Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (7 page)

Louis was entering a growth business.

Louis had no idea where he was.

He arrived at 88 Pine Street at about nine-thirty. It was a large building and Roy worked in an office that seemed to employ
a lot of people. That was about all he could figure out.

“I was scared,” said Louis. “I got out of the elevator and at the end of the hall there’s a big reception area. I ask the
lady behind the desk, ‘What is this place?’ And she says it’s a brokerage firm. So I say, ‘I’m here to see Mr. Ageloff.’ And
she says he ain’t in yet. Take a seat. So I sat there. I’m dying. And the girl says to me, ‘He’s always late like this.’ So
I’m waiting. I see people walking back and forth. Nobody’s saying anything to me.”

There wasn’t much traffic in and out. The secretary spent most of her time making personal calls, and Louis leafed through
a copy of
Crain’s New York Business
that happened to be there. It was not a recent issue. It would not be interesting to Louis, or understandable, even if it
were still warm from the presses. Louis tried reading it but then put it down and stared at the wall.

Roy arrived shortly before noon. He passed Louis without saying anything. Five unbearable minutes went by before the receptionist
told Louis to walk down the corridor until the far hallway, and then turn left.

Roy’s office was in the corner facing the East River. It was the kind of view you had to pay to see at the World Trade Center
or Empire State Building.

“Sit down. I want to introduce you to somebody,” said Roy. He walked outside and came back with a guy he introduced as Mark
Savoca.

Mark was a young guy, just twenty-three. They shook hands. Mark asked Louis to come with him. They left Roy’s office, walked
past the receptionist, and Mark pushed the button for the elevator. They waited. The elevator arrived.

Louis had no idea what Mark was doing, and the thought passed his mind that he must have done something they didn’t like and
now was getting his ass kicked out of the building.

When the elevator reached the lobby, Mark walked toward the revolving doors. Louis followed. Mark was acting as if he didn’t
care whether Louis came or not.

It was cold, with gusts of icy wet air from the East River. Mark walked ahead, not saying anything. They went up Water Street,
north toward the Seaport. In the parking lot across a side street from 88 Pine, Mark stopped and pointed. It was a Stealth.
“I been doing this for a year and this is what I’ve gotten,” said Mark.

Louis practically collapsed. A Dodge Stealth! What the fuck! Even though it was only a $30,000 car, Louis was impressed. Whoa!
“A Dodge Stealth is the biggest car at that time. A Dodge Stealth is awesome,” said Louis, recalling the moment.

“He says to me, ‘When I came in here I had nothing. I couldn’t even afford a car or an apartment. But now I live in Manhattan.
I have a beautiful apartment. I have a Dodge Stealth and I go out to dinner seven days a week.’ He says it took him a year
to go on his own. The first month he was on his own he made fifteen, sixteen grand.”

That was the highlight of the day—the Stealth. Louis could get a car, an apartment, a life. He wouldn’t have to wait until
he was thirty or forty. He wouldn’t have to flip burgers at the goddamn McDonald’s, as he did one lousy summer, or stack boxes
at Consumers Warehouse. He hated jobs like that, with their dumb rules and their moronic supervisors, guys he hated, guys
who hated him because he sneered at their dumb way of doing things. At McDonald’s they had asinine rules for fixing burgers.
The way they did it the bun was cold when he put on the burger. He wanted to heat the bun first. Got into a big fight. Lost
his job. It was the same in high school, at St. Josephs-by-the-Sea. He aced calculus classes without studying and he would
tell the teacher that there was more than one way to solve the problem, no one right way. But she always wanted it done her
way. The bitch.

At Hanover Sterling he could get great stuff and still be young and not have to put up with stupid middle-aged assholes telling
him what to do. Everybody there was young and cool.

Back upstairs, Mark flipped through a midnight-black three-ring binder—his “client book.” He went through the procedures Louis
would have to follow if he wanted a Stealth and an apartment of his own. You get yourself clients, you call up “leads”—potential
customers—you tell them your name, and you pitch them stocks. And if they buy, they’re your clients.

“But I don’t know what he’s talking about. I never heard of Wall Street in my life. I didn’t know what a ‘client’ was, never
mind a ‘new issue.’ He walks me around the boardroom, shows me what everybody does. He shows me the quote machines. Meanwhile,
I don’t have any concept of what he’s showing me,” said Louis.

