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

  “So all week before this, while the limo was downstairs, I would call Stefanie. Ten-second conversations. ‘Really busy.

  Can’t talk right now. ’Bye.’ I would hope and pray that the machine would pick up so that I could just leave a machine message. Then when I went down to Florida I told her I had to go away on business.

  “I was ‘in Texas’ for four days.”

  There were moments, not very many of them, but a few spare moments when he questioned what he was doing, when he started thinking that maybe he was making the wrong decision by getting involved—with Stefanie. He could relate to Deenie in a way that he couldn’t relate to Stefanie. Deenie represented the new. Stefanie the old. It was hard to choose. There were things he could do with Deenie that he just couldn’t do with Stefanie. Missions, for instance.

  Deenie could deal with him being high. With Deenie there was a lot less lying, a lot less acting. He was who he was, who he had become. He could get high and he didn’t have to hide that from her. He could never tell Stefanie that he got high. With Deenie he could be himself, who he really was.

  Stefanie thought he was still the scrawny kid she met when they were seventeen, only now he was successful. A success on Wall Street.

  But she wasn’t supportive. She didn’t understand him. She had stupid doubts, asinine questions.

  So he didn’t choose. During the week he had Deenie, the Manhattan girl. During the weekend, and during the week, he had Stefanie, the Staten Island girl. It was like working two jobs. Two shifts. But Louis was a hardworking guy.

  “There ain’t nobody who knows my life better than my doorman. You got to make him your best friend. I used to tip this guy like crazy, because he would know everything about me. If he wanted to give me up to either girl, it was easy. But I used to explain to him, ‘Stefanie’s my girl from Staten Island. She’s my wife-to-be. Deenie’s my sidekick girl.’ I used to tell him my life because he knew anyway. He used to see me come in, leave, come in, leave. It was fucking nuts.

  “So this is how my day went. I wake up in the morning, eight o’clock, eight-thirty. Sometimes seven. There’s Deenie. ‘Deenie, I’m going to work.’ She says, ‘Yeah, see you later.’ She only had four hours of sleep. Me too. Then I go to work. Driven to work. Brod is right across West Street, but I don’t give a fuck. I’m not walking. If Sally Leads is at the apartment he drives me to work. Otherwise I get the car, drive to work. Come back from work at lunchtime. Deenie’s still in the apartment. Maybe have an afternoon sex session. If not, wake her up, so she can get on with her fucking day. She would sleep until six o’clock if not. So I’d wake her up. ‘Come on, Deenie, you got to get your shit together.’ She’d get up, get something to eat, fool around, whatever. And then I would go back to work. Now she would straighten up the apartment, she would clean up. She was a good girl.

  “I come back to the apartment at four o’clock. She’d be there. Now mind you, Stefanie would think I’m working till seven or eight o’clock at night. I’m not. I’m working till four, four-thirty. If not, sometimes I’d stay at work till eleven o’clock. It depended. But I’d come home every day at four o’clock anyway. I would hang out with Deenie for a little while, go out and get something to eat. If not, she would leave. I’d drop her off at her apartment and she’d get ready to go to work.

  “Then I would call Stefanie from my cell phone on the way back. This would be five-thirty, six o’clock. Sometimes I would have to go back to work and I wouldn’t hang out with Stefanie. But if I wasn’t working I’d call Stefanie and say, ‘What are you doing? Do you want to come out here? Do you want me to come to Staten Island?’ Most of the time she’d want to come out to the apartment. We’d go out to get something to eat, go back to the apartment, hang out, watch a movie, whatever, fool around. She’d go home at twelve o’clock. Now she’d be thinking I’m going to fucking bed at twelve o’clock. I’m not. I’m just starting.

  “I would take a shower now, get dressed. Benny lives two blocks away in the ‘projects’ of Battery Park City, I used to call it. Gateway Plaza. Lowest buildings, shit buildings. Hallways stank. Horrible. So I’d call him at the projects down the block. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Nothing. Getting ready to go to Scores.’ He was doing the same thing. He had Michelle, who would come over and hang out at the apartment, go home to Brooklyn, and he’d get ready, get dressed, go out with me. He was living the same fucking psycho lifestyle.

