Sins of the City

ON THE NIGHT of March 25, 1990, Lydia Feli­ciano, a woman who checked coats and occa­sion­al­ly bar­tend­ed at the Hap­py Land social club in the Bronx, got into a vio­lent argu­ment with her boyfriend, a Cuban immi­grant named Julio Gon­za­lez. Accord­ing to tes­ti­mo­ny before the grand jury that lat­er indict­ed Gon­za­lez for the largest mass mur­der in U.S. his­to­ry, he left in a drunk­en, jeal­ous rage and returned a short time lat­er with a dollar’s worth of gaso­line and a match. The club, which catered to the local com­mu­ni­ty of Hon­duran immi­grants, had no fire exit and only one door, lead­ing down a steep flight of stairs to the ground lev­el. At about 2:30 A.M., as cou­ples danced to “Young Lover,” a reg­gae tune, flames roared up from the vacant first floor. In the pan­de­mo­ni­um, only five peo­ple got out alive, one of them Lydia Feli­ciano. Eighty-sev­en peo­ple died, many of them almost instant­ly from smoke inhala­tion, their drinks still in their hands.
     The media played up the tragedy as if it were The Bon­fire of the Van­i­ties—dis­en­fran­chised vic­tims, rich cul­prits. Bet­ter yet, rich land­lords, a most unloved species. The fire brought instant noto­ri­ety to Alexan­der DiLoren­zo III, the mul­ti­mil­lion­aire prop­er­ty own­er, and to Jay Weiss, the mil­lion­aire lease­hold­er, who might have been spared some of the atten­tion had his wife not been the actress Kath­leen Turn­er.
     It was soon revealed that a full year and a half ear­li­er, the Fire Depart­ment had brand­ed Hap­py Land haz­ardous and issued a vacate order, which had been ignored. In the wake of the infer­no, civ­il suits in the hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars were served on DiLoren­zo, Weiss, and Weiss’s part­ner, Mor­ris Jaffe. There was talk that the Bronx D.A.’s office was con­sid­er­ing fil­ing crim­i­nal charges against the three men.
     What didn’t make it into the news was DiLorenzo’s vis­it the day after the tragedy to Weiss’s office, which hap­pened to be around the com­er from his own. In a recent inter­view, he recalled find­ing Weiss “in shock,” talk­ing deject­ed­ly about pack­ing it in and mov­ing to Cal­i­for­nia. “He said, ‘I’m fin­ished! I’m broke! I’m bank­rupt! I’m ruined!’ Jay kin­da goes on, he gets crazy. I don’t think he ever dreamt some­thing like this would hap­pen. He had vio­la­tions, he sent them to the ten­ant. The city issued these things as a reg­u­lar rou­tine, and then peo­ple would go down and get them lift­ed. Jay is not a stu­pid guy, O.K.? He didn’t see it. He didn’t put it all togeth­er. I’m telling you. I know the guy. I know him since he’s a twen­ty-year-old kid, you fol­low? He wasn’t play­ing with me. He didn’t real­ly under­stand it. He thought it was a card game, you hear me?”
     DiLoren­zo laughed soft­ly, ner­vous­ly. “A card game.”
     It had seemed unlike­ly that DiLoren­zo would agree to talk about Hap­py Land. Apart from his legal prob­lems, he has a rep­u­ta­tion for secre­cy, even reclu­sive­ness. His for­mer lawyer, John Burns, con­firms that “when Alex isn’t sure what he wants to do next, he’ll hide behind unavail­abil­i­ty.” But above all else, DiLoren­zo is unpre­dictable. And so, after some cajol­ing, he entered into his only con­ver­sa­tion with a reporter since the fire.
     Of the three land­lords, DiLoren­zo stands the best chance of going to jail. As the building’s own­er, he was named on the Fire Department’s 1988 vacate order, and when it went unheed­ed, a bench war­rant was issued for his arrest. It was nev­er served, which is not unusual—by one esti­mate, the city has more than 100,000 unserved war­rants against New York land­lords, dat­ing back to the 1970s. But after the fire, DiLorenzo’s lawyers told him it would be pru­dent to turn him­self in. On April 3, he sur­ren­dered in Man­hat­tan Crim­i­nal Court.
     At the time, there were forty-three oth­er unserved war­rants for his arrest, some dat­ing back to 1978. Indeed, DiLoren­zo is infa­mous as a land­lord: this year the New York Dai­ly News con­duct­ed a review of eighty-nine build­ings owned by DiLoren­zo and turned up 5,642 code vio­la­tions, rang­ing from water short­ages to struc­tur­al flaws.
     If con­vict­ed of will­ful­ly neglect­ing the vacate order, DiLoren­zo could face nine­ty days in the slam­mer. On July 26, he appeared in Bronx Crim­i­nal Court and entered a plea of not guilty. It was the sec­ond time he had been arraigned on the mis­de­meanor charge; the first indict­ment was with­drawn after DiLoren­zo’s lawyers object­ed on tech­ni­cal grounds.
     DiLoren­zo turns out to he a man of sur­pris­ing can­dor. His assess­ment of the cacoph­o­ny of legal advice he has received since the fire is typ­i­cal­ly blunt: “What I feel in my gut, after talk­ing to all these genius­es, is that this is a polit­i­cal night­mare. Eighty-sev­en peo­ple are dead, there are Hon­durans scream­ing, and ‘Who is this rich prick?’—you fol­low?”
     Jay Weiss and Mor­ris Jaffe, mean­while, have refused to dis­cuss the Hap­py Land dis­as­ter, or any­thing else. Their attor­ney, Shep Gold­fein, a fire spe­cial­ist at Skad­den, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, ini­tial­ly agreed to respond to writ­ten ques­tions, then backed off on orders from Weiss. Gold­fein says Weiss feels embat­tled. Short­ly after the fire, some­one left a threat­en­ing note on his black Jeep. Weiss and Turn­er have put their $885,000 Green­wich Vil­lage town­house up for sale and moved else­where in the city. Weiss has also relo­cat­ed his office from East Fifty-sec­ond Street to a down­town address. (He and his rock band, Blue Suits, recent­ly put in unpub­li­cized appear­ances at Manhattan’s Cat Club and Chi­na Club, how­ev­er.) Though Weiss has kept his silence, his wife elect­ed to defend his actions on the evening news. “I’m very sor­ry that my hus­band has any link with this,” Kath­leen Turn­er said, “but I can’t con­ceive of any respon­si­bil­i­ty for him or for me.” Syd­ney Schan­berg, edi­to­ri­al­iz­ing in News­day, was roused to rage. “It’s a pity,” he wrote, “Jay Weiss is so fright­ened that he lets his wife do the ali­bi­ing for him.” He summed up Weiss’s occu­pa­tion in one curt phrase: “the guy who does all those deals with that mas­ter-shark, Alexan­der DiLoren­zo III.”
