Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (29 page)

Frank’s price for serving as their advocate was $50,000, or just under $17,000 each for Louis, Benny, and Marco. Louis figured
it was well worth the price. It was great having control of the New York office, great winning against Sonny. But the exhilaration
was short-lived. Victory was followed by stupidity. If Louis had any faith in mankind, he would have lost it.

This was getting to be ridiculous. Hanover, then Brod, and now Nationwide experiencing the same cancer—the malignant phenomenon
known as the free market.

Some fuck-heads outside the firm were selling Nationwide’s chop stocks. And the owners of Nationwide, down in Fort Worth,
wanted to hold back commissions from the brokers to pay for the stock. It was as if they and Jay Taneja were reading the same
How to Run a Chop House
instruction manual. Louis, Benny, Marco, and their Guys had already made a bundle from trading the warrants. So they weren’t
hurting. These commissions were mainly owed to their cold-callers and brokers.

They had to act fast. The brokers were counting on that money. “Once three days go by and the brokers don’t get paid, they
get pissed off,” said Louis. “They don’t come to work, the firm goes out of business. Without the brokers, what kind of firm
have you got?”

The guys who ran these chop houses never learned. Jay Taneja didn’t learn, and now Kevin Williams, the president of Nationwide,
was going to have to learn that you just don’t treat people this way. Louis and his pals were going to have to take a trip
down to Fort Worth, to visit Kevin. They were going to face him down. It was a selfless thing. Chivalrous, almost. Going to
bat for their guys, their cold-callers. People did stuff like that out West. Louis had seen in the western movies that when
guys had a dispute, they just went out to the person who owed them money and looked them straight in the eye with a steely
gaze. Sometimes the guys in the movies brought along a gunslinger.

“These were the guys who went down to Texas: Me, Marco, Dave Lavender, Pete Restivo, Carl Banks, and Charlie. The money was
owed to all of us, and we decided to take Charlie with us so we could intimidate the guy. We’d give Charlie, whatever, ten
thousand dollars for that. So we flew down there. We got to Dallas, rented a car, drove out to Fort Worth, to the offices
down some dirt road in the middle of nowhere next to a motel.

“The cops were waiting for us. Somebody from the firm, I think it was Howie Zelin, called there to probably get on Kevin’s
good side, and told him we were coming down. The cops stayed outside while Charlie went inside with Marco. They were talking
with Kevin. Kevin started being, like, loud and boisterous, and screaming and hollering, and the cops came in and said to
Marco, ‘You guys are better off going back to New York.’ We left. We would have got arrested.

“When I saw the cops I just walked the other way. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Just hung out with Dave and
we smoked cigarettes until they came out. We didn’t want to get arrested in Texas. That would be the worst. Charlie said,
‘I don’t want to get incarcerated in Texas.’

“It was a wasted trip. We flew to Texas that day and went home that night. We drove back to the airport, got back on the plane,
and went back. The whole way back in the plane, Charlie’s telling me, ‘You fucking guys wasted my fucking time. This fucking
shit.’ I wanted to kill myself. All squeezed in there with Charlie next to me. We were flying coach. He was practically on
my lap. He wanted to sit next to me so he could torture me. I say, ‘Don’t tell me. I didn’t want you to come. Marco did.’”

It was crazy taking Charlie to Texas. What was going to happen if they had gotten paid? Would Charlie have been satisfied
with $10,000? Of course not.

But that was a moot point. After they got back from their wasted trip to Texas, Nationwide was finished. No wooden tickets
this time. Louis had already gotten paid most of what he was owed, so he didn’t care anymore. Louis knew he was in demand,
that he could get a job anywhere on the Street—his corner of the Street. Chop House Wall Street. No more illusions. No more
dreams about moving over to the Real Wall Street. Louis and Benny had given up the idea that they could ever be legitimate,
ever sell real stock to real clients. They were with Charlie and Frank and Sonny now. It wasn’t all that bad. Louis saw the
way Charlie was treated. He saw the awe Frank inspired. What was wrong with that?

By the time Louis picked up his client book and left Nationwide’s offices at 100 Wall Street, he had already gotten rid of
his big-name customers. Craig Kallman, the sports guys, the Howard Stern people were all gone. Stuttering John, now sharing
an apartment with their partner Marco Fiore, was still a good friend. But as investors these guys were more trouble than they
were worth.

