Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (27 page)

“The whole lifestyle—she was just against it. I was turning into my father. ‘Be careful—you’ll wind up just like your father.’
I didn’t want to hear it. And my father would come to my house and I’d have to hear my mother telling me, ‘Don’t let him in
the house!’ What am I supposed to do? He rings the doorbell, I let him in. She didn’t like it because he would stay, go partying
and not go home. I’m not going to say no. I’m not his father. He’s my father.

“We’d go out to dinner with Stefanie and her parents on a Friday night, and then we’d leave for Atlantic City right from dinner.
It was fucking ridiculous. Nuts. Everybody thought it was okay. Nobody ever said anything. Her father never said to me, ‘What
are you doing? Why are you going to Atlantic City at eleven o’clock?’

“One time when we were in Atlantic City I snuck downstairs at like six in the morning, while Stefanie was sleeping. She woke
up. She came downstairs and she found me at the table. I was drinking. She goes, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I was down
to like three grand, from the forty thousand. And the pit boss is like, ‘Get him out of here. He’s fucking nuts.’ I had a
marker for like thirty grand.

“I went back to the room and threw up.”

Charlie liked Louis, and Louis had to admit that he was starting to like Charlie. No, he was not the kind of guy Louis would
want to hang out with under ordinary circumstances. But he didn’t mind being around the guy. And besides, having a Guy was
making more and more good solid business sense at Nationwide. That’s because Louis saw that he was going to have to deal with
gangsters whether he liked it or not.

Frank Coppa was coming up to Nationwide frequently now to get his cut from the IPOs, but mainly to be sure the brokers were
pushing Chic-Chick. Frank felt very strongly about the company. His sons were officers of Chic-Chick. Frank Junior was going
to be CEO. There was just no arguing with Frank on the subject. The company’s selling points, or lack thereof, were simply
not a topic for debate at 100 Wall Street when Frank was around.

“When he came up to Nationwide everybody was always nervous. You always had to watch what you said with him. Like he could
kid you. But then, you couldn’t kid back at all. Because then he’d be, like, annoyed. So there was no kidding with Frank.
He could bust your balls. He’d say, ‘Why don’t you wear a suit or something, you look like shit,’ and then if you even remotely
try to say it back to him, ‘You’re fat and fucking ugly,’ you’d be dead. So you just laugh. ‘Ha ha, great. . . .’ So everybody
was always nervous when he was there. ‘Frank’s in the office.’ You got to watch what you say, blah blah blah.

“‘Are you going to do it, Lou?’

“‘I’m going to do it, Frank.’”

“He’d be like that when I had to cross him out of a stock. Because he started realizing that Benny didn’t do the buying of
the stock, in the crosses. You got to get somebody to buy the stock, and I’d do that. So he started asking me:

“‘Do you have buying for my stock?’

“‘Yeah, I do, Frank.’

“‘Are you going to do it?’

“‘Yeah. Yes, I’m going to do it.’

“‘You’re sure you’re going to do it?’

“‘Yes. It’ll be done.’

“And I’d do it, like, instantaneously. I wouldn’t even wait to do it. Because I knew he’d be back there the next day looking
for his confirmation. He’d come up and look to see his tickets. Like when he wanted a stock sold, there was no getting around
it. Marco, Benny, everybody just frantically tried to get rid of his stock. It was a major fucking issue.

“‘Frank’s on the phone. Wants to sell his stock.’

“‘Arghhhhhhh.’

“He’s a very scary guy, very intimidating-looking guy. More intimidating-looking than Charlie. He’s just quiet. He don’t say
anything. He just sits there, two hundred and eighty pounds, in his mink coat.”

Frank Junior would come with his father to Nationwide at times, to tell the brokers of the great things going on at Chic-Chick
and to find out how the private placement was selling. Frank Junior was five years older than Louis, and grew up on Staten
Island in a huge house near St. Joseph-by-the-Sea. A nice guy, basically. But sometimes Frank Senior would come up to the
office with a guy who wasn’t nice at all, a mean-looking guy named Gene Lombardo. Gene was big—bigger even than Frank—and
he had a kind of craggy face that reminded Louis of the actor Tom Berenger. Alone or accompanied, Frank would meet with Benny
or Louis or their Nationwide partner Marco Fiore. Marco was now sharing an apartment with Stuttering John, and he had new
pals—the Coppas. Frank, Frank Junior, and Marco were forging a relationship.

