by Don Winslow
That’s when the radio squawked in Mike’s car. Mike wasn’t paying any attention, so Frank got in and answered it. It was the office dispatcher.
“Christ, I’m glad I reached you,” she said. “Patty went into labor. She’s at Scripps.”
Frank hustled out of the car.
“I gotta go,” he told Mike.
Mike was transfixed on the scene inside the house.
“Now?”
“Patty went into labor.”
Mike didn’t take his eyes off the window. “Go. Go.”
Frank jumped back into his car and sped out. He made it to the hospital in time and was in the room when Jill was born. He held his daughter in his arms and his life changed.
Like that.
Frank learned later—with the rest of the suckers—that the savings and loan industry was the biggest bust-out scheme in history, dwarfing anything any wise guy ever managed to put together.
Here’s how the scam worked:
Garth and the other S&L guys would get themselves savings and loan operations, make unsecured loans to themselves and their partners through shell corporations, then default on the loans and drain their S&Ls of all their assets.
Garth took his own Hammond Savings and Loan down for a billion and a half bones.
Identical in shape to your classic Mafia bust-out, Frank thinks now, except we only managed to do it with restaurants and bars, maybe the occasional hotel. These guys busted out the whole country to the tune of $37 billion and Congress hit up the working guy to pay for it.
The whole S&L house of cards eventually came tumbling down, and Garth and a few of the others did some time polishing their short games at various Club Feds, and the senators and congressmen who had been on the boat, literally and figuratively, got on CNN to proclaim what a disgrace it all was.
Karen Wilkenson did a couple of years for pandering. John Saunders went away for a year for misuse of bank funds.
Fortunate Son went on to become a U.S. senator.
Summer Lorensen had a sadder ending, Frank remembers. They found her body a few days later in a ditch off the road on Mount Laguna. She ended up a victim of the Green River Killer, who picked up prostitutes, raped and killed them, then stuffed their mouths with rocks.
The police didn’t catch him for years.
Not surprising. Back then, the cops had a phrase for the murders of prostitutes and junkies: “No humans involved.”
But Frank felt bad, thinking about that sweet girl lying off a road with rocks in her mouth.
But then he forgot about it.
He was busy.
The Strip Club Wars were about to break out.
49
Eddie Monaco looked like Huckleberry Finn.
That is, if Huck were fifty years old and had just gotten laid. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, Eddie had this boyish, innocent look about him, and he could always make people laugh.
Nothing seemed to bother Eddie, ever. Life was a party, full of booze, broads, and buddies. And he was no Donnie Garth: Eddie was a legitimate tough guy who had done stints for extortion and counterfeiting. With a sheet, Eddie couldn’t get a liquor license, of course, so he had a front guy who technically owned the Pinto Club. But everyone knew that the club didn’t belong to Patrick Walsh. The Pinto was Eddie Monaco’s.
The strip club sat on Kettner Boulevard, in what had been Little Italy, just a few blocks away from Lindbergh Field. Frank and Mike were running limos out of the airport, and Mike made sure that every businessman who came into San Diego got the word about the Pinto Club.
“We’ll pick you up at your hotel,” went the pitch, “deliver you to the club, deliver you safely home. You can drink all you want, you don’t have to worry about a DUI, and if you happen to want some company on the way back—say, one of the girls, we can arrange for that, too, no extra charge. And if you want to write it off, no problem—we’ll give you a clean receipt. We can even give you a restaurant check, if you want it, to prove you were going to a business dinner.”
So seeing as how Frank was taking customers there all the time, and seeing as how he’d usually end up driving them home as well, he ended up hanging out there a lot.
The girls were pretty, he had to admit that.
Eddie Monaco knew how to find talent.
And he was generous with it.
“You want anything,” he’d tell Frank, “you don’t even have to ask. A sandwich, a drink, a blow job, it’s yours.”
