolled his eyes and turned toward the row of glass-fronted offices on his right. As he did, a nervous young man hurried out of the corner office, still pulling on his suit jacket. “Mister Burke?” the man asked, “I didn’t expect you here this soon. I’m Henry Stern, the branch manager. Mister Van Gries from the Bimini Bay phoned and said you had a cashier’s check from our Chicago division, which you need cashed. Please step over to my office here, and we’ll see what we can do.”
Bob began to follow, but then turned back to Linda and Patsy. “You two stay here and graze on the popcorn. This shouldn’t take very long.”
“Good idea,” Linda answered as she held up the bag. “Besides, I really need a potty break. I had my legs crossed the whole time I was sitting at that slot machine.”
He shook his head. “You could’ve gotten up any time you wanted. There was a restroom right around the corner from where you were.”
“And leave a winning slot? Break the mojo, the karma? You gotta be kidding. Get the money; Patsy and I will be back in a minute,” she said as she grabbed the younger woman by her arm and headed for the restroom sign.
Bob followed the branch manager into his office and handed him the certified check along with one of his business cards. Stern looked the check over carefully, front and back, and held it up to the light to check the paper and watermarks.
“It appears perfectly legitimate, Mister Burke; but $170,000 dollars is a lot of money, even here, and you wouldn’t believe the forgeries floating around out there.”
“Do you keep that much cash on hand in a small branch like this? When Van Gries told me to come here, I was a little concerned.”
“I doubt there are many bank branches anywhere that do, but this is Atlantic City. Like our offices in Las Vegas, we do handle a lot of cash and try to support the gaming industry wherever possible. So yes, we can cover it, but it will pretty much clean me out for the day.”
“Thanks, I appreciate the help.”
“I’m going to have one of my associates go into the vault and begin counting it out, while I call Chicago and verify the serial numbers. I’m sure you can understand.”
“Of course,” Bob said as he handed Stern the briefcase. “I guess you can put the cash in here.”
Stern laughed. “I think you’re underestimating how much room that much cash will take. We may need to give you one of our canvas bank bags as well, depending on how the denominations work out. But we’ll see.”
Five minutes later, Linda and Patsy had returned from the restroom, grabbed three more bags of popcorn, and handed one to Bob as they joined him in Stern’s office. “It’s an anniversary present,” Linda said solemnly.
Not being a novice at this husband thing and having no intention of being sandbagged again, he quickly replied, “Yours is in a little box in my desk drawer back in Chicago. It isn’t on the insurance yet, so I didn’t want to bring it on the plane.”
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