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

  “From what he told me, he had a guy held hostage on Long Island. He told me he went into a house, the people were supposed to be away, they weren’t, and he had a hostage situation. He says he didn’t get out and the police arrested him right there. He made it seem like it was a bad scene, with hostage negotiators and everything, helicopters flying over the house. After that, whenever I watched a movie about a hostage situation, I thought about Charlie.”

  Louis tried to bring his new almost-friend up to speed on how money was made on Wall Street. He explained it as simply as he could, because Charlie did not have a particularly good grasp of the principles of finance.

  “I tried to explain it to him, but he had trouble with it. Finally I say, ‘Look, you’re buying it for a penny, and you’re selling it for two dollars.’ Like with warrants I didn’t explain to him what exactly it was, or he had an option to buy stock, or anything like that. It was just, ‘Give me the money. I’ll give you thirty grand.’ Because there was no point. Even if I explained it to him, he wouldn’t understand. I knew he was a simple-fucking-minded guy, but he’s definitely shrewd.”

  Charlie made it clear from the start that he was going to be more than a friend, and more than a client, though Louis had a hard time figuring out just what he would be. This much was sure, though: Charlie was going to be around—physically. He was never going to stray too far from his money, or from his new money generator.

  “When he came up to my office to see me at Nationwide, it was a surprise out of nowhere. ‘How you doing, Louie. Let me open my account.’ That’s what he was coming up there to do. Open his account. He opened it under his girlfriend’s name. I opened the account, and he sent a ten-thousand-dollar check. He did like he said he would. He actually bought stock on the first deal, Gaylord. It was amazing.”

  The money in Charlie’s account was set aside for two thousand shares of Gaylord common stock, and Louis was throwing in five thousand warrants. He was going to make a bundle—$30,000 on a $10,000 investment. That is what he told Charlie. He was going to make some good money for Charlie, his new Guy friend.

  But things weren’t going as planned. Louis was annoyed at the way he and his partners were going to split up the warrants from the Gaylord deal. So Louis decided to quit.

  Chris Wolf was through with Greenway and now he had set up shop just down the street, at 63 Wall—Vision Investment Group. They were going to be selling stock in a company called Auxer Enterprises—AUXI—from Vision. Louis liked AUXI. He liked Vision—good name. He liked Chris. Chris would treat him fairly. Bobby Cash Deals was at Vision. Vision would have to be better. He was sure of that.

  So he went to Vision, taking Sally Leads and nobody else.

  In comparison to Vision, Greenway could have been the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library.

  “Vision was just completely fucking insane. It looked like a rave. Like a fucking underground club. Real shithole office. You walked in, there were three offices. That was it. Dozens of guys on drugs, hanging out in the office. All punks working up there.”

  The Chris-Rocco team was over. Rocco Basile had gone to another firm, State Capital Markets, and now there was a new team—Chris-Dom-Rico. It was the same arrangement as at Greenway, except that Dom and Rico were now running the place. And the stories about Chris and his two keepers weren’t rumors anymore. Louis saw for himself how Black Dom and Rico bullied Chris and shook him down, driving his cars and, in the case of Rico, even living in his apartment. Chris wasn’t a willing roommate: “Rico forced his fucking way in there. ‘I’m taking the second bedroom. Fuck you.’”

  Vision was a nightmare. And not just because of the occasional bloody nose, as was doled out at Hanover. Brokers who crossed Rico and Dom were getting beaten senseless. “Dom and Rico beat the shit out of my friend Armando, hung him out the window. Armando told me. What happened was, he pitched some client, the client reneged on the trade. He and his friend went to the client’s house and robbed the guy. They took coins from the guy. And then he left his card there. He was fucking nuts, Armando. Then the guy called the firm and talked to the manager, which was Dom. So he made Armando return the coins, and then they beat the shit out of him. They made him walk through the fucking ‘train’ under everybody’s legs. Dom had everybody in the firm make a circle, and then Armando had to crawl in the circle and everybody would hit him in the back of his ass with a fucking newspaper. He’d walk to the end and then Dom would be there with a Whiffle ball bat. Bam!”

