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

  Lee drove into the driveway, got out of the car, and opened the front door to his house. He had one foot inside when he saw the gun. A man with a gun was standing to his right, behind the door, wearing a stocking mask.

  The man with the gun said, “We have your kids upstairs. Come into the house—” but he wasn’t able to finish what he was saying because Lee turned around and ran outside yelling, “Help!” As he got to the end of the driveway, he stumbled and fell, gashing his hands.

  The man with the gun and the stocking mask, and a man without a gun but with a stocking mask, walked over to Lee on the ground. “Don’t do that,” the man with the gun told Lee. “Don’t be stupid,” he told him.

  Lee came inside. A voice from upstairs said, “Rip that chain off his neck.” He knew about the chain, even though he was upstairs and out of sight. Lee took the chain off and gave the man with the gun his chain, his other jewelry, and the money in his pockets.

  The voice again: “Where’s your wife? Where’s her ring?” Lee replied that she wasn’t there, that he had just driven her to the railroad station.

  The voice was angry, impatient.

  “You’re lying,” said the voice.

  “I’m not lying,” said Lee. “You know, it’s obvious she’s not here.” It was obvious. She wasn’t there. And she was wearing her ring.

  “Where’s the jewelry boxes?” the voice asked. Still upstairs.

  “I have no jewelry boxes,” said Lee.

  The voice knew about them too. Lee used to have jewelry boxes in his closet. But he had a burglary. So he took them out.

  The voice upstairs kept asking about the wife, and the ring, and kept getting the same answer. Not there.

  The two men with stocking masks led Lee down to the basement. The voice continued to ask about the wife and jewelry and the ring. As if asking would make them appear.

  A knife ripped the shirt up his back. An order was given. He removed his pants. Another order. He removed his underpants. He put his hands behind his back and they were bound with duct tape. His hands hurt. They were still bleeding from the fall, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that.

  The voice said, “Is that all you have? I thought it was a lot of money.” It was a lot of money—$1,500. Lee’s store was open late the night before and he hadn’t had a chance to deposit all the cash. But the voice expected more. The voice wanted more and the voice was threatening.

  The voice told him that if he didn’t do everything he was told, he would take the children. The voice told him that if he loved the children, he would not do anything stupid.

  The men with the stocking masks left. The voice stopped talking. The housekeeper came downstairs and untied Lee. The police came.

  Lee was reluctant to tell the Nassau County detectives that the voice belonged to his friend, the nice young guy he got to know a couple of years before, who came to his kid’s party. He was reluctant to show them the pictures that he took on the deck, the ones showing Charlie. He was reluctant to tell the detectives that he knew where they could find Charlie. He was afraid that, maybe, Charlie might come back.

  But the detective in charge of the case knew just what to say. He had heard that kind of thing before. Charlie might come back anyway, he told Lee. Better that he be in jail.

  Lee told him what he knew. By the end of the day, the three men who came to his house were in custody and were arranging bail. There was Charlie, his sister’s boyfriend Anthony Cella, and a third man they both knew.

  While he was in police custody, Cella gave a statement to Nassau County detectives implicating Charlie. He described the weapons. He described the split. About enough to buy each of them a nice 27-inch color television set.

  Charlie pleaded guilty to one count of robbery in the first degree, and on May 21, 1982, he appeared for sentencing in Nassau County Court. He was accompanied by his lawyer, Thomas Davenport.

  “I have just had occasion to read the probation report,” said Davenport. “It is one of the most scathing reports I have ever read, I must confess.

  “The one aspect that concerns me the most that I [have] personal knowledge on is the lack of Charles Ricottone’s remorse. I think, unfortunately, Mr. Ricottone gives the appearance of a sense of swagger. I think that is done to mask and not to betray his feelings.

  “I have a deep sense that he is remorseful not just that he was caught. I think he did a foolish thing and he recognizes it and he violated a trust and a friendship and he recognizes that.”