     Actu­al­ly, “mas­ter flake” seems more appro­pri­ate: at forty, DiLoren­zo may be one of the few Forbes Four Hun­dred mem­bers who pre­fer to trav­el by sub­way. He lives in a rather lugubri­ous three-bed­room apart­ment on Manhattan’s East Side, full of pack­ing box­es and mis­matched, hand-me-down fur­ni­ture. Short, stocky, and beard­ed, often dressed in jeans and a checked lum­ber­jack shirt, he ven­tures incon­spic­u­ous­ly into neigh­bor­hoods such as West Harlem, where he owns forty-odd brown­stones with more than two hun­dred apart­ments delib­er­ate­ly kept vacant—for which angry ten­ants have repeat­ed­ly hanged him in effi­gy. He car­ries a Japan­ese grav­i­ty knife he bought at a trade show a few years ago after being mugged.
     Alex III, as col­leagues call him, is the eldest child of the late Alex DiLoren­zo Jr., one of New York’s top real-estate moguls, who, in part­ner­ship with Sol Gold­man, once held the lease on the Chrysler Build­ing. A bach­e­lor with four children—twice divorced from the same woman—DiLorenzo has a net worth exceed­ing $500 mil­lion and con­trols almost four hun­dred prop­er­ties, forty-two acres’ worth in Man­hat­tan alone, rang­ing from slum ten­e­ments to gems like the Wash­ing­ton Square Mews and the land under the St. Reg­is hotel. He is, in fact, the city’s largest pri­vate land­lord (unless you count the estate of Sol Gold­man, who died in 1987).
     Jay Weiss is a self-made man, worth, DiLoren­zo esti­mates, $10 to $15 mil­lion, not count­ing Turner’s income. The two men met in 1975, when Weiss, twen­ty years old and broke, asked DiLoren­zo for a job. Weiss went on to make his for­tune by leas­ing small com­mer­cial build­ings, includ­ing about thir­ty owned by DiLoren­zo, and then sub­let­ting them. One of these is at 1959 South­ern Boule­vard, the site of Hap­py Land, part of a row of store­fronts that DiLoren­zo bought in May 1985, putting $120,000 down on an $885,000 mort­gage. Three months after the pur­chase, DiLoren­zo “net-leased” the build­ing to Lit­tle Peach Real­ty, one of sev­er­al cor­po­ra­tions owned by Weiss and Mor­ris Jaffe, a for­mer ladies’-hat mer­chant. Net-leas­ing, which typ­i­cal­ly involves pass­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for upkeep to the net-lessee, is a favorite device for DiLoren­zo, who has more hold­ings than his own employ­ees can sen­si­bly man­age. Lit­tle Peach became the building’s sole ten­ant for thir­ty years.
     Of course, for Lit­tle Peach to prof­it on the deal, it need­ed to find a sub­tenant will­ing to pay a high­er rent. In late 1987, Weiss and Jaffe believed they had found such a man in Elias Colon, who would soon con­vert the sec­ond floor of the build­ing into Hap­py Land. By ear­ly 1990, Lit­tle Peach was charg­ing Colon about two grand a month, plus insur­ance pre­mi­ums and real-estate tax. Colon was able to draw on the neighborhood’s large Hon­duran pop­u­la­tion and fill the club to capac­i­ty, which was not difficult—the room’s dimen­sions were a tiny twen­ty-two feet by fifty-eight feet, and the ceil­ing was so low that a per­son could touch the mir­rored ball that spun above the dance floor. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, though the club appeared to be thriv­ing, Weiss and Jaffe con­sid­ered Colon a dead­beat. In Feb­ru­ary, one month before the fire, Lit­tle Peach alleged that Colon owed almost $15,000 in back rent and insur­ance, and filed papers to evict him.
     The city of New York also want­ed Colon out, but for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. Hap­py Land had a sin­gle, unmarked exit door, lead­ing to a nar­row stair­case. There was no fire alarm and no sprin­kler sys­tem. In Novem­ber 1988, soon after police had arrest­ed three peo­ple at the premis­es for the ille­gal sale of liquor, the Fire Depart­ment issued a vacate order on safe­ty grounds. It was sent to DiLoren­zo, who says his office passed it on to Lit­tle Peach. The order was ignored. The fol­low­ing July 24, the police made anoth­er arrest at the unli­censed bar, and, on the same day, the Fire Department—now appar­ent­ly aware that Lit­tle Peach was in charge of the building—phoned Mor­ris Jaffe to tell him that the vacate order was still out­stand­ing. Jaffe report­ed­ly said it would be tak­en care of. At this point, the sto­ry of Hap­py Land was no more than stan­dard fare in the Jay Weiss reper­toire: the Dai­ly News inves­ti­ga­tion lat­er found that eigh­teen build­ings leased by Weiss (and owned by DiLoren­zo) had a com­bined total of 1,241 vio­la­tions. In Man­hat­tan, one of Weiss’s build­ings was cit­ed for 119 vio­la­tions, includ­ing lack of smoke detec­tors and blocked fire escapes.
     A month lat­er, in August 1989, Weiss stopped by Hap­py Land to harangue Colon about the rent. A Police Depart­ment spokesman lat­er explained that Hap­py Land was by then “in the pad­lock mode,” mean­ing the club had bro­ken nearly—but not quite—enough laws for Colon to be forced to vacate. He died in the fire instead.

DILORENZO has spurned the idea of meet­ing at a four-star Ital­ian restau­rant, say­ing he would not feel com­fort­able in so “fan­cy” a place. Instead, he opts for a small health-food joint on Sec­ond Avenue in mid­town. He wears a gray suit and striped tie, a Casio sports watch, and a beep­er on his belt. He is not car­ry­ing his grav­i­ty knife, because, he says, it is too bulky with a suit. DiLoren­zo looks a bit porcine in pho­tographs, less so in per­son. His beard, which has flecks of gray, is neat­ly trimmed, and his black hair hangs straight down in a mop, rather like that of the Three Stooges’ Moe Howard, near­ly touch­ing his glass­es. DiLoren­zo is about five feet six; his weight is said to go up and down by forty pounds. He speaks so soft­ly at times that you must strain to hear him. He has a ner­vous laugh that sounds like “heh-heh-heh.”