  Louis never fell afoul of the Vision style of employee discipline. Charlie saw to that. Charlie went up to Vision as soon as Louis started working there, and told Black Dom to leave him alone. It was nice. It was as if Charlie had become his big brother, telling the schoolyard bully to lay off. “Charlie said, ‘He’s with me,’” said Louis. “If Dom had a problem, he was supposed to call Charlie.”

  It was great to be protected from physical violence. At least Charlie could do that much. It made it easier to pay Charlie. And it was good that it was easier because Charlie was expecting to be paid.

  Charlie never came out and said it in so many words, but he was anticipating a regular flow of money from Louis. Louis’s earnings from Vision were pretty good, about $150,000. Charlie didn’t know that, because he wasn’t there. But he could always ask around. “I said to myself, if he talks to Black Dom, God forbid word gets out that I just made a hundred fifty grand. The fucking guy is going to lose his wig. I figured that if I give him money, he’ll never go around asking.”

  But how much to give? This wasn’t like tipping the building superintendent at Christmas, but there were similarities. The same question is involved: How much will make him happy?

  Charlie was never very happy with having to write out a check for $10,000 to buy Gaylord warrants. It seemed to Charlie that Louis was asking him to take a risk, and Guys don’t take risks. Guys agree with half of the concept of risk-taking—the “taking” part.

  Charlie kept asking about his $10,000. Was he going to get stuck for that money?

  So Louis decided, what the fuck. It was fuck-you money anyway. He opened the safe in his apartment, pulled $10,000 out of the stacks, drove to the pizzeria at West First and Kings Highway, and gave the money to Charlie.

  He had earned it, in a way. What the fuck.

  Even with Charlie’s protection keeping Dom and Rico off his back, after about seven weeks at Vision Louis decided that he had had enough. He couldn’t take that kind of scene anymore. He was too old. He was about to turn twenty-two. So when Benny offered to give Louis a better deal, Louis came back to Nationwide. He picked up where he left off. His office, his cold-callers, his clients. Everything. Bygones were bygones.

  Gaylord had just gone public and there was a lot of work to be done. Nationwide’s traders, who were at the home office in Texas, made a mess of the warrant trades. They all wound up making a pretty good profit, despite the screwup.

  Charlie made about $27,000 off the Gaylord deal, $3,000 less than Louis had expected, because of the screwup in Texas. Still, it was a pretty good return on investment—almost 200 percent. Not bad, considering that he had gotten the $10,000 back, making the $27,000 more of a gift than a return on invested capital.

  But Charlie made it clear that he had expectations from Louis, and that they were high. “Almost” a 200 percent return on his investment—even when his investment was refunded—was not good enough. If 200 percent was promised it had to be exactly 200 percent that was delivered.

  One of his expectations, one that Louis was not used to, was that Louis had to do everything he said he was going to do. That was always a problem for Louis. At Sea, the priests made a big fuss about that. His father and mother were always pissed that Louis didn’t keep his promises, and it was starting to become an issue for Stefanie as well.

  Charlie felt strongly about the subject of keeping promises as well. As a matter of fact, Charlie took a very broad view of what a promise was—basically any expression of
intent, any forecast of things to come. It became an obligation, an expectation. A deal.

  And Louis was learning that there was a final arbiter in any dispute or difference of opinion that might arise between Louis and Charlie. His name was Charlie. He invariably ruled in favor of Charlie. This Gaylord IPO provided Louis with his very first experience with Charlie’s concept of contractual obligations as they relate to broker-client relations.

  Louis had indicated an expectation that Charlie was going to get back $30,000 if he put up $10,000. So that is what Charlie wanted—$30,000—even though he got back the $10,000. It was a deal. As Charlie put it, “I thought we were looking at thirty grand.”

  Louis made his point as best he could, describing how the traders in Texas screwed up for everybody, but Charlie did not feel his arguments were persuasive. Louis appealed to his sense of fair play and common sense, to no avail. Charlie had made a decision. It was a final ruling, it was in favor of Charlie, and there was no appeal.

  So Louis did the only thing that he could do under the circumstances. He went to his apartment, pulled $3,000 out of the stacks, drove to the pizzeria, and gave the money to Charlie.

