Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street Page 18

  “Bobby Cash Deals, I used to call him. He used to drive a Rolls-Royce and park it right in front of Greenway. Some cold-caller would go sit in the car. Bobby would give him a hundred bucks, while Bobby came upstairs. He was old, about fifty years old. Gray hair. Cowboy-looking guy. About six feet three inches tall. Always had a cast on his arm, for some damn reason, this guy. And he had an associate with him, who also was named Bobby. They used to come up with the suitcase. We knew, when we seen them walk through the door, it was payday. They were the suitcase guys. They’d come up to Greenway and bring the money.”

  It was a good life, at least for Louis. But it wasn’t such a great life for Chris. His two partners were at Greenway almost constantly. They didn’t own Greenway. They didn’t have to. They owned Chris.

  They were Dom and Rico—Black Dom Dionisio and Enrico Locascio, who had come up to Hanover, armed with submachine guns, during the safe-stealing incident. Now they kept their guns out of sight but were at Greenway almost every day.

  Louis started to hear that Black Dom and Rico were always in Chris’s face, making his life miserable. There were lurid rumors. He didn’t know whether to believe them or not. But it was clear that they were at Greenway all the time to watch their investment—Chris Wolf.

  Dom was as humongous as Louis remembered him from Hanover, and he now got to know Rico, whose snarl could melt ice cream across the room.

  Louis saw the Guys at Greenway and said hello to them and that was that. They were none of his business.

  His business was making money. The money was good. But Louis wasn’t happy at Greenway despite the cash and the conviviality. He felt tense. A little jealous, maybe. With all the big earners there, he was always going to be a small fish in a large (and smelly) pond. It wasn’t long before Louis started to get restless.What he really wanted was his own firm, and his old friend Marco Fiore was offering just that, more or less. Marco was opening the New York branch office of a Fort Worth-based brokerage firm called Nationwide Securities. Benny was ditching Sovereign and going to the offices that Marco was leasing for Nationwide at 5 Hanover Square, in the same space occupied by Hanover Sterling when it was just starting up, before moving to 88 Pine. Hanover Square was down by the tip of Manhattan, where the streets are crooked and narrow. Lots of chop houses were setting up shop down in the tall stone buildings that overlooked those crooked streets.

  Louis and Benny, partners again, were going to run the firm. At Greenway he could never be part of the inner circle and get the real dough. Goddamn politics. The curse of Wall Street. To overcome politics, and make the most money, you must be the boss. He was learning that.

  Louis had to be in control. It was more than just the money. He had to do things his way. He had to be in charge. At Nationwide he could be in control. And in the same place where Roy started Hanover! It was terrific. Everybody was psyched.

  Louis brought his cold-callers with him. Even John, the promising kid he had cut in on the Zanart warrant deal. Being a mentor wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Louis felt that John didn’t work hard enough for his share of the warrant profits. He decided to hold back some of the money. That would serve him right.

  John didn’t like it. Tough.

  In September 1995, Louis and a few of his cold-callers made the move to Nationwide at Hanover Square. A mover transported his beautiful new mahogany desk and leather chair a few blocks to the new building, with its great history and even better promise. The plan was to move to even bigger and better offices at 100 Wall Street in a couple of months. And 100 Wall was just around the corner from 88 Pine, where Louis got his start at Hanover. They were in the footsteps of greatness. And the name—Nationwide—sounded so patriotic.

  Everything was terrific as Louis got his stuff moved into his new office, even though John was still ragging on him for the money. Blow me, Louis told him. But John kept it up.

  “He kept on asking for it, asking for it, but I wasn’t giving it to him,” said Louis. “I says, ‘You’re not getting it.’ And he says, ‘You know what? I’m going to tell my cousin.’ And I go, ‘I don’t give a fuck. Tell your cousin. Tell him to come see me.’”

  part four

  A GUY LIKE ME

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “I walk into my office at Nationwide, late in the morning. Nobody was there, because we were just moving in. There’s this guy in my office. Tan guy. He’s sitting at my desk, my chair. I walked in.

  “‘Do you know who I am?’

  “‘No.’

  “‘I’m Charlie. I’m John’s cousin.’

  “‘Okay.’

  “‘Sit down.’

