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

  “I called up the people who owned Sports Sciences. ‘Listen, Sports Sciences is at $3.00. It’s not doing that well. I want you to buy Sure Shot. It’s at four dollars a share. We’ll sell your Sports Sciences and we’re going to buy Sure Shot. All I need is a thousand bucks from you.’ Easy sale.

  “Then I called all the clients that owned Sure Shot, and told them I was swapping them Sure Shot for Sports Sciences. I can charge them the three seventy-five ask price for Sports Sciences, and I can add another twenty-five-cent markup legally.

  “So the people who sell Sports Sciences were sending me a dollar a share to make up the price difference, which is a dollar a share for me—a hundred thousand dollars total from them. The people who swapped Sure Shot for Sports Sciences aren’t paying me any money, but they’re buying for four dollars—the stock that my other customers just sold for three. The whole hundred thousand that I raised, because of this cross, I kept. The whole fucking thing.”

  Pitching clients for the second trades and crosses was an art. The kind of stuff that came from within. It was like being a great football player, like being a Johnny Mitchell, or a great comedian like Jackie the Jokeman. It was talent. That was the word for it. Something you were born with. But talent needs to be practiced. Honed. Louis became an expert in investor psychology. He knew that people craved acceptance and hated rejection. He put that to work for him.

  “Nobody in my book didn’t have another trade. And if they didn’t have another trade I’d fire them as a client. I’d literally yell at them. I’d say, ‘You know what it is? I don’t even want you as a client if you’re not going to trade with me. You’re fired. I’m sending your account out of here. I don’t want you as a client.’ And they’d take it to heart. They’d say, ‘What do you mean?’ I’d say, ‘What do you mean, you don’t want to do the trade? You know, I don’t want to do no trades with you. You’re fired. Take your account, get it out of here, give it to your other shit broker in fucking Texas. I don’t want to do shit with you.’

  “I’d hang up the phone on them. And they’d call back and say, ‘I’m not fired! I’ll send the money!’

  “If they’d call up to sell I’d tell them to buy. Some guy would say, ‘You know, Lou, I got to liquidate some funds. I’m buying a house.’ I’d say, ‘Let me call you right back. I’m in the middle of something.’ I’d hang up the phone and call back like ten minutes later. I’d say, ‘You wouldn’t believe the opportunity that came across my desk. The stock that you’re telling me to sell is about to go to seven. I need you to buy more.’ He’d say, ‘Keep what we got.’ I’d totally reverse the situation.

  “Some of these guys, ten thousand was all they had. I’d feel sorry for them. They were scrubs like. And they’d invest the whole thing. They’d tell you how much they had in their checking account. They’d say, ‘I only got ninety-six hundred in there.’ I’d say, ‘What, you can’t put another four hundred in your checking account? I need ten thousand.’ He’d say, ‘I get paid Thursday, so I can do it. I can put in another four hundred.’ And they would send ten thousand to you. They’d wait for the paycheck, and try to cover the check. I used to think to myself, ‘What is it with these guys? If all I had was forty thousand, maybe if I was dumb enough I’d invest like two. Not thirty-five.’ Not all my money. They would throw in all their money. They really believed it. Like they were going to get a stock that was going to go from two to forty and they were going to be millionaires. I used to tell them, ‘This stock will make you a millionaire.’

  “If a client had like six hundred thousand with us, I said, ‘You send me a couple of hundred thousand dollars, this stock will put you over the top. You’ll be a million-dollar client. You’ll be right in my A Book of million-dollar clients.’ They used to hate being in my C book. ‘You’re in my C Book right now,’ I used to tell them. ‘Don’t you want to get to the A Book?’ ‘Well, how do I get there?’ They wanted to be your best guy. And I used to make them always feel like more important than the next guy. Meanwhile, there was no A, B, or C Book. I used to have the papers on the table. I used to have to search for their numbers. ‘Where is this fuck?’

  “Sometimes I used to feel bad for some of them. Because they really thought they were going to make money. But I would take their money. If you want to send me the money, send me the money, man. I’ve got cars and shit to buy. And after a while if I started to feel bad for somebody, I’d say to myself, ‘You know what? If he’s stupid enough to send it to me, fuck his ass. I’ll steal his money.’”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Stefanie was beginning to talk about getting married, and Louis was okay with it.