     Per­haps the “shark” descrip­tion fit his father, about whom there were always dark rumors (he attend­ed the funer­al of slain mob­ster Albert Anas­ta­sia). Cer­tain­ly it applied to his father’s part­ner, Sol Gold­man. But Alex III claims he nev­er had the tem­pera­ment or even the incli­na­tion for his cur­rent voca­tion. A for­mer “hip­pie with hair down to my ankles,” DiLoren­zo was twen­ty-sev­en and fresh from run­ning a pro­gres­sive school-with­out-walls in Brook­lyn Heights when his father died sud­den­ly of a mas­sive heart attack. The empire was hand­ed down to him at the worst pos­si­ble time—it was 1975, the city was in the depths of a fis­cal cri­sis, and the real estate mar­ket had crashed. His father and Sol Gold­man had not been devel­op­ers, but tight­fist­ed deal­ers who built an empire on debt and hard bar­gains. The young DiLoren­zo had to learn the game.
     Although Alex III did well, he has the resigned air of a man who is a fail­ure in his own eyes. “I had big­ger dreams,” he admits. “Much big­ger dreams. They’ve been honed down to size.” What did he want to do? “Oh, Christ. I want­ed to save the world. Don’t laugh. A lot of peo­ple were there. I became a lot more cyn­i­cal over time, I guess.”
     DiLoren­zo does have a cyn­i­cal edge, but more often he comes across as almost implau­si­bly naïve. He seems sur­prised that his ware­hous­ing of apart­ments in West Harlem has pro­voked out­rage from neigh­bor­hood res­i­dents. After all, he put $4.5 mil­lion of his own mon­ey into upgrad­ing those dilap­i­dat­ed brownstones—who else is invest­ing up in Harlem?—and, as his reward, “I’m get­ting my ass kicked.” It has not dawned on DiLoren­zo that the work­ing class peo­ple liv­ing in those rent-con­trolled build­ings don’t want remod­eled apart­ments they can’t afford. “Ten­ants always get very emo­tion­al,” he says, as though it’s an epiphany. Well, yes, but we’re talk­ing about people’s homes. “I hear ya,” DiLoren­zo says, nod­ding. “But some­times it gets out of line, in my opin­ion.”
     As it hap­pens, the health-food restau­rant is across the street from the office of Nikos Kefa­lidis, own­er of KLM Con­struc­tion and per­haps DiLorenzo’s best friend in busi­ness. Reached by pay phone from the curb out­side, Kefa­lidis stands at his win­dow and waves, but seems reluc­tant to join the lunch until DiLoren­zo gets on the line and asks him to do so as a per­son­al favor. Kefa­lidis is a Greek immi­grant with a thick accent, a for­mer com­put­er whiz who, the sto­ry goes, got into the con­struc­tion field rather serendip­i­tous­ly: the broth­er of a woman he dat­ed was in the busi­ness, but had to give it up when he was shot and wound­ed by loan sharks. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, this sub­ject does not come up at lunch.
     Instead, the con­ver­sa­tion turns to Jay Weiss. Kefa­lidis and DiLoren­zo paint a por­trait, lat­er sup­port­ed by oth­ers, of a born hus­tler, like Ricky Roma in Glen­gar­ry Glen Ross, the real-estate sales­man whose mot­to is “Always be clos­ing.” Weiss’s cock­i­ness and charm also come through in pho­tos, which show him to be short and ath­let­ic, with long dirty-blond hair.
     Jay Mar­tin Weiss was born on June 24, 1955, in Queens. He grew up in Cedarhurst, one of the fabled Five Towns on the South Shore of Long Island, known for their expen­sive split-lev­el homes. His father, Arthur, was a suc­cess­ful con­trac­tor in the mar­ble busi­ness; he laid down the fac­ings of office build­ings and pro­vid­ed the mar­ble for city projects such as Lin­coln Cen­ter. In high school, Weiss drove a Jaguar. “Jay,” Kefa­lidis says, “was raised like a lit­tle prince.”
     It appears that Weiss’s boy­hood ambi­tion was to be a rock star. He played gui­tar and bass with dex­ter­i­ty, earn­ing the nick­name “Hot Licks.” In the ear­ly sev­en­ties, he and three friends formed Milk ‘n’ Cook­ies, an Anglo-pop band with a hard sound and a cute look. Milk ‘n’ Cook­ies per­formed in New Wave clubs, wear­ing base­ball uni­forms dyed pink. He adopt­ed “Jay D. Weiss” as his nom de rock (for juve­nile delinquent—get it?). But in 1974, dishar­mo­ny struck. John Hewlett, a British man­ag­er, saw the band per­form and offered to take them to Eng­land to cut an album for lsland Records. There was only one hitch: Weiss was not invit­ed. “Jay threw a fit. He went crazy,” recalls Justin Strauss, the band’s lead singer, today a record pro­duc­er. “I don’t blame him. He more or less start­ed the band. But we were kids, and it was either Jay or a record deal, so we took the record deal. We didn’t think twice about it.”
     Weiss soon had big­ger prob­lems. Around this time, New York City near­ly default­ed on its bonds and failed to get fed­er­al aid (as reflect­ed in the famous Dai­ly News head­line FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD). Arthur Weiss got caught in the squeeze. “The city wasn’t pay­ing his bills. and he couldn’t pay his lenders,” says a knowl­edge­able source. His com­pa­ny went under.
     Sud­den­ly, col­lege was out of the ques­tion for Jay Weiss. He went look­ing for work. The crash had dev­as­tat­ed DiLorenzo’s oper­a­tions as well, and, he says, “we need­ed some­body cheap who could learn.” Hav­ing just assumed his father’s busi­ness, he also want­ed to attract some younger blood to the com­pa­ny. Weiss seemed to fit the bill per­fect­ly. He became a build­ing man­ag­er, col­lect­ing rent, super­vis­ing repairs, and deal­ing with ten­ants’ com­plaints.
     What was Weiss like in those days?
     “Very loud,” DiLoren­zo says.
     “Woooo!” Kefa­lidis says, cov­er­ing his ears for empha­sis. “Always before you start ask­ing for some­thing, he’d scream and yell. But Jay put in hours like not too many peo­ple. He was up ear­ly in the morn­ing. You can’t take that away from him. You can take away oth­er things…”
     DiLoren­zo looks thought­ful. “It was very unusu­al to see some­one twen­ty years old that hun­gry for mon­ey,” he remarks, and Kefa­lidis nods. Maybe, he adds, it was the shock of see­ing his father lose his busi­ness.
     “Should I tell him about the ‘ben­e­fit of Jay Weiss’?” DiLoren­zo asks sud­den­ly. Kefa­lidis is silent. “We used to have a say­ing that the ben­e­fit of Jay Weiss was that he didn’t know what he was doing. I real­ize that sounds sick today, because of Hap­py Land, and it doesn’t mean Jay didn’t learn a lot of things over the years. But that’s some­thing that we kid­ded about back then. He was a kid; he would do things you couldn’t get an old­er guy to do. He didn’t think that much about it. Jay was focused on an objec­tive. The guy had incred­i­ble ener­gy.“
     His spe­cial­ty, accord­ing to the two men, was evict­ing ten­ants from DiLorenzo’s build­ings. How did Weiss do it? “Kill ’em!” DiLoren­zo says, laugh­ing, then real­izes the joke is a bit taste­less under the cir­cum­stances. “Some­times just through talk­ing.”
