Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (3 page)

After the first $300,000 from Welch, Louis was ready to go to Arizona to lay the groundwork for getting the rest of the $10
million just sitting in that goddamn Smith Barney account.

He had to look the part. No problem.

In the morning, as he prepared to leave for the airport, Louis put on his platinum Rolex Presidential. This was not the Oyster,
which the losers and wannabes wear. This was top-of-the-line, with a square-diamond bagette bezel. It had cost him $17,000
and it
looked
as if it cost him that much. To get money, even if you are desperate for money as he was, you have to look as if you have
money already. His suit was a custom fit. The tailor had come to his office and measured it to his body. Pinstripes. Suitably
conservative. The suits had cost him $2,000 each but you need a custom suit, you have to have one, if a suit is going to look
really good. In a regular suit the ass would be a little baggy but the waist would be tight. Custom suits fit the body perfectly.
Not that Louis was a freak or anything. He would look great in an off-the-rack suit. He was 160 pounds of solid muscle. Louis
made good first impressions. He was somber, sensitive when in the right mood. He spoke with a New York accent, a street accent,
but his manner was deferential, respectful. Not arrogant. He was a New York broker but he didn’t act the part. Strangers quickly
noticed the taste so evident in his tailored Armani suits, his clean-cut appearance, his manners. In moments of greenback-driven
passion at some of the firms where he had worked, Louis would tear off his shirt, revealing a muscular back covered with a
panoply of tattoos, with “Native New Yorker” in Old English lettering and an ebullient, sprawling dragon covering the left
shoulder. But the tattoos were well hidden under his $300 Hugo Boss shirts, with “LAP” on the cuff.

Rich people dressed that way. Or so he thought until Joe Welch pulled up in his rusting heap of a wreck.

“He had a torn dungaree jacket on. He had Air Force pins all over his jacket, wore loafers and shitty pants. A fifteen-million-dollar
guy looked like a bum on the street,” said Louis.

Louis felt relieved when he arrived, a nauseating half-hour drive later, at Tonolea Trail. It was quite a spread. Louis judged
people by their possessions, and his estimation of Welch immediately rose. Welch lived in a beautiful split-level house with
an in-ground pool. Louis loved beautiful houses. He loved in-ground pools. He looked in Joe Welch’s in-ground pool. It was
empty, except for the rats. Louis’s opinion of Joe Welch returned to equilibrium. He concentrated on the task at hand. “This
pathetic bastard—I’m gonna rob him blind,” he said to himself.

Louis tried to be honest with himself, because it was impossible to be honest with anyone else. He was going to steal from
Joe Welch. That was why he came to Arizona. He had to focus on that. He wasn’t there to hike in Sabino Canyon—he hated the
outdoors with a passion anyway—and he didn’t go there to buy cactus jam or Indian tamales outside the San Xavier Mission or
visit the prairie dog colony at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

After ushering Louis inside his sprawling unkempt house, Joe Welch introduced Louis to his young Asian wife. Louis had always
marveled at the ability of money to lure women, and his esteem for the female-grabbing power of greenbacks was instantly enhanced.
The woman was approximately one-third of Welch’s age.

After dinner, Louis hinted to Joe that it might be time for business. Instead came more torture. Music. “He starts playing
the piano. So I’m sitting in the chair, I’m a professional, I got my legs crossed. ‘Play for me, Joe. I love the piano.’ I
say, ‘I’m a fan of the piano.’

“He sits at his piano and he’s horrible. And at the end of the thing, I remember I went, ‘Bravo! Bravo, Joe.’”

It was time for business. Louis moved his chair close to Welch, knowing that physical proximity bespoke intimacy, the intimacy
required to steal large sums of money.

“He’s sitting at his couch, and out of respect, to make him think we’re really going to talk about something serious, I say,
‘Is it okay if I talk in front of your wife?’ Like we were about to split the world today. And so he says, ‘Would you feel
more comfortable if she wasn’t around?’ I say, ‘Actually, Joe, I would. No disrespect, but I would.’ He says, ‘Honey, can
you leave us alone a little bit?’

“We talked our business, and that was it. He sat at the table and wrote out a check for two hundred thousand dollars.”