“Marco started hanging out with Frank Junior. Like an idiot. I remember him walking around. Ooh, Frank Junior’s my friend.’
Yeah, right. They had him. Once I heard him yelling at Marco. Frank was up there with him, and Gene was there too. Gene was
taken there to really intimidate Marco. Marco opened his mouth, agreed to do some Chic-Chick, and then he couldn’t do it.
And then boom. ‘No, no, you got to do Chic-Chick.’ That was the meeting. They were yelling at him about Chic-Chick. ‘You got
to do it.’ You said you were going to do it and it’s like gold. ‘You said you were going to raise a couple of hundred thousand
for Chic-Chick. Where is it?’ We all had to do some, no matter what we thought of it.”

Marco liked the idea of being friendly with Frank Junior. Frank Junior liked it too, and so did Frank Senior. That was the
idea—friendship. Obligation. They had to sell Chic-Chick. It was a promise. A promise is a promise. People can’t go around
breaking promises. But it’s not as if they were robbing anybody, or shaking them down.

That was the way it was with Frank, in the way he dealt with Benny and Marco, and that was the way it was with Charlie, in
the way he was dealing with Louis during those first few months when he was at Nationwide. It was probably that way with Guys
since the first Guy emerged from the primordial muck. Louis was seeing this, and learning this, and understanding what it
meant and why it worked even though he wasn’t able to do anything about it. He wasn’t able to do anything about it because
it worked. He had a Guy now, and when he thought that maybe it wasn’t right, that maybe he shouldn’t have to give Charlie
money or sell that crappy chicken private placement, he wouldn’t do anything because Frank and Charlie had planted second
thoughts.

That was the whole trick to being a Guy.

It was something the movies didn’t show, when they portrayed gangsters, because it is hard to show somebody having a second
thought. Second thoughts aren’t glamorous. There are no guns involved, usually, with planting a second thought. It happens
all in the mind. It means that you do what a Guy wants because he has gotten in your head, and he has a relationship with
you. You think twice about not doing what he wants, or getting pissed and saying no.

It was a little bit like the way Louis got his clients to send him money, over the phone, without even meeting him. With his
clients, Louis’s objective was to get in their heads, to establish a relationship with them, manipulate them. Pick up a pen,
he’d say. Pick up a pen. “Don’t you want to get in my A Book?” To get people to really want to be in your A Book or to pick
up a pen, you have got to be in their heads. So now, for Louis and Benny and Marco, the Guys were in their heads, planting
the second thoughts that kept them saying yes and saying no problem.

“They didn’t come in and say, ‘You’re giving me stock and warrants. That’s it. I’m in the stir now. It’s over.’ Everybody
knew who Frank was. We knew he had the power. He could easily have come in, sat in the chair and said, ‘You’re going to give
me three thousand in cash a month, and I’m getting IPO warrants and you’re going to cross me out. I’m making fifty grand a
month off this firm.’ And we would have been like, ‘Okay.’ There would’ve been nothing to do. But he didn’t do that.

“Frank comes in as your friend. ‘Heyyy, guys. What’s going on? Let’s make some money.’ When you start to hate him you second-guess
yourself. ‘He’s all right. He’s my friend.’ They got you second-guessing. They put a second thought in your head. They almost
make themselves like they’re your girlfriend. The way Charlie used to beep me and I’m not calling him back, I used to say,
‘What, am I making this guy come or something?’ Almost like you’re married to the guy. It’s just fascinating how they get
in there, into your head.”

Louis wasn’t reading the papers much, which was just as well, because if he did, he would know that what he was seeing at
Nationwide surely had to be a figment of his imagination. There shouldn’t have been any Guys at Nationwide. They shouldn’t
have been anywhere at all. According to all the papers, Guys were on the run. They were through. John Gotti had been put in
prison for the rest of his life, and the Commission trial was also a big victory for the government. Louis didn’t read books,
so he didn’t read how the FBI was winning the war against Guys. Yet here they were, real as life, at Hanover and Sovereign
and Greenway and Brod and Vision and now Nationwide. And people were as scared of them as ever. They could do whatever they
wanted and Louis and Benny and Marco had nothing to say about it.

