Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (33 page)

“I never really seen him in action, but based on his history, he was capable of doing nasty things. I knew he was involved
in the Colombo wars, he was shot once. He said that. He used to say, ‘I was in the Colombo wars. I survived that.’ Blah blah
blah. He looked like a normal guy. If you looked at him you’d think he was dressed up sharp. Clothes, jewelry. The way he
talked, presented himself. You’d think he was an important person with somebody. Dressed sharp. Expensive clothes. Knits and
stuff like that. Nails. The whole works.

“I was at Louis’s house when Charlie was there with his friend Joe Botch. He was telling me that Louis took money from Joe
Botch, he needed the money for his wife’s operation, he needed it back. Some bullshit story. ‘I’m going to fucking break his
head,’ blah blah blah.

“Look, I don’t know. They’re bringing me in. These people are telling me this, you’re telling me that, and Louis, because
of his history, I couldn’t tell if he was telling me the truth, in what he was telling me. Because he just lied so much. His
thing was about lying and gambling. So at that point, based on his history, I didn’t know who to believe. I tend to believe
my son, but these guys are saying this, and I know what I was going through with him, so at that point I’m saying, these guys,
maybe they have a beef, a legitimate beef, with him. I don’t know.

“So after they left I ask him, ‘Louie, what’s the story? They need money for the operation.’ And he says, ‘No, that’s all
bullshit.’ All right. So what do you want to do? I don’t know what I’m going to tell you. You’re getting me involved—and I
don’t have any money to give him.

“That was the time Charlie smacked him. He didn’t punch him or anything, he smacked him. He smacked him in front of me. But
then this other guy was there, and if I jumped in, they were ready. At the time I wanted to smack him too. So he deserved
a smacking. [Laughs.] I never seen him really—if he got hurt worse than a smacking. I wouldn’t stand for that. But he didn’t
do it, that one time he smacked him in front of me.”

F
RAN
P
ASCIUTO
: “I used to call him ‘Charlie Macaroni.’ He was about the lowest as far as I was concerned. I met him for the first time
at the wedding. What did I think of him? That he was a gangster. You know, the way he was dressed, the way he acted. And then
he called a few times, looking for Louis. ‘Is Louie there?’ I would say yes, no, or whatever. ‘Tell him Charlie called.’ He
would have palpitations on the phone. He was always looking for Louis. He used to call, ‘I’m going crazy. Where’s your son?
I’m going to kill him.’ I used to say, ‘I don’t know where he is. Beep him.’

“At first he would just ask for Louis, and then after the arrest for the checks he started to get a little crazy on the phone,
bad-mouthing him. I can’t believe some of the things he said sometimes. I used to speak back to him. One time he told me how
bad Louis was and I said, ‘Hey Charlie, I don’t want to hear that no more.’ I said, ‘An extortionist is talking?’ I said,
‘Here you are telling me everything my son does, what about you? What do you do? You take money from people. You sit, your
feet up, and you take from everybody and you beat them up. You’re an extortionist. How would you like if I called up your
mother and told your mother how rotten you are and how you extort people, what you do for a living?’

“He says, ‘Well, I work.’ I said, ‘Really? Where do you work? With your million-dollar tan and you never leave the house,
where do you work?’ I used to get, like, crazy with him and Louis used to go, ‘I don’t believe you, Ma.’ I said, ‘He got me
on the phone. It’s just some person calling me and I wasn’t going to let him intimidate me in any way.’ Charlie once said
to Louis, ‘Your mother’s crazy.’

“When Louis was arrested for the checks, I remember he called me up. I don’t remember his exact words, but it was something
like, ‘Your son, what is he, like, an informant or something?’ I said, Charlie, please. He’s in jail. What ‘informant’? This
is where he is. Leave me alone. He said, ‘Is he really in jail?’ I said, ‘No, I’m making it up.’ I told him, ‘Call Jersey.
That’s where he is. Call him. Leave me alone.’”

From the moment Louis was arrested for the check scam, it became a continuing motif. An obsession. Charlie was preoccupied
with the notion that Louis was a rat.

Louis wasn’t a rat. But Charlie knew it could happen. Louis was facing serious jail time, or at least it was serious from
the standpoint of someone who wasn’t a Guy.

