Money to Burn

30

A FEW MINUTES BEFORE FOUR P.M., TONY GIRELLI WAS SEATED ALONE at a café table at the Rink Bar outside Rockefeller Center.

Every spring when the ice melted and the Zamboni went into storage, the famous skating rink in front of the gold statue of Prometheus became a popular lunch and happy-hour destination. A scattering of brightly colored umbrellas shaded tables for about six hundred margarita-loving patrons. Above them at street level, the year-round swarm of tourists stood at the rail, people watching. Girelli took it all in. His boss had extensive commercial real estate holdings, and Girelli wondered if he owned a piece of this place.

Real estate, however, was a sore subject for Girelli.

“Sparkling water,” he told the waiter. “With lemon.”

Girelli still carried a copy of a certain blast e-mail in his wallet, one that he-and hundreds of guys like him-had received last fall from a trader at the residential mortgage desk at Saxton Silvers. As per Michael Cantella, it read, we will no longer be purchasing NINA loans. Please do not call. No exceptions will be granted. At the time of that announcement, Girelli had been pulling down $125,000 in commissions-a month. He and his buddies would go into Miami Beach clubs almost every night, order four or five bottles of Cristal champagne at $1,500 a pop, and think nothing of it. Not bad for a guy who had once been flat broke but who was determined never to return to the world of a leg-breaking, brass-knuckled debt collector for the mob. He’d been shooting pool at a bar one night when a buddy had asked, “Wanna be a mortgage broker?” and he’d jumped on it.

Girelli’s specialty had been NINA loans-“no income, no assets”-for, as he put it, “people who didn’t have a pot to piss in.” He’d load up an eight-dollar-an-hour housekeeper with a million dollars in mortgages on six houses, one for everyone in her family, including two sisters who were still trying to get here from Mexico. And what self-respecting taxi driver should be without three or four pre-construction-priced condos on Miami Beach? The loans were destined to go into default, of course, but that wasn’t Girelli’s problem. He teamed up with a buddy at Sunpath Bank, and they borrowed at a 30 to 1 ratio-$100 million against $3 million in capital-to fund all the subprime loans they wrote. Then Sunpath bundled all the subprimes together and sold them up the daisy chain to Wall Street, paying back Sunpath’s lenders with Wall Street’s money and keeping the profit. What a hoot. What a party. Until the e-mail:

As per Michael Cantella…

Never mind that Sunpath had already funded yet another $100 million in subprime loans in “business as usual.” Never mind that there was no way to pay back Sunpath’s lenders unless Wall Street bought the bundles. Girelli and his partner tried other investment banks, but Wall Street firms were like sheep: The minute a leader like Saxton Silvers decided to stop buying NINA loans, they all followed suit. Funny thing was, no one in the subprime pipeline had ever heard of this asshole Michael Cantella. The guy didn’t even have direct supervision over the residential mortgage desk at Saxton Silvers. Some even said that the e-mail’s attribution, “As per Michael Cantella,” was just Kent Frost and his subprime factory taking a swipe at Cantella for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. Whatever the case, the plug was pulled. Sunpath closed its doors in a week. Three hundred employees lost their jobs. The people at the top lost everything. Michael Cantella didn’t even know their names.

Girelli intended to keep it that way.

“Here you are, sir,” said the waiter.

Girelli squeezed the lemon and discreetly surveyed the crowd. Michael Cantella was nowhere to be seen, and in light of the disclosure of the e-mails at this afternoon’s court hearing, Girelli doubted that Cantella’s divorce lawyer would let him go to a secret meeting that was no longer a secret.

Wasting my damn time here.

The thought had barely registered when Girelli spotted a woman approaching the table referenced in the e-mail, the one right in front of the gold statue of Prometheus.

A tight smiled creased his lips.

Pay dirt.