Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (35 page)

Louis went to the gold store on Avenue S, gave Luciano the $4,000, and Luciano proceeded to give Louis a slow, earnest, and
methodical beating.

“He starts smacking me all over the fucking place, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I’m saying. He’s goes, ‘You fucking’—smack!
He smacked me in my face a hundred times. I’m putting my hands up to cover my face and this guy’s holding my hands down so
he can smack me. He says, ‘Keep the fucking four thousand.’ He pulls out a knife. Fucking steak knife. He goes, ‘I should
fucking take this knife . . .’ Meanwhile, I wasn’t even all that scared because I was just thinking to myself, kill me already.
I didn’t care no more. Just get it over with. One of yas, you, Charlie, just kill me.”

Louis decided, after that visit to Luciano, that maybe he had better try to patch up his differences with Charlie.

“I left there with the four thousand, smacked all around. Then I called Charlie up and I go, ‘Charlie, sorry. I got money
for you. Where do you want to meet? Get this guy away from me. He’s nuts.’ He was worse than Charlie! Charlie says, ‘I told
you! You stupid motherfuckerrrrrrrr!’ I said, ‘Aw, Charlie, it was a fucking mistake. I’ll just bring you the money I got,
settle some of this shit, and just continue to work, all right?’

“When I saw Charlie he goes, real slow, ‘You motherfucker. You fence-jumping stoolie rat motherfucker. I knew you’d be a fucking
fence-jumper.’”

It was a bad time to alienate Charlie. Louis was still gambling whenever he had any money in his hands. By now his biggest
creditor was a respected young man, intelligent and entrepreneurial, valued by many in the neighborhood as a purveyor of working
capital. His name was Richie. Just as Charlie turned a local pizzeria into a very special place of his own, Richie was a constant
and loyal customer of the Doo-Wop Shoppe, a music store, pool hall, and local hangout in a small stretch of stores on Arthur
Kill Road, in a part of southwestern Staten Island noted for its landfill and penitentiary.

Louis would have to work off the Richie debt, just as he had worked off the Vinnie debt at U.S. Securities. Another sharecropper
gig. Richie put him to work at a dumpy brokerage firm branch office in Woodbridge, New Jersey. Argent was the name. Richie’s
friend and associate John Mergen was going to come with Louis to Argent, to ensure that Louis worked hard and paid back what
he owed. John was Turkish, real name Volkan Mergen. He was about five feet six inches tall, and built like one of the old-style
multispout fire hydrants that were being removed from the streets by municipal authorities.

“I walked in and it was a real shitty office. Tremendous but shitty. Rugs are dirty. I just wanted to work there, pay this
Richie back, and go away. I just went myself. No cold-callers. After U. S. Securities Benny went his separate ways. He quit
the business.

“So now I’m working in the same office with this kid Mergen. Now, you got to understand, Richie is this major loan shark on
Staten Island. All the kids in the neighborhood are intimidated and scared. The Turk, Mergen, was the muscle. I don’t want
to work with this fucking kid. He starts going, ‘You got to pay my friend Richie back.’ He goes, ‘You’re around us now.’”

Do Wop

Louis wrote the words on a pad of lined yellow paper.

Do Wop 5,000

He was doodling on a pad of yellow paper in his shithole of an office at Argent.

Do Wop Do Wop

5,000

Do Wop Do Wop

Do Do Do Di Di

Do Wop

The “5,000” was what he owed Richie, what he would have to trot over to Richie at the Doo-Wop Shoppe, after working at Argent
for a few weeks. About $10,000 in gambling winnings brought his $20,000 gambling debt down to $10,000, and then he was able
to pay Richie another $5,000 from his earnings at Argent, bringing his debt down to $5,000. That’s all he owed. That’s what
he had to pay. Peanuts. To pay it off, all he needed was just a few more weeks on the plantation—maybe days, if he got luckier.
Or maybe—fuck it—no days at all. Maybe he’d just “hang it on the limb,” as Paul Muni did in one of those old chain-gang movies.

Louis had hit bottom, and he knew it. Or he hoped he had hit bottom. He thought he had hit bottom when the U.S. Securities
warrant deal fell through. But Argent was worse. Nothing could be worse than this. He kept thinking of those old movies. Did
they have Turkish overseers in the Antebellum South? At least he wasn’t getting flogged. At least they weren’t putting welts
on his back.

