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

  Louis filed the paperwork to take the test for the NASD broker license, the Series 7, about a month after leaving Brod. By that time, he and Benny had started work at a little firm with an office in the World Trade Center. Its name was Sovereign Equity Management.

  Louis took the Series 7 when he was at Hanover. He had better things to do with his time than study, so he got 40 percent. Louis figured that if he really applied himself he could definitely ace the test. Only one problem: He still had better things to do with his time then memorizing a lot of bullshit sales-practice rules that everybody knew were a crock. It was a dilemma, but easily solvable.

  Louis made up his mind. He decided to pass the test. Or to put it more accurately, he decided that the test would be passed. In order to become Louise Pasciuto, officially, someone else would have to become Louis Pasciuto, officially.

  For the chop house kids, Series 7 tests were like any other lame formality that could be overcome with a little cash. Ever since he was at Robert Todd, Louis had heard that people were paying kids, mainly Russians, to take the tests for them. He was dubious.

  “I was nervous to do it when I first heard about it at Robert Todd, because I said to myself this was going to catch up with me. There was no way that these people were going to get away with it. You had people getting licensed that hadn’t finished high school and couldn’t read a book. So I figure I had to be smarter than that. I wasn’t going to ask some Russian I didn’t know to take the test for me, give him three grand. It wouldn’t work.”

  Louis approached a former cold-caller to take the test for him. He was a bright kid—his father was a heart surgeon on Long Island. He agreed to do it for $10,000.

  “I paid more than other guys were paying because I wanted it done right,” said Louis. “I wanted to be sure he shut his mouth and everything was done perfect. I paid twenty-five hundred just for the IDs alone, on top of that. You had to show a driver’s license. I went to a printer who was a friend of my father’s and I got the ID. I got a perfect driver’s license with the watermark and everything. A cop could have played with it and he wouldn’t have known. It was laminated perfect. It actually felt rubbery like the actual license.”

  The NASD—no fools, they—required two forms of ID, so Louis got a gym card made along with the license. Just to be on the safe side, Louis gave the kid his wallet, in case he had to show even more ID. Louis even gave him one of his shirts and ties, the actual clothing of Louis Pasciuto. It was brilliant. With the surgeon’s kid taking the test, Louis got an overall grade of 88 percent. There were separate grades for every subject area covered by the test. His highest grade in any single subject area was 100 percent—a perfect score. The subject was “regulation.” That made sense. The actual Louis Pasciuto was a self-regulating entity. Nobody told him what to do except Louis Pasciuto, and in that sense he was a true Wall Street guy.

  At Sovereign, the newly licensed Louis was going to be equal partners with Benny for the clients they already had, and Louis was going to start getting his own client book, under his own name for the first time. He was paid a small sign-up bonus. To get it, Louis had to meet Phil.

  Phil was at 90 Broad Street, which was where Sovereign was planning to move in a few weeks. The offices were empty. But Phil was there.

  Phil was standing by the window, hands clasped behind his back. Looking out. He was a quiet guy. Louis had never heard of him. In fact, nobody had ever heard of Phil. And Phil liked it that way just fine.

  Philip C. Abramo was just a few weeks shy of fifty. His hair, once jet-black, had become a kind of tarnished-quarter silver. But Phil kept in shape and when he smiled the years melted away. He had a broad, infectious grin. Guys like Phil weren’t known for their smiles. They were known for a kind of blank stare, and for a certain look in their eyes. It was an important look, a revenue-generating look in much the same way as Louis had a revenue-generating way of firing clients and getting people to be frightened that they may not get a chance to give Louis money that he would not give back. That is how Louis made a living. Phil made a living by that stare.

  Phil had that look, but he didn’t use it very often, because he didn’t have to, not when you learned that he was Phil Abramo. And once you learned that he was Phil Abramo, that was sufficient and his look would be blank, his eyes a kind of spoiled-salami brown. Phil didn’t talk unnecessarily. He didn’t have to talk. Talking was for idiots. John Gotti talked. He talked so much that he was living in a six-by-eight-foot cell in Marion, Indiana.

