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

  But Nick had friends Fran liked. Gerard was one of them. As a kid, Louis would stare, goggle-eyed, as Gerard would drive up in the newest Benz and emerge in a long mink jacket, dangling gold jewelry like a rig of a pint-sized Clydesdale. Gerard had a way of talking, with his hands. He had attitude, self-confidence. Gerard owned a printing company and spent time in prison when Louis was ten. It was no major shame, but not discussed.

  Louis had no aspirations to be a Guy. But he wanted everything that the Guys had. He found a way.

  LOUIS: “I was maybe ten years old. Me and my friends would go into town, and we would go and buy baseball cards. And they’d be buying, like, Mattingly, eleven dollars, and I could never get it. My mother just wasn’t giving me the money. The kids up the block, they always had money. They had forty, fifty, and I had four dollars. I was always the guy with the short end of the stick.

  “My father had change up in his closet that he was saving, quarters and stuff, so I would take three dollars. I would always say to myself, ‘I’ll put it back. When my mother gives me the five next week, I’ll get quarters and put it back.’ But then I would take three more and then three more. I used to start putting nickels in the jar to make it look higher.”

  FRAN: “When Louis was a young child I never had money missing from my pocketbook and it was always around. I used to keep money on the table. He didn’t steal. Not that I know of. He never mentioned to me. My pocketbook was always around, I had money on the table, his friends used to come in. When he was younger, things were always around. I never had anything missing—jewelry, nothing.”

  LOUIS: “I was slick. I was sly, so it was hard for them to catch me. If I took money out of my mother’s wallet, if she had like three tens and twelve singles, I’d take like two singles and a ten. I wouldn’t take two tens. I would split it up so she would be, like, ‘Well, maybe I spent that ten.’

  “From as early as I can remember I did everything I had to do to get everything I wanted. If I wanted that baseball card, I’m getting that baseball card. I didn’t care what I had to do.”

  Such as steal. Just as the Bible says. Thou shalt steal.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Whenever Roy Ageloff pulled into the Getty station on Amboy Road in the fall of 1992, he would never let the scrawny kid gas-station attendant fill the tank of whatever he happened to be driving on that particular day. Roy was damned if he was going to let the finish on his Benz or his Ferrari or his Lexus be ruined by some stupid kid with long hair and an attitude. So Roy would take a rag, wrap it around the nozzle, and fill it himself. Not a drop spilled. It made the kid, an eighteen-year-old Louis Pasciuto, absolutely furious.

  Roy was thirty-three, stocky, and with a pencil-thin mustache that lined the rim of his lip. He wore his dark brown hair slicked back. He lived right up the road and around a corner. And what he did for a living—well, Louis was dying to know but didn’t dare ask. Since the guy paid in cash, he didn’t even know his name. Louis would have guessed he was Italian, a tough Italian—half-a-wiseguy, maybe. If Roy had known that, he would have been a very happy man.

  Roy Ageloff carefully cultivated and nurtured his image of toughness and possible Italian origin. Sure he was a Jew, with a white-collar job and parents in Florida. But his attitude exuded the kind of guy he wanted to be, a “don’t fuck with Roy Ageloff” kind of attitude. Roy gives fucks, he doesn’t take them. He gives ulcers, he doesn’t get them. Roy gives beatings, he doesn’t take them.

  It wasn’t just the cars that dazzled Louis. It was everything about Roy and the heavyset young guy who usually sat next to him, who he later learned was named Joe DiBella. There was the way Roy dressed. Louis had never seen anybody dress so sharp. Roy dressed in the color and smell and taste of the money he was making, the money so obvious from the cars he drove. Roy wore bright electric-blue suits, but never with some dumb blue tie. He’d always wear a contrasting tie—a pink shirt with a green tie. A yellow suit with a red tie. And the shoes. They’d knock Louis out. Blue shoes. Yellow shoes. On a scrub they’d look moronic. But they looked cool on Roy. And he was a down-to-earth guy, no stuffed shirt. When he came by for gas they would joke around, usually about how Roy would never let Louis fill the tank for him.

