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

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.

CHAPTER FIVE
    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.
    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