Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street Page 26
As brokers, if not as human beings, the lives of the chop house kids were worth less and less. First the regulators, the polyester-suit guys, with their dumb restrictions cutting into deals and making investors wary. And now the press. The financial press had been puppy-dog passive when Louis was starting out. They were docile and stupid and blind. But now the publicity had begun.
In July 1996, Fortune published a full-length dissection of the decline and fall of Hanover Sterling, with several unflattering references to Roy. The story hinted at Guy involvement. Even though it focused on the short-sellers who profited from Hanover’s decline—the red herring that was pushed by the Adler Coleman trustee, Ed Mishkin—it definitely was unwanted attention. Then came a Business Week cover story just before Christmas 1996, entitled “The Mob on Wall Street.” It named Phil and Dom and Roy and Sonny, a Genovese skipper named “Allie Shades” Malangone and his sidekick Alan Longo. The story linked Roy to Longo and Allie Shades.
Louis and Benny weren’t all that troubled by the BW story. It didn’t name them. Except for Greenway, it didn’t name any of the firms where they had worked since Hanover. They did a ritual burning of the issue when it came out, but they didn’t get too upset because they knew that memories were short. Chop House Wall Street was as huge and anonymous as the city, and they could easily get lost in it, buried in the ever-shifting landscape of doors with pretty and patriotic names engraved on them.
With heat increasing from regulators and the media, they were going to have to work even harder to make a buck. Louis had a wife to support now. He had a lifestyle to support.
Louis’s money hunger was like a never-slackening disease. Cash ruled everything around him. But cash ruled Louis too. He couldn’t stop spending and he couldn’t stop gambling. And losing.
It wasn’t fuck-you money anymore.
As it became harder to make a dishonest buck, earning money on Chop House Wall Street meant greater potential for conflict. Conflict meant sitdowns. Except for the Carmine sitdown, which was a rare exception, sitdowns meant Charlie. And Charlie was getting harsher, more difficult to deal with, more unreasonable. Charlie was tired of being pulled into sitdowns. And he was throwing tantrums like a petulant child because deals were getting harder to pull off. A Brooklyn health care company looked promising at First Hanover, one of the firms he changed as often as whores changed tampons, but Louis and Benny—and Charlie—lost out when the stock promoter got cold feet. The reason was the heat, the publicity.
The BW story and other articles exposed the Guys and the chop house kids, but Louis and his pals didn’t give a fuck and neither did the Guys. The money was just too good, even with deals harder to pull off. In fact, by 1997 Guys were doing more than just shaking down guys who ran firms, earners like Chris Wolf and Louis. They were running firms, the way Dom and Rico were running Vision, or acting as talent scouts, as Frank Coppa did when he introduced Louis and Benny to State Capital.
And now Louis was going to another firm, called U.S. Securities & Futures, because of a referral from another Guy in Louis’s life.
The move to U.S. Securities grew out of another bullshit dispute. This one involved a Guy named Vinnie Nunez. Louis owed Vinnie about $80,000, and Vinnie was friends with a Guy named “Little Nick” Corozzo, a Gambino skipper who was about to go on trial for racketeering. Nick called Charlie. Same old ritual. Someone has a beef against Louis, calls Charlie, and Charlie shakes down Louis. It was getting old.
“Charlie calls me up and says, ‘You’re going to have to pay this kid back some money,’ which I knew was going to happen. But I really didn’t have the money, so I tried to deal with Vinnie personally, and it worked out better. Vinnie introduced me to a guy named Alan Saretsky and Alan’s friend Ralph, who owned a catering hall in Brooklyn. Alan was in hock to Ralph and this Guy named Phil Defonte. Alan had a deal—a company called Waco Classic Aircraft.”
A simple idea. Louis would work off his debt, like some kind of sharecropper in the Old South. He would generate profits that would make Vinnie whole, and thereby lift from Louis the yoke of indentured servitude. To accomplish this task, Louis went to work at Alan’s firm, Danalan Investments. When Danalan couldn’t pull off Waco, the deal went to U.S. Securities & Futures and Louis followed. Waco made vintage aircraft for collectors, not that anyone cared. The product mattered—the warrants. Alan was in charge of the product.
