Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (25 page)

While your deponent was writing the summons, the defendant repeatedly threatened your deponent, for instance by saying that
he was “going to hit that scumbag with a two-by-four in his fucking face,” and that he was going to “open that motherfucker’s
head.”

Subsequently, a number of other Park Police officers arrived on the scene and attempted to place the defendant under arrest.
The defendant forcibly resisted arrest by struggling with the Park Police officers and with New York City police officers
who were attempting to assist. . . . The defendant refused to identify himself but instead claimed that his name was “John
Doe.”

One of the cops wound up with a sprained thumb. It was no big deal. And if the Canarsie pier brawl had been adjudicated in
the city’s criminal justice system, Charlie would have wound up getting a short jail term at the most, or maybe nothing at
all. But now prosecutors were making, literally, a federal case out of it. And when Charlie was released on $50,000 bond,
the U.S. Attorney’s Office insisted on “special conditions” not ordinarily found in most bail documents. Charlie, who gave
his address as Oceanside, Long Island, agreed not to enter Brooklyn or to communicate with thirty-nine individuals. The list
included just about every Guy of consequence who was allied with a Colombo family honcho named Victor Orena in his war with
another faction of the Colombos, headed by Alphonse Persico. Apart from Orena himself and various Orena relatives, the list
included “Wild Bill” Cutolo, the Colombo skipper who was Black Dom’s uncle and a close associate of Orena.

On June 8, 1992, Charlie was arrested again. He was in Brooklyn, in violation of a condition of his release. The car he was
using was stolen. FBI agents were following him at the time, and prosecutors said the FBI men suspected that Charlie and the
other people in the car were up to no good, apart from being in a car that didn’t belong to them. In fact, the FBI men were
following them because they thought the people in the car were part of a “hit team” and were going to kill somebody.

The Brooklyn incident was a troublesome issue when Charlie came up for sentencing on November 13, 1992, before U.S. District
Court Judge Reena Raggi. Charlie had been caught red-handed violating the bail conditions. He had every reason to expect Raggi
would throw the book at him. The judge had a presentence report in front of her that detailed the FBI’s concerns, including
Charlie’s alleged status as a Colombo family associate. Assistant U.S. Attorney Karen Popp told the judge that when he was
arrested in Brooklyn for the stolen car thing, “he indicated to an FBI agent that he hated me. I was a pain in the ass. And
he would like to kill me.”

Popp asked for forfeiture of the entire $50,000 bond, and a maximum ten-month sentence for the Canarsie pier brawl.

Popp believed Charlie could afford the forfeiture because “the defendant’s illegal occupation of being a part of a hit team
is very lucrative.”

James DiPietro, Charlie’s lawyer, conceded that some of the things Charlie had done weren’t particularly nice. The threat
against Popp, for instance. A very bad joke, he insisted. He conceded that his client had been in Brooklyn, where he was not
supposed to be.

DiPietro complained that seeing Charlie “lose fifty thousand dollars for the indiscretion that brings him before the court
would be a little harsh.” He went on to say that Charlie was a diabetic, but working hard despite his handicap, and helping
out his father, who wasn’t well either, in the family window business. “He’s working with his father and helping support the
family,” said the lawyer.

Popp countered by saying that the “indiscretion” in Brooklyn was preceded by tossing of guns out the window, and that towels
that could have been used as silencers were found in the car at the time.

Federal defendants are given an opportunity to personally plead their case before sentencing. Charlie addressed the judge:

“What I want to say is mostly that I’m very sorry for the incident that happened because the incident in question is just
about me having an argument with a federal officer that got out of hand and I used abusive language.

“As far as assaulting an officer, Your Honor, I mean I understand you have to go by what you read. You weren’t there. I can
only tell you, I never assaulted, picked up my hands. I was surrounded by fifteen or so police officers asking me to lay on
the floor. You’re under arrest. And I was saying, well, what am I being arrested for?

“They just kept on telling me, get on the floor. You are under arrest. I was intoxicated. I did not get on the floor. With
that, they surrounded me with German shepherd dogs that for some reason was left out of all the papers and they subdued me
to the floor.

