A couple of months after the Sparks episode where Samantha had managed to upset a crowd of supposedly Mafiosa who were having a nice, quiet dinner until she started shouting about ‘fucking yanks’, word was sent through Pelinni that we would not be welcome in Sparks – ever again. I wasn’t too worried about the ban from Sparks – Harry’s, just off Wall Street does a better steak and its 82 Margaux is also a mite cheaper but it was Richard Pelinni who was worrying me. How come the hoodlums were using him as their mouthpiece and, looking back, I was desperately trying to remember how we had recruited him. I resolved to try and find out about his background but that was for another day.
Today we were going to make some money. I’d been given a tip about Google coming to the market. Not it’s listing – everybody knew the day they’d start trading. I’d actually been given information about HermesDirect, a company in New Jersey used by the SEC to run part of the ‘Dutch Auction’ which was the process by which Google shares would be allocated. It was all relatively simple – get over to the Harborside Centre in New Jersey on several Friday nights and get Samantha to ‘befriend’ one of the guys in Hermes. This was months before the float and long before anybody even knew that Hermes Direct would be used as part of Google’s auction process. Nobody smelled a thing – apart from Samantha!
Everybody knew the Google share price would rocket and to maximise our potential profits we needed to maximise our shareholding right from the start. I spoke to Daddy and he authorised an extra $5 million to be transferred into our trading account which, I have to say took a bit of persuading but eventually he agreed. It was a great move and one which put me in Daddy’s good books for quite a few years.
The 19th August 2004 will remain with me forever. On that seminal day, as we electronically posted our bids for Google stock, exactly 50 cents over the mid-price of the current bids and as relayed to Samantha by Blackberry by her HermesDirect toy-boy ‘lover’, who just happened to be one of the authorised auctioneers, we were allocated block after block of Google stock. At the end of the day we managed to get our hands on 59,000 Google shares at an average price of $85 each. We used every last cent of Daddy’s $5m.
Two months later we sold the Google stock for just over $40 million. A 700% return in two months!! A fucking triumph. Well it was a triumph until Richard Pelinni came into my office the following Monday morning and tendered his resignation. I was about to give him a $250k bonus for the Google scam but I could replace him and save myself some money so we shook hands and that was that. Or I thought it was. As he moved towards my office door, he turned and informed me that ‘the guys in Sparks would be visiting in a few days and wanted to pick up their $2m’. Without going into details, he said that Samantha’s behaviour that night had caused a bit of a stir and had drawn us to the attention of some ‘undesirables’. The fact that Pelinni knew these guys, was also a complication and did not help as you might think it would. The little turd had started feeding the ‘Sparks’ guys information about our operations and in particular, our coup with Google. They wanted 5% of our profit. There was no point in asking what the alternative was.
That night as Samantha tried yet another position and complained loudly that I ‘didn’t seem up to it’, I let my mind wander to the fact that if she hadn’t had such a big mouth, we wouldn’t be paying out $2m the following week. Ok, she was great in the sack and normally took my mind off everything, but the Mafia, (I assumed that’s who they were) asking for $2m was enough to nullify anything she did to my body. I just lay there wondering why they didn’t use their ‘contacts’ to get their hands on 50,000 Google shares and do what we did but I suppose there was little excitement in that. I also suspected that they wanted us to refuse to pay so they could have some fun, especially with Samantha! All because of a fucking undercooked steak!
I spoke to Daddy and he said we should pay. After all, we’d made $35m profit. $2m was peanuts he said but there was a condition – ‘get rid of that fucking woman’ was his edict.
The following Monday I said goodbye to $2m, and Samantha. I always hated losing money and handing the suitcase over to the guy who arrived at reception looking like a badly shaved gorilla was one of the lowest points in my career. Losing Samantha didn’t come easily either. In a strange way she was probably worth more than the $2m I had just handed over.
That night as she moved her stuff out of my apartment which overlooked Central Park and was just round the corner from the Chambers, I felt a twinge of misplaced sympathy for her. She’d been brilliant in setting up the US operation with me. She’d found Chambers and this apartment and she’d been a huge diversion for me after hours but after one last kiss, she smiled, took her envelope containing $250k and left her key on the hall chest of drawers before closing the door quietly.
