Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (19 page)

“So he’s on the couch, lying there, and I’m video-cameraing it, and he’s got the beer, and I’ve got him drinking the beer
at like nine in the morning and it smelled so bad, the apartment. You know that alcohol-coke mixed breath? It’s just like
this breath, it’s so unique, and it stinks, it’s this odor. So he’s drinking the beer and he’s like, ‘Louie, what are you
doing with that?’ And he took a sip out of his beer, and he put it down, and I stayed on it with the video camera.

“You really bond with somebody when you’re in these positions. You get to really know somebody’s true colors.”

Louis was learning a lot about himself too as he enjoyed the better things in life and spent money. He was learning what it
was to be twenty-one and have access to an undepletable supply of money. He was learning that the more money he was getting,
the more he was likely to get, and that it was never going to stop. He was learning that you didn’t even have to think about
money. That money was just there, and that he never had to worry about money again for the rest of his life. He could do what
he needed to do to feel comfortable and relaxed. Like order a limo, for instance. But he would do more than just take one
home late at night, the way most people on Wall Street might do, or use one to go back and forth from work.

“This was after my second or third big check at A. T. Brod. I got like a two-hundred-forty-thousand-dollar paycheck, and I
just went berserk. Beserko. I took a hundred seventy in cash out of the bank. I went to Citibank and asked for it in cash.
The fucking teller almost died. They had a security guard walk me to the door. I go, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine. Don’t worry. You
ain’t seen nothing yet. I’ll be back for the rest tomorrow.’ I just went home and I spent like sixty, seventy thousand in
a week and a half.

“I was partying with Benny and we were doing coke and I was getting so paranoid that I wanted the limo running and downstairs
in front of my building, because I was nervous, in case I had to make a breakaway. In case I had to make a getaway out of
there. So I had the limo company send me a limo. Twenty-four hours a day. For a week. I used to look out my window. I told
the guy, ‘Park by the tree,’ right downstairs, so I could spit on the car from my window. I’d look out my window and ‘Okay,
he’s still there.’ I’d have them change the limo drivers by my building.

“Then the limo driver left. I looked out the window and I went, ‘Arggggh!’ Fucking limo ain’t there! ‘Benny, the limo ain’t
there,’ and he’s a nervous wreck. Feeling his chest. I call the limo company and I go, ‘Jerry. The limo’s not here.’ He says,
‘The guy went to buy a pack of cigarettes. He had to get gas in the limo. You got him running the engine.’

“We paid a lot of money to do it, though. Ten thousand dollars for the limo to stay there for a week. Two thousand dollars
a day. We didn’t use it one time. We kept on telling the guy, ‘Pull up to the front. We’re coming down to go out.’ We never
made it downstairs to go out.’

“Then finally I went down with a girl, and we just went off. It was some chick, some friend of a Scores girl. I said, ‘I want
to go to Florida.’ He says, ‘Where you leaving from? Newark or LaGuardia?’ I say, ‘No, no. You don’t understand. I want to
take the limo to Florida. How much? I’ll give you three grand.’ He says, ‘Done deal.’ So he probably told the guy who ran
the limo company he was driving me around in Jersey and New York for three or four days.

“I was so paranoid, I remember in the car. I didn’t want to shower, and I wouldn’t peek out the windows of the limo. I was
fucked up. Fucked up bad. I don’t know what it was. I was partying too much, really paranoid. The limo driver, he tells me
on the way down there, the Carolinas or somewhere, he says he needed to take a shower. I says, ‘Make sure you leave the car
running.’ He’s yawning. He wanted to sleep at night in a hotel. I say, ‘No, no. I’m staying in the limo.’ I remember sitting
there, biting my nails. Once he opened the partition and said he had to sleep, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, man, he’s got to sleep.
All right. We got to figure this out.’ And I said, ‘Listen, I’ll give you an extra couple of hundred dollars to sleep in the
limo.’ So he slept in the front seat.

“I wouldn’t even let the girl get out of the limo. I remember I wouldn’t let her get out of the car. She’d say she had to
go to the bathroom, and I’d go with her. Because I was afraid she was going to take off. ‘I’m coming with you. There’s no
way I’m going to let you leave this limo.’ I wouldn’t even leave the limo. I’d have to go to the bathroom and I’d tell them
to pull over to a deserted block. I didn’t want nobody to see me. I don’t know what it was. I was completely fucking paranoid.
It took us two and a half days to get there and I didn’t leave the limo for two and a half fucking days.