As he got better acquainted with Charlie, he began to learn how Charlie got to be a Guy. Louis knew from Charlie’s “war stories”
that he had been a “shooter” a few years before, when a Colombo family skipper named Victor Orena and his pals were trying
to take over the family, then headed by the imprisoned Carmine Persico and his son Alphonse. Charlie used to report to a skipper
named Lenny Dello, who was aligned with Orena. Once he pulled open his shirt and showed Louis a scar on his chest—a bullet
scar, Charlie said. A war wound. Charlie kept the jacket with the bullet hole, a bomber jacket, and would talk about how a
veterinarian extracted the bullet from his chest.

Charlie was lucky.
Daily News
columnist Jerry Capeci did a body count when the smoke cleared and found that twelve people died in the Orena-Persico conflict,
including a kid who worked in a Bensonhurst bagel shop and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Louis always counted himself lucky. Not as a gambler, but in life. Lucky that good fortune had put him in touch with the right
people. He was lucky meeting Roy, lucky meeting Stefanie, lucky meeting Benny, lucky meeting Charlie.

As the latest Nationwide deal approached, involving the IPO of a company called Thermo-Mizer, Charlie stopped hinting and
began talking about the kind of money he wanted from the deal. Without getting specific about amounts or percentages, he made
it clear he expected a bigger piece than he had gotten from Gaylord.

“I don’t know who he knew up there, or how he knew, but he knew exactly how much money I was making, and what I was making
and how I was making it. What, when, where, how. For some reason this guy knew everything. Somebody must have been telling
him. Maybe his cousin John was telling him. Then he comes to me and says, ‘I know you took down a lot more than you shared
with me on that deal. Next time that won’t happen.’”

How could Louis argue? He wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on. Charlie was earning his money. Louis and Benny were now using
Charlie to do things for them. “We sent him to a client who wouldn’t pay. Guy’s name was Michael. He was from Queens. Bought
a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Gaylord warrants and reneged. Cost me thirty thousand. Charlie went there and got the
money. I don’t know what he did, but two days later I got a check from the fucking guy. That’s all I know.”

The collection proved that Charlie could be a useful Guy to have around. They might have benefited, all of them, even more
if Charlie was “made”—initiated into full-time membership. But that wasn’t happening. Charlie was on the shelf. And as he
told it, it wasn’t because of anything wrong that he might have done—maybe being too much of a hothead, even for a Guy, or
because of any other kind of blot on his record. By his account, it was because he tried to do the right thing, and got blackballed
as a result. It happened right after the Colombo wars, which ended with Persico victorious.

“I used to ask him when are you going to get your thing, your button. I used to tell him if you get your thing, then I can
just rob everybody. I used to go like that—push the side of my nose. Meaning get straightened out. When is he going to get
straightened out. At first he didn’t tell me about it, but then as we got to be more friends he was more open about it.

“Supposedly Charlie and his friend Joe Botch, and this guy Lenny Dello, did a score. It was $300,000 or something like that.
He didn’t say what it was, but I think it was a robbery. Lenny Dello’s father was a skipper in the Colombo family, also named
Lenny, and his son Lenny Dello, Jr., was Charlie’s partner.

“They do the score. Lenny and Charlie get the money and they’re going to get Joe a piece. But Lenny wanted to give Joe only
like fifty grand. So Charlie, maybe he gets a vision of some type of morals. He told Joe he was going to split it three ways,
and he wanted to give Joe a hundred grand. So that’s what Charlie did. He gave Joe the hundred. And he had a big beef with
Lenny over that. Lenny’s father told him no, you’re going to give Joe fifty and you’re going to bring the rest here, and we’re
going to split it up. And Charlie didn’t listen to that. He gave Joe a hundred.

“So this is the story he told me. There was a big blowup with Lenny’s father, a fistfight with his son, and they shelfed him.
They were going to make him. He was going to get made, Charlie. And they shelfed him. That was it. He was banned. Lenny was
best friends with him since they were little, since they were eighteen, seventeen years old. Didn’t talk to him no more. Nothing.
To this day he hasn’t talked to him.”

That, at least, was the story as Charlie told it. As far as Louis knew, it was as much the gospel truth as the story of the
hostage situation on Long Island.