Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street Page 7

  Roy wanted people producing and he wanted to keep their spirits up—and in check. Even though he had never spent a day in a school like Sea, he seemed to have an instinctive knack for managing kids from parochial schools.

  “Everybody took lunch at the same time. Literally the whole firm was going downstairs. You took lunch from twelve to one. Roy better not find you eating lunch after one o’clock, or he’d rip your head off. He used to throw it out. He’d throw out people’s breakfasts too. He used to come to the desk, see someone eating breakfast after eight o’clock, used to take the fucking bagel out of his mouth, throw it in the garbage. And say, ‘Before seven-thirty. Otherwise, don’t eat.’ Later on I treated my cold-callers like that. I used to throw their lunches out. Or not give them lunch. I got a lot of my ways from him.”

  Roy imbued Hanover with a corporate culture, a mind-set that was infectious. It was a tough place to work. A hard place to work. A hard place, with hard people.

  A Guy named Fat George used to come up to Hanover and yell at Roy now and then. Roy would close the door, roll down the blinds, and you could hear the yelling. Muffled screaming. It was a kind of angry screaming, sort of the way people yell when they are being screwed by a car dealer and the manager isn’t able to do anything to make it better and the customer has lost it, and is ready to march off to the attorney general. That kind of screaming. “He’d always be yelling at Roy, ‘WHAT THE FUCK!’ ‘THIS IS WHAT YOU MAKE THE KIDS DO!’ ‘THIS IS FUCKING NUTS!’ ‘IT’S LIKE A FUCKING HOODLUM AREA HERE!’” And Roy would take it. You could always hear Fat George through the closed glass doors but you could never hear Roy yelling back. “When you shut the blinds you always knew there were gangsters there,” said Louis.

  There were the rumors that Roy had people behind him. Guys. That a Guy named Allie Shades—Alphonse Malagone, the Genovese family skipper from the Fulton Fish Market a few blocks away—was the power behind Hanover.

  But they were only rumors and Louis didn’t give a shit about rumors. If there were really Guys behind the scenes at Hanover, he would have to see them with his own two eyes if he was going to believe it.

  And even if it was true, so what?

  part two

  FUCK-YOU MONEY

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Chris Wolf had to get his safe back. Someone had taken it and it had to be returned. If the safe was not returned, someone was going to get shot. It didn’t matter how many people were around. Black Dom and the rest of them were going to use those machine guns.

  The trouble began at the due dilly the night before. If the due dilly hadn’t been a fiasco, they wouldn’t have stolen the safe and—well, it was a mess, no question. Louis had seen his share of messes. Had caused some. But the mess that began at the due dilly party for Porter McLeod was a mess to end all messes.

  Due dillies were always fun. This one was for a company called Porter McLeod National Retail Inc., which was about to go public in July 1993, using Hanover as the underwriter. Louis, who spent many hours describing its virtues to potential investors, hadn’t the slightest recollection, some years later, as to what the company did or even what industry it was in. In fact, Porter McLeod performed a function vital to American retailers. The company was a general contractor, based in Denver, that provided construction services mainly for national retail firms—building and renovating stores throughout the country. Without outfits like Porter McLeod, stores wouldn’t open and, hell, the whole economy could grind to a halt. It was an easy sell. Not that what Porter McLeod did, or if it did anything, mattered one bit. What mattered was that Louis made money from it, and that Lawrence Taylor was at the due dilly.

  A former star linebacker with the New York Giants, Lawrence Taylor was a regular at Hanover in the spring of ’93. An IPO for his company, All-Pro, was underwritten by Hanover, so he was a frequent visitor to 88 Pine, meeting often with Roy, who was the big Pied Piper for deals at Hanover Sterling. It was always a treat to see the beefy, fireplug-necked Taylor. The kids at Hanover were devoted sports fans and Louis was genuinely starstruck. Hanging out with Lawrence Taylor was one of the best things about working at Hanover Sterling. Right up there with the money and the due dillies.