Louis decided to hang it on the limb. He didn’t have his heart in the job. He was too depressed. In the space of just a year,
he went from being a sought-after broker, with sign-on bonuses and offices with TVs, to a guy in a shit office working off
a debt with a Turk breathing down his neck. It was more than a guy could tolerate.

Mergen was in his late twenties and had spent a year and a half in prison on attempted robbery and weapons charges at Queensboro
State Prison—the Guy equivalent of the New York Institute of Finance. Mergen’s personal qualities were important assets for
his broker-management work. He was squat, dark, and mean. It might have been nice to have Charlie in his corner at this time
of his life, but Charlie was not feeling friendly toward Louis at the moment. Louis was not generating cash and had also recently
displayed disloyalty of the most extreme kind.

At least he had company in his misery. It seemed that most of the other brokers and cold-callers at this Argent branch also
had to make periodic trips to the Doo-Wop Shoppe. Louis hung a sign on his wall: “An account a day keeps the Doo-Wop away.”

“I used to tell all the cold-callers, ‘Listen, if you don’t want to have to deal with the kid at the Doo-Wop Shoppe, just
open an account a day,’” said Louis.
^*

But Louis wasn’t giving the fucking guy any more accounts, period. He stayed home—the chop house equivalent of heading into
the swamps. Instead of the incessant din of bloodhounds baying, there was the gentle buzz of an ignored pager. Louis had made
his bid for freedom as a matter of principle—he was tired of being a slave. And $5,000 was such a pissant sum of money. It
was half of what he had spent to keep a limo idling for a few days in front of his building in Battery Park City just two
years before.

It was a matter of principle for John and Richie too. Banks foreclose on tiny houses in bad neighborhoods when it doesn’t
make economic sense. Guys have to similarly act out of principle to maintain their credibility and standing in the community.
But these Guys seemed to be taking their cues from
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
instead of
The Godfather
.

One day Louis came downstairs in the morning to find the air let out of his truck’s tires. Not slashed. Deflated. Clearly
the days of severed horses’ heads had vanished, if they had ever existed. Louis had to pay $60 to get it towed.

Then the doorbell was ripped off his front door.

When Guys started acting like this, what could come next? Covering his mailbox with shaving cream? Short-sheeting his bed?
Louis figured he was dealing with a new breed of Guy. Juvies were supposed to emulate Guys. But here were Guys emulating juvies.
Louis would have laughed it off. But Stefanie was pregnant. She didn’t need the stress, even from bubble-gum gangsters. So
he sent her back home to her parents.

Louis decided to move out too, and was with his friend Mike Fusco packing up when John Mergen crashed his car into the garage.

John was backing up and smashing into the garage door, again and again, and probably doing a hell of a lot more than $5,000
in damage to his car in the process.

“He’s smashing his car into my garage, over and over again. So we went downstairs with a gun now, waiting for him to break
through the garage. Mike says, ‘I’m nervous!’ and I go, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ Soon as he breaks through the garage, we’re going
to shoot this motherfucker. Fuck him. I had my father’s registered gun. Big fucking .357 cannon. So I was going to say my
father was living in my house, this guy broke into my house, and I shot him. Dead issue. I’m not in trouble.

“He never breaks through the garage. He leaves. I call the cops now. I say, ‘Listen, some person just tried to smash through
my garage.’ I described the car. The cops start asking me, ‘Do you owe the guy any money?’ and I say, ‘What’s that got to
do with it? He just tried to drive through my garage!’”

A couple of days later, Louis was almost finished packing and was moving a few personal belongings into the car. It was early
in the morning. The movers had just left with the furniture. They were almost free. Almost gone.

Mergen and Richie paid a visit.

“They take me into the house and bring me upstairs. ‘Where’s all your shit?’ I tell them I sent it to storage. I can’t afford
to live there. I’m moving. Richie says, ‘You’re moving your fucking shit out? This is what you do to me?’ Pow. Hits me. I
say, ‘Rich, you don’t understand. It’s not like that.’”

At this point Mergen interjected with an offer—to smash a glass pot cover over Louis’s head. But instead of doing that, Louis’s
two creditors decided to bring him with them for a trip in their car.

“I say, ‘Kidnap me? What you guys doing?’ They fucking throw me in the back of Richie’s truck. I’m sitting there, and I’m
thinking, ‘I’m going to jump out of this fucking truck.’ I was just going to jump and run. But then they take me to this house
where these Irish kids John and Jeff are living. They take my cell phone. They take my beeper. And they make John and Jeff
watch me.”

