Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (23 page)

Greenway overlooked the bull statue at Bowling Green park. It was so close they could have stuck their heads out the windows
and spit on the bull. The kids at Greenway never did that but it would have made sense. They didn’t need the bull market to
make money. The bull market was for losers.

Greenway was like coming home, if home was a combination social club, parochial-school yard, and lunatic asylum. It was a
bit like Hanover, only without the Roy-imposed order and corporal punishment.

Louis had a huge office that looked all the way up Broadway. The offices seemed to have been thrown together at random from
IKEA and the Salvation Army Thrift Store. But that was okay. Everybody was having fun.

“It was a zoo. They would run in the water fountains downstairs. Joe Temp did a half million, pulled his pants down, ran through
the fountain. They were crazy psychopaths. There were no rules at Greenway. We came and went as we pleased. We had parties
up there, we got high. We had everything. We got a Wiffle ball bat and played Wiffle ball.”

Rocco and Chris had their own crew, about thirty-five or forty kids in all. Benny had stayed at Sovereign, and Louis went
to Greenway with about eighteen cold-callers. The crews were separated from each other, as they were at Hanover. Louis had
his own boardroom. “I didn’t like my guys associating with anybody else,” said Louis. “Cancer. That’s what I used to call
it. Other people have a different work ethic. They cause your guys to have cancer, like. It rubs off on them. These guys work
like this, your guys start to work like that. I used to train my guys my own way, according to my rules. They start seeing
other people’s rules, they get different ideas.”

Being around guys like Chris and Rocco, guys who really knew how to sell stock, was important because selling stock wasn’t
getting any easier. The public was starting to get wise to chop stocks. It was a gradual thing. People wanted to hear about
the companies. Were they legitimate? It was a concern now, and a lot of customers were wondering if the stocks they were pitched
were phonies. Clients were getting wise to big spreads (big differences between the bid and ask prices). Chop stocks had huge
spreads. They could find out that kind of stuff easily. The Internet was just beginning, but there were plenty of ways to
get quotes and corporate info. People were getting smarter. But not so smart that they weren’t going to buy stocks over the
phone.

But the change in public attitudes was gradual, and Louis and the others didn’t think about it too much. They had more important
things on their minds. Mentoring, for instance. Now that he actually had a license, Louis decided to share it with one of
the underprivileged cold-callers who was not so blessed. A kid named John was showing promise on the phone, so Louis let him
run his own book of clients as a kind of junior partner, using Louis’s name just as Louis had used Benny’s name. In a warmhearted
moment he had even cut the kid in on a deal. John borrowed $11,000 to sink into a deal involving warrants in a company called
Zanart. John was promised a share of the profits in return.

Louis had his doubts about Greenway, but the money was good. For every $100,000 in stock he sold, Louis got $25,000 in cash,
which was put in a paper bag and provided to him promptly on, usually, Tuesdays. The cash came from a guy Louis knew only
as Bobby.

“Bobby Cash Deals, I used to call him. He used to drive a Rolls-Royce and park it right in front of Greenway. Some cold-caller
would go sit in the car. Bobby would give him a hundred bucks, while Bobby came upstairs. He was old, about fifty years old.
Gray hair. Cowboy-looking guy. About six feet three inches tall. Always had a cast on his arm, for some damn reason, this
guy. And he had an associate with him, who also was named Bobby. They used to come up with the suitcase. We knew, when we
seen them walk through the door, it was payday. They were the suitcase guys. They’d come up to Greenway and bring the money.”

It was a good life, at least for Louis. But it wasn’t such a great life for Chris. His two partners were at Greenway almost
constantly. They didn’t own Greenway. They didn’t have to. They owned Chris.

They were Dom and Rico—Black Dom Dionisio and Enrico Locascio, who had come up to Hanover, armed with submachine guns, during
the safe-stealing incident. Now they kept their guns out of sight but were at Greenway almost every day.

Louis started to hear that Black Dom and Rico were always in Chris’s face, making his life miserable. There were lurid rumors.
He didn’t know whether to believe them or not. But it was clear that they were at Greenway all the time to watch their investment—Chris
Wolf.

Dom was as humongous as Louis remembered him from Hanover, and he now got to know Rico, whose snarl could melt ice cream across
the room.

Louis saw the Guys at Greenway and said hello to them and that was that. They were none of his business.

