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

  Louis and Benny made lunch money, about $15,000 each, selling the Chic-Chick private placement at State. Lousy. It was obvious after a few weeks that they were wasting their time there, and by now even Frank realized the thing just wasn’t going to get sold, and he didn’t raise a fuss when they moved to a firm called L. T. Lawrence. Louis and Benny each got a $40,000 sign-on bonus, which Louis promptly used for a down payment on a Ferrari. Model 348. Canary-yellow.

  That was the good news. But then there was the bad news. There was a lot of bad news. It involved one of the two owners of Lawrence, Larry Principato.

  “I didn’t really know Larry or what his story was, and at first I thought he was running a half-legit kind of firm,” said Louis. “When we went up to this place it was a great building, really nice office. Very professional. Everybody well dressed. Wearing suits. He told me that he had this stock, Echo Tire. I didn’t get paid cash off Echo Tire. I think the common was three-something and the warrants were a dollar-something. The first month I think we did a hundred and twelve thousand in gross just off the warrants.

  “I wasn’t there too long before I had an incident with Larry. What I did was I put some of these Echo Tire warrants in my own personal account. I bought them off the bid. The spread was fucking sixty cents. It was ridiculous. So I bought some right above the bid and I crossed myself out at the offer, like I used to do with Stuttering John, and I made like forty, fifty thousand in my own account, a nominee account. And Larry just flipped out. He wanted me to give the money back. He gives me, like, a warning. ‘We don’t have that kind of shit here. Only for me.’ So they canceled the trade and took the money back. It was the wrong place for us to work because Larry wanted to do the same kind of thing we wanted to do.”

  With Larry having that kind of attitude, there were obviously going to be limits on the kind of money Louis was going to be able to make at L. T Lawrence. And that was bad, because his gambling wasn’t getting any better. Gambling wasn’t relieving stress and guilt anymore. It was causing stress. But Louis couldn’t stop, and he was starting to have some trouble paying off his gambling debts. He always managed—somehow. But his spending was still out of control.

  Not long after coming to Lawrence, Louis and his friend Ronnie—an old pal who just happened to sell drugs for a living—went to a local marina and put down a payment on a forty-eight-foot yacht. They christened it CREAM. The people at the pier might have thought Louis and Ronnie were dairymen, but they were actually borrowing the name from the Wu-Tang Clan rap group, which had a hit at the time called “Cash Rules Everything Around Me.” Louis came up with half of the $62,000 down payment. Barely.

  “I didn’t have a ton of money because I was gambling at this point. I’d make forty grand and just gamble forty grand. I would take five grand to pay my bills and just gamble the rest. Nobody ever saw the money. But we got the money together for the boat, me and Ronnie. The guy at Staten Island Boat Sales probably still remembers me because I tried to pay in cash. It was a brand-new boat. Huge. Two full bedrooms, full kitchen, dining area. Had a big-screen TV.”

  He was doing well, making almost as much money as he did at Brod. But he was living month to month, gambling about as much as he made. Losing, winning, losing, earning.

  “So now I lose a hundred and eighty thousand with a bookie in Staten Island. This wasn’t a bookie to beat. Because Thursday afternoon, if I won ninety thousand, Thursday afternoon there was an envelope or bag with my name on it with ninety thousand dollars. If you lost and didn’t pay, they would come get you.

  “I knew this kid in Staten Island. Owned a gym. His name was Tom Cunningham. A big-money kid. He trusted me a lot. I’d been making good money for him through the bid-ask thing, figuring someday I could really set him for a score. So his time had come. He wanted to make some money with me in the market, so I made him give me two hundred thousand in cash, and I tell him, we’re investing it in Chic-Chick. So he gives me the two hundred thousand and I pay the bookie. A couple of months go by. Tom’s wondering, what’s going on with Chic-Chick? Where’s his two hundred thousand?

  “It somehow gets back to Frank—maybe he called the company; I don’t know—that I took two hundred thousand for Chic-Chick and didn’t give him any. And it was bad. It was bad. Charlie calls me up and says, ‘Louie, what the fuck did you do?’ I say, ‘What? What did I do?’ He says, ‘You took two hundred thousand dollars for Frank Coppa’s name?’ I say, ‘What?’