  Phil had visited Gotti at the Ravenite Social Club before Gotti went to Marion, in the days when Gotti thought it was great to force Guys to come and talk with him at the Ravenite, right in the middle of a heavily traveled district of Manhattan where the FBI and New York City police could look and watch and listen.

  Phil went. He had to. No choice. He had his own club, around the corner on Mott Street, one the cops weren’t watching. But it didn’t matter. He went back and forth to the Ravenite, the club that was practically in the guidebooks it was so well known, and the cops watched Phil as he met John Gotti. They counted his visits. Twenty-five times.

  Phil Abramo made his living by being Phil Abramo, just as John Gotti made his living by being John Gotti and Frank Coppa made his living by being Frank Coppa. He made his living by seeing to it that people paid him money for two broad categories of reasons:

  1. They paid Phil Abramo to remove obstacles to their livelihoods or lives.

  2. They paid Phil Abramo because he was a potential obstacle to their livelihoods or lives.

  This was how Guys like Phil Abramo made their living. It was not a growth business in the early mid-nineties. Phil could thank John Gotti for that. By keeping a high profile at the Ravenite and in the tabloids, by mouthing off in front of FBI microphones, by forcing other Guys to meet him at the Ravenite where they could be watched and counted, he made the world of Guys into an uncomfortably public world. How does a Guy make money under such circumstances?

  Phil Abramo always found a way, which was to quietly tend to business. He lived in a blue-collar district of Saddle Brook, a little town in northern New Jersey where outsiders rarely ventured, except to visit the Jewish cemeteries on the outskirts. While Gotti was flashy and violent and stupid, Phil was educated—four years of college—and he kept his name out of the papers. The newspapers, that is. He was in other papers. SEC files.

  Phil Abramo was in a whole bunch of SEC files—but not because the SEC had him under surveillance or anything like that. No, Phil Abramo was in the SEC’s files because he did the filing. He had to. It was the law. He had to obey the law. He was a CEO.

  In the late eighties and early nineties, Phil Abramo headed a series of “blind pools”—basically companies set up for the purpose of making investments and buying other companies. Blind pools have a sorry history, because in the eighties they were often used by penny stock promoters as a way of packaging cruddy companies that were then sold off to the public the way Louis was selling chop stocks in the nineties. But Abramo’s blind pools never got off the ground. All he basically did was file papers with the SEC, thereby supplying anyone who looked with a full biography of Philip C. Abramo.

  Phil’s SEC filings skipped over his early career.

  As a young man in the early 1970s he was involved in general merchandising (possession of stolen property) and purchase and sale of pharmaceuticals (conspiracy to sell heroin). Some years later, Phil confided to a friend that his incarceration from the latter episode put him in touch with Gambino-affiliated Guys, who saw to it that his career moved forward.

  In the 1980s he had found himself a mentor, a man by the name of Thomas Quinn. Quinn was a lawyer and a very prominent penny stock promoter, back in the days when chop stocks went by the name of “penny stocks,” though the game—the rip—was essentially the same. One of the stocks Quinn brought public was a company called Bagel Nosh. Phil was on the books as a “consultant” to Bagel Nosh back in the early 1980s, not long afte
r it went public.

  The Quinn-Abramo friendship never wavered as the years went on. When authorities in France nabbed Quinn on charges of securities fraud in 1988, Phil’s unlisted phone number was in his notebook. When the SEC questioned Phil about Quinn, he decided to invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. But not everyone in Phil’s life was quite so reticent. He learned that the next time he popped into the feds’ gun sights. In 1994, he was indicted by a federal grand jury in Newark for running a scam preying on poor people who couldn’t get credit. In return for paying him money, he would arrange for them to get loans.

  So they would pay him money—and he wouldn’t arrange for them to get loans. It was a terrific scam—simple, low-maintenance. People sent money. Phil took it. Christmas every day.