Alan Saretsky was not a typical chop house broker. He was older than most. He had worked on the Real Wall Street, but his career had taken a wrong turn along the way. He was a Shearson broker back in the 1980s, but ran afoul of regulators and was barred by the New York Stock Exchange in the early 1990s. So now he was one of the dozens of former brokers who enjoyed a prosperous existence on the fringes of the securities business, brokering deals between unprosperous companies and chop houses. Alan was a “friend of a friend” of Vinnie’s, the kind of networking that often resulted in jobs on both the Real and the Chop House Wall Street.
U.S. Securities & Futures was part of the Real Wall Street. It didn’t just look like the Real Wall Street. It was the Real Wall Street.
For the first time since A. T Brod, he was back—for a few minutes, at least—on the Real Wall Street. What was he doing there? The Business Week story had received a serious amount of publicity, and there were calls in Congress for the SEC to act. The chop houses were getting a great deal of unwanted exposure. But there it was—a legit firm housing a crew of chop house brokers. The proprietor was a man named John Hing, who traded bonds and futures and didn’t seem to grasp the kind of people he was dealing with in Louis, Benny, and their friends. Instead of trading Eurobonds, these kids were pushing a company whose shares were about to be sold to the investors of America. It seemed legit at first glance, like most chop house schemes.
The Waco deal wasn’t an IPO. It was a “15c2-11.” Waco was a teeny-weeny company whose shares were going to start trading over the counter, which required filing papers. Form 15c2-11, to be exact. These kinds of deals were better than IPOs, because you had to file fewer papers before you could begin to steal—or raise money, in the case of a legit 15c2-11.
Louis and Benny were going to share a half million warrants as their reward for selling $1 million in Waco paper. It looked simple in theory. In practice, it was a fiasco.
“We’re all ready and prepared,” said Louis. “Our biggest client from way back at Todd, Ed Delano, he’s invested. Tension’s tight because we’re waiting for the deal to come out. Nobody has money. Everybody’s going to get warrants from this deal and we’re all going to come out okay.
“So we raised all that money and the deal isn’t going through. There’s a holdup at Nasdaq. I have to go down to Maryland to see Shannon Johnson, and tell him we’ll give him as payment twenty thousand warrants for his company, YBC Associates, if he’ll get the forms approved. So I drive down there to Maryland with the 15c2-11 in a manila envelope, and handed it to Shannon. I didn’t want to send it overnight so I drove it down. It was a fucking pain in the ass. I went down there in the worst car imaginable. A fucking 1984 Cutlass. I was uncomfortable all the way. By now the Benz is gone, the Ferrari is gone. I couldn’t afford them no more.
“So the deal went through and everybody’s trying to scam U.S. Securities. Everybody—me, Benny, Alan—all of us were running to get rid of our stock. But we couldn’t raise enough money to cross ourselves out of this shit.
“This U.S. Securities is not anywhere close to a chop shop. It’s an international brokerage firm. It’s owned by Chinese people. There was always a problem. We were in Hing’s office every fucking day. This guy called. That guy called. The clients were complaining.
“I couldn’t believe the shit that was going on. Alan Saretsky is totally out of his fucking mind. He’s trying to sell something like two hundred thousand shares of common stock. He’s trying to cut John Hing in on it! I’m sitting in the room listening to Alan trying to tell John Hing that he can give Hing money under the ta
ble. John Hing says, ‘I don’t understand.’ What was he doing? The guy’s legit. I said, ‘Let’s look like we’re doing this legit. If we look like we’re doing it legit, we’re going to pull this fucking shit off.’
“Then Charlie comes to the office like a gang-banger, looking to sell his fucking stock and get his money. Charlie came up there and smacked me and punched me in the face in the conference room of this legit Wall Street firm! I said, ‘Charlie, you got to keep your voice down. This isn’t like the other firms.’ He goes, ‘I don’t give a fuck!’ Bam! John Hing was right next door. Charlie went to talk to him. About his ‘account.’ His account? He had a fucking nominee account! He had it under his friend Sean. I go, ‘Are you fucking nuts? What are you gonna tell him? You’re Sean Dunleavy, you’re going to tell him?’ He did! He told Hing he’s Sean fucking Dunleavy.