“So all week before this, while the limo was downstairs, I would call Stefanie. Ten-second conversations. ‘Really busy.

Can’t talk right now. ’Bye.’ I would hope and pray that the machine would pick up so that I could just leave a machine message.
Then when I went down to Florida I told her I had to go away on business.

“I was ‘in Texas’ for four days.”

There were moments, not very many of them, but a few spare moments when he questioned what he was doing, when he started thinking
that maybe he was making the wrong decision by getting involved—with Stefanie. He could relate to Deenie in a way that he
couldn’t relate to Stefanie. Deenie represented the new. Stefanie the old. It was hard to choose. There were things he could
do with Deenie that he just couldn’t do with Stefanie. Missions, for instance.

Deenie could deal with him being high. With Deenie there was a lot less lying, a lot less acting. He was who he was, who he
had become. He could get high and he didn’t have to hide that from her. He could never tell Stefanie that he got high. With
Deenie he could be himself, who he really was.

Stefanie thought he was still the scrawny kid she met when they were seventeen, only now he was successful. A success on Wall
Street.

But she wasn’t supportive. She didn’t understand him. She had stupid doubts, asinine questions.

So he didn’t choose. During the week he had Deenie, the Manhattan girl. During the weekend, and during the week, he had Stefanie,
the Staten Island girl. It was like working two jobs. Two shifts. But Louis was a hardworking guy.

“There ain’t nobody who knows my life better than my doorman. You got to make him your best friend. I used to tip this guy
like crazy, because he would know everything about me. If he wanted to give me up to either girl, it was easy. But I used
to explain to him, ‘Stefanie’s my girl from Staten Island. She’s my wife-to-be. Deenie’s my sidekick girl.’ I used to tell
him my life because he knew anyway. He used to see me come in, leave, come in, leave. It was fucking nuts.

“So this is how my day went. I wake up in the morning, eight o’clock, eight-thirty. Sometimes seven. There’s Deenie. ‘Deenie,
I’m going to work.’ She says, ‘Yeah, see you later.’ She only had four hours of sleep. Me too. Then I go to work. Driven to
work. Brod is right across West Street, but I don’t give a fuck. I’m not walking. If Sally Leads is at the apartment he drives
me to work. Otherwise I get the car, drive to work. Come back from work at lunchtime. Deenie’s still in the apartment. Maybe
have an afternoon sex session. If not, wake her up, so she can get on with her fucking day. She would sleep until six o’clock
if not. So I’d wake her up. ‘Come on, Deenie, you got to get your shit together.’ She’d get up, get something to eat, fool
around, whatever. And then I would go back to work. Now she would straighten up the apartment, she would clean up. She was
a good girl.

“I come back to the apartment at four o’clock. She’d be there. Now mind you, Stefanie would think I’m working till seven or
eight o’clock at night. I’m not. I’m working till four, four-thirty. If not, sometimes I’d stay at work till eleven o’clock.
It depended. But I’d come home every day at four o’clock anyway. I would hang out with Deenie for a little while, go out and
get something to eat. If not, she would leave. I’d drop her off at her apartment and she’d get ready to go to work.

“Then I would call Stefanie from my cell phone on the way back. This would be five-thirty, six o’clock. Sometimes I would
have to go back to work and I wouldn’t hang out with Stefanie. But if I wasn’t working I’d call Stefanie and say, ‘What are
you doing? Do you want to come out here? Do you want me to come to Staten Island?’ Most of the time she’d want to come out
to the apartment. We’d go out to get something to eat, go back to the apartment, hang out, watch a movie, whatever, fool around.
She’d go home at twelve o’clock. Now she’d be thinking I’m going to fucking bed at twelve o’clock. I’m not. I’m just starting.

“I would take a shower now, get dressed. Benny lives two blocks away in the ‘projects’ of Battery Park City, I used to call
it. Gateway Plaza. Lowest buildings, shit buildings. Hallways stank. Horrible. So I’d call him at the projects down the block.
‘What are you doing?’ ‘Nothing. Getting ready to go to Scores.’ He was doing the same thing. He had Michelle, who would come
over and hang out at the apartment, go home to Brooklyn, and he’d get ready, get dressed, go out with me. He was living the
same fucking psycho lifestyle.

