September 17, 2025 • 35 mins
Model turned agent Omar Albertto enters the business, and meets Paul. The two join forces in their quest for good times and industry clout, all on Larry Lind’s dime. But with Larry proving increasingly toxic, how much longer can they work for him?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Campsite Media.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Omar Alboreto grew up in Panama City. He arrived in
New York in the nineteen seventies and soon charmed his way.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Past the velvet rope. At Studio fifty four.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
One 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 4 (00:39):
Got discovered as a model, moved to Italy, worked as
a model for four years, and then moved back.
Speaker 5 (00:45):
To New York City.
Speaker 4 (00:46):
And from model I made the transition to becoming a
model agent.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
So Omar's working as a model agent and one night
in nineteen eighty three, he gets.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
A call from a former colleague.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
Hey, 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 2 (01:10):
The meeting with guys handing out money is a meeting
you take? So Omar said, yes, of course, come meet
me at my office.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
But he wasn't sure what to.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
Expect, so these three guys came in.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
It was a Friday night, it was like a movie.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
So one guy looks exactly, exactly spitting version of Kenny Rogers.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Kenny 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
(01:56):
is just very televangelist trying to become a sex track.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
Suit 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 5 (02:16):
That's one guy, Larry Lynd. Then there's a second guy,
and he had glasses on. At seven o'clock at night.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
This guy's wearing glasses, perfectly tailor navy suit, white shirt,
red tie, overcoat, very Italian looking.
Speaker 5 (02:31):
Michael Fitzmorris.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
So that's Michael. And of course next in the door
is Larry's muscle.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
And at the door there's a big guy.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
Italian guy, kind of heavy set. He didn't come in.
He just stayed at the door, like that's their bodyguard.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Ohmer's watching all this, but he's still on the phone
with somebody.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
And 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 5 (03:05):
He didn't even shake my hand. He goes, how much
money you make?
Speaker 4 (03:10):
I'm like, I, uh, whoa, okay, I make I make
five one year a week, which is a lie.
Speaker 5 (03:18):
I was making like three hundred and fifty bucks a week.
I make five one year a week.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
He goes in his pocket and pulls a lot of
money and just stands there and goes like this.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Larry's rapidly counting through a bunch of money with a
practiced flourish, like he's a blackjack dealer with a deck
of cards.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
And 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 5 (03:48):
And they left.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Who 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
(04:13):
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 3 (04:31):
And there's a.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Saying 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 5 (04:49):
Everything was cash. Everything was cash.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
We will go to Western Union once or twice a
week and come out of you with you know, eighty grand.
Speaker 5 (04:59):
I'll hunt your grand you know. We would put you
know forty running our barget each and walk back to
the household.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Is 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
(05:30):
legitimacy that comes from spending shitloads of money is just
so alluring.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
He 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 3 (05:45):
But was that all that was really going on with Larry.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Paul may have considered him the ultimate party buddy, but Michael,
who was much closer to Larry, saw a man in crisis.
Speaker 6 (05:58):
Larry 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 7 (06:14):
That we owned real.
Speaker 6 (06:15):
Estate in Houston, and he decided he wanted to go
out and meet every girl in the world.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
So the Lend Agency, Paul's entire career is built on
top of one man's mid life crisis.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
And our pal. Paul has no idea.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
He 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 6 (06:44):
With 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
(07:05):
hours a day, trying to keep everything together, screaming and
yelling at him, telling what are you doing?
Speaker 7 (07:10):
This is not right.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Because 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 3 (07:27):
Maybe he even wants to take it up a notch.
Speaker 6 (07:30):
Paul was going on meeting girls in Houston and bringing
them in, and you know, but Larry was enjoying that.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
But Larry also genuinely thought Paul could be a good
model agent.
Speaker 6 (07:41):
Larry 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 2 (07:56):
It'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
(08:16):
dangerous man to disappoint.
