Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street (8 page)

In the past he did not like it, would not do what other people told him. Would not do it in his school, would not do it in
his home, would not do it anywhere. But now he did it in an office, now he did it in a firm, now he did it for Roy.

I do so like green eggs and ham!

He loved Hanover. “Those were the best times that I can remember,” said Louis. “Every day was a great day. Roy was nothing
but fun.” Sure, it was tough. He would have to drag himself out of bed very early, five, to make it to the Great Kills station
of the Staten Island Rapid Transit and then the ferry and then the walk to Pine Street. And then—
Green Eggs and Ham
. Every morning. It was a ritual, a crazy fun ritual. Who knew why Roy did it? Nobody asked him and he wouldn’t have said
if anyone had asked. Maybe it was just fucking off. Or maybe it was Roy’s way of letting them know every day that they were
going to do what Roy wanted, even if that meant eating green or black or blue eggs and ham. Sure, the
Green Eggs and Ham
readings were kid stuff. Roy had kids of his own and the brokers were a bit like his kids too.

Most of the brokers and cold-callers at Hanover were just out of high school like Louis. Hanover was a Staten Island outfit.
Roy was from Staten Island, and so was his partner Bobby Catoggio and so was Lowell Schatzer, who was on the papers as president
of Hanover Sterling. Nobody paid much attention to Lowell.

It was a different kind of Wall Street. Spirited. “‘Buy fucking Porter!’ If you walk into Shearson Lehman, they’ll be sitting
there, quiet. We were, like, yelling, ‘Yaaaaaaaaah!’ It was crazy,” said Louis. “We’d work from seven in the morning to eleven
at night, nonstop. Pump those phones, man. It was awesome. Best training I ever had, there.” But this was no button-down operation.
He learned that fast. “Always somebody smoking a joint downstairs. Everybody’d get stoned during lunch,” said Louis.

Sure, Roy had to make a fist every now and then. The brokers had to be kept in line. It was like St. Joseph-by-the-Sea. Tough
kids. Corporal punishment.

“Every day, people would get beat up,” said Louis. “One kid never used to wear a shirt and tie. One day Roy broke his nose.
Right at the meeting. ‘Come here.’ Crack! Punched him right in his face. Kid’s nose was all bleeding. He was crying. But Roy
and Bobby ran the joint. That was it. Everybody was petrified of him. I couldn’t even go into Roy’s office without getting
abused. I used to, like, stick my head in and he’d go, ‘You little Staten Island fag, get the fuck in here!’”

But Louis didn’t mind. It was okay. Roy yelled and hit but so did his father. People in authority yelled and hit. Besides,
at Hanover he never got smacked—which made Roy an improvement over his father. Wasn’t necessary. Louis didn’t need to get
smacked. He didn’t give Roy shit the way he gave his father shit, and the way he gave the priests at Sea shit. Why would he?
No cause for that. He was making money. He was really diligent, not “put-on-an-act” diligent.

He started out like everybody else, making cold calls but not selling anything. “Qualifying leads,” it was called. The “leads”
being customers, the “qualifying” meaning that the cold-callers wanted to find out if there was any point in calling these
people. You don’t sell stock to a guy who owns nothing but mutual funds, any more than you’d get on the phone and peddle ham
hocks to those bearded Hassidic guys Louis saw when he drove through Borough Park. Only beginners qualified leads. Louis wasn’t
a beginner for very long.

“So on my first day I went to the kid Chris Girodet. I walked in, sat down, he handed me the leads and explained what to do.
Now I still have no idea what I’m doing. He says, ‘Here’s a stack of these leads’—he’s explaining it to me. ‘Call the number,
ask for this guy. If he gets on the phone, you tell him, “This is Chris Girodet from Hanover Sterling. What I’d like to do
is send you out some information, and get to know what kind of investor you are.’ This is not a sales call, you tell him right
away, or they would hang up the phone,” said Louis.

It was easy. All he was doing was feeling people out, prepping them for the brokers. But Louis was paying attention. He was
listening. He heard the way the brokers were pitching stock. He could do that.

But Chris Girodet didn’t want him to do that. He just wanted Louis to qualify leads. He didn’t give a shit about schooling
him, what the rest of the Street would call mentoring. Louis knew that he wasn’t going to get a Stealth and an apartment,
not as a cold-caller. He had to move up.

Fortunately, Roy took a liking to Louis. After a while he introduced him to the best broker at the firm, Chris Wolf, and one
day he had Louis hang out in the office with Chris and his partner Rocco Basile. Louis listened to them pitch for an hour
or two.

Louis was in the presence of genius.

