Hell Gate

THIRTY-EIGHT

“I haven’t had anything to do with that group in years,” Donny Baynes said as he sat down in his high-backed leather desk chair. “So far as I know, it doesn’t exist. Who’s been feeding you that crap?”

“Kendall Reid,” I said.

Donny cradled his forehead in his hands, elbows on his desk. He took a few seconds to collect himself. “Reid’s a thief and a liar. I don’t know what the hell he’s trying to do by dragging me into this.”

“He says you know-maybe you were even there-the night Ethan met Salma.”

“Look, if she’s the girl I think, I never put her together with Ethan. She was probably at fund-raisers. But I always figured she was Kendall Reid’s girl. Maybe he was just the beard for Ethan. Maybe that’s how stupid and naive I am.”

“What about this men’s club?” I asked.

“I just told you it’s defunct. Can’t have anything to do with this.”

“You also told her you didn’t know who Salma was, when it turns out you might,” Mike said. “It’s a good time to spill your guts and let us decide.”

The task force prosecutor was silent.

“Don’t try to filter the facts, Donny,” I said. “You’re too tight with Ethan to make the judgment calls. Let us help you decide.”

“This is harmless, Alex. I promise you it was harmless,” Donny said. “The Tontine Association. That’s what it was called.”

“Tontine. Haven’t heard that word in ages. Michael Caine-The Wrong Box. Which brother lived longer.” Mike was trying to loosen Baynes up by making light of things. “Which one got all the money. Is that the right movie, Coop?”

“Yup. Robert Louis Stevenson story.” Mike knew the movies, I knew the books.

“What’s a tontine anyway, Donny?”

“They’re schemes for raising capital-like a combination of a group annuity and a lottery. A Neapolitan banker named Lorenzo de Tonti invented them in the seventeenth century.”

“They legal?” Mike asked.

“Not anymore, ’cause they’re basically swindles. But-but-it was just a name we used. There was no tontine involved.”

“Financial geniuses, the Italians. They got Tonti, Ponzi-Gotti-all came up with clever ways for guys to make a buck. I’d think as a prosecutor you’d know enough to stay away from that kind of stuff.”

“It was Moses Leighton who formed the club. I was in private practice at the time. It was just a well-intentioned way of raising money for the restoration of some old properties in the city.”

“Like how?”

“It’s a simple concept. In a real tontine, each member invited in pays a sum-say five hundred dollars from twenty members each. The money’s invested, and every year-every good year-you get a dividend. When an investor dies, the money is reallocated among the survivors. Last man standing gets the whole pot-a gamble that in the old days could leave someone with a fortune.”

“Your tontine wasn’t real?” Mike asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

Mike was baiting Donny and it was working. Asking simple, general questions about the concept to get his subject to open up. And Donny Baynes was talking.

“They’ve been banned in this country for decades. Moses Leighton had this idea to start an organization for private funding to help the city raise money for neglected projects, things that just wouldn’t get repaired or restored because of budget restraints.”

“And Ethan was a new city councilman at the time,” I said.

“Exactly. It was a lot about paving a future for his son, of course.”

“With a swindle?” Mike asked.

“Listen to me, will you?” Donny liked being in the superior position to Mike again. “This is why the first tontines were created-for governments to use to raise capital. They were good things. Louis XIV created a tontine in 1689 to fund military operations when he was broke. It was honest. It worked. The last surviving investor lived to the age of ninety-six with that fortune. The British government copied the idea to go to war against France a few years later.”

“So why’d they stop working?”

Donny was gesturing with both hands. “Investors caught on. They bought shares for infants and children, instead of for themselves. If the kids lived till old age, they often made pots of money. The governments weren’t able to keep up with the costs. That’s why you’ve got a pension today, instead of a tontine-instead of a death gamble.”

Mike nodded his head. “Okay, so what did old Moses have in mind?”

“The city owns a good number of properties in the five boroughs that have historic significance. They’re run by a nonprofit trust that raises private funds for them, in tandem with the city parks department, since several of them sit in local parks.”