Speaker 6 (08:19):
Larry 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
(08:39):
Bob Dylan's lyrics.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
You just knew that Bob Dylan was going to feature
in this story.
Speaker 5 (08:47):
Now.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Michael 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
(09:09):
a story that Larry told Michael.
Speaker 6 (09:15):
Bob 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
(09:37):
lived together for two in the West Village, Okay.
Speaker 8 (09:40):
And in the West Village in those.
Speaker 6 (09:41):
Days, anyone that was anybody sang in the streets.
Speaker 8 (09:45):
They got their guitar and they sang on the streets.
They sang in the little cubs, they sang in places.
Speaker 6 (09:50):
And 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
(10:12):
the big reels, okay, and.
Speaker 8 (10:13):
He just sat there taping him.
Speaker 6 (10:15):
Well, Larry was shown, you know, just writing ten twenty
songs a night.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
So in this version of events, rumored mobster Larry Lynd
is actually the Rosetta stone that unlocks Bob Dylan's famously
enigmatic lyrics.
Speaker 6 (10:39):
Larry 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 2 (10:51):
So, according to Larry via Michael, these are the origins
of some of Dylan's most famous songs.
Speaker 7 (11:04):
Maggie's Farm is about a whorehouse in Brooklyn.
Speaker 6 (11:07):
Okay, the Dyland doesn't even get close to it.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Farm equals whorehouse. And Casey were wondering and I'm not
going to think about what scrubbed the floor.
Speaker 5 (11:18):
Makes me scrub the floor.
Speaker 6 (11:20):
He 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 3 (11:26):
Joes someone Larry knew named Joan.
Speaker 6 (11:30):
He says, uh, how does the song go in my
what do you call it? Bud brass, big brass balls,
big grass.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
So Joan is the unnamed lady.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
And who knows if the bed was even big or
brass at this point, maybe it was a futon.
Speaker 8 (11:53):
So when I said, I asked him, I said, what
do you think of doing?
Speaker 6 (11:55):
He says, well, good for him, he says, at least
my songs got out there.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Larry 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 3 (12:17):
It's called Devil and the Dollar.
Speaker 5 (12:21):
Young Girls.
Speaker 8 (12:25):
Page and.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
In 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 3 (12:47):
Really classy.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
At 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
(13:10):
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.
(13:32):
And Michael Fitzmorris also had an alternative upbringing.
Speaker 6 (13:37):
I 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 7 (13:56):
What I was doing.
Speaker 6 (13:57):
Was that time I was fifteen years old, I was
peddling rings and pins on the streets in New York City.
Speaker 7 (14:03):
I was making good money.
Speaker 6 (14:04):
I 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
(14:26):
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 2 (14:42):
So 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 8 (14:58):
They always be b closing, always be closing, always be closing.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
But at this point New York wasn't the best place
for the real estate business.
Speaker 6 (15:10):
At 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 7 (15:27):
And I thought, and at the time.
Speaker 6 (15:29):
I'm nineteen, and I thought, if that guy could be
a million, and that can be one.
Speaker 7 (15:33):
So I said, come on, ri, let's go, Let's go Houston.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
They end up buying hundreds of acres of land as
Houston's going through this major oil boom, and they put
on these seminars.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Redipline your image of what a salesperson looks like.
Speaker 6 (15:48):
We 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 7 (16:02):
Then they would come up and buy the land.
Speaker 6 (16:04):
And on the weekend we'd probably sell a half a
million dollars with a property back in you know, eighty three.
Speaker 7 (16:09):
That was good money.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
This 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 9 (16:29):
He'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 2 (16:47):
David and Paul were in the audience, just creating what
seems to be an illusion of competition.
Speaker 9 (16:55):
I'm going to have the corner, and then other people
be like, no, no, no, I'm going to get the corner.
Speaker 8 (16:59):
You're like they literally were buyers.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Now the bodyguards are starting to make a bit more sense.
But when Houston's economy crashed, things went bad.
