Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street Read online

  The money couldn’t sit in a safe forever. Louis was no miser.

  Nearly every weekend Louis and Stefanie went to South Beach in Miami, usually with Benny and his girlfriend Michelle. In the winters they had a rental at Hunter Mountain. When he wasn’t on South Beach or Hunter Mountain, he was in Atlantic City. When he wasn’t in one of those places or with Stefanie, he would be at another money funnel, Scores.

  He would go there most weeknights, meeting important new people. Celebrities. Sports figures. The kind of people you meet in New York when you go to the right places and have a lot of money. And when you have a lot of money you have to look as if you have a lot of money. You don’t buy suits off the rack and you don’t wear a Seiko. Watches don’t tell time. They tell something about you. They make a statement. He got his first Rolex right after he got to Todd, and it was on his wrist when he turned twenty. From then on he always had at least one Rolex, and by the time he got to Brod he had a bunch in his bedroom drawer.

  Buying stuff was fun.

  When he went to Tourneau on Madison Avenue for the Presidential, he came with a hat pulled over his nose and pajama-bottom-type pants. It was a thing to see. Coming into a store like Tourneau with Sally Leads, and being ignored, and going to the Rolex counter, and putting a stack of money on the counter. He got service. Good service.

  “I went from wondering where I was going to get ten dollars to go back and forth from work, to buying stupid shit and not even thinking about it,” said Louis. “It wouldn’t bother me. I wouldn’t think twice. I bought Louis Vuitton wallets. They’re four hundred. I didn’t care. I wouldn’t think about it. People would go into a store and say, Ohhh . . .’ I’d say, ‘Nice wallet. How much? Three ninety-five? No big deal.’ My mother got for Christmas a Hummel, my father got a Nautica jacket, Stefanie got all of Bloomingdale’s. I would just go there and pick out the mannequins. I’d see a mannequin dressed in a girl’s clothes and I’d tell the salesperson, ‘That mannequin there.’

  “I was always tan. I used to take time out of my day to go to the tanning salon. At lunchtime I’d leave, take a cab, go to the tanning salon, and come back. Facials. I’d get a face masque and stuff. Why not? Take the dirt out. Really deep-cleanse it. Barbershop once a week. I got my eyebrows waxed. Used to go to a salon, Hermitage. A men’s salon. I’d go there and all in one day get a massage, manicure, facial, eyebrows, haircut. Never did that before.

  “I used to get a massage up on 38th Street, and I’d have Sally Leads shoot up to Bloomingdale’s and buy an outfit to wear to go out that night. This happened every other day. I wouldn’t even wash the clothes. I was too lazy to take them to the wash. I didn’t like them after a week. Didn’t want to wear them no more. I’d buy new ones. It was irrational. Normal people would just take their clothes and wash them. But if I have to go home and wash them, I go, ‘Nah, I don’t want to do that. I need a new outfit. It’s shit. Sucks. Fuck it.’ Half the shit I bought I wouldn’t wear.”

  “The money and the possessions were so important to him because they really did boost his self-esteem,” said Stefanie. “He didn’t have any. For him, I think, the money was self-worth. If he had no money, he was worth nothing. He wasn’t a good enough person.

  “He put too much of a value on the dollar. When he started work, he decided to become a big shot. All of a sudden all these people were coming out of the woodwork. Even the people he met. Who are these people? They weren’t his friends. Two months ago he was nothing. Now we’re treating them to dinner, buying them drinks. Taking them out. I would say to him, ‘What happens when the money runs dry? Are they still going to be here? These aren’t your friends. Your friends are the people you grew up with. If they’re your friends they shouldn’t be freeloading.’ I think he didn’t care as long as he had a lot of people who were interested in him, to hang out with him.”

  In the back of his mind, Louis knew that people were using him, maybe, just a little. But he didn’t care. There was plenty of money to go around. Plenty for everybody, forever.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  When Benny brought a large, heavyset man named Frank Coppa up to A. T. Brod a few months after they started working there, it was a pain in the ass. Louis hated when strangers came by to visit.