  Louis didn’t like it, but he figured he could afford it. Besides, Charlie was a necessity. Things were starting to get nasty. A confrontation with Rico and Black Dom, shortly after he left Vision, proved that.

  Louis had gotten paid from Vision about $80,000 from the sale of AUXI stock to a particular client. This client later transferred the stock out of Vision and sold it. That was no good. Once a chop stock is sold to a client and the broker gets the commission, it is supposed to disappear. The chop house doesn’t want to see it again.

  If the client transfers the stock to another firm and sells it, the stock—in this case AUXI—winds up coming back to the chop house, in this case Vision. That’s because Vision was the only firm that dealt in the stock on the Street. If someone out there was selling, Vision had to be the buyer. And that wasn’t the idea. Vision wanted to sell that piece of shit, not buy it.

  So Louis had a problem. Rico and Dom wanted the commission paid back to them.

  “Rico was trying to get in touch with me, and I was avoiding him. So Black Dom came to find me and he wanted the money back. And he says, ‘I don’t care about Charlie. I don’t care about anybody. If I see you on the street, you’re dead.’ So I knew he didn’t care. This kid didn’t care about nobody. They would beat people up and not care if they were around anybody. They didn’t care. They’d worry about the consequences afterwards.”

  Charlie had to call his own Guy to intervene. Charlie had a Guy of his own. All of the Guys had Guys of their own. Sometimes Charlie said his Guy was Barry, a Genovese out on Coney Island. Sometimes Charlie said his Guy was Little Benji, a Colombo skipper. So Louis figured Charlie had two Guys. Charlie never clarified the matter.

  This time, according to Charlie, he called Barry. Barry was a respected Coney Island gangster. Never convicted, rarely arrested. That was why he was so respected. “Nothing happens in Coney Island without him knowing it,” says one ex-detective who used to work the organized crime beat. “He’s a stone killer,” says this ex-cop. Well, Coney Island is a tough neighborhood.

  “Charlie had to call Barry up. Barry’s a made Guy with the Genoveses, an old-timer. You don’t hear his name that much. Barry called up Wild Bill to tell Dom to chill out, I’m going to pay the money. I had to pay the money. And I couldn’t even pay it to Charlie. I had to pay it right to Dom. That’s the way it worked out. Charlie told me, ‘Louie, you got yourself in a fucking mess.’ Dom was Wild Bill’s nephew. Bill was a very strong gangster, very feared and strong.” The problem was resolved by Louis getting the stock into someone else’s account. Everything went very smoothly.

  Louis needed a Charlie to deal with a Dom. That’s the way it was on Wall Street. That’s how bad it was getting. At least Charlie was rational, in his own way. With Charlie, only one thing mattered—money. But at least he was consistent about it. Nothing else was consistent in Louis’s life.

  At the same time that his life on the Street was getting more complicated and violent, his private life was going nuts.

  Sure, the lies were still working. He was juggling Deenie and Stefanie, and they were both in the air, and he wasn’t dropping either of them. But Stefanie had set a wedding date: April 27, 1996. The clock was ticking. He was getting married and he had to figure out what to do with Deenie—or Stefanie. It was getting so he wasn’t in control over what was going on under his own roof. It wasn’t any good.

  “If Stefanie would come to my house surprisingly, I would be aggravated. A couple of times she came to the house without telling me and I would say, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

  “That’s what happened on my twenty-second birthday, November 1995. Deenie was in my apartment, sleeping. I got up, went to work, as usual. I had plans with Stefanie that evening. I called Stefanie’s house at about eleven-thirty and her mother says, ‘She’s on her way to New York.’ I thought to myself, ‘Oh, shit.’ On her way to fucking New York. Got to be kidding me. I say to her mother, ‘Oh, thanks. ’Bye!’

  “I ran home to my apartment. I didn’t even get into my car—my car was in the garage. Stefanie didn’t have a key, but the doorman would let her in. I told the doorman this is my wife-to-be. I couldn’t have Stefanie saying she couldn’t get in there. She wanted a key and I postponed it—didn’t make a copy of it. Never made a fucking copy. Took me like years to make a copy.

