Catching the Wolf of Wall Street: More Incredible True Stories of Fortunes, Schemes, Parties, and Prison

CHAPTER 8

STINKOSLOVAKIA

fter chirping like a canary for more than seven hours, day one of singing on Court Street had finally come to a close. I had gotten as far as my first day as a licensed stockbroker, which, by sheer coincidence, was October 19, 1987, the day of the Great Stock Market Crash. My four captors, as well as my own attorney, had found great irony in that. After all, between my first day of dental school, my first day in the meat business, and my first day on Wall Street, I seemed to have the Midas touch, in reverse: Everything I touched turned to shit.

Yet, on the flipside of that, there was no denying that I had a certain resilience to me. The way Magnum had put it, if someone were to flush me down a toilet bowl I would come out the other side holding a plumber's license. And while Magnum's words had been greatly appreciated, I was completely certain that there was no plumber's license waiting for me on the other side of this toilet bowl.

Right now I was in the limousine again, on my way to Old Brookville, where I would place myself back under house arrest, reduced once more to a prisoner within my own home as well as an emotional piñata for the Duchess to swat around. As always, the babbling Pakistani was behind the wheel, but he hadn't uttered a word since we'd left Sunset Park thirty minutes ago, when I'd threatened to cut his tongue off if he didn't stop talking.

At this moment we were on the Long Island Expressway, somewhere near the Queens-Long Island border. It was the tail end of rush hour, at that hour of dusk where the streetlights come on but make little difference. As we crawled along at a snail's pace, I stared out the window, lost in thought.

The Great Crash of 1987 was the pivotal point of my life, an exceptional happening from which all other happenings would unfold. The Dow had dropped 508 points that Black Monday in a single trading session, sending the longest bull market in modern history to a screeching halt.

In truth, I had been nothing more than a casual observer, not just of the crash but also of the fabulous run-up that preceded it. In the summer of 1982, in the wake of slashed income-tax rates and plummeting interest rates, runaway inflation had finally been tamed, and Reagonomics was the rage of the day. Money had become cheap, causing the stock market to catch fire. Michael Milken had just invented junk bonds, turning Corporate America upside down on its ear. Hostile raiders like Ronald Perelman and Henry Kravis, a new breed of financial celebrity armed with war chests of cash raised by Milken's junk bonds, were becoming household names. One by one, they were bringing America's largest corporations to their knees through hostile takeovers. TWA, Revlon, RJR Nabisco… who would be next?

By October of ‘87 the euphoria had reached its peak, as the Dow crossed the 2,400 mark. The era of the yuppie was in full swing, and there was no end in sight. And as the Michael Falks of the world raked in the dough, people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were changing the world. It was the dawn of the Information Age, and it hit with the force of an atomic bomb. Lightning-fast computers were appearing on every desktop; they were powerful, intuitive, and they had shrunk the world to a global village.

For Wall Street, this opened vast possibilities: Faster computers yielded massive increases in trading volume, as well as cutting-edge financial products and novel trading strategies. The financial products, called derivatives, allowed large institutions to hedge their investment portfolios like never before, and the trading strategies, the most exciting of which was called portfolio insurance, began fueling the buying frenzy itself.

In a financial farce of Kafkaesque proportions, portfolio insurance caused advances in the Dow to stimulate computers to spit out massive buy orders for derivatives, which then caused the Dow to advance even further, which stimulated those very same computers to spit out even more buy orders for derivatives… and on and on it went. Theoretically, it could have gone on forever.

Actually, it couldn't have, because the two numnuts who'd invented portfolio insurance had programmed a fail-safe mechanism into the software. In other words, after a certain level of price increases the computers said, “Wait a second—there's something rotten in Denmark! We'd better sell all the stock in our portfolios as fast as our silicone wafers will allow!”

That's when the problems started. In a real-life version of The Terminator, computers turned on their masters and began spewing out endless waves of sell orders at the speed of light. At first, the market declined sharply; that was bad. But, alas, the computers kept right on selling, and by midday, the volume was so enormous that the computers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange couldn't keep up. And that was tragic, because just like that everything came to a grinding halt.

Meanwhile, stockbrokers, being stockbrokers, stopped answering their phones, thinking: What's the fucking point of listening to my irate clients scream, “Sell, God damn it! Sell!” when there're no buyers around to sell to? So instead of holding their clients’ hands and telling them everything would be okay, they leaned back in their seats and put their crocodile shoes up on their desktops and let their telephones ring off the hook. By four p.m., the Dow had plunged twenty-two percent, half a trillion dollars had vanished into thin air, investor confidence had been shattered, and the era of the yuppie had officially come to a close.

Now, more than a decade later, as I'd recounted those events to my captors, I felt strangely detached from them, as if the young man who'd lived through all that—some poor schnook named Jordan Belfort—was a complete stranger to me, someone whose life story I had been narrating in the first person for the sake of simplicity. And odder still was how I had conveniently omitted the personal impact those events had had on me, especially when it came to my marriage to my first wife, Denise, who I'd wed three months prior to the crash. We were both broker than broke. Yet we knew that success was right around the corner. So we had hope and we had faith—until the crash.

And that was where I'd left off: Jordan Belfort had just left the boardroom of LF Rothschild with despair in his heart and his tail between his legs. He was a broken twenty-five-year-old with one personal bankruptcy under his belt and a license to sell stocks that had suddenly become worthless.

Ironically, inside the debriefing room I had grown disturbingly comfortable as the day wore on. Losing myself in the past had allowed me to block out the pain of the present, especially my sense of loss regarding the Duchess. And despite the fact that I knew I was ratting, the information I'd provided was strictly historic-sketching only broad strokes about things marginally illegal. The ninety-seven people on my villains, thieves, and scoundrels list still seemed reasonably safe.

