Born to Steal When the Mafia Hit Wall Street by Gary Weiss

Description

The Mafia meets Wall Street — the true story. Gary Weiss’s Born to Steal tells of Louis Pasciuto: the mob-connected stock scammer who lived the Wolf of Wall Street life a decade early — then flipped and brought the whole rotten crew down in one of the FBI’s great stings.

Weiss — the great financial journalist — writes with insider authority: the boiler rooms, the wiseguys, the wiretaps. It is Goodfellas meets the stock market: funnier, scarier, and truer than fiction, with a cast of characters Scorsese couldn’t invent.

The great Wall Street true-crime book: propulsive and eye-opening. For finance readers who like their morality tales with mobsters — and their justice served cold. Weiss exposes the boiler-room underworld with a reporter’s rigor and a novelist’s pace: the definitive account of mobbed-up markets. Gripping from first page to last. Pasciuto’s double life — wiseguy, then witness — is stranger than fiction. Weiss delivers the definitive, propulsive account.

When the mob came to Wall Street

Louis Pasciuto was a kid from Staten Island with a gift for stealing — and Wall Street’s notorious “chop houses” gave him the perfect place to use it. In Born to Steal, published in 2003, veteran business journalist Gary Weiss tells the true story of Pasciuto’s meteoric rise through the boiler rooms where organized crime and stock fraud became one business.

Weiss follows Pasciuto from small-time scams into the heart of the chop-shop world: high-pressure sales floors pushing worthless stocks on unsuspecting investors, pump-and-dump schemes orchestrated with mob muscle, and millions siphoned from ordinary people’s savings. It’s a vivid tour of 1990s Wall Street’s dark side — and of the FBI investigation that finally brought the whole operation down.

Part true-crime thriller, part financial exposé, Born to Steal shows how easily greed, glamour, and intimidation blended on the Street — and why the same schemes keep coming back.

For fans of

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• True-crime stories and financial scandals.
• The Wolf of Wall Street — this is the real thing.
• Gripping nonfiction about the mob’s grip on American business.

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A page-turning exposé of crime, corruption, and the street that never sleeps.