  “He’d get dressed and pick me up, or I’d pick him up, and we’d go to Scores. He had his girl and I had my girl at Scores. He had all the girls at Scores, almost, Benny was a very good-looking kid. Puerto Rican-Italian. So we’d drink, party, do whatever we were doing for the night. Doing lines if we’re doing blasts, whatever. We used to call it Scooby-Doo. That was our nickname for it. One of the kids that we got it from looked like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.

  “At four o’clock I’d be at Scores. Wait for Deenie to come out. We would go home. Maybe get a bite to eat at the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s on Second Avenue. Go to Battery Park, park my car, go upstairs. She would take a shower. I used to make her take a shower because guys dance with her all night. So quick shower and we go to bed, do what we do, wake up, do it again. Call Stefanie in the morning during the day. ‘Hey, babe. How’s everything?’

  “Sometimes in the morning I would do a blast just to get me through the day. How else was I going to live? I used to have to do a Valium just to get myself to sleep, because I was so overtired. I’d get, like, sixteen winds. I’d be on my third wind for the night. ‘All right, I’m up again.’ I’d take a Valium just to settle down and go to sleep. I mean, I was living two lives.

  “I used to leave on Friday and not come back till Sunday, and Deenie used to think I was hanging out with my friends. I would tell her that I promised my friends in Staten Island that on Friday nights after work I shut my beeper off and I have nothing to do with my New York life. And she believed it! So that was it. And she wouldn’t ask no questions.

  “My phone was picked up by neither girl. But one night I picked up the phone and Deenie was on the line and I said, ‘Joe’s not here.’ Stefanie was right next to me. Deenie said what are you talking about and I said, ‘Come on. Joe’s not here. Talk to you later.’ Next day I said, ‘Oh, Deenie, I was sleeping, you woke me up, I was dreaming.’ I was good. I had my shit covered. Once Stefanie found a pair of panties. I just said it belonged to Sally Leads’s girlfriend. He used to sleep over with her once in a while. She never questioned it.”

  The Missions poured coke-flavored honey over the knot that his life had become. And a new diversion was coming into use—Ecstasy. Not as dangerous as coke. Less likely to send you to the hospital. Safe, it seemed. Mellow. In the Chop House Wall Street of the 1990s, quaaludes and Ecstasy were so common that you’d think they were sold at the Duane Reade drugstores. Pills were popped like Vitamin C, and cocaine was scooped out like talcum in some old greaseball’s barbershop. Coke wasn’t used openly in the offices—except when it was absolutely necessary.

  “Sometimes we’d have to. We were so fucking tired from partying that we’d do a fucking line or two just to get through the day. I sometimes would be fucked up, talking to clients. I mean, we were crazy. We were fucking maniacs. Man-i-acs.

  “It wasn’t as if we were drug addicts because we really weren’t. I don’t know why we did it. It wasn’t as if we couldn’t stop. If I didn’t want to do it anymore, I just wouldn’t do it. I had no fear that I was addicted to them at all. But we used to take it to the next level. I took Benny to the hospital twice, he almost thought he was going to have a heart attack. He was lying on the couch, ‘Louie, please call the ambulance,’ he says.

  ‘I’m dying. I can’t breathe. My heart’s doing one-sixty. I’m about to fucking die.’ He thought his heart was going to blow up.

  “We went to South Beach one time. We stayed there like five days. We had a slew of drugs. Ecstasy, Valium, mushrooms, and cocaine. I never took mushrooms before in my life. Th
ey were these little things. They make you hallucinate. We were in a club and Benny handed me the bag, and he tells me to hold it. So I go, ‘What do I do with it?’ and he says, ‘Eat ’em.’ Now, I thought he told me to eat the whole bag. I ate the whole fucking bag. I was on a dance floor, and I lost control of my bowels.

  “So I’m telling Benny I can’t hold it in. I’m shitting. So he’s dragging me into the bathroom, and there’s a guy in the stall and he kicked the door open. And I remember the guy was sitting on the toilet bowl shitting and Benny grabbed him off the toilet bowl, threw him out of the way, and threw me in there. I couldn’t control it. I was pissing and shitting. It was ridiculous. And then I had to leave the place with Benny’s shirt tied around my waist, naked, because I had to leave my fucking jeans and underwear there. So I had to walk through this club. It was mad crowded, girls all over, and I had Benny’s see-through Versace shirt, and my cock and my ass were hanging out. And Benny was around me, trying to cover it. It was ridiculous. It was like crazy. Fucking nuts.