Then the Bastard burst my bubble.

It was a few minutes before five when Joel had said, “We need to put the history lesson on hold for a while. We're fighting a time clock with your cooperation…” and then he went on to explain that there was only so long my esteemed status as a rat could be kept secret. There were telltale signs when someone was cooperating, starting with the court record, which in my case would be conspicuously dull. In other words, there were certain motions filed when a defendant was taking a case to trial, motions that wouldn't be filed if he was singing on Court Street.

In practical terms, explained the Bastard, there would be two distinct aspects to my cooperation: historical ratting and proactive ratting. Up until now I had been engaged only in the former. Now, however, the Bastard had asked me to make a recorded phone call to one of the soon-to-be-sorry souls on my villains, thieves, and scoundrels list. And, the Bastard had chosen of all people, my loyal and trusted accountant, Dennis Gaito, aka the Chef.

Dennis Gaito was, indeed, a chef, although not in the traditional sense of the word. It was a nickname born out of love and affection and one that had been earned as a result of his natural propensity to cook the books. He was a man's man, calm, cool, collected. He lived for world-class golf courses, Cuban cigars, fine wines, first-class travel, and enlightened conversation, especially when it had to do with figuring out ways to fuck over the IRS and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which seemed to be his life's foremost mission.

In his mid-fifties now, the Chef had been cooking the books since the early seventies, while I was still in grade school, cutting his teeth under the watchful eye of Bob Brennan, one of the greatest stock jockeys of all time. Bob's nickname was the Blue-eyed Devil—a testament to his steel-blue eyes, devilish trading strategies, and the icy-cool blood that ran through his veins, which was rumored to be two degrees cooler than liquid nitrogen.

The Blue-eyed Devil was the founder of First Jersey Securities, which in the late seventies and early eighties had been a penny-stock operation of unprecedented scope and scale. The Chef had been the Devil's accountant, as well as his chief confidant. As a team, they were legendary, leaving a swarthy trail of unadulterated stock fraud in their wake. And unlike most penny-stock guys, the Blue-eyed Devil had walked away with all the marbles, nearly a quarter billion of them.

Therein lay the rub: The Blue-eyed Devil had gotten away with it. He'd outwitted the regulators every step of the way, and there was nothing that the Bastard wanted more than the head of the Blue-eyed Devil on a platter.

Just then the voice of Monsoir snapped me back to the present. “This traffic is brutal!” he declared. “It is a wonder we will ever make it back to Brookville. Don't you think, boss?”

“Monsoir,” I said gently, “you happen to be a damn good driver. You never call in sick, you never get lost, and, being a Muslim and all, I don't think you can even drink!” I nodded in admiration. “That's why I have two kind words for you.”

“Oh, yeah, boss, what's that?”

“Fuck—off!” I snarled, and I pushed a button on the overhead console and watched the babbling Pakistani's head disappear behind a felt-covered divider. I stared at the rich blue felt for a good few seconds, and my eyes lit on three gold-colored letters—an N, a J, and a B—which stood for Jordan and Nadine Belfort. The letters had been embroidered onto the felt, in 18-karat-gold thread, written in Gothic-style script. What a fucking mockery! I thought. Such reckless spending! Such wanton excess! And all so meaningless now….

My mind went roaring back to the Blue-eyed Devil and the Chef. In truth, I hadn't really danced with the Devil, so I couldn't implicate him in any wrongdoing, at least not directly. The Chef, however, was a different story. We had cooked up a thousand nefarious schemes together, too many to even count. Ironically, I had decided to exclude him from my Swiss activities, fearful at the time that his relationship with the Blue-eyed Devil would bring heat to me.

Alas, four years later—which is to say, a few hours ago—the Bastard and OCD had found this exclusion difficult to swallow. It made no sense, the Bastard argued. “Why would you keep the Chef out of this?” he'd asked skeptically. “You include him in everything else and leave him out of this? It doesn't jive—unless, of course, you did include him and you're just trying to protect him!” With that, the Bastard had pulled out a stack of old travel records relating to a trip I'd taken to Switzerland back in the summer of 1995, and, by no coincidence, it was a trip the Chef had accompanied me on. Even more incriminating was that after we'd departed Switzerland, rather than flying back to the United States, we made a brief pit stop behind the former Iron Curtain, in Czechoslovakia. According to the Bastard's records, we'd stayed there for less than eighteen hours, literally flying in and out. Something about that didn't sit right with the Bastard; after all, for what possible reason would we do that, other than to drop off cash or open a secret account or cook up a scheme? Whatever we'd done, the Bastard knew I was hiding something, and he wanted to know what it was.

Meanwhile, I could only scratch my head. The Bastard was so far off the mark it was literally mind-boggling. Having no other choice, though, I recounted that excursion in intimate detail, starting with Switzerland, explaining that my sole purpose for being there was to do damage control. I had been trying to wind down the latest in a series of horrific debacles, the sum of which had landed me in the room in which I was now sitting. This particular debacle had to do with the untimely death of the Duchess's lovely aunt Patricia, who, unbeknownst to the Duchess, I'd recruited into the heart of my money-laundering scheme.

I had convinced my wife's favorite aunt—a sixty-five-year-old retired British schoolteacher who'd never broken a single law in her entire life—to break more than a thousand of them in one swift swoop, by acting as my Swiss nominee. And the moment she agreed, I began stashing millions of dollars in numbered accounts tied to her name. Then, without warning, she died of a stroke, throwing those millions into limbo.

