Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street Page 25

  Carmine was middle-aged and baby-faced, with tight, receding, slick-backed hair. Soft-spoken, quiet. Like a grocer. Hell, he was a grocer.

  “After the introductions everybody sits down. Carmine asks me to explain the situation. So I did because Benny never does. ‘He fired us. I feel we don’t have to give it back,’ blah blah blah. Carmine says, ‘You’re not willing to give him back anything?’ He says, ‘If you’re not, just say you’re not. And that’s it. It’s no big deal.’ So I says no, I didn’t want to give back nothing. He fired me. I’ll still work there. Carmine says he can understand how he wouldn’t want me to work there. I says I do too, but if that’s the way he feels he has no right to get his eighty thousand dollars back.

  “Carmine says, ‘Okay, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll try to take care of it.’ Thank you, and that was it. I explained the situation, and he talked back vague and rare. So then me, Benny, and John talk outside for another twenty minutes. John was like, ‘Don’t worry about it, we’ll take care of it, we’ll get in touch with Vinnie and we’ll all meet in Brooklyn.’”

  By the time he returned, the christening was coming to an end. Louis never heard the end of it from Stefanie.

  The session with Carmine was just a kind of opening consultation, not the arbitration itself. That took place a few days later at the Top Tomato at 86th Street and Stillwell Avenue in Bensonhurst. It might have been the first time in Wall Street history, even in the history of Chop House Wall Street, that a broker-compensation dispute was adjudicated within twenty-five feet of freshly misted arugula.

  “Carmine’s got an office up some stairs at the store. A little office. Two couches, a desk, some chairs. Carmine’s behind the desk again. Larry’s there in his suit and tie. Him and me sit in the chairs in front of Carmine, and Carmine says, ‘Why don’t you explain yourselves to each other.’ So Larry says, ‘Well, you should give back the money I gave you,’ and I go, ‘Why should I? For what? It’s ridiculous. You fired me. I’m not giving you back the fucking money. I did a hundred and seventeen thousand dollars gross and then I did another one-eighteen gross. You paid us for it and kept half the money. So you got that money back, if you really look at it.’ So it went back and forth, he said we had to be there for at least a year, blah blah blah.

  “Carmine asks if Vinnie has anything to say, and Vinnie says no, and Carmine’s like, ‘All right, I’ve heard both of your sides of the story,’ and that was it. They’ll let us know. Great. I could give two fucks, to be honest about it,” said Louis. “And then they let us know. Later on I got a call from John. They wanted us to pay twenty grand back each, whenever we got it. Half. So I say, okay. No problem.

  “I never had the money. They asked me for it. John would say, ‘You got some money to pay back Larry?’ and I’d say, ‘I don’t got it.’ And John knew I didn’t have it, and they didn’t bust my balls for it. I think Benny paid it back, his half. I paid two, three thousand. Charlie never found out about it. Then he’d know I got a forty-thousand-dollar signup bonus, he didn’t get a piece of it. That’s ten thousand right there. It would have been a fucking mess.”

  Sometime later Carmine invited Louis, Benny, and John over for lunch. It was semi-social, with Carmine making small talk and finding out what John was doing with them. “That way John could never get beat,” said Louis.

  As often happens in arbitrations on the Real Wall Street, the Top Tomato tribunal left neither party very satisfied. Louis never found out how much Carmine was compensated for his mediation services, presumably some portion of the $40,000 that Louis and Benny were supposed to pay Larry through Vinnie. Carmine never pressed the issue. But Larry did.

  “He sued me,” said Louis. “I got sued by L. T. Lawrence. Like he didn’t know whether to be legit or a gangster. He was confused.” *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “You cursed his wife?”

  Charlie didn’t wait for an answer.

  Bam! He smacked the guy Rob right across the face. That’s how he did it. Fast. No time for Rob to react. You had to be fast, if you were going to smack someone across the face. Rob was crying. “You ever fucking call this kid’s house, talk to his fucking wife,” said Charlie, “I swear I don’t care who’s sitting at the table, I’m going to come personally to your fucking house and talk to your fucking wife.”

