Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (37 page)

But it was hard, so hard. His favorite song was “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynrd:
“For I’m as free as a bird now, and this bird you cannot change.”

Louis was going to try to change. But he had to admit to himself that he couldn’t. He gambled compulsively. He couldn’t stop.
He couldn’t change, and he faced three years in prison for the check scam. He was keeping his mouth shut about Charlie, he
had stopped trying to jump ship, and still Charlie was acting as if he were a pariah, a traitor, a rat. Charlie didn’t help
when John Mergen started to torture him again. Louis saw Mergen every day at TYM. Even though Louis had paid off the debt
he owed Richie months before, Mergen was still trying to squeeze him for money.

The Mergen situation was straining his relationship with Charlie. It was a violation of the implied contract between Louis
and Charlie: Louis paid; Charlie helped. Louis was still paying when he could, or more precisely when he couldn’t get away
with
not
paying. And Charlie was balking.

A typical early 1998 conversation on the subject:

“I want to go to Brooklyn to talk to you. I need help with Mergen,” he told Charlie.

“No!”

“Every time you wanted me to come to Brooklyn for you to talk to me, I come. I want to come to Brooklyn to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk to you. What’s it about?”

“I just said—John Mergen.”

“Fuck that fucking Turkish pigheaded fuck. Tell him I’ll smack him.”

“If I tell him you’re going to smack him he’s going to kill me right on the spot. You just got to come here and smack him.”

“Fuck him. I ain’t fucking going nowhere. Tell him if he lays a hand on you he’ll have to deal with me.”

“That ain’t good enough.”

Charlie just didn’t understand. Or he understood and he didn’t give a shit.

Charlie might have forgiven Louis for the fence-jumping if he was generating cash. But he wasn’t. By the spring of 1998 they
were barely on speaking terms because the TYM branch office shut down. So much for stability. Louis moved to firm number thirteen,
Barron Chase. The offices were getting crummier and crummier. He was on Maiden Lane now, a cruddy building on a grimy little
side street a few blocks north of Wall Street. A kid named Lance Marino, who was related to a Guy in the Colombo family named
Craig Marino, was running the place, along with Alex Versace and a few other Russians. It sucked. Louis didn’t get along with
one of the Russians, and Mergen and his crew followed him there too and made his life miserable. It seemed as if Mergen was
going to follow him everywhere, forever. And not as his pal. As his boss.

“Now I go to Barron Chase and this kid Mergen thinks I’m going to work for him,” said Louis. “I’m like, ‘Get the fuck out
of here.’” But Mergen persisted. Since Louis didn’t tell Charlie he was making money, he couldn’t go to him for help. “I couldn’t
say to him I made fifty grand and Mergen wants a piece of it,” said Louis. “I was in a bad situation.”

Louis had a plan to open his own branch office. If Lance Marino could do it, why not him? So he called Shannon Johnson, who
happened to know of a firm that had a branch office available. “Shannon knew so many people, he could get me a branch office
right away,” said Louis. He flew Shannon up to New York and discussed it with him. But it didn’t pan out.
^*

Nothing was panning out. Everything was turning to shit.

The Cunningham IPO was Louis’s downfall. Not directly. One thing led to another, as it always did, and the other thing the
first thing led to was always worse.

Cunningham was a printing company where Nick Pasciuto worked—Cunningham Graphics International. It went public toward the
end of April 1998. A legit IPO for a legit company, and Nick Pasciuto wanted to invest in it. Louis didn’t have any money
to loan, so he put his father in touch with a broker and pal named Armando. Nick Pasciuto borrowed $40,000 from Armando and
bought some shares in the IPO. A good investment. He wound up making about $20,000. But then something went wrong. Naturally.

Mergen found out that Nick owed Armando $40,000. So he wanted Louis to get that money from Nick—and give it to Mergen. Louis
would just have to gain access to Nick’s checking account. It would be simple. Louis knew what to do with checks. He had done
that before. He had stolen from his father before too. It would be as easy as stealing rolls of quarters from the bedroom
closet. Easier, maybe. “‘We’ll split it and beat Armando,’ Mergen said. I said, ‘No.’ Then he starts threatening me, trying
to force me to beat my friend.”