Poor Johnny Mitchell, the Jets player—his son died, and they had to cash him out of his stock right away. Guys like him believed
Louis and Benny were real brokers. It was ridiculous. Sure, the signed Jets jerseys were cool. But the novelty had worn off
by the time Johnny Mitchell called to get out of his stock. Louis did it, crossing him out of the stock as a favor, because
of his kid. Benny wanted to keep the name clients but Louis was firm. That was it. No more name clients. No more clients they
couldn’t rip off, except, of course, for the Guys.

Benny required some convincing. He still had Celebrity-Nobody dreams. Not Louis. “I said, ‘You don’t understand, Ben. Win,
lose, or draw, it don’t matter. We’re the ones who should be making the money. They’re not going to send us any more money.
And if they do, we can’t beat them anyway.’ Lots of time I’m crossing them out of three, four hundred thousand dollars’ worth
of stock, while I could be crossing myself out. I used to not like it after a while. I felt like I was giving these people
free money. Enough of this referral shit. Fuck that shit.

“I loved Stuttering John. But I said, ‘We made him eighty grand one time, and that’s it. What are we going to do, keep making
him eighty grand every six months? Fuck him.’ He wants to invest ten thousand, make a few thousand. I said we shouldn’t even
invest his money, we should just send him a couple of thousand each month and make him happy. For real. Because it was just
too much of a hassle. John would call every day. ‘Where’s my money?’ I used to see him because I used to hang out with him,
and he’d ask about his ‘investments.’ After a while we just sent him back his money.

“I didn’t want to deal with Craig Kallman anymore. He used to give us the dream. ‘You’re going to have Metallica and Madonna
as clients.’ Benny would get all excited, but after a while I was like, ‘We’re going to make him two hundred thousand and
he’s going to laugh at us and not give us any clients.’ Yeah, it would be great if he could give us these clients. But that
wasn’t happening. I wanted to rob as much money as I possibly can as fast as I can, and that was it.”

At the same time that he was getting the big names out of his client book, Louis had another cleanup operation under way.
He had do something on the Deenie-Stefanie front. He had decided which one to dump. He just couldn’t continue with things
as they were. Not with Stefanie planning a wedding. The confusion, the effort involved, the complications were all too much.
Guilt, the stink of it, was oppressive. His conscience was coming out of its stupor, like one of those near-stiffs he saw
in the TV movies, lying in a coma, barely in existence, but still with a tiny bit of life and maybe even capable of hearing
sounds. He was gambling more and more and more, which somehow made him feel better, so his conscience was behaving itself,
lying there, half dead, or, better still, ignored.

Louis dropped Deenie. He didn’t have much choice. One weekend a friend of his, Frankie Balls, ratted him out. “I said to him,
‘What, were you trying to get her in the sack?’ She didn’t have proof or anything. If she had asked me, I would have said,
‘What? Fuck you. Get the hell out of here.’ But that was it. It just started to fall apart after that. And I made, like, a
decision. I decided to go with Stefanie.”

Stefanie was the kind of woman who could be the mother of his children—a wife. Stefanie wasn’t flashy but she represented
stability, honesty. All the qualities he didn’t have. When they got engaged he gave her a beautiful ring, with a 3.1-carat
almost-flawless diamond as big as a hunk of popcorn. And as far as Stefanie knew, he was a faithful, if not always available,
fiancÉ who worked hard, had a lot of guy friends, and had to be away a lot.

Now he would try, really hard, to put the lies behind him too. He had to admit, they were good lies. He was an excellent liar.
So great a liar that he was starting to hate it. Lying to clients was one thing. That was business. That was Wall Street.
Everybody lied on Wall Street. But lying to Stefanie was different. More complicated.

“It was annoying after a while. ‘What am I going to tell her now? What story am I going to fucking come up with?’ I was supposed
to be home at eight at night. It’s fucking seven in the morning. I didn’t call. What am I going to say? ‘What happened?’ ‘Benny
got into a car accident. He almost died. Lost a leg. They sewed it back on.’ There was a cockamamie story every time. One
time I said we went to go see Benny’s father in the cemetery and I couldn’t get him to leave. Benny was fucked up. He said,
‘Louie, as my friend take me to the cemetery.’ I couldn’t get him to leave. There was no phone. The battery on my phone died.
Benny was hysterical crying. He wanted to sleep on the grave. I couldn’t leave the guy there!

