Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street Page 6

  George was a Brooklyn boy himself, and his family wasn’t exactly prosperous, but George did well for himself. He was proud of what he had overcome, what he had accomplished, but he didn’t boast. He served in Vietnam as a military policeman but didn’t like to talk about it. George didn’t talk much. He didn’t have to. A glance was enough. Voices weren’t raised much in the Donohue household. George had a “don’t give me any shit” glance that could sting as hard as the back of a hand. George wasn’t old-country strict but he wasn’t going to let his kids run around like skells—and they didn’t. Gender roles were unambiguous. Generational differences were not bridged. The kids weren’t pals. They were offspring. End of discussion.

  Well, not really end of discussion. George had another old-fashioned virtue: loyalty. The Donohue kids could get into trouble, even bad trouble at times, but the love was unconditional. You were part of the family. You made mistakes, you screwed up, but you could always come home. George had known misfortune in those close to him. He didn’t like to talk about it. But it showed up in the way he acted. No kid of his, no one close to him, was ever going to be without support.

  So as a teenager, Stefanie’s normal rebellion was muted. She worked. She obeyed. She had values. Her life revolved around close friends and a close family. She did normal things on summer nights. Bars. Clubs.

  STEFANIE: “I was at a bar on Bay Street, which is where a lot of kids hung out. I was at the bar with two of my friends. A friend of his, Mike, comes up to me with two of his friends and says, ‘You know my friend Lou?’ I say I don’t know him.

  “Mike says, ‘He wants to meet you.’

  “I say, ‘I don’t care.’ “‘Do you want to hang out with him?’

  “‘I don’t know.’

  “Louis was about twenty-five feet away. He looked like a skinny kid. He had long hair, punky clothes on. His pants were below his belt. He was wearing a little T-shirt. A hat down to his nose. He was with a group of kids. I knew a lot of his friends, kids he went to school with at Sea.”

  LOUIS: “I just had a mad attraction to her from the first time I saw her. It was that innocent look. Very innocent. She had blond hair—I love blondes. Tall, five-eight. And she was very, like, quiet. It was nice. To me, in my eyes she was beautiful. Like I’m very attracted to her. She was Irish. I had mainly gone with Italian girls. She went to public school. Maybe her parents didn’t have the money.

  “Usually I would hang out with the girl, go with the girl and not think about them. But with Stefanie, I was thinking about her. The next day I was, like, ‘I got to call this girl.’ When I went home I told my friend Mike Layden, I said ‘Mike, I want to make this girl my girlfriend.’ ”

  STEFANIE: “I thought he was nice and everything—cute. The next night I saw him we exchanged numbers. But then he didn’t want to go home. He said, ‘Can you drop me off at my friend Mike’s house?’ I thought it was strange, so I said, ‘Where’s Mike? Where was he tonight?’ And he says, ‘Oh, he didn’t come out.’ And I said, ‘You’re living with this friend?’

  “I thought it was strange. So he says, ‘My mother, we got into a fight, so she threw me out and I’m staying here for a couple of days.’ He gave me Mike’s number and his house number, and I gave him my number. I thought it was a little odd that he was thrown out.”

  Louis had a girlfriend with a loving family, a source of stability and limits in her life. Stefanie had a boyfriend who was a bit wild and on the edge, something that was absent in her stable and sane and loving but, maybe, slightly dull family.

  They had a normal courtship, the Italian street kid and the cloistered Irish girl. Their lives were happy. Their parents approved.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I do not like them, Sam-I-Am. I do not like Green Eggs and Ham.

  The first time he read from Green Eggs and Ham at Hanover Sterling, Louis thought it was dumb. He wasn’t mad. He was just annoyed, a little, but he accepted it. It was okay. Not much of a price to pay if he was going to make good money. He hadn’t read Dr. Seuss since he was a kid, and maybe not even then—not out loud anyway. Roy would have them read from it at the meetings they had in the morning. And you did what Roy told you to do.

  So they would read Green Eggs and Ham. They would take turns reading lines from it. That’s not the only weird shit Roy would do in the morning. Sometimes he would have one of the brokers, Benny Salmonese, “do the monkey.”