“He’d get dressed and pick me up, or I’d pick him up, and we’d go to Scores. He had his girl and I had my girl at Scores.
He had all the girls at Scores, almost, Benny was a very good-looking kid. Puerto Rican-Italian. So we’d drink, party, do
whatever we were doing for the night. Doing lines if we’re doing blasts, whatever. We used to call it Scooby-Doo. That was
our nickname for it. One of the kids that we got it from looked like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.

“At four o’clock I’d be at Scores. Wait for Deenie to come out. We would go home. Maybe get a bite to eat at the twenty-four-hour
McDonald’s on Second Avenue. Go to Battery Park, park my car, go upstairs. She would take a shower. I used to make her take
a shower because guys dance with her all night. So quick shower and we go to bed, do what we do, wake up, do it again. Call
Stefanie in the morning during the day. ‘Hey, babe. How’s everything?’

“Sometimes in the morning I would do a blast just to get me through the day. How else was I going to live? I used to have
to do a Valium just to get myself to sleep, because I was so overtired. I’d get, like, sixteen winds. I’d be on my third wind
for the night. ‘All right, I’m up again.’ I’d take a Valium just to settle down and go to sleep. I mean, I was living two
lives.

“I used to leave on Friday and not come back till Sunday, and Deenie used to think I was hanging out with my friends. I would
tell her that I promised my friends in Staten Island that on Friday nights after work I shut my beeper off and I have nothing
to do with my New York life. And she believed it! So that was it. And she wouldn’t ask no questions.

“My phone was picked up by neither girl. But one night I picked up the phone and Deenie was on the line and I said, ‘Joe’s
not here.’ Stefanie was right next to me. Deenie said what are you talking about and I said, ‘Come on. Joe’s not here. Talk
to you later.’ Next day I said, ‘Oh, Deenie, I was sleeping, you woke me up, I was dreaming.’ I was good. I had my shit covered.
Once Stefanie found a pair of panties. I just said it belonged to Sally Leads’s girlfriend. He used to sleep over with her
once in a while. She never questioned it.”

The Missions poured coke-flavored honey over the knot that his life had become. And a new diversion was coming into use—Ecstasy.
Not as dangerous as coke. Less likely to send you to the hospital. Safe, it seemed. Mellow. In the Chop House Wall Street
of the 1990s, quaaludes and Ecstasy were so common that you’d think they were sold at the Duane Reade drugstores. Pills were
popped like Vitamin C, and cocaine was scooped out like talcum in some old greaseball’s barbershop. Coke wasn’t used openly
in the offices—except when it was absolutely necessary.

“Sometimes we’d have to. We were so fucking tired from partying that we’d do a fucking line or two just to get through the
day. I sometimes would be fucked up, talking to clients. I mean, we were crazy. We were fucking maniacs. Man-i-acs.

“It wasn’t as if we were drug addicts because we really weren’t. I don’t know why we did it. It wasn’t as if we couldn’t stop.
If I didn’t want to do it anymore, I just wouldn’t do it. I had no fear that I was addicted to them at all. But we used to
take it to the next level. I took Benny to the hospital twice, he almost thought he was going to have a heart attack. He was
lying on the couch, ‘Louie, please call the ambulance,’ he says.

‘I’m dying. I can’t breathe. My heart’s doing one-sixty. I’m about to fucking die.’ He thought his heart was going to blow
up.

“We went to South Beach one time. We stayed there like five days. We had a slew of drugs. Ecstasy, Valium, mushrooms, and
cocaine. I never took mushrooms before in my life. They were these little things. They make you hallucinate. We were in a
club and Benny handed me the bag, and he tells me to hold it. So I go, ‘What do I do with it?’ and he says, ‘Eat ’em.’ Now,
I thought he told me to eat the whole bag. I ate the whole fucking bag. I was on a dance floor, and I lost control of my bowels.

“So I’m telling Benny I can’t hold it in. I’m shitting. So he’s dragging me into the bathroom, and there’s a guy in the stall
and he kicked the door open. And I remember the guy was sitting on the toilet bowl shitting and Benny grabbed him off the
toilet bowl, threw him out of the way, and threw me in there. I couldn’t control it. I was pissing and shitting. It was ridiculous.
And then I had to leave the place with Benny’s shirt tied around my waist, naked, because I had to leave my fucking jeans
and underwear there. So I had to walk through this club. It was mad crowded, girls all over, and I had Benny’s see-through
Versace shirt, and my cock and my ass were hanging out. And Benny was around me, trying to cover it. It was ridiculous. It
was like crazy. Fucking nuts.