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

  Louis knew he had to stop complicating his life, that he had to put his relationship with Stefanie on a new footing. But the secrets could not end, not entirely. Louis let Stefanie know about Charlie, but just that he was a friend who had joined him in some business venture. He couldn’t let her know exactly the kind of relationship that he had with Charlie. He would have had difficulty putting it into words anyway. He wasn’t sure what it was. Besides, his relationship with Charlie was changing—and not for the better. They were becoming more intimate, in the sense that Louis began to realize that he was being fucked.

  The honeymoon was over by the time Nationwide was out of his life, and now Louis and Charlie were like any normal married couple. They knew each other very well. And one of the things that Louis learned by now was that Charlie wasn’t a fair guy, not a square shooter, not even with Cousin John.

  John told Louis that he got only $2,500 of the $15,000 Charlie collected from Louis that first time they met. Charlie kept the rest, and told John he only got $4,000 from Louis. Charlie told his cousin he had kept $1,500, when he really kept $12,500. That was no way to treat family. Louis thought Guys were into family. That’s how it was in the movies, at least. Served John right, of course, but it was still a crappy thing to do to a relation.

  Learning about Charlie’s dishonesty was the first sign Louis had—or, more precisely, the first sign Louis noticed—that maybe Charlie was going to be a problem. The second sign took place in the waning days of Nationwide. They were still socializing, still friendly. But there was always an edge to the way Charlie dealt with Louis, a quick temper that he was doing less and less to keep under control.

  Charlie was pissed about Fort Worth. He was not happy Nationwide was holding back on the commission money. It wasn’t a lot, but Charlie was entitled to his share of it. The exact amount that Charlie was expecting wasn’t fuzzy anymore. At Nationwide Charlie was getting at least $15,000 a month, and that was what he wanted. If Louis made more, Charlie wanted more. But if Louis made less, Charlie wasn’t going to take less.

  When Charlie made it known that he was expecting that much from Louis, he didn’t react, didn’t say anything. But there was this pain, deep in the pit of his stomach. This was what Charlie was going to get as his due, and there was to be no negotiation or discussion on the subject. He had done work for Louis, collected the money from the guy in Queens and visited those short-sellers. He had intervened with Black Dom—actually called his Guy, Barry, to intervene with Wild Bill and keep Dom from battering Louis to a pulp at Vision, when that scrub transferred AUXI stock away from the firm.

  Why did he do it? Because he liked Louis’s face? Because they were “friends”? Because he was a nice guy? Barry wouldn’t have known Louis if he had passed him on the Boardwalk or spilled clam sauce on him in Gargiulo’s, where Coney Island wiseguys could sit among themselves and keep away from the dark-skinned people who crowded into that neighborhood. When Charlie went to see Little Benji Castel-lazzo at the Torrese Social Club, he wouldn’t even let Louis come inside.

  Barry and Charlie pulled Louis’s bacon out of the deep fryer because Louis was partners with Charlie, because Louis paid Charlie, and because Charlie paid Barry. It worked that way up the ladder too. If Barry had a beef with Wild Bill or some other Colombo, he would call Chin Gigante, the Gen-ovese boss, and Chin Gigante would call Alphonse Persico, the Colombo boss. That’s because Barry paid Chin and Wild Bill paid Persico. The guys who reported to Barry, guys like Charlie, paid Barry, and the guys who reported to Wild Bill, guys like Black Dom, paid Wild Bill. Then Black Dom got people like Chris Wolf to pay money to him and Charlie got people like Louis to pay money to him. Chris and Louis were at the bottom of the food chain. Earners. The fools out in the hinterland were the grubs and sea turds.

  That was how it worked. You did what you had to do to pay Guys, and the Guys were supposed to help you in a Guy kind of way. Those Guys paid other Guys. They weren’t welfare workers. They weren’t policemen. They weren’t Godfathers. They weren’t “Fathers”—that was the word the old-time boss Joe Bonanno used, in his modestly named autobiography Man of Honor. Guys didn’t do “favors.” Those were pipe dreams, for the scrubs and the saps. On the Real Wall Street and in Corporate America, it would be called spin—PR. Guys had the greatest PR.

