Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (31 page)

Louis and Benny made lunch money, about $15,000 each, selling the Chic-Chick private placement at State. Lousy. It was obvious
after a few weeks that they were wasting their time there, and by now even Frank realized the thing just wasn’t going to get
sold, and he didn’t raise a fuss when they moved to a firm called L. T. Lawrence. Louis and Benny each got a $40,000 sign-on
bonus, which Louis promptly used for a down payment on a Ferrari. Model 348. Canary-yellow.

That was the good news. But then there was the bad news. There was a lot of bad news. It involved one of the two owners of
Lawrence, Larry Principato.

“I didn’t really know Larry or what his story was, and at first I thought he was running a half-legit kind of firm,” said
Louis. “When we went up to this place it was a great building, really nice office. Very professional. Everybody well dressed.
Wearing suits. He told me that he had this stock, Echo Tire. I didn’t get paid cash off Echo Tire. I think the common was
three-something and the warrants were a dollar-something. The first month I think we did a hundred and twelve thousand in
gross just off the warrants.

“I wasn’t there too long before I had an incident with Larry. What I did was I put some of these Echo Tire warrants in my
own personal account. I bought them off the bid. The spread was fucking sixty cents. It was ridiculous. So I bought some right
above the bid and I crossed myself out at the offer, like I used to do with Stuttering John, and I made like forty, fifty
thousand in my own account, a nominee account. And Larry just flipped out. He wanted me to give the money back. He gives me,
like, a warning. ‘We don’t have that kind of shit here. Only for me.’ So they canceled the trade and took the money back.
It was the wrong place for us to work because Larry wanted to do the same kind of thing we wanted to do.”

With Larry having that kind of attitude, there were obviously going to be limits on the kind of money Louis was going to be
able to make at L. T Lawrence. And that was bad, because his gambling wasn’t getting any better. Gambling wasn’t relieving
stress and guilt anymore. It was causing stress. But Louis couldn’t stop, and he was starting to have some trouble paying
off his gambling debts. He always managed—somehow. But his spending was still out of control.

Not long after coming to Lawrence, Louis and his friend Ronnie—an old pal who just happened to sell drugs for a living—went
to a local marina and put down a payment on a forty-eight-foot yacht. They christened it
CREAM
. The people at the pier might have thought Louis and Ronnie were dairymen, but they were actually borrowing the name from
the Wu-Tang Clan rap group, which had a hit at the time called “Cash Rules Everything Around Me.” Louis came up with half
of the $62,000 down payment. Barely.

“I didn’t have a ton of money because I was gambling at this point. I’d make forty grand and just gamble forty grand. I would
take five grand to pay my bills and just gamble the rest. Nobody ever saw the money. But we got the money together for the
boat, me and Ronnie. The guy at Staten Island Boat Sales probably still remembers me because I tried to pay in cash. It was
a brand-new boat. Huge. Two full bedrooms, full kitchen, dining area. Had a big-screen TV.”

He was doing well, making almost as much money as he did at Brod. But he was living month to month, gambling about as much
as he made. Losing, winning, losing, earning.

“So now I lose a hundred and eighty thousand with a bookie in Staten Island. This wasn’t a bookie to beat. Because Thursday
afternoon, if I won ninety thousand, Thursday afternoon there was an envelope or bag with my name on it with ninety thousand
dollars. If you lost and didn’t pay, they would come get you.

“I knew this kid in Staten Island. Owned a gym. His name was Tom Cunningham. A big-money kid. He trusted me a lot. I’d been
making good money for him through the bid-ask thing, figuring someday I could really set him for a score. So his time had
come. He wanted to make some money with me in the market, so I made him give me two hundred thousand in cash, and I tell him,
we’re investing it in Chic-Chick. So he gives me the two hundred thousand and I pay the bookie. A couple of months go by.
Tom’s wondering, what’s going on with Chic-Chick? Where’s his two hundred thousand?

“It somehow gets back to Frank—maybe he called the company; I don’t know—that I took two hundred thousand for Chic-Chick and
didn’t give him any. And it was bad. It was bad. Charlie calls me up and says, ‘Louie, what the fuck did you do?’ I say, ‘What?
What did I do?’ He says, ‘You took two hundred thousand dollars for Frank Coppa’s name?’ I say, ‘What?’

