twenty-eight
First, the cast of characters. The Heiress—Harriet Pierce, multi-millionaire and heiress. The Bridegroom—Dana Mitchell, divorced father of seven, friend and business associate of Philip J. Mandina, and soon to marry the Heiress. The Call Girl—Terry Timme, friend of Philip J. Mandina, soon to be kept by Dana Mitchell (the Bridegroom). The Divorcée—Ruth Casey, restaurant owner, dupe in the first scam. The Attorney—Philip J. Mandina, attorney.
The nicknames may prove useful because this is a long and tangled story. It emerges from hundreds of pages of testimony, the record of
Philip J. Mandina, et al. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue (1982).
Although Mandina has several accomplices (also found guilty of fraud), he is the one given star billing.
The year was 1969. The Divorcee, Ruth Casey, owned a Miami restaurant known as Black Caesar’s Forge. Regulars at the restaurant included a certain Dana Mitchell and a certain Philip J. Mandina.
Dana Mitchell wanted to buy the restaurant from the Divorcée. Not with his money, but with the money of the woman he planned to marry. She was the Heiress, Harriet Pierce, and she came up with $175,000, which she loaned to the Bridegroom’s company, which eventually became known as DMI (Dana Mitchell Industries).
Oddly, the Heiress’s money was deposited in a checking account under the name of Philip J. Mandina, the Attorney. Mandina then drew up papers establishing the firm bearing the initials of the Bridegroom, DMI. Mandina named himself corporate counsel for DMI; his private secretary and his private investigator were named as officers; the official DMI office was a room in Mandina’s law offices. (This set-up was the same he later used in setting up Linda Lovelace Enterprises.)
DMI’s first order of business was to buy the Divorcée’s restaurant. This was done with four checks—one for $100,000, one for $50,000, and two for $25,000 each. All four checks were made out to Divorcee Ruth Casey, and she endorsed all four of them. However—get ready for the scam—she was allowed to cash only one, the $100,000 check. Mandina assured her she should be grateful to be getting that much. The other $100,000 in checks bearing her endorsement were cashed by . . . well . . . someone else.
According to court testimony, and to all outward appearances, the Heiress was very much in love with the Bridegroom. It’s not just that she was often seen clinging to his arm. Her affection could be measured in numbers, large numbers, large round numbers. Because that same month, April of 1969, she was persuaded to invest some of her money in the firm that bore her Bridegroom’s initials; she invested precisely $2,600,000 in DMI.
Although this would seem to be powerful evidence of affection, the Bridegroom was not content. He seemed to want more. According to another witness, Dana Mitchell didn’t like the idea of starting out married life on a less-than-equal footing with his Heiress bride-to-be. Consequently, on the very day before the marriage ceremony, she presented him with a gift of $400,000. The Bridegroom accepted $100,000 in cash, and deposited that in his personal checking account. The other $300,000, in the form of a cashier’s check made out to cash, was cashed by . . . well . . . someone else.
The Bridegroom’s firm, DMI, made a loan of $100,000 to the Bridegroom, a loan that was never paid back. Of this amount, $97,000 found its way into Mandina’s bank account. Supposedly, this was a combination loan and payment for the sale of a motorboat and a yacht. This enabled Mandina to plunk down $93,000 toward an even newer and bigger yacht.
In August of that year, the Bridegroom signed a DMI check for $260,000. It was claimed that this money went into buying Sooner State Oil Co. stock, but, as it turned out, Sooner State was what is known as a shell corporation, an empty shell that looks something like a real business but is just a place to conceal money. The money dealings were all handled by a longtime Mandina friend and associate named Stefano Brandino, an Italian national who lived in the Bahamas.
And how did the Heiress’s money disappear in this kind of a deal? Here’s how. At a meeting in Mandina’s office, Brandino bought 344,500 shares of Sooner stock for a reported $35,000. He immediately resold the stock to DMI for $260,000. Brandino was paid $3,000 for signing the right papers in the right places. And—poof!—more than $200,000 of the Heiress’s money disappeared into thin air.