  “Benny’s a big, stocky guy—looks like a monkey,” said Louis. “So Roy would have him stand in the middle of everybody, all the hundred brokers, and act like a monkey. That’s the kind of place it was—crazy.” Crazy—but fun. Crazy—but lots of money. And that’s what mattered.

  He had never had a job he liked, never gotten up early for anybody. But yes! He could do it! He had it, he had a job that offered him what he wanted, and he was motivated. He be- longed. He could get up early. He could take the ferry and do what other people told him to do. Imagine that—somebody actually told him to do something and he didn’t rebel against it.

  In the past he did not like it, would not do what other people told him. Would not do it in his school, would not do it in his home, would not do it anywhere. But now he did it in an office, now he did it in a firm, now he did it for Roy.

  I do so like green eggs and ham!

  He loved Hanover. “Those were the best times that I can remember,” said Louis. “Every day was a great day. Roy was nothing but fun.” Sure, it was tough. He would have to drag himself out of bed very early, five, to make it to the Great Kills station of the Staten Island Rapid Transit and then the ferry and then the walk to Pine Street. And then—Green Eggs and Ham. Every morning. It was a ritual, a crazy fun ritual. Who knew why Roy did it? Nobody asked him and he wouldn’t have said if anyone had asked. Maybe it was just fucking off. Or maybe it was Roy’s way of letting them know every day that they were going to do what Roy wanted, even if that meant eating green or black or blue eggs and ham. Sure, the Green Eggs and Ham readings were kid stuff. Roy had kids of his own and the brokers were a bit like his kids too.

  Most of the brokers and cold-callers at Hanover were just out of high school like Louis. Hanover was a Staten Island outfit. Roy was from Staten Island, and so was his partner Bobby Catoggio and so was Lowell Schatzer, who was on the papers as president of Hanover Sterling. Nobody paid much attention to Lowell.

  It was a different kind of Wall Street. Spirited. “‘Buy fucking Porter!’ If you walk into Shearson Lehman, they’ll be sitting there, quiet. We were, like, yelling, ‘Yaaaaaaaaah!’ It was crazy,” said Louis. “We’d work from seven in the morning to eleven at night, nonstop. Pump those phones, man. It was awesome. Best training I ever had, there.” But this was no button-down operation. He learned that fast. “Always somebody smoking a joint downstairs. Everybody’d get stoned during lunch,” said Louis.

  Sure, Roy had to make a fist every now and then. The brokers had to be kept in line. It was like St. Joseph-by-the-Sea. Tough kids. Corporal punishment.

  “Every day, people would get beat up,” said Louis. “One kid never used to wear a shirt and tie. One day Roy broke his nose. Right at the meeting. ‘Come here.’ Crack! Punched him right in his face. Kid’s nose was all bleeding. He was crying. But Roy and Bobby ran the joint. That was it. Everybody was petrified of him. I couldn’t even go into Roy’s office without getting abused. I used to, like, stick my head in and he’d go, ‘You little Staten Island fag, get the fuck in here!’”

  But Louis didn’t mind. It was okay. Roy yelled and hit but so did his father. People in authority yelled and hit. Besides, at Hanover he never got smacked—which made Roy an improvement over his father. Wasn’t necessary. Louis didn’t need to get smacked. He didn’t give Roy shit the way he gave his father shit, and the way he gave the priests at Sea shit. Why would he? No cause for that. He was making money. He was really diligent, not “put-on-an-act” diligent.

  He started out like everybody else, making cold calls but not sel
ling anything. “Qualifying leads,” it was called. The “leads” being customers, the “qualifying” meaning that the cold-callers wanted to find out if there was any point in calling these people. You don’t sell stock to a guy who owns nothing but mutual funds, any more than you’d get on the phone and peddle ham hocks to those bearded Hassidic guys Louis saw when he drove through Borough Park. Only beginners qualified leads. Louis wasn’t a beginner for very long.

  “So on my first day I went to the kid Chris Girodet. I walked in, sat down, he handed me the leads and explained what to do. Now I still have no idea what I’m doing. He says, ‘Here’s a stack of these leads’—he’s explaining it to me. ‘Call the number, ask for this guy. If he gets on the phone, you tell him, “This is Chris Girodet from Hanover Sterling. What I’d like to do is send you out some information, and get to know what kind of investor you are.’ This is not a sales call, you tell him right away, or they would hang up the phone,” said Louis.