“Now I’m shitting my pants, because just three days before this Frank shows up at L. T. Lawrence to talk to Benny. Without
me, and that usually wouldn’t happen. He would talk to us together. I kind of thought something was up but I wasn’t sure.
And it was. So I had to go to L&B Spumoni Gardens for a sitdown. L&B is in Brooklyn, on Eighty-sixth Street, near Marlboro
Houses. Frank’s always there. All benches outside, then a pizzeria where you get the spumoni ices, famous ices. That was his
place.

“Now I got to go to this sitdown. And Tom’s going to be there, telling him about the money. I go in, and I’m scared. I’m thinking
I am definitely going to get whacked over there. I fucking robbed two hundred thousand from Frank Coppa. It’s crazy. Charlie’s
there already. Frank’s there. Tom’s there. And this is the first time I heard Frank yell ever in his life. I wanted to say
hello to him and he says, ‘Louie, shut the fuck up and sit down. You’re in a lot of trouble.’

“I sit down. Frank says, ‘Tell me what happened. Tell me your story. And don’t lie a word to me.’ Now, I got no prep before
this, I don’t know what Charlie wants me to say, I don’t know nothing. I don’t know what to do.

“He might have told them something before I got there. They wanted me to speak now. They wanted nobody else to speak. Now,
I’m very confident of myself at the time. I’m paying Charlie big money. I’m driving around in a Ferrari. I’m very confident
of myself. I’m scared but I’m confident. So I kind of in a roundabout way deny it. I say, ‘Frank, I don’t know what he’s talking
about. This kid’s a fucking liar.’

“And then he tells me, ‘Don’t call me Frank.’ Everybody called him Mr. Coppa, you know what I mean? So I go, ‘Mr. Coppa, I
don’t know what this fucking kid’s talking about.’ Charlie says, ‘You don’t know what this kid’s talking about?’ Crack! I
get smacked for that. I say, ‘Charlie, I really don’t. What is he talking about? I didn’t say Chic-Chick.’ He goes, ‘Did you
take two hundred thousand dollars from the kid?’

“I don’t want to admit I took two hundred thousand from the kid. I say, ‘No, I didn’t take two hundred thousand from the kid.’

“Charlie says, ‘You’re trying to tell me that this kid’s here, in Brooklyn, at L&B, for no fucking reason but to lie and to
say you took two hundred thousand dollars from him and didn’t fucking give it back to him? You trying to tell me this kid’s
here for no reason?’

“I say, ‘Charlie, I didn’t take the money from this kid. Maybe this kid has other issues and other problems.’

“Charlie says, ‘Frank, give us a minute.’ We go outside, and I tell Charlie, ‘Listen, Charlie, I’ll give you fifty thousand
in cash. I can’t admit that I took this kid’s money.’

“Charlie says, ‘Louie, if I get you out of this fucking jam with this guy—I shouldn’t even be here,” he tells me. ‘I’m not
a fucking skipper. This guy’s a fucking underboss. How the fuck do you get me here with this mess?’ He says, ‘You got me all
over Staten Island and Brooklyn. My name is going to be all over the place. I’m a nice low-key guy, nobody knows me. Now you’ve
got me sitting down with an underboss.’ That’s what I heard too. I never asked Frank, ‘Are you an underboss?’ but from my
understanding he was the guy in charge.
^*

“We got back inside. Now they make us leave. Charlie says ‘Tom, Louie, go outside. I’ll talk to Frank.’ So they talk a good
hour. Tom and me are standing by the picnic tables outside. Tom says to me, ‘How can you do this? How can you sit there and
lie?’ I say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Tom. I don’t know you. You got me here with this mess.’ He could have
just came to me. He didn’t have to go through these channels. Because now it could be that I could be in a lot of trouble
and pay back the two hundred thousand plus another hundred thousand, maybe. It could have been some type of major situation.,

“We go back inside, and now Frank starts asking Tom to tell him the truth. Now I’m thinking in my head, ‘What? Are you telling
me that Charlie just told this guy that I was telling the truth, and that this kid’s a fucking liar, and it worked?’ I don’t
know what they talked about, but it worked! They beat him up. They beat up Tom, they smacked him around, right in front of
me. Charlie goes, ‘You fuck. You want to take this kid here, this reputable kid. You want to take this fucking reputable kid.
This kid has a reputation.’”

Louis paid Charlie $50,000, and that was the last he ever heard of the subject. Years later he ran into Tom on Staten Island.
They exchanged greetings. They chatted a little. Tom made no mention of the meeting at L&B.