At first I'd thought her death would cause me great problems, the most obvious of which was that my money would be tied up in the seedy underbelly of the Swiss banking system for all eternity. But I had been wrong, because the Swiss were adept at such matters. To them, the death of a nominee was a huge positive, something to which one cracks open a bottle of champagne. After all, the best nominee is a dead nominee, or so I was told by my blubbery Swiss trustee, Roland Franks,^1* an affable three-hundred pounder with a voracious appetite for sweets and an unworldly gift for creating forged documents that supported a notion of plausible deniability. And when I had asked my Master Forger why that was so, he shrugged his fat shoulders and said, “Because dead men tell no tales, my young friend, nor do dead aunts!”

Meanwhile, as I had recounted all this sordidness to my captors, I had focused in on the fact that the Chef and I weren't alone on the trip; we'd brought company with us, in the form of Danny Porush, my erstwhile partner-in-crime, and Andy Greene, my loyal and trusted attorney, who was better known as Wigwam.

I had freely admitted that Danny had been my partner in all this. “He's as guilty as I am,” I'd declared to the Bastard, and then I swore to him that Wigwam and the Chef had had no part in it. They were merely coming along for the ride to Czechoslovakia, I said, which was our next stop on the trip. Neither of them knew that Danny and I had already smuggled money to Switzerland; they just thought we were there to scope things out for future reference.

By this point in the story, the Bastard and OCD seemed to be buying into it, so I plunged into the next leg of our excursion, to Czechoslovakia, explaining how our venture there was part of a failed attempt to corner the market in Czech vouchers, which the new government had recently issued to its citizens as a means of privatizing the economy. Yet, beyond that, I found myself unable to come completely clean with my captors. After all, what had transpired in Czechoslovakia was so utterly decadent that they would never have understood. So, instead, I gave them a calmer, more watered-down version of things, lest they view me as a complete social deviant, who was not worthy of a 5K letter. It was only now, two hours later, that I could fully relish the insanity that had defined that leg of the journey.

It had all started inside the private jet, which was a Gulfstream III. Like all Gulfstreams, this one had a plush, roomy cabin finished in mellow beige tones. The seats were as big as thrones, and the twin Rolls-Royce engines had been fitted with the latest Hushkits, making the ride so quiet that all you could hear was the gentle hum of turbofans as air swept past the fuselage at 550 knots.

It was early evening, and we were high above southern Poland, although I was a good deal higher than that. But I wasn't nearly as high as Danny, who was sitting across from me and had completely lost the power of speech. He was in the latter half of the drool phase, which is to say, he was at that point of his high where he could no longer get the words out without a river of saliva dripping down his chin.

“Iz iz guz zehnzamea!” he exclaimed, with a thick gush of saliva. Over the last two hours he'd consumed four Quaaludes, nearly a pint of Macallan's single-malt scotch, twenty milligrams of Valium, and a two-gram rock of Bolivian marching powder, which he'd Hoovered up his nostrils through a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill. Then, about ten seconds ago, he'd taken a hit from a thick joint of Northern California sinsemilla, which led me to believe that what he had been trying to say was: “This is good sinsemilla!”

As always, I found it literally mind-boggling how normal Danny looked. What with his short blond hair, average build, and boiling white teeth, he gave off a wonderfully WASPy whiff, the sort of whiff you would expect from a man who could trace his genealogy back to the Mayflower. He was dressed casually this evening, in a pair of tan cotton golf pants and matching short-sleeve polo shirt. Over his pale-blue eyes he wore a pair of conservative horn-rimmed glasses that made him look that much more refined, that much WASPier.

Yet, with all this WASPiness, Danny Porush was a purebred Jew who could trace his roots back to a tiny kibbutz near Tel Aviv. Nevertheless, like many a Jew before him, he tried to be mistaken for a blue-blooded WASP—hence, those wonderfully WASPy glasses, which had clear lenses in them.

Meanwhile, the interior of the cabin looked like a flying DEA seizure locker. Between Danny and me, on a mahogany foldout table, a brown leather Louis Vuitton shower bag was overflowing with a fabulous medley of dangerous recreational drugs—a half ounce of sinsemilla, sixty pharmaceutical Quaaludes, some bootleg uppers, some bootleg downers, a sandwich bag full of cocaine, a dozen hits of Ecstasy, and then the safe stuff, from the doctors: a vial of Xanax, a vial of morphine, some Valiums and Restorils and Somas and Vicodins, and some Ambiens and Ativans and Klonopins, as well as a half-consumed pack of Heineken and a mostly consumed bottle of Macallan's to wash things down. Pretty soon, though, all the nonprescription stuff would be gone, shoved up our collective assholes or buried deep beneath our scrotal sacs, as we negotiated our way through Czech Customs.

My trusted attorney, Wigwam, was sitting to Danny's right. He was also dressed casually, although, in his case, he also wore his perpetually glum expression and horrendous-looking toupee. It was mud brown in color, a poor match to his pale complexion, and had the consistency of desiccated straw. In fact, despite the Iron Curtain coming down four years earlier, it was still a safe bet that his horrific hairpiece would draw some second looks from the Czechs.