“Is Gracie Mansion part of that trust?” I asked.

“It is. And these are great old houses that date back centuries, so they’re enormously expensive to maintain. Moses Leighton had a creative idea to help the city do just that.”

“With an eye to restoring Gracie in case his son needed a mayoral roof over his head,” Mike said.

“Bloomberg was a little more popular than Moses expected. That’s why Ethan took the congressional seat.”

“So the club?” I asked.

“Moses invited thirty or forty guys to participate as members. I think he wound up with a little more than half that at every dinner. Some of them were politicians, and others were wealthy businessmen, but all approved of his plan.”

“What was it?

“A dinner club. A perfectly respectable dinner club,” Donny said, looking Mike in the eye. “Every second month Mr. Leighton arranged to have dinner catered for us at one of these different properties. Most of them are restored, to one degree or another, and run as museums.”

“You rented them?”

“Even you can do it, Chapman. It’s one of the ways they make money. Most people don’t even know these places exist, especially in the other four boroughs.”

“Leighton paid for the dinners?” Mike asked.

“He did. He underwrote them. But we each had to make a contribution to his enterprise. Five hundred, a thousand, each according to his means, I guess. If you were in public service, you paid less, and he had some very high rollers from the investment banking world. You gave him your check, which went to the trust to restore the houses, of course.”

“Not the tontine?”

“A pretty harmless tontine, Chapman, like I said. At each dinner, every member had to bring a bottle of wine-a really fine wine. The money went to its designated purpose, and the wine got stored in Moses Leighton’s cellar. Last man standing gets a damn good selection of wines, to toast those gone before him.”

“Who’s in the club?”

“I told you, it’s been disbanded.”

“Why’d that happen?”

“A few of our original members-uh-had some problems.”

“Hit the skids?” Mike asked. “Who were they?”

“Moses and Ethan Leighton, of course, were the founders of it. Ethan invited me to join, along with a couple of our other law school friends who were also at big firms. I’ll give you their names if you think it matters. One of them was convicted of insider trading, so he was the first to go.”

“A classmate of yours?”

“Yes. And a year later, one of the men was a suicide-jumped out the window of a hotel room where he’d been holed up doing drugs. Had a problem with crystal meth and male prostitutes.”

“Guess the screening for club standards was a little loose,” Mike said. “Was Kendall Reid in the club?”

Donny rubbed his hands together as he answered. “No. But Reid was around the Leightons all the time back then. Working for Moses, I think, before he became Ethan’s aide. He wasn’t in on these dinners. Probably because he was just considered staff by the Leightons. That may be why he’s so resentful about all this, telling you about me, like I’d done something wrong.”

“Did Ethan ever bring a woman to any of these meetings?” I asked.

“Not once. Nobody did. Don’t get me wrong, Alex. No reason it couldn’t have been that way. Nothing improper. It was just a throwback to the old boys’ club kind of thing that Moses Leighton thought would be amusing every now and then.”

“Which politicians were involved?” Mike asked.

“We had some councilmen from each of the boroughs, a congressman from Queens. And we had the former police commissioner, before he crashed and burned.”

“Bernie Kerik?”

“Yes. A real gent,” Donny said, sarcasm dripping from his words. “The guy was a misfit in that group from the first time I met him. You got that feeling his big disgrace was just around the corner, if you could only put a finger on it. When the feds arrested Kerik, that was like the third strike for the Leighton tontine.”

“Running clean out of gentlemen, huh?”

“Ethan told his father it was time to let it go. We actually raised a good amount of money for these historic trusts.”

“Where had you met?”

“The first dinner was at Gracie Mansion, of course. Bloomberg wasn’t involved, but he let us use the dining room, since that house is the real star of the trust-the most elegant of the old estates. I think our next dinner was in the Bronx, at the Bartow-Pell Mansion on Pelham Bay.”

I knew the fashionable old property, renowned for its Greek Revival details and its extraordinary gardens.

