Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street Page 33

  “I deeply regret the life that I have chose,” said Charlie. Not that he wanted to make any excuses for his behavior. Given a chance he would lead a life that would be productive for himself and his family. He did apologize for his actions. If he could take them back he could. He never seemed to make the right choices.

  He stopped. Time for sentencing from a judge whose glower seemed capable of reducing the hardest Guy into a quivering mess.

  The judge began by very slowly expounding upon the definition of assault. This had some bearing on whether Charlie’s 1992 thumb-spraining altercation could count toward him being declared a career criminal. Causing a physical injury would put Charlie over the top.

  The judge read several definitions of physical injury. A sprained thumb didn’t appear to fit the definition. But it didn’t matter. Judges have discretion and this was one angry judge. He had seen so many defendants, people like Charlie, stand before him as their lawyers read letters saying what wonderful people they were. But this judge saw through all that. The people who wrote those letters had no idea of the other side of the defendants’ lives. Judge Glasser did. He saw right through Charlie like an X ray.

  “You beat people up. That’s what you do. That’s what loan sharks do.” He wasn’t buying a thing. Rosen might just as well have saved his breath. And so it seemed, right up to the moment the judge said he was not designating Charlie as a career criminal, and was sentencing him to four years in prison.

  Then came a tongue-lashing. Charlie might not be a career criminal, but if he was not going to get a heavy sentence he was certainly going to get some pretty heavy words thrown at him, to shame him in front of the assembled lawyers and FBI agents and court clerks.

  “Let me tell you, Mr. Ricottone. In some respects you are pretty lucky, because you’ve been standing before judges for the greater part of your life, and every time you appear before a judge you make the same speech … I want to tell you that if you half believe the things you say, you might want to give consideration. …”

  The judge went on in that vein for a while. A tough speech from a tough judge. Maybe Charlie listened and maybe he didn’t. He had heard it before, and he would probably hear it again.

  Charlie was remanded to custody immediately. That had been a big problem for Roy Ageloff. Not Charlie. He didn’t care. He could do the time. He took off his bracelet and neck chain and gave it to the old man in the back of the courtroom.

  Then he went to jail.

  In the summer of 2002, Louis began reading the papers regularly for the first time in his life. There was plenty to read. Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen. Wall Street analysts lying. Investigations. Indictments. Convictions. During his years in the chop houses, Louis had always believed that he just wasn’t good enough—not polished enough, not well-educated enough—to cross that unbridgeable gulf into the Real Wall Street. But now, as he read the papers, he knew he had been wrong. He’d been in the Real Wall Street all the time.

  Nothing in the papers about chop houses anymore. Not even the guilty pleas and sentences. So Louis didn’t feel that he was missing out on anything, that if he hadn’t been caught

  he could have kept up his old lifestyle. Louis was pretty sure of that until one day in July 2002, when he ran into an old friend from Staten Island who was opening up a chop house in downtown Brooklyn.

  He offered Louis a 30 percent payout. Cash.

  Good money. Tempting. So painful to pass up.

  This much was sure: Louis would always have temptations and he would always have to pass them up.

  Louis’s life was very different now. He wasn’t always happy about it, but he was coping. The cars were gone; the expensive restaurants and nights in the strip joints were a thing of the past. No more gambling, no more drugs. Stefanie saw to that. Their relationship was still rocky at times, and they weren’t always together. But they were trying. They didn’t have much choice in the matter. As 2001 gave way to 2002, Stefanie realized with a mixture of joy, surprise, and chagrin that she was pregnant with their second child. Just as it was when Anthony was born five years earlier, the timing wasn’t terrific. Maybe it was a message from—who knows? Louis was still an atheist. But he began to realize that nothing in his life was totally under his control. He began to realize that maybe something more than pure chemical interaction placed Amanda Pasciuto on this planet on August 4, 2002.

  Now that he had a second kid, Louis knew that he couldn’t fuck up anymore. He had to focus on rebuilding his marriage and being a father, and preparing for whatever the government might demand of him—whether that meant being a witness against his former associates or serving time in prison for what he had done.

  No more Guys meant no more torture, but it also meant no more clout. He would have to handle disputes himself. When a neighbor was acting unreasonably, complaining about noises and making false claims of drug use, Louis for a moment missed the days when a call to Charlie would have ended

  that problem quickly. But when a friend wrote for him a strongly worded letter to the building management, something miraculous happened. The problem ended. The neighbor apologized.

  Louis made other discoveries in his new life. He found that if he collected the loose change that was left over at the end of the day and put it in a jar, at the end of the month he had as much as $50. He would take the jar of loose change and bring it to the bank, which would convert the coins into clean, fresh greenbacks. It was good money, fifty bucks. He would count the bills fast, with his thumb, like a teller.

  Louis knows people are looking for him. He knows because they have said so in their own special way. His sister was threatened. His mother’s car was burned in their driveway. Nobody was hurt. That was the important thing. His mother called the police when the car was torched. The FBI paid the suspected perpetrator a visit.

