
·S1 E3
The Times, They Are A-Changin’
Episode Transcript
Campsite Media.
Speaker 2Omar Alboreto grew up in Panama City.
He arrived in New York in the nineteen seventies and soon charmed his way.
Speaker 3Past the velvet rope.
At Studio fifty four.
Speaker 2One night, he's on the dance floor sipping ice water because he can only afford one drink.
His perfect cheekbones stick out and glitter under the disco light.
He's surrounded by celebrities and sex.
And that's when he gets discovered as a model.
Speaker 4Got discovered as a model, moved to Italy, worked as a model for four years, and then moved back.
Speaker 5To New York City.
Speaker 4And from model I made the transition to becoming a model agent.
Speaker 2So Omar's working as a model agent and one night in nineteen eighty three, he gets.
Speaker 3A call from a former colleague.
Speaker 4Hey, have you been hearing about these guys?
These millionaire guys that I hear recruiting like the best agency in New York City and they're paying like top money to open an agency and they want to meet you.
Speaker 2The meeting with guys handing out money is a meeting you take?
So Omar said, yes, of course, come meet me at my office.
Speaker 3But he wasn't sure what to.
Speaker 4Expect, so these three guys came in.
Speaker 5It was a Friday night, it was like a movie.
Speaker 4So one guy looks exactly, exactly spitting version of Kenny Rogers.
Speaker 2Kenny Rogers, the country singer, the chicken restaurant magnet.
May not be the exact person that Larry Lynd is trying to emulate, but that's the look he's got.
He has this big Santa Claus beard.
It's almost like the before picture from a Beard Die commercial.
And his whole look is just very televangelist trying to become a sex track.
Speaker 4Suit in an Adida's Wrong DMC track suit blue and white with Adida sneakers and I never saw like a bling blink rolex and a pinky ring with like diamonds.
Speaker 5That's one guy, Larry Lynd.
Then there's a second guy, and he had glasses on.
At seven o'clock at night.
Speaker 4This guy's wearing glasses, perfectly tailor navy suit, white shirt, red tie, overcoat, very Italian looking.
Speaker 5Michael Fitzmorris.
Speaker 2So that's Michael.
And of course next in the door is Larry's muscle.
Speaker 5And at the door there's a big guy.
Speaker 4Italian guy, kind of heavy set.
He didn't come in.
He just stayed at the door, like that's their bodyguard.
Speaker 2Ohmer's watching all this, but he's still on the phone with somebody.
Speaker 4And I said, hey, let me call you back, and I hung up, and the Kenny Rodgers lookalike, guy Larry Linn.
I'm knocking.
He looks at me and he goes, oh, all right.
I go, yeah, oh my, hey, how are you?
Speaker 5He didn't even shake my hand.
He goes, how much money you make?
Speaker 4I'm like, I, uh, whoa, okay, I make I make five one year a week, which is a lie.
Speaker 5I was making like three hundred and fifty bucks a week.
I make five one year a week.
Speaker 4He goes in his pocket and pulls a lot of money and just stands there and goes like this.
Speaker 2Larry's rapidly counting through a bunch of money with a practiced flourish, like he's a blackjack dealer with a deck of cards.
Speaker 4And he just kept going and going and going, and he puts six thousand dollars in my hands.
Monday morning, you come in and work for me.
I'm at the plaza.
Contact me this weekend.
Speaker 5And they left.
Speaker 2Who the hell are these guys Larry Lynd and Michael Fitzmorris and what exactly are they trying to buy their way into But with cash in hand, Omar didn't stop to ask what was really going on here, and neither did Paul Fisher.
From iHeart Podcasts and Campside Media.
I'm Vanessa Grigoriotis and this is Model Wars episode three.
So you could say this story is chock full of wisdom, lessons about life, sex, friendship, and of course business.
Speaker 3And there's a.
Speaker 2Saying that you're probably familiar with.
If you want to make money, you've got to spend money.
And at the Wind Agency, that seems to be as far as they got while creating their business model.
When Omar and Paul get going, no pile of money is safe.
Speaker 5Everything was cash.
Everything was cash.
Speaker 4We will go to Western Union once or twice a week and come out of you with you know, eighty grand.