  “Another time, on another trip down there, they gave me all these fucking drugs, they gave me like Valium, Ecstasy, coke. They gave me them to hold. They said hold on to these, because they had to go back outside the club and get something. They were gone six, seven, eight hours. I couldn’t find them. So I did all the drugs. I did them all. They came back and they found me, and my friend Mike Fusco said that I was on the sofa like fucking dead, and that he found me and that Benny was like, ‘Where’s the drugs?’ And I said, ‘I did them. I did them all.’ And they said they had to carry me home. I don’t even remember it.”

  When he was down in Miami—and he was there every week or two, with or without Stefanie—he would often run into his old friends, the two Chrises. Chris Wolf and Chris Pa-ciello. Chris Wolf, the Hanover Sterling ace broker, had recovered nicely. Plastic surgery performs miracles. Now you could barely see the scar on his face from getting thrown through that plate-glass window on Broadway, during the harbor-toss and safe-stealing incident a couple of years before. Chris Paciello was from Staten Island and was known to Louis from the old days as a kind of street investment banker. His specialty was raising capital for himself by using a loaded gun. Somehow Chris Paciello wound up in South Beach, was operating a nightclub and showing up in the gossip columns, dating models.

  Paciello was known to Louis as Chris Binge-a, or Binja—it wasn’t set down in writing as a rule, so the spelling is approximate. That’s Binge-a as in “binge.” Chris Wolf and Chris Paciello had little in common except for substance usage and that both had changed their names—Chris Wolf to conceal Italian ancestry, and Chris Paciello (nÉe Ludwigsen) to assume Italian ancestry. It was part of what one New York pol used to call the “gorgeous mosaic.”

  “We used to hang around with Chris Wolf and he was just nuts. He’d run around the Liquids club in South Beach, putting hits of Ecstasy in people’s mouths. Me and Benny used to try to avoid him, because he’d want to stick ’em in your mouth. He’d say, ‘Come on, let’s fucking party!’ He used to carry a bag—these pills were twenty-five dollars each—and he used to carry a bag of like a thousand of them and just give them to fucking everybody. He’d go, ‘Here. Here. Here.’ Just give them out.

  “Liquids was Chris Binja’s club, Chris Paciello. He would binge, just disappear for a month. He was nuts, that Christoo. He was nuts, we all were nuts. Chris Wolf was nuts because he would just OD like it was a fucking ritual. They were always taking him to the hospital. He was always foaming from the mouth somewhere in the corner. I mean, these are people—we’d go on the phone and get like a million dollars from investors and then we’re laying on couches half dead, foaming from the mouth. Every once in a while it used to just hit me, imagine our clients seeing us now. Can’t even talk.”

  That was a definite disadvantage of taking drugs. But there were social benefits to chemistry, apart from its self-medicating, stress-relief function. Just as Benny and Louis bonded during their Missions, drug use was a necessary social skill. Just as strip clubs like Scores were now assuming the same role as mahogany-paneled private clubs for previous generations, drugs were now supplanting alcohol to promote conviviality and good fellowship. In the 1960s, drugs were a counter-cultural phenomenon. Louis and Benny weren’t part of any counterculture that they were aware of. They were, after all, members of the Establishment. Wall Streeters. Stockbrokers. Drugs were now apolitical, equal-opportunity mouth-foamers. They made bad times good. They made good times great. Sure, they could make great times bad, if you took too much. They had to watch that. They didn’t.

  Louis kept about $1,500 worth of coke in his safe at all times, right alongside the stacks, for easy access. It was important to have coke available at all times. But when Louis and Stefanie joined Benny and Michelle at the Sandals resort in Jamaica on New Year’s Eve, Louis and Benny couldn’t very well take the drugs with them on the plane. That threatened to deprive them of a necessary element in greeting the upcoming, outstanding year of 1995. But everything turned out okay. They found a Jamaican guy on the beach who had what they needed.