“Man, he was good. Definitely one of the best salesmen I’ve seen. Chris is about five feet four or five. Long, pushed-back
hair. Good-looking kid. Real name’s not Wolf. It’s Italian. He’s an Italian kid. Changed his name to Wolf for his Series 7
broker license. That’s the name he chose to do business. Great name, Chris Wolf. Jewish much better than Italian last name,”
said Louis.

“So I listened to him, and he had this thing that he did when he opened accounts. Somebody would say I’m not interested, blah
blah blah. Chris would say, ‘Okay, take care.’ Then Chris would call them back thirty seconds later and he’d say, ‘You know,
Bob, I just gave you that investment opportunity and I’d be an asshole to let you off the phone. It’s an outstanding situation.
All I’m looking is for you to buy one share or a thousand shares—it don’t matter. It’s not the dollar amount. Give me a chance
to show you percentage gains. Because you know and I know that if I show you forty percent on paper, I’m going to be the broker
you’re going to be doing business with year-round.’ Blah blah blah. So you beat him up till he buys the stock.”

Louis paid attention. The next morning he called one of his leads and pitched him. He used the whole spiel, and after the
guy hung up he did a callback and talked about being an asshole to let him off the phone. Blah blah blah.

It worked. The guy bought a thousand shares.

“I get off the phone and I’m screaming, ‘A thousand shares! I opened a thousand shares!’ And then Chris Girodet came over
and he’s mad I used his name and opened an account. I went to Roy. I said, ‘Roy, I opened an account. I took the pitch, I
pitched the account, I opened it.’ And Roy comes out of his office and says to Chris, ‘If this kid wants to open accounts,
he opens accounts. This is my protÉgÉ.’

“He cut my tie—that’s what they do when you open your first account. They cut your tie. It’s like a traditional thing. So
I’m walking around with no tie. It’s great. I opened my first account. And I opened an account every day since then.”

At this point Louis hadn’t passed the Series 7, which is the test, administered by the National Association of Securities
Dealers, or NASD, that gives brokers the solemn right to sell stocks to the public. He also wasn’t supposed to be using Chris
Girodet’s name. During his pitch he guaranteed profits, which was another no-no. But at Hanover Sterling, all this fell under
the category of “big fucking deal.”

After that, Louis became a pitching fiend. Pitching to everybody. Pitching to himself in the mirror. Pitching to Stefanie,
to his father.

Louis was a natural at getting people to do things. He had been manipulating people since he was a kid. He had the knack,
the instinct.

“How are they going to say no to me? ‘Grab a pen. Grab a pen.’ I’d say it sixty times. ‘Grab a pen. Grab a pen.’ And that
would be it. They would grab a pen, and then I would rip them to shreds. And then they’d be like, ‘Oh, I don’t really want
any.’ I’d say, ‘Of course you don’t want any.’ Sometimes I used to fucking kill them. ‘Of course you don’t want any. You’re
in Texas. You don’t know anything about the market. You probably don’t have a TV antenna down there.’”

Selling was an interactive thing. That’s why scripts were dumb. With scripts you talked “at” people. To sell, you had to get
into the other guy’s head. You had to engage in a dialogue. Talking with, not talking at. He was now in the realm of the kind
of relationship that would define his life—the relationship between thief and victim.

That was the division of the world. The takers and the taken. Louis was planting himself firmly on the side that was going
to prevail.

Benny Salmonese didn’t have any problem with “doing the monkey.” It was okay with him. Most things were okay with Benny. That
was the kind of guy he was. Easygoing. Benny was a jovial, hefty Brooklyn kid, half Italian and half Puerto Rican, and he
had grown up on the streets of Bensonhurst. He was also hardworking. A talented salesman. A people person, in a street-kid
kind of way.

“Benny was cool. Benny had a unique style on the phone. It was like, ‘Heyyyyyyyyyy’—somebody would pick up the phone, and
he’d be like ‘Heyyyyyyyyyyyyy, Ben Salmonese here. Hanover Sterling.’ We used to listen to him and he’d sit with the phone
down on the desk, and he wouldn’t touch the phone. He’d just bend over and talk into it. I started doing that too. I got that
from him. I didn’t pitch like him but I started doing that,” said Louis.