Speaker 5I'll hunt your grand you know.
We would put you know forty running our barget each and walk back to the household.
Speaker 2Is the Lend Agency a business or is it a charity to benefit people like Paul Fisher?
A five oh one C three that could be called Ferraris for fuck Boys, the Make a Wish Foundation for men suffering from permanent erection syndrome.
Paul really does want to build a successful modeling agency, but in the absence of expertise, the perceived legitimacy that comes from spending shitloads of money is just so alluring.
Speaker 1He didn't give a shit Larry.
As long as he could come in on a Friday and Saturday night and do blow with a nineteen twenty year old girl, He's fucking happy as shit.
Speaker 3But was that all that was really going on with Larry.
Speaker 2Paul may have considered him the ultimate party buddy, but Michael, who was much closer to Larry, saw a man in crisis.
Speaker 6Larry got divorced or was getting divorced, so he went through a middle aged craze at the time.
At the time, he was forty one and we had a very successful business who we had sixty million dollar, which at that time was a lot of money.
Speaker 7That we owned real.
Speaker 6Estate in Houston, and he decided he wanted to go out and meet every girl in the world.
Speaker 2So the Lend Agency, Paul's entire career is built on top of one man's mid life crisis.
Speaker 3And our pal.
Paul has no idea.
Speaker 2He didn't even know Larry was married, and he definitely doesn't know the business in Houston is going up in flames.
So jumping back to those days in La Paul's first days.
Speaker 6With Larry, he opened up a real estate office out there to keep me happy because between me and the fence post, he was out there just having a good time.
And he also knew that the business was going down, so he wanted to enjoy the money while he had it.
That was Larry, you know, and I was and I was working, you know, seven days a week, sixteen eighteen hours a day, trying to keep everything together, screaming and yelling at him, telling what are you doing?
Speaker 7This is not right.
Speaker 2Because the business, Michael says, is about to go bankrupt, and girl crazed Paul Fisher is gasoline on Larry's mid life crisis bonfire.
Despite his business troubles, Larry's very motivated to keep the party going.
Speaker 3Maybe he even wants to take it up a notch.
Speaker 6Paul was going on meeting girls in Houston and bringing them in, and you know, but Larry was enjoying that.
Speaker 2But Larry also genuinely thought Paul could be a good model agent.
Speaker 6Larry finally just said to me, Mike, look, this kid's got a great eye.
I want to open up an agency.
And I says, are you serious?
I says, well, when am I go bankrupt?
He says, I only cost a million bucks, don't worry about it.
I says, okay, all right, all right, well we'll do it.
Speaker 2It's only going to cost a million bucks.
But Paul's wrap burning through that money.
The Lend agency has been on the edge of a cliff.
The entire Binge is just one last meal before a famine.
And Larry seems to be happy, but really he's spiraling and he's a dangerous man to disappoint.
Speaker 6Larry had two sides to his personality.
He was an animal.
If he got into a fight, he'd fight five people, you know.
I mean, he was unbelievable with his hands.
But at the same time, he was the most creative person you ever found in your life.
And just put a thu like this.
I know he wrote most of Bob Dylan's lyrics.
Speaker 2You just knew that Bob Dylan was going to feature in this story.
Speaker 5Now.
Speaker 2Michael later clarified that he was only four years old when all this happened, and certainly not around to witness any of it.
And we should also note that Bob Dylan is one of the most gregonized people on the planet.
But sometimes stories have meaning beyond their plausibility.
So here's a story that Larry told Michael.
Speaker 6Bob Dylan and Larry lived together in nineteen fifty nine and makes in sixty on the summers, and they sang on the streets of New York City.
And Bob had a reel to real tape recorder and just tape recorded all the songs.
And they laid around smoking marijuana and just Larry was writing.
So they met in like nineteen fifty nine, maybe fifty eight, but probably fifty nine.
They lived together for two in the West Village, Okay.
Speaker 8And in the West Village in those.
Speaker 6Days, anyone that was anybody sang in the streets.
Speaker 8They got their guitar and they sang on the streets.
They sang in the little cubs, they sang in places.
Speaker 6And Larry, who had a terrible voice, he did sing on the street songs.
Well Larry would do it is he say to someone, give me a topic, and they'd give them a topic.