  Louis could find stability in his relationship with Stefanie and her family. Stability and—something else. Something that he had never had in his life, not since he was a baby. He didn’t quite know what to call it. Boundaries? Limits? He wasn’t sure what to call it.

  His family didn’t have much in the way of boundaries when he was a kid, and now that he was an adult he saw that Wall Street had no boundaries either. Louis had always set his own limits—by not having any. He did whatever the fuck he pleased. St. Joseph-by-the-Sea taught him that authority was dumb and could be ignored, and that society had no meaningful consequences for bad behavior. It prepared him for Wall Street.

  George Donohue became a kind of second father. As Louis was growing up, Nick Pasciuto had become almost as much a buddy as he was a father. And when the money came in, when Louis moved to Manhattan, Nick, still burly and youthful in his mid-forties, started to hang out with him sometimes, and even stay over at the apartment. Fran came too, staying in the apartment with a friend of hers when Louis was out of town for a few days. Fran thought the apartment was beautiful, and she liked Stefanie, but she worried about her only son, her firstborn. She wondered if what he was doing, whatever that was, was going to hurt him. She remembered her days on Wall Street. She didn’t like Wall Street.

  George was different. George would gently question whether the money was going to come in forever, but he never lectured Louis, never nagged him, never sat in judgment. With George he could be an adult. With his parents he was always a kid.

  Louis saw the way Stefanie acted toward her father. Their friends called the Donohues the Brady Bunch but there was a reason why they made movies and TV shows about the Brady Bunch and My Three Sons and, when Nick was a kid in the 1950s, that ultimate fantasy, Father Knows Best. People made fun of shows like that but there is something about that kind of pseudo-family that appeals to people, deep in the recesses of whatever value system or fantasy life they may possess.

  In the Donohue household, father knew best. Louis saw that but could never quite understand it. George and Barbara taught Stefanie to—what was this? Work? Obey? Tell the truth? Louis saw it with his own two eyes and he didn’t really know what to think about it. Her parents wouldn’t even let her stay overnight at his apartment. Not that Louis was complaining.

  There were other girls. Of course there were. Usually it didn’t matter. He’d meet a girl and she was history before the bed dried. But when he met Deenie, it wasn’t like that. Deenie was different. She was a dancer at Scores.

  “At the time, a lot of people that were going to Scores were older businessmen. We were young kids with Benzes and lots of money and fancy watches, and not dressed in suit and ties, dressed in Calvin Klein casual wear. Dressed well. Always tan. So Deenie came over, she was talking, and you know what? I knew she wasn’t like the regular girls there. You know, girls just looking to rob you for your money. They were always coming over to you, being all nice to you, because they’re just trying to scam you for your money. They do what we do.

  “Later on they talked about John Gotti, Jr., running the place but I never seen him there. I used to see actors in there all the time. I used to hang out with Stuttering John, hang out with the Jets. Brad Baxter and Johnny Mitchell used to come there a lot. I used to see, like, Ethan Hawke. Demi Moore I seen there one night. I was sitti
ng right next to her. I was talking to her a little bit. She was hot, a good-looking girl. She was in there, learning for her movie Striptease, I think.

  “So I went there a couple of times and Deenie comes over to me and says, ‘What are you doing? How are you?’ Blah blah blah. And she’d say, ‘You want me to dance for you?’ And I’d say, ‘No, if you want to dance, dance for my friend.’ I used to give her the money to dance with somebody else. I didn’t want to dance with her. I kind of liked her a little bit and I didn’t want her to dance. That ruins it. It ruins the relationship then. Then you just become another sucker on her list. So then I asked if she wanted to hang out one night. And she said, ‘Yeah.’ So I took her out, and that was it. We hit it off. She left that night, and then she came back a few days later and she stayed at my apartment almost every night since then.