“I have never raised my hand to an officer. I’m very sorry for this incident. It snowballed into all these things and I just
am very sorry for the incident that happened this night because it’s costing me very dearly.”

Judge Raggi accepted Charlie’s apology.

She refused to buy the “hit team” argument, and told prosecutors to put up or shut up—prosecute him if they thought he was
out to kill somebody. Even though he was caught red-handed violating the conditions of his release, Raggi forfeited just $15,000
of his $50,000 bond. She shrugged off the threat against Popp. She called it “less than funny” and said, “It does give me
pause about whether or not you understand the responsibility of every citizen to obey the law.”

Raggi didn’t pause very long. She rejected the government’s plea for a maximum ten-month sentence and sentenced Charlie to
the lowest term of incarceration allowed under the guidelines: four months in prison plus one year of supervised release.
He went to prison just after the turn of the year 1993, and served his four months.

Not long after returning to society, Charlie again found himself running afoul of the criminal justice system. The charges
were filed on Valentine’s Day, 1994. The offense: violating the terms of his supervised release. The particulars: Charlie
changed his address without telling his probation officer, lied about his address on papers that he filed with the Probation
Department, and failed to let a probation officer into his residence as required by law.

Charlie pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in prison. On June 6, 1994, Charlie surrendered to the federal prison
at White Deer, Pennsylvania, to begin serving his term of imprisonment.

Despite Judge Raggi’s bend-over-backward-till-the-vertebrae-crack leniency, that brawl at the Canarsie pier cost Charlie ten
months of his life, $15,000 from the forfeited bond, and probably a nice hunk of change in legal fees.

All this may sound a bit weird, or even sick, to the average person. But Guys aren’t average people. Guys don’t play by the
rules. They couldn’t care less about the legal consequences of their actions. It’s not crazy at all. It’s what being a Guy
is all about.

The incident in Canarsie, and its aftermath, says more about the durability of Guys than a whole shelf-full of criminology
texts, with their insistence that Guys have a role in society by providing services not otherwise available. Guys are here
because we want them, supposedly. Sure we do. We like home-invasion robberies. We want to buy worthless stocks.

“There is no reason why La Cosa Nostra should not be relegated to history within a few years,” former Attorney General Ramsey
Clark wrote in his book
Crime in America
, back in 1970. “It is on the ropes now. The question is why we have endured it so long.”

That isn’t the question at all.

“We” don’t endure Guys. Guys endure prison. It’s the price they pay for being Guys. In return they get status, power, freedom—and
the money they get from the guys who steal.

Charlie changed things.

It was like being a parent for the first time, and realizing that the bundle of joy in your bassinet is going to change your
life forever. It was the same with having a Guy in your life. Having a Guy in your life changed things forever. Before he
met Charlie, Louis didn’t know what it would be like to have a Guy like Charlie. But now that he had Charlie, now that he
had a Guy, he couldn’t imagine life without Charlie.

In the immediate afterglow of the dinner with Charlie—well, he couldn’t have felt better. He was moving up in the world. A
guy with a Guy. “It was a great dinner. I felt good about myself at the time. At the time I felt, ‘Wow, this is cool,’” said
Louis.

Life with Charlie was different but better, definitely better. Louis was convinced of that. Sure, if Louis thought real hard
about his initial interactions with Charlie, he might have seen that it was Charlie who was benefiting, at least financially—even
if what Charlie said was true about Louis needing him. And Charlie didn’t make it easy for Louis to deal with him. He was
not particularly polite. His phone manners, at times, lacked civility. Louis couldn’t con him, couldn’t put him off. That
point he raised about Louis needing him was not a debatable proposition. Charlie was not offering his services to Louis. He
was not selling himself. That wasn’t the point at all.

“It’s not like I could say, ‘Maybe I’ll just never talk to him again.’ That just wasn’t going to happen. But it’s also not
like I decided to pick up the phone and call the guy. It’s not like I called the guy in a couple of days and said, ‘Hey, Charlie,
how you doing? I made ten grand. Would you like some of it?’ He called me.”