And they sing the song.
It come out of his head.
Okay, there was no writing the song.
It just came out of his head.
And that blew Dylan's mind.
So Dylan got a real, real tape record.
Those are the old ones, the ones with the big reels, okay, and.
Speaker 8He just sat there taping him.
Speaker 6Well, Larry was shown, you know, just writing ten twenty songs a night.
Speaker 2So in this version of events, rumored mobster Larry Lynd is actually the Rosetta stone that unlocks Bob Dylan's famously enigmatic lyrics.
Speaker 6Larry told me hundreds, if not thousands of times, the different songs that he wrote and what they meant, and that Dylan couldn't read his handwriting and so on.
Speaker 2So, according to Larry via Michael, these are the origins of some of Dylan's most famous songs.
Speaker 7Maggie's Farm is about a whorehouse in Brooklyn.
Speaker 6Okay, the Dyland doesn't even get close to it.
Speaker 2Farm equals whorehouse.
And Casey were wondering and I'm not going to think about what scrubbed the floor.
Speaker 5Makes me scrub the floor.
Speaker 6He just would go over all the different lyrics and tell him to me and I go, wow, He says, oh, this song that was about.
Speaker 3Joes someone Larry knew named Joan.
Speaker 6He says, uh, how does the song go in my what do you call it?
Bud brass, big brass balls, big grass.
Speaker 3So Joan is the unnamed lady.
Speaker 2And who knows if the bed was even big or brass at this point, maybe it was a futon.
Speaker 8So when I said, I asked him, I said, what do you think of doing?
Speaker 6He says, well, good for him, he says, at least my songs got out there.
Speaker 2Larry he kept up his songwriting even after this alleged Bob Dylan era, and later Michael went out and got some musicians in Nashville and they recorded some of Larry's originals, like this honky Tonk number from the musicians that recorded it.
Speaker 3It's called Devil and the Dollar.
Speaker 5Young Girls.
Speaker 8Page and.
Speaker 2In a way, yeah, very romantic.
All you need to do to find a young girl, apparently is look in the yellow pages and you'll find one.
They're all going to have sex anyway, and you might as well pay them so you can lay them.
Speaker 3Really classy.
Speaker 2At least that's what I thought when I first listened to the song but if you really tune in, it's clear that Larry's actually making fun of this way of living.
It seems like Larry has some awareness of what he's doing, and in general, some of his songs are pretty great.
There's one we only have the lyrics for, and it's got this chorus that talks about being a killer and a king, a prisoner and a fool, having life go up and down your feet always in the balance.
Larry may have been a rumored mobster with ties to Frank Costello, as you remember from the first episode, and he certainly seems to keep a lot of bodyguards around, but whatever the truth about his mafia ties, he's a bona fide troubadour.
And Michael Fitzmorris also had an alternative upbringing.
Speaker 6I met Larry through a fellow that I work for, and he was over at his place and he was singing songs and I walked in and I was listening to him, and I thought, that's pretty good.
And Larry asked me.
Speaker 7What I was doing.
Speaker 6Was that time I was fifteen years old, I was peddling rings and pins on the streets in New York City.
Speaker 7I was making good money.
Speaker 6I was making about fifteen hundred to two thousand a week back in nineteen seventy one.
It's a lot of money in those days, and it was cash.
Anyway, Larry handed me his card and said, listen, I have an office on Wall Street and we rent apartments.
Were the biggest agency in New York City.
And you know, I think you're a smart kid.
He says, we may have to cut your hair.
My hair was at that time halfway down back and it was so fun.
I was a vegetarian, the whole crazy thing.
But he got me out of it.
Within a couple of weeks, started eating cheeseburgers in front of me, saying this is good.
Speaker 2So Michael went to work for Larry and they actually formed a partnership selling land investments.
They were hunting down leads, they were closing the deals.
It feels a little like Alec Baldwin and Glengarry Glenn Ross A b C.
Speaker 8They always be b closing, always be closing, always be closing.
Speaker 2But at this point New York wasn't the best place for the real estate business.
Speaker 6At the time, New York City was going down the down the tubes.
It was very bad, and they in the mid seventies, everyone was leaving New York.
