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

  “When he came up to Nationwide everybody was always nervous. You always had to watch what you said with him. Like he could kid you. But then, you couldn’t kid back at all. Because then he’d be, like, annoyed. So there was no kidding with Frank. He could bust your balls. He’d say, ‘Why don’t you wear a suit or something, you look like shit,’ and then if you even remotely try to say it back to him, ‘You’re fat and fucking ugly,’ you’d be dead. So you just laugh. ‘Ha ha, great. . . .’ So everybody was always nervous when he was there. ‘Frank’s in the office.’ You got to watch what you say, blah blah blah.

  “‘Are you going to do it, Lou?’

  “‘I’m going to do it, Frank.’”

  “He’d be like that when I had to cross him out of a stock. Because he started realizing that Benny didn’t do the buying of the stock, in the crosses. You got to get somebody to buy the stock, and I’d do that. So he started asking me:

  “‘Do you have buying for my stock?’

  “‘Yeah, I do, Frank.’

  “‘Are you going to do it?’

  “‘Yeah. Yes, I’m going to do it.’

  “‘You’re sure you’re going to do it?’

  “‘Yes. It’ll be done.’

  “And I’d do it, like, instantaneously. I wouldn’t even wait to do it. Because I knew he’d be back there the next day looking for his confirmation. He’d come up and look to see his tickets. Like when he wanted a stock sold, there was no getting around it. Marco, Benny, everybody just frantically tried to get rid of his stock. It was a major fucking issue.

  “‘Frank’s on the phone. Wants to sell his stock.’

  “‘Arghhhhhhh.’

  “He’s a very scary guy, very intimidating-looking guy. More intimidating-looking than Charlie. He’s just quiet. He don’t say anything. He just sits there, two hundred and eighty pounds, in his mink coat.”

  Frank Junior would come with his father to Nationwide at times, to tell the brokers of the great things going on at Chic-Chick and to find out how the private placement was selling. Frank Junior was five years older than Louis, and grew up on Staten Island in a huge house near St. Joseph-by-the-Sea. A nice guy, basically. But sometimes Frank Senior would come up to the office with a guy who wasn’t nice at all, a mean-looking guy named Gene Lombardo. Gene was big—bigger even than Frank—and he had a kind of craggy face that reminded Louis of the actor Tom Berenger. Alone or accompanied, Frank would meet with Benny or Louis or their Nationwide partner Marco Fiore. Marco was now sharing an apartment with Stuttering John, and he had new pals—the Coppas. Frank, Frank Junior, and Marco were forging a relationship.

  “Marco started hanging out with Frank Junior. Like an idiot. I remember him walking around. Ooh, Frank Junior’s my friend.’ Yeah, right. They had him. Once I heard him yelling at Marco. Frank was up there with him, and Gene was there too. Gene was taken there to really intimidate Marco. Marco opened his mouth, agreed to do some Chic-Chick, and then he couldn’t do it. And then boom. ‘No, no, you got to do Chic-Chick.’ That was the meeting. They were yelling at him about Chic-Chick. ‘You got to do it.’ You said you were going to do it and it’s like gold. ‘You said you were going to raise a couple of hundred thousand for Chic-Chick. Where is it?’ We all had to do some, no matter what we thought of it.”

  Marco liked the idea of being friendly with Frank Junior. Frank Junior liked it too, and so did Frank Senior. That was the idea—friendship. Obligation. They had to sell Chic-Chick. It was a promise. A promise is a promise. People can’t go around breaking promises. But it’s not as if they were robbing anybody, or shaking them down.

  That was the way it was with Frank, in the way he dealt with Benny and Marco, and that was the way it was with Charlie, in the way he was dealing with Louis during those first few months when he was at Nationwide. It was probably that way with Guys since the first Guy emerged from the primordial muck. Louis was seeing this, and learning this, and understanding what it meant and why it worked even though he wasn’t able to do anything about it. He wasn’t able to do anything about it because it worked. He had a Guy now, and when he thought that maybe it wasn’t right, that maybe he shouldn’t have to give Charlie money or sell that crappy chicken private placement, he wouldn’t do anything because Frank and Charlie had planted second thoughts.