As complicated as all these dealings were, one thing became clear: Hundreds of thousands of dollars found their way from DMI into the pockets of the Attorney, the Bridegroom and two other partners. But this was a secret. They didn’t want anyone to know that they were becoming rich while the Heiress was becoming poorer. Which must be why, when he filed his income tax form that year, Mandina reported an income of $17,055. The Bridegroom, on the other hand, didn’t bother to file any income tax report at all.
Just a few weeks after the marriage, the Bridegroom, Mitchell, visited Mandina’s yacht, where the Attorney introduced him to the Call Girl, one of two call girls who happened by on this particular evening.
This Call Girl’s name was Terry Timme. It was love at first sight. The very next morning the Bridegroom asked the Call Girl to give up her profession. The Bridegroom immediately installed her in an apartment at the Jockey Club and provided her with a $1,000-a-week allowance, a new car and many gifts.
The source for all this was, of course, the Heiress. The Heiress, then, was paying for her new husband’s very own Call Girl. Naturally, the Heiress was unaware of this. All she knew was that the Bridegroom went off “to work” every morning at 9 a.m. and came home at 5 p.m. complaining about another tough day at the office. Of course, he was not really going to any office; he was going, instead, to the Jockey Club and spending a not-so-tough day with the Call Girl.
But then: Trouble.
Big
trouble! Dana Mitchell, the Bridegroom, found himself falling deeper in love with the Call Girl. In fact, he talked about leaving his wife, the Heiress (with her still-untapped millions), and running away with the Call Girl. When Philip Mandina heard this, he ordered the Call Girl to get to his office—and fast.
“Mr. Mandina at that time told me that he was in control of Dana Mitchell, and he would make any decisions whether Dana would see me or not,” she testified. “He informed me at that time that he would also be paying me, not just Mr. Mitchell, and my job was to keep Mr. Mitchell happily married. And . . . he was telling me that Dana was working under him, and that he (Mandina) was running this whole show. I don’t—at the time I didn’t understand what he was talking about. And . . . he just told me I would take my orders from him, more or less, on how much time I would spend with Dana, and when I would see Dana.”
“Did he indicate why you were to take orders from him?”
“He said he was running the show.”
“What show?”
“At that time I wasn’t aware of what it was.”
“Did he make any reference to other individuals?”
“Yes,” she said. “That was the time that he informed me that Dana’s wife had the money, not Dana. He said Dana’s wife had the money. . . . At the time he said there was a lot of money to be made, and what Dana was talking about was chickenfeed compared to what was the possibility, and I got the impression of a large sum of money at that time, but he did not put a figure on it.”
One might conclude, therefore, that although the Heiress-Bride seemed to love the Bridegroom, he was not equally fond of her. According to the Call Girl that was, indeed, the case: “He married her for her money and . . . he wanted out. He couldn’t stand the marriage but he had to stay until the shopping center was done.”
Whoa, shopping center—
what
shopping center? The shopping center was the next stage in the plan to separate the Heiress from her inheritance. The basic modus operandi was the same as in the purchase of the restaurant. If you recall, there it was made to seem as though $200,000 was paid out when, in reality, the payment was only $100,000; the other $100,000 was unaccounted for. With a shopping center there were many purchases to be made and many numbers that could be inflated.
The Call Girl asked the Bridegroom what was so important about his shopping center.
“I asked him at the time why that was important, and he said because (of ordering) pipes and things, and they were to be a different price than what he ordered them for, and that’s how they were going to take the money . . . say, if you would buy pipes at $10, and you would put down that you paid $20 for it. . . . This was what he explained to me, how they were getting money from the shopping center. He also took me and showed me where the shopping center was going to be built off 36th Street [in Miami].”
The Call Girl then reported that Mandina sometimes visited the Bridegroom at her Jockey Club apartment. At one of these meetings they discussed the purchase of a shell company—a make-believe corporation with no real assets, a device used to hide large amounts of money. The phrase “shell company” was not in Terry Timme’s vocabulary, and her next response in court could be delivered properly only by an actress like Judy Holliday.