  “Now I’m a little scared. I’m kind of shaken up. I don’t know what’s going to happen.

  “‘You owe my cousin some money.’

  “I says, ‘Well, I gave him five thousand, what I thought he deserves.’

  “He says, ‘It’s not about who deserves what. You made an agreement. You’re going to pay him the twenty thousand.’ He explains, if I don’t pay the money—in a roundabout way he doesn’t say he’s going to beat my face in, he doesn’t talk like that, he says, the $20,000 is not worth the consequences, the repercussions of not paying.

  “Then I says, ‘I don’t think it’s fair for me to pay him the twenty thousand.’

  “He says, ‘What do you think is fair? I’m going to be fair now.’ I say fifteen. And he says, ‘Okay, I want it tomorrow. No later than tomorrow.’”

  Charlie was burly, a little pudgy, moon-faced, about Louis’s height. He seemed to be in his late thirties. His hair was combed straight back. He dressed nicely. But Louis couldn’t concentrate on what he was wearing at the moment, even though that was the first thing he usually noticed about a person.

  Nobody had ever talked to Louis like that before, except his father maybe, or George Donohue sometimes, or the priests at Sea, or the cops who’d pull him over for speeding. But Louis never listened to his father, and George was a friend. Easygoing. Charlie wasn’t easygoing. Neither were the cops, but he didn’t give a shit about the cops and the priests. He’d take the ticket or show George’s PBA badge and not get a ticket, and keep on speeding. There was something about this guy Louis couldn’t put his finger on, so he asked Benny, when Benny got into the office that day. “Benny says, ‘Pay him the money.’ I say, ‘Why?’ and Benny says, ‘He’s nobody to mess with, he’s going to get you if you don’t pay him the money. Pay him the money.’ I asked Marco, he tells me the same thing—the guy is very respected, has a great reputation, pay him the money.”

  But that wasn’t a good enough reason. Louis had the $15,000, it was in the stacks in his safe at home, and he wasn’t going to pay it. He just decided to do what he usually did when people wanted money, or a stock sold, or whatever people wanted him to do that he wasn’t going to do. He just didn’t pay it any attention.

  “So now, taking lightly the subject, I avoid him. He beeps me the next day. I don’t call him. Beeps me the day after that. I don’t call him. I decide to call like four days later. Charlie tells me, ‘Louis, you think you’re going to make a fucking jerk out of me? Meet me in Brooklyn, right now. A half hour you got.’ He gives me the address of a pizzeria on West First and Kings Highway.

  “So I go to the pizzeria. A guy there says Charlie’s at an auto body shop across the street. I get there, I get out of the car, it’s my Mercedes four-door. I’m very head down, like puppy-dog scared, and he says, ‘Come with me.’ I didn’t want to go, you know. But I go. He takes me downstairs to this basement-type situation, it’s all dark, and he smacks me.

  “He tells me, ‘You going to make a fucking jerk out of me? You brought the money, right?’ And I don’t tell him no, because I only brought seventy-five hundred with me, so I don’t tell him I don’t got it all, right downstairs in the basement, because I figure if I told him I didn’t have it all, I was probably going to stay in the basement.

  “I says, ‘Yeah, I got it, it’s up in the car.’ So we get up
to the car, I give him the seventy-five hundred, and he says, ‘You’ve got the balls to bring me seventy-five hundred fucking dollars. You owe me fifteen thousand. Do you know who I am? Do you have any idea?’ He says, ‘You’re not taking your car. Leave your car.’”

  “Leave your car?” This guy wanted to take his car? Wanted to keep his car? Steal his car? Or hold it until he got paid? It wasn’t clear. Louis could have told him to go fuck himself. Louis was in good shape. He could have taken on this Charlie. Maybe. But something told him that maybe that wouldn’t be a good idea.

  “‘How am I going to get home?’ He says, ‘I don’t give a fuck. Give me the keys to your car.’

  “So he makes me give him the keys. I start to walk away and he makes me come back. He says, ‘I don’t want your fucking shit in the trunk. Take it out of there.’ So I take all the car stuff out of the trunk and I give him my key and I leave my car there. I got to get on the train.

  “About twenty minutes later he beeps me. I was on the elevated train at McDonald Avenue. I had gone a few stops.

