Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (2 page)

Louis hated thinking about his Guys even more than he hated thinking about the future. The past was great. The present sucked,
and the future was the present that was going to happen tomorrow. Beyond that—he didn’t know and he didn’t give a shit. He
didn’t try to influence it. No point in that. What would happen would happen.

Louis didn’t like to plan more than a week or two in advance. A month was his limit. He had no savings, no will, no insurance
of any kind. He had no credit cards. He owned no stocks, even though the country was going nuts over stocks, even though he
had sold millions of dollars in stocks, much of them before he was old enough to sit in a bar and order a drink.

Louis sat in bars and ordered drinks long before he was old enough to sit in bars and order drinks. For years, Louis had not
followed bullshit rules and dumb laws, such as the ones that say you have to pay taxes. He would throw away the notices from
the IRS as soon as they arrived. He did not pay parking tickets or traffic tickets. He did not serve on jury duty, vote, or
register for the draft.

He did not like restrictions on his freedom of any kind.

He hated moral codes, the racket known as the Church and the fraud known as religion. He had no patience for the misconception
known as the conscience. Louis lived a free life, not influenced by such asinine fables.

Louis Pasciuto was a stockbroker. He was twenty-five years old.

For most of his life, and all of his seven years in the literal and spiritual vicinity of Wall Street, Louis had lived as
if the rules of society did not exist. But now the rules were crashing down on him, just as surely as if the bunk above him
had broken loose from the wall and the Chinese guy had come falling down on his chest.

Louis was a wiry five feet eight inches tall. His prematurely balding head was shaved, his eyes were mahogany-brown, and his
lips were curled in a sardonic sneer. He had a lot to sneer about lately. Although Louis believed deeply in breaking every
law that stood in the way of a free life, he did not feel any camaraderie with his fellow alleged lawbreakers, the inhabitants
of the Hudson County Correctional Center. The other inmates, also accused and/or convicted of various violations of the law,
were, in his opinion, scum. Lowlifes. They were muggers, dope addicts, check-kiters, and shoplifters rounded up by law enforcement
personnel in the lower-rent districts of northern New Jersey. They were virtually all members of various ethnic minority groups
that did not make Louis feel especially warm and fuzzy.

During the day, Louis kept to himself and tried to read, but conditions were not conducive. There were two open tiers of cells
facing each other, with a kind of open pit in the center. A TV was always blaring. There were frequent fights about programming
selections on the TV, fights of the kind that might break out between siblings with differing tastes, if the siblings were
raging maniacs. There was a great deal of noise all the time. The place smelled of disinfectant and perspiration.

It was a familiar odor. He had been here before.

He could do the time, even with the stink and the bad, cheap food and the uniforms and rules that were almost as bad as at
St. Joseph-by-the-Sea, the parochial high school that tried unsuccessfully to mold his character. He could withstand prison
if he didn’t have to think.

When his incarceration began two weeks earlier, he tried to keep his mind on safe ground. Friends and family. That didn’t
work. He soon learned that there were no safe thinking-subjects in prison. Friends? Shit friends who didn’t care if he lived
or died. Family? What kind of family didn’t visit? Why wasn’t anyone taking his calls anymore? Try as he may, he couldn’t
keep his mind off Stefanie and Anthony, their two-year-old.

Stefanie took his call once. She was okay. The baby was okay. But she was struggling. Nobody was sending her money. One of
his so-called friends, Armando, had promised to give her money. She waited, with the baby, at a shopping mall on Staten Island.
He stood her up and she waited for an hour like a teenager on a first date at some fucking cineplex.

Now Stefanie wasn’t taking his calls anymore.

Charlie was pissed.

The FBI was pissed.

The FBI had knocked on his door just before dawn on October 20, 1999. Louis and Stefanie were asleep in their two-bedroom
apartment. They lived in a townhouse attached to other townhouses, lined up with neat geometry in a former rural community
called Eltingville, in the southern tier of the New York City borough of Staten Island. Unlike the older, more crowded neighborhoods
to the north, crime was low on the south shore of Staten Island. Women could walk the street at night without being bothered.
People knew each other. Strangers, be they burglars or FBI men, were conspicuous.

