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

Shortly after the Thermo-Mizer deal came out, Charlie provided Louis with further proof that he was earning his keep and not just robbing Louis. Somebody out there was shorting Thermo-Mizer, and it had to be stopped. If the shorting continued, the price of the stock and warrants was going to drop. There was too much money at stake.

  “Charlie and one of his goons went to go see somebody. It was a small firm—I forget the name. This was the story he told us later: He went in, and the trader had the door locked. So Charlie was knocking on the door. Trader opened the door. Charlie put his foot into it and the guy was scared shit. Wouldn’t open the door, and Charlie kind of like cracked him through the door. The guy didn’t short the stock no more. Charlie’s very good. He got it done.”

  The other product going out to customers, at about the same time as Thermo-Mizer, was the stock of a company called Spectratek. It was a cash deal, which was great. But this particular cash deal came with its own Guy. Louis saw him come up to Nationwide.

  “The first day he comes up there I don’t think anything about it. It’s some old man, looks like he needs a cane and a wheelchair to get around. He’s got this huge black guy with him. So he’s in there talking with Glenn [Benussi]. But then, after he left, Benny comes to me and says, ‘What are we getting ourselves involved in here? It’s fucking Sonny Franzese!’” Louis shrugged. He had never heard of Sonny Franzese.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “John ‘Sonny’ Franzese was, among many other things, a chameleon,” his son, Michael Franzese, wrote in a 1992 book called Quiting the Mob. “He could change his colors so fast, over such a wide range of personalities, that he could have fooled any dozen psychiatrists into thinking he was certifiable.” The description was apt, not just for Sonny but for all the leading Guys of his generation. They were in control—in every sense of the word. They weren’t frightened by jail and they didn’t become “cooperators.”

  In the 1960s, Guys like Sonny served their time, even if it meant fifty years in jail—the sentence imposed on Sonny for a bank robbery conviction. He served it until he was paroled, and kept his mouth shut. Years later, other Guys cooperated in the face of far less jail time.

  Sonny was such a legend that his son, a self-described Colombo skipper, shimmered in his reflected glory and wrote an autobiography in which he lingered at length on his dad’s career. Until the bank robbery conviction—his son insisted it was a frame-up—Sonny had done it all. He had risen to skipper on the strength of sheer guts and moneymaking prowess. He had the makings of becoming the John Gotti of his generation, had he not been nabbed for that bank robbery. He kept a low profile and, unlike Gotti, he didn’t sneer at legitimate business. He owned a piece of the classic porn movie Deep Throat, and was involved in the record business. He was such a notable Guy that in 1968 he was the subject of a massive article in the old Life magazine on that scary new phenomenon known as organized crime. In page after page, the article described how Sonny had beaten a murder rap, in a lengthy trial in which his legal team had wiped up the floor with prosecutors in Queens. Guys were at their peak. It must have been glorious—right up to the moment he was sent to prison for fifty years for that bank robbery.

  By the end of his career, Sonny could have written a book himself—When Bad Things Happen to Bad People. Sonny’s reward for his loyalty was betrayal. He was forced to step down as a skipper. But even though treated shabbily, he always remained a Guy, true to the code of being a Guy. After serving ten years of his fifty-year sentence, he was released on parole in 1979. But he was sent back for two years in 1982 for accidentally running into a Gambino skipper named Carmine Lombardozzi. It was an accident, his son insisted. Could have happened to anyone. (Don’t you just hate it when you run into Carmine Lombardozzi?) Sonny got another eight years in prison in 1986, again for consorting with a known criminal. Ten years for bank robbery. Ten years for violating parole. It is a thing that Guys do, even when they are past seventy. *

  In 1996 Sonny was out of jail and became involved, somehow, in pushing the Spectratek stock. Benny was totally bummed out.

  “Benny says, ‘Don’t do no Spectratek.’ But how could you not do it? It was thirty percent cash. So we did Spectratek. I didn’t know who this Sonny was. I didn’t know about the book. I just heard Sonny was a major old-timer, a very crazy old-timer. And I couldn’t believe that he was up in our office. I says, ‘What is he doing up here?’ I never really talked to the guy. It was just, ‘Hello.’ I had my own Guy, so I wasn’t looking at any other gangster. I was happy with my gangster. Besides, Sonny was just a dirty-looking old man, a broken-down old man. A broken-down valise. That’s Charlie’s words. That’s what he’d call a washed-up wiseguy.”