  Due dillies are enshrined in the securities laws. But like all Wall Street concepts, particularly the ones required by the securities laws, “due diligence” had a special meaning at Hanover Sterling, and was a lot more fun than the Wall Street way of doing things.

  When a company is preparing to sell its stock to the public, it has to do so, except in the smallest cases, through an underwriter. That’s a fancy name for an investment bank, which is a fancy name for a brokerage house that raises money for companies by selling their stock. The underwriter is subject to all kinds of awful lawsuits unless it “had, after reasonable investigation, reasonable ground to believe and did believe” that there was nothing serious missing from the registration statement. That is the law of the land—so decrees the Securities Act of 1933.

  At Hanover, a due dilly meant only one thing—party time!

  “You heard ‘due dilly,’ and it would be like, ‘Yeahhhhhhh!’ Due dillies were a fucking bash. You went to a due diligence to meet the people who owned the company, and they were supposed to explain to you about the company, tell you what was going on. But that never happened. We’d never do it in an office where a couple of people from the company would make a presentation. It was either in a boat, in Trump Tower, or in Atlantic City. It was always like a huge thing. Roy would have the company pay for it. We weren’t celebrating that we were taking a company public, we were celebrating that we were going to make fucking loot,” said Louis.

  The Porter McLeod due dilly was on a yacht that could barely squeeze into the boat basin at Battery Park City. It was about thirty yards long, with three decks, a dance floor with a live band, two bars, girls nobody had ever seen before, and bedrooms for the girls if the due dilly had lasted long enough. Great food for everybody. The food and the girls were always terrific at due dillies.

  After a short speech from Roy, which pumped everybody up the way it always did, the party began, the dance music echoing off the empty Hudson River piers. The boat went up-river at a leisurely pace. It wasn’t going anywhere in particular. Just another cruise for another brokerage house. The party was on for about an hour and a half, just started warming up, when Chris Wolf decided to have some fun.

  Louis was hanging out at the stern. Music was blaring from the dance floor.

  “They’re smoking joints on the back of the boat, and this kid Tony was sitting on the railing of the boat,” said Louis. “Chris Wolf and this kid John Claudino ran up behind him and flung him off the boat. So he’s down in the water.

  “As soon as they threw the kid off the boat, everybody ran off the deck. We all went inside. It was like, ‘Holy shit.’ I mean, he flung the kid off the boat, really flung him. He was in the water awhile. They threw the life saver to him, but they couldn’t get him in. They didn’t want to bring the boat to him. It wasn’t a normal boat. You’re not going to bring a ninety-foot boat close to somebody. They’d run him over. The captain was turning around in the water. The Coast Guard came and pulled him out. It was a fucking mess.

  “When we got back to the dock, forget about it. Coast Guard, fire department, ambulances, police. People ran off the boat. It was ridiculous.”

  Lawrence Taylor was hustled away. Louis read in the paper the next day that he wasn’t in New York at all that night, but was someplace out of town. It didn’t matter. Nobody was talking. No repercussions. No lawsuits. No complaints. The cops tried questioning people, but they didn’t get anywhere. The Hanover kids took care of things themselves.

  Later that night, Tony’s friends tracked down Chris Wolf on lower Broadway.

  “I heard they pulled up in a limousine. Chris was walking,” says Louis. “One of Tony’s friends throws him through a plate-glass window, jumped back in the limo, and pulled away. Chris had a scar across his face for five yea
rs after that. He had to get plastic surgery. That scar went from the top of his head all the way down to the bottom of his chin.”

  At about the time Chris was getting tossed through that window, Louis was also on lower Broadway, bonding with Roy. It was a rare experience, and he savored it.

  “When I left the dock, everybody scattered all over the place,” said Louis. “People were going here, people were going there, and for some reason Roy just let me go in the limo with him. We took a ride, and we got out and went to Morgan Williams, a bar on Broadway. That’s when I found out he used to do mad ’ludes. He handed me a handful of quaaludes and made me hold them for him. That was the first time I really interacted with Roy, went drinking and partying with him. After that the relationship became more, like, not so business. Now he knew me. Now he remembered.”