But Louis wasn’t dumb. For an hour and a half he just sat there listening while Mark was on the phone, pitching people. Louis
paid attention. It was easy. All his life he had been a good talker. All he had to do was talk.

After a while he was summoned back to see Roy.

“You interested?” Roy asked him.

Louis was interested. The only problem was that he had just started a semester at the College of Staten Island.

Roy asked him how much it cost. Louis told him—$900.

Roy reached into his pocket, took out a money clip, and peeled off nine $100 bills. “Come back at seven in the morning,” said
Roy.

It was pitch-black out when Louis got up the next morning. There were still bums on the ferry. It was cold, miserable, but
Louis would have gone to Hanover Sterling stark naked if Roy had asked him.

Louis was put to work in the “boardroom.” It was a weird use of the word, which most people associate with long tables surrounded
by retired rear admirals and other members of corporate boards of directors. In the chop houses, the boardrooms were big rooms
for all the brokers and cold-callers. Every firm had its own arrangement. At Hanover the desks were arranged in clusters,
and people would work together in teams. Well, “teams” is what they called them most places on Wall Street. The chop houses
called them “crews.” And the guys in the crews were all very much like Louis.

These were kids from the boroughs and the close-in suburbs. Kids who had gone to community college or no college at all. White
“ethnics,” the Manhattan snobs would call them. Guys who spoke with New York accents. In Manhattan, people didn’t talk like
that anymore if they could help it. If you had any kind of standing in Manhattan, you worked hard to eradicate that way of
talking. Not Roy. Not the kids in the boardrooms.

Years ago the kids in the boardrooms couldn’t have made it into the front office. If they had worked hard and gotten MBAs
maybe they could have gotten assistant-trader gigs at second-tier firms. But these kids didn’t have MBAs. Some of them could
barely read. They couldn’t have gotten any firm to hire them as brokers, not when it was the 1980s and the market was booming
and the Street was filled with ambitious preppies trying to make it in the business. Kids without fancy college degrees could
have made it only to the back office, slogging along as clerks like Fran Pasciuto, or maybe working in the offices where brokerage
trades are executed. But the penny stock era, the era that was coming to an end in the early 1990s, started to put the street
kids in the front offices.

Now the chop house era was beginning and the street kids were everywhere. Hanover Sterling was at the forefront of this socioeconomic-demographic
revolution on Wall Street. In the boroughs and the burbs, word was spreading, fed by word of mouth and ads in the city’s tabloids.
The Street was looking for ambitious kids from the street.

Stefanie Donohue was excited about Louis’s new job.

They had met the year before, in the record-hot summer of 1991. Louis had just graduated from Sea, Stefanie from Tottenville
High School. The Donohues could afford Sea but felt its rules and its uniforms and its discipline weren’t necessary. Stefanie
and her brothers were nice kids. They could be trusted. Stefanie and Louis were about as different as any two people could
be and still be in the same species.

Stefanie’s family was comfortably middle class, quiet, maybe a little repressed in an Irish Catholic way. But a little repression
wouldn’t have done Louis any harm—which might have been the appeal. George Donohue was a retired policeman who ran a bar on
Coney Island Avenue in Midwood, the neighborhood where Roy Ageloff had spent his formative years. By the time George wound
up at the Seventieth Precinct, the Jewish population was being fast supplanted by a kind of polyglot stew of nationalities—resulting
in some interesting grocery stores and a boring array of domestic strife and postmidnight mayhem. There were Russians and
Pakistanis and Arabs and Haitians. George served in plainclothes most of his time at the Seven-oh.

George was a Brooklyn boy himself, and his family wasn’t exactly prosperous, but George did well for himself. He was proud
of what he had overcome, what he had accomplished, but he didn’t boast. He served in Vietnam as a military policeman but didn’t
like to talk about it. George didn’t talk much. He didn’t have to. A glance was enough. Voices weren’t raised much in the
Donohue household. George had a “don’t give me any shit” glance that could sting as hard as the back of a hand. George wasn’t
old-country strict but he wasn’t going to let his kids run around like skells—and they didn’t. Gender roles were unambiguous.
Generational differences were not bridged. The kids weren’t pals. They were offspring. End of discussion.