  Louis was sitting there, in a packed diner on Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island. A few months before he wouldn’t have believed his eyes. Now he took it in stride. A sitdown, a smack in public. Charlie earning his money.

  It was a money dispute. It was always a money dispute. And Charlie was going to bat for him. That was their relationship. Louis would come to Brooklyn, give him money, it wouldn’t be enough, and he would get a beating. But when needed, Charlie would go to bat for Louis.

  In this case, Rob had made the mistake of playing gangster and Charlie really hated the gangster act, unless he was doing the acting. Louis was his bitch boy now, and you don’t curse the wife of a bitch boy.

  Louis owed Rob money. Louis was always owing somebody money—Rob, Charlie, dozens of others.

  It was 1996, and as the year dragged on it was turning out to be a totally sucky year, as Louis went from one firm to another. One firm would sour, and he would move on to another. He was in demand. But getting less money. Not a lot less, but enough less that he noticed.

  More heat on the chop houses from the regulators. Less and less and less money and more and more and more pressure and sitdowns. More visits and calls and meetings with Charlie, who was getting to know the whole family.

  STEFANIE: “I was upstairs and Louis answered the door. Charlie was with this heavy guy. I remember him sitting at the table, and I was sitting on the stairs. Charlie was yelling about something. Louis said, ‘Calm down, calm down, calm down.’ Charlie’s yelling at me, ‘He owes this guy money. He’s supposed to have it and he doesn’t have it. The guy wants his money.’

  “Then they come upstairs and the heavy guy’s sitting in my kitchen in one chair, and Charlie’s standing there talking to me, and Louis was like two stairs up to the third floor. I’m sitting on the step.

  “Charlie says, ‘He owes him the money and he’s not going to give it to him. This guy can’t wait no more. He needs it. He’s got to give it to his kids. He’s got bills to pay and Louis owes him all this money.’

  “Charlie says, ‘You’re lucky to have me’ with Louis gambling so much—justifying that he’s this good guy. Here’s Charlie trying to make himself this good guy, and Louis is this big mess-up. ‘Thank God he has me,’ Charlie tells me.

  “So then I just started crying. Then Louis says maybe he can get a couple of dollars to him.

  “Charlie says, ‘I don’t want you to get upset, Stefanie. I just want you to know the truth here. You need to know the truth. What’s going on. He tries to hide everything from you. I want to let you know that he’s my friend and I’m trying to help him out.’ He says, ‘I want you to be aware. He has a problem. He’s gambling. He borrows money. You need to be aware of what’s going on. He owes this guy money. He owes me money. I just want you to be aware.’

  “I’m sitting there crying. And I remember the other guy says something like, ‘Louis, I’ve had it. I’m not playing around. I need my money tomorrow. If I don’t get my money, I’m going to be back here.’ Louis says, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I’ll get you the money tomorrow.’ And of course when they leave, Louis is like, ‘He’s out of his mind.’

  “So we went to Brooklyn, around Charlie’s neighborhood, so Louis could pay him the money. We parked the car. Louis got out and he walked over to Charlie. Before they even started talking, Charlie smacked him across the face. When he came back, I said, ‘I don’t understand. What the hell? Why did he do that?’ Louis says, ‘Oh, he’s losing his mind. He’s just pissed off and he’s taking it out on me.’ I says, ‘This is your friend, huh?’

  “I remember Charlie being there when his father was there. And I remember Charlie yelling about mo
ney or whatever, and Nick saying, ‘Well, we’ll get the money. We’ll get the money. We’ll get it somehow. We’ll get it to you.’

  “Everybody’s intimidated by Charlie. I’m thinking you must be Italian to get it, that fear. Because I can be intimidated by people but it’s not in that way. I figure it’s an Italian thing. My father wouldn’t allow a guy to intimidate him. And my father never dealt with Charlie at all. Charlie never called my parents’ house but he called Louis’s parents’ house. He used to call their house and scream and curse. If he called my parents’ house ever, he would use another name. And you knew it was him. You could tell his voice. ‘Could you tell Lou to call Joey?’ He would never say Charlie in my house. I’d hear from my mother, ‘Some guy named Joey called.’”

