Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (38 page)

In imposing a sentence of three years probation, Judge Camille M. Kenny recorded the following four “Mitigating Factors” in
his case file:

1. The defendant has no history of prior delinquency or criminal activity and has led a law-abiding life for a substantial
period of time before the commission of the present offense.

2. The defendant’s conduct was the result of circumstances unlikely to recur.

3. The character and attitude of the defendant indicate that he/she is unlikely to commit another offense.

4. The defendant is particularly likely to respond affirmatively to probationary treatment.

Louis was released.

“I wanted Louis to get a good job,” said Stefanie. “I told him, ‘You need a job where you get paid every week.’ I told him
we need money, and we need to know it’s coming every week, so we know how much money we have to spend. We have to know how
much rent we can pay. And we’ll budget our money. And if we have to spend every night in the house, eating pasta or whatever,
that’s what we’ll have to do. It’s no big deal. Everybody has to start at the bottom, and work their way up. I said, ‘So what?
You started at the top, come back down to reality and start where everybody else starts. At the bottom. And hopefully in ten
years you’ll be better off. That’s how most people do it.”

For eight years Stefanie worked part-time at a Kids “R” Us in a Staten Island shopping mall. She was paid peanuts. But she
liked to work. It was something people did. It was how she was brought up. Even when she was spending weekends in Miami, she
would drive to the Kids “R” Us in the Beemer. Then she got a job as a brokerage house assistant through an employment agency.
By coincidence—small world that Wall Street is—Stefanie was placed at a firm called William Scott, a chop house run by a scary-looking
Colombo family associate named Frank Persico. Stefanie quit Scott after a few months.
^*
She later found work as an elementary school teacher in Brooklyn.

Louis was willing to try anything, at least for a while. After coming out of prison, he went to bartender school for a few
days. Naah. Got a lead on a job selling cars in New Jersey. Went for an interview. Naah. Then he got a real opportunity. A
good job. A job a lot of young people would kill for—an opportunity to learn a trade that had made a lot of enterprising,
hardworking guys rich. If he kept at it, it was a job that could mean a comfortable, even luxurious lifestyle.

Louis was becoming a plumber.

An old Pasciuto family friend, Leo, did construction jobs—“roughing the building,” putting in the cast-iron pipes. It was
hard physical labor, carrying eight-inch pipes. Hard labor but honest, clean. The kind of work the Pasciutos and Surrobbos
had done since they came off the boat from Sicily nearly a century earlier. It was the kind of hard work the Donohues had
always embraced.

Louis didn’t like to work. But Stefanie was pushing him, so he took a job with Leo as an assistant plumber, working off the
books.

For a month or so, Louis led a normal life. Most of his neighbors on Staten Island lived that kind of life, and Louis was
amazed when he found out how absolutely shitty it was. You get up early, so early that the sun isn’t out even in the summer.
You ride out to a miserable, filthy, disgusting work site somewhere. Even the worst shithole of a chop house was no comparison
to a muddy slime pit of a construction site, even when it was right smack on Park Avenue. Didn’t matter where it was. You
got a shovel from some slimy, unshaven turd and you had to dig and carry heavy iron pipes. Louis was in great shape but at
the end of the day his muscles were aching and he was dead tired. This is what most people did, and most people did this all
their lives.

Louis was different. He was better than that. He proved that to himself when talking to his landlord one weekend. His landlord
noticed that Louis was being picked up every morning at an ungodly hour by a guy in a pickup truck, so he asked Louis what
he was doing for a living.

Louis didn’t hesitate a moment. He instinctively knew what to say. In a millisecond his brain was active and the old Louis
was back.

“I said, ‘I do renovating. We do kitchens, bathrooms.’

“He said, ‘I want to redo my bathroom. Think you can do it?’ I said, ‘I been doing it nine years.’ My whole fucking life I
been a plumber. I gave him a price. He said, ‘I could get it done for a couple hundred less.’ And I said, ‘If you want to
get it done for a couple hundred dollars less, it’s not going to be professional. I’m going to come in there and do a professional
job.’ I sold the guy.”

So Louis became a plumber. He cut out a few steps—such as the several years required to learn the trade—but that was okay
because the money was great. He knew how much plumbers could earn from renovation work. That was really the only information
he needed.