  When he beeped me I was on the train. I got off the train, called him from the pay phone, and he says ‘Come back here right now.’ I went to the opposite platform, got on the train going back, mind you with my fucking bin, a crate of oil, all my car shit. So it takes me a half hour.

  “I get back to the place and he says, ‘If you don’t come tomorrow with the other seventy-five hundred, don’t come. I’ll find you.’ This is when he tells me, ‘You’re with me now.’ He gives me the car back and I give him the seventy-five hundred the next day.”

  “So I bring over the other seventy-five hundred and he actually takes me out to dinner that night. He played bad guy. Now it’s good guy, because he probably sees, look at this kid, 500-series Mercedes, brought me fifteen thousand without even sweating it. At the time I was thinking, maybe this is a good thing. I need a gangster, I’m making a hundred thousand dollars a month. People are always trying to beat me out of what I’m owed.”

  Louis met Charlie at 101, a sleek new restaurant on Fourth Avenue in Fort Hamilton, a pleasant middle-class neighborhood in the shadow of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

  “I was very impressed with this guy. We walked in. It was crowded but we sat right down. Everybody knew him. About a hundred people come over to him while we’re eating, kissing him hello, how are you doing. Two people sent over a bottle of wine.

  “With me, he was very friendly. Not saying, ‘You have no choice, you’re giving me ten thousand warrants a deal, and that’s that.’ Very friendly and nonchalant. He tells me, ‘Sorry we had to meet on these terms. I think we could do a lot together. How’s Wall Street treating you? Any up-and-coming deals?’ he asks me. He says, ‘I don’t want a free ride. I don’t expect nothing for free. I want to invest money. So the deal you got coming around, count me in—I want to invest.’

  “I think this is a great thing. I’m thinking, wow, I’ll invest this guy’s money. Look at him. He knows everybody. He’s definitely—he’s out there. Everybody knew him. Kissing him hello. Charlie is very tan. Always tan. Dead-of-winter-tan. No-matter-what-tan. But he denies that he ever goes to a tanning salon. Slicked-back hair. Kind of receding hairline. Good-looking guy. Very distinguished guy. Stocky. A little muscle behind him. And you would not mistake him for who he is. If you put a picture of him in your mind, that’s what he looks like. He just looks like that typical Brooklyn gangster.

  “He wears black mockneck shirts. Not a high turtleneck. Low. Silk black turtleneck, mockneck shirts. That’s what he wears. He’ll wear a sports jacket, slacks, and, like, snakeskin shoes. Really flashy shoes. Gold watch—Rolex. No chains or anything around his neck. Nothing like that. Ring, Rolex. That’s it. Very sharp-dressed. Very sharp. Always a different-color sports jacket. So if he was wearing all black it would be a printed sports jacket. A sharp dresser. Dressed very well.”

  Impressed as he was with how Charlie dressed, Louis could see that Charlie was only vaguely familiar with Wall Street, as if maybe he learned about it by watching the Charlie Sheen movie. But that was okay. The people out there, members of the public, often have only a slight understanding of how the Street works. But Charlie had one insight into the Street that the general public, as well as the regulators and the press, just didn’t have at the time. He knew that kids from his neighborhood were on Wall Street, cold-calling people, and making money. That was all he needed to know. He knew that and he knew he was entitled. He didn’t know much else. He didn’t know what an IPO was, even though IPOs were getting a lot of press at the time. That was okay too. Louis read the News and Post but didn’t get to the business section most days.

  Louis told him about the hot new IPO that was due out in a couple of months, Gaylord Companies. It made specialty cookware, and the lead underwriter was a firm called RAS Securities, which didn’t have the army of brokers that Nation-wide could bring to the table. But they didn’t discuss the product line or the underwriter or anything like that. What they discussed was that it was a great deal, and that Charlie could make a lot of money. It seemed like the kind of thing to say at the time—that Charlie could make a lot of money, and that Louis could make it for him. Louis said that. Said how much he could make. Mentioned specific numbers. It seemed like the thing to do, there at 101, with people coming over and with Charlie looking so good.

