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

  The FBI men politely removed Louis’s computer and gave him time to dress in a sweatshirt and jeans. Then he was escorted in a van directly to the FBI field office at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan.

  At that point, Louis had to pick between two distasteful alternatives. He chose swiftly.

  Having made that choice, the only reasonable choice under the circumstances, Louis called Charlie. Charlie expected his call. Charlie was always available on the phone. That was why he paid Charlie. Charlie was a problem-solver. Of course, the other reason he paid Charlie was that Charlie was a problem-creator as well.

  Louis grinned as the FBI tape recorder began humming and Charlie began screaming.

  Taping Charlie as he screamed was a labor of love. Charlie loved to scream. When Louis was arrested, the idea of not hearing Charlie scream, of being in a position to not see Charlie’s phone number in his pager, gave him a feeling of serenity.

  His hatred of Charlie was combined with another emotion. Fear. After a few days fear overcame hate and he stopped cooperating. So his bond was revoked and he was transported to the HCCC, where federal defendants awaiting trial were housed when the Metropolitan Correctional Center was filled up. Or at least that was the explanation. Louis theorized that he was sent to the HCCC, and not the allegedly less unpleasant MCC, because the federal government, for a growing list of reasons, did not like him.

  The feds kept him in HCCC, he theorized, because Louis knew about the Guys. He knew why they were on Wall Street. He knew their names. He knew the scams that had fed them.

  So there he was, three weeks after his arrest, two weeks after he was sent to the HCCC, lying on his bunk and listening to the snores and thinking about the Guys. The Guys could get him out of there. Charlie was his Guy, but there were plenty of others who had come into his life over the years. Ralph. Phil. Sonny. Frank. John. John. Two Johns—the Turk and the Irishman. Elmo. There were so many Guys, and they were so different in age, appearance, and ostensible socioeconomic strata. Carmine was a fruit man. Sonny was a media icon long before Guys became media icons. Phil was educated and Frank wore a mink jacket. Ralph was from Pennsylvania. Whoever they were, it was always first names and nicknames. Cigar. Dogs. Fat Man. As if they were schoolkids. And they traveled in gangs, like schoolkids and prisoners. Gangs of fat, stupid, violent, middle-aged men. Not Goodfellas. Not The Godfather. At times they seemed to Louis to be a kind of weird amalgam: The Sunshine Boys meets The Warriors.

  To the Guys, Louis was a piggy bank they would crack open, literally if need be, when necessary to get money. Louis would fill his piggy bank with other people’s money. When he had the money it always seemed to go somewhere, and quickly. Most of it went to his debts, because Louis gambled and was the most inept gambler since Staten Island was settled in 1670-something.

  A lot of it went to Charlie, but never enough.

  All he needed were a few more scores. All he had to do was get out. Maybe he could give the FBI some Guys, and get out.

  The Chinese guy stopped snoring, and for just a little while he was doing what he loved. Stealing.

  Louis went to Arizona to steal from Joe Welch just a couple of months before he was arrested. He went to steal but not to rob. There is a difference. A robber uses a gun. Louis never used a gun when he stole. He didn’t have to.

  Joe Welch lived in northeast Tucson, on a side road off a side road off a side road. A dirt road. Since this was the desert Southwest, the street where he lived had a weird-sounding name—Tonolea Trail. When Louis heard it he thought he had misunderstood. Tana-what? Tana-lay? As in fuck? Louis hated the Southwest. He hated the desert. He hated dirt roads. He hated dirt. Period. He liked clean things, objects and places that were tidy and familiar, and people whose reactions were predictable. Large, clean apartments. Old men.

  Joe Welch was an old man. Old men liked Louis and he got along with them, joked with them, cursed at them, let them curse at him. Knew what made them tick. You had to have that kind of knowledge, that kind of rapport, if you were going to steal from old men who had a lot of money—the only old men worth knowing.