  Louis realized he was facing a situation in which Charlie was not going to sit back passively and wait for his share. He was going to get his money, and he was not going to tolerate any delay. After the dumb trip to Fort Worth, Charlie made clear to Louis the kind of thing that was going to happen if there was a delay.

  “After Fort Worth I met him at the pizzeria. I was telling him about the money from Nationwide, how I couldn’t get it. I was rambling and rambling. He was quiet, then he goes, ‘I don’t want to fucking hear it,’ and he smacked me. Smack. And that was it.

  “Before he did that, I’m thinking to myself, ‘Wow. I’m the Man. I got the money. I got the Guy. I got the world by the balls.’ Nobody’s going to treat me disrespectful, because nobody did. And then he just killed that whole thing. I left there thinking like, ‘What’s this happening?’ Now I felt like crawling out under the door.”

  What right did Charlie have, smacking him like that? Louis felt like killing him. Louis had a gun at home—he needed it, he carried around so much money—and he felt like taking it to Brooklyn and killing Charlie with it. But then, once the rage subsided, Louis had a second thought. Charlie had been nice to him when they last went out, a few nights before. Charlie had been to his home a few times. They were friends. Sure, he came up to the house to borrow Louis’s Mercedes so he could use it for the weekend, and drop off his cruddy old Caddy in its place. Sure, he had a bad temper, but that’s what Guys like him were like. They could still make good money together. Besides, it wasn’t a hard smack. It didn’t leave a welt and was more embarrassing than anything else, or would have been if anybody was around. It happened out by the kitchen. Nobody saw it.

  So Louis decided to forget about the smack. There were more important things going on in his life, after all. He was moving to another firm. Getting married.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Louis was back in Staten Island now. He was living in a town-house down by Tottenville, in a subdivision. It was a suitable place for a young couple to enjoy a blissful marriage.

  Two nights before his wedding, Louis was at his new house with Stefanie, two others friends, and Sally Leads. Stefanie and the friends left. Louis went outside with Sal to move the cars. Sal put the Mercedes into the driveway and went back inside. Louis parked his truck.

  “Freeze!”

  Six guys with guns. They were wearing masks.

  “Get in the fucking house!”

  Louis thought it was a joke at first. “What are you talking about? Get out of here.” One of the guys in the masks walked over to him and punched him in the face.

  Louis fell on the ground and grabbed on to a tree in the front of the house. Five guys were stomping him, beating the shit out of him. They pulled him free of the tree. Louis yelled for help. But it was three o’clock in the morning, and this was a neighborhood where people minded their own business.

  After dragging Louis into the house, two of them pinned him against the wall, while a third gave Louis a few hard socks in the left eye.

  “Then they drag me upstairs, and meanwhile I’m spitting at them, telling them, ‘You’re dead tomorrow!’ They take me upstairs, and Sally Leads is sleeping and so’s my friend Carl. So they smack Sally Leads in the face, because he don’t hear what’s going on outside. Dumb bastard. I’m getting beat up all over the place, and he’s sleeping! Five minutes after he parks the car, he’s sleeping.

  “They tie him up. Put his head in the toilet bowl. They got one guy with him, keeping his head in the toilet bowl. They got one guy downstairs and the other four guys take me upstairs to the third floor. Carl’s still asleep. They kick him to wake him up.”

  Everything was happen
ing fast. One of the robbers had a police radio, and Louis could hear it crackling in the background.

  “On the way upstairs, one of them says, ‘Where’s your watch?’ I’m saying to myself, ‘How did they know about my watch?’ So I say, ‘What are you talking about? I don’t have no fucking watch.’ He goes, ‘Where’s your fucking watch?’ And they’re smacking me and shit. So I tell them it’s on the kitchen table.

  “They drag me upstairs and say, ‘Let’s go to the safe.’ And I’m thinking, ‘How do these fucking guys know about the safe?’ It’s ridiculous. So they take me upstairs. They throw me on the floor in front of my safe. They put me on my knees. There’s two guys pointing guns at my head. ‘Open up the fucking safe!’ I had money in the safe. I didn’t want to open up the safe. Fuck these kids. Meanwhile, they’re kicking Carl in the head. Carl goes, ‘Louie, open up the safe!’ I go, ‘I’m not opening up the fucking safe.’ Then the big kid comes up to me and sticks the gun right in my face, cocks it. He’s going to shoot me by accident, this fuck. I opened it.”