  Still, it annoyed Louis. So one day he challenged Roy on that issue. There was no need for this. He could be trusted with the nozzle. Hell, he could be trusted, period. Ask anybody.

  Louis liked his job. It was boring, though, particularly when he had to work night shift. Fishing money out of the floor safe with a clothes hanger—that broke the monotony. So did putting down the wrong numbers from the gas pumps, so the last money of his shift would go into his pocket and not the register. True, the guy on the shift after him always got stuck, because it showed him pumping more gas than he really did. But that was his problem.

  And then there was the real perk of working at the Getty station—Louis’s favorite customer. He was the credit card guy. A youngish guy, maybe thirty or so, with a chubby face and always in a rush, like a coke-head. Louis never knew his name, and the names on the credit cards would change every now and then. It was a simple, beautiful scam. If during his shift Louis pumped, say, thirty gallons for people paying cash—maybe $50 or so—he would ring up credit-card-guy charge slips for all or most of that gas. They would split the $50 in the cash register, and replace the cash with $50 in credit card slips.

  Louis could have told Roy about that, if he dared. He didn’t know it, but Roy would have been impressed. What Roy could tell, by just chatting with Louis, was that he was glib and facile, convincing and sharp. It was a gift. It worked wonders with the owner.

  “I was charging forty to fifty a night with the credit card guy,” said Louis. “After a while I started getting crazy, charging, like, eighty dollars worth of gas on one slip. And the owner says, ‘What kind of car does he have?’ and I say, ‘He came in with three cars. He had his mother and his wife. They fill up twice a week.’ I used to tell him he used to leave me his credit card because he lived down the block and he’d go back and get his other two cars. He’d leave his credit card, go back, get the car, get the gas, go back for his other car. He wanted it all on one charge, I used to tell him.”

  The owner believed him. Of course. People want to believe the more palatable of two alternatives—when Alternative A is you’re a sucker, you’ve hired a thief, and Alternative B is you’re smart, you’ve hired a trustworthy kid and the customer fills up three gas tanks at a time.

  What wasn’t there to like about a job like that? Between the money out of the floor and the gauge numbers and the credit card guy, he was pulling in maybe $300 a week. Not enough for the kind of Ferrari Roy was driving. Louis wanted to touch it.

  Roy liked that kind of spirit, within reason. “I want to tell you one thing, kid. If you spill anything on the car you’re going to fucking wear it,” he told Louis. After he pumped the gas, not spilling a drop, Roy said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” He liked the job Louis had done. Louis was flattered. Roy could have gone to any other gas station on Amboy Road, and he was coming to this one.

  Who was this guy? Louis was dying to know. What did he do for a living?

  Roy was driving the Ferrari when he came the following day. And they talked, and Louis didn’t ask what he did for a living. The next time, a few days later, he came in a Lexus. Louis shot him the question. Roy answered without hesitation.

  “We kill people,” said Roy.

  Louis knew he had to be joking. They didn’t really kill people, did they?

  “Okay, sign me up,” Louis replied. “If I can get a Ferrari I can kill people too.”

  “So what do you do, kid?” Roy asked him. When Louis told him he was studying to be an accountant at the College of Staten Island, Roy looked as if he were about to throw up. “What do you want to be, a fat accountant? Fuck that shit,” Roy told him. “Take my number. Call me tomorrow. Tell them Lou Getty is on the phone.”

  Fran hit the ceiling when she heard about
Roy Ageloff. Louis should stay in school, and not get a job with some guy who drove a nice car.

  Fran always knew that if Louis applied himself, he would excel. He was good with numbers, good with math. This was the era when kids with mathematical aptitude could do well on Wall Street. In the early 1990s, “rocket science” was the rage. Derivatives were in the news. They were financial techniques to reduce risk and make money, usually designed by applying complex mathematical formulas. Even the Daily News had articles on how bright math majors were getting jobs right out of college.

  But Fran never seriously considered a Wall Street career for Louis. Had anyone ever suggested that, she would have given him a dirty look. Fran knew Wall Street. She had worked there when she was about Louis’s age during his time at the Getty station. She didn’t like Wall Street.