  Louis is careful. He takes precautions to assure his safety. The Guy world is weaker than it ever has been—but it still exists. It’s dying, it’s on the ropes, the good guys have won. Blah blah blah. But it will never go away. Guys will kill when provoked, such as the time in October 1999 when two stock promoters, Alan Chalem and Maier Lehmann, were shot dead in Colts Neck, New Jersey. It made front-page headlines at the time. The Mob was on Wall Street. Imagine that.

  Louis knew Alan slightly. Alan once offered him a job. He had no idea why the two guys were killed. Maybe they reneged on a debt.

  To the Guys who used to run his life, Louis reneged on a debt too. He owed them his life. It was his life, and he has taken it back.

  It was his last score.

  *Despite repeated requests, the NASD would not make its staffers available to discuss its oversight of Hanover and other chop houses during the 1990s.

  *Brokers sold stocks, of course. But since they had to technically buy them from the firm, their ability to sell stocks was referred to, counterintuitively, as “buying power.”

  *A few years later, while working at another chop house, Peter Cohen tried another way to move up to a better grade of Rolex. In 1999 he was indicted for insider trading involving advance copies of Business Week’s “Inside Wall Street” stock market column. He pleaded guilty to one felony count. In September 2002 he was sentenced to 30 days probation. The sales-maven-insider-trader Peter Cohen, by the way, should not be confused with the Peter Cohen who was chairman of Shearson in the 1980s.

  *Years later, Taneja acknowledged meeting with Louis and Benny, and having them as guests at his home, but said he was rarely in New York and denied knowledge of any wrongdoing at the New York office of Brod.

  *Kemper Securities “cleared” trades for A. T. Brod—executing trades and issuing statements and other routine paperwork. Kemper also physically maintained the customer accounts.

  *The NYSE and other regulators did not implicate Taneja in any wrongdoing. But Brod didn’t exactly get any medals from the NYSE. In a disciplinary action announced two years after Brod went out of business, the NYSE permanently banned Brod from the excha
nge. (Brod was long defunct, so this was a largely symbolic act.) The NYSE found that Brod had committed multiple violations of exchange rules. Among other things, the NYSE disciplinary panel made note of the wooden tickets Louis wrote in March 1995, said that “unauthorized staff had the ability to enter the trading room during the relevant period,” and that “firm procedures were inadequate to detect or prevent misconduct in connection with execution of orders.” The decision was silent on whether or not the brokers were owed any money by Brod.

  *Sonny was sent back to jail in 1998, again for parole violation, and again for associating with Guys. One of them was Lenny Dello, Sr., Charlie’s former skipper. Small world.

  *The feds disagree. In court papers during his various scrapes with the law, Frank has been identified as a Bonanno family skipper—a “capo”—and not as an underboss.

  *“Joe Butch” Corrao, a skipper in the Gambino family, had just begun a stretch in federal prison for racketeering. His son has been identified by law enforcement as a Gambino soldier.

  *Sciandra, identified in court papers as a Gambino skipper, was an official of Top Tomato, a grocery chain in Brooklyn and Staten Island.

  *It was an arbitration, actually—this time, a Real Wall Street arbitration, filed with the NASD. Louis ignored it and Lawrence won by default.

  *John Hing remembers Louis and Saretsky, but denies that they worked there or ever did more than “visit” U.S. Securities. Hing also denies Louis’s account of an offer by Saretsky, or that gangsters congregated at the firm because of the Waco deal. He remembers a “Sean Dunleavy,” but says someone else handled his complaint. Subsequent federal charges support Louis, and contradict Hing, by saying that Louis did indeed work at U.S. Securities and sold Waco stock there.

  *The owner of the Doo-Wop Shoppe, who declined to disclose his full name, hotly denied that his establishment was ever patronized by loan sharks or other unsavory personages.

  *Shannon Johnson was never implicated in any wrongdoing in connection with these events or the other work that he did for Louis and his friends.

  *The New Jersey conviction still wasn’t on his NASD record—or in his Justice Department file, for that matter—years later. The reason could have been a screwup by Hudson County court personnel. Louis’s name was misspelled as “Pascuito” in the court records, and the mistake wasn’t caught even after motion papers filed by his lawyer spelled his name correctly.

  *Louis never found out why his offer to cooperate was ignored by the FBI’s Newark office. When he told John Brosnan, the FBI agent handling his case, “he just laughed,” said Louis.

  *Interestingly, Stefanie was never questioned by authorities, even when Scott’s principals were indicted in mid-2000.

  *That is, an offering of under $1 million in securities under SEC Rule 504. The rule was aimed at helping small companies get their stock on the market, and was often used to bring chop stocks before the investing public.

  *The criminal charges later brought against Louis, however, say that Louis was “working at” Aaron Capital and sold Aaron’s house stock, Matco. Louis, who was not involved in setting up the office, says it is possible that it wasn’t an officially sanctioned Aaron office. Aaron itself was not able to shed any more light on the subject. Gordon was no longer an official of Aaron, and the firm’s NASD-listed phone number was disconnected.

  *Neither Frank Junior nor Chic-Chick were implicated in any wrongdoing.

  **Larry pleaded guilty. He had not been sentenced as this book went to press. Todd pleaded not guilty and was awaiting trial.