Charlie decided to help this time. He called Mergen.

“Now John Mergen says, ‘I don’t give a fuck if Charlie calls me.’ I call Charlie. He says, ‘Tell him I don’t give a fuck either,’”
said Louis.

That was true enough. Charlie didn’t give a shit. Louis was on his own. Mergen summoned him for a meeting in Staten Island.
They went for a walk on the beach. “He grabs me and whispers in my ear, ‘Go rob Armando by tomorrow morning, or I’ll come
to your house. You’ll be dead.’ I say, ‘Okay, I’ll rob him.’ He says, ‘Tomorrow morning, I want the money.’ All right.”

Louis knew what he had to do.

The next morning he drove to the Hudson County courthouse in Jersey City and asked a startled Judge Camille Kenny to revoke
his bail on the check-stealing charge. He went to jail.

It was May 27, 1998. The lucky two-sevens were at work again.

Louis’s new home, the Hudson County Correctional Center, was a concrete-block structure about halfway between New York and
Newark. Years later, after the September 11 attacks, it would gain some limited notoriety as a holding pen for illegal immigrants
from the Middle East. But when Louis resided there it was steeped in obscurity. Even the gas station attendant down the street
had trouble locating it for a visitor. From the outside it vaguely resembled a shopping mall, with a vaulted entranceway and
exposed steel. But inside, from the inmate point of view, it had few if any virtues, except for a kind of heavy-handed, chemically
induced germicidal miasma. Chlorine made it smell like a cross between a high school swimming pool and a public beach restroom.

When he arrived at the end of May 1998, Louis surveyed his surroundings with a kind of bleak indifference.

He could not leave. That was okay. Louis didn’t want to leave. Most of the inmates were very upset about being there, which
they demonstrated in various ways, but Louis was different. He was a volunteer.

Mike Basile was there. It was great having a friend in prison. Well, Mike Basile wasn’t a friend, exactly, and if Louis had
contemplated the subject much he might even blame Mike for the whole check fiasco. But Mike was facing even more time at HCCC
than Louis. He had just begun serving a five-year prison term for his role in the check nightmare. Mike had been to prison
before. He read a lot. One nice thing about prison, if you like to read, is that you can catch up on your reading. Louis didn’t
like to read.

Mike and Louis—and a young car thief named Nick—were pretty much the only Italians, and the only white people, in all of HCCC.
Or at least the only ones visible—and they were very visible—in C500 (Block C, Tier 500).

There was no “Mafia Row.” There were no special privileges for these guys, no bribed guards, no steaks sizzling on hot plates.
Unlike federal penitentiaries, which have large numbers of prisoners who had engaged in criminal activity requiring intelligence
and finesse, the HCCC was less a place of punishment or “correction” than it was a solid waste facility—a receptacle for Hudson
County’s garbage, its muggers and burglars and street trash and bad-check-passers. Louis came to realize that he was now at
the bottom. This time for real. He was in the can—the trash can.

Still, it was restful not having the beeper go off. Prison was the ultimate escape. He had finally escaped from Wall Street.
Escaped to prison.

He thought a bit about the future now. He plotted ways of clearing up his license. Some weeks earlier he got a printout of
his record from the NASD, which should have included any criminal charges, and the check arrest wasn’t on it. But he figured
it would show up there eventually.
^*
He thought about getting a legit Wall Street job with a fourth-tier but clean firm like J. W Charles or a J. B. Oxford, where
a college degree wasn’t required.

But Stefanie wanted him to quit the Street. He did not blame her. His way of life was coming to an end. Just a few months
before, the first trial of a chop house exec was concluded in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, when the mousy-looking
controller of a chop house called A. R. Baron was tried for something called “enterprise corruption.” That is the New York
State equivalent of the federal racketeering laws. John McAndris, a middle-aged, soft-looking accountant, was sentenced to
five to fifteen years in a state prison where he’d be lunch and breakfast for the hoods there, if not isolated in protective
custody.

The feds were a more imminent threat than the Manhattan DA. In 1997, federal prosecutors began to get indictments of Street-linked
Guys, among them the ones behind a cash deal Louis remembered very fondly—HealthTech International. He had done some HealthTech
a few chop houses ago.