“Then my friend Ronnie’s father got sick in jail and I had to go visit him. ‘You going to come home and change first?’ ‘No.’
I couldn’t come home and change because I was with seventy-five girls in Benny’s apartment. I wasn’t even seeing Ronnie.

“I ran out of gas. You know how many times I ran out of gas? All I did was run out of gas. One time I told her some guy cut
me off, and I followed him all the way to Connecticut. ‘I wanted to kill the guy. I was trying to follow him and catch up
with him. I couldn’t catch up with him. I wind up going over the Triborough Bridge. I’m in fucking Connecticut. Got lost.
Had to come back. It was a mess.’ Followed the guy all the way to Connecticut. I started believing this shit myself. I’d wake
up in the morning and I’d say, ‘I can’t believe I followed that asshole to Connecticut.’”

Louis knew he had to stop complicating his life, that he had to put his relationship with Stefanie on a new footing. But the
secrets could not end, not entirely. Louis let Stefanie know about Charlie, but just that he was a friend who had joined him
in some business venture. He couldn’t let her know exactly the kind of relationship that he had with Charlie. He would have
had difficulty putting it into words anyway. He wasn’t sure what it was. Besides, his relationship with Charlie was changing—and
not for the better. They were becoming more intimate, in the sense that Louis began to realize that he was being fucked.

The honeymoon was over by the time Nationwide was out of his life, and now Louis and Charlie were like any normal married
couple. They knew each other very well. And one of the things that Louis learned by now was that Charlie wasn’t a fair guy,
not a square shooter, not even with Cousin John.

John told Louis that he got only $2,500 of the $15,000 Charlie collected from Louis that first time they met. Charlie kept
the rest, and told John he only got $4,000 from Louis. Charlie told his cousin he had kept $1,500, when he really kept $12,500.
That was no way to treat family. Louis thought Guys were into family. That’s how it was in the movies, at least. Served John
right, of course, but it was still a crappy thing to do to a relation.

Learning about Charlie’s dishonesty was the first sign Louis had—or, more precisely, the first sign Louis noticed—that maybe
Charlie was going to be a problem. The second sign took place in the waning days of Nationwide. They were still socializing,
still friendly. But there was always an edge to the way Charlie dealt with Louis, a quick temper that he was doing less and
less to keep under control.

Charlie was pissed about Fort Worth. He was not happy Nationwide was holding back on the commission money. It wasn’t a lot,
but Charlie was entitled to his share of it. The exact amount that Charlie was expecting wasn’t fuzzy anymore. At Nationwide
Charlie was getting at least $15,000 a month, and that was what he wanted. If Louis made more, Charlie wanted more. But if
Louis made less, Charlie wasn’t going to take less.

When Charlie made it known that he was expecting that much from Louis, he didn’t react, didn’t say anything. But there was
this pain, deep in the pit of his stomach. This was what Charlie was going to get as his due, and there was to be no negotiation
or discussion on the subject. He had done work for Louis, collected the money from the guy in Queens and visited those short-sellers.
He had intervened with Black Dom—actually called his Guy, Barry, to intervene with Wild Bill and keep Dom from battering Louis
to a pulp at Vision, when that scrub transferred AUXI stock away from the firm.

Why did he do it? Because he liked Louis’s face? Because they were “friends”? Because he was a nice guy? Barry wouldn’t have
known Louis if he had passed him on the Boardwalk or spilled clam sauce on him in Gargiulo’s, where Coney Island wiseguys
could sit among themselves and keep away from the dark-skinned people who crowded into that neighborhood. When Charlie went
to see Little Benji Castel-lazzo at the Torrese Social Club, he wouldn’t even let Louis come inside.

Barry and Charlie pulled Louis’s bacon out of the deep fryer because Louis was partners with Charlie, because Louis paid Charlie,
and because Charlie paid Barry. It worked that way up the ladder too. If Barry had a beef with Wild Bill or some other Colombo,
he would call Chin Gigante, the Gen-ovese boss, and Chin Gigante would call Alphonse Persico, the Colombo boss. That’s because
Barry paid Chin and Wild Bill paid Persico. The guys who reported to Barry, guys like Charlie, paid Barry, and the guys who
reported to Wild Bill, guys like Black Dom, paid Wild Bill. Then Black Dom got people like Chris Wolf to pay money to him
and Charlie got people like Louis to pay money to him. Chris and Louis were at the bottom of the food chain. Earners. The
fools out in the hinterland were the grubs and sea turds.