Speaker 6 (17:11):
It 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 2 (17:27):
Soft, 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 1 (17:50):
Fitzmorris 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 7 (18:01):
Fuck book book, make book, book book. I'd got to
jump on an airplane.
Speaker 6 (18:06):
Come 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 10 (18:12):
You know.
Speaker 6 (18:12):
I 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 1 (18:21):
Book 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 2 (18:35):
There'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 3 (18:44):
A baseball bat.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
It's a little like the scene and the Untouchables where
de Niro murders someone, and this.
Speaker 7 (18:52):
Was before the Naro did it.
Speaker 8 (18:54):
He comes in with a baseball bat, piss.
Speaker 7 (18:57):
I had a baseball bat and I was giving a meeting.
Speaker 9 (19:00):
Everyone'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 8 (19:08):
I'm not worried. I think it's a trip that this
is going on.
Speaker 9 (19:11):
But 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 7 (19:17):
They weren't listen to no.
Speaker 8 (19:18):
All of a sudden, he's just started. He just erupted,
and how pissed I am. And god damn, you fucker.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
We had this big gold fucking uh like toots and
calm and big gold fucking thing on the table.
Speaker 7 (19:29):
Yeah, it was the King podhead on my conference.
Speaker 9 (19:32):
And 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 1 (19:40):
Everybody's head and smash it to fucking pieces.
Speaker 8 (19:42):
And everybody's like freaking out.
Speaker 7 (19:45):
And I got their attention.
Speaker 5 (19:48):
Now.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
David 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
(20:10):
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
(20:36):
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 1 (20:56):
Larry, 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 2 (21:10):
Them 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 1 (21:25):
So 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
(21:47):
like it was real. It looked like it was real.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
So here's how it would work.
Speaker 9 (21:53):
He 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 2 (22:13):
David Tridan witnessed all this when he was working for
Larry in Houston along with Paul, and then.
Speaker 9 (22:18):
He 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
(22:40):
dark and put on your bikini and then go to
this conference room and meet with this guy.
Speaker 8 (22:47):
And then at the end you're going to meet.
Speaker 9 (22:49):
With 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,
(23:12):
so it's all mirrors on the inside, and it was
like a ReSpectacle.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
This is just so weird and so very uncool, but
Larry loved it, so he decided he wanted an encore.
Speaker 9 (23:25):
So 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 2 (23:43):
But 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 9 (24:03):
A 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 3 (24:17):
And that was just the beginning of the can.
Speaker 8 (24:20):
For the rest of the year, he would say hey.
Speaker 9 (24:23):
On 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 8 (24:29):
Yeah, no, call this girl.
Speaker 9 (24:30):
I mean, we would use the And I think he
structured that entire thing unbeknownst to us, just.
Speaker 8 (24:37):
To have that kind of.
Speaker 9 (24:40):
Digital 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 8 (24:53):
I just watched all that happen. It was part of it.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Even 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 1 (25:12):
Oh 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 2 (25:28):
Okay, 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 3 (25:41):
But that was about to change.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
And 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 2 (25:57):
Tina 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
(26:18):
Paul wanted, and that's what Tina delivered.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Just different kind of Asiana shyes, curly hair, just different
than what was happening in the marketplace. Just cool, looking, interesting,
looking different.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Paul 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 1 (26:50):
Creating 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 3 (27:01):
And it changed everything for Paul.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
I 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 2 (27:22):
Now, 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 5 (27:43):
We're making this agency from scratch. He was right next
door to Carnegie Deli. The whole building.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Carnegie Deli is next to Carnegie Hall, where you can
hear a lot of classical music, but the deli is
pastrami and cheesecake.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
We got a neon sign, Lynn, and we were making
making our old booking table, making the furniture.
Speaker 5 (28:06):
Everything was brand new and sparkling. And when the.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Whole and Umar notices a shift in Paul around this time.
Speaker 4 (28:13):
We became partners, so we were always together, and Polly
grew to love this industry.
