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

in an office, now he did it in a firm, now he did it for Roy.
    I do so like green eggs and ham!
    He loved Hanover. “Those were the best times that I can remember,” said Louis. “Every day was a great day. Roy was nothing
     but fun.” Sure, it was tough. He would have to drag himself out of bed very early, five, to make it to the Great Kills station
     of the Staten Island Rapid Transit and then the ferry and then the walk to Pine Street. And then—
Green Eggs and Ham
. Every morning. It was a ritual, a crazy fun ritual. Who knew why Roy did it? Nobody asked him and he wouldn’t have said
     if anyone had asked. Maybe it was just fucking off. Or maybe it was Roy’s way of letting them know every day that they were
     going to do what Roy wanted, even if that meant eating green or black or blue eggs and ham. Sure, the
Green Eggs and Ham
readings were kid stuff. Roy had kids of his own and the brokers were a bit like his kids too.
    Most of the brokers and cold-callers at Hanover were just out of high school like Louis. Hanover was a Staten Island outfit.
     Roy was from Staten Island, and so was his partner Bobby Catoggio and so was Lowell Schatzer, who was on the papers as president
     of Hanover Sterling. Nobody paid much attention to Lowell.
    It was a different kind of Wall Street. Spirited. “‘Buy fucking Porter!’ If you walk into Shearson Lehman, they’ll be sitting
     there, quiet. We were, like, yelling, ‘Yaaaaaaaaah!’ It was crazy,” said Louis. “We’d work from seven in the morning to eleven
     at night, nonstop. Pump those phones, man. It was awesome. Best training I ever had, there.” But this was no button-down operation.
     He learned that fast. “Always somebody smoking a joint downstairs. Everybody’d get stoned during lunch,” said Louis.
    Sure, Roy had to make a fist every now and then. The brokers had to be kept in line. It was like St. Joseph-by-the-Sea. Tough
     kids. Corporal punishment.
    “Every day, people would get beat up,” said Louis. “One kid never used to wear a shirt and tie. One day Roy broke his nose.
     Right at the meeting. ‘Come here.’ Crack! Punched him right in his face. Kid’s nose was all bleeding. He was crying. But Roy
     and Bobby ran the joint. That was it. Everybody was petrified of him. I couldn’t even go into Roy’s office without getting
     abused. I used to, like, stick my head in and he’d go, ‘You little Staten Island fag, get the fuck in here!’”
    But Louis didn’t mind. It was okay. Roy yelled and hit but so did his father. People in authority yelled and hit. Besides,
     at Hanover he never got smacked—which made Roy an improvement over his father. Wasn’t necessary. Louis didn’t need to get
     smacked. He didn’t give Roy shit the way he gave his father shit, and the way he gave the priests at Sea shit. Why would he?
     No cause for that. He was making money. He was really diligent, not “put-on-an-act” diligent.
    He started out like everybody else, making cold calls but not selling anything. “Qualifying leads,” it was called. The “leads”
     being customers, the “qualifying” meaning that the cold-callers wanted to find out if there was any point in calling these
     people. You don’t sell stock to a guy who owns nothing but mutual funds, any more than you’d get on the phone and peddle ham
     hocks to those bearded Hassidic guys Louis saw when he drove through Borough Park. Only beginners qualified leads. Louis wasn’t
     a beginner for very long.
    “So on my first day I went to the kid Chris Girodet. I walked in, sat down, he handed me the leads and explained what to do.
     Now I still have no idea what I’m doing. He says, ‘Here’s a stack of these leads’—he’s explaining it to me. ‘Call the number,
     ask for this guy. If he gets on the phone, you tell him, “This is Chris Girodet from Hanover Sterling. What I’d like to do
     is send you out some information, and get to know what kind of investor you are.’ This