Salvatore D. Romano

Romano attended the Staten Island campus of St. John's University before he began working on Wall Street in 1985, when he obtained a position as an assistant broker with Lehman Brothers, where he outperformed "everyone in the sales department".

Government investigators discovered that the firm's partners "pressured the sales staff through fear, intimidation and the promise of outlandish commissions to make hundreds of client calls daily and to use information they knew was false and inaccurate to promote selected stocks".

The firm did extremely well, with Romano illegally controlling small cap stocks "by dominating the ownership of equity positions in publicly traded companies" and then reselling the shares to retail investors at higher prices.

[2] In 1992, both Romano and his father were "convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy", having been "charged with running a loan brokerage out of Willowbrook that scammed applicants of more than $1 million".

[2] John "Johnny G" Gammarano, a soldier in the Gambino crime family, soon "requested a meeting with Romano at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Manhattan.

As for Gammarano, "he was out on bail pending sentencing"[5] for setting up "a $10 million scheme in which New Orleans mobsters cornered the market on the distribution of Joker Poker machines throughout Louisiana".

[8] Romano would go on to forge a very close friendship with music legend Paul Anka, who wrote My Way for Frank Sinatra and would later rewrite the song as Sal's Way, using the same melody but with new lyrics.

This unofficial nickname was coined in 2007 by American journalist and author Gerald "Jerry" Capeci, in an article that appeared in The New York Sun,[9] and based on court testimony.

Years earlier, Romano had been on parole and Joey D'Angelo, a Gambino soldier in Mikey Scars' crew, was on home confinement.

Romano also fingered mobsters John "Johnny G" Gammarano, William "Big Billy" Scotto, Peter Gotti, Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, and Joseph "Little Joe" D'Angelo "as partners who shared up to $5 million of the cash that he generated in his far-reaching schemes".

[9] In 2017, Romano and some members of his family appeared in the documentary series Mafia Women with Trevor McDonald, which aired on February 16 and 23 on the ITV network in the United Kingdom.