Execs make mob look legit by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 8-05-2002 One arrest at a time, the G-men are closing in on the Axis of Sleaze. There were the capos of the Rigas family, looters of a company called Adelphia Communications, immortalized in the great American ceremony of the perp walk. A few weeks later, here came two of the consiglieri of WorldCom Inc., brought before the cameras by the agents of the Southern District. Their trousers were perfectly creased. Their ties were silk. They were clean-shaven. And their hands were lashed behind their backs. Other members of the Axis are sure to follow. The most important, of course, is Kenneth Lay, capo de tutti capi of Enron. Even now he must be preparing for that glorious moment when the agent drops a hand on top of his head to guide him into the waiting car. Should he carry a Bible to the arraignment? Should he wear an American flag pin in his lapel? Lay is, of course, George W. Bush's old buddy, known affectionately to the President as Kenny Boy, the way Alphonse Persico of South Brooklyn was known in the Gambino family as Allie Boy. Mob guys love those nicknames. But when (and if) Enron Chairman Lay is hauled off to his bail hearing, he will have company. Certainly we'll see his one-time CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, get booked. We'll see Andrew Fastow, Lay's chief financial officer (think Robert Duvall here), doing the perp walk shuffle. Fastow is apparently trying hard to become the new Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano by ratting out his accomplices in a plea bargain. But he and Lay will not be the last of the dirty lot. The federales - including the SEC and the attorney general's office - are looking hard at the trembling twin towers of AOL and Time Warner. A long list They're examining the shell games at Kmart and Global Crossing, Qwest and Lucent, Xerox, Tyco and Merrill Lynch. They're pursuing Martha Stewart and her dealings with ImClone. A few brave souls in Congress and the media are demanding facts about the President's dealings with Harken Energy in 1989 (exposed last week in the Daily News) and Vice President Cheney's operations as CEO of the Halliburton Corp. in 1998. Most of these people are accused of some form of insider trading. Just like gangsters. In the old mob, of course, the only kind of trading was insider trading. But on one level, it's unfair tothe mob to compare the old wiseguys with the Axis of Sleaze. If you added up all the illegal profits gathered by the mob over the past century, you wouldn't come close to what these corporate sleazebags have won for themselves in the past two years. As the economy began to sag, the ringleaders in the Axis of Sleaze all saw what was coming. They knew the real numbers about their own companies. They knew the jig was up and those companies were about to become empty shells. The upper hand They used that secret knowledge to cash in their chips. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of chips. Thousands of their naive employees were left jobless and in some cases penniless. Their investors were left as defrauded suckers. When Carlo Gambino was CEO of the Brooklyn-based corporation that still bears his name, he couldn't have imagined the larcenous possibilities of legitimacy. If only he had gone legitimate - and then public - trading Gambino Family Inc. shares in the stock market. He could have made millions without doing anything at all. As the head of a corporate secret society (there is no other kind), Don Carlo wouldn't have been forced by market pressures to allow his district salesmen to peddle heroin. He wouldn't have had to approve the occasional bullet in the back of the skull, to keep order in the branch offices. He could have spoken airily in Business Week about the value of "derivatives." He could have written off the cost of every limousine, every yacht, every meal in a restaurant, every seat at the Westchester Premiere Theatre. He could have bought a company jet, named it the "Charlie Lucky" or "Meyer II" and used it for every trip to Vegas. He could have used investors' money as a private piggy bank, getting low-interest loans for himself or to drive up stock prices. Every quarter, his books would have shown grander profits, provided he hired Arthur Andersen to do the cooking. Gambino, in fact, would have been a perfect candidate to join the Axis of Sleaze, even if it meant lowering his moral standards to be in their company (the old mob guys, for example, had a fundamental sense of honor, which the sleazebags don't possess). As a capitalist businessman, he'd have welcomed the benefits offered by legitimate rackets. He certainly would have been pleased to receive the equivalent of Kenny Boy's annual salary of $5.4 million a year, plus stock options. Poor Allie Boy, for example, never made that kind of dough. And if Gambino, who died in bed in 1976, could have lived to the end of the '90s, he certainly would have approved of the personal rewards of the legitimate rackets. Especially the fact that CEOs were being paid, on average, about 475 times more than the average worker. Knowing the limits That was the way it should be. The boss should get more than the button man. But as the CEO of DonCarloCom, presiding every once in a while in a boardroom, meeting with bankers and pension fund ganefs, sitting among men with $3,000 suits, face tucks, personal trainers and hideouts from Florida to Aspen, the old hoodlum might have felt a growing moral repugnance. A true racket guy knew about limits. Gambino shopped at fruit and bread stores in his old neighborhood (the mansion was in Long Island). Meyer Lansky drove a blue Plymouth down in Hallandale, Fla. They had none of the pretensions of the boys in the Axis of Sleaze. Not one of them ever tried to get his name attached to a wing of a museum. I suspect that at some point Gambino would have cashed in his stock options and gone home. After all, you judge a man by the company he keeps, and Carlo Gambino was a good judge of character. That's why he died in bed.