  It was easy. All he was doing was feeling people out, prepping them for the brokers. But Louis was paying attention. He was listening. He heard the way the brokers were pitching stock. He could do that.

  But Chris Girodet didn’t want him to do that. He just wanted Louis to qualify leads. He didn’t give a shit about schooling him, what the rest of the Street would call mentoring. Louis knew that he wasn’t going to get a Stealth and an apartment, not as a cold-caller. He had to move up.

  Fortunately, Roy took a liking to Louis. After a while he introduced him to the best broker at the firm, Chris Wolf, and one day he had Louis hang out in the office with Chris and his partner Rocco Basile. Louis listened to them pitch for an hour or two.

  Louis was in the presence of genius.

  “Man, he was good. Definitely one of the best salesmen I’ve seen. Chris is about five feet four or five. Long, pushed-back hair. Good-looking kid. Real name’s not Wolf. It’s Italian. He’s an Italian kid. Changed his name to Wolf for his Series 7 broker license. That’s the name he chose to do business. Great name, Chris Wolf. Jewish much better than Italian last name,” said Louis.

  “So I listened to him, and he had this thing that he did when he opened accounts. Somebody would say I’m not interested, blah blah blah. Chris would say, ‘Okay, take care.’ Then Chris would call them back thirty seconds later and he’d say, ‘You know, Bob, I just gave you that investment opportunity and I’d be an asshole to let you off the phone. It’s an outstanding situation. All I’m looking is for you to buy one share or a thousand shares—it don’t matter. It’s not the dollar amount. Give me a chance to show you percentage gains. Because you know and I know that if I show you forty percent on paper, I’m going to be the broker you’re going to be doing business with year-round.’ Blah blah blah. So you beat him up till he buys the stock.”

  Louis paid attention. The next morning he called one of his leads and pitched him. He used the whole spiel, and after the guy hung up he did a callback and talked about being an asshole to let him off the phone. Blah blah blah.

  It worked. The guy bought a thousand shares.

  “I get off the phone and I’m screaming, ‘A thousand shares! I opened a thousand shares!’ And then Chris Girodet came over and he’s mad I used his name and opened an account. I went to Roy. I said, ‘Roy, I opened an account. I took the pitch, I pitched the account, I opened it.’ And Roy comes out of his office and says to Chris, ‘If this kid wants to open accounts, he opens accounts. This is my protÉgÉ.’

  “He cut my tie—that’s what they do when you open your first account. They cut your tie. It’s like a traditional thing. So I’m walking around with no tie. It’s great. I opened my first account. And I opened an account every day since then.”

  At this point Louis hadn’t passed the Series 7, which is the test, administered by the National Association of Securities Dealers, or NASD, that gives brokers the solemn right to sell stocks to the public. He also wasn’t supposed to be using Chris Girodet’s name. During his pitch he guaranteed profits, which was another no-no. But at Hanover Sterling, all this fell under the category of “big fucking deal.”

  After that, Louis became a pitching fiend. Pitching to everybody. Pitching to himself in the mirror. Pitching to Stefanie, to his father.

  Louis was a natural at getting people to do things. He had been manipulating people since he was a kid. He had the knack, the instinct.

  “How are they going to say no to me? ‘Grab a pen. Grab a pen.’ I’d say it sixty times. ‘Grab a pen. Grab a pen.’ And that would be it. They would grab a pen, and then I would rip them to shreds. And then they’d be like, ‘Oh, I don’t really want any.’ I’d say, ‘Of course you don’t want any.’ Sometimes I used to fucking kill them. ‘Of course you don’t want any. You’re in Texas. You don’t know anything about the market. You probably don’t have a TV antenna down there.’”

  Selling was an interactive thing. That’s why scripts were dumb. With scripts you talked “at” people. To sell, you had to get into the other guy’s head. You had to engage in a dialogue. Talking with, not talking at. He was now in the realm of the kind of relationship that would define his life—the relationship between thief and victim.