In any event, Wigwam was buzzed too, although, as our attorney, he was held to a higher standard. He understood that he was not to get sloppy until after we'd finished dealing with the Czechs. So he'd gone heavy on the coke and light on the Ludes. It was an inspired strategy that made perfect psychotropic sense; after all, taking a Quaalude was like drinking three bottles of grain alcohol on an empty stomach, while snorting cocaine was like consuming eight thousand cups of coffee intravenously. The former made you sleepy and sloppy, while the latter made you pumped up and paranoid. Insofar as business was concerned, it was more effective to be pumped up and paranoid than sleepy and sloppy. But, alas, Wigwam had accidentally snorted himself into a coke-induced paranoia.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Wigwam muttered. “This cabin reeks of skunk weed! Can't you put that shit out, Danny? I mean… we're… we're… we're”—spit it out, Wigwam-“we're gonna end up in Czech jail, for Chrissake!” He paused, wiping the beads of sweat that had formed on his pale, paranoid brow. He was actually good-looking, in a boyish sort of way. He was average height, with fine, even features, although he had a bit of a paunch going. “I'm gonna get disbarred,” he moaned. “I know it. Ughhhhhhh ….” It was a paranoid drug groan, and as soon as he'd finished groaning he put his toupee in his hands and shook his egg-shaped skull in despair.

The Chef was sitting to my left, and he was straight as an arrow. In fact, he'd never done a drug in his entire life—being that rare breed of man who could surround himself with world-class drug addicts and be entirely okay with it. The Chef was handsome, in a striking sort of way, like a trimmed-down version of Mr. Clean. He was completely bald on top, with a prominent forehead, a very square jaw, piercing brown eyes, an aquiline nose, and an infectious smile.

The Chef was a born-and-bred New Jerseyite, who could lay his Jersey accent on real thick, especially when the occasion called for it, as it did now. “Whaddaya, whaddaya?” the Chef said to Wigwam. “You godda gedda grip dare, Andy! If you're worried about the smell, then turn on them overhead air vents. The pressure is so low ow dare”—out there—“it'll clear the stench out in two seconds flat.”

Indeed. The Chef was absolutely right. “You should listen to the Chef,” I said to Wigwam. “He has uncanny reasoning skills in these situations.” I reached over and placed my left hand on Wigwam's shoulder and offered him a concerned smile. “On a separate note, I strongly advise you to take a couple of Xanax. You need to even yourself out a bit.”

He stared at me.

“You look like a train wreck,” I said. “Trust me, a couple a Xanax is just what the doctor ordered.” I turned to the Chef. “Isn't that right, Chef?”

“Indeed,” the Chef agreed.

Wigwam nodded nervously. “I guess I will,” he said, “but I need to do some housekeeping first.” He rose from his chair and began walking around the cabin and opening air vents. I looked at Danny, who was still smoking a joint. “In spite of our attorney being a cokehead,” I said, “he's got a valid point. Why don't you get rid of that joint just to be safe.”

Danny held up the half-inch-long joint and cocked his head to the side, as if inspecting it. He turned the corners of his mouth down and shrugged, then threw the joint into his mouth and swallowed it. “Eating poss gets you fucked up!” he slurred proudly.

Just then Wigwam sat back down, his jaw still doing a coke addict's version of the Latin hustle. “Here,” I said, grabbing the appropriate vial from the LV bag. I unscrewed the cap and poured out a few pills. “The correct dosage is two blues…” I paused, thinking for a moment, “although at this altitude there's no way to be sure. The body might be more susceptible up here.” I shrugged.

Wigwam nodded nervously, still trapped in the deep trough of the worry phase. If I plunged into the story of how he'd lost his hair while still in high school and then got caught cheating on his SATs, there was a better than fifty-fifty chance he would make a mad dash for the emergency exit and jump. But I took pity on him and said nothing.

I turned to the Chef and smiled respectfully. “Getting back to business,” I said, in hushed tones, “I wasn't all that impressed with the people I met in Switzerland, so I'm not going forward with them. They didn't seem trustworthy enough.” I shrugged again. That was a lie, of course, and as much as I hated lying to the Chef, I had my reasons.

Back in the United States, an obsessed FBI agent named Gregory Coleman was hot on my trail, and I needed to set up false trails for him to follow, to divert his attention away from my real Swiss accounts. I would have the Chef assist me to that end—opening a Swiss account for me that I would never actually fund but whose existence I would leak to Agent Coleman. And when Coleman petitioned the Swiss government to open my account, I would fight him tooth and nail on it, as if I actually had something to hide. It would keep him occupied for a good two years, I figured, maybe even more. And when he finally did get his way and the account was opened, he would find out that I had never actually funded it.

In essence, the joke would be on Coleman, and my real business would go on undisturbed. With that in mind, I said to the Chef, “So let's do the stuff you talked about before. What do I gotta do to get things started?”

“You don't gotta do nothing,” replied the Jersey Chef, using a double negative to reinforce how little I had to do. “I got the whole thing set up for you—trustees, nominees, and I can be an adviser to the trust. That'll put another buffer between you and the money. And God forbid the boys downtown start snooping around, then I resign as adviser and the money disappears into Liechtenstein and, you know… Schhhwiitttt!”—and he clapped his hands and slung his right arm out toward southern Romania— “we'd be good to go then.”

I smiled at the Chef and nodded warmly. He was a man of many talents, the Chef, although his most remarkable was his ability to use an intricate combination of hand gestures and blowing sounds to get his point across. And my favorite was Schhhwiitttt, which he elicited by curling his tongue into a reverse C and then forcing out a gust of air. And as he made the Schhhwiitttt sound he would clap his hands, sending his right arm flying out into the distance. The Chef used this sound when he was tying up loose ends of a cover story, as if to imply, “Yeah, and with that last phony document we've created, you know… Schhhwiitttt!… there's no way the feds will ever be able to figure things out!”