  NICK PASCIUTO: “One time I met Charlie in a bistro on Staten Island. It was a bar, club. Me and Louis went there. He’s telling me how much Louis owed him. He says, ‘This kid’s doing all these crazy things. I got to stop them from getting at him.’ He says, ‘They want to get paid and I’m holding them off.’ He says he’s always helping him, keeping the wolves away from him. ‘If it wasn’t for me, he would be gone already.’ I was going to say to him, ‘Who are you kidding?’ But at the time it wouldn’t have mattered. It just would have made things worse. No way he was going to get away from him.

  “I knew about this Charlie, not that he was anything big. I knew he was a knockaround guy and all that in Brooklyn. That’s what he did for a living. Whatever—rob stuff, loan-sharking, gambling. Whatever he did, and extorting was probably the biggest one. I met him a few times. Louis was out with him, and he’d be there and I met him. Louis would go out with him, they had a couple of laughs, and he’d always be a ball-breaker. Talk down to you. Shit like that. That was part of the goof. That was part of the scene, I guess.

  “I never really seen him in action, but based on his history, he was capable of doing nasty things. I knew he was involved in the Colombo wars, he was shot once. He said that. He used to say, ‘I was in the Colombo wars. I survived that.’ Blah blah blah. He looked like a normal guy. If you looked at him you’d think he was dressed up sharp. Clothes, jewelry. The way he talked, presented himself. You’d think he was an important person with somebody. Dressed sharp. Expensive clothes. Knits and stuff like that. Nails. The whole works.

  “I was at Louis’s house when Charlie was there with his friend Joe Botch. He was telling me that Louis took money from Joe Botch, he needed the money for his wife’s operation, he needed it back. Some bullshit story. ‘I’m going to fucking break his head,’ blah blah blah.

  “Look, I don’t know. They’re bringing me in. These people are telling me this, you’re telling me that, and Louis, because of his history, I couldn’t tell if he was telling me the truth, in what he was telling me. Because he just lied so much. His thing was about lying and gambling. So at that point, based on his history, I didn’t know who to believe. I tend to believe my son, but these guys are saying this, and I know what I was going through with him, so at that point I’m saying, these guys, maybe they have a beef, a legitimate beef, with him. I don’t know.

  “So after they left I ask him, ‘Louie, what’s the story? They need money for the operation.’ And he says, ‘No, that’s all bullshit.’ All right. So what do you want to do? I don’t know what I’m going to tell you. You’re getting me involved—and I don’t have any money to give him.

  “That was the time Charlie smacked him. He didn’t punch him or anything, he smacked him. He smacked him in front of me. But then this other guy was there, and if I jumped in, they were ready. At the time I wanted to smack him too. So he deserved a smacking. [Laughs.] I never seen him really—if he got hurt worse than a smacking. I wouldn’t stand for that. But he didn’t do it, that one time he smacked him in front of me.”

  FRAN PASCIUTO: “I used to call him ‘Charlie Macaroni.’ He was about the lowest as far as I was concerned. I met him for the first time at the wedding. What did I think of him? That he was a gangster. You know, the way he was dressed, the way he acted. And then he called a few times, looking for Louis. ‘Is Louie there?’ I would say yes, no, or whatever. ‘Tell him Charlie called.’ He would have palpitations on the phone. He was always looking for Louis. He used to call, ‘I’m going crazy. Where’s your son? I’m going to kill him.’ I used to say, ‘I don’t know where he is. Beep him.’

  “At first he would just ask for Louis, and then after the arrest for the checks he started to get a little crazy on the phone, bad-mouthing him. I can’t believe some of the things he said sometimes. I used to speak back to him. One time he told me how bad Louis was and I said, ‘Hey Charlie, I don’t want to hear that no more.’ I said, ‘An extortionist is talking?’ I said, ‘Here you are telling me everything my son does, what about you? What do you do? You take money from people. You sit, your feet up, and you take from everybody and you beat them up. You’re an extortionist. How would you like if I called up your mother and told your mother how rotten you are and how you extort people, what you do for a living?’

