“What do you mean? The SEC has initiated investigations on much less before.”
“I mean it just like I said. Forget the SEC.”
Forget the SEC! She would have loved to ask him directly about SeaStarFriends, but his involvement in MPM was just speculation at this point. Sergio wasn’t a banker, but he knew enough about business to fear the Securities and Exchange Commission, which monitored the trading of all securities. Especially if he knew that MPM and LMI were trading on insider information. Was his carelessness an indication of his naiveté or the exact opposite? Since her conversation with Nick Kostidis on Christmas at the Downeys’ house, she’d thought about him many times. To her annoyance, she realized that she was listening for revealing undertones in every one of Sergio’s words. She hadn’t seen Kostidis since then, but she still owed her nagging guilty conscience to him—which she could have done without. She was relieved that Sergio was still in Chicago. When he said good-bye after fifteen minutes and said he’d get in touch when he was back in the city, it sounded almost like a threat.
Sergio had been in Las Vegas for the past three days and was extremely satisfied with the deal he had finally closed after long and tenacious negotiations. In addition to the Gold Nugget, the Pyramid, and the Southern Cross, he now also owned the fourth-largest luxury hotel on the Las Vegas Strip: the Venice. The negotiations had been tough, but Angelo Canaletti—the last offspring of the once important Canaletti family from New York, which had relocated to the West in the 1960s—lacked any sense for business. He had gotten too comfortable with his excessive lifestyle. He’d run the gold mine of the Meridian, with its six hundred beds and enormous casino, completely into the ground with his disastrous management. He was in deep because he owed millions of dollars to the IRS. This purchase was a bargain for Sergio; it just required some patience. After finishing the contract, he finally cemented his position of dominance in Las Vegas. Profits from the casinos were sizable and crisis-proof sources of income.
However, his meeting in Vegas with Jorge Alvarez Ortega had been much more important. Ortega had become the undisputed number one of the powerful Colombian drug cartel in Medellín after the violent death of Emilio Arqueros a few months prior. The negotiations with Ortega concerned the import of cocaine to the US. Due to Sergio’s newly consolidated influence at the Brooklyn port, he was the only person who could guarantee Ortega a risk-free import of drugs from Colombia. The old routes via Florida or Mexico were too risky, and many couriers had been busted. But Sergio’s people knew how to smuggle illegal drugs directly into New York in front of the customs agents and the police without any problems.
Sergio demanded thirty percent of the revenues for his services; Ortega only offered him fifteen. The negotiations with the Colombian dragged on through the entire night and seriously put Sergio’s patience to the test. They wined and dined like kings, and Franco Cavalese—Sergio’s man in Vegas—brought in the prettiest girls in town. With a mixture of contempt and amusement, Sergio watched the eyes of this South American peasant Ortega pop when he saw them. At three in the morning, the man disappeared into his suite with three very young blondes.
He and Sergio hadn’t come an inch closer in their negotiations. Sergio left the hotel at three thirty in the morning and had a limousine take him to the airport. He didn’t need to wait for this peasant! If Ortega wanted something from him, he would have to come to New York. To show that Sergio was serious about his thirty percent share, he would blow cover on the next delivery from Colombia.
When he arrived in Chicago, Sergio had received a message from Levy that St. John’s reckless behavior threatened to trigger an investigation by the SEC against LMI and MPM. It was a bad situation, but Sergio had managed to control the damage with a few phone calls.
The fact that Alex now seemed suspicious was far more serious to him. Zack had Jack Lang from MPM and Rudensky go overboard buying the stock of a company that LMI intended to represent in a takeover. Zack usually acted on his knowledge more prudently, but this time he had made a mistake. Sergio urgently needed to speak to Alex and check whether she had noticed anything. After their conversation, he was overcome with a wild longing for her. She had never mentioned another word about his uncontrolled violation of last October and behaved normally toward him. Sergio was sure that she had forgiven him for his faux pas.
Despite Nelson’s warning on Cinnamon Island, Sergio kept thinking about getting divorced from Constanzia. His biggest wish was to have Alex at his side day and night. His surveillance and monitoring of her telephone calls and e-mails turned up nothing. Alex went to work, came home, and met him occasionally. If Alex went out, then it was to after-work parties with her colleagues or a visit to the Downeys—with whom she’d spent a weekend on Long Island. There was no other man in her life besides him. Sergio poured himself a whiskey and contemplated whether he should skip his appointment in the morning. He longed for Alex with every fiber of his being, and at the same time he was mad at himself for being so obsessed with her. His anger at Ortega and St. John had caused him unbearable tension, and he desperately needed to let off some steam. After a third whiskey, he ordered a call girl to his room. The girl was young, blonde, and gorgeous, but Sergio suddenly thought about Alex. And although the little whore gave it her best effort, Sergio was horrified to realize that he couldn’t get it up. Feeling terribly humiliated, he angrily sent the girl away. At that moment, he hated Alex with all his heart. She was to blame for his failure. She had jinxed him.
On Tuesday, June 14, 2000, US Customs caught a very big fish at the Brooklyn port. The customs agents had received an anonymous tip early in the morning to take a closer look at the Panamanian freighter Cabo de la Nao, which was coming from Costa Rica with a cargo of coffee beans. Sure enough, they found more than two hundred kilos of pure cocaine with a street value of several million dollars. The drugs, originating from Colombia, were sealed in plastic bags hidden in the coffee. The captain and the crew of the Cabo de la Nao were arrested on the spot and taken away for questioning; the entire shipment was seized. Time and again, customs and drug enforcement agents seized narcotics at the city’s port or airports, but usually they only found a few grams or kilos. This discovery was surely one of the biggest in United States history.
Naturally, every news channel focused on coverage of the cocaine bust in Brooklyn. Mayor Kostidis proudly announced this significant blow to organized crime in New York. Sergio laughed disdainfully and turned away from the television.
“Excellent,” he said to Massimo, Nelson, Luca, and Silvio, who were all watching the news with him at his apartment on Park Avenue, “this will force Ortega to give in.”
“Or there will be war,” Nelson said.
“Ortega can’t afford that. He needs our connections at the port in order to bring such large shipments into the country. And he’s certainly dependent on the North American market.” Sergio shook his head and once again watched the mayor’s grim face on the screen. “This idiot really believes that his cops pulled this off all by themselves.”
“Maybe you should talk to Ortega again,” Nelson said. “Now he’ll—”
“Nelson!” Sergio looked at his friend in astonishment. “What’s going on with you? You don’t sound like the Nelson I know!”
“The idea of you starting a war with the Colombians makes me a little uneasy. They’re dangerous.”
“It sounds like you’re getting scared in your old age.” Sergio grinned.