After that, Louis was so filled with sheer pleasure that he practically ran the seven miles back to the airport. At a stopover
in some dipshit city, Louis took out the check and stared at it, reveling in the kind of pride a painter would feel if he
could roll up the canvas and stick it in his wallet. Louis was not a thief; he was an artist. He was a hero of his own fantasies.
He was like the firemen who extract victims from car wrecks, except that instead of the Jaws of Life he used his tongue, and
instead of mangled corpses he extracted large checks from old men with wives who were about to inherit $200,000 less than
before.

Louis was staring at the check, in the airport bar, when a man walked up to him and began speaking to him. It was no problem.
Louis loved talking to strangers, or anyone else he might be able to use. The man asked him what he did for a living. Louis
told him: An investment banker. Where? Prudential. The family business, Prudential.

“He says, ‘Oh, you look young, you must be successful.’ I remember saying, ‘You know, my father’s very high up in Prudential,’”
Louis recalled. It was wonderful, working for such a fine and reputable firm. Louis Pasciuto, the young executive, scion of
a long line of Prudential executives, left the airport bar and completed his trip back to Staten Island.

Charlie was pleased by the proceeds from Tucson. Louis had done his job. He had taken from Joe Welch. Now it was time for
Charlie to do his job, which was to take from Louis. And the Guy above Charlie would take from Charlie. And so on, up to the
top of an amorphous but rigidly defined pyramid of Guys.

Charlie Ricottone was his partner in life and in business. He was a stern taskmaster, a father figure and elder brother. He
was precise and neat, neater than Louis ever could be or ever would want to be. Charlie had been to prison and did not care.
Being a Guy meant there was no shame attached to going to prison. There was no stigma in having a criminal record. On the
contrary, it was expected. And the federal government was obliging. More and more Guys were being incarcerated, and many of
them were being incarcerated because they were the life partners of guys like Louis.

Louis came to Brooklyn and gave Charlie his share of the money from United Capital and Charlie didn’t hit him. It was a relief.
Louis never raised a hand to Charlie when he got slapped around. His father, Nick, pumped iron but didn’t step in when Charlie
smacked Louis right there, right in front of him. You don’t raise your hand to Charlie, or Ralph or Phil or the Fat Man, just
as you don’t raise your hand to your priest. Or your father.

The FBI agents assigned to Louis, John Brosnan and Kevin Barrows, really wanted Charlie and were seriously annoyed that Louis
had cooperated and then changed his mind. They didn’t threaten him. They didn’t have to. Louis knew that he was facing years
in prison. Maybe three, maybe five or ten. It all depended on the sentencing guidelines and the prosecutor and the judge—and
him.

At his arraignment on October 20 he was charged with one count of securities fraud stemming from his investment strategies
at United Capital. But that was just an opening salvo, and he knew it. They had more charges in store for him unless he gave
them Charlie and the others. Everybody. Guys. Brokers. No exceptions.

At the time he made the taped phone call to Charlie shortly after his arrest, their relationship had been undergoing severe
stress. United Capital was a thing of the past, and Louis was not giving Charlie money anymore. It was a promise he had made
to himself, and he did not share it with Charlie at the time. All Charlie knew was that Louis was in a slump. It was an extended
slump—over two months—so Charlie was in a bad mood when Louis called him with the tape recorder running, and Louis put him
in a worse mood by goading him, to the great pleasure of the FBI men in attendance. Louis knew how to push Charlie’s buttons
and Charlie said things that were profane, and threatening, and might tend to incriminate him.

Louis called Charlie from jail after he decided to not cooperate. He was pleading now, apologetic, but it was too late. “I
decided I ain’t doing nothing for you,” Charlie said. He could see Charlie at the pizzeria on Kings Highway, in his jogging
suit, smoking his Cubans. They had to be Cuban, even if they burned like crabgrass.

Charlie was hurt. He had been spurned. Louis never laid a hand on Stefanie. But to Charlie he was a wife and he was abused
and fucked. Louis didn’t take it personally. That’s how Guys were. They got into a relationship with you. They weren’t policemen
for crooks—the media got it all wrong. They didn’t need psychologists, like the TV mobsters. They
were
psychologists. They burrowed into your mind.