  Coppa met with Benny in the office alone. Louis was asked to leave. He hated it. There was nothing he hated more than being asked to leave somewhere.

  So he went downstairs, down by Battery Park. He smoked for a while. Looked at the girls. Then he came back up and they were still talking. The door was closed. Frank was doing most of the talking. He was gesturing with his large, ham-sized hands. It went on for an hour and a half. Louis was sitting outside, in the boardroom, smoking. Excluded.

  “It was so annoying,” said Louis. “Then I called Benny on his extension and I said, ‘Listen, what do you want me to do here? I got work to do, you know.’ And he says, ‘I don’t know.’

  “Frank was sitting in my chair. He was a big guy. About six-two, maybe two hundred and eighty pounds. Humongous. So he’s sitting there, and they were talking about this great deal that Frank has and how we’re going to raise lots of money. It was going to be the next fucking Mickey D’s.

  “At that time I didn’t really know who he was. Benny didn’t introduce me to him. Then, after he left, as he was walking out, he said, ‘Louie, this is the guy who shook me down and took my ’Vette.’”

  Frank sat in Louis’s seat with comfort, regally, because he was at home. Frank had always been at home in brokerages, no matter where they were located—New Jersey, Long Island, or Manhattan. He was working with stocks and brokers as far back as the 1970s, and in 1979 he was convicted by the feds for his role in a stock deal involving a company called Tucker Drilling. Oil stocks were the dot.coms of the 1970s. People wanted to buy hot stocks. So Frank and his crew got oil company stock that was nearly worthless and gave brokers cash, under the table, to sell the stock to the public at high prices. “Cash deals.”

  Frank was back in the stock business by the late 1980s, only this time he was more careful and didn’t get caught. When the feds sent him to prison in 1992 for tax evasion, it was for something entirely unrelated to Wall Street. In fact, it was such a bullshit thing that it got very little publicity at the time. He was accused of concealing income he got in the early 1980s from a school bus company that was controlled by members of his family. It was called My Three Sons, as in the 1960s TV series.

  The name was more than a homage to Fred MacMurray. Frank actually had three sons. One became a doctor. The others, Frank Junior and Michael, stayed close to their father and went into business. The school bus business.

  Frank got out of school buses after that and switched to chicken. Chicken restaurants. Chain restaurants, including a hot IPO called Boston Chicken, were serious stock plays at the time. That’s why he had stopped by to see Benny. Chicken was the subject of conversation, a chain of fast-food chicken restaurants Frank’s family ran called Chic-Chick. The way Frank talked about it that day at A. T Brod, you’d think it was the greatest thing since God created the school bus leasing contract.

  Frank Junior and Michael had both moved to Chic-Chick after they left their last line of work back in 1991. According to papers later filed by Chic-Chick with the New York secretary of state, Frank Junior had “owned and operated transit companies having bus contracts with the New York City Board of Education,” and the same description applied to his older brother Michael, except for the ownership part.

  It was not exactly a typical career transition—school buses to fried chicken—but there were commonalities. School-age children ride in school buses and eat fried chicken, no? Besides, management is management, and the Coppa name alone stood for something, particularly when stock was involved.

  Frank wanted to take the company public, À la Boston Chicken, with Frank Junior slated to be the chairman and chief executive officer. The first thing he was going to do was to commence a “private placement” of Chic-Chick s
hares. That is a conventional and, usually, perfectly respectable capital-raising technique, used by thousands of companies. A private placement is a bit like an IPO, but without all the dumb SEC paperwork. In a private placement, wealthy investors—they have to be millionaires, by law—invest money in a company that is not yet public, often in the expectation that it will go public sometime down the road.

  When a private placement works out okay, the investors can walk away very wealthy. If it goes wrong, they can lose every penny. The business can go bad, or—it happens—maybe the company doesn’t exist at all. But that wasn’t happening here. There were Chic-Chick restaurants. Six of them. None were owned by the company—all were owned and operated by outsiders, under franchise. But that was fine print and who gave a fuck about that?