Eddie liked having mobbed-up guys around. It kept things copacetic and gave the place a whiff of notoriety and danger, which brought customers through the door. What did he call it—“gangster chic”? And anyway, Mike and Frank were driving a lot of business up to those doors, so a meal, a little booze, a hummer in the back room, what was that?
Peanuts to Eddie Monaco.
Frank would accept the free food and the comped drinks, but he never took Eddie up on the BJs. There was something sad enough about the girls already, without them having feign enthusiasm on their knees in the office, and besides, with a toddler at home, he was trying to be faithful to his wife.
It wasn’t that hard to do. The strippers looked sexy at first—it was because of the lights, the pounding music, the atmosphere of undiluted eroticism—but the appeal wore off in a hurry. Especially when you hung out at the bar and got to know them, talked with them on their breaks. Then, sooner or later—usually sooner—the same tired, depressing stories came out of their mouths. The childhood sexual abuse, the cold, distant fathers, the alcoholic mothers, the teenage abortions, the drug addictions.
Especially the drugs.
These girls were so coked up, it was a wonder they could ever stop dancing. Unless they hooked up with some sugar daddy, they were just caught in the spin cycle, until they were used-up coke freaks with more lines on their face than up their nose, and then they were out the door.
And a fresh crop came in.
There was never a shortage of girls.
There was never a shortage of anything, not in the world of Eddie Monaco.
Eddie had five vintage cars, including the Rolls he usually drove around in. He had women—lots of women, and not just the dancers, either—and the women had lots of jewelry that came from Eddie’s fingers. Eddie had a big house in Rancho Santa Fe and a condo in La Jolla.
Eddie had nice threads, Rolex watches, and wads of cash.
The other thing Eddie had a lot of was debts.
They went with his ambitions. Nothing was too good for Eddie, and nothing was too good for the Pinto Club. He spent millions remodeling the place—millions he didn’t have—but he wanted the Pinto to be the premier topless club in California, the base for a whole string of clubs. Eddie wanted to be king of the strip club world, and he didn’t mind spending money to get there.
Problem was, he was spending other people’s money.
Eddie was the king of OPM. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of it, but it didn’t seem to bother him at all. He’d pay off his old debts in fresh OPM, and that way he just kept kiting the debt around. Somehow, people were always willing to give him money.
One of them was a loan shark named Billy Brooks.
Billy used to hang out at the Pinto, ogling the tits and ass and cruising for customers. His two goons were usually with him—Georgie Yoznezensky, known, for obvious reasons, simply as “Georgie Y,” and Angie Basso, who was actually Eddie Monaco’s favorite dry cleaner when he wasn’t breaking legs for Billy.
Angie was your typical goombah, but Georgie Y, Georgie Y was a case. A tall, gangly immigrant from Kiev with thick wrists and a thicker head, a guy so stupid and violent even the Russian mob up in the Fairfax district didn’t want him hanging around. Somehow he hooked up with Billy, and Billy gave him occasional work, even getting him a job as a bouncer at the Pinto.
Eddie gave him the job as a favor to Billy, and why not—Billy had loaned Eddie $100,000.
And Billy wanted to get paid back.
Eddie blew him of
f.
Billy would keep coming by the club, asking Eddie for his money. At first, Eddie would tell him, “Tomorrow, I promise,” or “Next week, Billy, sure thing.” He’d put him off with free girls, who would take Billy back into the office for a blow job, or down the street to a motel for a quickie.
But Billy wasn’t satisfied with pussy, Billy wanted his money.
And he wasn’t getting it.
And he had to sit there and watch while Eddie rented entire clubs for a night and threw himself a party, or drove around in his Rolls with Playboy models cuddled up to him, or gave C-note tips to doormen and coat-check girls and just generally threw money around like paper airplanes and didn’t pay Billy penny one.
It didn’t help that Eddie was handsome, Eddie was cool, and that Billy was neither. He had a mutt of a face, and this hangdog expression. Bad hair and bad skin. It must have been, Frank thought years later, like Richard Nixon watching Bill Clinton pull chicks.