“And others?” Mike asked.

“King Manor.”

“The Kings of Queens?”

Donny tried to smile. “Yes, Chapman. Rufus King was a member of the Continental Congress. He was a senator from New York and later ambassador to Great Britain. I hadn’t known anything about him.”

“Where’s the manor?”

“It’s not grand, like Gracie. It’s an old farmhouse, off Jamaica Avenue. King was an early and outspoken opponent of slavery.”

Donny thought he was lulling Mike into a history lesson, and while he was testing the information, Mike was leading his charge exactly where he wanted.

“Was the Hamilton Grange one of your meeting places?”

“Yes. Yes, it was.”

“But Kendall Reid had nothing to do with that evening?”

“I don’t remember ever seeing him at dinner.”

“A little odd that the phantom funds that Reid’s alleged to have stolen are for a fictitious Save the Grange organization. Or was that part of a Moses Leighton plan?”

“Odd, how?”

“That your all-boys club was about getting money for this handful of fancy old houses, and Kendall Reid’s council scam arose out of the same concept.”

“Hey, maybe that’s between Reid and the Leightons,” Donny said. “Maybe that’s exactly where Reid got the idea for his own swindle, from a corruption of the plan that Moses Leighton had. I’m sure Paul Battaglia will figure that out without your help, Chapman.”

“I’ll just leave it alone, Mr. Baynes. I won’t even breathe the word tontine to the district attorney.”

“You know why it was named that? I’ll tell you. It had nothing to do with schemes and swindles,” Donny said, standing up and staring out the window, over the seaport of lower Manhattan. “Right down there, at the corner of Water and Wall streets. That’s where the old Tontine Coffee House was located. Ever heard of it?”

Neither Mike nor I had.

“I was a securities litigator before I joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office, handling stock frauds, among other things. The Tontine Coffee House is where the New York Stock Exchange was organized, two hundred years ago. It was built by the merchants of the Tontine Association-Archibald Gracie was a charter member-as a daily meeting place.”

“Legal and aboveboard?” Mike asked.

“Absolutely. Gracie, Rufus King, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr-the prominent leaders of the time met there from twelve to two, almost every day, when they were in town.”

“All the guys who owned your fancy houses.”

“And more. It’s where the merchants and power brokers of New York gathered, the hub of politics and business. It’s the part of the city’s history Leighton wanted to recapture. That’s why he used the name Tontine, because the coffeehouse was the most important gathering of the city’s men in its day. That and the fact that these very men whose homes he wanted to preserve were the original members of the association.”

“I’ll have to start making house calls,” Mike said. “History’s my thing.”

“Gracie owned a large oceangoing fleet, as you probably know. The coffeehouse had a bell system and a spyglass, so the members could watch the great merchant ships arriving in New York Harbor, look for their own men coming back from sea.”

There was no stopping Donny Baynes now. He liked being in charge of the information flow.

“As soon as a ship’s captain reached the docks, he was required to come in to the Tontine to register his cargo. All the companies that outfitted, insured, and owned the boats had agents waiting here, just like Gracie, to account for their goods.”

“Coffee, tea, sugar, cloth,” Mike started to list the inventory of imports.

“Fine furniture, cotton, molasses,” Donny said.

“Blackbirders too?”

“Sorry?”

“Did they track their black ivory?” Mike asked, looming over Baynes’s chair.

“I don’t get it, Chapman.”

“You should, Donny. Being in charge of human trafficking and all. Those very same merchant ships carried slaves to the port of New York. Men, women, and children. Their human cargo was referred to as black ivory, in case you didn’t know it. And the snakeheads of the day were known as blackbirders.”

Baynes’s jaw slackened.

“The Wall Street Slave Market was at the very same intersection of Water and Wall streets. The Meal Market across the street from your coffeehouse, I guess, was the place where the enslaved Africans were sold.”

“I-I had no idea.”

“It’s helpful to know how your gentlemen’s club came to be, Donny. That original Tontine Association? It must have thrived on human trafficking.”