  “So she was on her way to my apartment in the city. And I had to go home and tell Deenie to get out. So I say, ‘Get out.’ She says, ‘What are you talking about?’ I say, ‘My father is on his way here. He’s fucking nuts right now.’ It was chaos. She says, ‘What do you mean?’ She’s sleeping. I’m picking her up.

  I say, ‘Come on, you’ve got to get the fuck out. He’s going fucking crazy. You know my father.’ She did know my father. She had met him and she knew my father was a maniac.

  “So I threw her out. I put her in a cab. I walked her downstairs. I said, ‘Sorry, babe. I love you. ’Bye.’ Literally not thirty seconds after I get into my apartment, Stefanie walks through the door. I’m like, ‘Holy shit.’ I was probably pale white. I was on the couch, panting. I was casual. I say, ‘Oh, what are you doing here?’ I didn’t get mad at her at that time. It was my birthday, she was surprising me, she had balloons. It was so sweet. She was going to come clean the apartment, when I got home she was going to have the dinner ready and have the apartment really cleaned. She said, ‘Can you please go back to work so I can surprise you like I was going to?’ I say, ‘Okay.’

  “They were like my clients. I was lying to them like I was lying to my clients.”

  It didn’t feel good. But he was with Charlie now, and Charlie was protecting him, and it made him feel better about everything. Nobody else would have been able to help him with Dom—not the cops, not the Pope, not Bill Clinton, not God. Only Charlie. As he got to know Charlie through the tail end of 1995, he began to realize that Charlie was a power greater than anything he had ever seen before.

  He didn’t want to get rid of Charlie, even if he had a chance. If he could have pushed a button and gotten rid of Charlie, he would not have pushed that button.

  Even his doorman could see that his life was chaotic, and even his doorman could have told him that Charlie could bring some order to his life. He started saying that to himself, saying it from the moment he realized he couldn’t get rid of Charlie, no matter what.

  Charlie could end the chaos, maybe. He kept on saying that

  to himself, over and over again, when the pressure began to build.

  * * *

  By the time he got to Nationwide, gambling and losing was a part of his life that just wasn’t going away. Like Charlie. Nobody knew how his gambling was becoming a problem. Certainly not his mother, and she didn’t like him gambling even when he was winning. What else was new? Louis never could please his mother. And h
e sure wasn’t pleasing her now, no matter much money he made on the Street. She always had an issue. Now it was the way he lived his life.

  “The whole lifestyle—she was just against it. I was turning into my father. ‘Be careful—you’ll wind up just like your father.’ I didn’t want to hear it. And my father would come to my house and I’d have to hear my mother telling me, ‘Don’t let him in the house!’ What am I supposed to do? He rings the doorbell, I let him in. She didn’t like it because he would stay, go partying and not go home. I’m not going to say no. I’m not his father. He’s my father.

  “We’d go out to dinner with Stefanie and her parents on a Friday night, and then we’d leave for Atlantic City right from dinner. It was fucking ridiculous. Nuts. Everybody thought it was okay. Nobody ever said anything. Her father never said to me, ‘What are you doing? Why are you going to Atlantic City at eleven o’clock?’

  “One time when we were in Atlantic City I snuck downstairs at like six in the morning, while Stefanie was sleeping. She woke up. She came downstairs and she found me at the table. I was drinking. She goes, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I was down to like three grand, from the forty thousand. And the pit boss is like, ‘Get him out of here. He’s fucking nuts.’ I had a marker for like thirty grand.

  “I went back to the room and threw up.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Charlie liked Louis, and Louis had to admit that he was starting to like Charlie. No, he was not the kind of guy Louis would want to hang out with under ordinary circumstances. But he didn’t mind being around the guy. And besides, having a Guy was making more and more good solid business sense at Nationwide. That’s because Louis saw that he was going to have to deal with gangsters whether he liked it or not.

  Frank Coppa was coming up to Nationwide frequently now to get his cut from the IPOs, but mainly to be sure the brokers were pushing Chic-Chick. Frank felt very strongly about the company. His sons were officers of Chic-Chick. Frank Junior was going to be CEO. There was just no arguing with Frank on the subject. The company’s selling points, or lack thereof, were simply not a topic for debate at 100 Wall Street when Frank was around.