Louis stayed there all day in his makeshift debtors prison. While John and Jeff watched him, Richie and Mergen went to Louis’s
storage bin and removed his TV and VCR as a kind of payment-in-kind toward the $5,000 that was owed. Then they returned. Richie
was upset. He discussed the matter with Louis outside the John-Jeff residence.

According to Richie, an incident had marred the trip to the storage unit. He had scratched his car while moving Louis’s possessions.
This was offered by way of explanation for what transpired—not that there had to be a reason, as Louis was learning.

The escaped sharecropper was flogged.

“Richie just beat the shit out of me. Started hitting me with a stickball fucking bat. I guess he blamed me for the scratch
on the car. I got welts all over my back. He beats me up in the middle of the street. This was Huguenot Avenue and Woodrow.
Right in the middle of the fucking intersection! There’s cars going by every two seconds. Cars stop. John goes, ‘What the
fuck! Get the fuck out of here!’ Telling that to the people driving by. One guy is like, ‘Leave the kid alone!’ John yells,
‘Mind your fucking business!’ Mergen tells the guy, ‘You’re next!’”

It was embarrassing, to say the least, and the idea of explaining everything to Stefanie was a prospect Louis did not relish,
presuming he survived the experience. That was not assured.“Richie takes me in the car now. I’m all beat up. John Mergen gets
in the car and goes, ‘I told you you fucked up,’ and gives me a shot right in the eye. I’m bleeding. They drive me to the
back of this school, IS 75. I get out of the car.

“I say, ‘Rich, I think you guys did enough. I’ll have the money in a few weeks. Give me a break. Keep my keys. Leave me the
fuck alone.’ Richie says, ‘Nah, I don’t think I’m going to do that. I think I’m going to make John take you in the woods to
smash your fucking skull.’

“I go, ‘You got to be fucking kidding me.’ I’m begging the guy not to take me in the woods now. I say, ‘Look, I really don’t
want the kid taking me in the woods. I’ll pay the fucking money. I just want to get out of here.’ So then Rich takes me for
a walk-talk. ‘I really didn’t want to do this to you. But you have to pay the money.’ I look at the guy. My eye’s hanging
off my face. I’m all beat up. I got welts all over my back. I say, ‘In a few weeks I’ll have the money for you.’ He says,
‘Don’t leave or do anything stupid.’”

Do anything stupid? As he walked to the bus stop, Louis realized that there wasn’t anything he had done for the past few months
that wasn’t stupid. But he also realized that there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do to find a way out, even if he wanted
to be smart, or even if he could figure out what “smart” meant.

Stefanie didn’t want to hear what happened. Enough.

S
TEFANIE
: “I chose not to live in reality a lot. I chose—I still choose sometimes—not to live in reality, because it’s okay to take
a vacation from reality for a while in a sense. For the most part I could yell and scream about things, but then sometimes
I didn’t want to be bothered. Like when Charlie came up with that heavy guy and I’m sitting there crying. Or a phone call
in the night he didn’t want to answer. Or somebody ringing the bell in the middle of the night, and him not wanting to answer
it. Him saying, ‘Don’t—just sit here.’ And ringing the bell and ringing the bell and ringing the bell. And he couldn’t look
out the window, because if he looked out the window somebody would see him look out the window. And I’m like, ‘This is ridiculous.’

“I remember lying in the bed, and the phone is ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing. I didn’t know who it was. But
somebody is calling at like three o’clock in the morning.

“After he was arrested for the check thing, the calls were nonstop. It seems as if the phone was always ringing, and he was
always running out. He was always on the phone, talking to this one or that one. ‘I got to go see this one.’ ‘I got to go
see that one.’ It was just overwhelming. I couldn’t take it anymore. And I was never getting a straight answer about his problems
or what was going on. Who he owed money to. He told me about some people but not all of them. One minute he’d have money.
The next minute he wouldn’t have any money.

“After the arrest Charlie started showing up more, Louis was always running out, trying to work but not really getting any
money, and if he did—I don’t think I ever saw him come home with checks anymore. He always used to come home with cash. He’d
tell me he wasn’t working under his own name, so somebody pays him in cash, or he pays me by check and then we cash it, but
they’re going to W-2 him at the end of the year. That was one of his big lines.