  For Frank Senior, the private placement was a way of killing two pullets with one stone. He would raise money for the company and, meanwhile, lay the groundwork for taking the company public. That way everybody would make a bundle of money. Legally. Frank was enthusiastic—and hey, when Frank wanted something, he usually got it. Whether it was a private placement or Benny’s ’Vette.

  The ’Vette episode did not rankle Benny.

  Guys always retain ties to their neighborhoods, and Frank Coppa was no exception. He lived in New Jersey but, like a salesman who knew the territory, he still had an exclusive franchise over the vicinity of 86th Street at the eastern edge of Bensonhurst by the elevated train line. As soon as you walked onto the platform you were in Frank Coppa Country. It could have been on the subway maps, for it was just as true as “86th Street.”

  Frank’s territory encompassed a low-income municipal housing project called Marlboro Houses. By Benny’s account, the whole ’Vette business stemmed from the fact that Benny, who lived in the vicinity, used to sell drugs at Marlboro back in the 1980s and early 1990s, at the time when he was listed on NASD records as “unemployed.”

  Frank was no neighborhood dope dealer, but Benny’s enterprise fell under his jurisdiction, so Benny had to pay him for the privilege, and he couldn’t come up with the cash one time. Frank got his ’Vette. He climbed into the ’Vette, somehow, and drove off with it.

  Benny’s drug dealing put him in contact with more than just the honest, hardworking substance abusers of Marlboro Houses. He got to know a guy in his mid-twenties, from Queens originally, who had slicked-back blond hair and looked a bit like Charlie Sheen. Al Palagonia was just starting to make his name at D. H. Blair when he met Benny. And when Hanover Sterling started up in 1992, Al introduced Benny to his other friend, Roy Ageloff. Benny was genial and smart, a hustler. Just the kind of fresh new blood Roy was looking for, a young kid uncontaminated by the Street.

  In the years ahead, people on the outside, regulators and journalists, would have described Frank’s visit to Brod as part of some kind of effort to “infiltrate” Brod. But the Frank-Benny-Brod relationship was a lot simpler than that. Frank was just bringing a business deal to an associate. And it was one hell of a deal.

  It took a few months for the papers to be processed. Louis was not waiting with bated breath. Which was good. Because when Louis saw the Chic-Chick private placement memorandum, duly filed with the New York State Bureau of Investor Protection in February 1995, he almost gagged.

  Louis was being asked to sell Chic-Chick “units” to his clients, and each of them cost $25,000. The units were in the form of a loan, at 10 percent, with some stock thrown in as a sweetener. But there was no way you could sugarcoat Chic-Chick. In 1994 the company had a financial statement that looked as if it was generated by a small-town church thrift shop—revenues of $163,581 and expenses of $158,568, with $59,736 in working capital. That was it. No 000s omitted.

  True, Chic-Chick had “expansion” plans. Following this offering, the private placement memorandum said, “the Company intends to commence development of one (minimum) or two (maximum) Company owned restaurants.” If the “casual atmosphere” didn’t get them lining up outside the “one (minimum) or two (maximum)” Chic-Chick-owned and -operated restaurants, they might be enticed by the slogan, “Chicken with Good Taste.”

  “I used to say to Benny I had a pitch for Chic-Chick: ‘Frank used to eat a lot of chicken when he was young, used to cook the chicken on the barbecue. And he told his son, “You should start a franchise chicken company.”’ I used to say they could put Frank in a chicken suit in front of the store, and that wouldn’t sell the chicken. It wasn’t even good chicken. The fries were rubbery. It was the stupidest fucking thing I ever saw in my life. They had the whole family working there. Frank Junior was really into it. I think that Frank Junior really wanted to make it go somewhere, but his father probably smacked him. ‘Smarten up!’

