born to steal; when the mafia hit wall street

[...]... stolen You can’t count what you can’t see The chop houses and bucket shops were the best-known secret on Wall Street Now the guys in the chop houses and bucket shops, and the Guys who took their money, were starting to go to jail How did they get him? The question gnawed at Louis Someone had turned The FBI knew all the places he’d worked, whether he was on the books or not They knew about the Guys They... in the early 1950s In those days, the organized crime of the waterfront the shakedowns, the loansharking, the strong-arm rackets—were about as alien to Wall Street as the burly, tough-talking longshoremen who had their own separate world down by the Wall Street waterfront They existed, for all purposes and intents, on a separate planet from the men in suits in the offices high above, on Wall and the. .. was the Wall Street Way For the floor brokers, the Wall Street Way was the only way How else were those guys to make a living? What were they going to do, drive a cab? One American Stock Exchange floor broker had to do just that when he lost his job He wasn’t ashamed He was a blue-collar guy with kids to support Lots of guys like him on Wall Street by the early 1990s Ambitious, working-class guys Street. .. HCCC, he theorized, because Louis knew about the Guys He knew why they were on Wall Street He knew their names He knew the scams that had fed them So there he was, three weeks after his arrest, two weeks after he was sent to the HCCC, lying on his bunk and listening to the snores and thinking about the Guys The Guys could get him out of there Charlie was his Guy, but there were plenty of others who... expressway and the bridge to the city He came in to the office whenever he wanted He was boss Not boss on paper, but the real boss The paper boss, Lowell Schatzer, had a little office near the front entrance Roy had the corner office, with a view looking northeast over the bridges, over the Fulton Fish Market, toward Queens and the majestic Midtown skyline What a house it was It had to be big People,... “Penny stock” was like a lot of dumb Wall Street expressions, this one coming from the old days when penny stocks literally cost in the pennies By the 1980s, all that a “penny stock” was, in the generally used definition of the term, was a stock that sold for under $5 And they weren’t always “stocks” at all, but very often they were sold to the public as “units.” A unit included a share of stock and... on him and keep him off the streets, and away from the people nobody liked to talk about Everybody knew them They were in the family They were cousins and uncles Friends People down the block Nick used to shine shoes at the Club 62 on Fort Hamilton Parkway, where the men in the tailored suits would give him $30 tips—at a time when his father took home $50 a week It was hard to grow up in Bensonhurst... two-tone jobs, with red brick at the bottom and faux-wood-grain white shingles at the top, three cruddy floors with tiny energy-efficient windows looking out on other tiny windows and other two-tone cookie-cutter houses So he moved from the cruddy townhouse-rowed subdivision street called Blythe to the awesome Ardsley Street in the section of Staten Island called Richmondtown He could afford it He could... twice the size of both halves of the house on Blythe It had huge vaultlike windows etched in a fine Beaux Arts pattern There was a gazebo to the side of the house Out front, cast-iron street lamps Big ones with hanging white globes, five for each lamp, the kind that public buildings used to have in the days when public buildings were built to impress the public Roy’s house wasn’t a mansion but rather... yesterday stocks Penny stocks were stocks for the future Dream stocks Not dreary, dull, boring stocks like utilities that paid penny-ante dividends These were little companies, start-ups, fresh companies Sure, they hadn’t started making money Of course not Neither did IBM and GM when they were starting out, neither did Thomas Edison before he got that lightbulb in the stores They didn’t cost in the pennies, . THIRTY-TWO CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT part five: FENCE JUMPER CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE CHAPTER FORTY CHAPTER FORTY-ONE CHAPTER. FORTY-ONE CHAPTER FORTY-TWO CHAPTER FORTY-THREE CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE CHAPTER FORTY-SIX CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN part six: ESCAPE CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT CHAPTER FORTY-NINE epilogue For Anthony. go to their colleagues Bennett Ashley and Richard Morris. At Warner Books I had the rare good fortune to work with executive editor Rick Horgan, who shares the credit for virtually everything