Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (40 page)

What was obvious was that the feds were getting nearer and nearer to Louis and the people around him. But if that dawned on
Charlie, it seemed to make him even more violent, even more unreasonable. Louis didn’t know what pressure Charlie was getting
from the Guys above him, but it must have been every bit as brutal as the pressure Louis was getting from Charlie.

Things were simple now. Illusions were out the window.

Louis was taking money from his customers in return for nothing, and Charlie was no longer making believe that he was doing
anything for Louis in return for his money. He was collecting a debt that Louis owed him—Louis’s existence on the planet—and
Louis was going to be paying for the rest of his life.

“After Aaron I didn’t care no more,” said Louis. “I was getting wise with him. I used to just totally irritate him. I used
to know exactly how to tick him off. He’d say, ‘I’m coming to your house.’ I’d know if I said, ‘No, Charlie don’t come!’—he’d
back off. But I didn’t say that no more.

“I’d say, ‘You come here, it’s not going to get me to Brooklyn any faster. In fact, it would be better off if you came here.
If you come here I don’t have the money, and if you come to Brooklyn I don’t have the money, and I’m not leaving my fucking
house. So if you want to come here, I’m here.’ He’d say, ‘You’re therrrrrre! You’re therrrrrrrrrrre!’ I’d say, ‘Right here.
I don’t know why you’re yelling about it.’ I’d be a wiseass. I just didn’t care no more. I’d hear the phone dropping on the
floor. I could see him foaming at the mouth.

“I’d just tease him now. I’d say, ‘Charlie, you’re getting crazy for no reason. You’re really going to make your blood pressure
go up, pal. You shouldn’t be acting like this. You’re a grown man.’ That’s what I used to say to him.”

It was a game of chicken. They were both rushing to the edge of the cliff. One of them was going to have to jump.

“According to our most recent investor survey we have determined that everyone who possesses the knowledge and the wherewithal
would like to take advantage of the many opportunities that are currently available in this industry. We believe this creates
a desire for our primary service which is finding top quality companies in targeted industries.”

—from the private placement
memorandum of United Capital Consulting
Corporation, dated July 15, 1999

It went on like that for six pages, single-spaced, describing what United Capital was going to do for its investors. It was
so good. There was a little problem in the section describing key executives. Louis had to tell a little white lie and say
he “graduated” from the College of Staten Island, and he inflated his position a tad from unregistered cold-caller to “investment
banker with Hanover Sterling.” Louis figured that nobody would have paid much attention to the indictments of Hanover principles,
which were all over the papers. But this much was true: “Following a successful stay at Hanover he went on to build such small
cap firms as AT Broad [sic], Nationwide Securities and has successfully placed and participated in 20 successful IPOs.” He
certainly built those firms, though he did have to take down Brod as well as build it up. But nobody would know about that.

Nicholas Pasciuto, “managing director of international and U.S. manufacturing at Hudson printing for ten years,” was down
as vice president. Once again, Nick was letting Louis use his name, figuring that this time Louis was getting into business
for himself, a legit business, and would finally pull himself up by his bootstraps.

By the summer of 1999, Stefanie was trying to reconcile with Louis—and reconcile the Louis of 1999 with the Louis she’d known
years ago, the skinny kid at the gas station. Stefanie was facing reality now—the reality of Louis, and the reality of the
world in which he and she were living.

Louis was making promises now. He admitted stuff too. He had problems. They were fixable. He would change. Lynyrd Skynrd—fuck
them.
This bird you can change
.

She believed him. She went back to him in time to see him off to Arizona for his meeting with Joe Welch. At last, a legitimate
moneymaking opportunity.

The blackjack cracked Louis on the skull. Louis leaped out of the car and ran onto Fingerboard Road, toward the Verrazano-Narrows
Bridge. Louis didn’t know where he was going. Maybe he would head to the bridge. Maybe he would jump off it.

He owed $5,000 to John and Jeff, the kids who had watched him for a day while Mergen and Richie looted his storage unit. He
had started gambling with them. No hard feelings. That is, no hard feelings so long as he paid what he owed. He now owed $5,000.
That seemed to be the magic number—$5,000—the threshold that got Guys to haul out their blackjacks. John and Jeff had taken
him for a ride in their car, and the blackjack was their way of commencing the discussion.