  The safe held $12,000 in cash and a gun, a 9mm Glock. His watch was a solid gold Omega. Custom-made. Had an extra dial. It was awesome.

  “So they take the cash. And this fucking guy, this big guy stands me up and goes, ‘Where’s the rest of the fucking money?’ I say, ‘There is no money.’ I say, ‘You came on a bad day. Come back next week, I’ll have more money.’ That’s exactly what I said.

  “The guy says, ‘Want to be a fucking cocksucker?’ He grabs a screwdriver. Like an asshole I got a screwdriver laying around. He grabs the screwdriver, puts it point-down on the top of my head. Says, ‘I’m gonna drive this fucking thing right through your head!’ I say, ‘Go ahead. I ain’t got no more money. It’s over. Take what you got and go. You’re dead.’

  “I start that shit again, and one of the kids’s on the CB, listening to the police band. He goes, ‘Five-oh.’ They scatter now. They leave, except this one kid stays behind, and he goes, ‘Give me that fucking ring!’ I got this ring from my grandfather. Has a diamond in it. I say, ‘I’m not giving you the fucking ring!’ He tries to take the ring off my finger. I say, ‘You got to cut the finger off. It’s my grandfather’s ring. It’s not worth nothing. It’s sentimental.’ Then he smacked me again and left.

  “Carl gets up now. He runs to the back of the house, kicks the screen out of the window. He wanted to see if maybe he could jump down from the second floor and catch them. We were going to chase them now. I go down the stairs, get two knives out of the kitchen, and go running out the front door. I got two knives in my hands and I’m bleeding.

  “‘Freeze!’

  “It’s the cops. I go, ‘No, no, no, get the fucking car! They just left.’ A cop says, ‘Put the fucking knives down!’ So I put the knives down and tell them I got robbed. Blah blah blah. They take me upstairs. Detectives come. I call my father-in-law. He comes down. Talks to the detectives. He got me out of the gun problem. It’s an unregistered gun. It was left in my backyard. My fingerprints were all over it. So my father-in-law explains I have it in the house because I’m getting death threats and stuff like that. I got out of it. They didn’t even write the gun down. They left the gun there.

  “I looked for these kids. I found out where my watch got sold. They only got seven thousand for the watch. My friend Ronnie dealt with a jeweler who bought it, and it was my watch. He could have said who did it, but he wouldn’t. I didn’t tell the cops about that. I called the cops a month later and they had nothing. I figure they had no clues. The kids were wearing gloves, big work gloves.”

  Charlie was upset. He told Louis, “Let’s find out who did it. I’ll keep my ears open.”

  Charlie knew about the safe.

  Louis remembered what Charlie had said about the “hostage situation” on Long Island, way back in the 1980s. “I knew he did a home robbery,” said Louis. “It crossed my mind. Everybody crossed my mind. But I never suspected Charlie might have been behind it.”

  Louis never found out who robbed his house. In any event, he soon had more important things to worry about.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Fade in on a wedding album swirling in space, as a male vocalist sings “If You Say My Eyes Are Beautiful.”

  The album opens.

  Louis and Stefanie are walking, slow-mo, into the picture, as the song continues.

  “You could say that I am a dreamer”

  They kiss.

  “who had a dream come true”

  Bright-green titles are superimposed.

  A PELICAN VIDEO PRODUCTION

  STEFANIE AND LOUIS’ WEDDING

  SATURDAY, APRIL 27, 1996

  A montage of freeze frames:

  The wedding party arrives at the church in white stretch limousines.

  The procession down the aisle. Stefanie and Louis: Stefanie smiling, radiant, glorious. Louis smiling weakly, hesitantly. His left eye is puffy, the flesh surrounding it a bluish black.

  The soundtrack switches to a female vocalist singing “The Chapel of Love.”

  More frames: Louis is “goin’ to the chapel.” Goin’ to do you-know-what.

  Nervous, a little distracted, as he recites the vows.

