The Cartel Lawyer

Chapter 2

2

I grew up in Carle Place, New York, which is about forty minutes from New York City on the Long Island Railroad. My father used to tell me that it was a quick forty-one-minute train ride from “the City,” when he wanted me to come visit. New Yorkers call it “the City” as if there is only one city in the entire country. Any New Yorker will tell you that NYC is the best city on the planet. Their pride can rub people from different parts of the country the wrong way.

My father, Peter, grew up in Brooklyn. His parents moved from Poland and arrived in New York to escape World War II. My old man worked hard and tried to provide the best he could for his family. He worked as a business manager for a group of neurosurgeons. When my father was a kid, his mother got sick and he left college to work in the family business. His mother died of cancer in her early fifties, leading him to fall into a depression and start drinking.

My father eventually got help and stopped drinking after a stint in rehab. He continued to work in the family business and finished his degree in finance taking classes at night at Long Island University. After nearly a decade, he earned his bachelor’s degree in finance and completed an executive MBA designed for working professionals.

My father’s therapist told him that maybe it would be healthy to leave the family business as he had a toxic relationship with his own father. My dad always told me, “My old man was tough. And you are lucky that I’m much softer.”

My grandfather grew up in the Great Depression and always feared that he would lose it all. He would never spend a penny on anything. In fact, he lived in the same home for nearly six decades and saved every dollar he had.

My father started to manage a doctor’s office and things were looking up for him until my mom got sick. My mother had a stroke and required around-the-clock care. Although my father had decent insurance, the homecare nearly bankrupted him. He could not deal with the stress and became depressed after seeing my mom suffer so much. He started drinking again. We tried to urge him to go back to rehab, but he said that he could not afford it.

My father got into a car one Sunday afternoon after drinking a few too many beers at the local bar while watching the New York Giants play. A police officer arrested my dad for driving under the influence. He spent the night in jail since we did not have the funds to bail him out.

My father lost his job after his DUI arrest. My dad told me the story repeatedly and urged me to never drink and drive.

“My boss told me he had to let me go because my actions reflected poorly on the office. Luckily, I didn’t kill anyone, but I lost everything. One mistake, son.” It crushed him. “One mistake, he repeated. One mistake and I lost it all. Who will hire me now that I have a criminal record? I’m a middle-aged man with an MBA and a pretty mugshot.”

After looking unsuccessfully for a job for weeks, my father fell into a deep depression and would not leave the house. He finally found a job as a manager for a local restaurant. The pay was lousy, and the stress of the job caused him to put on an extra twenty pounds.

When it came time for me to go to college, my father looked to me to take care of the family. As a student I had dreams of going to college in California. I had never been out west and wanted to experience something different. Given my family’s circumstances, I stayed closer to home and went to Hofstra University, a private college only a few miles down the road from where I grew up. I also went to Hofstra because it gave me a seventy-five percent scholarship.

I wanted to study English literature. In the summertime, I would read four to five books a week as a kid. Literature provided me with a way to escape the realities of my life. When drinking, my father could become abusive. He hit me on several occasions, even giving me a black eye. He would later apologize, saying, “I’m sorry, son. I can’t control my temper when I drink.” As bad as things were, I could always run away and escape to another country or universe through my books.

I thought that maybe I would become a writer. My father quickly derailed my plans.

“Hey kid, you’re not going to become the next great novelist. Get your head out of the clouds. It’s like saying that you are going to play in the NBA. Look where we live. Look at our life.”

“But an English degree will teach me how to write. Every employer needs to have someone who can think, read, and write.”

“Don’t be a wise guy, son. Reading and writing books are a hobby. We aren’t royalty. You can’t sit around and live off the family’s trust fund. Why? Because you don’t have one,” he yelled.

“Okay Dad,” I groaned. “What do you want me to study?”

“Look kid, become a doctor or some sort of professional. Something where you can make a living and support our family. We’re struggling, and I can’t pay for you to be a starving writer. You will end up working at a local coffee shop.”

I never excelled in science classes. I hated taking chemistry and physics in high school. I

I rationalized what my father told me, and I decided to major in business and minor in English. I thought that a business degree would teach me skills that would help me land a job. It is very difficult to become a writer. Reading and writing would just be a hobby.

While at Hofstra I enrolled in a business law course. I will never forget my teacher, Professor Mark Burns. He had a thick New York accent and would tell stories about his days working as a corporate lawyer in New York City. Mr. Burns got sick of working as a corporate lawyer and became a professor. He became jaded over the years and hated large corporations.

“You know what my fancy law degree and my corporate job gave me? High blood pressure and sleepless nights. Oh, and a heart attack.”

Mr. Burns was a brilliant guy who loved teaching. He traded in his three-piece suits for blue jeans and a button-down t-shirt. He would rub his hair, which would then stick straight up.

I loved every minute of his class. He taught me about fighting against corporate fraud and greed. As a kid from a working-class neighborhood on Long Island, I wanted to stand up and fight for the little guy. I would think of my dad’s problems and his run-ins with the law. Mr. Burns, with his coffee stained t-shirt and crazy hair, got me excited about fighting large corporations and motivated me much more than my accounting classes, which made me want to poke my eyes out.

When I was not studying, I worked twenty-five hours a week at various odd jobs to pay the bills. I mowed lawns during the fall. I even drove for Uber. I had a perfect five-star rating since I spoke to every customer with the utmost respect. I even had bottled waters, candy, and mints available.