His business was making money. The money was good. But Louis wasn’t happy at Greenway despite the cash and the conviviality.
He felt tense. A little jealous, maybe. With all the big earners there, he was always going to be a small fish in a large
(and smelly) pond. It wasn’t long before Louis started to get restless.What he really wanted was his own firm, and his old
friend Marco Fiore was offering just that, more or less. Marco was opening the New York branch office of a Fort Worth-based
brokerage firm called Nationwide Securities. Benny was ditching Sovereign and going to the offices that Marco was leasing
for Nationwide at 5 Hanover Square, in the same space occupied by Hanover Sterling when it was just starting up, before moving
to 88 Pine. Hanover Square was down by the tip of Manhattan, where the streets are crooked and narrow. Lots of chop houses
were setting up shop down in the tall stone buildings that overlooked those crooked streets.

Louis and Benny, partners again, were going to run the firm. At Greenway he could never be part of the inner circle and get
the real dough. Goddamn politics. The curse of Wall Street. To overcome politics, and make the most money, you must be the
boss. He was learning that.

Louis had to be in control. It was more than just the money. He had to do things his way. He had to be in charge. At Nationwide
he could be in control. And in the same place where Roy started Hanover! It was terrific. Everybody was psyched.

Louis brought his cold-callers with him. Even John, the promising kid he had cut in on the Zanart warrant deal. Being a mentor
wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Louis felt that John didn’t work hard enough for his share of the warrant profits. He
decided to hold back some of the money. That would serve him right.

John didn’t like it. Tough.

In September 1995, Louis and a few of his cold-callers made the move to Nationwide at Hanover Square. A mover transported
his beautiful new mahogany desk and leather chair a few blocks to the new building, with its great history and even better
promise. The plan was to move to even bigger and better offices at 100 Wall Street in a couple of months. And 100 Wall was
just around the corner from 88 Pine, where Louis got his start at Hanover. They were in the footsteps of greatness. And the
name—Nationwide—sounded so patriotic.

Everything was terrific as Louis got his stuff moved into his new office, even though John was still ragging on him for the
money. Blow me, Louis told him. But John kept it up.

“He kept on asking for it, asking for it, but I wasn’t giving it to him,” said Louis. “I says, ‘You’re not getting it.’ And
he says, ‘You know what? I’m going to tell my cousin.’ And I go, ‘I don’t give a fuck. Tell your cousin. Tell him to come
see me.’”

A GUY LIKE ME

“I walk into my office at Nationwide, late in the morning. Nobody was there, because we were just moving in. There’s this
guy in my office. Tan guy. He’s sitting at my desk, my chair. I walked in.

“‘Do you know who I am?’

“‘No.’

“‘I’m Charlie. I’m John’s cousin.’

“‘Okay.’

“‘Sit down.’

“Now I’m a little scared. I’m kind of shaken up. I don’t know what’s going to happen.

“‘You owe my cousin some money.’

“I says, ‘Well, I gave him five thousand, what I thought he deserves.’

“He says, ‘It’s not about who deserves what. You made an agreement. You’re going to pay him the twenty thousand.’ He explains,
if I don’t pay the money—in a roundabout way he doesn’t say he’s going to beat my face in, he doesn’t talk like that, he says,
the $20,000 is not worth the consequences, the repercussions of not paying.

“Then I says, ‘I don’t think it’s fair for me to pay him the twenty thousand.’

“He says, ‘What do you think is fair? I’m going to be fair now.’ I say fifteen. And he says, ‘Okay, I want it tomorrow. No
later than tomorrow.’”

Charlie was burly, a little pudgy, moon-faced, about Louis’s height. He seemed to be in his late thirties. His hair was combed
straight back. He dressed nicely. But Louis couldn’t concentrate on what he was wearing at the moment, even though that was
the first thing he usually noticed about a person.

Nobody had ever talked to Louis like that before, except his father maybe, or George Donohue sometimes, or the priests at
Sea, or the cops who’d pull him over for speeding. But Louis never listened to his father, and George was a friend. Easygoing.
Charlie wasn’t easygoing. Neither were the cops, but he didn’t give a shit about the cops and the priests. He’d take the ticket
or show George’s PBA badge and not get a ticket, and keep on speeding. There was something about this guy Louis couldn’t put
his finger on, so he asked Benny, when Benny got into the office that day. “Benny says, ‘Pay him the money.’ I say, ‘Why?’
and Benny says, ‘He’s nobody to mess with, he’s going to get you if you don’t pay him the money. Pay him the money.’ I asked
Marco, he tells me the same thing—the guy is very respected, has a great reputation, pay him the money.”