In retrospect, as I now sat on the Gulfstream, I knew I'd made a colossal blunder in not using one of the Chef's many fabulous recipes to satiate my Swiss banking appetite. But his relationship with the Blue-eyed Devil had spooked me. It was common knowledge that they were doing business in Switzerland, and, as hot as I was, the Blue-eyed Devil was that much hotter, and they still hadn't been able to catch him! So how did that bode for my plight? Rather well, I figured. Like the Devil, I was a careful man, always going to great lengths to cover my tracks.

I held on to that happy thought as I reached into my medicine bag and broke out the Valium, downing three blues. It was a lion's dose, I knew, but given the amount of coke I'd snorted, it was just what I needed to get me safely to Czechoslovakia.

Rather than going through the main terminal at Prague's Ruzyně Airport, the Gulfstream was directed to a small private terminal that, up until a short time ago, had been reserved for communist dignitaries. That suited me just fine, given my current state of intoxication, but as they led us to a room that looked like the inner sanctum of the Kremlin, there was something bothering me, something I couldn't quite place my finger on. Danny was standing beside me, looking disturbed. “You smell something?” I asked, scrunching up my nose.

Danny scrunched up his own nose and took two deep snorts. “Yeah,” he replied. “What the fuck is that? It smells like… I don't know, but I don't like it.” He took two more snorts.

I turned to Wigwam. “You smell something?” I whispered.

Wigwam darted his eyes around the room like a wild animal. “It's poison gas,” he said nervously. “I… I gotta get my passport back. I… please… I'm gonna lose it.” He put his index finger to his mouth and began biting his nail.

The worries, I thought. I leaned over to the Chef. “You smell something, Chef?”

He nodded. “Yeah, it's fucking body odor!” he declared. “These commie bastards don't use deodorant!” He scratched his chin, taking a moment to consider. “Or maybe they can't find it in stores. You'd be surprised how commies forgo the normal pleasantries.”

Just then a smelly middle-aged Czech, dressed in blue-gray police garb, walked over. He eyed us suspiciously for a moment, then motioned to a series of high-backed leather armchairs that had been arranged around an enormous mahogany conference table. Not too shabby, I thought. We sat down, and a uniformed waiter appeared from out of nowhere, carrying a tray of dessert aperitifs, which he placed before us without saying a word.

I looked up at the waiter, who was sweating bullets. “Excuse me,” I said humbly. “Why is it so hot in here?”

He flashed me the look of the disinterested and the lobotomized and then walked away without saying a word. As I reached for my glass, Wigwam warned, “Don't drink the wine!” He began looking around nervously. “That's what they want.” He looked back at me, with wild eyes. “You understand?”

Now the Chef leaned over. “I don't think that guy speaks English,” he whispered, “but when I was getting off the plane the captain told me they're having their worst heat wave in a hundred years. I think today was the hottest day in the country's history.”

Inside the taxi I breathed through my mouth.

“You ever smell anything so vile?” I asked Danny.

Danny shook his head gravely. “Never. The guy needs to be dipped in sulfuric acid.” The Chef nodded in agreement, then added more words of wisdom. “Don't worry,” he said confidently. “We're staying in the nicest hotel in the country. I'm sure there'll be air-conditioning there. You can count on it.”

I shrugged, not entirely believing him. “Is Prague the largest city in Czechoslovakia?” I asked the smelly driver.

Without warning, the driver expelled a giant gob of spit onto his own dashboard. “Slavs are dogs,” he snarled. “They are no longer part of country. We are Czech Republic: Jewel of East.” He rolled his neck, as if trying to regain his composure.

I nodded nervously and looked out the window, trying to take in the beauty of the Jewel of the East, but there were no streetlights and I couldn't see anything. Nevertheless, I was still hopeful; after all, our destination was the fabulous Hotel Ambassador, the only four-star hotel in Prague. And thank God for that! I thought. This leg of our journey seemed to be cursed. A bit of pampering would be just what the doctor ordered!

Alas, what the Chef hadn't been aware of was that the Hotel Ambassador had just been rated one of the worst four-star hotels in Europe. Just why I found out the moment we stepped into the lobby and it was two hundred degrees and a thousand percent humidity. In fact, it was so stifling I almost passed out.

The space was vast and grim-looking, like a Cold War-era bomb shelter. There were only three couches in sight, which were a disturbing shade of dog-shit brown.

At the front desk, I smiled at the Czech check-in girl, a pale young blonde with wide shoulders, enormous Czech boobs, a white blouse, and a nametag reading Lara^2* “Why is there no air-conditioning?” I asked the lovely Lara.

Lara smiled sadly, exposing some crooked Czech choppers. “We have problem with air conditioner,” Lara replied, in heavily accented English. “It is not at work now.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Danny sag, but then the Chef offered more words of wisdom. “We'll be fine here,” he said, nodding a single time. “I've seen much, much worse.”

I recoiled in disbelief. “Really, Chef? Where?”

He smiled knowingly. “You forget I'm from New Jersey.”

Such logic! I thought. The Chef was a true warrior!

Emboldened by his words, I threw down my Am Ex card, smiled at Lara, and said to myself, “How bad could it possibly be? When you're as tired and post-Luded as I am, the tendency is just to pass out from sheer exhaustion.”

Two hours later I was lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, stark naked and contemplating suicide. My hotel room was hotter than the boiler room on the SS Titanic. The windows had been bolted shut and the radiator was on. Just why, no one in the hotel could seem to figure out. Nevertheless, there was heat coming from the radiator, nothing was coming from the air conditioner, and I would've paid a million bucks for someone to unleash a swarm of bumblebees to hover over me and flap their tiny wings.