By the time my senior year rolled around, I decided to take the LSAT, which is the entrance exam for law school. This test is a bear, and I had never been a great standardized test taker. Unfortunately, law schools weigh the test a great deal. A 3.7 GPA and one hundred and seventy-four meant that you could go to Yale, while a 3.7 and one hundred and sixty-two would land you at a terrific school, but outside the Ivy League. I took the test twice and applied to ten law schools all in the area. Columbia and NYU rejected me, but I received an offer at three of my top five choices. I started looking at the price. Law school is insanely expensive. Brooklyn Law gave me a half scholarship, making my decision easier as I would have been out nearly two hundred and fifty thousand dollars if I attended Fordham Law School.

I went to law school because I thought that I could use my degree to help people and at the same time support my family. The administration at Brooklyn Law surveyed my class at the beginning of the year and then again two years after graduation. The law school discovered that forty percent of the incoming class was interested in human rights and non-profit law. Two years after graduating from law school, eighty percent of the class worked in corporate law, complex litigation, or criminal defense. Crushing student loan debt forces people to “sell out” and chase money. Working as a non-profit lawyer making thirty thousand dollars per year is unrealistic for most young lawyers, unless you are independently wealthy.

I moved to Brooklyn to be closer to the university and to get away from my parents. My mom’s condition kept getting worse. My father remained clean for several months, but he would start drinking again. Watching my mom’s body wither away only worsened my father’s depression and drinking habits.

My father found his job not only stressful but lacking intellectual rigor. Before his DUI, he used the skills he had learned during his MBA program to help find ways to make the doctor’s office more efficient. My dad would spend days and nights coming up with different projections and ideas for how to improve the practice. As a restaurant manager, he spent his time yelling at the cooks, some of whom did not take the job seriously. He also had to deal with irate customers. This was Long Island, and people were not afraid to tell my father what they thought of the food and service.

On top of all that, my father started going into more debt as my mother’s care became more expensive. He would spend his days off from work fighting with insurance companies and the disability offices. He would berate the poor insurance representatives, yelling: “What’s the point of having insurance and disability coverage if all you do is deny me. Isn’t there anything that you do cover?”

My new apartment in Brooklyn was a fifteen-minute train-ride away from the university. Even though the university gave me a big chunk of change to help me pay for my law school education, it was not enough to survive. I looked for jobs that could help me pay my rent and put protein in my diet.

I started out waiting tables at night, but I later saw a job packing and unpacking meat at a butcher’s shop in the meat-packing district, not too far from Mansion, a nightclub where young peopled raged at until 4 a.m. This was tough work. The shop where I worked had high turnover, given not only the hours but also the nature of the job. The store realized that they could only keep people if they increased the pay to seventeen dollars an hour. Thus, I started working in the spring of my first semester at Morty’s Butcher Shop.

My white coat, which looked like a lab coat, would be covered in sweat and blood from moving the large chunks of meat from the back room to the truck. The staff teased me and called me college boy or Harvard.

Morty, the owner, was notoriously cheap. He was only five feet four inches and bald, but he was tough as nails. He was an old school boss who did not want anyone to waste a single penny on packaging. Once I used too much tape on a box, and Morty let me have it. “Hey college boy, you are killing me. This isn’t Yale. We don’t have money to use that much tape. Put the meat on the truck and box the sauces. Don’t spend my tape. You are killing me,” he screamed in his thick New York accent, spraying me with an endless flow of saliva.

I knew how to respond to Morty: respect and kindness.

“Yes sir! It won’t happen again.”

“Excellent, college boy,” exclaimed Morty. He patted me on the back with his hand, which was the size of a baseball glove. He lifted his cigar in his other hand and took a puff.

“That a boy, college kid. You’re learning sonny boy.”

Morty had a big heart, but he had to be tough to make it in this business. He had many bad experiences of people trying to steal from him or rip him off. He was even robbed at gunpoint on three separate occasions in the 1980s.

Other employees had not always been so kind and had run-ins with Morty. The famous story is that Morty, with his pot belly and all, got into an altercation with one of the employees who had enough of Morty and started to curse him out. Morty pressed his large stomach up against the employee and screamed, “Do you know why the doors to this place are so big? It’s so people like you who have big egos can fit through them. YOU’RE FIRED.”

My odd jobs over the years helped me hone my people skills. This benefited me more than I would ever know, as I had worked with some very tough clients over the years.

My job at the butcher’s shop paid well, but it made having a social life very difficult. Between studying and working I would sleep about four hours a night.

I started out as a very diligent law student, but this faded over time. There is a saying in law school that the first year the professors try to scare you to death. The second year they insist on working you to death. During the third year they bore you to death, and you cannot wait to get out.

Law professors used the infamous Socratic method. They did not lecture with power points and graphs, but instead would tell you to read a case and ask you endless questions designed to help improve your analytical skills. The challenge in law school is that you never know when you are going to be in the hot seat. While there are different types of law professors, some of the old school professors cold-called students based on their seating chart. They loved making a first-year student look stupid in front of the entire section.

I remember the first day of class when Professor Smith, an eighty-five-year-old law professor who had been at the university for fifty-five years, called on a student and asked him to answer questions about a case. Most people on the first day of class are looking at the syllabus and trying to get a feel for things. None of us had even bought the book, which cost a whopping four hundred dollars. Professor Smith, who looked like the prototypical law professor with a bow tie and suspenders, berated the student: “You must always be prepared. Lawyers are never supposed to be caught off guard. We are clerks of the court and you must uphold the honor of this distinguished profession.”

The professor’s statement led to a major eye roll by the students who sat sweating in their seats because they feared being called on. The professor’s assertion could not be further from the truth. Most legal cases take years and drag on. I thought, Buckle up. This is going to be a long three years of many sleepless nights and seeing how much nonsense I can tolerate.