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

Author:Gary Weiss [WEISS, GARY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS000000
ISBN: 9780759528000
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2003-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

1. They paid Phil Abramo to remove obstacles to their livelihoods or lives.

2. They paid Phil Abramo because he was a potential obstacle to their livelihoods or lives.

This was how Guys like Phil Abramo made their living. It was not a growth business in the early mid-nineties. Phil could thank John Gotti for that. By keeping a high profile at the Ravenite and in the tabloids, by mouthing off in front of FBI microphones, by forcing other Guys to meet him at the Ravenite where they could be watched and counted, he made the world of Guys into an uncomfortably public world. How does a Guy make money under such circumstances?

Phil Abramo always found a way, which was to quietly tend to business. He lived in a blue-collar district of Saddle Brook, a little town in northern New Jersey where outsiders rarely ventured, except to visit the Jewish cemeteries on the outskirts. While Gotti was flashy and violent and stupid, Phil was educated—four years of college—and he kept his name out of the papers. The newspapers, that is. He was in other papers. SEC files.

Phil Abramo was in a whole bunch of SEC files—but not because the SEC had him under surveillance or anything like that. No, Phil Abramo was in the SEC’s files because he did the filing. He had to. It was the law. He had to obey the law. He was a CEO.

In the late eighties and early nineties, Phil Abramo headed a series of “blind pools”—basically companies set up for the purpose of making investments and buying other companies. Blind pools have a sorry history, because in the eighties they were often used by penny stock promoters as a way of packaging cruddy companies that were then sold off to the public the way Louis was selling chop stocks in the nineties. But Abramo’s blind pools never got off the ground. All he basically did was file papers with the SEC, thereby supplying anyone who looked with a full biography of Philip C. Abramo.

Phil’s SEC filings skipped over his early career.

As a young man in the early 1970s he was involved in general merchandising (possession of stolen property) and purchase and sale of pharmaceuticals (conspiracy to sell heroin). Some years later, Phil confided to a friend that his incarceration from the latter episode put him in touch with Gambino-affiliated Guys, who saw to it that his career moved forward.

In the 1980s he had found himself a mentor, a man by the name of Thomas Quinn. Quinn was a lawyer and a very prominent penny stock promoter, back in the days when chop stocks went by the name of “penny stocks,” though the game—the rip—was essentially the same. One of the stocks Quinn brought public was a company called Bagel Nosh. Phil was on the books as a “consultant” to Bagel Nosh back in the early 1980s, not long after it went public.

The Quinn-Abramo friendship never wavered as the years went on. When authorities in France nabbed Quinn on charges of securities fraud in 1988, Phil’s unlisted phone number was in his notebook.

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