Whipping Boy (23 page)

By all outward appearances, the two cigar aficionados had little in common. The prince boasted that his Transylvanian ancestry dated back twenty generations to Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
. Mamarella, by contrast, was the son of a beat cop from the Bronx.

When the two met, Richard Mamarella was working for a “litigation service” in Weehawken, New Jersey, and billing clients $200 an hour—less than half what David Glass and his Park Avenue colleagues charged on the tonier side of the Hudson. Employing Mamarella promised to save Badische a bundle in legal fees, money the prince and his associates much preferred to spend on hotel suites and vintage champagne.

{© 1968, 1972, The Augustan Society, Inc.}

In 1972, “Prince” Robert convinced a quarterly publication called
The Augustan
to publish a genealogy that traced his lineage back to Vlad the Impaler, but in all probability, Dracula’s self-proclaimed heir was born Isaac Wolf, in the Jewish ghetto of Oradea, a small Romanian city.

While the loan program was up and running, Mamarella supplied the Trust all manner of assistance. He developed anti-money-laundering policies, conducted background checks on prospective borrowers, and revised loan contracts, letters, and legal memorandums. After his colleagues started receiving federal subpoenas, Mamarella switched gears and began tutoring the bankers and their shills on how to avoid prosecution.

None of this seemed particularly noteworthy. What
did
catch me off guard was the mountain of evidence confirming that Richard Mamarella was not a lawyer employed by criminals, but rather a criminal employed by lawyers.

Some twenty years before joining Badische, Mamarella was charged with conspiring to defraud Lloyd’s of London, the insurance syndicate, by diverting client premiums to personal bank accounts in Curaçao. That swindle, detailed in a seventy-eight-count federal indictment,
attracted the attention of a US attorney named Rudolph Giuliani. Giuliani subsequently established that Mamarella operated a side business peddling fire insurance to arsonists. When coverage on a property he insured was discovered to have lapsed only after the building was torched, Mamarella remedied the oversight by renewing and backdating the arsonist’s $300,000 fire policy. Presented with irrefutable proof of his role in a blaze that injured seventeen firefighters and left dozens of residents homeless, Mamarella cut a deal, testifying against his codefendants in exchange for five years’ probation on three counts of perjury.

Soon after that conviction, Mamarella relocated his insurance business to a small town in southern New Jersey where, using as collateral a list of fictitious policies and a pad of blank promissory notes, he and some associates bilked the First Fidelity Bank of New Jersey out of $22 million. It was, at that time, the biggest bank swindle in the history of a state famed for the ambition of its embezzlers. Caught, prosecuted, and found guilty of bank fraud and extortion, Mamarella cut another deal. This one required him to provide a full account of his criminal history.

Mamarella first made a name for himself in direct sales. While still a teenager, he ran a successful business hawking “boxes of TVs” out of the back of a truck. When John Valentine Goepfert, a legendary insurance swindler, learned that the boxes of TVs contained bricks and telephone directories in lieu of the advertised consumer electronics, he saw potential in the enterprising young salesman and took him under his wing.

Canceled checks like this one confirmed that Richard Mamarella backdated fire insurance for arsonists.

Mamarella proved a quick study. It wasn’t long before he caught the eye of Joseph Paterno, a lieutenant in the Gambino
crime syndicate. Questioned under oath about the whereabouts of First Fidelity’s $22 million, Mamarella said he’d spent it all. Pressed for specifics, he said, “I ate out a lot.” Although he refused to connect his insurance scam to the Mob, Mamarella did acknowledge operating a highly successful loan-sharking operation whose client list included Antonio Turano, a Sicilian-born footwear executive turned narcotics trafficker with proven ties to the Mafia.

{Courtesy of Jacqueline Hankins}

Richard Mamarella. The Bronx-born Weehawken wiseguy provided behind-the-scenes legal advice to the Trust.

The Mamarella-Turano relationship offered troubling insights into the business practices of the Trust’s legal adviser. After Turano was caught concealing fifteen kilograms of heroin in a shipment of shoes from Thailand, Mamarella decided to safeguard $300,000 he had lent the importer by taking out a short-term life insurance policy in his name.

