The Man I Never Met by Adam Schefter

Author:Adam Schefter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

11

Six months before he died, Joe Maio asked his friend Jordan Bergstein to come visit his office in the World Trade Center.

Joe and Jordan were close friends and golf buddies who bonded over their love for action and the quick bursts of adrenaline that led to harmless highs. A lot of the action came in the form of gambling. Not high-stakes gambling, where the loser wonders how he will pay the mortgage. Mostly, they made small bets for their own entertainment.

Joe used his business acumen to make a betting market for the New York Jets, just among his friends. How many games would they win in the next four weeks? He traded positions with people and played the market well enough that he was sure to come out ahead, no matter what the Jets did.

Joe and Jordan bet when they were on the golf course. They even bet when they walked down the street. One of them would take out a nickel, point to a parking meter twenty feet away, and say, “Five dollars if you hit it.”

From there, negotiations would begin.

“That’s far. I want three-to-one odds.”

“No. Straight up. You take the shot if you want it.”

“Two-to-one.”

“Deal. No tears.”

“No tears.”

That’s how they always settled on the terms: No tears. It meant that all terms were final. No complaining later. And if you had asked them who won more bets, you would get firm answers: Joe would say Joe, and Jordan would say Jordan.

So here was Jordan Bergstein, on a cold, rainy day in the spring of 2001, only a few months after George W. Bush had taken the oath of the presidency and given his inaugural address:

Through much of the last century, America’s faith in freedom and democracy was a rock in a raging sea. Now it is a seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations.

Jordan rose up to the top of One World Trade Center in an elevator that traveled at a rate of 1,600 feet per minute. That elevator could make you forget how high you were going until you walked out and saw where you ended up.

Joe’s childhood friends were amazed that Joe ended up working in the World Trade Center, of all places. They were amazed because when Joe was a child, he had one big fear:

He was scared of heights.

He did not hide this from anybody. He did not share it with one friend and beg that friend to keep the secret. That wasn’t his style. He was Joe Maio, take him or leave him. All his friends knew he was scared of heights.

When you’re a child, getting to know your landscape, tunnels and ponds and spooky houses have an outsized hold on your mind. For Joe, the spot that messed with his head was a bridge near his house, in Spring Valley, New York, just over the New Jersey border.

The bridge was on Scotland Hill Road. It was an overpass over the Garden State Parkway; it was only as long as the width of the parkway and just high enough to allow trucks to pass through underneath.

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