  Stefanie, calm and serene.

  George Donohue is best man.

  Those bells are going to ring, says the song.

  Stills of the catering hall.

  That sun is going to shine, the song goes on.

  Louis and Stefanie are dancing.

  Charlie and Louis at the reception.

  Charlie is deeply, evenly tanned, his gray Armani double-breasted suit razor-creased. His hand is on Louis’s shoulder. Both are smiling, Charlie tightly, Louis broadly, as if they could hear the song:

  …I’ll be his

  and he’ll be mine….

  They’ll love until the end of time, maybe. Maybe not love but something better. And one thing was for sure. He didn’t need the song to tell him this.

  Louis would never be lonely anymore.

  Another frame. Louis is relaxed, hands clasped in front of him in a gesture of triumph, maybe. Happiness. Success. Behind him, Charlie is beaming.

  The freeze frames end and the video begins. Real sounds now. The guests arriving on a breezy, chilly day. The bridesmaids are Stefanie’s friends; the ushers are Louis’s—the beefy, boyish Benny, followed by a gawky Sally Leads.

  Stefanie’s parents are dignified and Middle American.

  Louis’s parents are exuberant, his mother cherubic, his father black-haired and mustached, youthful.

  Louis is nervously chewing gum as he arrives at the catering hall, but he is more relaxed as the evening goes on, toward the end of the ninety-five-minute tape. He is in his element now, partying, horsing around with Charlie and his friends from Staten Island.

  “I got a little song for Louie personally,” says Stuttering John, bearded and disheveled, strumming an electric guitar. “This one’s coming from Marco Fiore, personally wanted me to say this.”

  He sings to the tune of “Louie Louie.”

  “Louie got to tell you you’re a real cool dude.

  I don’t want this to sound so rude.

  But the chef’s really pissed and I’ll tell you why.

  It took a thousand steaks to cover up your eye!

  Louie Louie”

  He doesn’t stutter, not even once.

  Now a great day, a great wedding, a great party is coming to an end. It had been a very American wedding, with no tarantellas, no Irish jigs. Louis and Stefanie are dancing, surrounded by their friends and family, who have formed a circle around them.

  The camera shows the newlyweds and then moves down the line of people facing them—the misty-eyed parents and beaming relatives and friends, young and old, swaying to the dance music.

  Benny mugging for the camera.

  Marco prancing.

  Frank Coppa, Jr., reserved and nondescript, self-conscious when the camera finds him.

  Charlie, Ben
gal-tan, smiling, with his arms around his blond and wholesome-looking girlfriend.

  The band is playing “That’s What Friends Are For.”

  The video ends with Stefanie, Louis, and the wedding party climbing into their white stretch limousine and driving off.

  FADE OUT.

  It was cool how Stuttering John sang at his wedding and goofed on his black eye. Everybody was talking about it for months afterward. Stuttering John, that is. Definitely the highlight of the wedding. John sat at the wiseguy table, with his friend Marco and Charlie and girlfriend and Frank Junior. Frank Senior couldn’t come, which was strange. “A few weeks before the wedding, Frank says, ‘I’m looking forward to being invited to your wedding.’ I got on the phone with Stefanie right away. ‘We got to invite this guy,’” said Louis.

  Frank Senior and Frank Junior gave $1,000 between the two of them, which was generous. At least compared to Charlie. He gave $300, which Louis figured was less than Charlie paid for his Cole Haan lighter.

  No honeymoon. Not that he was in the mood for a honeymoon, after the robbery. But he really hated the idea of going away when he was moving to another firm. He just couldn’t count on Benny. He was about to start a new job, at the World Trade Center offices of State Capital Markets. Stefanie was pissed about that. Tough.

  State was Frank’s idea. He knew the people there, and introduced Louis and Benny to the firm. They were going there to sell Chic-Chick. In theory. But Chic-Chick was as tough a sell at State as it was at Brod and Nationwide. Everything was tougher to sell. By now, regulation was getting a lot harder. The regulators were starting to crack down on “units,” which were combinations of stocks and warrants, popular in chop house IPOs. Listing requirements on the Nasdaq were becoming more stringent. Things were starting to get sucky.