Stefanie was the first to wake from the FBI knocks. She sat up and cursed. More strangers at the door. Over the past few months
there had been other predawn knocks. There were a lot of visits by people who didn’t like Louis, or wanted something from
him. Once, when she wasn’t there, the visitors had come by car and tried to smash it through the front door of the garage.
She had gotten used to that kind of thing, but not used to it so much that she was willing to continue living with Louis.
They were on again, off again, on the rocks.

The FBI men politely removed Louis’s computer and gave him time to dress in a sweatshirt and jeans. Then he was escorted in
a van directly to the FBI field office at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan.

At that point, Louis had to pick between two distasteful alternatives. He chose swiftly.

Having made that choice, the only reasonable choice under the circumstances, Louis called Charlie. Charlie expected his call.
Charlie was always available on the phone. That was why he paid Charlie. Charlie was a problem-solver. Of course, the other
reason he paid Charlie was that Charlie was a problem-creator as well.

Louis grinned as the FBI tape recorder began humming and Charlie began screaming.

Taping Charlie as he screamed was a labor of love. Charlie loved to scream. When Louis was arrested, the idea of not hearing
Charlie scream, of being in a position to not see Charlie’s phone number in his pager, gave him a feeling of serenity.

His hatred of Charlie was combined with another emotion. Fear. After a few days fear overcame hate and he stopped cooperating.
So his bond was revoked and he was transported to the HCCC, where federal defendants awaiting trial were housed when the Metropolitan
Correctional Center was filled up. Or at least that was the explanation. Louis theorized that he was sent to the HCCC, and
not the allegedly less unpleasant MCC, because the federal government, for a growing list of reasons, did not like him.

The feds kept him in HCCC, he theorized, because Louis knew about the Guys. He knew why they were on Wall Street. He knew
their names. He knew the scams that had fed them.

So there he was, three weeks after his arrest, two weeks after he was sent to the HCCC, lying on his bunk and listening to
the snores and thinking about the Guys. The Guys could get him out of there. Charlie was his Guy, but there were plenty of
others who had come into his life over the years. Ralph. Phil. Sonny. Frank. John. John. Two Johns—the Turk and the Irishman.
Elmo. There were so many Guys, and they were so different in age, appearance, and ostensible socioeconomic strata. Carmine
was a fruit man. Sonny was a media icon long before Guys became media icons. Phil was educated and Frank wore a mink jacket.
Ralph was from Pennsylvania. Whoever they were, it was always first names and nicknames. Cigar. Dogs. Fat Man. As if they
were schoolkids. And they traveled in gangs, like schoolkids and prisoners. Gangs of fat, stupid, violent, middle-aged men.
Not
Goodfellas
. Not
The Godfather
. At times they seemed to Louis to be a kind of weird amalgam:
The Sunshine Boys
meets
The Warriors
.

To the Guys, Louis was a piggy bank they would crack open, literally if need be, when necessary to get money. Louis would
fill his piggy bank with other people’s money. When he had the money it always seemed to go somewhere, and quickly. Most of
it went to his debts, because Louis gambled and was the most inept gambler since Staten Island was settled in 1670-something.

A lot of it went to Charlie, but never enough.

All he needed were a few more scores. All he had to do was get out. Maybe he could give the FBI some Guys, and get out.

The Chinese guy stopped snoring, and for just a little while he was doing what he loved. Stealing.

Louis went to Arizona to steal from Joe Welch just a couple of months before he was arrested. He went to steal but not to
rob. There is a difference. A robber uses a gun. Louis never used a gun when he stole. He didn’t have to.

Joe Welch lived in northeast Tucson, on a side road off a side road off a side road. A dirt road. Since this was the desert
Southwest, the street where he lived had a weird-sounding name—Tonolea Trail. When Louis heard it he thought he had misunderstood.
Tana-what? Tana-lay? As in fuck? Louis hated the Southwest. He hated the desert. He hated dirt roads. He hated dirt. Period.
He liked clean things, objects and places that were tidy and familiar, and people whose reactions were predictable. Large,
clean apartments. Old men.

