Nothing But Money by Greg Smith Read Free Book Online

balding, with a nasty little mustache that looked like a leach lurking on his lip. He had tiny black eyes and it was hard to tell his age. He could have been thirty, but he looked forty. He cursed and talked a mile a minute, faster than Cary even. He threw around business words the way Cary dealt in the commodity of psychobabble. When he walked, the guy had a kind of side-to-side manner that he would call swagger and others would call waddle. He looked like a penguin with a criminal record.

    “Jeffrey Pokross,” he said, reaching out a hand.

    Cary liked him immediately.

    “Jeffrey had a rapier wit. Extremely quick. Extremely intelligent. He was one of the few individuals that I could banter with. He had a vast source of knowledge, a jack of all trades and master of none. I could see he had never done a legitimate day of work in his life.”

    Cary had a feeling that Jeffrey Pokross and his Three Star Leasing were not all they seemed. The place looked like a real business—there were secretaries and computer screens and telephones—but there was something odd about it all. When Jeffrey described what Three Star did, he was somewhat vague. He claimed the company arranged long-term leases of luxury cars for customers through banks. That was his story, anyway. The customer would lease the car through Three Star, which would obtain the lease from the car company and sell it to a bank. The bank would then assume responsibility for collecting the money and Three Star would get a fee. That was fine when the eighties were in full swing and people on the Street were a bit freer with their money. Now that was all over and Three Star was having a tougher time. Jeffrey still had his Wall Street customers, but far fewer, and now he was getting customers from different walks of life. Some didn’t have the best credit ratings. At first, this meant Three Star had to say no to these people, but Three Star didn’t say no anymore. They needed the business. They began offering a new service, which they never really put down on paper as a real service. It was referred to as “credit adjustment.” This meant turning into a fiction writer when filling out lease applications. Cary could relate to that.

    Three Star began to get even more creative. They came up with a new idea—one that Jeffrey did not mention to Cary. They were quietly selling cars they did not own to customers. The banks would raise a fuss and Jeffrey Pokross would funnel over a few payments from new customers to the bank to shut them up for a while before closing up shop and heading for another bank. It was a classic Ponzi scheme with Mercedes and Bentleys and Porsches as bait.

    When they began talking about Cary’s precarious Mercedes 580SL, Jeffrey assured him they could work something out. Cary was aware that Jeffrey Pokross and Three Star were not UNICEF, but he didn’t much care. This was business, and he needed money. In business you sometimes cut corners to keep the operation running. You do it to help out the employees. They have babies to feed, car payments to make, mortgages to abide. Just because Jeffrey Pokross did some things that maybe weren’t kosher every single minute, well, everybody’s got something to hide, right?

    Including, of course, Cary himself. He did not mention to Jeffrey certain aspects of his situation. Such as the fact that he was unemployed. Or that he was mooching free rent off his girlfriend. Instead, he told Jeffrey he was an independent financial adviser who’d quit Prudential because he’d felt cramped and unable to realize his full potential. He still had possession of his stockbroker’s license, so he could wave that around, and he made mention that he had access to plenty of clients who’d invested millions of dollars with him over the years and trusted him like a priest. He dropped in his onetime employment as a Bear Stearns partner without mentioning how it all had ended up over there. Now he was claiming he’d gone