Speaker 5 (28:21):
I don't think when he first got in, and I
hope I don't. I don't know. I feel agree with that.
Speaker 4 (28:25):
I 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 5 (28:34):
Ooh, girls, girls, girls, you know.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
And I believe by meeting me and explaining to him
that it's just not about that, and he knew that.
Speaker 5 (28:45):
I was never about that.
Speaker 4 (28:46):
I 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 5 (29:04):
And Paulie grew into that.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Paul'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
(29:28):
wasn't working.
Speaker 4 (29:30):
Paulie 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 5 (29:42):
You know, you just can't come in here.
Speaker 4 (29:44):
You 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 2 (29:53):
Paul 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 5 (30:06):
We were out partying that night.
Speaker 10 (30:07):
We 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 4 (30:21):
I'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 2 (30:33):
Go 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
(30:57):
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 1 (31:08):
And 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 2 (31:26):
In 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 1 (31:37):
I'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,
(32:00):
let's do that. He goes call a couple of girls.
Come on, we'll meet him over at the wherever Chipriani.
Speaker 5 (32:04):
Is whatever whatever.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
I said, okay, gun Laird, and we went out for
like a nightcap, like a fucking three in the morning cheeseburger.
Speaker 7 (32:12):
Whatever.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
It'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 3 (32:27):
But then a few months later.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
Larry's divorce is working its way through court and the
judge makes a significant ruling.
Speaker 7 (32:39):
The court hired a receiver to watch the calf.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
I 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 6 (33:01):
And 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 2 (33:12):
The lend agency is one hundred percent broke.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
I 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
(33:39):
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 5 (34:01):
I said, shit, shit.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Indeed, within twenty four hours, I was out on the street.
Speaker 5 (34:12):
We had a roller coaster of Shenanigans.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
It 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 3 (34:27):
That's next on Model Wars.
Speaker 11 (34:34):
Model 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 3 (34:50):
Julia K.
Speaker 11 (34:51):
S 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
(35:12):
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
(35:35):
review the show wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
Thanks so much for listening.
Campsite Media.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Omar Alboreto grew up in Panama City. He arrived in
New York in the nineteen seventies and soon charmed his way.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Past the velvet rope. At Studio fifty four.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
One 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 4 (00:39):
Got discovered as a model, moved to Italy, worked as
a model for four years, and then moved back.
Speaker 5 (00:45):
To New York City.
Speaker 4 (00:46):
And from model I made the transition to becoming a
model agent.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
So Omar's working as a model agent and one night
in nineteen eighty three, he gets.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
A call from a former colleague.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
Hey, 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 2 (01:10):
The meeting with guys handing out money is a meeting
you take? So Omar said, yes, of course, come meet
me at my office.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
But he wasn't sure what to.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
Expect, so these three guys came in.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
It was a Friday night, it was like a movie.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
So one guy looks exactly, exactly spitting version of Kenny Rogers.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Kenny 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
(01:56):
is just very televangelist trying to become a sex track.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
Suit 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 5 (02:16):
That's one guy, Larry Lynd. Then there's a second guy,
and he had glasses on. At seven o'clock at night.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
This guy's wearing glasses, perfectly tailor navy suit, white shirt,
red tie, overcoat, very Italian looking.
Speaker 5 (02:31):
Michael Fitzmorris.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
So that's Michael. And of course next in the door
is Larry's muscle.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
And at the door there's a big guy.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
Italian guy, kind of heavy set. He didn't come in.
He just stayed at the door, like that's their bodyguard.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Ohmer's watching all this, but he's still on the phone
with somebody.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
And 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 5 (03:05):
He didn't even shake my hand. He goes, how much
money you make?
Speaker 4 (03:10):
I'm like, I, uh, whoa, okay, I make I make
five one year a week, which is a lie.
Speaker 5 (03:18):
I was making like three hundred and fifty bucks a week.
