Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (28 page)

There was no question that Charlie had a lot of status, a lot of respect in Brooklyn. Louis could see that himself, as he
visited Charlie at his apartment, and hung out with him at Scores and in the bars and restaurants in Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst
where Guys could be comfortable and unwind.

Louis saw how Charlie was treated with fear and, almost, reverence. And he also saw what Charlie was like when he let his
guard down. “He could be a right guy if he wanted to be,” said Louis. “A lot of times I’d go out with him and get drunk with
him and stuff. He used to get wrecked. He used to drink martinis. He’d get an Absolut martini or a Belvedere martini, or a
Grey Goose martini, all the good vodkas. ‘In and out with the vermouth.’ And then he’d say it again, more forceful like. ‘In
and out with the vermouth.’ Like really dry. Hardly any vermouth. Almost straight vodka with an olive.”

Charlie had his quirks, as do most people. Well, maybe a bit more. Something—the prison experience, maybe—had done something
to Charlie’s method of housekeeping. Charlie believed in order. So did Louis, but Charlie took it to another level.

“We would go over to his apartment sometimes, when we were changing to go out. His apartment was immaculately clean. It was
a bullshit apartment, only a one-bedroom apartment, but it was nicely furnished. He had a nice sectional in his living room.
Nice TV. His dining room table was big, like wood. Nice. He had expensive furniture. His clothing closet was like he was still
in jail. That’s probably why—he was in jail so long he was institutionalized. Probably all he could do in jail was clean stuff.
He was a fanatic about it. Your shoes had to be off. ‘Take your shoes off!’ He acted like I was dirty. Dirty? I got a fucking
seven-hundred-dollar suit on. What ‘dirty’? I’d eat a fucking Oreo cookie and he’d literally follow me around with a Dustbuster.
‘You’re fucking eating an Oreo cookie—eat ’em outside.’ He spent too much time in a shit-hole.

“His pants were so perfectly creased it was ridiculous. Not even a bend all the way down to the cuff. We’d get into the car,
and he’d take this foam thing and brush his shoes.

“His refrigerator was a psycho refrigerator. Shit was facing front, lined up. His suits were color-coordinated in the closets,
with fucking slacks on the bottom and suits on the top, everything perfect. He had eight-hundred-dollar shoes. Snakeskin shoes.

“When we were getting ready to go he was never fucking ready. He was doing his hair. He’d spray it, because he had a bald
spot, so he’d spray it with this black shit.
Shhhhhhhhhh
. He’d go outside his house into the fucking hallway, and spray it and come back in. Never in the house. Are you kidding?
I took a shower in his house one time, and it was fucking the end of the world. Because he was like, ‘Don’t drip any fucking
water.’ I couldn’t drip water anywhere. He was annoyed when I had to take a shit in his bathroom. ‘Can you go in the pizzeria
and take a shit in there? You got to shit in my fucking toilet?’ And then he’d use that shit against me. ‘I let you shit in
my toilet, shower in my fucking bathroom.’

“Charlie used to have a lot of locks on the door, and he had one of those police locks, with the bar that went in the floor.
He used to roll up the money and keep it in this three-inch pipe, which was threaded, and screw it right into this stand-pipe
in his bedroom. It looked like part of the pipe. It was brilliant.”

It was clear that Charlie was one of the more prominent citizens of his little part of Brooklyn, the section of Kings Highway
just west of the elevated train on McDonald Avenue. To the east was Roy Ageloff’s old neighborhood—and George Donohue’s old
beat—Midwood—and to the south and west was Frank Coppa’s turf, Bensonhurst. Charlie’s neighborhood was still mostly Italian
though outsiders, Russians and Asians, were moving in. But the area still had more than its share of pizzerias. The pizzeria
at West First and Kings Highway was just down the street from Charlie’s apartment. He used an area in the back, by the kitchen,
for meetings and to take cash after Louis had made a trip to the stacks. Charlie acted as if he owned the place. He didn’t,
not that it mattered. The pizzeria was in the neighborhood. Charlie’s neighborhood. And that still meant something, even though
this was the late 1990s and Guys were supposed to be on the way out.

“I used to be there early, because Charlie used to have me meet him sometimes eight o’clock in the morning. He was up at like
six-thirty in the morning. I think he used to run or something. Every morning at nine-thirty somebody would bring him coffee.
This kid Louie. He was a retarded, a slow kid. He used to run around and do Charlie’s errands. Come in the morning with coffee,
move his car for him, for the alternate-side-of-the-street parking. ‘Move my car!’