  When Fran graduated from New Utrecht High School in the mid-1960s, she got a job as a clerk at a brokerage firm. It paid well. But she didn’t like the atmosphere. It was crude, as in a locker room, there was plenty of foul language, and people were treated in a nasty way. And there was something else, something more than the atmosphere. A neighbor who worked on Wall Street told her that the people in those cavernous 1920s office buildings, with their fancy lobbies and shoe-shine men and candy shops, were . . . well, he wasn’t too specific. “My neighbor said don’t do it,” said Fran. “You don’t want to get stuck in that world, he said. ‘Be careful, you’ll get into trouble. It can lead to trouble,’ he used to tell me. ‘You’ll do things you’re not supposed to do. Be smart.’”

  Fran never learned exactly what the neighbor meant by “trouble.” She never asked and he never volunteered just what he meant. She didn’t really care. It was none of her business. Wall Street was not a genteel place, not a proper place for a girl from a conservative Catholic family. It was a rough-and-tumble world, with its own way of doing things.

  You might say that on Wall Street there were three ways of doing things—a right way, a wrong way, and a Wall Street way. The foul language Fran experienced, what later generations might even call sexism, might even sue over—well, that was just one aspect of Wall Street’s moral twilight.

  Ethics and profits were not always compatible on Wall Street. One had to give way. It was a dilemma everywhere, even on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. For years, the tales circulated, to be occasionally confirmed by indictments and regulatory actions, none of which really meant a damn. Floor brokers at the stock exchanges routinely traded for their own profit, even though they were supposed to just execute trades for other people. They did it right out in the open, in front of exchange officials who were supposed to be watching, and in front of the public—quite literally. The illicit trading would take place right underneath the visitors’ gallery and, in more recent years, under the gaze of TV cameras from business news shows.

  You might say that the floor brokers had a hanger to pull out money from the safe in the exchange floor—and with nobody noticing or caring. Floor brokers are the men—there are very few women among them—who act basically as couriers, seeing to it that large mutual funds and pension funds get their trades filled on the exchange floor. But because they fill that function, and because they hang out on the exchange floor all day, they get all kinds of information that the general public doesn’t have. If you are a floor broker, and you know a trade is about to take place that is going to lift the price of a stock, should you slip in a trade of your own first? You can do it, and maybe get away with it. Nobody will notice. Everybody’s doing it. And if you feel that everybody’s doing it is wrong, and decide to blow the whistle by notifying the government or the regulators—well, you might just as well put a target on your rear end and say, “Kick me.” You will be unemployable on Wall Street—permanently.

  Fran had been briefly exposed to a subculture almost as tight, almost as suspicious of outsiders and governmental authority, as Bensonhurst. Through bull market and bear, that was one aspect of Wall Street that never changed. The government was the enemy. Regulators hamper the Street in the pursuit of its one and only goal—making money.

  So if you worked on Wall Street, you kept your mouth shut. You didn’t embezzle. That would be wrong. You didn’t blow the whistle on people who cut corners. That would be right—but dumb. Instead, you didn’t steal but you didn’t get all upset if people violated a few idiotic regulations nobody enforced. That was the Wall Street Way.

  For the floor brokers, the Wall Street Way was the only way. How else were those guys to make a living? What were they going to do, drive a cab?

  One American Stock Exchange floor broker had to do just that when he lost his job. He wasn’t ashamed. He was a blue-collar guy with kids to support. Lots of guys like him on Wall Street by the early 1990s. Ambitious, working-class guys. Street guys.

  CHAPTER THREE

  By the time he met Louis in the fall of 1992, Roy Ageloff had made his move. It was long overdue. People may not have been making fun of him—nobody did that, ever—but they could have, if they saw how he lived. It was absurd. Imagine the head of Hanover Sterling, one of Wall’s Street’s fastest-growing brokerage houses, living in a subdivision. Living in one of those three-story two-tone jobs, with red brick at the bottom and faux-wood-grain white shingles at the top, three cruddy floors with tiny energy-efficient windows looking out on other tiny windows and other two-tone cookie-cutter houses. So he moved from the cruddy townhouse-rowed subdivision street called Blythe to the awesome Ardsley Street in the section of Staten Island called Richmondtown.

