Money to Burn by Grippando James M

Author:Grippando, James M. [Grippando, James M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Read, Shared-Mom
ISBN: 9780061556302
Goodreads: 6561825
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2010-02-23T05:00:00+00:00

"There's one way to find out."

He knew what I meant. "If you go to the Rink Bar at four o'clock, you will be playing right into Highsmith's hands. He will cite it as proof that you have a lover, and that the two of you are plotting to hide your assets from Mallory. As your lawyer, I absolutely forbid you to go."

"I don't care," I said, looking him in the eye. "I'm going."

Chapter 30.

A FEW MINUTES BEFORE FOUR P.M., TONY GIRELLI WAS SEATED ALONE at a cafe 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.

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