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

  The good feeling lasted a few days. Louis was between brokerages, so he was making the rounds, trying to find a place that might accommodate him. One day he went to visit a firm in Manhattan. It took about an hour. Louis came downstairs and there he was. Charlie.

  Charlie walked up to Louis. He didn’t hit him, which kind of disappointed Louis because he figured that he had it coming, that hitting him would be enough. Instead, Charlie just talked to him quietly. “He says, ‘I’m just letting you know something. If you think this is gonna work, you’re going to die.’ And he just left. I was, like, ‘Oh man. He’s mad. I’m dead,’” said Louis. He called Luciano immediately from his cell phone.

  “He just found me,” he told Luciano. Louis could hear a sigh on the other end of the phone. It made him feel good, just a little. “Ah, that fucking guy,” Luciano said. He said he’d call Charlie. He hung up.

  Later that day, Luciano called him back. “He won’t come near you no more,” he told Louis.

  For several nightmarish days, it was as if Charlie had nothing better to do but to call Louis’s pager. He was relentless. The pager was constantly buzzing. It was almost as if his pager were some kind of malfunctioning circulation-boosting vibrator, the way it was buzzing constantly.

  Louis didn’t call him back. Luciano, while not exactly exuding warmth, had made it clear that he would get Charlie off his back. Louis figured that was going to happen. It might take a while, but it would happen. He still held that hope when he went to see Luciano to make a payment. He was a little short—he was supposed to pay Luciano $6,000 for distribution to his creditors, and he only had $4,000. But he figured that a partial payment would be okay, as this was supposed to be a friend of Butchie and Butchie was a friend of his father, not to mention his tightness with Alphonse Persico.

  Louis went to the gold store on Avenue S, gave Luciano the $4,000, and Luciano proceeded to give Louis a slow, earnest, and methodical beating.

  “He starts smacking me all over the fucking place, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I’m saying. He’s goes, ‘You fucking’—smack! He smacked me in my face a hundred times. I’m putting my hands up to cover my face and this guy’s holding my hands down so he can smack me. He says, ‘Keep the fucking four thousand.’ He pulls out a knife. Fucking steak knife. He goes, ‘I should fucking take this knife . . .’ Meanwhile, I wasn’t even all that scared because I was just thinking to myself, kill me already. I didn’t care no more. Just get it over with. One of yas, you, Charlie, just kill me.”

  Louis decided, after that visit to Luciano, that maybe he had better try to patch up his differences with Charlie.

  “I left there with the four thousand, smacked all around. Then I called Charlie up and I go, ‘Charlie, sorry. I got money for you. Where do you want to meet? Get this guy away from me. He’s nuts.’ He was worse than Charlie! Charlie says, ‘I told you! You stupid motherfuckerrrrrrrr!’ I said, ‘Aw, Charlie, it was a fucking mistake. I’ll just bring you the money I got, settle some of this shit, and just continue to work, all right?’

  “When I saw Charlie he goes, real slow, ‘You motherfucker. You fence-jumping stoolie rat motherfucker. I knew you’d be a fucking fence-jumper.’”

  It was a bad time to alienate Charlie. Louis was still gambling whenever he had any money in his hands. By now his biggest creditor was a respected young man, intelligent and entrepreneurial, valued by many in the neighborhood as a purveyor of working capital. His name was Richie. Just as Charlie turned a local pizzeria into a very special place of his own, Richie was a constant and loyal customer of the Doo-Wop Shoppe, a music store, pool hall, and local hangout in a small stretch of stores on Arthur Kill Road, in a part of southwestern Staten Island noted for its landfill and penitentiary.

  Louis would have to work off the Richie debt, just as he had worked off the Vinnie debt at U.S. Securities. Another sharecropper gig. Richie put him to work at a dumpy brokerage firm branch office in Woodbridge, New Jersey. Argent was the name. Richie’s friend and associate John Mergen was going to come with Louis to Argent, to ensure that Louis worked hard and paid back what he owed. John was Turkish, real name Volkan Mergen. He was about five feet six inches tall, and built like one of the old-style multispout fire hydrants that were being removed from the streets by municipal authorities.

