Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

fact. So were the other words.
     He read them again.
You’re my first and you will always be
.
    He was the first and he will always be.
    He didn’t want to tell the truth, not at first. But in the weeks and months and years that followed, Louis told the truth.
     He talked about the Guys and the brokers—from Roy and the gas station to Joe Welch in Tucson. He went back to his old friends,
     wearing a concealed tape recorder and transmitter. He recounted, in merciless detail, all the chop houses and bucket shops—the
     seventeen he didn’t want to remember. He remembered the names. The guys and the Guys behind it all. They were his friends,
     his enemies, his creditors. His family.
    It was the truth. It was the first consequence Louis ever encountered in his twenty-five years: telling the truth.

CHAPTER ONE
    Louis always knew that Santa Claus was a crock of shit. As far back as he could remember, he didn’t buy into the Santa thing.
     Back when he wasn’t big enough to stand up, maybe then he believed all that garbage. But by the time he was five he knew where
     the presents came from. He saw them in the upstairs closet. When they brought out Uncle Sal on Christmas Eve he could see
     through the glued-on white beard. What did they think he was, an idiot? He knew there was no Santa Claus and no Tooth Fairy
     and no Easter Bunny and no God.
    Jesus walked on water? A snake told Eve not to eat the apple? Kiss my ass, he’d say. It was all a fable, to give people faith.
     A good thing, for sure. Louis would go to church with his grandmother when he was a little kid. And after she died he would
     go there to light candles for her. But it was respect for his grandmother. It wasn’t as if he were looking up in the sky and
     talking to her. When you’re dead, you’re dead. You live for the present, the here-and-now.
    Louis knew better than to buy into all that horseshit about the soul and afterlife. He knew very early there were no eternal
     consequences for what one does in this life, and no code of conduct that was dictated to everybody from God. Sure there were
     Ten Commandments. Somebody sat down one day and wrote them out. Moses never came down some mountain holding on to them like
     two bags of groceries from Food Emporium.
    Where is this Heaven and Hell? He couldn’t see them. What Louis could believe in were the things he could hold in his hands,
     the things other people had, the things he wanted, and the things that money could buy.
    His parents tried hard to teach him otherwise. Years later, Louis exonerated his parents. They were honest. They tried to
     teach him right from wrong. Not just knowing right from wrong, but doing right when it was easier to do wrong. Louis always
     knew what was right. But he didn’t care. His parents would set an example, the way parents are supposed to according to the
     self-help books, and he didn’t care.
    Take the time when he was a little kid, with his mother at a neighborhood bowling alley in Staten Island. He found a pay envelope
     with $500 in cash. He picked it up and brought it to his mother.
    “I would have put it in my pocket when I was ten. I must have been eight,” Louis recalls. “So I went to my mother and I said,
     ‘Ma, I found this on the floor outside,’ and she brought it to the lost and found. And I remember I was thinking like, ‘This
     is stupid.’ I was old enough to know this would get me a lot of baseball cards. But she made me give it back. She says, ‘This
     is somebody’s paycheck. This is what they make in a week.’ I said, ‘I hear you. But they dropped it. Finders keepers.’”
    Maybe it was an Oedipal thing, or Jupiter misaligned with Mars. Maybe his mother had bumped into a doorknob or drank too much
     coffee while she was pregnant with Louis. Maybe it was all these things or none. Maybe there was no reason. All he knows,
     all anyone ever knew, was that Louis was a thief all his life. It began as a realization early in his life that