Shades Of Al Avasso

[Policing Wall Street]

Here's another good one from Wall Street for you.

Al Avasso was a member of the American Stock Exchange. Avasso was a colorful character,
who boasted to me of ties to the Italian Mafia. 

In the mid-1980s Avasso was banned from AMEX for entering fictitious options trades.

In 1991 Avasso convinced two members of the Board of AMEX, Robert VanCaneghan and Louis Miceli, to participate in a stock promotion; PNF Industries. Their specialist unit, Miceli-VanCaneghan, became the specialist in the stock. This led to a front page article in The Wall Street Journal- and the stock scam collapsed.

What reminded me of Avasso was a recent incident in Italy. It involved two men, who were apprehended with $134 billion of forged United States Treasury Securities. The men were attempting to smuggle these forged Treasury securities from Italy into Switzerland.

In 1971 Avasso was apprehended with $200,000 in stolen bonds from Manufacturers Hanover Trust in Switzerland. Avasso was attemtpting to sell these stolen bonds.

A federal judge dismissed the charges because the government could not prove that Avasso knew that the bonds had been stolen. 

I had a friend, Gene Weissman, who was a member of the AMEX. Weissman always said that Avasso was a man
who was "ahead of his time."

What Weissman meant was that honest money could no longer be made on Wall Street and that dishonesty was the wave
of the future.

The hucksters and sharks are the ones who make money on Wall Street.

Weissman was so prescient.