  Louis hated the desert but he loved the people of Arizona, as long as they lived where the cacti outnumbered the people. Phoenix was bad. Tucson was small enough to be good. Small towns, ranchers—they were the best. He loved rural America. Their young men and even their professionals were fine. His kind of people. But the World War II generation was, for Louis, truly the Greatest Generation. And when they died—well, that could be awesome. It was so easy, so utterly cool, to steal from the dead. He had done it before, and he hoped, and prayed, even though he was an atheist, that he would do it again.

  Soon Joe Welch would die. But Louis didn’t know that as he arrived at Tucson International Airport and waited for Joe Welch to pick him up. Most clients wouldn’t have picked up their brokers at the airport, but Louis and Joe had a special rapport. They were friends, almost. Father and son, or grandson, almost.

  Joe Welch was eighty-five years old. He had a $10 million account at Smith Barney. Louis wanted all of it.

  Louis knew the financial needs of men that age—particularly men old enough to die soon. He knew what kind of investments would meet their special requirements. He had plenty of experience.

  By the time he met Joe Welch in the summer of 1999, Louis had been a broker for the greater part of seven years and had worked at seventeen brokerage houses. The bull market had been constant background noise for most of his life. It had begun when Louis was in grade school. He never knew a bear market. And since he rarely put his clients’ money in anything resembling an investment, he never really knew the bull market either. But he knew how to sell stocks. When it came to selling stocks, no one was better.

  He knew precisely the kind of stocks to sell to Joe Welch and the other persons who had the misfortune to be clients of United Capital Consulting Corporation. Certificates of deposit, mutual funds, and other easily liquidated, conservative investments were not for them. Louis preferred moneymaking opportunities that would appeal to the youthful zest in even the most wizened old fart.

  Walt Disney Company, for instance. Great company. Louis had designed a superb trading strategy for Welch, and his other clients, involving that particular stock. They were not aware of this strategy, though Louis was such a terrific salesman that he probably could have sold them on it anyway. What he did was simple: He took their money. That was it. How much more superb could you get?

  Louis applied that same straightforward if not honest approach to every aspect of his brief career as United Capital’s chief executive officer and sole employee. For example, every small brokerage firm must have a larger firm to handle client accounts. So Louis informed his clients that United Capital’s accounts were in the custody of a perfectly respectable corporation called Penson Financial Services. But instead of actually contacting Penson and opening the accounts, which would have presented problems since Louis was not actually buying stock for his clients, Louis just went ahead and made copies of Penson’s forms and made believe he was dealing with Penson. So the nonexistent Disney shares were put in nonexistent Penson accounts.

  He had other great things for his clients. The hot investment vehicle of the 1990s was high on his list—initial public offerings, or IPOs, when companies sell stock to the public for the first time. The public loved IPOs. IPO investors would buy the shares, and the shares would turn into something better than gold. It was in all the papers. Everybody was talking about IPOs. The blabbermouths on CNBC were constantly hyping them.

  So Louis had a fine IPO at United Capital. He sold Welch and other clients shares in the IPO of “Goldman Sacks.” Great name. Not Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that was actually going public. Louis changed the spelling of the name. He figured that maybe, if he ever got caught, using a phony name somehow would make it less serious.

  The Goldman Sacks IPO was Joe Welch’s first investment at United Capital. Then came the Disney “shares.” Welch sent a $
48,000 check, by Federal Express priority-one overnight delivery, directly to Louis’s “corporate headquarters” in Eltingville.

  Joe Welch’s checks came often, which made him a terrific client. In the weeks before the visit to Tucson, Louis had called Joe Welch with other opportunities as they arose. Trading situations, for instance. If a stock traded at a certain price. Louis said he could “buy” the stock for a few bucks less than its price in the market. Then he would “sell” the stock. Instant “profits” for Joe Welch—instant cash for Louis, who would follow the standard procedure of taking Welch’s money and keeping it.

  After the first $300,000 from Welch, Louis was ready to go to Arizona to lay the groundwork for getting the rest of the $10 million just sitting in that goddamn Smith Barney account.

  He had to look the part. No problem.