State regulators were showing a lot of moxie too. It was a bandwagon, people were climbing on it—and it was barreling down
on Louis and the chop house kids.

All these things were hurting business and making it hard to make money, but Louis never expected that any of this stuff would
ever adversely affect him personally. Neither the feds nor the regulators had ever charged him or named him in any indictment.
And it wasn’t as if they hadn’t known where to look. The SEC had conducted an investigation of Nationwide after it closed,
and he gave off-the-record testimony that pretty much laid out what had happened (except for the Guy involvement). But the
SEC never followed up, as far as he could see. And the NASD had done nothing to Louis in his nearly six years on the Street—except
give him a license to sell stocks.

Sitting in prison gave him a chance to think about all this stuff. And after about a week, almost magically, he got a visit—from
the FBI.

The agents wanted to talk with him, again, about the stock certificates they had found in his briefcase at the time of his
arrest. It was good timing.

He never made a conscious decision to cooperate with the authorities. It was simply the most obvious and natural thing to
do. He had hit the lowest point of his life. His misery was real, and so was his guilt. So he didn’t blow off the FBI agents
this time. He didn’t refer them to his lawyer. He didn’t give them any bullshit about the certificates belonging to customers.

This time he told them the shares were in his briefcase because he was being paid to sell stock. A cash deal.

“There were three agents. One guy was supposedly a Mafia expert. They start questioning about the certificates. I said to
myself, you know what? It’s time. I was done. I can just end it all here. I told them—these are my exact words—‘You have no
idea of my value in helping you with any type of crime on Wall Street.’ I basically told them if they want my help I’ll give
it to them. I kind of hinted I would go back on Wall Street and work there and be like an inside guy,” said Louis.

The agents did not seem very interested, but said they would get back to him. Louis went back to his cell at HCCC and resumed
his thinking. He waited for the agents to call. He had nothing to do in prison, so he waited, and waited. They never returned.
“It was amazing. I could have worked for them for the next five years. Nobody would have had any idea, because I wasn’t arrested
on stocks, I was arrested on the checks. They were so goddamn dumb,” said Louis.
^*

With his career as an informant going nowhere, Louis started thinking about the next event in his life—his sentencing, which
was coming up in a few weeks. The offer of a three-year sentence was still on the table. A good deal, considering the gravity
of the offenses—passing a bad check, carrying a firearm with a defaced serial number. Louis would have to get used to the
idea of spending at least a year in prison, even with the most possible time off for good behavior. It was the best he could
do.

Like hell it was. Louis wrote a letter to the judge.

It was a dumb move. Defendants rarely can get anywhere by writing letters begging for mercy, pleading to get cut loose. But
that was exactly the letter that Louis wrote. His new lawyer—he had the public defender now that his previous lawyer had quit
over nonpayment—would have advised against it. But he didn’t ask. He just wrote the letter.

When Louis appeared before Judge Kenny for sentencing on July 24, 1998, his letter was in front of her. Fran was in the courtroom
and so was Stefanie. And so was Anthony, seven months old.

“It was a sincere letter. I told her I got involved with the wrong people, that I was sorry, that I wouldn’t do it again.
She took it to heart. The judge, Judge Kenny, was very sympathetic. The prosecutor could hardly believe it. The judge said,
‘I don’t believe he deserves state prison. He wrote me a beautiful letter, and I trust that he’s sincere.’ That’s what the
judge said, ‘I trust that he’s sincere.’ In the courtroom. My mother and Stefanie were in the courtroom, and they couldn’t
believe what they saw.

“The judge said, ‘Do you have anything to say before I pronounce sentence?’ And I got choked up and I cried a little bit,
because my son was in the courtroom. I was really upset. I wasn’t going to see him. I hadn’t seen him for two months now.
I wasn’t going to see him for his first birthday. I got choked up, and she actually told me, ‘Please.’ Like she got choked
up, this woman. My mother said, ‘I can’t believe you had that effect on this lady.’ She let me go. She let me out of jail.
She did not want to send me to state prison.

“But I meant what I said. When I went home I wanted to do the right thing.”