After the sitdown at L&B, Louis couldn’t very well object when Charlie wanted his fifteen thousand a month—and more. Since
that was about how much Louis spent on himself, and now Stefanie, every month, Charlie was now truly a life partner. Another
wife. No—a husband. And Charlie was getting into his head, the way a life partner does. He was a spouse, a friend, a partner,
and, now, a criminal-talent agent.

Over the previous few years Louis had perfected his skills as a thief, the lifelong calling that had found a warm and welcome
home for him on Wall Street. Now Charlie was going to show Louis a new way to make money.

After L&B, after Charlie saved his life for $50,000, he couldn’t object when Charlie wanted him to cash some stolen checks.
And since he needed money to pay off his mounting gambling debts, he wouldn’t have objected even if he could.

Charlie introduced Louis to a guy named Michael Basile, who had access to the checks. These were great checks—cashier’s checks,
and Mike had a way of getting people’s names on the checks. All he needed was a check-cashing place that would convert them
into bills, no questions asked. Louis had just the place in mind, a huge outfit in Bayonne, New Jersey, that was used by a
lot of interstate truckers. Louis knew the guy who ran it.

They went to Bayonne. The check was made out to “Michael Decker”—an imaginary person to be portrayed by Mike Layden, for a
cut—and the amount was $995,000. Louis was going to get $350,000. The rest went to the check-cashing guy, Michael Basile,
and Mike Layden. It was September 17, 1996. They drove to Bayonne, happy as kittens chasing a newborn mouse.

“‘Hands up! Get the fuck out of the car!” Oh, jeez. Local cops. I was sick to my stomach. I went to go out of the car, they
threw me on the hood. ‘You fucking scumbag! Hands on your head!’ I say, ‘Calm down! I’m not going anywhere.’ They take my
bag out and they find a gun. Cop says to me, ‘What are you going to do with this, dickhead?’ He’s showing everybody, ‘Hey,
look at this!’”

This was serious. The gun charge was a felony. (It didn’t help that the serial numbers were filed off, making it a “defaced
firearm.”) The check charges were felonies. A felony conviction ends, more or less automatically, any possibility of a legitimate,
or even semi-legitimate, career on Wall Street. It wouldn’t do his marriage any good either. And what about George—the ex-cop?
Louis was shitting bricks, thinking about how George Donohue would react.

S
TEFANIE
: “The night of the arrest people were calling me, trying to find out where he was. There were all these people looking for
him, who he owed money to. And I guess this check was supposed to get his debts paid. This big score. So a lot of people were
calling and calling. I called his mother—I don’t think I called his mother until the next day. I just told her that I had
to do some stuff, and I went with his mother and father to the court, and they set the fifty-thousand-dollar bail.

“I would do it, I’d post the bail, but I didn’t have anything worth fifty thousand dollars. I had no properties, nothing that
I could hock to get that kind of money. So my father just said to me, ‘You can’t give it, I’ll give it. Your money is my money.’
I said, ‘I don’t want you to do it,’ and he says, ‘No, if you’re willing to do it, I’ll do it for you.’ I remember Fran coming
to the house and crying, saying thank you, whatever. So me and my father went, got the check, went to the jail. I remember
him coming but he didn’t wait for Louis to be bailed out.

“That was the first time that I was made aware of how much in debt he was and how many problems he was having. In one sense
it made my life even more horrible, but in the relationship this was probably the first time he was honest about anything
that was going on. Instead of trying to hide everything, he was saying, ‘Look, I have a serious problem. I owe a lot of money
on the street. If I don’t have that money, they’re going to start coming to look for me.’ He owed money to this one and that
one. He didn’t know what to do.

“Before, I knew he was gambling but I didn’t know he had so many problems, that he owed so much money. It was a real awakening
in a sense of who he was and what he was doing.”

Louis had stock certificates in his briefcase. They were part of an upcoming cash deal. The FBI was expressing some interest
in the check case, which they had the option to prosecute if they so desired. Louis expected the FBI might be interested in
talking to him about the certificates. It would have opened up a huge can of worms.

Two agents from the Newark FBI office dropped by L. T Lawrence a few days after the arrest. Louis wasn’t there at the time,
so they chatted with Larry Principato. They asked Larry a lot of questions—but didn’t show the slightest interest in the stock
certificates. When Louis found out, he almost dropped dead from relief and surprise. The surprise lingered, but the relief
ended when he was fired. “After he saw the FBI guys, I came in and Larry says it’s a difficult situation, he doesn’t think
I can work there no more. He says he can’t have that kind of heat. I ask, ‘What are you going to do, fire me?’ He doesn’t
know.”