  That was the division of the world. The takers and the taken. Louis was planting himself firmly on the side that was going to prevail.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Benny Salmonese didn’t have any problem with “doing the monkey.” It was okay with him. Most things were okay with Benny. That was the kind of guy he was. Easygoing. Benny was a jovial, hefty Brooklyn kid, half Italian and half Puerto Rican, and he had grown up on the streets of Bensonhurst. He was also hardworking. A talented salesman. A people person, in a street-kid kind of way.

  “Benny was cool. Benny had a unique style on the phone. It was like, ‘Heyyyyyyyyyy’—somebody would pick up the phone, and he’d be like ‘Heyyyyyyyyyyyyy, Ben Salmonese here. Hanover Sterling.’ We used to listen to him and he’d sit with the phone down on the desk, and he wouldn’t touch the phone. He’d just bend over and talk into it. I started doing that too. I got that from him. I didn’t pitch like him but I started doing that,” said Louis.

  Benny was Louis’s best friend at Hanover. He tried to learn from Benny just as he tried to learn from everybody. Louis was becoming something that no one could ever have dreamed that he would be—a workaholic. It was a disease that was sweeping Wall Street in the early 1990s. Not that Louis cared—he and the rest of the Hanover kids had about as much to do with the rest of Wall Street as they did with the Paris Bourse—even though Wall Street, the literal Wall Street, was so close that they could walk to it holding their breath and not get winded. The Hanover kids were a couple of blocks from the pinstriped young preppies who filled the trainee programs at J. P. Morgan and Merrill Lynch and Nomura but they were from different class backgrounds, different neighborhoods, and different schools—if they had bothered to finish school. They were an old-style New York neighborhood mix of Italians and Jews, almost all guys, while the white shoe firms were populated by suburban WASPs and out-of-towners and Jews from the East Side and a growing and increasingly slightly tolerated number of young women with short hair and tailored suits. Bedford vs. Massapequa. Yale vs. St. John’s. You could see the difference from a distance, and you could hear the difference without seeing the difference.

  What the Hanover kids had in common with the rest of the Street was a kind of all-encompassing, obsessive love of money. It was a great deal to have in common. For Louis, anyone who came in the way of that love affair would not be welcome no matter who it might be—whether it was the government or his fellow brokers. Not all of them shared his love of money and his desire to work hard for money. Not all of them paid him what he was owed. Some wanted to stiff him. Some of them, he complained to Roy, were thieves. After going through a succession of deadbeat broker bosses, Roy put him with the honest (to Louis), hardworking power broker John Lembo. But Chris and Rocco remained his pals and role models.

  Louis di
dn’t want anything to do with scrubs, guys who weren’t into the money the way he was. John Lembo, Chris Wolf, and Rocco Basile—they were top brokers, and young. There were like him. They knew their business. They were committed. “None of the rest were into it,” said Louis. “One guy they assigned me to, he didn’t want to come in on Saturdays. I wanted to come in on Saturdays and work. I couldn’t unless the broker that I was working for was there. I was always the last one there. Roy used to come back from going out, and I’d be the only one left, with like two other people.”

  The checks were announced every month. “Chris Wolf, he’s not even twenty-three at the time, getting a $112,000 check—in a month! Other kids were getting checks, twenty-year-old kids were getting checks for $20,000, $26,000 for the month. Roy used to pass out the checks and announce the names. ‘Joe Blow, $110,600!’ And everybody would be like, ‘Yaaaay, Joe!’

  “Roy used to make the whole firm go into the boardroom and hand out the checks. He’d be like, ‘Chris Girodet, $16,400. John Lembo, $21,300.’ Rocco and Chris Wolf always got the most money. ‘Rocco Basile $110,000. Chris Wolf $112,000—$40,000 in fines.’ He would be fined a lot. It would come off his commissions. Fines—coming in no tie, $5,000. Coming in late, $3,000 fine. Roy used to fine him left and right. Because he wouldn’t listen to Roy. But Roy would never fire Chris because he was a powerhouse.”

  Chris didn’t even care about the fines. “Whatever,” he’d say. That attitude, shrugging at fines the size of his father’s annual paycheck, pumped up Louis. He wanted to get $112,000 checks. He wanted to get that attitude toward money.