  “Now I’m shitting my pants, because just three days before this Frank shows up at L. T. Lawrence to talk to Benny. Without me, and that usually wouldn’t happen. He would talk to us together. I kind of thought something was up but I wasn’t sure. And it was. So I had to go to L&B Spumoni Gardens for a sitdown. L&B is in Brooklyn, on Eighty-sixth Street, near Marlboro Houses. Frank’s always there. All benches outside, then a pizzeria where you get the spumoni ices, famous ices. That was his place.

  “Now I got to go to this sitdown. And Tom’s going to be there, telling him about the money. I go in, and I’m scared. I’m thinking I am definitely going to get whacked over there. I fucking robbed two hundred thousand from Frank Coppa. It’s crazy. Charlie’s there already. Frank’s there. Tom’s there. And this is the first time I heard Frank yell ever in his life. I wanted to say hello to him and he says, ‘Louie, shut the fuck up and sit down. You’re in a lot of trouble.’

  “I sit down. Frank says, ‘Tell me what happened. Tell me your story. And don’t lie a word to me.’ Now, I got no prep before this, I don’t know what Charlie wants me to say, I don’t know nothing. I don’t know what to do.

  “He might have told them something before I got there. They wanted me to speak now. They wanted nobody else to speak. Now, I’m very confident of myself at the time. I’m paying Charlie big money. I’m driving around in a Ferrari. I’m very confident of myself. I’m scared but I’m confident. So I kind of in a roundabout way deny it. I say, ‘Frank, I don’t know what he’s talking about. This kid’s a fucking liar.’

  “And then he tells me, ‘Don’t call me Frank.’ Everybody called him Mr. Coppa, you know what I mean? So I go, ‘Mr. Coppa, I don’t know what this fucking kid’s talking about.’ Charlie says, ‘You don’t know what this kid’s talking about?’ Crack! I get smacked for that. I say, ‘Charlie, I really don’t. What is he talking about? I didn’t say Chic-Chick.’ He goes, ‘Did you take two hundred thousand dollars from the kid?’

  “I don’t want to admit I took two hundred thousand from the kid. I say, ‘No, I didn’t take two hundred thousand from the kid.’

  “Charlie says, ‘You’re trying to tell me that this kid’s here, in Brooklyn, at L&B, for no fucking reason but to lie and to say you took two hundred thousand dollars from him and didn’t fucking give it back to him? You trying to tell me this kid’s here for no reason?’

  “I say, ‘Charlie, I didn’t take the money from this kid. Maybe this kid has other issues and other problems.’

  “Charlie says, ‘Frank, give us a minute.’ We go outside, and I tell Charlie, ‘Listen, Charlie, I’ll give you fifty thousand in cash. I can’t admit that I took this kid’s money.’

  “Charlie says, ‘Louie, if I get you out of this fucking jam with this guy—I shouldn’t even be here,” he tells me. ‘I’m not a fucking skipper. This guy’s a fucking underboss. How the fuck do you get me here with this mess?’ He says, ‘You got me all over Staten Island and Brooklyn. My name is going to be all over the place. I’m a nice low-key guy, nobody knows me. Now you’ve got me sitting down with an underboss.’ That’s what I heard too. I never asked Frank, ‘Are you an underboss?’ but from my understanding he was the guy in charge. *

  “We got back inside. Now they make us leave. Charlie says ‘Tom, Louie, go outside. I’ll talk to Frank.’ So they talk a good hour. Tom and me are standing by the picnic tables outside. Tom says to me, ‘How can you do this? How can you sit there and lie?’ I say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Tom. I don’t know you
. You got me here with this mess.’ He could have just came to me. He didn’t have to go through these channels. Because now it could be that I could be in a lot of trouble and pay back the two hundred thousand plus another hundred thousand, maybe. It could have been some type of major situation.,

  “We go back inside, and now Frank starts asking Tom to tell him the truth. Now I’m thinking in my head, ‘What? Are you telling me that Charlie just told this guy that I was telling the truth, and that this kid’s a fucking liar, and it worked?’ I don’t know what they talked about, but it worked! They beat him up. They beat up Tom, they smacked him around, right in front of me. Charlie goes, ‘You fuck. You want to take this kid here, this reputable kid. You want to take this fucking reputable kid. This kid has a reputation.’”