     “He would talk from here to next Mon­day, Jay,” Kefa­lidis says.
     “Jay was pushy, aggres­sive.”
     What if talk­ing wasn’t enough to get ten­ants out of a build­ing?
     DiLoren­zo shrugs. “Pay ’em a few bucks. Crazy things. He didn’t know any bet­ter.”
     “A guy would ask for five thou­sand bucks. Jay would tell him, ‘I’ll give you five hun­dred,’“ Kefa­lidis says.
     “The cli­mate was dif­fer­ent,” DiLoren­zo says, cut­ting in. “We could relo­cate peo­ple in those days.” Besides, he adds, in a falling mar­ket, you take any edge you can get. “When you’re involved in an oper­a­tion that’s strug­gling, you do things not 100 per­cent kosher. You bend the rules a lit­tle. It was a game.” (Shep Gold­fein, Weiss’s attor­ney, says he doubts his client was good at vacat­ing build­ings, because “if he has a weak­ness. it’s that he’s basi­cal­ly a softy.”)
     Weiss and DiLoren­zo played the game for sev­er­al years, but by the end of the decade Weiss was ready to strike out on his own. Before long, he had moved into a red brick apart­ment house on West Six­teenth Street, in Chelsea, and set up a build­ing-man­age­ment com­pa­ny on the ground floor called J. L. Madi­son Prop­er­ties. (The ini­tials pre­sum­ably stood for his first name and that of his old­er sis­ter, Lau­rie Sol­dinger, who worked for him.) Mean­while, Weiss had got­ten a broker’s license, and one of his first clients was City Streets Real­ty, a real-estate part­ner­ship run by Ben­jamin Kol­bert and Mor­ris Jaffe—the man who would one day become Weiss’s part­ner. It was the gold­en era of real-estate “flipping”—buying prop­er­ties and rapid­ly sell­ing them at a profit—and there was a lot of mon­ey to be made all around. Weiss was said to be less inter­est­ed in pay­ing mon­ey out: in 1984, he waged war with a real-estate lawyer, Michael Schwartz, over sev­er­al thou­sand dol­lars Weiss owed for legal ser­vices. After an acri­mo­nious law­suit, a set­tle­ment was reached: Weiss would pay Schwartz $8,168.46 in three month­ly install­ments of $2,722.82. But three years lat­er, despite repeat­ed requests from Schwartz, Weiss con­tin­ued to stiff him on the third install­ment.
     DiLoren­zo smiles when remind­ed of the inci­dent. “Jay,” he says, “some­times has a habit of not pay­ing peo­ple.”
     Kefa­lidis laughs: “He put it right!”
     Indeed. it appeared to be a recur­ring theme in Weiss’s career. Says a for­mer employ­ee of J. L. Madi­son, “Jay didn’t like to pay con­trac­tors. He didn’t like to pay his work­men. He would have them do jobs, and then keep them wait­ing, and wait­ing, and wait­ing for the mon­ey. One day some guy just stormed into Jay’s office, grabbed him by the col­lar, and pushed him up against the wall. And Jay start­ed scream­ing, ‘Get me a check! Cut me a check!’ I guess Jay’s about five sev­en. This guy was a lot big­ger.”
     The per­son with per­haps the best knowl­edge of Weiss’s activ­i­ties dur­ing this peri­od is Alfred Groner, an attor­ney and real-estate investor who helped bankroll J. L. Madi­son. He is reluc­tant to speak at first: “The son of a bitch will prob­a­bly sue me. You nev­er know with this creep.” But he con­tin­ues any­way, say­ing Weiss did a cred­itable job as a build­ing man­ag­er. “He was as good or as bad as most of them, noth­ing super-spe­cial. He had a spe­cial quirk, though. He would get angry at ten­ants, and then he’d spend an inor­di­nate amount of time bust­ing their chops, try­ing to get them out of apart­ments. Which wasn’t real­ly eco­nom­ic. And, besides, you can’t get emo­tion­al about this shit.” Groner found Lau­rie Sol­dinger pret­ty emo­tion­al, too. “Ter­ri­ble scream­er.”
     It was around this time, in 1983, that Jay Weiss met Kath­leen Turn­er. Body Heat had estab­lished her as a star, and she had just fin­ished film­ing Romanc­ing the Stone. Too busy for a boyfriend, Turn­er was liv­ing in a small apart­ment on Fifty-sev­enth Street. When Weiss learned, through a mutu­al friend, that Turn­er was seek­ing a larg­er space, he went into over­drive. “He was fran­tic to try to find this movie star an apart­ment,” an acquain­tance recalls. “He was call­ing every­body he knew to get her a real­ly good deal, and he came up with one. That’s how the rela­tion­ship began.” But, for once in his life, Weiss seemed plagued by self-doubt. “He was afraid he wasn’t good enough for her,” Groner recalls. “I remem­ber hold­ing his hand, telling him, ‘Yeah, you’re a good guy.’”
     In August 1984, Weiss and Turn­er were mar­ried at a rent­ed man­sion in Ama­gansett, on Long Island. Both bride and groom were twen­ty-nine. “I prob­a­bly paid for the wed­ding,” says Groner, who was a guest, along with Mor­ris Jaffe and Ben Kol­bert, “but what the hell.” After that, how­ev­er, Groner decid­ed to pull out of J. L. Madi­son. “I could see the hand­writ­ing on the wall. I fig­ured a guy mar­ry­ing a big movie star isn’t gonna go around check­ing the plumb­ing and leaks and all that stuff.”
     Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Weiss did lose inter­est in main­tain­ing buildings—or so Groner alleged in a 1985 law­suit. Groner had remained part­ners with Weiss and Sol­dinger in two cor­po­ra­tions that man­aged four prop­er­ties. In the suit, Groner charged that Weiss had allowed two of the buildings—adjoining apart­ment hous­es on Forty-ninth Street—to fall into such dis­re­pair that ten­ants had mount­ed a rent strike. An angry let­ter from the ten­ants dat­ed August 22, 1985, com­plained of, among oth­er things, a miss­ing lock on the entrance door, mice and roach infes­ta­tion, hot-water short­ages, and the lack of legal­ly required smoke alarms in the hall­ways. The suit was set­tled in Jan­u­ary 1986; the part­ner­ships were dis­solved and Groner dropped his charges. (The case file con­tains no answer to the alle­ga­tions, and Weiss would not com­ment.)
