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

money was
     something he was supposed to have. Giving back money someone else had lost made no sense at all. It followed, when he started
     to think this way, that he really didn’t care about the guy who lost the money. The guy would get another paycheck. He could
     spare it. Or maybe not. “I might get a little feeling, like, ‘Ehh, poor guy.’ That’s all I’d get,” said Louis. “That’s all
     I’ve ever gotten on Wall Street. Sometimes I’d feel real bad. But it wouldn’t last long. I’d say to myself, ‘Ehh, poor guy.
     What are you going to do?’ Then I’d think of the money I was getting, and I’m thinking, ‘Fuck him.’”
    Louis wanted to be his own Santa Claus. He couldn’t see Heaven or Hell. But he could see numbers. He believed in numbers.
    Louis was fascinated with numbers. He saw numbers recur, and he saw patterns in the numbers in his life. Phone numbers repeating
     house numbers repeating phone numbers. He was born on the twentieth, his grandmother died on the twentieth, he got arrested
     on the twentieth; he was married on the twenty-seventh, his son was born on the twenty-seventh. Also Tuesdays: He was born
     on a Tuesday, and he would get money on Tuesdays. It was uncanny. It would always happen. On Tuesdays, when he was on the
     Street, they’d come with the cash. Maybe not always on Tuesday, but enough that he noticed. The bills would come in paper
     bags, and he would put them in neat stacks. He would count them fast, with his thumb, like a teller.
    The money would come from people, not from God.
    Thus it was strict biology, pure chemical interaction, that placed Louis Anthony Pasciuto on this planet on November 20, 1973.
     Louis’s parents were from Bensonhurst, a largely Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn just to the north of Coney Island. Nicholas
     Pasciuto, Jr., was a handsome, bright kid, a good street athlete, and not wildly ambitious. He worked in a printing shop.
     He met Fran Surrobbo, a petite brunette, at a club in Manhattan. They were married five months before Louis was born. It meant
     Nick couldn’t go to Baruch College, where he had just registered. It meant he would still be a printer when he was past fifty.
    Tough. He had to do the right thing.
    FRAN PASCIUTO : “My grandmother, mother, mother-in-law—when they saw Louis their eyes used to sparkle. He never did any wrong in their eyes.
     Always gave him a lot of attention. Oh, he was tough. Louis was tough, even when small. A lot of energy, very headstrong.
     When he has his mind made up you couldn’t talk him out of it. He was the type of child when he wanted something, he had to
     get what he wanted. As a young kid he was like that. Very high energy. Smart.”
    NICK PASCIUTO : “He got a lot of attention, no question about it. He was like the Number One, the Messiah. He always wanted one hundred
     percent attention. He didn’t demand it but his actions required attention. He was a handful, no doubt about it. I guess he
     had a normal life, as far as I was concerned. He was always mannerable. We raised him up to be mannerable and respectful and
     all that.”
    Years later, Louis thought back to his earliest memory—getting his head stuck in the bars of the iron fence outside their
     building in Brooklyn. He did it once and then he did it again—and each time his parents would have to call for the fire department.
     He remembered his head stuck in the bars and the big red fire truck. All the commotion. All the attention.
    He also remembered the yelling. Screaming. Cursing.
    The yelling started as far back as he can remember, when he was a little kid, and continued when Louis was five and the Pasciutos
     moved to a semidetached two-family house in the Great Kills section of Staten Island. A sister, Nicole, was born two years
     after they moved to Great Kills. Despite the seven-year age difference, Nicole and Louis bonded early.
    LOUIS : “We spent most of the time by ourselves, not wanting to be around