  That was the whole trick to being a Guy.

  It was something the movies didn’t show, when they portrayed gangsters, because it is hard to show somebody having a second thought. Second thoughts aren’t glamorous. There are no guns involved, usually, with planting a second thought. It happens all in the mind. It means that you do what a Guy wants because he has gotten in your head, and he has a relationship with you. You think twice about not doing what he wants, or getting pissed and saying no.

  It was a little bit like the way Louis got his clients to send him money, over the phone, without even meeting him. With his clients, Louis’s objective was to get in their heads, to establish a relationship with them, manipulate them. Pick up a pen, he’d say. Pick up a pen. “Don’t you want to get in my A Book?” To get people to really want to be in your A Book or to pick up a pen, you have got to be in their heads. So now, for Louis and Benny and Marco, the Guys were in their heads, planting the second thoughts that kept them saying yes and saying no problem.

  “They didn’t come in and say, ‘You’re giving me stock and warrants. That’s it. I’m in the stir now. It’s over.’ Everybody knew who Frank was. We knew he had the power. He could easily have come in, sat in the chair and said, ‘You’re going to give me three thousand in cash a month, and I’m getting IPO warrants and you’re going to cross me out. I’m making fifty grand a month off this firm.’ And we would have been like, ‘Okay.’ There would’ve been nothing to do. But he didn’t do that.

  “Frank comes in as your friend. ‘Heyyy, guys. What’s going on? Let’s make some money.’ When you start to hate him you second-guess yourself. ‘He’s all right. He’s my friend.’ They got you second-guessing. They put a second thought in your head. They almost make themselves like they’re your girlfriend. The way Charlie used to beep me and I’m not calling him back, I used to say, ‘What, am I making this guy come or something?’ Almost like you’re married to the guy. It’s just fascinating how they get in there, into your head.”

  Louis wasn’t reading the papers much, which was just as well, because if he did, he would know that what he was seeing at Nationwide surely had to be a figment of his imagination. There shouldn’t have been any Guys at Nationwide. They shouldn’t have been anywhere at all. According to all the papers, Guys were on the run. They were through. John Gotti had been put in prison for the rest of his life, and the Commission trial was also a big victory for the government. Louis didn’t read books, so he didn’t read how the FBI was winning the war against Guys. Yet here they were, real as life, at Hanover and Sovereign and Greenway and Brod and Vision and now Nationwide. And people were as scared of them as ever. They could do whatever they wanted and Louis and Benny and Marco had nothing to say about it.

  As he got better acquainted with Charlie, he began to learn how Charlie got to be a Guy. Louis knew from Charlie’s “war stories” that he had been a “shooter” a few years before, when a Colombo family skipper named Victor Orena and his pals were trying to take over the family, then headed by the imprisoned Carmine Persico and his son Alphonse. Charlie used to report to a skipper named Lenny Dello, who was aligned with Orena. Once he pulled open his shirt and showed Louis a scar on his chest—a bullet scar, Charlie said. A war wound. Charlie kept the jacket with the bullet hole, a bomber jacket, and would talk about how a veterinarian extracted the bullet from his chest.

  Charlie was lucky. Daily News columnist Jerry Capeci did a body count when the smoke cleared and found that twelve people died in the Orena-Persico conflict, including a kid who worked in a Bensonhurst bagel shop and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Louis always counted himself lucky. Not as a
gambler, but in life. Lucky that good fortune had put him in touch with the right people. He was lucky meeting Roy, lucky meeting Stefanie, lucky meeting Benny, lucky meeting Charlie.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  As the latest Nationwide deal approached, involving the IPO of a company called Thermo-Mizer, Charlie stopped hinting and began talking about the kind of money he wanted from the deal. Without getting specific about amounts or percentages, he made it clear he expected a bigger piece than he had gotten from Gaylord.

  “I don’t know who he knew up there, or how he knew, but he knew exactly how much money I was making, and what I was making and how I was making it. What, when, where, how. For some reason this guy knew everything. Somebody must have been telling him. Maybe his cousin John was telling him. Then he comes to me and says, ‘I know you took down a lot more than you shared with me on that deal. Next time that won’t happen.’”