  “I walked in and it was a real shitty office. Tremendous but shitty. Rugs are dirty. I just wanted to work there, pay this Richie back, and go away. I just went myself. No cold-callers. After U. S. Securities Benny went his separate ways. He quit the business.

  “So now I’m working in the same office with this kid Mergen. Now, you got to understand, Richie is this major loan shark on Staten Island. All the kids in the neighborhood are intimidated and scared. The Turk, Mergen, was the muscle. I don’t want to work with this fucking kid. He starts going, ‘You got to pay my friend Richie back.’ He goes, ‘You’re around us now.’”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Do Wop

  Louis wrote the words on a pad of lined yellow paper.

  Do Wop 5,000

  He was doodling on a pad of yellow paper in his shithole of an office at Argent.

  Do Wop Do Wop

  5,000

  Do Wop Do Wop

  Do Do Do Di Di

  Do Wop

  The “5,000” was what he owed Richie, what he would have to trot over to Richie at the Doo-Wop Shoppe, after working at Argent for a few weeks. About $10,000 in gambling winnings brought his $20,000 gambling debt down to $10,000, and then he was able to pay Richie another $5,000 from his earnings at Argent, bringing his debt down to $5,000. That’s all he owed. That’s what he had to pay. Peanuts. To pay it off, all he needed was just a few more weeks on the plantation—maybe days, if he got luckier. Or maybe—fuck it—no days at all. Maybe he’d just “hang it on the limb,” as Paul Muni did in one of those old chain-gang movies.

  Louis had hit bottom, and he knew it. Or he hoped he had hit bottom. He thought he had hit bottom when the U.S. Securities warrant deal fell through. But Argent was worse. Nothing could be worse than this. He kept thinking of those old movies. Did they have Turkish overseers in the Antebellum South? At least he wasn’t getting flogged. At least they weren’t putting welts on his back.

  Louis decided to hang it on the limb. He didn’t have his heart in the job. He was too depressed. In the space of just a year, he went from being a sought-after broker, with sign-on bonuses and offices with TVs, to a guy in a shit office working off a debt with a Turk breathing down his neck. It was more than a guy could tolerate.

  Mergen was in his late twenties and had spent a year and a half in prison on attempted robbery and weapons charges at Queensboro State Prison—the Guy equivalent of the New York Institute of Finance. Mergen’s personal qualities were important assets for his broker-management work. He was squat, dark, and mean. It might have been nice to have Charlie in his corner at this time of his life, but Charlie was not feeling friendly toward Louis at the moment. Louis was not generating cash and had also recently displayed disloyalty of the most extreme kind.

  At least he had company in his misery. It seemed that most of the other brokers and cold-callers at this Argent branch also had to make periodic trips to the Doo-Wop Shoppe. Louis hung a sign on his wall: “An account a day keeps the Doo-Wop away.”

  “I used to tell all the cold-callers, ‘Listen, if you don’t want to have to deal with the kid at the Doo-Wop Shoppe, just open an account a day,’” said Louis. *

  But Louis wasn’t giving the fucking guy any more accounts, period. He stayed home—the chop house equivalent of heading into the swamps. Instead of the incessant din of bloodhounds baying, there was the gentle buzz of an ignored pager. Louis had made his bid for freedom as a matter of principle—he was tired of being a slave. And $5,000 was such a pissant sum of money. It was half of what he had spent to keep a limo idling for a few days in front of his building in Battery Park City just two years before.

  It was a matter of princip
le for John and Richie too. Banks foreclose on tiny houses in bad neighborhoods when it doesn’t make economic sense. Guys have to similarly act out of principle to maintain their credibility and standing in the community. But these Guys seemed to be taking their cues from Fast Times at Ridgemont High instead of The Godfather.

  One day Louis came downstairs in the morning to find the air let out of his truck’s tires. Not slashed. Deflated. Clearly the days of severed horses’ heads had vanished, if they had ever existed. Louis had to pay $60 to get it towed.

  Then the doorbell was ripped off his front door.