     For a short time, Weiss worked for Mor­ris Jaffe and Ben Kol­bert as a sales rep­re­sen­ta­tive at City Streets. But soon Weiss and Jaffe decid­ed to split with Kol­bert and form their own part­ner­ship, Queens Apple. They moved to 30 Rock­e­feller Plaza and embarked on the busi­ness of leas­ing DiLoren­zo prop­er­ties. Weiss had now come full cir­cle; he was back man­ag­ing build­ings for his for­mer boss, only this time he got, essen­tial­ly, to own them, through long-term leas­es. He could be a real-estate mogul with­out hav­ing to put up the kind of cap­i­tal that DiLoren­zo pos­sessed.
     Although City Streets was defunct, some of its prac­tices would come back guy to haunt Weiss, Jaffe, and Kol­bert. In July 1987, New York Attor­ney Gen­er­al Robert Abrams ordered the three men. along with Jaffe’s wife, Har­ri­et, to pay $60,000 in resti­tu­tion plus $10,000 in legal fees in what was described as a com­plex sub­let­ting scam. Abrams charged that they had cre­at­ed “illu­so­ry ten­an­cies” by rent­ing apart­ments to them­selves, fam­i­ly mem­bers, and friends, then sub­let­ting them at high­er-than-legal rates. A press release issued by Abrams’s office sin­gled out Weiss, say­ing he had “ille­gal­ly prof­it­ed” from the scheme. All four of the accused signed a con­sent decree.
     The scan­dal did not appear to dam­age Weiss’s busi­ness or his per­son­al life. In an inter­view with Bar­bara Wal­ters late last year, Turner’s praise for her hus­band was unre­served. Asked what Weiss had that oth­er men did not, she said, “Besides being gor­geous and sexy and intelligent…he gave me the best com­pli­ment, the great­est com­pli­ment I ever had. He said that he thought I would be excel­lent at any­thing I decid­ed to do. So, he didn’t make me feel like I was some actress.… I liked the respect inher­ent in that state­ment.”
     The mar­riage is, by all accounts, a suc­cess. Weiss and Turn­er have a two-year-old daugh­ter, Rachel Ann. Turn­er plays in Sat­ur­day-after­noon soft­ball games her hus­band orga­nizes near their Ama­gansett sum­mer home, a two-and-a-half-sto­ry frame house with an ocean view. It’s unclear how much strain, if any, the Hap­py Land dis­as­ter has placed on the union. For a brief peri­od, Turn­er had to ask for a police escort home after her Broad­way per­for­mances in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, because of heck­lers.
     The effect of the fire on Weiss’s busi­ness rela­tion­ships is eas­i­er to gauge—investors are like­ly to look close­ly before enter­ing into deal­ings with Queens Apple now. As for DiLoren­zo, it appears that even before the fire, rela­tions with Weiss were strained. In Jan­u­ary 1990, Weiss and Jaffe sued DiLoren­zo to pre­vent him from revok­ing their leas­es on eight prop­er­ties, includ­ing a super­mar­ket in Long Island City and 877 East Tremont Avenue, part of the clump of stores that includ­ed Hap­py Land. DiLorenzo’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for try­ing to take back the prop­er­ties was Weiss and Jaffe’s alleged fail­ure to pay their rent on time and main­tain the build­ings. This lat­ter accu­sa­tion was an omi­nous fore­shad­ow­ing of the Hap­py Land dis­as­ter, although, in an affi­davit, Jaffe denied it. Hap­py Land has widened the rift between DiLoren­zo and Weiss, at least as far as future busi­ness is con­cerned. The day before our lun­cheon meet­ing, DiLoren­zo talked through his feel­ings about the deba­cle over the phone.
     “The truth is, I nev­er saw those vio­la­tions when they came in. We have a record that they were sent [on] to him [Weiss]. Prob­a­bly I should have gone to the city and had them reis­sued in his name. But we nev­er did it.”
     Indeed, to hear DiLoren­zo tell it, he was bare­ly aware that Hap­py Land exist­ed. When he bought the Bronx prop­er­ties, there was no social club, and even if there had been, DiLoren­zo would not have seen it. “I didn’t go in,” he recalled. “I drove by. I went to the cor­ner, which was a Chi­nese restau­rant that sold food through a win­dow.” It was not until four days after the Hap­py Land fire that DiLoren­zo went up and “looked at the joint,” he said. “It scared the shit out of me, to tell you the truth. It was a hor­ror.”
     Despite every­thing, DiLoren­zo expressed sym­pa­thy for his for­mer employ­ee. “I mean, what am I gonna do, hate Jay Weiss? He’s in a very tough sit­u­a­tion, being mar­ried to a movie star. It’s extra pres­sure, if you see what I mean. Me, I’m stu­pid enough to be able to deal with it. I can kind of skate away, just be a noto­ri­ous fel­low, and prob­a­bly sur­vive.” The next day, at the health-food restau­rant, DiLoren­zo appears a lit­tle less char­i­ta­ble.
     “Jay, what a headache,” he sighs. “This guy became such a fuck­ing headache, I can’t believe it.”

HAVING BECOME A “noto­ri­ous fel­low” is almost a ful­fill­ment of Alex III’s her­itage. Even his grand­fa­ther, the first Alexan­der DiLoren­zo, is a sub­ject of spec­u­la­tion. There are sto­ries that he ran num­bers all over Brook­lyn. “Is it true?” DiLoren­zo says. “Or did he spend eight, ten months of his life as a teenag­er as a gofer for some guy who did? That’s prob­a­bly clos­er to the real­i­ty.”
     The bare facts about Alex senior are intrigu­ing enough. He was an ille­git­i­mate child, born in Naples, then shipped to Brazil with his moth­er. She met a Brazil­ian with rel­a­tives in the Unit­ed States who raised the boy from the age of eight. He worked in a bar­ber­shop, stud­ied phar­ma­cy, and wound up in the insur­ance busi­ness. He also dab­bled in real estate, with lit­tle suc­cess. Alex junior, the father of Alex III, was born in the Red Hook sec­tion of Brook­lyn. He was a dark-com­plex­ioned man who stood about five feet ten inch­es and had an arro­gant streak. In 1973, when the New York Post point­ed out, cor­rect­ly, that he and Sol Gold­man were “the No. 1 sex land­lords in mid-Manhattan”—they owned a host of mas­sage par­lors, includ­ing the Harem, Caesar’s Retreat, and Puss ‘n Boots—the two men sued for libel. Under oath, DiLoren­zo said the arti­cles had dam­aged him with friends, but when pressed to pro­vide a few names he curt­ly replied, “I am not in a mood to recall.”