I make five one year a week.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
He goes in his pocket and pulls a lot of
money and just stands there and goes like this.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Larry's rapidly counting through a bunch of money with a
practiced flourish, like he's a blackjack dealer with a deck
of cards.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
And 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 5 (03:48):
And they left.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Who 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
(04:13):
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 3 (04:31):
And there's a.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Saying 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 5 (04:49):
Everything was cash. Everything was cash.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
We will go to Western Union once or twice a
week and come out of you with you know, eighty grand.
Speaker 5 (04:59):
I'll hunt your grand you know. We would put you
know forty running our barget each and walk back to
the household.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Is 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
(05:30):
legitimacy that comes from spending shitloads of money is just
so alluring.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
He 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 3 (05:45):
But was that all that was really going on with Larry.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Paul may have considered him the ultimate party buddy, but Michael,
who was much closer to Larry, saw a man in crisis.
Speaker 6 (05:58):
Larry 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 7 (06:14):
That we owned real.
Speaker 6 (06:15):
Estate in Houston, and he decided he wanted to go
out and meet every girl in the world.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
So the Lend Agency, Paul's entire career is built on
top of one man's mid life crisis.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
And our pal. Paul has no idea.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
He 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 6 (06:44):
With 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
(07:05):
hours a day, trying to keep everything together, screaming and
yelling at him, telling what are you doing?
Speaker 7 (07:10):
This is not right.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Because 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 3 (07:27):
Maybe he even wants to take it up a notch.
Speaker 6 (07:30):
Paul was going on meeting girls in Houston and bringing
them in, and you know, but Larry was enjoying that.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
But Larry also genuinely thought Paul could be a good
model agent.
Speaker 6 (07:41):
Larry 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 2 (07:56):
It'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
(08:16):
dangerous man to disappoint.
Speaker 6 (08:19):
Larry 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
(08:39):
Bob Dylan's lyrics.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
You just knew that Bob Dylan was going to feature
in this story.
Speaker 5 (08:47):
Now.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Michael 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
(09:09):
a story that Larry told Michael.
Speaker 6 (09:15):
Bob 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
(09:37):
lived together for two in the West Village, Okay.
Speaker 8 (09:40):
And in the West Village in those.
Speaker 6 (09:41):
Days, anyone that was anybody sang in the streets.
Speaker 8 (09:45):
They got their guitar and they sang on the streets.
They sang in the little cubs, they sang in places.
Speaker 6 (09:50):
And 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
(10:12):
the big reels, okay, and.
Speaker 8 (10:13):
He just sat there taping him.
Speaker 6 (10:15):
Well, Larry was shown, you know, just writing ten twenty
songs a night.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
So in this version of events, rumored mobster Larry Lynd
is actually the Rosetta stone that unlocks Bob Dylan's famously
enigmatic lyrics.
Speaker 6 (10:39):
Larry 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 2 (10:51):
So, according to Larry via Michael, these are the origins
of some of Dylan's most famous songs.
Speaker 7 (11:04):
Maggie's Farm is about a whorehouse in Brooklyn.
Speaker 6 (11:07):
Okay, the Dyland doesn't even get close to it.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Farm equals whorehouse. And Casey were wondering and I'm not
going to think about what scrubbed the floor.
Speaker 5 (11:18):
Makes me scrub the floor.
Speaker 6 (11:20):
He 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 3 (11:26):
Joes someone Larry knew named Joan.
Speaker 6 (11:30):
He says, uh, how does the song go in my
what do you call it? Bud brass, big brass balls,
big grass.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
So Joan is the unnamed lady.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
And who knows if the bed was even big or
brass at this point, maybe it was a futon.
Speaker 8 (11:53):
So when I said, I asked him, I said, what
do you think of doing?
Speaker 6 (11:55):
He says, well, good for him, he says, at least
my songs got out there.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Larry 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 3 (12:17):
It's called Devil and the Dollar.