  Apparently the judge recognized that too. Charlie was sentenced to six to ten years in prison, which was the least severe sentence he could have received. While serving his time at the Clinton correctional facility in Dannemora, Charlie tried to appeal his conviction. A lawyer was appointed by the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court. After investigating the case and interviewing Charlie, whose charm and loquaciousness impressed him, the lawyer asked to be relieved on the grounds that there was no basis for appeal. The request was granted.

  Charlie was released from Mid-Orange Correctional Center on February 12, 1988.

  The prison experience molded Charlie’s psyche, and his career. By the time he was in his mid-thirties, he was well on his way to achieving his goal of becoming a Guy.

  A little over four years later, Charlie and a friend had dinner at a restaurant on a pier jutting into Jamaica Bay, in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. They climbed into a car. Charlie’s friend was behind the wheel. It was about eight-thirty in the evening of April 23, 1992.

  The restaurant was on U.S. government property—the Gateway National Recreation Area. Charlie and his friend might not have known that. A lot of Brooklynites don’t know that much of Jamaica Bay is a national park. Property of the U.S. government.

  A National Park Service policeman, Paul Dorogoff, observed the vehicle traveling at approximately ten miles per hour in a five-mile-per-hour zone. Dorogoff motioned for the car to stop. Charlie’s friend, not identified in court records, was civil and consented to administration of a sobriety test. Charlie was not civil. While his friend was being administered the test, Charlie “exited the vehicle and repeatedly approached your deponent and interfered with the sobriety test,” Dorogoff stated in an affidavit in support of the arrest of Charles Ricottone for assaulting a federal officer. Dorogoff’s affidavit continued:

  While your deponent was writing the summons, the defendant repeatedly threatened your deponent, for instance by saying that he was “going to hit that scumbag with a two-by-four in his fucking face,” and that he was going to “open that motherfucker’s head.”

  Subsequently, a number of other Park Police officers arrived on the scene and attempted to place the defendant under arrest. The defendant forcibly resisted arrest by struggling with the Park Police officers and with New York City police officers who were attempting to assist. . . . The defendant refused to identify himself but instead claimed that his name was “John Doe.”

  One of the cops wound up with a sprained thumb. It was no big deal. And if the Canarsie pier brawl had been adjudicated in the city’s criminal justice system, Charlie would have wound up getting a short jail term at the most, or maybe nothing at all. But now prosecutors were making, literally, a federal case out of it. And when Charlie was released on $50,000 bond, the U.S. Attorney’s Office insisted on “special conditions” not ordinarily found in most bail documents. Charlie, who gave his address as Oceanside, Long Island, agreed not to enter Brooklyn or to communicate with thirty-nine individuals. The list included just about every Guy of consequence who was allied with a Colombo family honcho named Victor Orena in his war with another faction of the Colombos, headed by Alphonse Persico. Apart from Orena himself and various Orena relatives, the list included “Wild Bill” Cutolo, the Colombo skipper who was Black Dom’s uncle and a close associate of Orena.

  On June 8, 1992, Charlie was arrested again. He was in Brooklyn, in violation of a condition of his release. The car he was using was stol
en. FBI agents were following him at the time, and prosecutors said the FBI men suspected that Charlie and the other people in the car were up to no good, apart from being in a car that didn’t belong to them. In fact, the FBI men were following them because they thought the people in the car were part of a “hit team” and were going to kill somebody.

  The Brooklyn incident was a troublesome issue when Charlie came up for sentencing on November 13, 1992, before U.S. District Court Judge Reena Raggi. Charlie had been caught red-handed violating the bail conditions. He had every reason to expect Raggi would throw the book at him. The judge had a presentence report in front of her that detailed the FBI’s concerns, including Charlie’s alleged status as a Colombo family associate. Assistant U.S. Attorney Karen Popp told the judge that when he was arrested in Brooklyn for the stolen car thing, “he indicated to an FBI agent that he hated me. I was a pain in the ass. And he would like to kill me.”