  “They were both great girls. Stefanie was a shy, innocent Irish girl. That innocent look. I’m very attracted to it. I don’t like girls that wear makeup. Deenie was like that too. No makeup. That innocent look. I’m very attracted to it. The blond hair, the blue eyes, the pale skin. It drives me crazy.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  When the stress of working on Wall Street got to be too much, it was time for a Mission.

  They also called it a Bender. But “Mission” was a better word for what they did to relieve stress and overwork, because they were taking a little trip away from it all, a little trip to Blowland. They would take a vacation, right there in Battery Park City, in Louis’s apartment. Louis even took a home video of one of his Missions. It was a vacation and you take a nice video of a great vacation so you can remember it fondly in the future.

  “It was our break from the stress. It would be a Tuesday-Friday thing. I always knew when we were going to go on a Mission. You just knew. So I’d call Benny.

  “‘What do you want to do, Ben?’

  “‘I dunno. I don’t want to go to work for a few days.’

  “‘Neither do I.’

  “‘Good. Want to go on a Mission?’

  “‘Yeah.’

  “So we’d go on the Mission. We did a lot of cocaine and drank a lot of beers and fucked a lot of girls. We ordered them. We would get prostitutes sometimes because they were easy. Half the time we couldn’t even fuck them because our dicks couldn’t get hard because of the coke. So we’d have them just come around and walk around.

  “We’d really bond, me and Benny, during these Missions. Once we had these whores come up to the apartment. These two girls we ordered from this prostitute service. One of them was this beautiful blond girl—she shouldn’t have been a prostitute, this girl—and a girl that had multiple sclerosis or something like that. We’re both fucked up. I say, ‘Benny, I got the blonde.’ And he must have not noticed. He says, ‘Louie, I got the brunette. Look at her, she’s dynamite.’ Now, God forgive me, I don’t mean to make fun, but her hands were all twisted. So I open the door, and Benny’s on the floor, completely naked, and this girl was sucking his dick. And doing it all fucked up. But he didn’t notice. So I said, ‘Ben, what are you doing? The girl, Ben, she’s fucked up.’ He said, ‘Louie, get out of here.’

  “So we nicknamed her Handy Whore, like in the Saturday Night Live skit, Handy Man. And one of my other friends was there, and we were running around Benny, all high, and he was high, sitting on the floor getting his dick sucked by Handy Whore, and we’re running around him, making fun of him, laughing. It was so funny. I guess you had to be there. I was laughing so hard, my ribs were aching. And I remember Benny getting up, naked, and was all high.

  “We used to have black curtains on the windows. We couldn’t have sunlight. I bought from Bed, Bath and Beyond a stack of like thirty black sheets, just for this purpose, to put them over the windows so no sunlight could get into the house. Because if we woke up in the morning—and we weren’t sleeping; we were partying all night—and the sun came out, it was torture. It was the death of us. You have to be in that position to know what I mean. You’re partying. You don’t want the sun. You want gloomy, dead, morgue-looking territory. And you’re paranoid, and the sun makes you more paranoid. If you do blow for a period of twenty-four hours or more, you get paranoid. I don’t know why. If the phone rings—you get startled. Benny would be looking out the window, ‘Who’s coming?’ I say, ‘Who’s coming? We’re on the thirty-fourth fucking floor, Benny, who could be coming to the house?’ He’d be looking out the window, so we’d have to cover up the windows with black curtains.

  “So one time I took this video. I took the video prior, and the apartment is light and airy and beautiful. Floors all shiny. Then I took a video at the end—black curtains, beer all over, I’m talking about maybe twenty cases of beer. Cocaine all over every fucking possible flat surface. Girls and shit. When I was done I was done. And then I would realize. I’d walk around and I’d be like, ‘What happened? What are we doing?’

  “Benny used to have this thing about watching The Lion King after we did coke. I put in the video and he’s crying, watching the fucking Lion King. This is the last day of the Mission, and it’s over now. I would have to tell him it was over. He needed to be scolded into saying it’s over.

  “So he’s on the couch, lying there, and I’m video-cameraing it, and he’s got the beer, and I’ve got him drinking the beer at like nine in the morning and it smelled so bad, the apartment. You know that alcohol-coke mixed breath? It’s just like this breath, it’s so unique, and it stinks, it’s this odor. So he’s drinking the beer and he’s like, ‘Louie, what are you doing with that?’ And he took a sip out of his beer, and he put it down, and I stayed on it with the video camera.