  “I used to pitch it by saying, ‘Listen, I got something coming up. Chic-Chick. They got one franchise store and they’re opening up nine more. Could be the next Kentucky Fried Chicken.’ I felt like saying, ‘Frank Coppa owns it. You know, the guy in the Mafia. They got his name right in the prospectus.’ What else could you say about this company? It was fucking horrible. I couldn’t sell it. These guys are putting on the pressure and I told Benny, ‘Tell them I can’t do it. I can sell a lady in white gloves an open jar of ketchup but I can’t sell Chic-Chick.’ Eventually I got about three hundred thousand dollars of it sold, I don’t know how.”

  By now, New York State law prohibited smoking in most places of employment. Louis could always tell when Frank was arriving at Brod because he tended to disregard that particular statutory restriction. Frank was always smoking big cigars—“torpedoes”—and he didn’t care much if anybody was gagging on the fumes. Louis observed that he always dressed well. Guys like him always wore stylish clothing, but a Guy like Frank was not a slave to conventions in men’s clothing. Guys were fashion leaders, at least in their own circles.

  “He always wore slacks, never jeans. Always grayish slacks, nice shoes. A button-down shirt. No tie. And a black, short mink coat. I mean, he wears a fur, mink jacket. Men don’t wear mink jackets. Like how do you walk down Wall Street in a mink jacket and people not think that you’re a gangster? He probably had it custom-made. You have to go to Fifth Avenue, to one of the fur stores there. These are the guys who wear a mink coat: Either John Gotti, or a black guy. Some pimp in Harlem.

  “Frank wore a Rolex, but with style. Not gaudy. Not with diamonds. Not like mine. Mine had diamonds around the top, diamonds all over it. He just wore a gold Rolex, no diamonds, a bracelet, and a ring. Ring had a sick diamond on it. Then he had the cigar. It was about a foot long, I’m not kidding. But for him it was small. He was tremendous. All fat, but you don’t tell him that. Like he ain’t even a nice guy. Call him fat and he’d probably smack you around. He had big hands. Big Italian hands. Definitely a mean guy in his prime. You could tell.”

  Chic-Chick was an annoyance. But he had to pitch Chic-Chick. Benny made that clear. There was no choice. But Louis didn’t care. He was building a business. And sometimes, when you build a business, you have to do people favors. That’s how Wall Street works. Favors. Networking. Louis was learning that—learning to become a Wall Street guy.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The chop house kids loved Howard Stern. His early morning radio show was as much a part of their lives as the pitches they read and the rips that were making them rich. The media called him a “shock jock,” but that was the media for you—full of crap, as always. The press, and the yahoos and scrubs who tried to get him off the air, saw only the sensational stuff, the strippers, the butt bongo. To the chop house kids, Howard was just a guy from a blue-collar suburb who made good, who spoke his mind. He was a cool older guy. A Roy. Like Roy, Howard dressed as he wanted, didn’t go in for the button-down life, told people in authority to go fuck themselves, didn’t let the government cut off his balls. He had an entourage, just like Roy. He yelled at his people and gave them a hard time, just like Roy—and they still loved him. Just like Roy.

  But it was the fight with the Fede
ral Communications Commission, his constant running battle with the government, which was the most important common ground. Howard fought the FCC and won. The chop house kids were fighting the SEC and winning. And through it all—this was the part his detractors missed—Howard was always a family man. A private man, who lived on Long Island with his family and didn’t cheat on his wife.

  Louis wanted desperately to get Howard Stern as a client. It would be like getting God as a client. No, better than God, because there was no God. And there was a Howard Stern.

  Louis began his campaign methodically. He decided to home in on the periphery, the entourage of on-air personalities who kept Howard fed with straight lines. One of the most popular was a former intern named John Melendez, “Stuttering John,” who was noted for buttonholing celebrities at premieres and asking rude questions. Stuttering John was a young guy, only a bit older than Louis, and he was too young to have his own entourage.

  It was Louis’s idea to call Stuttering John, and he did it only a few weeks after he started working at Brod. John had talked on the air about how he was buying into IPOs, and Howard was goofing on him about it.

  “Benny said, ‘Yeah give him a call.’ Benny would never do it because he has no balls. So I did it. I didn’t give a shit. What was he going to say? Get off the phone, fuck you, hang up on me? That would be it. Dead issue.