     After the war, Alex junior attend­ed Brook­lyn Law, became an attor­ney, and, tak­ing a cue from his father, also got a degree in phar­ma­cy from St. John’s. In the ear­ly fifties, DiLoren­zo was rep­re­sent­ing a client who was pre­pared to buy a large apart­ment house in Brook­lyn in which Sol Gold­man had invest­ed. The son of a gro­cer, Gold­man had ven­tured into real estate part­ly with mon­ey he had bor­rowed from Alex senior. When the buy­er backed out at the last minute, Gold­man and Alex junior acquired the build­ing togeth­er.
     The part­ner­ship took off, and soon it appeared that Gold­man and DiLoren­zo were buy­ing a build­ing a day. Their empire grew so swift­ly that it set tongues wag­ging. “They were mys­tery men, and they were pre­sumed to be out front of nar­cotics or Mob mon­ey,” says a for­mer F.B.I. agent who took a pass­ing inter­est in them. Either out of secre­cy or per­verse­ness, Gold­man and DiLoren­zo fueled some rumors them­selves. Explain­ing how they had got­ten their seed cap­i­tal, they told the trans­par­ent­ly ridicu­lous sto­ry of a black domes­tic named Lulu Jack­son, who turned up one day with $250,000 in cash she had won play­ing the num­bers. Jack­son, they said, asked them to invest the mon­ey for her—and dis­ap­peared. In fact, Lulu Jack­son was the white aunt of Willard T. Jack­son, a wealthy Con­necti­cut busi­ness­man who did lend mon­ey to Goldman/DiLorenzo.
     Mob rumors about the part­ners were par­tic­u­lar­ly fre­quent. Gold­man once broke a strike at a build­ing by hir­ing a “labor-con­sul­tant firm” with ties to the Gam­bi­no fam­i­ly. “Bull­shit,” says Eddie Breger, a for­mer lawyer for Goldman/DiLorenzo, when asked about the Mafia rumors. “So Alex went to the race­track and one of the mafiosi was there. Ital­ians are Ital­ians. But he was a nice guy. Some­times. Always fought with him when he paid my fee.
     The real secret of the duo’s rapid rise, Alex III says, was less sin­is­ter, though still not strict­ly legal. Gold­man and DiLoren­zo were play­ing a game of lever­age, mort­gag­ing build­ings and using the pro­ceeds to buy big­ger build­ings. To keep from get­ting squeezed for work­ing cap­i­tal, they stalled as long as pos­si­ble in pay­ing their bills. Rather more dar­ing was their habit of not pay­ing real-estate tax­es. Since banks demand­ed to see tax receipts, Gold­man and DiLoren­zo got blank cer­tifi­cates and dum­mied them up. How did they get away with it? “Easy!” Alex III laughs. “Nobody went and checked.”
     Gold­man and DiLoren­zo worked on dif­fer­ent floors of their tro­phy prop­er­ty, the Chrysler Build­ing, which had been leased to them for forty years in 1960 for $42 mil­lion. DiLoren­zo han­dled the man­age­ment, and Gold­man made the deals, for which he had an appar­ent genius. Accord­ing to Eddie Breger, it was Gold­man who coined the famous phrase “loca­tion, loca­tion, loca­tion” to describe the three secrets of suc­cess­ful real-estate invest­ing. Gold­man claimed he could remem­ber the most minute detail of every deal he had ever made, and bragged that his ambi­tion was to become “the rich­est man in the world.”
     As a fam­i­ly man, how­ev­er, he was a pau­per. In 1973, Gold­man had evic­tion papers served on his grand­daugh­ters Stephanie and Cindy, then ages sev­en and five, who lived in one of his Man­hat­tan apart­ments with his recent­ly divorced daugh­ter-in-law; the papers referred to them as “John and Jane Doe.” He peremp­to­ri­ly fired his son Allan from Goldman/DiLorenzo and stood by as employ­ees smashed Allan’s framed pho­tos and diplo­mas and threw them out onto the street. After Goldman’s death in 1987, his heirs launched into one of the most vicious estate bat­tles ever record­ed. As it now stands, Goldman’s four chil­dren are try­ing to bar their moth­er, Lil­lian, from a one-third share of the $1.2 bil­lion estate. “They want me to be a bag lady,” she is report­ed to have said.
     Alex junior had the same goal as Gold­man, to be a rich man, yet mon­ey was sel­dom dis­cussed in his house­hold. Alex III grew up com­fort­ably, though not extrav­a­gant­ly, in Great Neck, on Long Island. At thir­teen, he was trans­ferred from the local pub­lic school to a pri­vate all-boys’ school in Gar­den City, but not because his father could afford to send him. “I had a behav­ior prob­lem,” he says.
     DiLoren­zo explains: “I had trou­ble with a guy who bul­lied me when I was in the sev­enth grade. He was in the ninth grade, and he got involved with a girl that was in my home­room class. Now, in lat­er life, I real­ize they had a sex­u­al involve­ment, but I didn’t know it at the time. She and I were some­what friend­ly, but strict­ly just friend­ly. Rode a school bus togeth­er. This guy used to get mad at me, broke a watch I had. And he used to beat me up. It got to be ridicu­lous. Every day, I’d come home with a cut face. And my father would go, ‘You got­ta fight back. Do the right thing.’ Well, when he found out what I did, he went nuts.”
     What did he do?
     “I straight­ened him out with a base­ball bat,” DiLoren­zo says after a pause. “Look, the guy broke my ass—he beat the shit out of me every day. Humil­i­at­ed me for about five months. So I got two of my friends and we took him apart. Cor­nered this guy and did him in good. I hit him in the legs. I think I dis­lo­cat­ed his knee. Crushed. Guy nev­er looked at me straight again.”
     DiLoren­zo reached col­lege age in the six­ties. He want­ed to go to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cape Town because it seemed exot­ic. His par­ents nixed the idea. Instead, he enrolled in an exper­i­men­tal pro­gram at Ford­ham, in the Bronx, called Ben­salem, named for an island in a Fran­cis Bacon nov­el. Before com­plet­ing his stud­ies at Ford­ham, DiLoren­zo and four friends found­ed New Prospects, the school-with­out-walls. He taught high-school math and his­to­ry, along with pho­tog­ra­phy. Lat­er, he han­dled admin­is­tra­tion.