“I went up there and I didn’t know where to start. So I just started ripping tile down. But I did it. Took me like a month,
but I did it. Had to gut the bathroom, rip out the toilet and sink. Had to retile the walls, new toilet, new sink, new bathtub.
Caulk the shower stall. New tile floor. It came out looking awesome, though. I had to rig things a little. I figure by now
the shower door fell off. I knew I didn’t put it on right. If he just leaned on the shower door, it’s falling down. Because
I leaned on it and it fell out. I put in some more glue and figured it would stay at least a month.

“I read instructions! That’s how I did it. When I had to put in the sink I couldn’t find no instructions, so I went to Home
Depot and asked the guy. He drew me a little diagram. I had no tools. None of the proper tools. Instead of using a monkey
wrench for the pipes I’m using pliers. Leo thought it was ridiculous. I told him I was doing a side job, and he said ‘Get
the fuck outta here.’ He said, ‘You’re gonna get sued.’ But he was nice about it. Helped me take a pipe out. One of the pipes
was rusted, and I spent hours trying to take it out. Hammering it, trying to hack-saw it off. Nothing worked. Leo came over
and took it off in like seven seconds. He took the monkey wrench and went
kwitcccch!
Came off. Felt like an idiot. Me and my friend Glenn were standing on the wrench, trying to turn it. We were probably turning
it the wrong way.”

Louis might have had quite a career as a plumber. He especially liked the terms, with money paid up-front before the job was
started. A guy who cut corners could just line up side jobs and walk off with the up-front money. But Louis figured he might
get people a bit too pissed off. He decided to make the landlord job the last one. He kept on going to the work sites every
morning.

He was finishing up a job in Manhattan one afternoon when Louis saw him, waiting outside the construction pit.

Charlie.

When Louis got out of jail, Charlie had taken half of the $6,800 Louis had had with him when he was arrested. Then he went
away for a while. He stopped beeping. Maybe he had gotten used to Louis being away for a couple of months. But here he was
again. He missed him, maybe.

Charlie got right to the point.

Louis was making $300 a week. Charlie wanted $100 of it.

“‘You’re going to do this to me?’ I told him. ‘I just came home, and you’re going to take what I’m earning every week as a
plumber for my wife and kid?’

“He goes, ‘It don’t matter because you’ll have no wife and kid to support. I saved your life. You owe me your life. You don’t
pay me for your life, I’m going to take it.’”

It was a sucky job anyway. Getting up early. The digging. The hauling pipe. Louis was almost relieved when Leo pulled up the
next morning and Louis told him to take a hike. He was going back to sleep.

Louis faced several problems as he prepared to reenter the Street in August 1998. The felony conviction was a big obstacle,
and even if his record was whistle-clean he’d have had a lot of trouble. Closer regulatory scrutiny of deals, and involvement
of law enforcement in the fight against securities fraud, were making life miserable for everybody on his side of the law.
“By this time IPOs were, like, shit, and the authorities were catching up with the cash deals. You couldn’t even get a 504
^*
registered anymore. It was impossible. They changed the regulations. The companies actually had to have money in the bank
or their stock couldn’t get registered,” said Louis. The nerve.

Paper was always a problem. Dumb forms. Dumb filings. Dumb criminal records. Selling stock left a paper trail. Even the cruddiest
stocks resulted in SEC filings and trading records, with all the incriminating stuff they often contained, and brokerages
piled on their own mountains of processed pulp. Brokers had records that could be searched, and the NASD by the late 1990s
was allowing members of the public to access broker records through its website.

Louis hooked up with a firm, First Fidelity, that had found a solution for all that. He was referred by an old friend, Eddie
Talmeni. “I called him and said, ‘Eddie, what are yas doing, because I’m fucking dying. I’m being a plumber. I can’t take
this shit no more. I got to go back to Wall Street. What’s going on up there?’ He was doing First Fidelity. First Fidelity
was a straight ‘I’ll take your money and I’m going to a party’ rip,” said Louis.

First Fidelity said it sold stocks to its customers, but that was a fib. It didn’t really do that. It took its clients’ money,
and didn’t buy the stock for them. A simple idea, and an old one. First Fidelity was a bucket shop—the most ancient scam on
Wall Street. Bucket shops didn’t produce much paper. No paper, no problem, at least in theory. You can’t regulate what you
can’t see, at least in theory.