Louis could not forget the Guys if he tried, even if he tried as hard as the feds wanted him to remember. But he couldn’t
recall all the places he had worked. They were hard to remember because they were so unimportant, so interchangeable. He had
worked at so many places with meaningless names on the door that it would take some memory-jogging to get him to recite their
names—and Louis had a terrific memory.

To refresh his memory, the feds showed Louis a list of the places he had worked. The number dazzled them. He was at each place
for months sometimes, or sometimes for only a few weeks, extracting cash and moving on, fast, when the “product” ran out.

Some of the places where Louis worked were real in the physical sense, in that they had offices and receptionists and desks
and phones. These were the chop houses. Chop houses looked like brokerages, in much the same way as a sewer pipe superficially
resembles a water pipe. The chop houses were registered with the regulators. Some were in business for months, even years.
And the stocks they sold existed. They were usually, but not always, pieces of garbage.

Late in his career he worked at bucket shops. United Capital was a bucket shop. Bucket shops pretended to sell stocks. Outfits
with that simple business model were around in the days when elevated trains whipped around the S-curve at Coenties Slip.
Bucket shops had a majestic history. They were an old-money, Gilded-Age-era ripoff.

The chop houses of the 1990s committed thievery on a scale that had never been seen before. And it took place out in the open.
One estimate was $10 billion a year. It could have been more, or it could have been less. No one really knew how much was
stolen. You can’t count what you can’t see. The chop houses and bucket shops were the best-known secret on Wall Street.

Now the guys in the chop houses and bucket shops, and the Guys who took their money, were starting to go to jail.

How did they get him? The question gnawed at Louis.

Someone had turned. The FBI knew all the places he’d worked, whether he was on the books or not. They knew about the Guys.
They knew about the nominee accounts. They knew the names he had put on some of those accounts. Nicholas Pasciuto. Stefanie
Pasciuto. They had him.

They had surveillance pictures of him with Charlie. They weren’t good pictures. But they were clear enough.

He thought about Roy Ageloff, his first mentor. Roy of the pastel suits and the cigarettes and the cursing. Father-figure
Roy. Fun-filled Roy, the unofficial chief executive officer of Hanover Sterling & Company. Roy had recruited him, trained
him, taken him from a gas station on Amboy Road and molded him into what he had become. He owed it all to Roy. It was a debt
he could never repay. He loved Roy. They all did—all of the chop house kids.

Roy had been indicted the year before. Multiple counts. Could Roy have turned cooperator? Louis didn’t believe it. Roy was
a Jew who liked to hang out with Guys. He dressed like a Guy and talked like a Guy and beat up people like a Guy. Even when
he was under indictment, he was arrested in Florida for head-butting a guy who mouthed off at him. That was Roy—he didn’t
take shit from anybody. But the government had dipped him in a Mt. Vesuvius of manure. So now that he faced a long prison
term, was he going to turn rat—like a Guy?

Nowadays everybody was turning. Ratting. Louis hated the word because he knew that he had no choice. He knew that not cooperating
would be silly. Stupid. Who was going to do time to protect him? Nobody could protect him. His friend and father-in-law George
couldn’t help and neither could his parents. They had bailed him out and gone bankrupt loaning him money.

I know in my heart things are going to turn around the right way.

His mother put those words on a birthday card, in her neat, even, penmanship-book handwriting.

I love you with all my heart and soul. You’re my first and you will always be. Listen don’t be mad if I can’t accept the calls.
They are expensive and I can’t afford them.

He wasn’t mad.

It hurts me more than you not to talk.

He read those words again and again.
It hurts me more than you not to talk
. That was his situation. The words were true. He would hurt himself by not talking. That was a fact. So were the other words.
He read them again.
You’re my first and you will always be
.

He was the first and he will always be.

He didn’t want to tell the truth, not at first. But in the weeks and months and years that followed, Louis told the truth.
He talked about the Guys and the brokers—from Roy and the gas station to Joe Welch in Tucson. He went back to his old friends,
wearing a concealed tape recorder and transmitter. He recounted, in merciless detail, all the chop houses and bucket shops—the
seventeen he didn’t want to remember. He remembered the names. The guys and the Guys behind it all. They were his friends,
his enemies, his creditors. His family.