So a friend of mine was living down in Houston, and he wasn't the smartest guy in the world, but he was worth millions of dollars.
Speaker 7And I thought, and at the time.
Speaker 6I'm nineteen, and I thought, if that guy could be a million, and that can be one.
Speaker 7So I said, come on, ri, let's go, Let's go Houston.
Speaker 2They end up buying hundreds of acres of land as Houston's going through this major oil boom, and they put on these seminars.
Speaker 1Redipline your image of what a salesperson looks like.
Speaker 6We were doing seminars here in Houston.
People learned how to become rich and buy blah land, you know, by real estate.
And we had a fabulous, you know, two three hour pitch and at the end of the pitch, we'd a million dollars with the deposits, and.
Speaker 7Then they would come up and buy the land.
Speaker 6And on the weekend we'd probably sell a half a million dollars with a property back in you know, eighty three.
Speaker 7That was good money.
Speaker 2This was all going on at the time that Paul and his college friend David Sheridan were in Houston with Larry.
David remembers these seminars for the prospective buyers.
He would go to them and Larry would stand at the head of the room just holding court with those Greenwich Village honed skills.
Speaker 9He'd stand up there with his easel and he'd be showing path and growth and there'd be a big picture of a map and you could get this corner.
It's the last corner.
Parcel maps through all the different pictures, I mean, they're different parcels, and then we would be in the audience and we'd be like, I'll want one.
Speaker 2David and Paul were in the audience, just creating what seems to be an illusion of competition.
Speaker 9I'm going to have the corner, and then other people be like, no, no, no, I'm going to get the corner.
Speaker 8You're like they literally were buyers.
Speaker 2Now the bodyguards are starting to make a bit more sense.
But when Houston's economy crashed, things went bad.
Speaker 6It was Climbacet and then it wasn't claws so and then the economy went down the toilet.
And when the economy went down a toilet, so did all our payments.
And we had, you know, five hundred thousand a month coming in in payments, so you know, the business just you know, it got.
Speaker 2Soft, which brings us back to Paul Fisher lighting money on fire in New York City.
Now Michael knows that Larry wasn't going to do anything to get things under control, and he wants that million bucks to stop disappearing and maybe even grow.
He decides to take the reins.
Speaker 1Fitzmorris would come in and scream, and everybody yell book book book like they were animals.
People were so scared shitless of Michael Fitzmorris.
It was literally like Michael core fucking come in like a fucking mania.
Speaker 7Fuck book book, make book, book book.
I'd got to jump on an airplane.
Speaker 6Come on, let's book, Let's make deals, let's you know, and let's get models in, let's get go gosties, get them out.
Speaker 10You know.
Speaker 6I mean I didn't know what I was doing, Okay, I mean all I knew was you got to book someone to get a job so you can make the money.
Speaker 1Book book, you slaps.
I'm sending twenty thousand bucks a week, your book.
Your fucking asses off, book models, book models.
We have brand new kids.
We don't know what I mean.
I don't know what you're talking about.
It's gonna take a couple of years to build this freaking thing.
Speaker 2There's a story about Michael that gets told a lot.
It involves meeting a bunch of people around a table and Michael roaming around with.
Speaker 3A baseball bat.
Speaker 2It's a little like the scene and the Untouchables where de Niro murders someone, and this.
Speaker 7Was before the Naro did it.
Speaker 8He comes in with a baseball bat, piss.
Speaker 7I had a baseball bat and I was giving a meeting.
Speaker 9Everyone's got a suit on, you know, and he's pissed about the sales are down.
And I'm not worried because my sales are fine and I'm ever at the head of the tail.
Speaker 8I'm not worried.
I think it's a trip that this is going on.
Speaker 9But there were people that were worried because their sales weren't fine, and he's walking around complaining, hitting the bat against his hand.
Speaker 7They weren't listen to no.
Speaker 8All of a sudden, he's just started.
He just erupted, and how pissed I am.
And god damn, you fucker.
Speaker 1We had this big gold fucking uh like toots and calm and big gold fucking thing on the table.
Speaker 7Yeah, it was the King podhead on my conference.
Speaker 9And he smashes the bat on top of the head which was next to other people's heads, and it's about the same size as.
Speaker 1Everybody's head and smash it to fucking pieces.