Hudson County prosecutors offered Louis a plea bargain in which he would have to serve three years in prison. It was, in the
view of Louis’s lawyer, a generous deal. It was the best he could do (or so the lawyer insisted when he wrote a letter to
the judge, asking to be removed from the case because Louis owed him money).

Prosecutors were not aware that Louis had Guy connections, so—if they cared—they had no way of knowing that Louis could give
up Guys. Louis never seriously thought about the idea.

But Charlie thought about it.

Charlie knew what being thrown in jail, deprived of your freedom, isolated—what that does to guys. Even guys who should know
better. Hard guys. When they’re young, unseasoned. A young kid up against an experienced cop? No contest. The cop wins. Charlie
knew.

On March 4, 1982, Nassau County Detective John Majoribanks testified at a pretrial hearing in the case of People vs. Charles
E. Ricottone. Majoribanks described what happened after he arrested Charlie for the home-invasion robbery in April 1981. He
had just put Charlie in a police car when a conversation ensued:

“We asked Mr. Ricottone, ‘Is that true? Do you want to cooperate?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ But he wanted to know what was in it
for him. We advised Mr. Ricottone that if he did cooperate in helping us with the investigation, we would make it known that
he had cooperated to the District Attorney’s office and to the judge. . . . We asked him who the other two [robbers] were
and where they were. And he told us that he would—he had just left them and he would show us where they were. . . . We got
out of our car, got back into the Robbery Squad car, followed the Seventh Squad unit to a location. . . .

“Mr. Ricottone pointed to the house stating that was the house [the two other robbers] were in.”

Later that day, Charlie gave Nassau County detectives a handwritten statement confessing his guilt in the robbery of the Polanski
residence, describing the robbery in detail and implicating his two accomplices. Both were arrested. Charges against one were
dismissed. The other guy fingered by Charlie, Anthony Cella, pleaded guilty.

It must have been a little uncomfortable in the Ricottone household back then. Cella was the boyfriend of Charlie’s sister,
and was living in the house, with the family, at the time they led him away.

It’s not 100 percent clear from court records whether detectives would have found the other perps without Charlie’s help.
Maybe they would have been located anyway. It’s that way sometimes with cooperating witnesses. Sometimes they are crucial.
And sometimes they just make life easier for the cops, and themselves, when they turn rat.

The idea of cooperating was moot because Louis never thought much about the prison term that was hanging over his head. It
was just another annoyance, another thing in the future. Louis never thought about the future. And even if he did, the idea
of spending three years away from Stefanie and his cars and his gambling and his life—that was just inconceivable. Almost
as beyond comprehension as being without Charlie.

Charlie was his Guy and he would just have to make the best of it, whether that meant taking his slaps or lying about the
money he was getting or, when he couldn’t avoid it anymore, paying the money. If you looked at it a certain way, maybe he
really owed the money. Maybe, as Nick said, Joe Botch really needed an operation. Who the fuck knew? Nick didn’t know. Nick
had his doubts. And Nick didn’t know that Louis owed Charlie his life, for the sitdown with Frank at L&B if nothing else.
How much is a life worth anyway? The $50,000 he paid Charlie for speaking up for him with Frank?

As brokers, if not as human beings, the lives of the chop house kids were worth less and less. First the regulators, the polyester-suit
guys, with their dumb restrictions cutting into deals and making investors wary. And now the press. The financial press had
been puppy-dog passive when Louis was starting out. They were docile and stupid and blind. But now the publicity had begun.

In July 1996,
Fortune
published a full-length dissection of the decline and fall of Hanover Sterling, with several unflattering references to Roy.
The story hinted at Guy involvement. Even though it focused on the short-sellers who profited from Hanover’s decline—the red
herring that was pushed by the Adler Coleman trustee, Ed Mishkin—it definitely was unwanted attention. Then came a
Business Week
cover story just before Christmas 1996, entitled “The Mob on Wall Street.” It named Phil and Dom and Roy and Sonny, a Genovese
skipper named “Allie Shades” Malangone and his sidekick Alan Longo. The story linked Roy to Longo and Allie Shades.

Louis and Benny weren’t all that troubled by the
BW
story. It didn’t name them. Except for Greenway, it didn’t name any of the firms where they had worked since Hanover. They
did a ritual burning of the issue when it came out, but they didn’t get too upset because they knew that memories were short.
Chop House Wall Street was as huge and anonymous as the city, and they could easily get lost in it, buried in the ever-shifting
landscape of doors with pretty and patriotic names engraved on them.