  Popp asked for forfeiture of the entire $50,000 bond, and a maximum ten-month sentence for the Canarsie pier brawl.

  Popp believed Charlie could afford the forfeiture because “the defendant’s illegal occupation of being a part of a hit team is very lucrative.”

  James DiPietro, Charlie’s lawyer, conceded that some of the things Charlie had done weren’t particularly nice. The threat against Popp, for instance. A very bad joke, he insisted. He conceded that his client had been in Brooklyn, where he was not supposed to be.

  DiPietro complained that seeing Charlie “lose fifty thousand dollars for the indiscretion that brings him before the court would be a little harsh.” He went on to say that Charlie was a diabetic, but working hard despite his handicap, and helping out his father, who wasn’t well either, in the family window business. “He’s working with his father and helping support the family,” said the lawyer.

  Popp countered by saying that the “indiscretion” in Brooklyn was preceded by tossing of guns out the window, and that towels that could have been used as silencers were found in the car at the time.

  Federal defendants are given an opportunity to personally plead their case before sentencing. Charlie addressed the judge:

  “What I want to say is mostly that I’m very sorry for the incident that happened because the incident in question is just about me having an argument with a federal officer that got out of hand and I used abusive language.

  “As far as assaulting an officer, Your Honor, I mean I understand you have to go by what you read. You weren’t there. I can only tell you, I never assaulted, picked up my hands. I was surrounded by fifteen or so police officers asking me to lay on the floor. You’re under arrest. And I was saying, well, what am I being arrested for?

  “They just kept on telling me, get on the floor. You are under arrest. I was intoxicated. I did not get on the floor. With that, they surrounded me with German shepherd dogs that for some reason was left out of all the papers and they subdued me to the floor.

  “I have never raised my hand to an officer. I’m very sorry for this incident. It snowballed into all these things and I just am very sorry for the incident that happened this night because it’s costing me very dearly.”

  Judge Raggi accepted Charlie’s apology.

  She refused to buy the “hit team” argument, and told prosecutors to put up or shut up—prosecute him if they thought he was out to kill somebody. Even though he was caught red-handed violating the conditions of his release, Raggi forfeited just $15,000 of his $50,000 bond. She shrugged off the threat against Popp. She called it “less than funny” and said, “It does give me pause about whether or not you understand the responsibility of every citizen to obey the law.”

  Raggi didn’t pause very long. She rejected the government’s plea for a maximum ten-month sentence and sentenced Charlie to the lowest term of incarceration allowed under the guidelines: four months in prison plus one year of supervised release. He went to prison just after the turn of the year 1993, and served his four months.

  Not long after returning to society, Charlie again found himself running afoul of the criminal justice system. The charges were filed on Valentine’s Day, 1994. The offense: violating the terms of his supervised release. The particulars: Charlie changed his address without telling his probation officer, lied about his address on papers that he filed with the Probation Department, and failed to let a probation officer into his residence as required by law.

  Charlie pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in prison. On June 6, 1994, Charlie surrendered to the federal prison at White Deer, Pennsylvania, to begin serving his term of imprisonment.

  Despite Judge Raggi’s bend-over-backward-till-the-vertebrae-crack leniency, that brawl at the Canarsie pier cost Charlie ten months of his life, $15,000 from the forfeited bond, and probably a nice hunk of change in legal fees.

  All this may sound a bit weird, or even sick, to the average person. But Guys aren’t average people. Guys don’t play by the rules. They couldn’t care less about the legal consequences of their actions. It’s not crazy at all. It’s what being a Guy is all about.

  The incident in Canarsie, and its aftermath, says more about the durability of Guys than a whole shelf-full of criminology texts, with their insistence that Guys have a role in society by providing services not otherwise available. Guys are here because we want them, supposedly. Sure we do. We like home-invasion robberies. We want to buy worthless stocks.