  How could Louis argue? He wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on. Charlie was earning his money. Louis and Benny were now using Charlie to do things for them. “We sent him to a client who wouldn’t pay. Guy’s name was Michael. He was from Queens. Bought a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Gaylord warrants and reneged. Cost me thirty thousand. Charlie went there and got the money. I don’t know what he did, but two days later I got a check from the fucking guy. That’s all I know.”

  The collection proved that Charlie could be a useful Guy to have around. They might have benefited, all of them, even more if Charlie was “made”—initiated into full-time membership. But that wasn’t happening. Charlie was on the shelf. And as he told it, it wasn’t because of anything wrong that he might have done—maybe being too much of a hothead, even for a Guy, or because of any other kind of blot on his record. By his account, it was because he tried to do the right thing, and got blackballed as a result. It happened right after the Colombo wars, which ended with Persico victorious.

  “I used to ask him when are you going to get your thing, your button. I used to tell him if you get your thing, then I can just rob everybody. I used to go like that—push the side of my nose. Meaning get straightened out. When is he going to get straightened out. At first he didn’t tell me about it, but then as we got to be more friends he was more open about it.

  “Supposedly Charlie and his friend Joe Botch, and this guy Lenny Dello, did a score. It was $300,000 or something like that. He didn’t say what it was, but I think it was a robbery. Lenny Dello’s father was a skipper in the Colombo family, also named Lenny, and his son Lenny Dello, Jr., was Charlie’s partner.

  “They do the score. Lenny and Charlie get the money and they’re going to get Joe a piece. But Lenny wanted to give Joe only like fifty grand. So Charlie, maybe he gets a vision of some type of morals. He told Joe he was going to split it three ways, and he wanted to give Joe a hundred grand. So that’s what Charlie did. He gave Joe the hundred. And he had a big beef with Lenny over that. Lenny’s father told him no, you’re going to give Joe fifty and you’re going to bring the rest here, and we’re going to split it up. And Charlie didn’t listen to that. He gave Joe a hundred.

  “So this is the story he told me. There was a big blowup with Lenny’s father, a fistfight with his son, and they shelfed him. They were going to make him. He was going to get made, Charlie. And they shelfed him. That was it. He was banned. Lenny was best friends with him since they were little, since they were eighteen, seventeen years old. Didn’t talk to him no more. Nothing. To this day he hasn’t talked to him.”

  That, at least, was the story as Charlie told it. As far as Louis knew, it was as much the gospel truth as the story of the hostage situation on Long Island.

  There was no question that Charlie had a lot of status, a lot of respect in Brooklyn. Louis could see that himself, as he visited Charlie at his apartment, and hung out with him at Scores and in the bars and restaurants in Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst where Guys could be comfortable and unwind.

  Louis saw how Charlie was treated with fear and, almost, reverence. And he also saw what Charlie was like when he let his guard down. “He could be a right guy if he wanted to be,” said Louis. “A lot of times I’d go out with him and get drunk with him and stuff. He used to get wrecked. He used to drink martinis. He’d get an Absolut martini or a Belvedere martini, or a Grey Goose martini, all the good vodkas. ‘In and out with the vermouth.’ And then he’d say it again, more forceful like. ‘In and out with the vermouth.’ Like really dry. Hardly any vermouth. Almost straight vodka with an olive.”

  Charlie had his quirks, as do most people. Well, maybe a bit more. Something—the prison experience, maybe—had done something to Charlie’s method of housekeeping. Charlie believed in order. So did Louis, but Charlie took it to another level.

  “We would go over to his apartment sometimes, when we were changing to go out. His apartment was immaculately clean. It was a bullshit apartment, only a one-bedroom apartment, but it was nicely furnished. He had a nice sectional in his living room. Nice TV. His dining room table was big, like wood. Nice. He had expensive furniture. His clothing closet was like he was still in jail. That’s probably why—he was in jail so long he was institutionalized. Probably all he could do in jail was clean stuff. He was a fanatic about it. Your shoes had to be off. ‘Take your shoes off!’ He acted like I was dirty. Dirty? I got a fucking seven-hundred-dollar suit on. What ‘dirty’? I’d eat a fucking Oreo cookie and he’d literally follow me around with a Dustbuster. ‘You’re fucking eating an Oreo cookie—eat ’em outside.’ He spent too much time in a shit-hole.