  While they were in Jamaica they ran into Craig Kallman, who was staying at another resort and arranged to meet them. They had mixed feelings about Kallman. He still hadn’t come through with referrals. But Louis and Benny were still hoping that he would do what he had promised. They had made good money for him, after all. It was the least he could do. In their new life they would have to get used to running into big shots like Kallman when they were on vacation. He was a cool youngish guy, in his thirties. But he was—they couldn’t put their finger on it—maybe a little standoffish.

  They still had hopes the Real Wall Street was in their future. But right now, the Chop House Wall Street was too much fun to leave. Life was drugs and sex and money and money and money and money. So much money that some of it had to be, almost literally, flushed down the toilet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  One of the nice things about having money is that you can buy off your guilt.

  As the piles in his safe multiplied like horny cockroaches, Louis slowly began to realize that he would have so much to confess, if he confessed, that the penance would set a new record in the Vatican or St. Patrick’s Cathedral or wherever. There would be no Hail Marys doled out by the priest or the Pope or whomever. He would be, maybe, nailed to a cross right in the middle of Battery Park City. He would hang from the cross and Stefanie and Deenie and his customers—everybody—would be jeering.

  Sure he was guilty. He knew it. He ignored what the priests taught him, he thought it was a lot of crap, but some of that bullshit seeped into his brain. He couldn’t help it. If he could have taken out his brain and tossed it in the dishwasher, he would have done it. But he couldn’t, so he did the next best thing. He bought off his guilt. Expiated it. Cleansed the money. Lost it.

  There was no better guilt-relief mechanism than the ability to take money—this precious thing that was the focus of his life—and lose it. Gambling wasn’t recreation anymore. It was money exorcism.

  By 1995, the stock market had become a gambling outlet for many people. But Louis wouldn’t have been caught dead playing the market. He could have day-traded or traded options, but screw that. Louis didn’t buy stocks he couldn’t control. That was for scrubs. But gambling was cool, and he was gambling on football and baseball and basketball and blackjack even though he tended to lose whatever he gambled. But it didn’t matter because the more he lost the more he bet, and the more he bet the more he lost, and then he would bet and lose and it would go on and on.

  Sometimes he would drive down to Atlantic City on week-nights, just for the night, with Sally Leads or a friend from Staten Island named Danny. They wouldn’t book a room. They’d book a chair at the tables. Then they’d do an all-nighter playing blackjack. That was his game. He’d sometimes play a little craps, but he stayed with blackjack because it gave you a chance. It wasn’t for scrubs, like the slots. Louis was no scrub. He’d do a little car
d counting. Counting tens and aces. After all, he wasn’t trying to lose. Quite the contrary.

  If you watch for the tens and the picture cards, if you concentrate, you have an edge over the house. That is a mathematical fact. With an edge, you win in the long run. You can see the cards on the table and figure out what is coming.

  And people can see you.

  “I used to get a crowd of people watching me. Fifteen hundred a hand. Two thousand a hand. I’d double down on twelve, which was unheard-of. People used to watch because they had to announce it. ‘Double down on twelve!’ It was a big thing. You never double down on twelve in blackjack. That’s insane. If you get a ten, you lose. But I used to see tons of tens come out and I say, ‘No way a ten is coming out.’ I’d double down. I’d get like a seven and I’d win. People would cheer.

  “I was the Man. It felt good. They’d give me a room. Two, three Jacuzzis, wet bar, stocked bar, fucking kitchen, living room, two bedrooms, four bathrooms. Free dinners. They used to send bottles of Cristal and fruit baskets up to the fucking room. They picked me up in Staten Island in a limo one time. They gave me Knicks tickets. I used to go to the back room, see the pit bosses.

  “‘Hey, Lou, how’s everything? Got your lucky hat on?’

  “‘Yeah, I’m ready to play.’

  “Everybody out there is playing twenty, ten dollars a hand. I’d sit down with thirty thousand. I’d make a scene. I used to like to make a scene. Sometimes I’d go in there with sunglasses on, a bandanna, checkered sweatsuit on, and start betting three thousand a hand. People used to say, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ I used to hear them. I’d make a fucking show.

  “I used to see a lot of rich people in that place. Ted Turner sat right next to me at blackjack. He was playing fifty, a hundred thousand a hand. Special chips. Ten thousand dollars a chip.