  “There is no reason why La Cosa Nostra should not be relegated to history within a few years,” former Attorney General Ramsey Clark wrote in his book Crime in America, back in 1970. “It is on the ropes now. The question is why we have endured it so long.”

  That isn’t the question at all.

  “We” don’t endure Guys. Guys endure prison. It’s the price they pay for being Guys. In return they get status, power, freedom—and the money they get from the guys who steal.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Charlie changed things.

  It was like being a parent for the first time, and realizing that the bundle of joy in your bassinet is going to change your life forever. It was the same with having a Guy in your life. Having a Guy in your life changed things forever. Before he met Charlie, Louis didn’t know what it would be like to have a Guy like Charlie. But now that he had Charlie, now that he had a Guy, he couldn’t imagine life without Charlie.

  In the immediate afterglow of the dinner with Charlie—well, he couldn’t have felt better. He was moving up in the world. A guy with a Guy. “It was a great dinner. I felt good about myself at the time. At the time I felt, ‘Wow, this is cool,’” said Louis.

  Life with Charlie was different but better, definitely better. Louis was convinced of that. Sure, if Louis thought real hard about his initial interactions with Charlie, he might have seen that it was Charlie who was benefiting, at least financially—even if what Charlie said was true about Louis needing him. And Charlie didn’t make it easy for Louis to deal with him. He was not particularly polite. His phone manners, at times, lacked civility. Louis couldn’t con him, couldn’t put him off. That point he raised about Louis needing him was not a debatable proposition. Charlie was not offering his services to Louis. He was not selling himself. That wasn’t the point at all.

  “It’s not like I could say, ‘Maybe I’ll just never talk to him again.’ That just wasn’t going to happen. But it’s also not like I decided to pick up the phone and call the guy. It’s not like I called the guy in a couple of days and said, ‘Hey, Charlie, how you doing? I made ten grand. Would you like some of it?’ He called me.”

  The calls began a couple of days after their meeting in 101. It was a pleasant call, inquiring about a pending IPO. A client call. No problem.

  Louis waited a few hours before calling him back the first time he saw Charlie’s phone number on his pager. It was a mistake.

  “He said, ‘What the fuck. You don’t call me. I just want to let you know, you call me back when I beep you.’ He goes, ‘I beep you from a pay phone. I don�
��t want to be waiting around until you fucking call me.’”

  They met again a few weeks later. Another pleasant business meeting, this time to talk about the Gaylord IPO. Charlie wanted to invest. And like any investor, he was worried about his exposure to downside market risk. “He says ‘I’m not going to lose money, right? How much am I going to make?’”

  Louis figured Charlie could make about $30,000 if he put up $10,000. He said so. It was a good-faith guess. Not the guarantee he had given to Stuttering John.

  Louis wasn’t really sure what his relationship with Charlie was supposed to be. It wasn’t something they taught you in preparation for the Series 7, even if he had actually studied for the test. What do you do when a Guy comes into your life? He was afraid to ask his father. He knew what his father would say. He knew how Nick Pasciuto felt about Guys—you stay away from them.

  No way he was asking George Donohue.

  One thing you do, when a Guy comes into your life, is eat.

  Louis had already begun to put on the pounds at Brod. It was the sedentary habits and eating out all the time, in restaurants such as Angelo’s in Little Italy, where his favorite waiter, Bruno, always knew to bring over a plate of calamari in red sauce over spaghetti. The skinny kid was getting a bull neck. Charlie made Louis’s bull neck widen, and helped him develop a growing pot belly, by introducing him to the better Guy Italian restaurants in Brooklyn like Zio’s and Mezzanote in Bay Ridge.

  Over meals, with Louis not having to fight too hard for the check, they were getting to know each other. Becoming, almost, friends. “He’d talk about some of his war stories that he had, like the time that he threw a glass in some bar and smashed the guy. Then he brought up that he did a lot of time in prison for something that was really scary. It happened out in Nassau County.