A memoir from the beloved, colorful criminal defense attorney and three-term mayor of Las Vegas.

This is the true story of Staten Island badboy Louis Pasciuto's meteoric rise to the top of Wall Street's notorious chop houses - by the award-winning journalist who broke it. Hood brokers. Monthly million dollar paychecks. Thirty-six hour cocaine binges. Rocky themed pep rallies. Run-ins with Mafia thugs toting Mac 10 machine pistols. This was the life of Louis Pasciuto, a fast talking Staten Island kid who, from the age of 19 to 25, moved stocks for 17 different brokerage houses - most of the time without a fake license. This inside account of the Mafia's infiltration of Wall Street details Louis' career as the consummate liar, selling phantom stocks to naive Americans and leading a lifestyle worthy of Caligula. To avoid a long prison sentence, Pasciuto eventually became state witness. Now, Gary Weiss shares the inside story of Wall Street's notorious chop houses, best known as the crooked Mob-run brokerages, where rampant thievery netted several billion dollars from gullible investors.

The mob couldn't live with Jimmy Roselli and it couldn't live without him. Roselli is Hoboken's other great singer, and to a greater degree than Frank Sinatra, who lived down the street from him, Roselli maintained his ties to his old neighborhood and its people. He's their link to their cultural heritage and Italy, and he continues to sing a good half of his repertoire in Italian. But this didn't stop his wiseguy following from getting angry at him from time to time. Roselli's best-loved song, "Little Pal, " is the wiseguy anthem, which he sang at John Gotti, Jr.'s wedding reception. Carlo Gambino attended shows regularly and had Jimmy chauffeured to his Massapequa estate for dinner. Mobster Larry Gallo was buried with a Roselli record in his hands. Hoboken's unsung great singer feuded with Sinatra, stood up to shakedown artists, befriended godfathers. But he also spurned legitimate help, sometimes when he needed it the most, by telling off Ed Sullivan, refusing Merv Griffin, and turning down Francis Ford Coppola's offer to sing "Senza Mamma" in The Godfather, Part II. Nevertheless, Roselli now has thirty-six recordings in print, owns his own record company, and commands more than $100,000 a night in performance. With a cast of characters that includes Jimmy Durante, the Rat Pack, comedian Joe E. Lewis, and Tony Bennett, Making the Wiseguys Weep is the story of a brilliant entertainer as well as a portrait of Italian-American culture from the 240 saloons that lined Hoboken's streets to the ritzy Copacabana and the bright lights of Caesars Palace in Atlantic City.