  Louis paid Charlie $50,000, and that was the last he ever heard of the subject. Years later he ran into Tom on Staten Island. They exchanged greetings. They chatted a little. Tom made no mention of the meeting at L&B.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  After the sitdown at L&B, Louis couldn’t very well object when Charlie wanted his fifteen thousand a month—and more. Since that was about how much Louis spent on himself, and now Stefanie, every month, Charlie was now truly a life partner. Another wife. No—a husband. And Charlie was getting into his head, the way a life partner does. He was a spouse, a friend, a partner, and, now, a criminal-talent agent.

  Over the previous few years Louis had perfected his skills as a thief, the lifelong calling that had found a warm and welcome home for him on Wall Street. Now Charlie was going to show Louis a new way to make money.

  After L&B, after Charlie saved his life for $50,000, he couldn’t object when Charlie wanted him to cash some stolen checks. And since he needed money to pay off his mounting gambling debts, he wouldn’t have objected even if he could.

  Charlie introduced Louis to a guy named Michael Basile, who had access to the checks. These were great checks—cashier’s checks, and Mike had a way of getting people’s names on the checks. All he needed was a check-cashing place that would convert them into bills, no questions asked. Louis had just the place in mind, a huge outfit in Bayonne, New Jersey, that was used by a lot of interstate truckers. Louis knew the guy who ran it.

  They went to Bayonne. The check was made out to “Michael Decker”—an imaginary person to be portrayed by Mike Layden, for a cut—and the amount was $995,000. Louis was going to get $350,000. The rest went to the check-cashing guy, Michael Basile, and Mike Layden. It was September 17, 1996. They drove to Bayonne, happy as kittens chasing a newborn mouse.

  “‘Hands up! Get the fuck out of the car!” Oh, jeez. Local cops. I was sick to my stomach. I went to go out of the car, they threw me on the hood. ‘You fucking scumbag! Hands on your head!’ I say, ‘Calm down! I’m not going anywhere.’ They take my bag out and they find a gun. Cop says to me, ‘What are you going to do with this, dickhead?’ He’s showing everybody, ‘Hey, look at this!’”

  This was serious. The gun charge was a felony. (It didn’t help that the serial numbers were filed off, making it a “defaced firearm.”) The check charges were felonies. A felony conviction ends, more or less automatically, any possibility of a legitimate, or even semi-legitimate, career on Wall Street. It wouldn’t do his marriage any good either. And what about George—the ex-cop? Louis was shitting bricks, thinking about how George Donohue would react.

  STEFANIE: “The night of the arrest people were calling me, trying to find out where he was. There were all these people looking for him, who he owed money to. And I guess this check was supposed to get his debts paid. This big score. So a lot of people were calling and calling. I called his mother—I don’t think I called his mother until the next day. I just told her that I had to do some stuff, and I went with his mother and father to the court, and they set the fifty-thousand-dollar bail.

  “I would do it, I’d post the bail, but I didn’t have anything worth fifty thousand dollars. I had no properties, nothing that I could hock to get that kind of money. So my father just said to me, ‘You can’t give it, I’ll give it. Your money is my money.’ I said, ‘I don’t want you to do it,’ and he says, ‘No, if you’re willing to do it, I’ll do it for you.’ I remember Fran coming to the house and crying, saying thank you, whatever. So me and my father went, got the check, went to the jail. I remember him coming but he didn’t wait for Louis to be bailed out.

  “That was the first time that I was made aware of how much in debt he was and how many problems he was having. In one sense it made my life even more horrible, but in the relationship this was probably the first time he was honest about anything that was going on. Instead of trying to hide everything, he was saying, ‘Look, I have a serious problem. I owe a lot of money on the street. If I don’t have that money, they’re going to start coming to look for me.’ He owed money to this one and that one. He didn’t know what to do.

  “Before, I knew he was gambling but I didn’t know he had so many problems, that he owed so much money. It was a real awakening in a sense of who he was and what he was doing.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Louis had stock certificates in his briefcase. They were part of an upcoming cash deal. The FBI was expressing some interest in the check case, which they had the option to prosecute if they so desired. Louis expected the FBI might be interested in talking to him about the certificates. It would have opened up a huge can of worms.