“So you got all these gangsters coming in and out and these U.S. Securities people are in suits and ties. They’re fucking graduates of college. You got Charlie with a turtleneck and sports coat, tanned like he just came back from Florida, walking around with Joe Botch. They just look like fucking gangsters. They didn’t belong there. The Business Week article had just come out. I used to tell Charlie, ‘You’re fucking nuts. You’re going to get in trouble. You can’t be coming up to the offices dressed like this.’ He goes, ‘Don’t tell me how to handle my affairs.’” *
The Waco disaster was proof, not that Louis needed any, that Charlie was no businessman.
Waco wasn’t a total loss. A little money was made from the warrants—much less than anticipated, but enough to pay off Vinnie, which was the purpose of doing the deal in the first place. He sold some of the warrants, before the Waco deal came out, to a cold-caller named Tommy Deceglie, an older guy who was Benny’s brother-in-law. Louis put twenty thousand warrants in Tommy’s account in return for $20,000 in cash.
Tommy expected that the warrants were going to rise to maybe $4.50, netting a $90,000 profit. Instead he wound up getting $3 for the warrants, but that was still $60,000. Not bad on a $20,000 investment, no?
No.
Another dumb sitdown. This one was at a restaurant in Bay Ridge.
“This old Guy with the Bonannos, Elmo, was representing Tommy,” said Louis. “He was supposed to be Tommy’s uncle. That’s right—Elmo. Like ‘Tickle-Me Elmo.’ I was so disgusted I didn’t think it was funny. Charlie used to make fun of it, though.”
Louis won this one. At the sitdown it became clear that Tommy had lied to Elmo about the dispute. Not wise, as there was nothing especially cuddly or tickleable about Vincent “Elmo” Almarante, a convicted drug dealer. Louis—as would have befit a Real Wall Street arbitration—had brought along trading records that contradicted Tommy on major points. “Elmo tells Charlie he’s sorry he brought us down there, it was a misunderstanding. I left and Benny told me the guy got smacked around after that. Every time I saw Tommy after that I made him miserable about it. Balls of the guy,” said Louis.
A fair decision, not that he gave a shit anymore.
part five
FENCE JUMPER
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
It was time to kill Charlie.
When Charlie started to talk about Stefanie, he crossed a line. Niggers raping Stefanie? Uh-uh.
This whole niggers-raping-Stefanie stuff, and the resulting need to kill Charlie, was maybe the most unpleasant part of Louis’s mid-career crisis. Here he was, twenty-three years old—an old man by chop house standards. When he left U.S. Securities in June 1997, Louis realized it was all over. He was through. The joy of stealing was gone. Now it was a struggle. Now he was just like everybody else, living from check to check, payoff to payoff, scam to scam. But there were no scams on the horizon, and the money he had was flowing out to Atlantic City and the bookies and loan sharks.
For the first time as an adult he couldn’t afford stuff. First the boat and now the cars were gone. He couldn’t afford the payments—and besides, Charlie had been using the Ferrari and the Mercedes as much as he was. He was down to one car, one wife (not counting Charlie), and soon he would have a child. Stefanie was pregnant. They both agreed that it was a bad time.
Charlie was pissed about missing out on the Waco warrants. Disappointment really brought out the worst in him, and Charlie’s worst was unpleasant in many ways, some of them new. Louis theorized that maybe Charlie had some kind of deep-seated fear of rejection. But he didn’t spend too much time analyzing it, and neither did Charlie. Instead Charlie did what psychologists recommend as healthiest for one’s psyche. He kept in touch with his feelings.
“Around the time of the Waco deal he wanted money, I forget for what, and I didn’t have it. I went to see him at his house. I took off my shoes, like I usually do, came into the apartment. I said, ‘Charlie, I really don’t have it.’ He goes over to the stove and sticks his hand in this pot holder hanging by the stove. He took out a .38 revolver. I was shitting my pants almost. Took it out, put it right on my fucking head. ‘I can blow your fucking head off right here.’ At that moment I don’t know what he’s going to do. I said, ‘Come on, Charlie, man, what the fuck are you doing, man? I’ll have it. I’ll have it.’ He says, ‘If next Sunday comes and I got to take this fucking thing out of the pot holder, I’m going to fucking use it.’”
But that was almost okay. Charlie was mad. He tended to get mad. That was Charlie. But Stefanie—no, that was off-limits. Louis was a man, and men don’t let their wives be raped by niggers, even in theory.