  Throwing Chris through the plate-glass window might have evened the score for most people. But the situation escalated the following day. Louis got in late—seven-thirty. But instead of Roy yelling at him or locking him out, he was sitting in Chris’s office. He appeared stressed out. Chris was there, his face covered with bandages and stitches. “I just wandered by the office nonchalantly and Roy says, ‘Get me a coffee,’ ” Louis recalled. He had never seen Roy look so upset before, not even after he had been with Fat George for three hours.

  “Usually Hanover Sterling at seven-thirty is like twelve o’clock in the afternoon, packed. Instead it was just me, Benny and four other guys. Benny says to me, ‘They stole Chris’s safe.’ He’s telling me, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here!’ What happened was—and this was bad—whoever Tony’s friends were, they went up and they took Chris Wolf’s safe out of his office. Chris would keep money and his client book and other shit in there. Supposedly he had four, five hundred thousand dollars in the safe,” said Louis.

  Louis got the coffee for Roy, who closed the door. Louis was sitting back at his desk for about five minutes when about a half dozen Guys came walking into the boardroom toward Chris’s office. They were carrying submachine guns—Tech Nines. They went in Chris’s office and closed the door.

  “They were standing there waiting for their safe. I heard later that Chris told Roy that he’d blow up the place if he didn’t get his safe back. Black Dom Dionisio was up there, and so was Rico Locascio. They were all up there with him—Dom, Rico, John Claudino, Joe Temperino. All the boys. Chris figured Roy probably knew who took the safe. He didn’t want to know who it was. He just wanted to get it back,” said Louis.

  Black Dom and Rico were both hooked up with a crew in the Colombo family. Black Dom was a nephew of Wild Bill Cutolo, a Colombo skipper. Louis had heard about Dom. What he didn’t know then, what he only found out later, was that even though Dom and Rico were there for Chris Wolf, they weren’t there for Chris the way Tony’s friends had been there for Tony.

  It wasn’t friendship. It was the same for Chris’s crew, his cold-callers. It wasn’t friendship for them either. They made money with Chris. Roy could yell at them and fine them and push them around. Somebody could toss Chris through a window. That was okay, no problem. But stealing Chris’s safe was out of line.

  “Chris Wolf had a crew of psycho kids from Brooklyn. They were just street kids, street-thug kids who came up to Hanover to work. They were nuts. They would have wrestling matches every night after work. From five to six o’clock they would have a wrestling match in Chris’s office, between two people in the office. They all bet on it, who would win. Joe Di-Bella and Chris, they would bet five, ten grand on who would win. Then they would take everybody out for drinks,” said Louis.

  Louis just sat there and read one of the pitches he found on a table. He read it again and again. He looked up long enough to see Bobby Catoggio come by. The door opened and Bobby was pulled in. The door closed again. Louis knew Roy and Bobby were in trouble, but he did the right thing. He minded his own business.

  After a while Louis started working the phones—after all, that’s what it was all about. Working the phones, making money. Nothing he could do to help Roy. Not with Rico and Black Dom there. Rico and Black Dom were muscle. The bad-news dudes. They said Black Dom was part black. But nobody made too big a deal of it. Some of the boys called him “Nigger Dom,” but never to his face. Not to the face of a guy who was six-foot-six of solid muscle.

  So Louis did his job and didn’t look up and minded his own business. And then—it ended. The guys with the submachine guns left. He looked up—it must have been around lunchtime—and the crisis was over. Sometime later he found out that the safe had been returned.

  If Roy was close to Guys, why didn’t he call in his Guys to deal with Black Dom and the rest? Was there a reason not to have a Guy go to bat for you? Louis thought about that afterward. But it was none of his business.

  The boat-toss/glass-throw/safe-stealing incident was forgotten. Everybody went back to work. It was no big deal. Nobody lost any money. That was the most important thing. That was the moral of the story. Money meant you could do anything. Throw people off boats. Throw people through plate-glass windows. Money was more than power. It was a way of life. It was life itself.