Speaker 8And everybody's like freaking out.
Speaker 7And I got their attention.
Speaker 5Now.
Speaker 2David Tridan says, this happens in Houston, and it's actually the head from Michael Angelo's David like a replication of that.
Paul and Michael, on the other hand, say it's the head of King Tut.
But regardless of the specifics and regardless of the intriguing possibility that this was a regular occurrence and Michael had a bunch of spare statue heads stashed in a closet, it seems like what we need to take away from this is Michael's wielding a baseball bat in a business meeting.
The good times that Lynd Modeling Agency are taking a very ugly turn.
So Paul at this point is just dying to get into the model wars, to get some really serious models and some serious bookers working hard just for him.
But there were other signs, lots of them, that Larry Lynde had things that were not just fashion world legitimacy on his mind.
Speaker 1Larry, to be able to get laid was a bad looking guys, a little bit overweight, a little bit chubvy guy.
But to get laid, he just would want to want there to be something that he was doing that would get them excited.
Speaker 2Them being girls, and the something he was convincing them of would be a totally fictional conceit about who he was, what he was up to, aka U scam.
Speaker 1So you know, it's a movie, it's an MTV video, and he'd he would start singing, literally start singing for the girls.
Oh and this is my new music video that I'm going to be doing.
And once again, these are young kids.
These are eighteen, nineteen, twenty twenty one, twenty two year old girls, twenty three year old girls.
So they believe any And you're in a limbo and you're in a ferrari and there's a modeling agent and you have a modeling agency there.
You know, it looked like it was real.
It looked like it was real.
Speaker 3So here's how it would work.
Speaker 9He sent out a notice to all the modeling agencies in Houston.
That we're doing album cover for the Jim Dandy next album, The Jim Dandy whatever the country Western Charlie Daniel, come a ban and if you're interested, send your models on Tuesday night at seven pm to our office.
Speaker 2David Tridan witnessed all this when he was working for Larry in Houston along with Paul, and then.
Speaker 9He says to us that day, all right, Paul, I need you to say, David, you stay, And he had a set up around this full floor of office space one to receive the girls as they came in two to tell them what we're going to do.
Then they got to by the way, it's a bikini shocks.
It's a summer photos.
So you're gonna have to go to the bathroom in February in Houston when it's cold and dark and put on your bikini and then go to this conference room and meet with this guy.
Speaker 8And then at the end you're going to meet.
Speaker 9With Paul Fisher, who's going to say, yeah, you did Gray, You're unbelievable.
By the way, we're having this big party this Saturday, and guess what you're invited.
And all these girls were in the lobby and they're all walking around our office in their bikinis and my twenty women and five guys at nighttime.
The office building is reflected glass, so it's all mirrors on the inside, and it was like a ReSpectacle.
Speaker 2This is just so weird and so very uncool, but Larry loved it, so he decided he wanted an encore.
Speaker 9So then Saturday comes and he's like, I want you guys go out and rent a tuxedo because we're going to have these girls over this night.
All these twenty girls show up, there's five of us in tuxedos, food during caterer limos downstairs.
All right, ladies, we're going to go down to Boccaccio, which was the super high end club at that time.
Speaker 2But before they all piled into the limos to go to the club, Larry had an announcement.
Turns out that Jim Dandies were not only going to do an album cover shoot, they were going to do the most cutting edge thing an eighties musician could do.
They were going to shoot a music video.
Speaker 9A music video was like, oh my god, no one even thought that's like saying AI today or something, and so on the way out, I want you to say, hey, my name is Tammy Smith.
Here's my phone number, here's my address.
I'd love to you know whatever.
Speaker 3And that was just the beginning of the can.
Speaker 8For the rest of the year, he would say hey.
Speaker 9On Saturdays, he'd like, Hey, get the video, put the video in, and put the video like and I'm going to call her, call this one.
Speaker 8Yeah, no, call this girl.
Speaker 9I mean, we would use the And I think he structured that entire thing unbeknownst to us, just.
Speaker 8To have that kind of.
Speaker 9Digital record, which today everybody has it.
But back then there was no internet.
So he had his VHS tape of these twenty girls.
And I don't think there was ever an album cover, and I certainly was no music video.