Well, not really end of discussion. George had another old-fashioned virtue: loyalty. The Donohue kids could get into trouble,
even bad trouble at times, but the love was unconditional. You were part of the family. You made mistakes, you screwed up,
but you could always come home. George had known misfortune in those close to him. He didn’t like to talk about it. But it
showed up in the way he acted. No kid of his, no one close to him, was ever going to be without support.

So as a teenager, Stefanie’s normal rebellion was muted. She worked. She obeyed. She had values. Her life revolved around
close friends and a close family. She did normal things on summer nights. Bars. Clubs.

STEFANIE
: “I was at a bar on Bay Street, which is where a lot of kids hung out. I was at the bar with two of my friends. A friend
of his, Mike, comes up to me with two of his friends and says, ‘You know my friend Lou?’ I say I don’t know him.

“Mike says, ‘He wants to meet you.’

“I say, ‘I don’t care.’ “‘Do you want to hang out with him?’

“‘I don’t know.’

“Louis was about twenty-five feet away. He looked like a skinny kid. He had long hair, punky clothes on. His pants were below
his belt. He was wearing a little T-shirt. A hat down to his nose. He was with a group of kids. I knew a lot of his friends,
kids he went to school with at Sea.”

LOUIS
: “I just had a mad attraction to her from the first time I saw her. It was that innocent look. Very innocent. She had blond
hair—I love blondes. Tall, five-eight. And she was very, like, quiet. It was nice. To me, in my eyes she was beautiful. Like
I’m very attracted to her. She was Irish. I had mainly gone with Italian girls. She went to public school. Maybe her parents
didn’t have the money.

“Usually I would hang out with the girl, go with the girl and not think about them. But with Stefanie, I was thinking about
her. The next day I was, like, ‘I got to call this girl.’ When I went home I told my friend Mike Layden, I said ‘Mike, I want
to make this girl my girlfriend.’ ”

STEFANIE
: “I thought he was nice and everything—cute. The next night I saw him we exchanged numbers. But then he didn’t want to go
home. He said, ‘Can you drop me off at my friend Mike’s house?’ I thought it was strange, so I said, ‘Where’s Mike? Where
was he tonight?’ And he says, ‘Oh, he didn’t come out.’ And I said, ‘You’re living with this friend?’

“I thought it was strange. So he says, ‘My mother, we got into a fight, so she threw me out and I’m staying here for a couple
of days.’ He gave me Mike’s number and his house number, and I gave him my number. I thought it was a little odd that he was
thrown out.”

Louis had a girlfriend with a loving family, a source of stability and limits in her life. Stefanie had a boyfriend who was
a bit wild and on the edge, something that was absent in her stable and sane and loving but, maybe, slightly dull family.

They had a normal courtship, the Italian street kid and the cloistered Irish girl. Their lives were happy. Their parents approved.

I do not like them, Sam-I-Am. I do not like Green Eggs and Ham
.

The first time he read from
Green Eggs and Ham
at Hanover Sterling, Louis thought it was dumb. He wasn’t mad. He was just annoyed, a little, but he accepted it. It was
okay. Not much of a price to pay if he was going to make good money. He hadn’t read Dr. Seuss since he was a kid, and maybe
not even then—not out loud anyway. Roy would have them read from it at the meetings they had in the morning. And you did what
Roy told you to do.

So they would read
Green Eggs and Ham
. They would take turns reading lines from it. That’s not the only weird shit Roy would do in the morning. Sometimes he would
have one of the brokers, Benny Salmonese, “do the monkey.”

“Benny’s a big, stocky guy—looks like a monkey,” said Louis. “So Roy would have him stand in the middle of everybody, all
the hundred brokers, and act like a monkey. That’s the kind of place it was—crazy.” Crazy—but fun. Crazy—but lots of money.
And that’s what mattered.

He had never had a job he liked, never gotten up early for anybody. But yes! He could do it! He had it, he had a job that
offered him what he wanted, and he was motivated. He be- longed. He could get up early. He could take the ferry and do what
other people told him to do. Imagine that—somebody actually told him to do something and he didn’t rebel against it.