But that wasn’t a good enough reason. Louis had the $15,000, it was in the stacks in his safe at home, and he wasn’t going
to pay it. He just decided to do what he usually did when people wanted money, or a stock sold, or whatever people wanted
him to do that he wasn’t going to do. He just didn’t pay it any attention.

“So now, taking lightly the subject, I avoid him. He beeps me the next day. I don’t call him. Beeps me the day after that.
I don’t call him. I decide to call like four days later. Charlie tells me, ‘Louis, you think you’re going to make a fucking
jerk out of me? Meet me in Brooklyn, right now. A half hour you got.’ He gives me the address of a pizzeria on West First
and Kings Highway.

“So I go to the pizzeria. A guy there says Charlie’s at an auto body shop across the street. I get there, I get out of the
car, it’s my Mercedes four-door. I’m very head down, like puppy-dog scared, and he says, ‘Come with me.’ I didn’t want to
go, you know. But I go. He takes me downstairs to this basement-type situation, it’s all dark, and he smacks me.

“He tells me, ‘You going to make a fucking jerk out of me? You brought the money, right?’ And I don’t tell him no, because
I only brought seventy-five hundred with me, so I don’t tell him I don’t got it all, right downstairs in the basement, because
I figure if I told him I didn’t have it all, I was probably going to stay in the basement.

“I says, ‘Yeah, I got it, it’s up in the car.’ So we get up to the car, I give him the seventy-five hundred, and he says,
‘You’ve got the balls to bring me seventy-five hundred fucking dollars. You owe me fifteen thousand. Do you know who I am?
Do you have any idea?’ He says, ‘You’re not taking your car. Leave your car.’”

“Leave your car?” This guy wanted to take his car? Wanted to keep his car? Steal his car? Or hold it until he got paid? It
wasn’t clear. Louis could have told him to go fuck himself. Louis was in good shape. He could have taken on this Charlie.
Maybe. But something told him that maybe that wouldn’t be a good idea.

“‘How am I going to get home?’ He says, ‘I don’t give a fuck. Give me the keys to your car.’

“So he makes me give him the keys. I start to walk away and he makes me come back. He says, ‘I don’t want your fucking shit
in the trunk. Take it out of there.’ So I take all the car stuff out of the trunk and I give him my key and I leave my car
there. I got to get on the train.

“About twenty minutes later he beeps me. I was on the elevated train at McDonald Avenue. I had gone a few stops.

When he beeped me I was on the train. I got off the train, called him from the pay phone, and he says ‘Come back here right
now.’ I went to the opposite platform, got on the train going back, mind you with my fucking bin, a crate of oil, all my car
shit. So it takes me a half hour.

“I get back to the place and he says, ‘If you don’t come tomorrow with the other seventy-five hundred, don’t come. I’ll find
you.’ This is when he tells me, ‘You’re with me now.’ He gives me the car back and I give him the seventy-five hundred the
next day.”

“So I bring over the other seventy-five hundred and he actually takes me out to dinner that night. He played bad guy. Now
it’s good guy, because he probably sees, look at this kid, 500-series Mercedes, brought me fifteen thousand without even sweating
it. At the time I was thinking, maybe this is a good thing. I need a gangster, I’m making a hundred thousand dollars a month.
People are always trying to beat me out of what I’m owed.”

Louis met Charlie at 101, a sleek new restaurant on Fourth Avenue in Fort Hamilton, a pleasant middle-class neighborhood in
the shadow of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

“I was very impressed with this guy. We walked in. It was crowded but we sat right down. Everybody knew him. About a hundred
people come over to him while we’re eating, kissing him hello, how are you doing. Two people sent over a bottle of wine.

“With me, he was very friendly. Not saying, ‘You have no choice, you’re giving me ten thousand warrants a deal, and that’s
that.’ Very friendly and nonchalant. He tells me, ‘Sorry we had to meet on these terms. I think we could do a lot together.
How’s Wall Street treating you? Any up-and-coming deals?’ he asks me. He says, ‘I don’t want a free ride. I don’t expect nothing
for free. I want to invest money. So the deal you got coming around, count me in—I want to invest.’