  According to court records, one day in 1991 Phil had a conversation with an associate in the scam, a man by the name of John Forte. “We had a lengthy discussion,” Forte later testified, “and it was terminated by Phil saying if—this is his company. He was going to run it the way he saw fit. It’s not that much money. He would throw it out on the street and send me home in little pieces.”

  Forte gave this testimony at a bail-revocation hearing. The judge decided not to revoke Phil’s bail. Forte decided that one session in the witness chair, staring into those spoiled-salami eyes, was enough. He wasn’t testifying at any trial of Phil Abramo. Phil wound up pleading to lesser charges—and getting less jail time than Forte did. None of this got any publicity at the time, and when Phil was sent away for a year in prison, there was no press conference announcing the conviction of a major “organized crime figure.”

  Phil was wrestling with the loan-scam charges at the time he got Sovereign up and running in ’95. All the while he kept in touch with his old pal Quinn, who was now back from France. In the mid-1990s Quinn was still a subject of SEC suits seeking to seize his assets to satisfy unpaid civil penalties dating back to the penny stock days. But despite all the litigating and scrutiny, Quinn’s dealings with an ex-dope-dealer-bagel-consultant-construction-company-operator-economic-consultant from New Jersey just didn’t raise much of a fuss among the feds. Phil continued to operate on the Street, without anyone paying particularly close attention.

  It’s not very likely that anyone in a position of authority was aware that Phil was standing at a window on the fourteenth floor of 90 Broad Street, staring out at Manhattan and giving one of his guys $5,000 to give to Louis.

  Louis had never heard of Phil before, and was not familiar with his history, but that information wasn’t necessary. The way he stood at the window was enough.

  “The quiet ones are the bad ones. They’re the bad guys. He just wouldn’t talk much. When I was up there, the place was empty and he just stood by the window, hands behind his back, looking out. It was nerve-wracking. You understand? Phil’s standing by the window. Walking around, looking out windows.

  “I knew that he was, like, a Guy. I heard about it. But it wasn’t like somebody said, ‘We got a firm starting up. We got one of the gangsters from Jersey. He’s a skipper. If you don’t come to work he’ll probably kill you.’ Nobody said anything like that.

  “Besides, Phil would have had you fooled a little bit. If you looked at his face, when he’s cleaned up he really doesn’t look like a fucking gangster. As soon as he opens his mouth, the way he talks, his mannerisms, is a dead giveaway. He’s just a very nonchalant guy. There’s certain mannerisms a gangster has. A Guy that knows that you’re never going to get over on him. There’s a certain mannerism about him, like when he talks to you. They just look at you, and there’s this gray in their eye, and you just know. He knows. Somebody like Phil or Frank Coppa, he’d say, ‘It’s your choice.’ Just make the right choice, but it’s your choice. That’s more scary than him smacking you or beating the shit out of you.”

  Louis never really thought about why Phil—a Guy like Phil—was at Sovereign. He just seemed to belong. After all, Phil was there because it was his money. It was the same with Frank Coppa. He came to Brod to watch his money. Louis had seen a lot of Frank at Brod, mainly talking to Benny. Benny was cutting in Frank on warrants, making nice short-term profits for him. But when all was said and done, Frank was just a visitor at Brod. A client, more or less.

  This was different. Phil was Sovereign.

  After Louis saw Phil and got his $5,000 he put a desk in his office at 90 Broad. “I sat down in my office for a few days, with nothing to do. Every day product was coming, was coming, was coming. There was never any product. Then finally they had product, and I wasn’t gonna do it,” said Louis.

  The problem was that Sovereign was a ripoff. Not a ripoff of the clients. That was a given. Sovereign was out to rip off the brokers. No way. “They got some stock, and the rips were like nothing. It was bullshit. A ripoff. I’m not doing it. So I told Benny I’m not doing it. I gave them back their five grand. I had no choice about that,” said Louis.

  What Louis wanted, what he had just started hearing about, were cash deals. You sold stock, you were paid your rip right away, in cash. That’s where the real money was. Frank’s guys did them back in the 1980s, and got sent to jail for them, in one of the few criminal prosecutions that came out of the penny stock era. Louis heard about this marvelous new method of compensation from Chris Wolf.

