America: Still the Land of Opportunity
Securities, after all, could be used as collateral for large bank loans, thereby providing legitimate and tax-deductible funds for corporate takeovers or for countless other pur-poses. Thus the $195,000 loan ob-tained by one Charles L. Lewis of Atlanta from Charles "Bebe" Rebezo's Key Biscayne Bank in 1968, using 900 shares of IBM stock as collateral. When Rebozo went to sell the stock, it turned out to be stolen. Indicted later for theft were two Lan-sky gambling associates, Gilbert "the Brain" Beckley and Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, a New York hood, strong-arm man and major loan shark.
Securities, of course, can also provide the perfect cover for launder-ing cash deposited in the Swiss banks, serving as collateral for obtaining that money on paper in the form of loans. Or, by lending the securities to a financially desperate company, which can use them to inflate its balance sheet and so lure new investment capital, the mobsters opened new doors to the executive suite.
As for acquiring securities, this was fairly simple. One way was to counterfeit them, and the Mob had plenty of engravers, sources of good paper and expert printers, some of who got their experience turning out ration stamps during World War II. Another, and perhaps easier way, was simply to steal them. It was not necessary to hold up a stock mes-senger. The denizens of Wall Street were just as corruptible as business-men and politicians uptown, and by late in the Sixties, loan sharks-not the venomous kind that infest the waterfront but an outwardly more genteel crew were swarming through the financial district, getting brokerage house clerks into their debt and their clutches. Given the option of a beating, financial or physical, or a little certificate looting, most chose the latter, and under the tutelage of the new mobsters the recruited clerks learned how to steal with consider-able sophistication. .
The clerks were taught not only how to purloin stock certificates but how to destroy the microfilm records of such stocks and bonds in their brokerage houses. Gerald Martin Zelmanowitz, a Mob courier and front man in the stock racket who later turned FBI informant, declared that at one point Mob-controlled clerks made away with more than $1,000,-000 worth of securities from Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith, the nation's largest brokerage firm, and simultaneously destroyed the micro-films. Even when Merrill Lynch dis-covered that stock was missing, it couldn't determine which stock.
The lowly paid
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