Joe Welch was an old man. Old men liked Louis and he got along with them, joked with them, cursed at them, let them curse
at him. Knew what made them tick. You had to have that kind of knowledge, that kind of rapport, if you were going to steal
from old men who had a lot of money—the only old men worth knowing.

Louis hated the desert but he loved the people of Arizona, as long as they lived where the cacti outnumbered the people. Phoenix
was bad. Tucson was small enough to be good. Small towns, ranchers—they were the best. He loved rural America. Their young
men and even their professionals were fine. His kind of people. But the World War II generation was, for Louis, truly the
Greatest Generation. And when they died—well, that could be awesome. It was so easy, so utterly cool, to steal from the dead.
He had done it before, and he hoped, and prayed, even though he was an atheist, that he would do it again.

Soon Joe Welch would die. But Louis didn’t know that as he arrived at Tucson International Airport and waited for Joe Welch
to pick him up. Most clients wouldn’t have picked up their brokers at the airport, but Louis and Joe had a special rapport.
They were friends, almost. Father and son, or grandson, almost.

Joe Welch was eighty-five years old. He had a $10 million account at Smith Barney. Louis wanted all of it.

Louis knew the financial needs of men that age—particularly men old enough to die soon. He knew what kind of investments would
meet their special requirements. He had plenty of experience.

By the time he met Joe Welch in the summer of 1999, Louis had been a broker for the greater part of seven years and had worked
at seventeen brokerage houses. The bull market had been constant background noise for most of his life. It had begun when
Louis was in grade school. He never knew a bear market. And since he rarely put his clients’ money in anything resembling
an investment, he never really knew the bull market either. But he knew how to sell stocks. When it came to selling stocks,
no one was better.

He knew precisely the kind of stocks to sell to Joe Welch and the other persons who had the misfortune to be clients of United
Capital Consulting Corporation. Certificates of deposit, mutual funds, and other easily liquidated, conservative investments
were not for them. Louis preferred moneymaking opportunities that would appeal to the youthful zest in even the most wizened
old fart.

Walt Disney Company, for instance. Great company. Louis had designed a superb trading strategy for Welch, and his other clients,
involving that particular stock. They were not aware of this strategy, though Louis was such a terrific salesman that he probably
could have sold them on it anyway. What he did was simple: He took their money. That was it. How much more superb could you
get?

Louis applied that same straightforward if not honest approach to every aspect of his brief career as United Capital’s chief
executive officer and sole employee. For example, every small brokerage firm must have a larger firm to handle client accounts.
So Louis informed his clients that United Capital’s accounts were in the custody of a perfectly respectable corporation called
Penson Financial Services. But instead of actually contacting Penson and opening the accounts, which would have presented
problems since Louis was not actually buying stock for his clients, Louis just went ahead and made copies of Penson’s forms
and made believe he was dealing with Penson. So the nonexistent Disney shares were put in nonexistent Penson accounts.

He had other great things for his clients. The hot investment vehicle of the 1990s was high on his list—initial public offerings,
or IPOs, when companies sell stock to the public for the first time. The public loved IPOs. IPO investors would buy the shares,
and the shares would turn into something better than gold. It was in all the papers. Everybody was talking about IPOs. The
blabbermouths on CNBC were constantly hyping them.

So Louis had a fine IPO at United Capital. He sold Welch and other clients shares in the IPO of “Goldman Sacks.” Great name.
Not Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that was actually going public. Louis changed the spelling of the name. He figured
that maybe, if he ever got caught, using a phony name somehow would make it less serious.

The Goldman Sacks IPO was Joe Welch’s first investment at United Capital. Then came the Disney “shares.” Welch sent a $48,000
check, by Federal Express priority-one overnight delivery, directly to Louis’s “corporate headquarters” in Eltingville.

Joe Welch’s checks came often, which made him a terrific client. In the weeks before the visit to Tucson, Louis had called
Joe Welch with other opportunities as they arose. Trading situations, for instance. If a stock traded at a certain price.
Louis said he could “buy” the stock for a few bucks less than its price in the market. Then he would “sell” the stock. Instant
“profits” for Joe Welch—instant cash for Louis, who would follow the standard procedure of taking Welch’s money and keeping
it.