“He started saying the craziest shit. Getting real abusive like. He says, ‘I’ll have six niggers come and rape your wife. How’d you like that? You lying scumbag.’ I went, ‘Charlie, that’s out of line.’ He says, ‘Out of line, my fucking ass. I’ll come myself.’ I say, ‘Now you’re going to rape my wife? I don’t understand. First you said you’d have niggers rape my wife. Now it’s you?’ He goes, ‘Don’t fuck around with me. Don’t mind-fuck me.’ He said that because I used to play with him sometimes. He says, ‘Everything’s a fucking joke. This is not a joke.’ He’s screaming. He was crazy.
“So Charlie’s talking about niggers raping Stefanie, and I’m trying to make a joke out of it, and he’s pushing it. He goes, ‘She’s probably fucking another guy. You’re so fucked up she’s fucking other guys,’ and I say, ‘Charlie, don’t even talk about Stefanie. I don’t give a fuck. Don’t get too personal,’ I told him. He goes, ‘What, are you going to defend yourself over this thing?’ and I say, ‘Just don’t talk about Stefanie and I won’t have to defend myself.’ It just died out. He kind of backed down a little bit. I would have raised my hands back to him that time. That’s the only time I would have raised my hands back to him. I said to myself, ‘If he raises his hands to me right now, I’m going to get the best of this motherfucker.’ I would have taken out every frustration I ever had in my life on him.”
After that, Louis realized he wanted Charlie dead. He deserved it. It was becoming torture. The phone calls. The beatings. Now Stefanie? Enough.
“I decided—that was it. But I needed someone to come with me. I was afraid to go alone. I went to my father. I talked to him outside the house. I said, ‘Dad, I don’t know if he’s going to show up or not, but I can’t live with me thinking he’s going to show up. I got to kill him. Let’s go to Brooklyn, take a fucking gun, ring his doorbell, shoot the motherfucker, and leave him dead. Nobody will care.’ We’d get back in our car, and go away. Throw the gun in the fucking water. Nobody would even know. We’d ring the doorbell at seven in the morning. He’d think it’s his fucking coffee. He’d open the door. Pkowwww!
“I’d be so happy. ‘Aw, Charlie. Look at you. You’re a fucking mess when you’re dead. You idiot. You shouldn’t have talked about the niggers fucking Stefanie. You fucking retard.’ I swear I would have spit in his face. No remorse at all. But my father says no, don’t do it.”
Nick said he would talk to his old friend Butchie, the connected guy Fran didn’t like, who was supposedly tight wit
h Alphonse Persico, boss of the Colombos. Butchie knew a Guy. The Guy would talk to Charlie. And that would be that. The new Guy would say to Charlie, “Listen, you got to calm down and leave the kid alone.”
Louis was going to get himself a new Guy. He was going to jump ship.
It would be a perilous move in any organization that values loyalty. But there can be valid reasons for moving from one part of an organizational chart to another. Louis figured the Guy world was like any other structured, logically run operation, with dispute-settling mechanisms and hierarchy. When he wasn’t treated right at Hanover, he had gone to Roy to complain and Roy had been reasonable and agreed with him and moved him to another broker. Louis had his reasons now, even more than at Hanover. So Louis figured it would all turn out okay.
Butchie had Louis get in touch with a Guy named Robert Luciano, who ran a precious metals shop, My Way Gold, on Avenue S just off Stillwell Avenue in Bensonhurst. Luciano would be the one to deal with Charlie and keep Charlie away. So Louis went to the gold shop.
Louis went there one unseasonably chilly afternoon. He remembered it was chilly because Luciano began the meeting by telling Louis to take off his clothes. After checking for a wire and finding none, Luciano wasn’t oozing with solicitude, but he was civil. He let Louis get dressed and asked Louis about his debts. Yes, he had debts, a couple. He would pay Luciano and Luciano would pay the debtors. Sort of like a credit counselor. He would talk to Charlie, assuming the role now of small-town family lawyer. He would tell Charlie to cease using coercive debt-collection tactics. The charge? No charge. It would be a favor. He was being nice. Luciano seemed to be a nice guy. He was in his mid-thirties, a bit pudgy.
Louis was happy after he left Luciano. Okay, he was jumping ship. Charlie wasn’t going to like it. Well, fuck Charlie. You just don’t treat a person that way and get away with it. You don’t abuse their wives, even verbally. Now Luciano was going to be his Charlie, getting the cut that he used to give Charlie. Fuck Charlie. Fuck him.