Speaker 5 (12:21):
Young Girls.
Speaker 8 (12:25):
Page and.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
In 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 3 (12:47):
Really classy.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
At 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
(13:10):
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.
(13:32):
And Michael Fitzmorris also had an alternative upbringing.
Speaker 6 (13:37):
I 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 7 (13:56):
What I was doing.
Speaker 6 (13:57):
Was that time I was fifteen years old, I was
peddling rings and pins on the streets in New York City.
Speaker 7 (14:03):
I was making good money.
Speaker 6 (14:04):
I 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
(14:26):
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 2 (14:42):
So 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 8 (14:58):
They always be b closing, always be closing, always be closing.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
But at this point New York wasn't the best place
for the real estate business.
Speaker 6 (15:10):
At 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 7 (15:27):
And I thought, and at the time.
Speaker 6 (15:29):
I'm nineteen, and I thought, if that guy could be
a million, and that can be one.
Speaker 7 (15:33):
So I said, come on, ri, let's go, Let's go Houston.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
They end up buying hundreds of acres of land as
Houston's going through this major oil boom, and they put
on these seminars.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Redipline your image of what a salesperson looks like.
Speaker 6 (15:48):
We 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 7 (16:02):
Then they would come up and buy the land.
Speaker 6 (16:04):
And on the weekend we'd probably sell a half a
million dollars with a property back in you know, eighty three.
Speaker 7 (16:09):
That was good money.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
This 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 9 (16:29):
He'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 2 (16:47):
David and Paul were in the audience, just creating what
seems to be an illusion of competition.
Speaker 9 (16:55):
I'm going to have the corner, and then other people
be like, no, no, no, I'm going to get the corner.
Speaker 8 (16:59):
You're like they literally were buyers.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Now the bodyguards are starting to make a bit more sense.
But when Houston's economy crashed, things went bad.
Speaker 6 (17:11):
It 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 2 (17:27):
Soft, 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 1 (17:50):
Fitzmorris 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 7 (18:01):
Fuck book book, make book, book book. I'd got to
jump on an airplane.
Speaker 6 (18:06):
Come 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 10 (18:12):
You know.
Speaker 6 (18:12):
I 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 1 (18:21):
Book 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 2 (18:35):
There'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 3 (18:44):
A baseball bat.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
It's a little like the scene and the Untouchables where
de Niro murders someone, and this.
Speaker 7 (18:52):
Was before the Naro did it.
Speaker 8 (18:54):
He comes in with a baseball bat, piss.
Speaker 7 (18:57):
I had a baseball bat and I was giving a meeting.
Speaker 9 (19:00):
Everyone'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 8 (19:08):
I'm not worried. I think it's a trip that this
is going on.
Speaker 9 (19:11):
But 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 7 (19:17):
They weren't listen to no.
Speaker 8 (19:18):
All of a sudden, he's just started. He just erupted,
and how pissed I am. And god damn, you fucker.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
We had this big gold fucking uh like toots and
calm and big gold fucking thing on the table.
Speaker 7 (19:29):
Yeah, it was the King podhead on my conference.
Speaker 9 (19:32):
And 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 1 (19:40):
Everybody's head and smash it to fucking pieces.
Speaker 8 (19:42):
And everybody's like freaking out.
Speaker 7 (19:45):
And I got their attention.
Speaker 5 (19:48):
Now.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
David 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
(20:10):
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
(20:36):
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 1 (20:56):
Larry, 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 2 (21:10):
Them 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 1 (21:25):
So 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
(21:47):
like it was real. It looked like it was real.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
So here's how it would work.
Speaker 9 (21:53):
He 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 2 (22:13):
David Tridan witnessed all this when he was working for
Larry in Houston along with Paul, and then.
Speaker 9 (22:18):
He 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
(22:40):
dark and put on your bikini and then go to
this conference room and meet with this guy.
Speaker 8 (22:47):
And then at the end you're going to meet.