If Eddie had just been nice to the guy, things might have gone down different, but Eddie got tired of Billy nagging him all the time and started blowing the guy off, ignoring him, not returning calls, brushing right past him in the club like he wasn’t there.
“What am I?” Billy said to Mike Pella one night. “An asshole?”
This was New Year’s Eve, and they were sitting at the bar of the Pinto Club, where Billy had arranged to meet Eddie to talk about the situation.
The fact that it was New Year’s Eve had not sat well with Patty.
“New Year’s Eve,” she’d complained. “I thought we could go out.”
“I have to work.”
“Work,” she said. “Hanging around with a bunch of whores.”
“They’re not whores,” Frank said. Well, some of them aren’t, he thought. “They’re dancers.”
“What they do isn’t dancing.”
“It’s the busiest night of the year. Do you know the tips I’ll make?” Frank asked. Besides, he thought, going out on New Year’s Eve to a restaurant or a hotel? Paying double for the same meal, which was usually subpar, with slow service and a mandatory 18 percent service charge thrown into the deal? When I could be out making good money? “Look, we’ll go out tomorrow night. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”
“No one goes out on New Year’s night,” Patty said.
“So we can get a table,” Frank said.
“Big fun,” Patty said. “Two cheap people in an empty restaurant.”
“I’ll call you at midnight,” Frank said. “We’ll smooch over the phone.”
For some reason, that didn’t seem to mollify her. She didn’t even speak to him when he left.
When Frank got to the club, he sat at the bar, listening to Billy Brooks bitch to Mike. Mike and Billy had done time together in Chino, so they were old friends. As Frank sat there that night, listening to Billy whine about his Eddie Monaco problem, he knew what Mike would say about that, and Mike did.
“No offense, Billy,” Mike said, “but you should know people are talking, the way you’re letting Eddie laugh at you. It can’t be good for business.”
No, it can’t, Frank thought.
A loan shark has two assets—cash and respect. You let one guy not pay you—and throw it in your face in public, to boot—and pretty soon, the rest of your customers get the idea they don’t need to pay you, either. Word gets out that you’re a sucker, a pussy, a wimp, and then you can kiss your money good-bye. It ain’t ever coming back, principal or interest.
Then you’d better give up the shylock business and go into something you’re more suited to—like nursing or library science.
This was what Billy Brooks was facing, and it was a problem, because Eddie Monaco was a tough guy and he had his own mob connections. If Billy just took Eddie out—like he ought to—he could have serious problems with the Migliores. It was an interesting dilemma.
Truth was, everyone was watching to see how Billy Brooks would handle the situation.
“I’m in a hell of a situation here, Mike,” Billy said.
That’s all he had to say, all he had to say, and Frank knew that Eddie Monaco was a dead man.
Mike Pella was never a guy to let any grass grow under his feet.
“There’s money in tits and ass,” Mike had told Frank all those years ago. “Big.”
Frank wasn’t so sure if Mike had meant big tits, big asses, or big money, but whatever he’d meant, he’d been dying to get into the topless club business, and this was his chance. The very next day, New Year’s Day, 1987, Mike went to Eddie’s condo in La Jolla. Mike waited until noon, because Eddie probably hadn’t gone to bed until eight or nine in the morning.
Eddie opened the door, blurry-eyed.
Smiled when he saw it was Mike.
“Hey, guy, what—”
Mike shot him in the face three times.
Billy Brooks got instant respect, and a piece of the Pinto Club.
Mike figured that if Billy had a piece of the club, that meant that he did, too. Now Mike wasn’t just dropping customers off at the door, or coming in for an occasional drink; he started hanging around the club all the time, like he was one of the owners, which in his view, he was.
All of Mike’s crew started hanging there—Bobby Bats, Johnny Brizzi, Rocky Corazzo—and Mike would comp their drinks, their meals, their back-room blow jobs. Mike was running up a tab at the Pinto as long as his arm, and Pat Walsh didn’t have the stones to ask him to pay, and neither did Billy, and Mike never thought anything of it.
