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

like, ‘Oh, I don’t really want
     any.’ I’d say, ‘Of course you don’t want any.’ Sometimes I used to fucking kill them. ‘Of course you don’t want any. You’re
     in Texas. You don’t know anything about the market. You probably don’t have a TV antenna down there.’”
    Selling was an interactive thing. That’s why scripts were dumb. With scripts you talked “at” people. To sell, you had to get
     into the other guy’s head. You had to engage in a dialogue. Talking with, not talking at. He was now in the realm of the kind
     of relationship that would define his life—the relationship between thief and victim.
    That was the division of the world. The takers and the taken. Louis was planting himself firmly on the side that was going
     to prevail.

CHAPTER SIX
    Benny Salmonese didn’t have any problem with “doing the monkey.” It was okay with him. Most things were okay with Benny. That
     was the kind of guy he was. Easygoing. Benny was a jovial, hefty Brooklyn kid, half Italian and half Puerto Rican, and he
     had grown up on the streets of Bensonhurst. He was also hardworking. A talented salesman. A people person, in a street-kid
     kind of way.
    “Benny was cool. Benny had a unique style on the phone. It was like, ‘Heyyyyyyyyyy’—somebody would pick up the phone, and
     he’d be like ‘Heyyyyyyyyyyyyy, Ben Salmonese here. Hanover Sterling.’ We used to listen to him and he’d sit with the phone
     down on the desk, and he wouldn’t touch the phone. He’d just bend over and talk into it. I started doing that too. I got that
     from him. I didn’t pitch like him but I started doing that,” said Louis.
    Benny was Louis’s best friend at Hanover. He tried to learn from Benny just as he tried to learn from everybody. Louis was
     becoming something that no one could ever have dreamed that he would be—a workaholic. It was a disease that was sweeping Wall
     Street in the early 1990s. Not that Louis cared—he and the rest of the Hanover kids had about as much to do with the rest
     of Wall Street as they did with the Paris Bourse—even though Wall Street, the literal Wall Street, was so close that they
     could walk to it holding their breath and not get winded. The Hanover kids were a couple of blocks from the pinstriped young
     preppies who filled the trainee programs at J. P. Morgan and Merrill Lynch and Nomura but they were from different class backgrounds,
     different neighborhoods, and different schools—if they had bothered to finish school. They were an old-style New York neighborhood
     mix of Italians and Jews, almost all guys, while the white shoe firms were populated by suburban WASPs and out-of-towners
     and Jews from the East Side and a growing and increasingly slightly tolerated number of young women with short hair and tailored
     suits. Bedford vs. Massapequa. Yale vs. St. John’s. You could see the difference from a distance, and you could hear the difference
     without seeing the difference.
    What the Hanover kids had in common with the rest of the Street was a kind of all-encompassing, obsessive love of money. It
     was a great deal to have in common. For Louis, anyone who came in the way of that love affair would not be welcome no matter
     who it might be—whether it was the government or his fellow brokers. Not all of them shared his love of money and his desire
     to work hard for money. Not all of them paid him what he was owed. Some wanted to stiff him. Some of them, he complained to
     Roy, were thieves. After going through a succession of deadbeat broker bosses, Roy put him with the honest (to Louis), hardworking
     power broker John Lembo. But Chris and Rocco remained his pals and role models.
    Louis didn’t want anything to do with scrubs, guys who weren’t into the money the way he was. John Lembo, Chris Wolf, and
     Rocco Basile—they were top brokers, and young. There were like him. They knew their business. They were committed. “None of
     the rest were into