     Dur­ing this peri­od, DiLoren­zo met a Ford­ham stu­dent his age who would soon become Grace DiLoren­zo. She was study­ing to become a nun and had worked as a mid­wife on Long Island. Her ances­try was var­ied: part Czechoslo­vak, part British, part Japan­ese. They mar­ried at nine­teen and prompt­ly had a daugh­ter, Genevra—Grace had caught the name from an Ital­ian paint­ing in a muse­um. (The mar­riage would not work well in the long run. The DiLoren­zos divorced at twen­ty-three, remar­ried years lat­er, had three more chil­dren, and divorced again when they were thir­ty-five. Today, Grace lives in Paris with the three youngest chil­dren. The divorce “wasn’t what he want­ed,” says John Burns, DiLorenzo’s for­mer lawyer.)
     See­ing his son get mar­ried at nine­teen deeply upset Alex junior. He did not dis­own Alex III, but was not about to sup­port him, his young wife, and their child. To help make ends meet, Alex III drove a cab. Then he and a cousin acquired a hard­ware store from Goldman/ DiLoren­zo that the real-estate part­ner­ship had picked up as part of a build­ing pur­chase.
     Alex III might have remained in the hard­ware busi­ness, but in 1973 his father’s health began to dete­ri­o­rate. The elder DiLoren­zo sent an emis­sary with a mes­sage: he believed he was dying and want­ed his son to come in and learn the busi­ness. The young man agreed.
     Two years lat­er, Alex junior was found slumped over his desk, dead of a heart attack at age fifty. A week ear­li­er, Goldman/DiLorenzo had lost the lease on the Chrysler Building—one of the first in a long series of defaults that would trans­form the adult life of Alex III and teach him the mean­ing of adver­si­ty.
     Goldman/DiLorenzo had built its empire on debt, and, as Don­ald Trump has recent­ly dis­cov­ered, that only works in a ris­ing mar­ket. “When Alex took over the man­age­ment of those prop­er­ties,” says Burns, “there was no rea­son for him to believe he was gonna come out own­ing any­thing.” DiLoren­zo still had a lot to learn, and now his father was no longer there to teach him. “It’s amaz­ing,” DiLoren­zo says. “I nev­er thought he would die. And then he just died.”
     Though Alex III had been groomed to replace his father as Goldman’s equal part­ner, it did not at first appear like­ly to hap­pen. DiLoren­zo had tak­en over his father’s office on the eighth floor of the Chrysler Build­ing, while Gold­man remained on the sixth. But as soon as their new part­ner­ship was formed, Gold­man announced he would move into DiLorenzo’s suite as a way to cut costs. DiLoren­zo rea­soned that he was still strug­gling to build an iden­ti­ty, and that if Gold­man moved in, “I was fin­ished.” So he called a secu­ri­ty-guard friend who in turn round­ed up eight ex-cops, all of them armed. They bar­ri­cad­ed his door. When Gold­man real­ized that DiLoren­zo was seri­ous, he deployed some ware­house goons to storm the office, but found it impen­e­tra­ble. Gold­man final­ly gave up, end­ing one of the more bizarre episodes in the his­to­ry of the aus­tere Chrysler Build­ing. “It was a Mex­i­can stand­off,” DiLoren­zo laughs.
     It remained an uneasy part­ner­ship. Ear­ly on, when busi­ness was still bleak, Gold­man pro­posed to buy DiLoren­zo out for $20 mil­lion. DiLoren­zo declined the offer. In ret­ro­spect, he says, “I think the biggest moti­va­tion for Sol to get rid of me was he want­ed to expand, and he didn’t want to take me into the deals. He under­stood that the mar­ket was com­ing back way before I did.”
     When boom times returned in the late sev­en­ties, it was DiLoren­zo who want­ed to split with Gold­man. Gold­man was against it, but DiLoren­zo sued and won. He was now faced with a dilem­ma: “How do you split up a busi­ness of a cou­ple of hun­dred build­ings with a guy when he knows every­thing and you don’t know a damn thing?” He arrived at an ele­gant solu­tion. Gold­man was instruct­ed to draw up A and B lists of prop­er­ties and place them in envelopes in a paper bag. A third par­ty tossed a coin, which DiLoren­zo and Gold­man called in the air. The win­ner of the toss extract­ed an enve­lope blind­fold­ed. “I fig­ured this was the way to guar­an­tee that he would work to make the lists equal,” DiLoren­zo says. “Basic set the­o­ry.”
     Now on his own, DiLoren­zo did not do bad­ly. The eight­ies were a big decade for flip­ping, but he nev­er sold, just acquired. He fig­ures he bought about 150 new prop­er­ties. About 20 per­cent of these might qual­i­fy as “slum” build­ings, which proved to be some of the most lucra­tive finds in the real-estate busi­ness, since they could be bought rel­a­tive­ly cheap­ly at a time when prices were sky­rock­et­ing. DiLoren­zo also bought some upscale items, includ­ing the land under 200 Madi­son Avenue, for which he paid $7 mil­lion. His best deal, per­haps, was his 1986 pur­chase of the Wash­ing­ton Square Mews, a Euro­pean-style lane in Green­wich Vil­lage, from New York Uni­ver­si­ty. “I clipped it,” he claims. DiLoren­zo is weigh­ing an idea to devel­op the mews into a retail sec­tion along the lines of London’s Covent Gar­den.
     Though the real-estate mar­ket, in DiLorenzo’s view, is now at its most depressed since the mid-sev­en­ties, he is not in any real dan­ger. He can be fault­ed, though, for invest­ments he has made out­side his core busi­ness. For starters, he lost $14 mil­lion spec­u­lat­ing in sil­ver futures. Then there is the invest­ment he rue­ful­ly terms his biggest “strike­out,” his pur­chas­es in late 1986 and ear­ly 1987 of two real-estate bro­ker­age firms for a com­bined $17 mil­lion. DiLoren­zo says he had no strate­gic rea­son for buy­ing the two firms—Huberth & Peters and Pearce, Urstadt, May­er & Greer—other than to make mon­ey. That’s the one thing he has not done, hav­ing over­paid for both com­pa­nies at the top of the real-estate cycle.
     The pur­chas­es would have been bad enough, but then DiLoren­zo made what he calls his “sec­ond mis­take.” In August 1988, after a year and a half of loss­es, he decid­ed to hire a “liai­son” to over­see the bro­ker­ages for him. The man he chose was Ando­nis “Tony” Mor­fe­sis, famil­iar to tabloid read­ers as “the Dev­il Land­lord.” Mor­fe­sis is an ardent flipper—the two men met when he sold DiLoren­zo some of the con­tro­ver­sial brown­stones in West Harlem and a park­ing garage. The Dev­il did not like to keep pos­ses­sion of build­ings for long, and when he did, he had an appar­ent aver­sion to pro­vid­ing basic ameni­ties, as heat or even, as The Vil­lage Voice found after vis­it­ing one of his prop­er­ties, a front door. The Voice, which anoint­ed him one of the city’s “Worst Land­lords,” also report­ed that Mor­fe­sis once greet­ed a process serv­er plac­ing a .45 at the man’s neck. (Not true, says Mor­fe­sis. He used a bil­ly club.)
