Born to steal : when the Mafia hit Wall Street
Record details
- ISBN: 9780446528573
- ISBN: 0446528579
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Physical Description:
print
xiii, 368 p. : ill ; 24 cm. - Publisher: New York : Warner Books, c2003.
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- 1 of 1 copy available at BC Interlibrary Connect.
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Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Gold Bridge Branch | 364.16 WEI (Text) | 35180100065233 | Non-fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Anonymous
"The true story of Staten Island badboy Louis Pasciuto's meteoric rise to the top of Wall Street's notorious chop houses--by the award-winning journalist who broke it. Hood brokers. Monthly million dollar paychecks. Thirty-six hour cocaine binges. ""Rocky"" themed pep rallies. Run-ins with Mafia thugs toting Mac 10 machine pistols. This was the life of Louis Pasciuto, a fast-talking Staten Island kid who, from the age of 19 to 25, moved stocks for 17 different brokerage houses--most of that time without even a fake license. This inside account of the Mafia's infiltration of Wall Street details Louis' career as the consummate liar, selling phantom stocks to naive Americans and leading a lifestyle worthy of Caligula. To avoid a long prison sentence, Pasciuto eventually turned state's witness. Now, Gary Weiss shares the inside story of Wall Street's notorious ""chop houses,"" the crooked Mob-run brokerages where rampant thievery netted several billion dollars from gullible investors. " - Baker & Taylor
Follows the career of counterfeit stock broker Louis Pasciuto, tracing his illegal activities on behalf of the mafia in seventeen different brokerage houses and his eventual cooperation with the state in order to avoid prison. - Blackwell North Amer
During Wall Street's big bull market, there were brokers in $3,000 suits, billion-dollar IPOs, and twenty-year-olds making $500,000 a month. And then there was Louis Pasciuto, who came from Staten Island at the age of eighteen and discovered an indelible truth: He was born to steal. And The Street was made for him.
This is the astounding, true story of the rise and fall of a fast-talking stock hustler, as well as a shocking portrait of the insidious ways the Mob infiltrates and fleeces Wall Street. From outrageous scams to out-of-control strip-club parties, Born to Steal takes you inside the lives of brash young men who flaunt their ignorance of stocks, bonds, and PE ratios even as they become the perfect foot soldiers in a vast campaign to separate honest people from their money.
Trading his jeans and T-shirt for a $90 suit, Louis Pasciuto arrived on Wall Street in 1992 to join a "chop house," a crooked brokerage firm set up by a charismatic Mob-connected overlord. Working out of seventeen brokerage firms, Louis sold often worthless or nonexistent stocks to gullible retirees in Phoenix, naive farmers in Nebraska, and profit-chasing millionaires in California - right under the nose of financial regulators. Stuffing his money into a mayonnaise jar - because he didn't have a clue how to invest it - he was quickly making thousands of dollars a day, and ready to strike out on his own. But a shark wanted a piece of Louis's action. Enter Charlie Ricottone, a mobster straight out of The Sopranos, who pummeled people in public, painted his bald spot in private, and was just the advance guard of a money-hungry army of wiseguys.
Suddenly Louis's lifestyle - the stripper girlfriend, his looming marriage to an entirely different woman, the Rolexes, Armanis, celebrity friends, orgies, and three-day cocaine binges - was about to go up in smoke. When the violence escalated and the FBI finally stepped in, Louis had to pull off the ultimate heist: join the Feds and steal back his life. - Book News
Louis Pasciuto joined a fraudulent Mafia-connected brokerage firm in 1992, slowly falling deeper and deeper into complications with high-spending lifestyle and a host of dangerous characters seeking a piece of the Wall Street action, until finally he found himself cooperating with the FBI in investigating Mafia operations in the high finance world of New York. An investigative reporter for BusinessWeek that made a name from his exposes of Mafia connections to Wall Street, Weiss sympathetically narrates Pasciuto's story for a general audience. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)