  When Guys started acting like this, what could come next? Covering his mailbox with shaving cream? Short-sheeting his bed? Louis figured he was dealing with a new breed of Guy. Juvies were supposed to emulate Guys. But here were Guys emulating juvies. Louis would have laughed it off. But Stefanie was pregnant. She didn’t need the stress, even from bubble-gum gangsters. So he sent her back home to her parents.

  Louis decided to move out too, and was with his friend Mike Fusco packing up when John Mergen crashed his car into the garage.

  John was backing up and smashing into the garage door, again and again, and probably doing a hell of a lot more than $5,000 in damage to his car in the process.

  “He’s smashing his car into my garage, over and over again. So we went downstairs with a gun now, waiting for him to break through the garage. Mike says, ‘I’m nervous!’ and I go, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ Soon as he breaks through the garage, we’re going to shoot this motherfucker. Fuck him. I had my father’s registered gun. Big fucking .357 cannon. So I was going to say my father was living in my house, this guy broke into my house, and I shot him. Dead issue. I’m not in trouble.

  “He never breaks through the garage. He leaves. I call the cops now. I say, ‘Listen, some person just tried to smash through my garage.’ I described the car. The cops start asking me, ‘Do you owe the guy any money?’ and I say, ‘What’s that got to do with it? He just tried to drive through my garage!’”

  A couple of days later, Louis was almost finished packing and was moving a few personal belongings into the car. It was early in the morning. The movers had just left with the furniture. They were almost free. Almost gone.

  Mergen and Richie paid a visit.

  “They take me into the house and bring me upstairs. ‘Where’s all your shit?’ I tell them I sent it to storage. I can’t afford to live there. I’m moving. Richie says, ‘You’re moving your fucking shit out? This is what you do to me?’ Pow. Hits me. I say, ‘Rich, you don’t understand. It’s not like that.’”

  At this point Mergen interjected with an offer—to smash a glass pot cover over Louis’s head. But instead of doing that, Louis’s two creditors decided to bring him with them for a trip in their car.

  “I say, ‘Kidnap me? What you guys doing?’ They fucking throw me in the back of Richie’s truck. I’m sitting there, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to jump out of this fucking truck.’ I was just going to jump and run. But then they take me to this house where these Irish kids John and Jeff are living. They take my cell phone. They take my beeper. And they make John and Jeff watch me.”

  Louis stayed there all day in his makeshift debtors prison. While John and Jeff watched him, Richie and Mergen went to Louis’s storage bin and removed his TV and VCR as a kind of payment-in-kind toward the $5,000 that was owed. Then they returned. Richie was upset. He discussed the matter with Louis outside the John-Jeff residence.

  According to Richie, an incident had marred the trip to the storage unit. He had scratched his car while moving Louis’s possessions. This was offered by way of explanation for what transpired—not that there had to be a reason, as Louis was learning.

  The escaped sharecropper was flogged.

  “Richie just beat the shit out of me. Started hitting me with a stickball fucking bat. I guess he blamed me for the scratch on the car. I got welts all over my back. He beats me up in the middle of the street. This was Huguenot Avenue and Woodrow. Right in the middle of the fucking intersection! There’s cars going by every two seconds. Cars stop. John goes, ‘What the fuck! Get the fuck out of here!’ Telling that to the people driving by. One guy is like, ‘Leave the kid alone!’ John yells, ‘Mind your fucking business!’ Mergen tells the guy, ‘You’re next!’”

  It was embarrassing, to say the least, and the idea of explaining everything to Stefanie was a prospect Louis did not relish, presuming he survived the experience. That was not assured.“Richie takes me in the car now. I’m all beat up. John Mergen gets in the car and goes, ‘I told you you fucked up,’ and gives me a shot right in the eye. I’m bleeding. They drive me to the back of this school, IS 75. I get out of the car.

  “I say, ‘Rich, I think you guys did enough. I’ll have the money in a few weeks. Give me a break. Keep my keys. Leave me the fuck alone.’ Richie says, ‘Nah, I don’t think I’m going to do that. I think I’m going to make John take you in the woods to smash your fucking skull.’