  In the morning, as he prepared to leave for the airport, Louis put on his platinum Rolex Presidential. This was not the Oyster, which the losers and wannabes wear. This was top-of-the-line, with a square-diamond bagette bezel. It had cost him $17,000 and it looked as if it cost him that much. To get money, even if you are desperate for money as he was, you have to look as if you have money already. His suit was a custom fit. The tailor had come to his office and measured it to his body. Pinstripes. Suitably conservative. The suits had cost him $2,000 each but you need a custom suit, you have to have one, if a suit is going to look really good. In a regular suit the ass would be a little baggy but the waist would be tight. Custom suits fit the body perfectly. Not that Louis was a freak or anything. He would look great in an off-the-rack suit. He was 160 pounds of solid muscle. Louis made good first impressions. He was somber, sensitive when in the right mood. He spoke with a New York accent, a street accent, but his manner was deferential, respectful. Not arrogant. He was a New York broker but he didn’t act the part. Strangers quickly noticed the taste so evident in his tailored Armani suits, his clean-cut appearance, his manners. In moments of greenback-driven passion at some of the firms where he had worked, Louis would tear off his shirt, revealing a muscular back covered with a panoply of tattoos, with “Native New Yorker” in Old English lettering and an ebullient, sprawling dragon covering the left shoulder. But the tattoos were well hidden under his $300 Hugo Boss shirts, with “LAP” on the cuff.

  Rich people dressed that way. Or so he thought until Joe Welch pulled up in his rusting heap of a wreck.

  “He had a torn dungaree jacket on. He had Air Force pins all over his jacket, wore loafers and shitty pants. A fifteen-million-dollar guy looked like a bum on the street,” said Louis.

  Louis felt relieved when he arrived, a nauseating half-hour drive later, at Tonolea Trail. It was quite a spread. Louis judged people by their possessions, and his estimation of Welch immediately rose. Welch lived in a beautiful split-level house with an in-ground pool. Louis loved beautiful houses. He loved in-ground pools. He looked in Joe Welch’s in-ground pool. It was empty, except for the rats. Louis’s opinion of Joe Welch returned to equilibrium. He concentrated on the task at hand. “This pathetic bastard—I’m gonna rob him blind,” he said to himself.

  Louis tried to be honest with himself, because it was impossible to be honest with anyone else. He was going to steal from Joe Welch. That was why he came to Arizona. He had to focus on that. He wasn’t there to hike in Sabino Canyon—he hated the outdoors with a passion anyway—and he didn’t go there to buy cactus jam or Indian tamales outside the San Xavier Mission or visit the prairie dog colony at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

  After ushering Louis inside his sprawling unkempt house, Joe Welch introduced Louis to his young Asian wife. Louis had always marveled at the ability of money to lure women, and his esteem for the female-grabbing power of greenbacks was instantly enhanced. The woman was approximately one-third of Welch’s age.

  After dinner, Louis hinted to Joe that it might be time for business. Instead came more torture. Music. “He starts playing the piano. So I’m sitting in the chair, I’m a professional, I got my legs crossed. ‘Play for me, Joe. I love the piano.’ I say, ‘I’m a fan of the piano.’

  “He sits at his piano and he’s horrible. And at the end of the thing, I remember I went, ‘Bravo! Bravo, Joe.’”

  It was time for business. Louis moved his chair close to Welch, knowing that physical proximity bespoke intimacy, the intimacy required to steal large sums of money.

  “He’s sitting at his couch, and out of respect, to make him think we’re really going to talk about something serious, I say, ‘Is it okay if I talk in front of your wife?’ Like we were about to split the world today. And so he says, ‘Would you feel more comfortable if she wasn’t around?’ I say, ‘Actually, Joe, I would. No disrespect, but I would.’ He says, ‘Honey, can you leave us alone a little bit?’

  “We talked our business, and that was it. He sat at the table and wrote out a check for two hundred thousand dollars.”

  After that, Louis was so filled with sheer pleasure that he practically ran the seven miles back to the airport. At a stopover in some dipshit city, Louis took out the check and stared at it, reveling in the kind of pride a painter would feel if he could roll up the canvas and stick it in his wallet. Louis was not a thief; he was an artist. He was a hero of his own fantasies. He was like the firemen who extract victims from car wrecks, except that instead of the Jaws of Life he used his tongue, and instead of mangled corpses he extracted large checks from old men with wives who were about to inherit $200,000 less than before.