He figured Billy owed him.
Which he did.
And Mike being Mike, he wasn’t content to take the freebies, sit back, and watch the money roll in. No, he had to squeeze the club for everything it was worth. What he did was, he started selling the girls their coke.
It was a lucrative sideline—sell blow to the girls, let them build up an expensive habit, then put them out to the business trade to let them pay for their jones. Then take 50 percent of their hooker money.
Mike even bought an apartment building near the club and gave the girls the first and last month’s rent, knowing that the coke habit would take the rest of the rent money. Angie Basso and Georgie Y were always there to shy the girls the rent money, and then they really had them hooked.
The girls could never catch up, and that was the point.
Pretty soon, Mike was getting all their money—their tips, their hooker money, their porn money. That was Mike’s next entrepreneurial maneuver—take a girl who was hopelessly behind on the vig and the rent and give her the chance to make some money doing a porn video.
A year down this road, Billy came to Frank about it.
“He’s going to ruin the business,” Billy said. “The cops are all over the place. I’ve had five girls—count them, five—busted on drug and prostitution charges. He has a six-figure bar tab….”
“What do you want me to do?” Frank asked. “I just drive a limo.” Thinking, you brought him in on this, Billy. “You didn’t want Mike, you should have handled your problems yourself.”
“Yeah, but shit, Frank.”
“Shit nothing, Billy.”
Anyway, Frank thought, I have problems of my own.
Like a divorce.
Patty was threatening one.
I can’t really blame her, Frank thought. I’m always working, I’m never home, and when I am home, I’m asleep. Other than that, she spends most of her time wondering where I am, what I’m doing, who I’m doing—even though I’ve told her fifty thousand times I’m not sleeping with the girls.
Still, they had argued about it, and the last fight had been a doozy.
“You knew the deal,” Frank had said. “You knew who I was when you married me.”
“I thought you were a fisherman.”
“Yeah, right,” Frank said. “Frank Baptista, Chris Panno, Mike Pella, Jimmy Forliano come to a fisherman’s wedding with envelopes of cash. You grew up in the neighborhood, Patty. You’re a smart woman. D
on’t go Diane Keaton on me now.”
“You’re fucking other women!”
“Watch your language.”
Patty laughed. “What, you can do it, but I can’t say it?”
“If you did more doing it than saying it,” Frank heard himself say, “I might not be so tempted to do it!”
“When am I supposed to do it!” Patty asked. “You’re never here!”
“I’m out putting food on the table!”
“A lot of men put food on the table and still come home at night!”
“Well, I guess they’re smarter than I am!”
She told him if things didn’t change, she was going to file.
Frank had all this on his mind when Billy was bitching about Mike running the Pinto Club into the ground.
“It’s none of my business,” he told Billy. “You have a problem with Mike, take it up with Mike.”
Yeah, good advice.
Three nights later, Mike grabbed Frank at the bar and told him they needed to have a little talk with Billy. “This guy is giving me shit. Can you believe it?” Mike said. “This fucking ungrate.”
“That’s ingrate.”
Mike blinked. “You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Because it’s ungrateful, not ingrateful,” Mike said.
“I just did it on a puzzle,” Frank said. He was spending a lot of his waiting time these days doing crossword puzzles. “I looked it up.”
“Anyway,” Mike said. “We gotta straighten this fucking Billy out.”
“Mike, I don’t have to straighten anyone out,” Frank said. Then he thought better of it—Mike had a quick temper. Who the hell knows what could happen, Frank told himself. He decided he’d better go along as a moderating influence.
They went for a cruise in Frank’s limo, east on Kettner into the warehouse district. Billy brought Georgie Y along for protection. Frank drove, Georgie Y rode in the front with him, and Mike and Billy sat in the back, arguing.
Mike sounded hurt.
He is hurt, Frank thought. That was the funny thing—Mike really loved the club, thought he had a stake in it, and here Billy was, intimating (puzzle word) that he hadn’t actually hurt Mike’s feelings.