The calls began a couple of days after their meeting in 101. It was a pleasant call, inquiring about a pending IPO. A client
call. No problem.

Louis waited a few hours before calling him back the first time he saw Charlie’s phone number on his pager. It was a mistake.

“He said, ‘What the fuck. You don’t call me. I just want to let you know, you call me back when I beep you.’ He goes, ‘I beep
you from a pay phone. I don’t want to be waiting around until you fucking call me.’”

They met again a few weeks later. Another pleasant business meeting, this time to talk about the Gaylord IPO. Charlie wanted
to invest. And like any investor, he was worried about his exposure to downside market risk. “He says ‘I’m not going to lose
money, right? How much am I going to make?’”

Louis figured Charlie could make about $30,000 if he put up $10,000. He said so. It was a good-faith guess. Not the guarantee
he had given to Stuttering John.

Louis wasn’t really sure what his relationship with Charlie was supposed to be. It wasn’t something they taught you in preparation
for the Series 7, even if he had actually studied for the test. What do you do when a Guy comes into your life? He was afraid
to ask his father. He knew what his father would say. He knew how Nick Pasciuto felt about Guys—you stay away from them.

No way he was asking George Donohue.

One thing you do, when a Guy comes into your life, is eat.

Louis had already begun to put on the pounds at Brod. It was the sedentary habits and eating out all the time, in restaurants
such as Angelo’s in Little Italy, where his favorite waiter, Bruno, always knew to bring over a plate of calamari in red sauce
over spaghetti. The skinny kid was getting a bull neck. Charlie made Louis’s bull neck widen, and helped him develop a growing
pot belly, by introducing him to the better Guy Italian restaurants in Brooklyn like Zio’s and Mezzanote in Bay Ridge.

Over meals, with Louis not having to fight too hard for the check, they were getting to know each other. Becoming, almost,
friends. “He’d talk about some of his war stories that he had, like the time that he threw a glass in some bar and smashed
the guy. Then he brought up that he did a lot of time in prison for something that was really scary. It happened out in Nassau
County.

“From what he told me, he had a guy held hostage on Long Island. He told me he went into a house, the people were supposed
to be away, they weren’t, and he had a hostage situation. He says he didn’t get out and the police arrested him right there.
He made it seem like it was a bad scene, with hostage negotiators and everything, helicopters flying over the house. After
that, whenever I watched a movie about a hostage situation, I thought about Charlie.”

Louis tried to bring his new almost-friend up to speed on how money was made on Wall Street. He explained it as simply as
he could, because Charlie did not have a particularly good grasp of the principles of finance.

“I tried to explain it to him, but he had trouble with it. Finally I say, ‘Look, you’re buying it for a penny, and you’re
selling it for two dollars.’ Like with warrants I didn’t explain to him what exactly it was, or he had an option to buy stock,
or anything like that. It was just, ‘Give me the money. I’ll give you thirty grand.’ Because there was no point. Even if I
explained it to him, he wouldn’t understand. I knew he was a simple-fucking-minded guy, but he’s definitely shrewd.”

Charlie made it clear from the start that he was going to be more than a friend, and more than a client, though Louis had
a hard time figuring out just what he would be. This much was sure, though: Charlie was going to be around—physically. He
was never going to stray too far from his money, or from his new money generator.

“When he came up to my office to see me at Nationwide, it was a surprise out of nowhere. ‘How you doing, Louie. Let me open
my account.’ That’s what he was coming up there to do. Open his account. He opened it under his girlfriend’s name. I opened
the account, and he sent a ten-thousand-dollar check. He did like he said he would. He actually bought stock on the first
deal, Gaylord. It was amazing.”

The money in Charlie’s account was set aside for two thousand shares of Gaylord common stock, and Louis was throwing in five
thousand warrants. He was going to make a bundle—$30,000 on a $10,000 investment. That is what he told Charlie. He was going
to make some good money for Charlie, his new Guy friend.

But things weren’t going as planned. Louis was annoyed at the way he and his partners were going to split up the warrants
from the Gaylord deal. So Louis decided to quit.