Blackjacks are venerable methods of nonverbal communication. They are black, leather-covered, flexible devices, typically
filled with lead or some other heavy substance. Blackjacks can be easily concealed in a jacket pocket. They were formerly
the standard equipment of New York City police detectives and other plainclothes police, but had fallen out of favor over
the years, to be replaced by a flexible metal rod called the asp. But blackjacks were still available for purchase on Staten
Island and over the Internet, and they still worked well, as evidenced by the tiny droplets of blood Louis was leaving on
Fingerboard Road.

It was early October 1999. United Capital had lived up to his expectations, grossing $360,000, of which $100,000 went to Charlie.
The remainder, of course, went to the bookies, to satisfy previous indebtedness and finance further wagers. All told, Louis
was short $5,000, hence the car ride and the blackjack usage.

“Jeff holds back and John’s right behind me. There’s people all over the place. People on the bus stop. I see a door open
and I run into some lady’s house. Some Chinese lady on the corner of Fingerboard and the service road. I was bleeding. I run
in, and this Chinese lady is flipping out. I slam the door and lock it. She’s yelling, ‘Nooooo!’ I say, ‘Calm down.’ I say,
‘Somebody just jumped me.’ She goes, ‘Get out!’ She goes to open the door. I say, ‘What, are you fucking nuts, lady? They’re
right outside.’ So these kids go into the backyard and try to get into the back door. I had to lock the back door. And this
lady is flipping out. ‘Get out of my house!’ I go, ‘Shut the fuck up. Call the cops. Tell them you’re getting robbed.’”

The police arrived.

“I try to walk over and talk to them. They go, ‘Hands up!’ I go, ‘Listen, you don’t understand.’ The cop that was there happened
to be a friend of mine I went to high school with. He went, ‘What happened?’ I told him I was waiting for the bus, two guys
jumped out and beat me up. I went to the hospital. The white of my eye was ripped. I looked like the Elephant Man for a few
days.”

He had to pay these kids back their $5,000. So when he got the checks in his hands, he had to cash them. It was that simple.
He had done it before. He knew how. It would have to go better this time, not that he cared much one way or the other if it
didn’t.

A stock deal had fallen through, and checks were going back to the customers. One of the checks was for $7,500, and the other
was for $25,000. Real money, just like the money he used to get in the paper bags on Tuesdays.

His friend Rich Dacunto knew a friend at a check-cashing place who would cash the checks for them. On October 13, 1999, Louis
and Rich went to United Check Cashing in Carteret, New Jersey, cashed the checks, and walked away. No cops this time.

The only problem was that the checks were from a Ralph Torrelli stock deal.

ESCAPE

Ralph was annoyed, very, very annoyed, about the checks. And Charlie was furious, even though he took most of Louis’s share
of the proceeds. Charlie insisted that Louis pay back to Ralph the money he stole from the clients—without deducting what
he had paid Charlie. It was a kind of penalty for stealing.

Charlie was taking a minimum of $12,000 a month, no matter what Louis was making. By now that meant Louis was paying up to
80 percent of his monthly income to Charlie. He was almost twenty-six years old. He had a wife and a child. He was a man.
And here he was, getting belted around, and giving away most of his money. One day a note appeared in his mailbox.

Charlie denied he sent it. Louis figured it didn’t matter. Charlie, Joe Botch, John or Jeff, or somebody else he had pissed
off—what difference did it make?

The note raised a good point, though. He had to escape.

He made the decision on the sidewalk in front of Lundy’s. That’s a restaurant on Sheepshead Bay. It was a cool, clear, crisp
day, sunny and windy. You could practically see all the way up to Canarsie Pier.

The seagulls were floating lazily overhead when he saw Charlie approaching. Louis was leaning against the railing, smoking
a cigarette, looking out over the small bay, with Manhattan Beach beyond. It was a weekday and the street was clear. The fishing
boats were docked, but no one was hawking fresh-caught bluefish in little tubs on the sidewalk. Damn, was it a great day.
It had gotten to the point that Louis couldn’t enjoy a day like this anymore.

Charlie was supposed to get $7,000. Louis had $6,000.

“Walk this way,” Charlie said. He was in a windbreaker and cap. Slumming.