  Two agents from the Newark FBI office dropped by L. T Lawrence a few days after the arrest. Louis wasn’t there at the time, so they chatted with Larry Principato. They asked Larry a lot of questions—but didn’t show the slightest interest in the stock certificates. When Louis found out, he almost dropped dead from relief and surprise. The surprise lingered, but the relief ended when he was fired. “After he saw the FBI guys, I came in and Larry says it’s a difficult situation, he doesn’t think I can work there no more. He says he can’t have that kind of heat. I ask, ‘What are you going to do, fire me?’ He doesn’t know.”

  Later the FBI came up again and asked Louis about the checks. He referred them to his lawyer. He was asked about the stock certificates. The bombshell.

  He said they belonged to one of his clients. They nodded. They believed him. Why not? The certificates weren’t listed as stolen. Perfectly credible. No law against owning stock certificates.

  The interview only took a few minutes. After they left, Larry called him in and fired him. Too much heat. Louis would have to get out. Right now.

  The firing was okay. Louis and Benny could find someplace else. But what wasn’t okay was that Larry wanted his $80,000 in signup bonuses returned. They had only been there for a couple of months, so Larry felt that, since there had been such a mess, they should return the money. Usually brokers stay for a much longer period than two months, after all. But Louis and Benny felt that since they were getting fired it wasn’t their fault that they couldn’t stay longer than two months. As for that FBI visit—hell, whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?

  If this were a dispute in the Real Wall Street, an arbitration claim would have been filed at this point. As a rule, broker employment contracts require arbitration of disputes. And that was precisely what was going to happen in this case, whether they liked it or not. It was going to be “mandatory arbitration” in every sense of those words.

  “Within like three, four days I get a call from Vinnie Corrao. Vinnie is Joe Butch’s * son. He says, ‘You know, we’re going to have to meet up. We got some stuff to settle.’ He says, ‘Larry’s looking for that bonus he gave you.’ So I say, ‘I’ll have somebody get in touch with you.’ He says okay, fine, give me a number. Joe Butch was basically Larry’s Guy.

  “Me and Benny weren’t giving the money back, even if we had it. It was ridiculous. It’s not as if we didn’t want to work. Larry fired us. But we needed a Guy to sit down with Vinnie. If we used Charlie he’d have kept the money. He’d have made us pay back the money and took it. He would
n’t have been reasonable about it. He’d have just said ‘Eighty grand! Twenty grand for me.’ Frank would have just done the same thing. Killed it.

  “So we spoke to this guy John who worked for us at L. T. Lawrence and was Carmine Sciandra’s * nephew. We figured Carmine is the best Guy to use in this situation. John says, ‘All right, I’ll have my uncle take care of it.’ So now we got to go meet with Carmine. John set it up. He calls over the weekend and says, ‘Let’s meet at Carmine’s. Tonight at seven.’ He gives me the address, on Todt Hill in Staten Island.

  “So that afternoon Stefanie’s best friend Michelle was having a christening. Her baby was getting baptized, and they had a party at a restaurant afterwards. Everybody’s hanging out, having a good time. I’m saying to myself, ‘I got to get the fuck out of here.’ I’m sick to my stomach. I didn’t say anything to Stefanie, I just thought I’d say I got a call, and had to go somewhere for an hour. I figure if I told her she’d get all upset, that I was embarrassing her, blah blah blah. I was just going to disappear, go to the bathroom like I was sick, but then I thought, naah. I say, ‘I got to go somewhere. I’ll be back in half an hour.’ Stefanie says, ‘Why now?’ I say, ‘I’ll explain to you later.’

  When Louis arrived, Benny and John were there already. Carmine’s house was tremendi—bigger than Paul Castel-lano’s. He even had a Spanish maid, just as Paul did. They entered the house and in a room on the left, up a few steps, Carmine was sitting behind a big desk facing the door. To the side was a table the size of a pier. The office was all mahogany. “He had three chairs set up for us. I was looking around this office. Like, wow. He had this painted picture, of his father, maybe. The whole house was top-notch. He had a piano in another room, he had a game room. He had two kitchens, one for the maid. Everything was professionally decorated. He had an in-ground pool, trees. His basement was like Disney World. He had twenty arcade games, pool table, ping-pong table. He had three Mercedes. The house was just ridiculous.”