Read Online Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street by Gary R. Weiss - Free Book Online

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