  A Guy organizational chart at Nationwide would have been simple and linear. Charlie’s role was limited at Nationwide to taking Louis’s money. “Charlie didn’t have much to do with the firm, because Frank was up there,” said Louis. “The only person he could get money from was me. He couldn’t corral anyone else, because Frank was involved, and he wasn’t going to step on Frank’s toes. He wouldn’t dare do that.”

  Family “territories” didn’t mean anything on Wall Street. Though nobody ever used terms like “open city” that used to describe Las Vegas and Miami, Wall Street firms pretty much fit that definition, which used to describe areas not in the territory of any particular family. The only thing that mattered on Wall Street was personal relationships—which Guy had a connection with which broker. Somehow, Sonny had formed a relationship with Glenn Benussi and Howie Zelin. How, or why, Louis didn’t know.

  Sonny was sharing in the Thermo-Mizer warrants, but his main interest at Nationwide was in pushing the Spectratek deal. It was his Chic-Chick. He felt very strongly about it. Louis discovered that the hard way when one of his customers tried to sell the stock. When Louis refused, the customer “back-doored” the stock—had it transferred out of Nationwide, and then sold it. It was the same thing that led to the beef with Black Dom. It was happening more often, and it was annoying. Clients were learning that they could get rid of stock, when a chop house broker wouldn’t sell it, by just transferring it to another firm and selling it there. Any fair person could see that it wasn’t Louis’s fault.

  “Marco and Glenn call me in. Sonny’s not there, but his black guy is there. Marco’s telling me to buy the stock back and get the stock sold to somebody else. I got to buy it back today? I wasn’t doing it. Suddenly this black guy comes at me out of nowhere. He’s tremendi. Six-foot-six. Huge. Grabs me by the throat. ‘Buy it back today. You know what I’m saying?’ I’m going, ‘Arghhhhhhh.’ He’s choking the life out of me. Marco pulled him off me and I fell on the floor.”

  Before long, Louis had the last laugh. Sonny simply didn’t have clout anymore. He might have been able to outsmart those Queens prosecutors in 1967, but in 1996 Wall Street he was just another Guy in a world where there were plenty of Guys. It didn’t matter that his kid wrote his memoirs. Sonny was washed up. Louis saw that with his own two eyes when the Thermo-Mizer deal was completed.

  “Marco started having a problem with Glenn and Howie over a lot of political crap—the Thermo-Mizer warrants, dividing up the money from the branch office. Shit like that. Marco did most of the politics shit for us. Me and Benny just worked and raised money. We could have given two fucks about anything except running the trading.

  “The main problem was the warrants from Thermo-Mizer. Howie wanted to give Sonny some warrants off the top, and then we split the rest. He wanted to pay their Guy off the top, while we had to pay our Guys out of our share. So it was a big problem. Frank and Sonny had a meeting downstairs, in a restaurant across the street, and that was it. Frank won. We had discretion. We gave out the warrants to the brokers. Howie wanted to do all that. But he got cut out. Glenn and Howie got their hundred and twenty thousand warrants each, and that was it. Frank just took control of the whole situation.”

  Frank’s price for serving as their advocate was $50,000, or just under $17,000
each for Louis, Benny, and Marco. Louis figured it was well worth the price. It was great having control of the New York office, great winning against Sonny. But the exhilaration was short-lived. Victory was followed by stupidity. If Louis had any faith in mankind, he would have lost it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  This was getting to be ridiculous. Hanover, then Brod, and now Nationwide experiencing the same cancer—the malignant phenomenon known as the free market.

  Some fuck-heads outside the firm were selling Nationwide’s chop stocks. And the owners of Nationwide, down in Fort Worth, wanted to hold back commissions from the brokers to pay for the stock. It was as if they and Jay Taneja were reading the same How to Run a Chop House instruction manual. Louis, Benny, Marco, and their Guys had already made a bundle from trading the warrants. So they weren’t hurting. These commissions were mainly owed to their cold-callers and brokers.