It was a little after two a.m., about eight p.m. New York time. I desperately needed to speak to the Duchess. I needed to hear some kind words from her, for her to tell me that she loved me and that everything would be okay. She could always make me feel better, even in my darkest hour. But I'd tried her a half dozen times and kept getting the same fucking recording, saying the overseas lines were busy.

Just then the phone rang. Ahhh, the luscious Duchess! She always knows! I reached for the phone and picked it up. Alas, it was Danny. “I can't sleep,” he snarled. “We need to drop Ludes and go get hookers; there's no other way.”

I sat upright. “You're kidding!” I said. “We're getting picked up in a few hours, Dan! That's insane.” I took a moment to think it through, coming to the quick conclusion that his plan was, indeed, insane. “Anyway, where we gonna find hookers this time of night? It's too complicated.”

“I already got it worked out with Lara,” he said proudly. “There's a place less than ten minutes from here, on the outskirts of Prague. Lara assured me we can find some smelly Czech hookers there, which are the best kind, she said.” He paused briefly. “Anyway, we must do this, JB. It would be bad karma to let things proceed along their current course. We need to take drastic action. I fear for you if you can't see that.”

“No way,” I replied. “I gotta take a pass. You're on your own.”

Somehow—and I'm still not sure how—one hour later I was three Ludes deep, with an enormous Czech hooker with bleached-blond hair and the face of a sheepdog riding me like Seattle Slew. Hardly a word was exchanged, only two hundred U.S. dollars and something that sounded like “Ta-hank yew!” right after I came inside her enormous Czech pussy. Whatever. Pussy was pussy, I thought, and despite this one being wide enough to parallel park a Czech taxi-cab in, I had still felt it my patriotic duty to deposit a red, white, and blue load inside her, if for nothing more than to remind her who won the Cold War.

An hour later I was back in my hotel room, sweating again, plotting my own death, and missing the Duchess terribly. But, above all things, I was wondering why I'd just done that. I loved the Duchess more than anything, yet I couldn't seem to control myself. I was weak, and I was decadent. The Wild Wolf was lurking inside me—just beneath the surface—ready to rise up at the slightest provocation and bare his drug-addicted fangs. Just where all this would end up I hadn't the slightest idea, but the word on Wall Street was that I'd be dead within a few years. Whatever. In more ways than one, I was dead already.

At four in the morning, I broke down and raided the Louis Vuitton bag again. Finally, thirty minutes later, I was fast asleep, with enough Xanax bubbling through my central nervous system to knock out half of Prague.

At 7:30 a.m.—only three hours later—came my wake-up call.

I blinked, then vomited, and then rose out of bed and took an ice-cold shower. Then I snorted a half gram of coke, swallowed a Xanax to quell any future paranoia, and headed downstairs to the lobby. I felt a twinge of guilt about being coked out for my first business meeting in this fine country, but after last night's escapade into the seedy cesspool of Prague's red-light district, there was no other way I could possibly start my day.

Downstairs in the lobby, thirty-year-old Marty Sumichrest, Jr., greeted us warmly. He was tall, thin, pasty-faced, and wore steel-rimmed glasses with very thick lenses. He was living somewhere near Washington, D.C., but was in Prague today because he wanted us to raise $10 million for his company, Czech Industries. At this point, the company was nothing more than a worthless shell, but he assured us that he could use his father's status as a Czech War Hero to insinuate himself into the highest echelons of the Czech power structure.

We exchanged morning pleasantries and then crammed ourselves into a horrendous limousine called a Skoda. It was black, boxy, beaten up, and, of course, it had no air-conditioning. The foul stench of body odor was so powerful that it could have incapacitated a platoon full of marines. I looked at my watch: It was 8:15 a.m. Only five minutes had passed, but it felt like an hour. I looked around the limo and all ties were at half-mast; Danny was white as a ghost; the Chef's lips were twisted subversively; and Wigwam's toupee looked like a dead animal.

Sitting in the front seat, Marty turned around to face us. “Prague is one of the only cities in Europe that wasn't destroyed by the Nazis,” he said proudly. “Most of the original architecture still remains.” He raised his palm toward the window and swept it from left to right in a gentle arc, as if to say, “Behold the wonder and beauty!” Then he said, “Many consider it the most beautiful city in all of Europe, the Paris of the East, so to speak. It's been home to many an artist, and many a poet too. They come here to get inspired, they come here to…”

Holy Christ! I was being bored to death, sweated to death, and smelled to death all at the same time! How could it be? I felt desperately homesick all of a sudden, like a little boy whose parents had sent him off to sleepaway camp and was dying to come home.

“… and the Czechs have always been entrepreneurs. It's the Slavs who gave this country a bad reputation.” He shook his head in disgust. “They're morons, lazy drunks with IQs just above the level of an idiot. They were thrust upon us by the Soviet Union, but now they're back where they belong: in Slovakia. And just watch—in ten years from now they'll have the lowest GNP in Eastern Europe and we'll have the highest.” He nodded proudly. “You just watch!”

“That's interesting,” I said casually, “but if the Czechs are so smart, how come they haven't discovered deodorant yet?”

“What do you mean?” asked Marty, narrowing his eyes.

“Never mind,” I answered. “I was just making a joke, Marty. It smells like fucking lilacs in here.”

He nodded, seeming to understand. “By the way,” he added, “the first company we're seeing this morning is Motokov. They have sole distribution rights to the Skoda”—he slapped his hand on the top of his headrest two times—”so they can flood the world with these bad boys!”