  He could afford it. He could afford practically anything if he set his mind to it. And Roy Ageloff was very ambitious when it came to setting his nimble and unrestrained mind.

  This was going to be Hanover Sterling’s first full year of operation. He had a sweet deal. He was pulling in 45 percent of the trading profits. That amounted to a million or so bucks a year, and he declared every penny of it to the IRS. Roy Ageloff could make big-time money legally, for that was the beauty of Wall Street, which had jobs for the up-and-comers and the silver-spoon crowd alike. Roy was no silver-spoon baby. He was a guy from a lower middle-class family. And now he had arrived. Hanover had arrived.

  Every morning he drove out of the garage of his beautiful, big, wide, brick, massively windowed new house at 163 Ardsley Street, and drove in one of his gorgeous new cars over to Clarke and the expressway and the bridge to the city. He came in to the office whenever he wanted. He was boss. Not boss on paper, but the real boss. The paper boss, Lowell Schatzer, had a little office near the front entrance. Roy had the corner office, with a view looking northeast over the bridges, over the Fulton Fish Market, toward Queens and the majestic Midtown skyline.

  What a house it was. It had to be big. People, in his world, judged you on what you owned, how you dressed, how you lived. His new house was twice the size of both halves of the house on Blythe. It had huge vaultlike windows etched in a fine Beaux Arts pattern. There was a gazebo to the side of the house. Out front, cast-iron street lamps. Big ones with hanging white globes, five for each lamp, the kind that public buildings used to have in the days when public buildings were built to impress the public. Roy’s house wasn’t a mansion but rather an institution in only the best sense of the word. It could have been a small-town city hall or maybe a library or courthouse somewhere, in a town with a historic preservation movement.

  What a transition for a kid from Brooklyn. He grew up there. Was proud of it. He was from Midwood, the Brooklyn of tough Jews, and Roy was a tough Jew. His house in Midwood, a two-family house—the Ageloffs had the left side—was shabby and had TV antennas on the top and was a short block north of Kings Highway, the main shopping street. Through the 1970s, one of the borough’s last hangouts for tough Jews was still going strong on Kings Highway, out by the D-train station. It was the last of the old Jewish cafeterias in Brooklyn, Dubrow’s. The Irish had bars, the Italians had social clubs, while the Jews had candy stores and cafeterias. But the neighborhood got olde
r, the tough Jews died or moved to Florida, just as Roy’s parents did. The cafeteria closed. All the old Jewish cafeterias in the city closed, quietly, unnoticed and unmourned, by the mid-1980s. The last, another Dubrow’s, shut in 1985. It was on Seventh Avenue, in the Garment District, where there were still a few aging, tough Jews.

  Roy might have gone into the garment business fifty years before. But the barriers had come down. Democracy had come to Wall Street. Working-class guys were in the front office. They were manning trading desks and working on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and selling people terrific little stocks, penny stocks. You didn’t need an MBA to succeed in penny stocks or squatting at a trading desk or screaming out orders on the exchange floor. What you needed were the kind of inborn characteristics that come from being on the street. The ability to talk, to persuade, and maybe to lead. Roy had all that. He was a powerhouse broker. Okay, not educated. He failed the Series 7 test—that’s the one all the brokers had to take, testing you on dividend yields and ethics and other crap—twice before he passed. But everybody on Wall Street knew that the Series 7 didn’t measure what you really needed to become a broker—which was in your guts as much as it was in your head.

  Roy got his start on Wall Street at an outfit that employed guys like him—guys who could sell. Guys who knew the gambling mentality because investors were really gamblers at heart, so many of them. He got his training at a place called J. T Moran & Company. When Roy knew him, in 1987 and 1988, John T Moran was a young guy, in his early thirties. He had just started the firm a year before. He had a respectable background. He was a man of moderation—a nonsmoker.