  They had to act fast. The brokers were counting on that money. “Once three days go by and the brokers don’t get paid, they get pissed off,” said Louis. “They don’t come to work, the firm goes out of business. Without the brokers, what kind of firm have you got?”

  The guys who ran these chop houses never learned. Jay Taneja didn’t learn, and now Kevin Williams, the president of Nationwide, was going to have to learn that you just don’t treat people this way. Louis and his pals were going to have to take a trip down to Fort Worth, to visit Kevin. They were going to face him down. It was a selfless thing. Chivalrous, almost. Going to bat for their guys, their cold-callers. People did stuff like that out West. Louis had seen in the western movies that when guys had a dispute, they just went out to the person who owed them money and looked them straight in the eye with a steely gaze. Sometimes the guys in the movies brought along a gunslinger.

  “These were the guys who went down to Texas: Me, Marco, Dave Lavender, Pete Restivo, Carl Banks, and Charlie. The money was owed to all of us, and we decided to take Charlie with us so we could intimidate the guy. We’d give Charlie, whatever, ten thousand dollars for that. So we flew down there. We got to Dallas, rented a car, drove out to Fort Worth, to the offices down some dirt road in the middle of nowhere next to a motel.

  “The cops were waiting for us. Somebody from the firm, I think it was Howie Zelin, called there to probably get on Kevin’s good side, and told him we were coming down. The cops stayed outside while Charlie went inside with Marco. They were talking with Kevin. Kevin started being, like, loud and boisterous, and screaming and hollering, and the cops came in and said to Marco, ‘You guys are better off going back to New York.’ We left. We would have got arrested.

  “When I saw the cops I just walked the other way. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Just hung out with Dave and we smoked cigarettes until they came out. We didn’t want to get arrested in Texas. That would be the worst. Charlie said, ‘I don’t want to get incarcerated in Texas.’

  “It was a wasted trip. We flew to Texas that day and went home that night. We drove back to the airport, got back on the plane, and went back. The whole way back in the plane, Charlie’s telling me, ‘You fucking guys wasted my fucking time. This fucking shit.’ I wanted to kill myself. All squeezed in there with Charlie next to me. We were flying coach. He was practically on my lap. He wanted to sit next to me so he could torture me. I say, ‘Don’t tell me. I didn’t want you to come. Marco did.’”

  It was crazy taking Charlie to Texas. What was going to happen if they had gotten paid? Would Charlie have been satisfied with $10,000? Of course not.

  But that was a moot point. After they got back from their wasted trip to Texas, Nationwide was finished. No wooden tickets this time. Louis had already gotten paid most of what he was owed, so he didn’t care anymore. Louis knew he was in demand, that he could get a job anywhere on the Street—his corner of the Street. Chop House Wall Street. No more illusions. No more dreams about moving over to the Real Wall Street. Louis and Benny had given up the idea that they could ever be legitimate, ever sell real stock to real clients. They were with Charlie and Frank and Sonny now. It wasn’t all that bad. Louis saw the way Charlie was treated. He saw the awe Frank inspired. What was wrong with that?

  By the time Louis picked up his client book and left Nationwide’s offices at 100 Wall Street, he had already gotten rid of his big-name customers. Craig Kallman, the sports guys, the Howard Stern people were all gone. Stuttering John, now sharing an apartment with their partner Marco Fiore, was still a good friend. But as investors these guys were more trouble than they were worth.

  Poor Johnny Mitchell, the Jets player—his son died, and they had to cash him out of his stock right away. Guys like him believed Louis and Benny were real brokers. It was ridiculous. Sure, the signed Jets jerseys were cool. But the novelty had worn off by the time Johnny Mitchell called to get out of his stock. Louis did it, crossing him out of the stock as a favor, because of his kid. Benny wanted to keep the name clients but Louis was firm. That was it. No more name clients. No more clients they couldn’t rip off, except, of course, for the Guys.

  Benny required some convincing. He still had Celebrity-Nobody dreams. Not Louis. “I said, ‘You don’t understand, Ben. Win, lose, or draw, it don’t matter. We’re the ones who should be making the money. They’re not going to send us any more money. And if they do, we can’t beat them anyway.’ Lots of time I’m crossing them out of three, four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stock, while I could be crossing myself out. I used to not like it after a while. I felt like I was giving these people free money. Enough of this referral shit. Fuck that shit.