  “I go, ‘You got to be fucking kidding me.’ I’m begging the guy not to take me in the woods now. I say, ‘Look, I really don’t want the kid taking me in the woods. I’ll pay the fucking money. I just want to get out of here.’ So then Rich takes me for a walk-talk. ‘I really didn’t want to do this to you. But you have to pay the money.’ I look at the guy. My eye’s hanging off my face. I’m all beat up. I got welts all over my back. I say, ‘In a few weeks I’ll have the money for you.’ He says, ‘Don’t leave or do anything stupid.’”

  Do anything stupid? As he walked to the bus stop, Louis realized that there wasn’t anything he had done for the past few months that wasn’t stupid. But he also realized that there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do to find a way out, even if he wanted to be smart, or even if he could figure out what “smart” meant.

  Stefanie didn’t want to hear what happened. Enough.

  STEFANIE: “I chose not to live in reality a lot. I chose—I still choose sometimes—not to live in reality, because it’s okay to take a vacation from reality for a while in a sense. For the most part I could yell and scream about things, but then sometimes I didn’t want to be bothered. Like when Charlie came up with that heavy guy and I’m sitting there crying. Or a phone call in the night he didn’t want to answer. Or somebody ringing the bell in the middle of the night, and him not wanting to answer it. Him saying, ‘Don’t—just sit here.’ And ringing the bell and ringing the bell and ringing the bell. And he couldn’t look out the window, because if he looked out the window somebody would see him look out the window. And I’m like, ‘This is ridiculous.’

  “I remember lying in the bed, and the phone is ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing. I didn’t know who it was. But somebody is calling at like three o’clock in the morning.

  “After he was arrested for the check thing, the calls were nonstop. It seems as if the phone was always ringing, and he was always running out. He was always on the phone, talking to this one or that one. ‘I got to go see this one.’ ‘I got to go see that one.’ It was just overwhelming. I couldn’t take it anymore. And I was never getting a straight answer about his problems or what was going on. Who he owed money to. He told me about some people but not all of them. One minute he’d have money. The next minute he wouldn’t have any money.

  “After the arrest Charlie started showing up more, Louis was always running out, trying to work but not really getting any money, and if he did—I don’t think I ever saw him come home with checks anymore. He always used to come home with cash. He’d tell me he wasn’t working under his own name, so somebody pays him in cash, or he pays me by check and then we cash it, but they’re going to W-2 him at the end of the year. That was one of his big lines.

  “I always knew they weren’t on the up-and-up and I always used to tell him, ‘Why don’t you get a job at a decent place?’ But at that point his record was so messed up from all the complaints and everything that he really couldn’t.

  “After he got arre
sted he got less money, and that made it harder to pay our bills, our rent. The landlord was pretty mean. I guess he had a right to be. Louis was lying all the time. ‘Oh, yes, I paid him.’ I’d get a phone call: ‘Louis was supposed to come by with the rent. He didn’t come by.’ He’d borrow money from a friend or somebody to pay the rent. We couldn’t afford the house anymore. It was very stressful financially and emotionally because of all the problems he was having.

  “I decided I was going to live at home.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Louis realized he would never get rid of Guys. He would always have at least one Guy in his life. He developed a kind of Zen attitude. He would withstand the abuse, the pressure. He would focus on what was important, which was scamming, and try his best not to be driven off the edge.

  Louis arrived at a firm called TYM Securities in Lower Manhattan in July 1997. He was happy even when Charlie No. 2, John Mergen, forced Louis to get jobs there for him and the other guys from Argent.

  In his first week at TYM, Louis made $10,000 and was able to pay back the $5,000 he owed Richie.

  He was back. A thief. He felt as if he were reborn. Yes, he could survive, he could make a living. Support his family. He had earned more money than some brokers did during their entire lives, and worked at three or four times as many firms. He had earned, and spent, millions already—he never sat down and counted it, much less accounted it for the IRS.

  The days of wild living were over, more or less. His life was now a constant quest for money, interspersed with compulsive gambling, losing, using the few winners to pay for the losers, and scraping together enough cash to keep the bookies and loan sharks and landlord and Charlie off his back. Sometimes he just liked to disappear, to go away, when the pressure got to be too much. But he had hope, if not faith, that TYM would make him healthy.