“Hmmm,” muttered the Chef. “I bet people all across Western Europe are gonna line up for the Skoda. In fact, the boys at Mercedes better watch their asses or they're gonna find themselves knee-deep in red ink!”

The War Hero's son nodded in agreement. “Like I said, the Czech Republic is brimming with opportunity. Motokov is just one example.”

The corporate headquarters of Motokov was a gray concrete office building that rose up twenty-three stories above the streets of Prague. Alas, the company needed only two floors for its operations. But the commies had been strong believers in “bigger is better,” viewing concepts like profits and losses as minor trivialities—or at least secondary to the creation of meaningless, low-paying jobs to placate a drunken Czechoslovakian workforce.

We took a linoleum-paneled elevator up to the twentieth floor and walked down a long, silent hallway that seemed low on oxygen. I was about to pass out when we reached a large conference room, where we were offered seats around a cheap wooden conference table large enough for thirty people. But only three representatives of Motokov were in the room, so after we'd taken seats, we were so far apart that you had to raise your voice if you wanted to make yourself heard. Leave it to the commies, I thought.

I was sitting at one head of the table, facing a plate-glass wall that looked out over the city of Prague. At this hour of the morning at this time of June, the sun was shining directly through the plate glass, heating the room to the temperature of the planet Mercury. On the floor were three geraniums in white plastic planters. They were dead.

After a few moments of opening pleasantries, Motokov's president took center stage and began speaking in heavily accented English. The company had suffered greatly due to the breakup of the Soviet Union, he explained. Antimonopoly laws had been passed, basically legislating them out of business. He seemed like an intelligent fellow—an altogether affable fellow, in fact—but pretty soon I began to notice something very odd about him. At first I couldn't place it, but then it hit me: He was a blinker. Yes-he was a world-class blinker! For every word escaping his lips, he blinked his eyes, sometimes more than once.

“So you see,” explained the Blinker, with three rapid-fire blinks, “under the new law, monopolies are no longer permitted, which puts”—blink, blink—“Motokov in a very difficult”—blink, blink, blink—“position.” Blink. “In a way, we have been legislated into near bankruptcy.” Blink, blink.

Sounds like a hell of an opportunity, I thought, especially if your goal is to flush your money down a Czech toilet bowl!

Still, I played the role of the interested guest, and I nodded in sympathy, to which the Blinker blinked on. “Yes, we are on the edge of bankruptcy,” continued the Blinker. “We have the overhead structure”—blink, blink—”of a multibillion-dollar company, but we no longer have the sales mandate.” The Blinker let out a deep sigh. He looked about forty and had very white skin. He wore the sort of checkered short-sleeve dress shirt and blue cloth necktie that reeked of a mid-level bookkeeper at an Omaha meat-slaughtering house.

Now the Blinker reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one up. Apparently his two underlings took this as a signal to light up too, and next thing I knew, the room was enveloped in an ominous cloud of cheap Czech tobacco smoke. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Danny, whose right elbow was on the conference table, with his chin cradled in his hand. And he was sleeping. Sleeping? Sleeping!

Through exhaled smoke, the Blinker went on: “That's why we are now focusing our attention on Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises”— What the fuck? Kentucky Fried Chicken? Why that?—”which we plan to roll out”—blink, blink-“very aggressively over the next five years.” The Blinker nodded in agreement with his own thoughts and blinks. “Yes,” continued the Blinker, with a rapid-fire double blink, “we will focus our efforts on fried chicken and mashed potatoes; the Kentucky Fried brand, of course, which is quite delicious if—”

SMASH went Danny's head onto the conference table!

There was absolute silence now, as everyone, including the Blinker, stared at Danny, astonished. His right cheek was pressed against the conference table, and a tiny river of drool was slowly making its way down his chin. Then he started snoring one of those deep guttural drug snores from way down in the bread basket.

“Don't mind him,” I said to the Blinker. “He's just jet-lagged from the trip. Please continue. I'm intrigued at Motokov's plans to capitalize on your underserved fried-chicken market.” I shrugged. “I wasn't aware that the Czechs were such lovers of fried chicken.”

“Oh, yes,” blinked the Blinker, “it's one of our staples,” and then he started blinking again, and Danny kept snoring some more, and the Chef kept rolling his eyes, and Wigwam's toupee was slowly turning into glue, and every last one of us, including the Blinker himself, was sweating to death.

The rest of the day was no better—lots of smelly Czechs, boiling offices, smoke-filled rooms, and Danny drooling. The War Hero's son shuffled us from company to company, each one in a similar situation to Motokov. Without fail, they had bloated overhead structures, inexperienced management teams, and a limited understanding of the basic tenets of capitalism. What amazed me, though, was the tremendous hope shared by every person we met. They all kept reminding me that Prague was the “Paris of the East,” and that the Czech Republic was really part of Western Europe. Slovakia had nothing to do with them, they assured me. In fact, it was populated by a bunch of retarded monkeys.

It was now six p.m., and the four of us were sitting in the hotel lobby on the dog-shit brown couches, in desperate need of salt pills. I said to the group, “I don't know how much more I can take of this: there's no amount of money worth this abuse.”

Danny seemed to agree with me. “Please!” he begged, rubbing a golf-ball-size welt that had formed on his right temple. “Let's get the fuck out of here and go to Scotland!” He bit his lower lip, as if on the verge of a breakdown. “I'm telling you, Scotland is beautiful! It's the land of milk and honey!” He nodded his head eagerly. “It's probably in the low seventies there, without a drop of humidity. We can play golf all day… smoke cigars… drink brandy… I bet we can even find young Scottish hookers who smell like Irish Spring soap!” He threw his palms up in the air. “I'm begging you, JB—throw in the towel on this one. Just throw it in.”