  “I loved Stuttering John. But I said, ‘We made him eighty grand one time, and that’s it. What are we going to do, keep making him eighty grand every six months? Fuck him.’ He wants to invest ten thousand, make a few thousand. I said we shouldn’t even invest his money, we should just send him a couple of thousand each month and make him happy. For real. Because it was just too much of a hassle. John would call every day. ‘Where’s my money?’ I used to see him because I used to hang out with him, and he’d ask about his ‘investments.’ After a while we just sent him back his money.

  “I didn’t want to deal with Craig Kallman anymore. He used to give us the dream. ‘You’re going to have Metallica and Madonna as clients.’ Benny would get all excited, but after a while I was like, ‘We’re going to make him two hundred thousand and he’s going to laugh at us and not give us any clients.’ Yeah, it would be great if he could give us these clients. But that wasn’t happening. I wanted to rob as much money as I possibly can as fast as I can, and that was it.”

  At the same time that he was getting the big names out of his client book, Louis had another cleanup operation under way. He had do something on the Deenie-Stefanie front. He had decided which one to dump. He just couldn’t continue with things as they were. Not with Stefanie planning a wedding. The confusion, the effort involved, the complications were all too much. Guilt, the stink of it, was oppressive. His conscience was coming out of its stupor, like one of those near-stiffs he saw in the TV movies, lying in a coma, barely in existence, but still with a tiny bit of life and maybe even capable of hearing sounds. He was gambling more and more and more, which somehow made him feel better, so his conscience was behaving itself, lying there, half dead, or, better still, ignored.

  Louis dropped Deenie. He didn’t have much choice. One weekend a friend of his, Frankie Balls, ratted him out. “I said to him, ‘What, were you trying to get her in the sack?’ She didn’t have proof or anything. If she had asked me, I would have said, ‘What? Fuck you. Get the hell out of here.’ But that was it. It just started to fall apart after that. And I made, like, a decision. I decided to go with Stefanie.”

  Stefanie was the kind of woman who could be the mother of his children—a wife. Stefanie wasn’t flashy but she represented stability, honesty. All the qualities he didn’t have. When they got engaged he gave her a beautiful ring, with a 3.1-carat almost-flawless diamond as big as a hunk of popcorn
. And as far as Stefanie knew, he was a faithful, if not always available, fiancÉ who worked hard, had a lot of guy friends, and had to be away a lot.

  Now he would try, really hard, to put the lies behind him too. He had to admit, they were good lies. He was an excellent liar. So great a liar that he was starting to hate it. Lying to clients was one thing. That was business. That was Wall Street. Everybody lied on Wall Street. But lying to Stefanie was different. More complicated.

  “It was annoying after a while. ‘What am I going to tell her now? What story am I going to fucking come up with?’ I was supposed to be home at eight at night. It’s fucking seven in the morning. I didn’t call. What am I going to say? ‘What happened?’ ‘Benny got into a car accident. He almost died. Lost a leg. They sewed it back on.’ There was a cockamamie story every time. One time I said we went to go see Benny’s father in the cemetery and I couldn’t get him to leave. Benny was fucked up. He said, ‘Louie, as my friend take me to the cemetery.’ I couldn’t get him to leave. There was no phone. The battery on my phone died. Benny was hysterical crying. He wanted to sleep on the grave. I couldn’t leave the guy there!

  “Then my friend Ronnie’s father got sick in jail and I had to go visit him. ‘You going to come home and change first?’ ‘No.’ I couldn’t come home and change because I was with seventy-five girls in Benny’s apartment. I wasn’t even seeing Ronnie.

  “I ran out of gas. You know how many times I ran out of gas? All I did was run out of gas. One time I told her some guy cut me off, and I followed him all the way to Connecticut. ‘I wanted to kill the guy. I was trying to follow him and catch up with him. I couldn’t catch up with him. I wind up going over the Triborough Bridge. I’m in fucking Connecticut. Got lost. Had to come back. It was a mess.’ Followed the guy all the way to Connecticut. I started believing this shit myself. I’d wake up in the morning and I’d say, ‘I can’t believe I followed that asshole to Connecticut.’”