Benny was Louis’s best friend at Hanover. He tried to learn from Benny just as he tried to learn from everybody. Louis was
becoming something that no one could ever have dreamed that he would be—a workaholic. It was a disease that was sweeping Wall
Street in the early 1990s. Not that Louis cared—he and the rest of the Hanover kids had about as much to do with the rest
of Wall Street as they did with the Paris Bourse—even though Wall Street, the literal Wall Street, was so close that they
could walk to it holding their breath and not get winded. The Hanover kids were a couple of blocks from the pinstriped young
preppies who filled the trainee programs at J. P. Morgan and Merrill Lynch and Nomura but they were from different class backgrounds,
different neighborhoods, and different schools—if they had bothered to finish school. They were an old-style New York neighborhood
mix of Italians and Jews, almost all guys, while the white shoe firms were populated by suburban WASPs and out-of-towners
and Jews from the East Side and a growing and increasingly slightly tolerated number of young women with short hair and tailored
suits. Bedford vs. Massapequa. Yale vs. St. John’s. You could see the difference from a distance, and you could hear the difference
without seeing the difference.

What the Hanover kids had in common with the rest of the Street was a kind of all-encompassing, obsessive love of money. It
was a great deal to have in common. For Louis, anyone who came in the way of that love affair would not be welcome no matter
who it might be—whether it was the government or his fellow brokers. Not all of them shared his love of money and his desire
to work hard for money. Not all of them paid him what he was owed. Some wanted to stiff him. Some of them, he complained to
Roy, were thieves. After going through a succession of deadbeat broker bosses, Roy put him with the honest (to Louis), hardworking
power broker John Lembo. But Chris and Rocco remained his pals and role models.

Louis didn’t want anything to do with scrubs, guys who weren’t into the money the way he was. John Lembo, Chris Wolf, and
Rocco Basile—they were top brokers, and young. There were like him. They knew their business. They were committed. “None of
the rest were into it,” said Louis. “One guy they assigned me to, he didn’t want to come in on Saturdays. I wanted to come
in on Saturdays and work. I couldn’t unless the broker that I was working for was there. I was always the last one there.
Roy used to come back from going out, and I’d be the only one left, with like two other people.”

The checks were announced every month. “Chris Wolf, he’s not even twenty-three at the time, getting a $112,000 check—in a
month! Other kids were getting checks, twenty-year-old kids were getting checks for $20,000, $26,000 for the month. Roy used
to pass out the checks and announce the names. ‘Joe Blow, $110,600!’ And everybody would be like, ‘Yaaaay, Joe!’

“Roy used to make the whole firm go into the boardroom and hand out the checks. He’d be like, ‘Chris Girodet, $16,400. John
Lembo, $21,300.’ Rocco and Chris Wolf always got the most money. ‘Rocco Basile $110,000. Chris Wolf $112,000—$40,000 in fines.’
He would be fined a lot. It would come off his commissions. Fines—coming in no tie, $5,000. Coming in late, $3,000 fine. Roy
used to fine him left and right. Because he wouldn’t listen to Roy. But Roy would never fire Chris because he was a powerhouse.”

Chris didn’t even care about the fines. “Whatever,” he’d say. That attitude, shrugging at fines the size of his father’s annual
paycheck, pumped up Louis. He wanted to get $112,000 checks. He wanted to get that attitude toward money.

Roy wanted people producing and he wanted to keep their spirits up—and in check. Even though he had never spent a day in a
school like Sea, he seemed to have an instinctive knack for managing kids from parochial schools.

“Everybody took lunch at the same time. Literally the whole firm was going downstairs. You took lunch from twelve to one.
Roy better not find you eating lunch after one o’clock, or he’d rip your head off. He used to throw it out. He’d throw out
people’s breakfasts too. He used to come to the desk, see someone eating breakfast after eight o’clock, used to take the fucking
bagel out of his mouth, throw it in the garbage. And say, ‘Before seven-thirty. Otherwise, don’t eat.’ Later on I treated
my cold-callers like that. I used to throw their lunches out. Or not give them lunch. I got a lot of my ways from him.”

Roy imbued Hanover with a corporate culture, a mind-set that was infectious. It was a tough place to work. A hard place to
work. A hard place, with hard people.

A Guy named Fat George used to come up to Hanover and yell at Roy now and then. Roy would close the door, roll down the blinds,
and you could hear the yelling. Muffled screaming. It was a kind of angry screaming, sort of the way people yell when they
are being screwed by a car dealer and the manager isn’t able to do anything to make it better and the customer has lost it,
and is ready to march off to the attorney general. That kind of screaming. “He’d always be yelling at Roy, ‘WHAT THE FUCK!’
‘THIS IS WHAT YOU MAKE THE KIDS DO!’ ‘THIS IS FUCKING NUTS!’ ‘IT’S LIKE A FUCKING HOODLUM AREA HERE!’” And Roy would take
it. You could always hear Fat George through the closed glass doors but you could never hear Roy yelling back. “When you shut
the blinds you always knew there were gangsters there,” said Louis.