“As your attorney,” added Wigwam, “I strongly advise you to follow Danny's advice. I think you should call Janet right now and get the plane fueled up. I've never been so miserable in my life.”

I looked at the Chef. Apparently he wasn't ready to throw the towel in yet; he still had questions. “Can you believe how that bastard from Motokov kept going on and on about Kentucky Fried Chicken? What's so good about Kentucky Fried Chicken?” He shook his head, as if still confused. “I thought they eat mostly pork in this part of the world.”

I shrugged. “I'm not really sure,” I said, “but did you count how many times that fucker blinked? It was incredible!” I shook my head in awe. “He was like a human adding machine. I've never seen anything like it.”

“Yeah, well, I lost count at a thousand,” said the Chef. “He must have some kind of disease, probably peculiar to the Czechs.” He shrugged too. “Anyway, as your accountant I have to agree with Wigwam: I strongly advise you to hold off making any investments in this country until they start using deodorant.” He shrugged again. “But that's only one man's opinion.”

Thirty minutes later we were on our way to the airport. The fact that twenty Czechs were waiting for us for a five-hour traditional Czech dinner was merely incidental. At six o'clock tomorrow morning we would be in the land of milk and honey, and I would never see these smelly Czechs again.

Scotland was gorgeous, but its beauty was lost on me.

I had been away from the Duchess far too long. I needed to see her—to literally feel her in my arms, and I needed to make love to her. Chandler, of course, was also waiting for me. She was almost a year old then, and who could guess what startling intellectual feats she'd accomplished the week I was gone? Not to mention the fact that the Ludes were running out, which meant that we'd be going to work on the narcotics. Then the nausea and vomiting would set in, as well as the intense constipation. And there's nothing worse than being stuck in a foreign country with your head perched over a toilet bowl, while your descending colon is frozen like a glacier.

It was for all those reasons that I nearly collapsed in the Duchess's arms when I walked through the door of our Westhampton Beach house on that Friday morning. It was a little after ten, and all I wanted was to go upstairs, hold Chandler for a moment, and then adjourn to the bedroom and make love to the Duchess. Then I would sleep for a month.

But I never got the chance. I was home for less than thirty seconds when the phone rang. It was Gary Deluca, one of my employees, who happened to bear an odd resemblance to Grover Cleveland, the dead president with the bushy beard and perpetually grim expression. “Sorry to bother you,” Grover said grimly, “but I thought you'd want to know that Gary Kaminsky got indicted yesterday. He's sitting in jail, being held without bail.”

“Really,” I said matter-of-factly. I was in that state of extreme weariness where you can't immediately fathom the consequences of what you're hearing. So the fact that Gary Kaminsky had intimate knowledge of my Swiss dealings wasn't troubling me—at least not yet. “What did he get indicted for?” I asked.

“Money laundering. Does the name Jean Jacques Saurel^3* ring a bell?”

That one got me! Woke me right the fuck up! Saurel was my Swiss banker, the one man who could sink me with Agent Coleman. “Not really,” I said tentatively, clenching my ass cheeks. “Maybe I met him once, but… I'm not sure—why?”

“Because he got indicted too,” said Grover. “He's sitting in jail with Kaminsky as we speak.”

To my own surprise, it still took OCD more than three years to secure an indictment against me, despite the fact that Saurel began to cooperate almost immediately. And while some of the delay had to do with the loyalty of my Strattonites, more of it had to do with my recruitment of the Chef to help me devise a cover story. In fact, as my house of cards was collapsing around me, the Chef was busy cooking up one of his legendary recipes. And this particular recipe was so tasty and so mouthwatering that it kept OCD scratching his head for more than three full years.

And now the Chef was a wanted man. He had a federal bull's-eye on his back, and not just because he'd aided and abetted me, by helping cover up my money-laundering debacle, but also because of his relationship with the Blue-eyed Devil. Jam up Gaito, reasoned the Bastard, and he'll roll over on Brennan, who was the true target.

In truth, I wasn't so sure of that. The Chef was fiercely loyal to the Devil—selling his soul to him, so to speak—and he was the sort of battle-hardened cook who could stand the heat in the kitchen, preferring, in fact, to conjure up his recipes right beside the flames. The Chef loved the action—no, he lived for the action—and after all those years of working with the Devil he'd become completely desensitized. Things like fear, self-doubt, and self-preservation were foreign concepts to the Chef. If you were his friend he stood up for you; if you were in trouble he went to war for you; and if your back was truly to the wall—and it was either you or him—he would fall on his sword for you.

Perhaps that was why today, this very afternoon, the Chef had defied the conventional wisdom and taken my phone call. After all, the first rule of thumb in my world—meaning, the villains’, thieves’, and scoundrels’ world—was that when someone gets indicted, you lose their phone number forever. It was like becoming a leper, and whether a leper actually touches you or not, it doesn't really matter. If you even get close, he infects you just the same.

So tomorrow would be D-Day, the FBI plan simple and devilish: The Chef would come to my house, and I would be wired. After a few minutes of small talk, I would casually bring up the past and get the Chef to incriminate himself. And as sad and de spic able as that was, what choice did I have? If I didn't cooperate they would indict the Duchess; and if I didn't cooperate my children would grow up without a father; and if I didn't cooperate I would risk becoming Mr. Gower! All I could hope for was that the Chef would be smart enough not to incriminate himself, that he would dance close to the line but wouldn't actually cross over it.

That was my only hope.

1*Name has been changed

2*Name has been changed

3*Name has been changed