“They were talking about some money, and they brought up the shell company. I was not involved in the conversation. I was sitting back listening to the conversation. And Dana [the Bridegroom] was quite quiet, and the rest were talking about the shell company, and the reason it stood out so much is because I had mentioned it afterwards to a friend of mine when he asked what they were into, and I said they were into a gasoline station. I figured the Shell companies in the Bahamas were—they were going to have gasoline stations, and I was informed that a shell company is just the outskirts of a business that does not exist.”
As quickly as possible, Mandina, the Attorney, found ways to steal Harriet Pierce Mitchell’s fortune. Reading the trial transcript, I was reminded of an old Marx Brothers movie, people running this way and that with briefcases and paper bags stuffed with money, trying to find ways to hide it. Still and all, $2,600,000 is a lot of money to swindle.
One night a man came to the Call Girl’s apartment with a briefcase full of money and it was her job to count it.
“How much money did you count?” she was asked.
“I counted over $200,000 that time.”
“How much over $200,000?”
“I have-I keep putting this figure, $229,000 or $225,000, but I know it was at least $200,000, and I can’t put anything more than that.”
The money, most of it in $100 bills, was kept in the apartment until Mandina came over to collect it.
“The money was placed in a dresser beside the bed,” she remembered, “and we stayed there all night, because of the money, and it was moved to Mr. Mandina’s office the next morning.”
“Why did you stay there all night?”
“To make sure nothing happened to the money.”
Clearly then, Philip Mandina felt he had a very good thing going. And he was not about to let anyone or anything rock the yacht. But it wasn’t enough to figure out what to do with all the money, he also had to figure out what to do with the people.
And the people were definitely becoming a problem. As Dana Mitchell, the Bridegroom, watched his new wife’s money disappear, he began to develop a conscience. In fact, he decided to confess everything to his wife, the Heiress.
“He cried many, many hours,” the Call Girl remembered. “Physically cried, and was very upset, because he wanted to go to Mrs. Mitchell and tell her what was going on, and get out.”
“He wanted to go to Mrs. Mitchell and tell her what?” the judge asked.
“That he had made a mistake, and everything that had happened, and that he wanted out of it.”
This would of course stop the flow of money into the pockets of Mandina. The Attorney was not about to let that happen. In fact, he got so upset with the Bridegroom that he refused to answer his telephone calls. The Call Girl was there when the Bridegroom tried, and this is the way she remembered it: “He would constantly call from the Jockey Club trying to reach Mr. Mandina, who refused to talk to him and told him: ‘Stop being such a baby!’ ”
Mandina got very tough when he saw the Bridegroom getting cold feet. And once again he summoned the Call Girl to his office for a little talk.
“He told me that Mr. Mitchell had signed some papers,” she remembered that meeting. “And that he would go to jail if he didn’t continue where he was at. And that marriage was not involved in it, and that he could have me thrown out at any time, which I said I did not object to at that time. They also . . . they could stop saying he was at the office when his wife believed that’s where he was every day.”
Why would Dana Mitchell, the Bridegroom, sign papers that would get him in trouble? Because he had no choice. In a sense it was the same reason I signed every piece of paper that Mandina shoved in front of my nose. In fact, the Call Girl’s sworn testimony rang more than a few bells: “Well, I know from my own experience that the three times that Mr. Mandina came with papers, Dana signed them without reading, and every time it was brought up, Mr. Mandina would tell Dana: ‘Just sign the papers.’ ”
The Call Girl was then asked whether she had ever discussed the signing of papers with anyone.
“Only Mr. Mandina . . .” she said, “I remember going back to the day I was in his office, and he was making a comment at that time about he never put his name on any papers, when he was telling this other guy about this insurance company, and that he never put his name on any paper, so it could not affect him since he didn’t put his name on it.”