Out on bail at his hotel, Tino boasts that "My friends will give me their business as soon as I rehabilitate myself."

At this point it is advisable to take a closer look at the epicenter of the De Angelis operations in Bayonne-a bleak and grimy region of docks, rail sidings, bleachcries, warehouses and tank "farms" within sight of Wall Street. Allied leased a group of some 100 tanks at a big Bayonne tank farm, with a capacity of some 500 million pounds of vegetable oil. To meet legal requirements of the business, it then subleased the tanks to a storage company, for a token fee of one dollar a year, and the storage firm assumed responsibility for the tanks' contents. The storage firm took regular inventory and issued the warehouse receipts, affirming the existence of Allied's stored commodities, and acted as a kind of "third party" between Allied and its creditors. The company Tino selected for this chore, Arerican Express Warehousing, Ltd., had a name calculated to still any doubts creditors might have had. Its warehouse receipts looked every bit as unimpeachable as the travelers checks issued by its parent firm, American Express. Allied paid Amex Warehousing up to $20,000 a week, and by all indications got more than its money's worth in the form of an extraordinarily tolerant attitude by the company supposedly monitoring its inventories. On Tino's recommendation, Amex hired several Allied employees as custodians, including Joseph Lomuscio, a good friend of Tino's, and John Bongardino, brother-in-law of Tino's secretary. The storage firm often left the inventory job to Allied, merely sending a custodian along to jot down the figures. Taking inventory at Bayonne, as it turned out, was something like counting bubbles in a glass of beer. Allied's tanks were interconnected by a maze of underground and overhead pipes, and were connected to other tanks that didn't belong to Allied at all. Soybean oil in three or four tanks could be concentrated in one tank or spread all over the farm, as circumstances required. Allied plant manager Frank Vivenzio has testified that Allied men were instructed to "grab as much oil as we could get" by opening valves and manipulating tape measures to pad the inventory figures (the instructions, he said, came from Leopold Bracconeri, Tino's brother-inlaw and Alhed general manager at Bayonne). Since the contents of a tank were computed by measuring the distance from the top of the tank to the top of the oil, large gains could be chalked up by pumping water under a thin layer of oil. On other occasions, said Vivenzio, an Allied man taking inventory would stop the tape measure ten or twenty feet above the surface of the oil and shout out the false figure to the custodian.

It was a good deal for Joe Lomuscio, who was paid $160,000 by Allied and Harbor Tank over a three-year period. Joe bought himself a $38,000 ranch house with a swimming pool, a white Lincoln Continental and even organized his own personal corporation, called Bulk Weighers and Samplers, Inc., the assets of which included a show horse named King Tudor. It was, in fact, a good deal for all the "young boys" Tino credits with being key men in his business. Salaries averaged $20,000, Cadillacs were the preferred cars, and there were other benefits. Explaining a personal check for $8,800 made out to Thomas Clarkin, who helped keep Allied's inventory records and worked for Amex Warehousing, Tino says matter-of-factly, "He told me he needed a house for his wife and kiddies so I said, `Tommy I'll give you the money for your house."'

Tino's own taxable income amounted to $100,000 annually, although it is alleged that he withdrew three million dollars from Allied's "petty cash fund" over the years to meet "expenses." Even these sums were small, of course, compared with the torrent of borrowed funds now pouring through Allied, generated by the growing torrent of warehouse receipts. According to Tino's secretary, Josephine Salto, it got to the point where Tino would carry her typewriter into a private office, hand her a blank Amex Warehousing receipt and dictate a figure to be typed in - a figure apparently unrelated to anything except Allied's need for cash.

Despite all this, Allied's business began to run into trouble. Tino claims it began with the 1960 Justice Department suit over his disputed shipments to Spain, which he says eventually cost him orders for 150,000 tons of soybean oil he had lined up in Madrid. Later, he claims, Agriculture began pressuring exporters to stop giving Allied contracts. Whatever the case, while he had once borrowed heavily to build up volume in the oil business, it appears he was now borrowing even more heavily just to pay off debts already incurred.