The timing couldn’t have been better. While Turano was out on bail, his bullet-riddled, plastic-wrapped corpse was fished out of a marsh in Queens, New York. The money Mamarella collected on the policy more than covered the outstanding principal and interest Turano was unable to repay.

Mamarella’s approach to debt collection wasn’t usually that premeditated. More typically, when clients failed to meet their obligations in a timely manner, he would flash a “piece” (his term) or hastily arrange a refinancing conference with “T-Ray,” a broad-shouldered associate regularly mistaken for Chicago Bears defensive tackle William “The Refrigerator” Perry.

Not that Mamarella needed backup. As he noted under oath, he
was perfectly at ease assaulting one tardy borrower with a chair (“I should have hit him harder”) and disfiguring another with his ring-studded fists. The Weehawken wiseguy displayed a similar hands-on approach to conflict resolution in his personal life. According to a
Wall Street Journal
article included in the DOJ case file, “Richard Mamarella is the kind of person who, when he lends you money, is likely to arrange a life-insurance policy to repay it—just in case you don’t. His own lawyer calls him a ‘tough fellow.’ His second wife, who left him after he broke her arm, might agree.”

As I’m flying out to San Francisco, I inventory the illegalities tied to Cesar and his colleagues. The catalog has grown substantially. It now includes: money laundering, embezzlement, racketeering, arson, forgery, all manner of fraud (wire fraud, insurance fraud, mail fraud), extortion, perjury, check kiting, probation violation, grand larceny, assault and battery, and domestic abuse. All of which makes me wonder: What the hell am I getting myself into? I could have ended the search in the law-firm conference room. That would have been the sensible thing to do. Why am I
still
pursuing Cesar? Is it to uncover his story? To avoid my own? The bottom line is this: I’m not sure
what
I’m after. Nor can I explain what compels me to travel cross-country to spy on the actions of a convicted felon I have promised my wife I will not confront. All I know is it sounds nuts when I hear myself telling the yoga instructor sitting in the seat next to me the reason I’m on a plane bound for San Francisco.

Time spent on reconnaissance is never wasted.

John le Carré
,
A Perfect Spy

Whatsoever things are true

Whatsoever things are honest

Whatsoever things are just

Whatsoever things are pure

Whatsoever things are lovely

Whatsoever things are of good report

Think on these things.

Group Captain Watts
, former headmaster of Aiglon, invoking Philippians 4:8

The day before the film fund-raiser, I meet up with a spry sixty-seven-year-old Japanese American named Yosh Morimoto in the lobby of my Bay Area hotel. Morimoto was never called to testify during the Badische trial, but his name and San Jose address appeared on a restitution order listing some of Cesar’s clients.

It’s been more than five years since Morimoto got taken. Whatever shame or rage he might have felt at the time has been replaced by quiet reflection.

“My mother and father had a rough life,” he tells me over a pot of tea. “Real rough.”

Before the Morimotos were interned in a relocation camp under the shameful provisions of Executive Order 9066, they owned a pear orchard outside Sacramento. “We managed to hold on to it, but just barely,” Morimoto says wistfully. The land was eventually sold to developers. Morimoto invested in real estate. His business prospered.

He remembers learning about the Badische Trust Consortium early in 1998, while trying to fund a $200 million nonprofit hospital-hotel complex in the Central American nation of Belize. Like most of the proposals Cesar presented to the Badische board, the Belize project had failed to attract legitimate investors. After dozens of rejections, Morimoto responded to an online funding offer posted by the Barclay Consulting Group. The managing director of BCG invited him to the firm’s worldwide headquarters in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district.

“Cesar was the screening person for Badische,” Morimoto tells me. “You had to meet him first. He’d only introduce you to Colonel Sherry
and the others if he thought you were a good suspect.”

Morimoto passed muster.

“The next thing I knew, we were flying to New York to make a funding presentation.” The visit floored him. “I never saw anything like it,” Morimoto recalls, shaking his head. “Cesar introduced me to about a dozen elderly guys in the boardroom of this really fancy law firm. All of them were really, really well dressed. And all of them were really, really smooth. Most had European accents. One guy even had one of those fancy eyeglass things you hold up like this.” Morimoto forms a circle with thumb and forefinger and brings it to his eye. “It made me wonder. What am
I
doing here? Why would these guys want to work with a guy like
me
?”