With heat increasing from regulators and the media, they were going to have to work even harder to make a buck. Louis had
a wife to support now. He had a lifestyle to support.

Louis’s money hunger was like a never-slackening disease. Cash ruled everything around him. But cash ruled Louis too. He couldn’t
stop spending and he couldn’t stop gambling. And losing.

It wasn’t fuck-you money anymore.

As it became harder to make a dishonest buck, earning money on Chop House Wall Street meant greater potential for conflict.
Conflict meant sitdowns. Except for the Carmine sitdown, which was a rare exception, sitdowns meant Charlie. And Charlie was
getting harsher, more difficult to deal with, more unreasonable. Charlie was tired of being pulled into sitdowns. And he was
throwing tantrums like a petulant child because deals were getting harder to pull off. A Brooklyn health care company looked
promising at First Hanover, one of the firms he changed as often as whores changed tampons, but Louis and Benny—and Charlie—lost
out when the stock promoter got cold feet. The reason was the heat, the publicity.

The
BW
story and other articles exposed the Guys and the chop house kids, but Louis and his pals didn’t give a fuck and neither
did the Guys. The money was just too good, even with deals harder to pull off. In fact, by 1997 Guys were doing more than
just shaking down guys who ran firms, earners like Chris Wolf and Louis. They were running firms, the way Dom and Rico were
running Vision, or acting as talent scouts, as Frank Coppa did when he introduced Louis and Benny to State Capital.

And now Louis was going to another firm, called U.S. Securities & Futures, because of a referral from another Guy in Louis’s
life.

The move to U.S. Securities grew out of another bullshit dispute. This one involved a Guy named Vinnie Nunez. Louis owed Vinnie
about $80,000, and Vinnie was friends with a Guy named “Little Nick” Corozzo, a Gambino skipper who was about to go on trial
for racketeering. Nick called Charlie. Same old ritual. Someone has a beef against Louis, calls Charlie, and Charlie shakes
down Louis. It was getting old.

“Charlie calls me up and says, ‘You’re going to have to pay this kid back some money,’ which I knew was going to happen. But
I really didn’t have the money, so I tried to deal with Vinnie personally, and it worked out better. Vinnie introduced me
to a guy named Alan Saretsky and Alan’s friend Ralph, who owned a catering hall in Brooklyn. Alan was in hock to Ralph and
this Guy named Phil Defonte. Alan had a deal—a company called Waco Classic Aircraft.”

A simple idea. Louis would work off his debt, like some kind of sharecropper in the Old South. He would generate profits that
would make Vinnie whole, and thereby lift from Louis the yoke of indentured servitude. To accomplish this task, Louis went
to work at Alan’s firm, Danalan Investments. When Danalan couldn’t pull off Waco, the deal went to U.S. Securities & Futures
and Louis followed. Waco made vintage aircraft for collectors, not that anyone cared. The product mattered—the warrants. Alan
was in charge of the product.

Alan Saretsky was not a typical chop house broker. He was older than most. He had worked on the Real Wall Street, but his
career had taken a wrong turn along the way. He was a Shearson broker back in the 1980s, but ran afoul of regulators and was
barred by the New York Stock Exchange in the early 1990s. So now he was one of the dozens of former brokers who enjoyed a
prosperous existence on the fringes of the securities business, brokering deals between unprosperous companies and chop houses.
Alan was a “friend of a friend” of Vinnie’s, the kind of networking that often resulted in jobs on both the Real and the Chop
House Wall Street.

U.S. Securities & Futures was part of the Real Wall Street. It didn’t just look like the Real Wall Street. It
was
the Real Wall Street.

For the first time since A. T Brod, he was back—for a few minutes, at least—on the Real Wall Street. What was he doing there?
The
Business Week
story had received a serious amount of publicity, and there were calls in Congress for the SEC to act. The chop houses were
getting a great deal of unwanted exposure. But there it was—a legit firm housing a crew of chop house brokers. The proprietor
was a man named John Hing, who traded bonds and futures and didn’t seem to grasp the kind of people he was dealing with in
Louis, Benny, and their friends. Instead of trading Eurobonds, these kids were pushing a company whose shares were about to
be sold to the investors of America. It seemed legit at first glance, like most chop house schemes.