  “You really bond with somebody when you’re in these positions. You get to really know somebody’s true colors.”

  Louis was learning a lot about himself too as he enjoyed the better things in life and spent money. He was learning what it was to be twenty-one and have access to an undepletable supply of money. He was learning that the more money he was getting, the more he was likely to get, and that it was never going to stop. He was learning that you didn’t even have to think about money. That money was just there, and that he never had to worry about money again for the rest of his life. He could do what he needed to do to feel comfortable and relaxed. Like order a limo, for instance. But he would do more than just take one home late at night, the way most people on Wall Street might do, or use one to go back and forth from work.

  “This was after my second or third big check at A. T. Brod. I got like a two-hundred-forty-thousand-dollar paycheck, and I just went berserk. Beserko. I took a hundred seventy in cash out of the bank. I went to Citibank and asked for it in cash. The fucking teller almost died. They had a security guard walk me to the door. I go, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine. Don’t worry. You ain’t seen nothing yet. I’ll be back for the rest tomorrow.’ I just went home and I spent like sixty, seventy thousand in a week and a half.

  “I was partying with Benny and we were doing coke and I was getting so paranoid that I wanted the limo running and downstairs in front of my building, because I was nervous, in case I had to make a breakaway. In case I had to make a getaway out of there. So I had the limo company send me a limo. Twenty-four hours a day. For a week. I used to look out my window. I told the guy, ‘Park by the tree,’ right downstairs, so I could spit on the car from my window. I’d look out my window and ‘Okay, he’s still there.’ I’d have them change the limo drivers by my building.

  “Then the limo driver left. I looked out the window and I went, ‘Arggggh!’ Fucking limo ain’t there! ‘Benny, the limo ain’t there,’ and he’s a nervous wreck. Feeling his chest. I call the limo company and I go, ‘Jerry. The limo’s not here.’ He says, ‘The guy went to buy a pack of cigarettes. He had to get gas in the limo. You got him running the engine.’

  “We paid a lot of money to do it, though. Ten thousand dollars for the limo to stay there for a week. Two thousand dollars a day. We didn’t use it one time. We kept on telling the gu
y, ‘Pull up to the front. We’re coming down to go out.’ We never made it downstairs to go out.’

  “Then finally I went down with a girl, and we just went off. It was some chick, some friend of a Scores girl. I said, ‘I want to go to Florida.’ He says, ‘Where you leaving from? Newark or LaGuardia?’ I say, ‘No, no. You don’t understand. I want to take the limo to Florida. How much? I’ll give you three grand.’ He says, ‘Done deal.’ So he probably told the guy who ran the limo company he was driving me around in Jersey and New York for three or four days.

  “I was so paranoid, I remember in the car. I didn’t want to shower, and I wouldn’t peek out the windows of the limo. I was fucked up. Fucked up bad. I don’t know what it was. I was partying too much, really paranoid. The limo driver, he tells me on the way down there, the Carolinas or somewhere, he says he needed to take a shower. I says, ‘Make sure you leave the car running.’ He’s yawning. He wanted to sleep at night in a hotel. I say, ‘No, no. I’m staying in the limo.’ I remember sitting there, biting my nails. Once he opened the partition and said he had to sleep, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, man, he’s got to sleep. All right. We got to figure this out.’ And I said, ‘Listen, I’ll give you an extra couple of hundred dollars to sleep in the limo.’ So he slept in the front seat.

  “I wouldn’t even let the girl get out of the limo. I remember I wouldn’t let her get out of the car. She’d say she had to go to the bathroom, and I’d go with her. Because I was afraid she was going to take off. ‘I’m coming with you. There’s no way I’m going to let you leave this limo.’ I wouldn’t even leave the limo. I’d have to go to the bathroom and I’d tell them to pull over to a deserted block. I didn’t want nobody to see me. I don’t know what it was. I was completely fucking paranoid. It took us two and a half days to get there and I didn’t leave the limo for two and a half fucking days.