     At the time DiLoren­zo hired him, Mor­fe­sis was fight­ing a los­ing bat­tle to avoid a five-month jail sen­tence for civ­il con­tempt after he had alleged­ly ignored a sum­mons to pro­vide heat and hot water in the dead of win­ter to ten­ants on St. Nicholas Avenue. Mor­fe­sis was released from jail last April after serv­ing only fifty-six days when a fed­er­al judge ruled that the civ­il court that had sen­tenced did not prove beyond a rea­son­able doubt that he had seen the sum­mons.
     To put it mild­ly, Mor­fe­sis was out of place among the white-shoe com­mer­cial bro­ker­age firms that DiLoren­zo asked him to over­see. Mor­fe­sis says he stemmed loss­es by cut­ting off the bro­kers’ advances against com­mis­sions, a unusu­al break from tra­di­tion. “I put some pride into their lazy ass­es,” he says. He also caused an exo­dus of bro­kers, and after six months he too depart­ed, leav­ing the firms no bet­ter off than before, accord­ing to DiLoren­zo.
     This unfor­tu­nate episode had bare­ly been played out when DiLoren­zo found him­self in court bat­tling his two younger sib­lings, Marc and Lisa. They alleged that his loss­es in sil­ver and real-estate bro­ker­age were part of a pat­tern of mis­man­age­ment that threat­ened their inter­ests. Under the terms of their father’s will, Marc and Lisa are Alex’s part­ners, though the sis­ter has played no role in oper­a­tions, and Marc very lit­tle before 1986. Thir­ty-three, taller, and bet­ter look­ing than Alex, Marc has led the play­boy life-style his old­er broth­er has avoid­ed, jet­ting off to ski vaca­tions, rac­ing for­mu­la Fords, dat­ing fash­ion mod­els. Marc and Lisa now want­ed to exer­cise a put option to carve up the DiLoren­zo empire and leave with their respec­tive prop­er­ties, but failed to reach an agree­ment through arbi­tra­tion. They asked Man­hat­tan Supreme Court judge Harold Baer to force the issue. Deny­ing the request in a Decem­ber 1989 rul­ing, Judge Baer crit­i­cized Marc for his “hyper­bole” and not­ed that, while Alex might have made some bad deci­sions, “the loss­es are small as com­pared with the growth in the val­ue of the fam­i­ly busi­ness under Alex’s stew­ard­ship.”
     Alex says that the mat­ter is near­ly resolved, that Marc (who had per­suad­ed Lisa to go along with the internecine bat­tle) and he were able to set­tle their dif­fer­ences on their own, face-to-face. “At a cer­tain point, you don’t need a hun­dred peo­ple talk­ing in between,” he says. “They don’t accom­plish any­thing, they just send bills. I mean, he’s my brother—I know him. Maybe cer­tain things I do irri­tate him, maybe he got confused—who the hell knows? But he’s still my broth­er, and if I want to go smack him in the face, I do it myself. It’s strict­ly on that lev­el. By the way, that’s how we actu­al­ly set­tled this thing. We final­ly got down to it. It got to be that stu­pid.” What was the out­come? “I let him beat me up. Heh-heh-heh.”

MAYBE HIRING Tony Mor­fe­sis was a mis­take, but at least it has paid DiLoren­zo one div­i­dend: free legal advice. Mor­fe­sis says he is at the end of a Dan­tean jour­ney that DiLoren­zo is just begin­ning. His own expe­ri­ence tells him that, because of Hap­py Land, DiLoren­zo faces not only jail but char­ac­ter assas­si­na­tion. Morfesis’s cramped office on West Hous­ton Street bears tes­ti­mo­ny to his per­son­al ordeal. The walls are cov­ered with framed arti­cles vil­i­fy­ing him—PACT WITH THE DEVIL, MORFESIS MOCKS THE COURTS AGAIN. “I put them up for a laugh,” he says, “because if any­body believes all this non­sense, you have to be sick.” The real vil­lain, he explains, is “the Sys­tem,” which makes “vic­tims” out of both land­lord and ten­ant. True, he hasn’t been “Jack Quick” to repair his prop­er­ties, but who can blame him when rent-sta­bi­liza­tion laws and spi­ral­ing real-estate tax­es wipe out prof­its? “Where’s free enter­prise? I’m not say­ing gouge. But don’t make the land­lord be a social-ser­vice man.”     Jail was a grim and humil­i­at­ing expe­ri­ence, Mor­fe­sis says, that left him “very, very cold.” The guards patrolling on sui­cide watch were con­vict­ed felons. When he got out, he did his bit for soci­ety by hir­ing two of them. “I made them supers.”
     Mor­fe­sis has been giv­ing DiLoren­zo some insight into what is in store. ‘‘It’s beyond a night­mare. It’s beyond the Twi­light Zone—turning on that tele­vi­sion and find­ing out you’re the biggest son of a bitch in Amer­i­ca and you can’t under­stand why. Do you have any idea? Here’s a man who made a lease with Jay Weiss, and now they want to put Alex in jail? That’s a sor­ry com­men­tary, my friend. Excuse the French, who the fuck are these peo­ple? Where is jus­tice?”
     “I asked Tony what goes on in jail, because I want­ed to know,” DiLoren­zo admits. “I was sur­prised that he seemed so shook, because Tony’s a pret­ty tough guy. But I’m not freaked out by the idea of sit­ting some­where for a while, as sick as that may sound. I just can’t let that destroy me. I woke up, and I’m in this god­damn sit­u­a­tion. I can’t run away. It’s like find­ing out you have to have your appen­dix out. What are you gonna do? You got­ta do it. Do it or you’re dead, you know what I’m say­ing? It’s on that lev­el. You take your best shot, and if you can’t beat it, you do it.”
     Does he think about the Hap­py Land vic­tims? “Sure, a lit­tle bit,” he says. “I don’t feel like I did any­thing. I real­ly don’t. Thank God. I look inside myself peri­od­i­cal­ly. I know what facts I knew. And I don’t feel like I killed ’em.”
     Kefa­lidis has left to go back to the office. The bill is paid. DiLoren­zo glances at his sports watch. It’s late, but he seems in no spe­cial hur­ry. As he walks down Sec­ond Avenue, no one rec­og­nizes him. He says he is on his way to buy an air­line tick­et, but it has just dawned on him that he has to answer a sum­mons in Queens next week. Time was when he could ignore the war­rants for his arrest, but no longer. He gives a slight shrug that says: More headaches. Then the man who owns forty-two acres of Man­hat­tan dis­ap­pears into the crowd.♦