  The chop house kids were earning a special kind of money. Fuck-you money. It was another concept Louis picked up from Roy and Chris, as they both used the phrase on occasion.

  Outside of the chop houses, the term simply meant a sum of money so large that you could tell people—your boss, for example—“fuck you.” But it was “fuck you” as in saying to the boss, “Fuck you, I have so much money I don’t need you anymore.” That’s not quite what “fuck-you money” meant in the chop houses. It’s meaning was in the realm of giving, not receiving. “It would be like, ‘Here’s a lot of money. Fuck you. You’ll do anything for money,’” said Louis.

  Chris gave a demonstration of fuck-you money one winter at Hunter Mountain. That’s a ski area that was popular with the chop house kids, kind of a Hamptons with snow, and it was in the Catskill Mountains, over a hundred miles from New York.

  “There was this kid Mario,” said Louis. “Chris paid the kid forty grand to walk back from Hunter Mountain. He was in the Marines or something. So it was like, fuck-you money. It was for Chris. ‘Here’s forty grand. Walk back. Fuck you. I can make you do anything I want for a little money. Fuck you.’”

  Until Hanover, Louis had lived his life saying “fuck you” without much to show for it, including consequences. Hanover Sterling taught him that he could make a ton of money, not have consequences—and still say “fuck you.”

  At Hanover, working for the best brokers in the shop, Louis was a star pupil. He was an amazing listener. He picked up from the brokers the best of their techniques and made them his own.

  Great as they were, Chris and Rocco and Roy and the rest of the chop house brokers couldn’t have accumulated all that fuck-you money without a lot of help.

  Nobody helped the chop house brokers more than the people who were supposed to stop them.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Massood Gilani was known to the brokers he dealt with as unfailingly professional and courteous, and always sartorially impeccable. Louis never met this lean, dapper man with a black mustache, but other brokers recalled him with affection. “I used to call him Blue Suede Shoes,” said a former chop house broker. “He was always nattily dressed. Real likable.”

  In 1993, twenty-four years after he emigrated from Iran, Gilani was fifty-four years old and could take satisfaction that he was moving, slowly but inexorably, toward fulfilling the immigrant’s version of the American dream. He was a respected professional—an accountant. In his various jobs he had always been conscientious, hardworking, and happy. By the early 1990s he had acquired a sensitive if not prestigious position: compliance examiner in the Special Investigations Unit of the National Association of Securities Dealers, the primary regulator of securities firms in the United States. He worked in the Whitehall Street offices of the NASD’s District 10, which had jurisdiction over the hundreds of brokerage fir
ms based in New York.

  Gilani was responsible for seeing to it that brokers didn’t rip off customers. He took his job seriously. He wasn’t in it for the money. Gilani was not paid “fuck you” money. Like most of the officials assigned to investigate the nation’s most sophisticated brokerage firms, he was paid considerably less than the babes who sat behind the tall desks in the chop house reception areas. In 1993 he was paid $34,800 before withholdings. In 1994 he was promoted to senior compliance examiner and his salary was increased to $38,280.

  Like most NASD examiners, even the ones in the elite Special Investigations Unit, Gilani had no Wall Street experience before joining the NASD. He had no experience as an investigator. But it didn’t take particularly strong investigative skills to see that some of the firms in District 10 stank worse than the Fulton Fish Market at high noon in July. Or that the worst of them was the one just down the street from the Fulton Market.

  Gilani’s job included investigating customer complaints. And a disproportionate share of the complaints concerned Hanover.

  In the brokerage business, there are complaints and then there are complaints. It’s not unusual for customers to blame brokers for their own bad stock picks, or for buying stocks for customers that weren’t right for them—“unsuitability” is the complaint that brokers get in such instances. That means a broker is not supposed to sell pork belly futures to an old lady about to enter a nursing home. Complaints like that can be serious, or they can be unjustified grousing by customers who are blaming their brokers for their own poor judgment.

  But then there are the complaints. Such as the ones that came from customers who opened up their statements and found stocks they didn’t order.