Speaker 9 (22:49):
With 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,
(23:12):
so it's all mirrors on the inside, and it was
like a ReSpectacle.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
This is just so weird and so very uncool, but
Larry loved it, so he decided he wanted an encore.
Speaker 9 (23:25):
So 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 2 (23:43):
But 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 9 (24:03):
A 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 3 (24:17):
And that was just the beginning of the can.
Speaker 8 (24:20):
For the rest of the year, he would say hey.
Speaker 9 (24:23):
On 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 8 (24:29):
Yeah, no, call this girl.
Speaker 9 (24:30):
I mean, we would use the And I think he
structured that entire thing unbeknownst to us, just.
Speaker 8 (24:37):
To have that kind of.
Speaker 9 (24:40):
Digital 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 8 (24:53):
I just watched all that happen. It was part of it.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Even 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 1 (25:12):
Oh 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 2 (25:28):
Okay, 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 3 (25:41):
But that was about to change.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
And 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 2 (25:57):
Tina 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
(26:18):
Paul wanted, and that's what Tina delivered.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Just different kind of Asiana shyes, curly hair, just different
than what was happening in the marketplace. Just cool, looking, interesting,
looking different.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Paul 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 1 (26:50):
Creating 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 3 (27:01):
And it changed everything for Paul.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
I 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 2 (27:22):
Now, 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 5 (27:43):
We're making this agency from scratch. He was right next
door to Carnegie Deli. The whole building.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Carnegie Deli is next to Carnegie Hall, where you can
hear a lot of classical music, but the deli is
pastrami and cheesecake.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
We got a neon sign, Lynn, and we were making
making our old booking table, making the furniture.
Speaker 5 (28:06):
Everything was brand new and sparkling. And when the.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Whole and Umar notices a shift in Paul around this time.
Speaker 4 (28:13):
We became partners, so we were always together, and Polly
grew to love this industry.
Speaker 5 (28:21):
I don't think when he first got in, and I
hope I don't. I don't know. I feel agree with that.
Speaker 4 (28:25):
I 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 5 (28:34):
Ooh, girls, girls, girls, you know.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
And I believe by meeting me and explaining to him
that it's just not about that, and he knew that.
Speaker 5 (28:45):
I was never about that.
Speaker 4 (28:46):
I 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 5 (29:04):
And Paulie grew into that.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Paul'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
(29:28):
wasn't working.
Speaker 4 (29:30):
Paulie 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 5 (29:42):
You know, you just can't come in here.
Speaker 4 (29:44):
You 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 2 (29:53):
Paul 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 5 (30:06):
We were out partying that night.
Speaker 10 (30:07):
We 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 4 (30:21):
I'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 2 (30:33):
Go 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
(30:57):
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 1 (31:08):
And 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 2 (31:26):
In 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 1 (31:37):
I'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,
(32:00):
let's do that. He goes call a couple of girls.
Come on, we'll meet him over at the wherever Chipriani.
Speaker 5 (32:04):
Is whatever whatever.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
I said, okay, gun Laird, and we went out for
like a nightcap, like a fucking three in the morning cheeseburger.
Speaker 7 (32:12):
Whatever.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
It'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 3 (32:27):
But then a few months later.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
Larry's divorce is working its way through court and the
judge makes a significant ruling.
Speaker 7 (32:39):
The court hired a receiver to watch the calf.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
I 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 6 (33:01):
And 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 2 (33:12):
The lend agency is one hundred percent broke.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
I 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
(33:39):
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 5 (34:01):
I said, shit, shit.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Indeed, within twenty four hours, I was out on the street.
Speaker 5 (34:12):
We had a roller coaster of Shenanigans.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
It 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 3 (34:27):
That's next on Model Wars.
Speaker 11 (34:34):
Model 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 3 (34:50):
Julia K.
Speaker 11 (34:51):
S 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
(35:12):
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
(35:35):
review the show wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
Thanks so much for listening.
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