“He’d be dressed and ready, dressed in like a full uniform, by nine o’clock in the morning. Maybe he wanted to feel like he
had a job. Sometimes he’d sleep late. He had everybody in the neighborhood doing favors for him. Everybody would say hello
to him as he’s walking down the block. He used to get his nails done on the corner. Sometimes I’d meet him while he was getting
his nails done. He had this other place he’d go for espresso, and they had a table where nobody else would sit. Every time
I went in there, nobody was sitting at his table. He used to park his car in other people’s driveways. They would just call
him on the phone when he had to move the car.

“He had four Louies in his life. There was me, the guy who owned the pizzeria, and his friend Louie owned the building that
he lived in. I remember a couple of times people were making noise in the hallway, and he says, ‘Pipe down, there!’ They go,
‘Sorry, Charlie.’”

By the time of the Thermo-Mizer deal, Charlie pulled as much weight at Nationwide as he did in his neighborhood. Everybody
was getting big money from Thermo-Mizer, and Charlie made sure he got a nice piece of the deal himself. Louis gave him thirty
thousand Thermo-Mizer warrants, which meant $60,000 in profits, once the company went public at the end of February 1996.

Shortly after the Thermo-Mizer deal came out, Charlie provided Louis with further proof that he was earning his keep and not
just robbing Louis. Somebody out there was shorting Thermo-Mizer, and it had to be stopped. If the shorting continued, the
price of the stock and warrants was going to drop. There was too much money at stake.

“Charlie and one of his goons went to go see somebody. It was a small firm—I forget the name. This was the story he told us
later: He went in, and the trader had the door locked. So Charlie was knocking on the door. Trader opened the door. Charlie
put his foot into it and the guy was scared shit. Wouldn’t open the door, and Charlie kind of like cracked him through the
door. The guy didn’t short the stock no more. Charlie’s very good. He got it done.”

The other product going out to customers, at about the same time as Thermo-Mizer, was the stock of a company called Spectratek.
It was a cash deal, which was great. But this particular cash deal came with its own Guy. Louis saw him come up to Nationwide.

“The first day he comes up there I don’t think anything about it. It’s some old man, looks like he needs a cane and a wheelchair
to get around. He’s got this huge black guy with him. So he’s in there talking with Glenn [Benussi]. But then, after he left,
Benny comes to me and says, ‘What are we getting ourselves involved in here? It’s fucking Sonny Franzese!’” Louis shrugged.
He had never heard of Sonny Franzese.

“John ‘Sonny’ Franzese was, among many other things, a chameleon,” his son, Michael Franzese, wrote in a 1992 book called
Quiting the Mob
. “He could change his colors so fast, over such a wide range of personalities, that he could have fooled any dozen psychiatrists
into thinking he was certifiable.” The description was apt, not just for Sonny but for all the leading Guys of his generation.
They were in control—in every sense of the word. They weren’t frightened by jail and they didn’t become “cooperators.”

In the 1960s, Guys like Sonny served their time, even if it meant fifty years in jail—the sentence imposed on Sonny for a
bank robbery conviction. He served it until he was paroled, and kept his mouth shut. Years later, other Guys cooperated in
the face of far less jail time.

Sonny was such a legend that his son, a self-described Colombo skipper, shimmered in his reflected glory and wrote an autobiography
in which he lingered at length on his dad’s career. Until the bank robbery conviction—his son insisted it was a frame-up—Sonny
had done it all. He had risen to skipper on the strength of sheer guts and moneymaking prowess. He had the makings of becoming
the John Gotti of his generation, had he not been nabbed for that bank robbery. He kept a low profile and, unlike Gotti, he
didn’t sneer at legitimate business. He owned a piece of the classic porn movie
Deep Throat
, and was involved in the record business. He was such a notable Guy that in 1968 he was the subject of a massive article
in the old
Life
magazine on that scary new phenomenon known as organized crime. In page after page, the article described how Sonny had beaten
a murder rap, in a lengthy trial in which his legal team had wiped up the floor with prosecutors in Queens. Guys were at their
peak. It must have been glorious—right up to the moment he was sent to prison for fifty years for that bank robbery.