“Do you have the money?”

Louis gave it to him.

“I’ll have the rest in a couple of days.”

“Tomorrow.”

“All right, tomorrow.”

Charlie walked away without saying a word.

Louis called out after him.

“You’re welcome, Charlie. Don’t worry about it.”

Charlie didn’t react.

“You want some clams? They should be on you. I’ll treat you if you want.”

He kept walking.

“Thanks. I’ll come here anytime you want. Bring you money. No problem. I’ll be right here. Sitting right here tomorrow. Take
care.”

Charlie kept walking.

Louis watched as Charlie walked away, toward Brighton Beach. Soon people came between them and he lost sight of Charlie, with
that bouncy walk of his. He watched after him and suddenly his eyes were filled with tears, and he was thinking thoughts he
couldn’t control.

“This is the last time I’m giving that motherfucker a penny,” Louis said to himself, over and over again. When he stopped
the thought, it came back again, unchanged. He had no second thoughts.

Louis went back to where he parked his car. He didn’t have the truck anymore. He had a Toyota Camry. A nice car. Better for
traveling with the baby. Solid, dependable, but nothing fancy. Reasonably priced but still expensive—$400 a month. He got
into the car and went home.

He never saw Charlie again.

Louis had never written a rÉsumÉ. That involved planning, which he didn’t do. Now, right before him in black and white, there
it was. The United States government had drafted it for him, and it was not the kind of curriculum vitae that most employers
would embrace.

Count One was Conspiracy to Commit Mail, Wire, and Securities Fraud. Counts Two and Three were Securities Fraud. The entire
document was fourteen pages long and signed by Mary Jo White. There were so many firms, so many stocks and scams, that they
were broken out in a chart, a spreadsheet of crime, beginning with Hanover and ending with United Capital.

It was not so much a criminal complaint, or even a rÉsumÉ, as it was the broad outlines of a life.

Louis pleaded guilty to his rÉsumÉ, and his life, a few days before the end of the millennium. He then went to work. The FBI
kept him busy.

Late in 1999 and early in 2000, Louis paid visits to his old friends and acquaintances on the Street. He just materialized
out of nowhere. It had to be nowhere, because Louis assumed that Charlie and John and Jeff were looking for him. John certainly
was. He rang the doorbell of his parents’ house. Louis wasn’t home at the time.

If anybody wanted to know what Louis was up to, all he had to do was go to the federal courthouse on Pearl Street.

Although the multicount “rÉsumÉ” indictment was sealed, the one-count criminal complaint that was filed against Louis on the
day he was arrested, October 20, was right in the files. A check of the courthouse computer would have found an entry for
December 20: “ORDER as to Louis Pasciuto, dismissing.” Why were the charges suddenly tossed out?

It’s a good bet that no one ever bothered looking there. So much for the vaunted ability of Guys to ferret out secrets.

Louis signed a cooperation agreement in which the government pledged to make its best efforts to put him in the federal Witness
Protection Program. But first Louis had a bit of work to do.

January 21, 2000, was a freezing cold day. FBI agents John Brosnan and Kevin Barrows picked him up at noon. They put a tape
recorder in his Frye boot—it was a microcassette job but sizable, uncomfortable. They pulled the wire up the leg of his jeans
and taped two microphones to his stomach, just above the belt. In his jacket pocket they placed a transmitter that would radio
the conversations to the van. Then they drove to Manhattan. The idea would be for Louis to set up shop at a chop house and
open accounts for his “customers”—federal agents. He would sell them stocks and get paid by the firm in cash, just as he had
so many times before, only this time it would all go down on tape. Then he would go away and the feds would come in, eventually,
and bust the firm for the cash deal.

His first stop was a firm in Staten Island. But it was a no-go. He had a friend there who knew him, and he wasn’t in. Louis
went back in the van and shut the tape off. They drove to another firm.

Louis had been at this firm twice before in the preceding few weeks, but never managed to talk to the right people. He was
irritated that the feds had strung out the visits. “I kept on explaining to them that if I go there on a Monday I have to
go back on Tuesday,” said Louis. “They know I’m not the type of kid to wait a week to go back somewhere. If they tell me they’re
going to pay me cash, I’m going to do it right away.”