  Louis was staring at the check, in the airport bar, when a man walked up to him and began speaking to him. It was no problem. Louis loved talking to strangers, or anyone else he might be able to use. The man asked him what he did for a living. Louis told him: An investment banker. Where? Prudential. The family business, Prudential.

  “He says, ‘Oh, you look young, you must be successful.’ I remember saying, ‘You know, my father’s very high up in Prudential,’” Louis recalled. It was wonderful, working for such a fine and reputable firm. Louis Pasciuto, the young executive, scion of a long line of Prudential executives, left the airport bar and completed his trip back to Staten Island.

  Charlie was pleased by the proceeds from Tucson. Louis had done his job. He had taken from Joe Welch. Now it was time for Charlie to do his job, which was to take from Louis. And the Guy above Charlie would take from Charlie. And so on, up to the top of an amorphous but rigidly defined pyramid of Guys.

  Charlie Ricottone was his partner in life and in business. He was a stern taskmaster, a father figure and elder brother. He was precise and neat, neater than Louis ever could be or ever would want to be. Charlie had been to prison and did not care. Being a Guy meant there was no shame attached to going to prison. There was no stigma in having a criminal record. On the contrary, it was expected. And the federal government was obliging. More and more Guys were being incarcerated, and many of them were being incarcerated because they were the life partners of guys like Louis.

  Louis came to Brooklyn and gave Charlie his share of the money from United Capital and Charlie didn’t hit him. It was a relief. Louis never raised a hand to Charlie when he got slapped around. His father, Nick, pumped iron but didn’t step in when Charlie smacked Louis right there, right in front of him. You don’t raise your hand to Charlie, or Ralph or Phil or the Fat Man, just as you don’t raise your hand to your priest. Or your father.

  The FBI agents assigned to Louis, John Brosnan and Kevin Barrows, really wanted Charlie and were seriously annoyed that Louis had cooperated and then changed his mind. They didn’t threaten him. They didn’t have to. Louis knew that he was facing years in prison. Maybe three, maybe five or ten. It all depended on the sentencing guidelines and the prosecutor and the judge—and him.

  At his arraignment on October 20 he was charged with one count of securities fraud stemming from his investment strategies at United Capital. But that was just an opening salvo, and he knew it. They had more charges in store for him unless he gave them Charl
ie and the others. Everybody. Guys. Brokers. No exceptions.

  At the time he made the taped phone call to Charlie shortly after his arrest, their relationship had been undergoing severe stress. United Capital was a thing of the past, and Louis was not giving Charlie money anymore. It was a promise he had made to himself, and he did not share it with Charlie at the time. All Charlie knew was that Louis was in a slump. It was an extended slump—over two months—so Charlie was in a bad mood when Louis called him with the tape recorder running, and Louis put him in a worse mood by goading him, to the great pleasure of the FBI men in attendance. Louis knew how to push Charlie’s buttons and Charlie said things that were profane, and threatening, and might tend to incriminate him.

  Louis called Charlie from jail after he decided to not cooperate. He was pleading now, apologetic, but it was too late. “I decided I ain’t doing nothing for you,” Charlie said. He could see Charlie at the pizzeria on Kings Highway, in his jogging suit, smoking his Cubans. They had to be Cuban, even if they burned like crabgrass.

  Charlie was hurt. He had been spurned. Louis never laid a hand on Stefanie. But to Charlie he was a wife and he was abused and fucked. Louis didn’t take it personally. That’s how Guys were. They got into a relationship with you. They weren’t policemen for crooks—the media got it all wrong. They didn’t need psychologists, like the TV mobsters. They were psychologists. They burrowed into your mind.

  Louis could not forget the Guys if he tried, even if he tried as hard as the feds wanted him to remember. But he couldn’t recall all the places he had worked. They were hard to remember because they were so unimportant, so interchangeable. He had worked at so many places with meaningless names on the door that it would take some memory-jogging to get him to recite their names—and Louis had a terrific memory.