Speaker 8I just watched all that happen.
It was part of it.
Speaker 2Even Paul at this time is getting uncomfortable with behavior in this vein as it continues in New York.
It is not only gross, but it feels like it's becoming a serious problem for the lend Agency's credibility.
Speaker 1Oh shit, if I really want to become that guy that I keep seeing out at night, John Casablancas, or I want to become the next Aileen Ford, I can't be involved with people doing blow with all these girls.
The guy's fucking killing my reputation.
I haven't even started yet.
Speaker 2Okay, so some model agents did blow with the girls they represented, and they helped them become stars.
So far though, Paul could only offer the doing blow part and not the success.
Speaker 3But that was about to change.
Speaker 1And then all of a sudden, one day, I made a kid into a model, Tina Mason.
I made her into a fucking model.
That was my first success.
Speaker 2Tina Mason isn't a household name, but that's not the standard Paul's talking about here.
He's talking about the supply and demand way the models worked.
See, very few women who were featured in the pages of major fashion magazines could demand big fees for other jobs.
But that's what Paul wanted, and that's what Tina delivered.
Speaker 1Just different kind of Asiana shyes, curly hair, just different than what was happening in the marketplace.
Just cool, looking, interesting, looking different.
Speaker 2Paul had long dreamed of booking a model with Mademoiselle, a leading fashion magazine that was seen as a stepping stone to the most prestigious magazine of all, Vogue, And now Paul got a call from Mademoiselle that they wanted to book Tina.
Speaker 1Creating your First Little Star.
That was my first hit.
That was like, oh my god, people are calling me, people are taking me serious.
Speaker 3And it changed everything for Paul.
Speaker 1I have to do this.
I just fucking meant to do this.
I had that first hit, and then I wanted a second, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth and a sixth, and I knew the only way that was going to happen get the fuck away from these maniacs.
Speaker 2Now, there are a few maniacs in this story, but in this case he's referring to Larry and the guys around him.
By the time Paul creates his first Star, Lynde has a fancy office near the south end of Central Park and.
Speaker 5We're making this agency from scratch.
He was right next door to Carnegie Deli.
The whole building.
Speaker 2Carnegie Deli is next to Carnegie Hall, where you can hear a lot of classical music, but the deli is pastrami and cheesecake.
Speaker 4We got a neon sign, Lynn, and we were making making our old booking table, making the furniture.
Speaker 5Everything was brand new and sparkling.
And when the.
Speaker 3Whole and Umar notices a shift in Paul around this time.
Speaker 4We became partners, so we were always together, and Polly grew to love this industry.
Speaker 5I don't think when he first got in, and I hope I don't.
I don't know.
I feel agree with that.
Speaker 4I don't think when he got into this industry he understood what he was getting into.
I thought he got into it with the same mentality that these guys were financing it, which was like.
Speaker 5Ooh, girls, girls, girls, you know.
Speaker 4And I believe by meeting me and explaining to him that it's just not about that, and he knew that.
Speaker 5I was never about that.
Speaker 4I was always about the craft of being an agent, the craft of making a model, the craft of taking someone who never in their wildness dream taught their life could change because of what you did for them.
Speaker 5And Paulie grew into that.
Speaker 2Paul's growing up.
He's finding a direction for his life that goes beyond the search for the next hit of pleasure.
His sister Deborah is still fighting cancer.
Life is short and painful, and he doesn't want to waste it on this doomed ride with a lend agency.
And so Paul knew he had to call Larry and tell him this wasn't working.
Speaker 4Paulie stood up to these guys like, Nah, it's not going to happen, Like this is a real company, a real agency, and MEISA, real models and NISA not just playdates for you guys.
Speaker 5You know, you just can't come in here.
Speaker 4You know, whenever you guys want and ask for, oh, get ten girls to come out with us, to go to dinner and party, No, that's not going to happen.
Speaker 2Paul made the call to Larry, the one you remember from earlier, the one that Paul just knew went very badly.
And after he made that call, Omar was with Paul and they went out to a club.
Speaker 5We were out partying that night.
Speaker 10We were out at club Area like a Canal in Hudson downtown, and we had come out of area and for the first time in so long, I didn't want to go back to the hotel with them.