  “His pants were so perfectly creased it was ridiculous. Not even a bend all the way down to the cuff. We’d get into the car, and he’d take this foam thing and brush his shoes.

  “His refrigerator was a psycho refrigerator. Shit was facing front, lined up. His suits were color-coordinated in the closets, with fucking slacks on the bottom and suits on the top, everything perfect. He had eight-hundred-dollar shoes. Snakeskin shoes.

  “When we were getting ready to go he was never fucking ready. He was doing his hair. He’d spray it, because he had a bald spot, so he’d spray it with this black shit. Shhhhhhhhhh. He’d go outside his house into the fucking hallway, and spray it and come back in. Never in the house. Are you kidding? I took a shower in his house one time, and it was fucking the end of the world. Because he was like, ‘Don’t drip any fucking water.’ I couldn’t drip water anywhere. He was annoyed when I had to take a shit in his bathroom. ‘Can you go in the pizzeria and take a shit in there? You got to shit in my fucking toilet?’ And then he’d use that shit against me. ‘I let you shit in my toilet, shower in my fucking bathroom.’

  “Charlie used to have a lot of locks on the door, and he had one of those police locks, with the bar that went in the floor. He used to roll up the money and keep it in this three-inch pipe, which was threaded, and screw it right into this stand-pipe in his bedroom. It looked like part of the pipe. It was brilliant.”

  It was clear that Charlie was one of the more prominent citizens of his little part of Brooklyn, the section of Kings Highway just west of the elevated train on McDonald Avenue. To the east was Roy Ageloff’s old neighborhood—and George Donohue’s old beat—Midwood—and to the south and west was Frank Coppa’s turf, Bensonhurst. Charlie’s neighborhood was still mostly Italian though outsiders, Russians and Asians, were moving in. But the area still had more than its share of pizzerias. The pizzeria at West First and Kings Highway was just down the street from Charlie’s apartment. He used an area in the back, by the kitchen, for meetings and to take cash after Louis had made a trip to the stacks. Charlie acted as if he owned the place. He didn’t, not that it mattered. The pizzeria was in the neighborhood. Charlie’s neighborhood. And that still meant something, even though this was the late 1990s and Guys were supposed to be on the way out.

  “I used to be there early, because Charlie used to have me meet him sometimes eight o’clock in the morning. He was up at like six-thirty in the morning. I think he used to run
or something. Every morning at nine-thirty somebody would bring him coffee. This kid Louie. He was a retarded, a slow kid. He used to run around and do Charlie’s errands. Come in the morning with coffee, move his car for him, for the alternate-side-of-the-street parking. ‘Move my car!’

  “He’d be dressed and ready, dressed in like a full uniform, by nine o’clock in the morning. Maybe he wanted to feel like he had a job. Sometimes he’d sleep late. He had everybody in the neighborhood doing favors for him. Everybody would say hello to him as he’s walking down the block. He used to get his nails done on the corner. Sometimes I’d meet him while he was getting his nails done. He had this other place he’d go for espresso, and they had a table where nobody else would sit. Every time I went in there, nobody was sitting at his table. He used to park his car in other people’s driveways. They would just call him on the phone when he had to move the car.

  “He had four Louies in his life. There was me, the guy who owned the pizzeria, and his friend Louie owned the building that he lived in. I remember a couple of times people were making noise in the hallway, and he says, ‘Pipe down, there!’ They go, ‘Sorry, Charlie.’”

  By the time of the Thermo-Mizer deal, Charlie pulled as much weight at Nationwide as he did in his neighborhood. Everybody was getting big money from Thermo-Mizer, and Charlie made sure he got a nice piece of the deal himself. Louis gave him thirty thousand Thermo-Mizer warrants, which meant $60,000 in profits, once the company went public at the end of February 1996.