By the end of his career, Sonny could have written a book himself—
When Bad Things Happen to Bad People
. Sonny’s reward for his loyalty was betrayal. He was forced to step down as a skipper. But even though treated shabbily,
he always remained a Guy, true to the code of being a Guy. After serving ten years of his fifty-year sentence, he was released
on parole in 1979. But he was sent back for two years in 1982 for accidentally running into a Gambino skipper named Carmine
Lombardozzi. It was an accident, his son insisted. Could have happened to anyone. (Don’t you just hate it when you run into
Carmine Lombardozzi?) Sonny got another eight years in prison in 1986, again for consorting with a known criminal. Ten years
for bank robbery. Ten years for violating parole. It is a thing that Guys do, even when they are past seventy.
^*

In 1996 Sonny was out of jail and became involved, somehow, in pushing the Spectratek stock. Benny was totally bummed out.

“Benny says, ‘Don’t do no Spectratek.’ But how could you not do it? It was thirty percent cash. So we did Spectratek. I didn’t
know who this Sonny was. I didn’t know about the book. I just heard Sonny was a major old-timer, a very crazy old-timer. And
I couldn’t believe that he was up in our office. I says, ‘What is he doing up here?’ I never really talked to the guy. It
was just, ‘Hello.’ I had my own Guy, so I wasn’t looking at any other gangster. I was happy with my gangster. Besides, Sonny
was just a dirty-looking old man, a broken-down old man. A broken-down valise. That’s Charlie’s words. That’s what he’d call
a washed-up wiseguy.”

A Guy organizational chart at Nationwide would have been simple and linear. Charlie’s role was limited at Nationwide to taking
Louis’s money. “Charlie didn’t have much to do with the firm, because Frank was up there,” said Louis. “The only person he
could get money from was me. He couldn’t corral anyone else, because Frank was involved, and he wasn’t going to step on Frank’s
toes. He wouldn’t dare do that.”

Family “territories” didn’t mean anything on Wall Street. Though nobody ever used terms like “open city” that used to describe
Las Vegas and Miami, Wall Street firms pretty much fit that definition, which used to describe areas not in the territory
of any particular family. The only thing that mattered on Wall Street was personal relationships—which Guy had a connection
with which broker. Somehow, Sonny had formed a relationship with Glenn Benussi and Howie Zelin. How, or why, Louis didn’t
know.

Sonny was sharing in the Thermo-Mizer warrants, but his main interest at Nationwide was in pushing the Spectratek deal. It
was his Chic-Chick. He felt very strongly about it. Louis discovered that the hard way when one of his customers tried to
sell the stock. When Louis refused, the customer “back-doored” the stock—had it transferred out of Nationwide, and then sold
it. It was the same thing that led to the beef with Black Dom. It was happening more often, and it was annoying. Clients were
learning that they could get rid of stock, when a chop house broker wouldn’t sell it, by just transferring it to another firm
and selling it there. Any fair person could see that it wasn’t Louis’s fault.

“Marco and Glenn call me in. Sonny’s not there, but his black guy is there. Marco’s telling me to buy the stock back and get
the stock sold to somebody else. I got to buy it back today? I wasn’t doing it. Suddenly this black guy comes at me out of
nowhere. He’s tremendi. Six-foot-six. Huge. Grabs me by the throat. ‘Buy it back today. You know what I’m saying?’ I’m going,
‘Arghhhhhhh.’ He’s choking the life out of me. Marco pulled him off me and I fell on the floor.”

Before long, Louis had the last laugh. Sonny simply didn’t have clout anymore. He might have been able to outsmart those Queens
prosecutors in 1967, but in 1996 Wall Street he was just another Guy in a world where there were plenty of Guys. It didn’t
matter that his kid wrote his memoirs. Sonny was washed up. Louis saw that with his own two eyes when the Thermo-Mizer deal
was completed.

“Marco started having a problem with Glenn and Howie over a lot of political crap—the Thermo-Mizer warrants, dividing up the
money from the branch office. Shit like that. Marco did most of the politics shit for us. Me and Benny just worked and raised
money. We could have given two fucks about anything except running the trading.

“The main problem was the warrants from Thermo-Mizer. Howie wanted to give Sonny some warrants off the top, and then we split
the rest. He wanted to pay their Guy off the top, while we had to pay our Guys out of our share. So it was a big problem.
Frank and Sonny had a meeting downstairs, in a restaurant across the street, and that was it. Frank won. We had discretion.
We gave out the warrants to the brokers. Howie wanted to do all that. But he got cut out. Glenn and Howie got their hundred
and twenty thousand warrants each, and that was it. Frank just took control of the whole situation.”