Speaker 4I'm like, nah, I think I'm gonna just go home, guys.
So we took a cab.
Billy Word was with us, and I remember when the cab got to twenty eighth Street, I'm like, guys, I don't feel like doing this, Like I'm just gonna.
Speaker 2Go home, and Paul eventually went home too.
He headed back to his room in the Wellington Hotel, tramping down the halls and then slowly opening his door.
Now there are different versions of what happens next, and in fact, Michael says nothing at all happened, but he wasn't there at the hotel.
And what Paul says is some bodyguards came out of the closet with guns and soon they had him laid out with his pants around his ankles, and they even had a gun barrel up his ass.
Speaker 1And then the final door opened and it was laring, and he said, where are you going?
Man?
I remember looking up to him going Marry, I ain't going anywhere, brother, I'm staying with you.
I'm with you, brother.
I don't know what I was thinking.
I don't know what I was thinking.
Speaker 2In that moment, Paul gives up on his dream of being a legitimate agent.
He very much just wants to live to see the sunrise.
Speaker 1I'm with you, brother, I am with you.
I'm sorry you didn't have to come all this way.
I'm sorry.
And could you please have them remove the gun out of my ass?
And he said, hey, let's go grab a bite like it was fucking nothing.
I said, yeah, let's do that.
He goes call a couple of girls.
Come on, we'll meet him over at the wherever Chipriani.
Speaker 5Is whatever whatever.
Speaker 1I said, okay, gun Laird, and we went out for like a nightcap, like a fucking three in the morning cheeseburger.
Speaker 7Whatever.
Speaker 2It's a beautiful tableau, that image right there, just two men having a late night bite.
Paul feels so trapped he knows he can't get away from Larry now.
Speaker 3But then a few months later.
Speaker 2Larry's divorce is working its way through court and the judge makes a significant ruling.
Speaker 7The court hired a receiver to watch the calf.
Speaker 2I really wish I could have been there when this receiver started tallying receipts.
It's one ferrari, one wheelbarrow full of roses, cocaine, penthouse, sanitary wipes for gun barrels, cheeseburger, cocaine, more cocaine.
Speaker 6And then everything was shut down and that was it.
There was no one could spend any money.
Our money was cut off.
They caught off Larry's money, my money, our salaries, everything.
Speaker 2The lend agency is one hundred percent broke.
Speaker 1I got a phone call from Larry and he said, you know what, I'm getting a divorce.
And I said, you're married and he said yeah.
I said, oh shit, and he goes, my wife's putting everything into receivership and Fitz Morris won't give me any more money.
So you got to get out of the hotel tomorrow.
And we're having the Ferrari brought back tomorrow, and all the bank accounts are being closed today.
And I go, Larry, I got eighty bucks on me.
He goes, I don't know what to tell you.
Speaker 5I said, shit, shit.
Speaker 1Indeed, within twenty four hours, I was out on the street.
Speaker 5We had a roller coaster of Shenanigans.
Speaker 1It was an opportunity occasionally, or somebody wanted to get some hope.
How would you like to meet one of the richest cats on the planet and he'll pay it thousands of dollars.
You got to go sleep with him?
Speaker 3That's next on Model Wars.
Speaker 11Model Wars was a production of iHeart Podcasts and Campside Media.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Model Wars was executive produced and hosted by Vanessa Gregoriotis.
Our senior writer was Michael Kenyon Meyer.
Speaker 3Julia K.
Speaker 11S Lavine was our producer and reporter.
Our senior producer was Lily Houston Smith and our assistant editor was Emma Simonov.
We had story and production help from show She's Millowitz, Ali Haney and Blake Rook.
Our production manager was Ashley Warren and our studio recordist was Ewan Lyi Tremuen.
Sound design, mix and engineering by Mark McCadam.
iHeart Podcasts.
Executive producers were Jennifer Bassett and Katrina Norbel.
The show was also executive produced by Rachel winter In.
Campside Media's Josh Dean, Adam Hoff, and Matt Share.
If you'd like to access behind the scenes content from Model Wars and Campside Media, please go to join campside dot com.
That's j O I N C A M P s I d E dot com.
If you enjoyed Model Wars, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3Thanks so much for listening.