The cage at Filch & Finagle was a large, cramped enclosure partitioned on three sides with floor-to-ceiling steel bars. Deliveries were made over counters built under teller’s windows fabricated into the metalwork. Other job stations, maybe eight or ten in all, lined the inside perimeter. Several desks, pushed together at the center of the room, formed a single countertop, where the head cashier held court.
Locked inside, a dozen or so wise guys, edgy from working together in the same tight space for 30 years, stood around keeping an eye on one another. A cross between your typical casino count room and the prison yard at Leavenworth one incident before lockdown.
The kind of place where you don’t go around stealing anybody’s Danish.
“Hey, he stole my Danish!”
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
“Get your gats outa my face.” Click
CLICK CLAAAAAACK CLICK.
"All right. Here, take it back. Who eats cheese Danish anyway?"
It was the summer of 1959 and this was the kid’s first job. A mob connection with close matrimonial ties to his mother, who was a Saint, figured it’d be cheaper to hire his teenager for those particular three months than to maintain him during that date-specific span of time.
The kid spent his entire salary on peanuts and tall beverages that summer owing to the astrological confluence of the number of calendar years he’d spent in this dimension and the minimum legal drinking age in the State of New York.
The kid’s mob connection put him in charge of the Crime Family's inventory of shares sold short, to the amusement of all the wise guys in the Filch & Finagle cage.
A joke the kid didn’t get for the longest time.
The teller’s windows faced a corridor leading to the service elevator. Stock deliveries were made through one window, the busiest work station in the cage, bond deliveries through the one beside it. The certificates there were filed in bins, sorted alphabetically, and when new paper came in, it was added to the rest, that lot then tallied and proven against mob books. Runners, generally retired wise guys, made these deliveries lugging big black satchels around, dangling from one hand. The hand changed from time to time when the sachels got heavy.
Cage soldiers prepared deliveries from tickets sent over by the bean counters, sliding appropriate certificates into large manila envelopes, penciling transaction information onto lines pre-printed across the outside, front and back.
Filch & Finagle runners waited for outgoing envelopes on a bench beside the elevators. Runners from other Crime Families dropped by with incoming envelopes all the time. Lower Manhattan swarmed with these guys, scurrying along everywhere, satchels lurching to and fro. They crisscrossed through narrow streets, navigating directly at the building they were headed for, disdaining pedestrian crosswalks of any kind.
In cold weather the runners bundled up. On slushy days janitorial staffs all over New York were kept busy mopping down the mess they made of city floors. When the rains hit, not a one called in sick, and you had to marvel at the old timers for that.
“Job gives them something to do,“ the kid’s mob connection commented one time, but it was more than that. These wise guys loved Wall Street, and being part of the action sparked their lives. You could see it all over their faces when deliveries came in.
Deeper inside the cage, mobsters dealt with other aspects of back office work. Dividend collections, receiving and matching chits with tickets, processing checks, running books, and so forth. The one thing no one ever touched was money.
It was a paper world down there.
The kid was assigned to the stock transfer window, backing up Eric whenever deliveries bunched up. Sometimes it would get hectic, and Joe had to come in and help them out.
Half a century later he would still remember their names.
The kid inventoried stock certificates against accounting records all day long. After the bin came up from the vault in the morning, the kid inventoried, before the bin went back to the vault at night, the kid inventoried, when things got slow and he had nothing else to do, the kid inventoried, and when business was really, really busy, the kid inventoried hardest of all.
The kid inventoried stock certificates all summer long.
And there wasn’t any inventory of shares sold short. It didn’t exist, and that’s what the joke had been about. The kid’s mob connection putting him in charge of nothing. Nothing at all.
Crime Families sell play shares short. They’re fake shares. Phony. Bogus. Made up. Believe me, if the certificates existed, the kid would’ve found them back in 1959. He was in charge of that inventory, and he looked for it all summer long.
Shares sold short are accounting entries only. Bernie Madoff accounting entries. You can see the numbers on records in the bean counter’s room, and the kid made his mob connection show that part to him, but nothing got posted to anything where the kid worked. There, certificates of shares sold short were nowhere to be found. Nowhere. Nowhere inside the whole stupid Filch & Finagle cage.
Such certificates do not exist. Their inventory is a deception in a massive securities fraud.