  “He says, ‘Well, I work.’ I said, ‘Really? Where do you work? With your million-dollar tan and you never leave the house, where do you work?’ I used to get, like, crazy with him and Louis used to go, ‘I don’t believe you, Ma.’ I said, ‘He got me on the phone. It’s just some person calling me and I wasn’t going to let him intimidate me in any way.’ Charlie once said to Louis, ‘Your mother’s crazy.’

  “When Louis was arrested for the checks, I remember he called me up. I don’t remember his exact words, but it was something like, ‘Your son, what is he, like, an informant or something?’ I said, Charlie, please. He’s in jail. What ‘informant’? This is where he is. Leave me alone. He said, ‘Is he really in jail?’ I said, ‘No, I’m making it up.’ I told him, ‘Call Jersey. That’s where he is. Call him. Leave me alone.’”

  From the moment Louis was arrested for the check scam, it became a continuing motif. An obsession. Charlie was preoccupied with the notion that Louis was a rat.

  Louis wasn’t a rat. But Charlie knew it could happen. Louis was facing serious jail time, or at least it was serious from the standpoint of someone who wasn’t a Guy.

  Hudson County prosecutors offered Louis a plea bargain in which he would have to serve three years in prison. It was, in the view of Louis’s lawyer, a generous deal. It was the best he could do (or so the lawyer insisted when he wrote a letter to the judge, asking to be removed from the case because Louis owed him money).

  Prosecutors were not aware that Louis had Guy connections, so—if they cared—they had no way of knowing that Louis could give up Guys. Louis never seriously thought about the idea.

  But Charlie thought about it.

  Charlie knew what being thrown in jail, deprived of your freedom, isolated—what that does to guys. Even guys who should know better. Hard guys. When they’re young, unseasoned. A young kid up against an experienced cop? No contest. The cop wins. Charlie knew.

  On March 4, 1982, Nassau County Detective John Majoribanks testified at a pretrial hearing in the case of People vs. Charles E. Ricottone. Majoribanks described what happened after he arrested Charlie for the home-invasion robbery in April 1981. He had just put Charlie in a police car when a conversation ensued:

  “We asked Mr. Ricottone, ‘Is that true? Do you want to cooperate?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ But he wanted to know what was in it for him. We advised Mr. Ricottone that if he did cooperate in helping us with the investigation, we would make it known that he had cooperated to the District Attorney’s office and to the judge. . . . We asked him who the other two [robbers] were and where they were. And he told us that he would—he had just left them and he would show us where they were. . . . We got out of our car, got back into the Robbery Squad car, followed the Seventh Squad unit to a location. . . .

  “Mr. Ricottone pointed to the house stating that was the house [the two other robbers] were in.”

  Later that day, Charlie gave Nassau Coun
ty detectives a handwritten statement confessing his guilt in the robbery of the Polanski residence, describing the robbery in detail and implicating his two accomplices. Both were arrested. Charges against one were dismissed. The other guy fingered by Charlie, Anthony Cella, pleaded guilty.

  It must have been a little uncomfortable in the Ricottone household back then. Cella was the boyfriend of Charlie’s sister, and was living in the house, with the family, at the time they led him away.

  It’s not 100 percent clear from court records whether detectives would have found the other perps without Charlie’s help. Maybe they would have been located anyway. It’s that way sometimes with cooperating witnesses. Sometimes they are crucial. And sometimes they just make life easier for the cops, and themselves, when they turn rat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The idea of cooperating was moot because Louis never thought much about the prison term that was hanging over his head. It was just another annoyance, another thing in the future. Louis never thought about the future. And even if he did, the idea of spending three years away from Stefanie and his cars and his gambling and his life—that was just inconceivable. Almost as beyond comprehension as being without Charlie.

  Charlie was his Guy and he would just have to make the best of it, whether that meant taking his slaps or lying about the money he was getting or, when he couldn’t avoid it anymore, paying the money. If you looked at it a certain way, maybe he really owed the money. Maybe, as Nick said, Joe Botch really needed an operation. Who the fuck knew? Nick didn’t know. Nick had his doubts. And Nick didn’t know that Louis owed Charlie his life, for the sitdown with Frank at L&B if nothing else. How much is a life worth anyway? The $50,000 he paid Charlie for speaking up for him with Frank?