Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [37]
Lipset was burning money, desperate to fend off Maris’s $5 million lawsuit. He deployed his own network of investigators to find out who Maris really was, starting in Philadelphia, where Maris claimed to have been born. Lipset had an investigator check for a birth certificate and school records—on his résumé, Maris said he’d attended John Bartram High School in Philadelphia and Baldwin Wallace College in Ohio. Lipset’s detectives fanned out to both campuses. Next, Lipset had another colleague check Maris’s military record in Washington, D.C.
The investigator in Philadelphia could find no records of Paul Maris at either the high school or the college. Maris’s old address was a vacant lot in an African-American neighborhood. Maris, who was white, probably hadn’t grown up there, the investigators figured. The Washington end of the investigation came back empty, too. Maris had never served in the army at all.
What’s more, Lipset found that Maris, his wife, Lillian, and his father had similar Social Security numbers, each just one number higher than the last. He knew that couldn’t be a coincidence. But his team of investigators still had no idea who Maris was. They developed a working theory: he’d changed his name from something he felt sounded too ethnic, like Maresh or Mariscal.
So Lipset called Patrick Murphy, the former FBI investigator at Proudfoot, to find out what he knew. Over the phone, Murphy said he remembered Maris well, he’d checked Maris out, and everything was fine.
But, Lipset wanted to know, did the investigators check where Maris had gone to school?
Murphy said he had, and he’d spoken to a registrar at the school who confirmed Maris’s dates of enrollment.
Now Lipset knew that Murphy was lying: the schools did not have a record of Maris. But why would this private investigator be in on the cover-up? Lipset couldn’t figure it out.
The six-foot-six bodyguard who’d accompanied Creative Capital’s CEO had the final piece of the puzzle. The bodyguard’s name was Ed, and he was a former narcotics investigator with an entrepreneurial streak of his own. He knew Maris was a valuable prize, and he demanded that Creative Capital pay him thousands of dollars to reveal what he knew. The company paid Ed off, and he said he had heard from his buddies in the federal marshals’ service that Maris was actually a gangster from New Jersey. Years earlier, he’d testified against the Mafia, and he’d been offered a spot in the government’s witness protection program.
Maris, it turned out, did have a fake identity—one that had been created by the FBI itself. Eventually, Lipset found out that Maris’s real name was Gerald Zelmanowitz. The Mafia had a contract out on his life.
Zelmanowitz was a stock cheat who had been born in Brooklyn and whose testimony against the Mafia capo Angelo (“Gyp”) DeCarlo had put DeCarlo behind bars in 1970.15 Zelmanowitz, who described himself as a “securities analyst,” told the court that he’d seen DeCarlo’s associates brutally beating an insurance broker who had fallen behind in loan payments to the Mafia. The broker later died under suspicious circumstances, and the government thought he’d been murdered. Zelmanowitz’s testimony was one of the keys to the case. During the high-stakes proceedings in a courthouse in Newark, New Jersey, the feds went to great lengths to keep Zelmanowitz safe. He was escorted into and out of the courtroom by four federal marshals, and every person in the courtroom was screened for weapons by a metal detector. In those days, such screening was rare enough to be noted prominently in the newspaper.16
Still, Zelmanowitz exuded the confidence of a veteran con man on the witness stand. Under cross-examination, he said he’d earned $1 million over five years in a complicated Mafia-backed stock scheme. Zelmanowitz was used to living high. He and his wife drove new Cadillacs, his home was crammed with expensive furniture, and