First Fidelity was pushing, of course, an Internet stock, Exchange.Online. Louis used the name “Bruce Follick.” This was a
broker with a clean record. By using Follick’s name, he didn’t have to worry about anybody finding out about that felony conviction,
or somebody suing Lou Pasciuto for what some Follick guy did. Since Exchange.Online didn’t trade but was a private placement
like Chic-Chick, it had no stock symbol with pesky shares that had to be sold and boxed and cleared. First Fidelity was, itself,
a “public company” whose “stock” actually “traded,” though its “stock symbol” belonged to another company.

Just about every day was a payday—$1,000 one day, $3,000 the next. It made Charlie happy. It made the bookies happy, and Louis
was able to pay down his mountain of debt. He was at First Fidelity through the beginning of 1999, clearing something in the
neighborhood of $200,000, which wasn’t bad for a few months’ work.

Louis barely looked up from the phone during the market tremors of October 1998, when tech stocks took it on the chin. The
market bounced back anyway. It always did. It was a permanent bull market, after all. It would never end.

But the glory days were ending for Chop House Wall Street, as its leading figures were arrested, one by one. In September
1998, a federal grand jury in Brooklyn indicted Jordan Belfort and the other bosses of Stratton Oakmont, the Long Island counterpart
of Hanover Sterling. Three months later, another bombshell, also from the Brooklyn feds. On December 17, 1998, the target
was a slew of brokers who used to work at Hanover Sterling. By the time the arrests were completed, fifty-five brokers and
their Guys were thrown in jail—including Roy Ageloff and Bobby Catoggio. Louis’s old pal Randy Ashenfarb was arrested, and
so were Rocco Basile and his former boss John Lembo. There were some omissions. Rico Locascio was arrested, but his partner
Black Dom was not. Chris Wolf was not named in this indictment. A broker named Brent Longo was arrested, but not his stepfather
Alan Longo, the Genovese skipper and Fulton Fish Market Guy whom
Business Week
had identified as a Genovese family connection to Hanover.

Louis was sad and pissed when he read about the arrests. Roy was God, the reason why he and the rest of the chop house kids
were making money. Roy had created the pitching style, and his management techniques were emulated everywhere there was a
rip. Rocco was another role model, a salesman to copy and cherish. All the guys at Hanover taught him everything he knew about
selling stocks, and managing kids, and spending the money that came from it all. And they were starting to go to jail.

When the FBI came up to First Fidelity, Louis was calm. Everyone else was panicking. Not Louis. He realized there wasn’t a
damn thing he or anybody else could do about it. More shit luck. Shortly before Christmas 1998, New York police raided the
5 Hanover Square office of First Fidelity. Somebody had smelled the odor of burning crack. The FBI took over the case and
eventually followed a paper (or powder) trail to the office at 110 Wall.

When the FBI agents came to 110 Wall, Louis was at his Play Station, enjoying a video game with Eddie Talmeni. Two of the
four agents entered his office and politely interrupted the game.

“Hi, how are you doing? FBI.”

“How you doing, guys?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I just use this office.”

“Who you work for?”

“Myself.”

“What do you do?”

“Consulting.”

“What kind of consulting?”

Louis had to think a moment before answering, “Securities consulting.”

“Interesting. What’s your name?”

“Robert Gro.”

“Have you got ID?”

“No, left my wallet at home.”

The FBI guy made Louis print his name and sign it. He wasn’t sure how to spell his name, as he had just made it up. G-R-O-W?

“I didn’t know how to spell it. I think I spelled it G-R-O,” said Louis. “Eddie put down some Spanish name. Nobody had ID.
Nothing they could do. I cleared out that afternoon.”

Louis had to figure out some way to get cash. He looked to his family. He had helped them when times were great. Now times
were not so great.

STEFANIE
: “One time I was changing the baby and I remember taking off my ring. And my ring—my engagement ring—disappeared. Louis says,
‘You probably flung it somewhere,’ but I didn’t fling it. I ripped the whole house apart. I went through dirty diapers. Every
single diaper, because I thought maybe it fell into the diapers, and I had a pail of dirty diapers. I remember going to meet
my mother for lunch one day with the baby, and my mother noticed that it wasn’t on. My father said something to my mother,
‘Why isn’t she wearing her engagement ring?’ and I said I can’t find it. So he says, ‘If you want, I’ll come down and help
you.’ But I think they knew what was going on.