  Charlie was definitely interested. He definitely wanted to do business. He wanted to invest. He said that. He would invest. A new client. Like Craig Kallman, who was not coming through with referrals, or the Jets guys, who were becoming a pain in the ass, or Baba Booey and Stuttering John, who were more trouble than they were worth. Howard Stern as a client? It wasn’t happening. Stuttering John didn’t even try.

  Louis had to think of the future. Not plan. He never planned. But he was getting married. He was going to start a family. Maybe Charlie could be good for him. Maybe Charlie could help.

  At Brod, Louis got beat out of the money he was owed. At Greenway and now Nationwide, he was doing cash deals. What if Bobby Cash Deals had decided not to pay? What could Louis have done? Sue? Not for cash deals. They were handshake deals. Deals that he knew were illegal—“undisclosed compensation,” the lawyers would call it. What could he do if there was a beef over the cash? Go up against Black Dom and Rico? The kid John had done the right thing. He felt strongly about the $20,000 so he went to his cousin.

  Charlie knew he could be useful. He said so. But he did it in a nice way, a funny way. “Kind of made me laugh, Charlie,” said Louis. “He was very blunt the way he would talk. He wouldn’t hold anything back. He was that kind of gangster. He wasn’t a quiet guy. He says, ‘You’re taking down big money over there. All you little pricks think you’re going to run around, make big money, and not share with us Guys.’ He says, ‘One day you’re going to need a Guy like me.’”

  Charlie was older than Louis and had done a lot of living. Charlie didn’t talk about it at first, but nothing had come easy for him. Charlie was from a blue-collar neighborhood and he was a blue-collar guy. He had never gone to college. Nothing was given to him. Everything he had, all that he had achieved in life, he took with his own two hands.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It was a chilly spring morning, April 16, 1981. Lee Polanski was driving his sky-blue Cadillac convertible down a street in Merrick, Long Island, when he saw the three guys, walking. Lee was heading north on Frankel Boulevard, taking his wife Jessica to the train station. The three guys were on the sidewalk, walking south. He saw them. They didn’t see him.

  Lee knew one of them. He didn’t know him well enough to wave at him, but just enough to say to himself—not even to his wife, just to himself—hey, I know that guy. And it was not a bad memory at all. A memory of a nice guy, a young guy, a guy who liked kids.

  It was Charlie. Charlie Ricottone. It was a pleasant memory.

  Lee was a young guy himself, in his early thirties, and he was from Brooklyn originally. Now he was manager
of a supermarket. He and his wife were starting a family, and after they were married in the early 1970s they had moved out to a bedroom community in Nassau County, as had generations of upwardly mobile Brooklyn couples over the years. That’s what happens in New York. An outer-borough tradition, almost. Bronx people move to Westchester. Brooklyn people move to Long Island or Staten Island. So Lee moved to Long Island and by the summer of 1979 they had a two-year-old daughter, Annie. Jessica Polanski was pregnant with their second child, and they were adding a room to the house. It was a last-minute, hurried kind of thing, because Mrs. Polanski was due in August, so the crew worked hard to get it finished on time. Charlie was part of the crew and he was at the house, working, all summer.

  Charlie stood out in Lee’s memory of that hectic but joyous summer. He was more than just another guy in the crew, hauling and cutting lumber and painting the freshly installed plasterboard. He was a nice guy. A jovial guy. Lee was home during much of July, and he got to know Charlie very, very well. Jessica would make lunch for the guys on the construction project, and they would relax and talk. Charlie was a personable, young guy, just twenty-one at the time. He was hardworking, a go-getter. He and the rest of the guys on the construction crew worked capably to finish the addition, which they did on the day Jessica gave birth to Jennie, on August 3, 1979.

  Lee liked Charlie so much, and was so pleased with his diligence and good nature, that he had Charlie come back and do some more painting, once the extra room was finished. When Lee threw a birthday party for Jennie a year later, Charlie was invited. It was only natural. He was such a nice guy. And it was a great party. Charlie stayed till late that night, drinking and joking and posing for pictures with the rest of the gang and having a great time.

  Now, driving to drop off his wife at the station, it was seven months later, and Charlie and two other guys were walking south. Toward his house. The thought didn’t really jell in Lee’s mind. He was in a hurry to get his wife to the Long Island Railroad station for her train. He dropped her off at the station and went home. His two daughters were home. His housekeeper was home.