  “Wall Street’s a small world, especially in Battery Park City. We all lived in Battery Park City. So after A. T. Brod was over, Chris one night was really drunk at the Tunnel and he gave me money to buy a drink. I didn’t want the money—I had plenty of money—but he’s drunk. So he gives me the money and he’s got all this cash. He’s got cash coming out of all his pockets, stuck in his pants. Everyplace. Bulging out all over. Must have been about fifty thousand. He was so loaded he gave me a thousand for a four-dollar drink, and says I should keep the change. I say, ‘Where’d you get this fucking cash?’ He says, ‘A new type of business.’ He says, ‘You get paid under the table for stock.’”

  Louis always liked Chris Wolf, and seeing Chris with all the cash made him like Chris even more. Chris and Rocco were at a new firm, also one he could see out his window at Battery Park City. Greenway Capital Corporation was on the nineteenth floor of 45 Broadway. It was a brand-new building just a couple of doors down from Morgan Williams, that great bar where Roy and Louis bonded on the night of the boat-ride due dilly that left Chris with the scar, fading now.

  Greenway overlooked the bull statue at Bowling Green park. It was so close they could have stuck their heads out the windows and spit on the bull. The kids at Greenway never did that but it would have made sense. They didn’t need the bull market to make money. The bull market was for losers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Greenway was like coming home, if home was a combination social club, parochial-school yard, and lunatic asylum. It was a bit like Hanover, only without the Roy-imposed order and corporal punishment.

  Louis had a huge office that looked all the way up Broadway. The offices seemed to have been thrown together at random from IKEA and the Salvation Army Thrift Store. But that was okay. Everybody was having fun.

  “It was a zoo. They would run in the water fountains downstairs. Joe Temp did a half million, pulled his pants down, ran through the fountain. They were crazy psychopaths. There were no rules at Greenway. We came and went as we pleased. We had parties up there, we got high. We had everything. We got a Wiffle ball bat and played Wiffle ball.”

  Rocco and Chris had their own crew, about thirty-five or forty kids in all. Benny had stayed at Sovereign, and Louis went to Greenway with about eighteen cold-callers. The crews were separated from each other, as they were at Hanover. Louis had his own boardroom. “I didn’t like my guys associating with anybody else,” said Louis. “Cancer. That’s what I used to call it. Other people have a different work ethic. They cause your guys to have cancer, like. It rubs off on them. These guys work like this, your guys start to work like that. I used to train my guys my own way, a
ccording to my rules. They start seeing other people’s rules, they get different ideas.”

  Being around guys like Chris and Rocco, guys who really knew how to sell stock, was important because selling stock wasn’t getting any easier. The public was starting to get wise to chop stocks. It was a gradual thing. People wanted to hear about the companies. Were they legitimate? It was a concern now, and a lot of customers were wondering if the stocks they were pitched were phonies. Clients were getting wise to big spreads (big differences between the bid and ask prices). Chop stocks had huge spreads. They could find out that kind of stuff easily. The Internet was just beginning, but there were plenty of ways to get quotes and corporate info. People were getting smarter. But not so smart that they weren’t going to buy stocks over the phone.

  But the change in public attitudes was gradual, and Louis and the others didn’t think about it too much. They had more important things on their minds. Mentoring, for instance. Now that he actually had a license, Louis decided to share it with one of the underprivileged cold-callers who was not so blessed. A kid named John was showing promise on the phone, so Louis let him run his own book of clients as a kind of junior partner, using Louis’s name just as Louis had used Benny’s name. In a warmhearted moment he had even cut the kid in on a deal. John borrowed $11,000 to sink into a deal involving warrants in a company called Zanart. John was promised a share of the profits in return.

  Louis had his doubts about Greenway, but the money was good. For every $100,000 in stock he sold, Louis got $25,000 in cash, which was put in a paper bag and provided to him promptly on, usually, Tuesdays. The cash came from a guy Louis knew only as Bobby.