The Lufthansa heist: The Real GoodFellas

https://www.amazon.com/Stories-Neil-Moran/dp/1954396848/ 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Neil, you were a young FBI agent thrust into the nineteen seventy eight Luftanza heist at J at JFK Airport, where approximately five million dollars in untraceable cash and approximately eight hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in jewelry was stolen. Right in the middle. It was right around Christmas time.

SPEAKER_02 0:14

I think it was December 11, 1978. Um we were just like any other day coming into the office and we noticed a little hustle and bustle. Uh you know, this is this is not the 24 hour the days of the 24 hour news cycle. So um we hadn't, I don't think we heard anything on the radio coming in. Those are days of days of old where people car pulls together, so probably about three or four of us in a car coming into the office, supervisor waving us in. I I need a I need a bunch of you to get out to the airport. Something's going on at the Lufthansa terminal. Uh looks like they may have stolen money. We don't know how much, we don't know what's going on. Just get out there and sort it out and get back to me. Uh we had an office at JFK Airport, which was comprised of mostly senior agents, you know, to get those small offices is kind of a plumb assignment. And so those the people out there assigned were were older agents, but there was probably only a handful of them, six or eight. And uh they were interviewing people with uh with the Port Authority police, and it soon came out that just about six million dollars in cash and jewelry were stolen. Initially, I guess the Port Authority had convinced the FDI office at JFK that they had some workable leads into this, and the JFK office basically told us, we'll we'll probably wind up handling this. And then it was probably a day or two later where uh a high-level organized crime informant told uh the agent that was handling him that these are the six, these are these six upfront guys that committed the robbery. And when we found out who they were uh tied to Jimmy Burke and the uh that faction of the poor the Paul Vario faction of the Lucchese family, our squad sh was handling truck hijackings. This wasn't a truck hijacking, but it was uh interstate theft. We took it over. And um from that point on, it was on these big operations at of which I'm sure you've been a part of, Vic, in in your career. In the first couple of days, it's it's chaos. You got handheld radios, you come into the office and there's radios all over the place. People from other squads and other commands are being uh assigned to us. They're all all have to drop what they're doing, they're not happy. Um so people are being assigned to to various uh to Tommy D. Simone, to Jimmy Burke, to uh Angelo Seppi. At first, I I probably followed Tommy D. Simone, Louis Cafora, and then on a more permanent basis, I was assigned to the group following Angelo Seppi, who, for your listeners, uh in the movie is the uh Frank Carbone character. So uh that's and that's Angelo Seppi. Angelo lived in the shadows of John Adams High School in Ozone Park, and as is depicted in the movie Goodfellas, Louis Cafara and his wife in that scene where he walks into Robert's lounge and Robert De Niro confronts him. He's driving a pink Cadillac and the wife has got an expensive fur. Angelo essentially, you know, uh not following Jimmy Burke's directive, not to spend the money because we have cops all around. We have cops and agents following us. Angelo goes out and buys a 1979 Ford Thunderbird, which was the hot car in Ozone Park and Howard Beach. You could not drive a block and not see this really, really nice car, a navy blue body with a nice light brown rust top. Everybody had that car in Ozone Park and Howard Beach. So uh Angelo got the car within days of the robbery. So one of the things that I that I talk about in the book is that um he was very easy to follow. He bounced I was on the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift, which actually was the bet I wasn't much of a night guy, and but I, you know, I soon learned to be a night guy. We had just had a baby back in August, and uh my schedule was all tossed around and I couldn't sleep during the day, and I'd go in exhausted at night. But Angelo kept us hopping. He was a he was a bouncer. He bounced from clubs to club to club. He also, his wife Hope, had a family home in Mattituck out in eastern Long Island. So maybe once or twice a week, the two of them at two o'clock in the morning would make their way out to Mattituck on the LIE. Angelo's car was the easiest car to follow. Those very distinctive horizontal taillights, you could see him cars ahead. You didn't, there was no need to be on his bumper. There came a time when a listening device, we got court authorization to install a listening device in his car. But to be perfectly frank, so much time had gone by from December 11th when we finally got the authorization. At any talk of Luftanza, there was a couple of vague references. There was enough for an arrest. So uh sometime in either February or March the following months, I was on the team that uh on a Saturday afternoon arrested Jimmy Burke and Angelo Seppi in uh in Queens to getting authorization from the U.S. Attorney's Office, and just in the hopes that they would cooperate, we didn't have a prosecutable case for either one of them. And needless to say, Angelo and Jimmy Burke didn't cooperate. So, really, the only person that was ever prosecuted for Lafonza was the inside guy, Lou Werner, who provided the information to Martin Krugman, who is the Maury character, the weak guy in uh in Goodfellas.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

What was it like to arrest Jimmy Burke? How how was he with you?

SPEAKER_02 5:34

Didn't give any trouble. There was a whole bunch of us there. Actually, the guy who put the handcuffs on him is now deceased, but he was a uh an ex-detective. He had left the police department, Manny Gonzalez, and he had done a lot of undercover work. And uh, you know, Manny was pretty pretty tough customer, and they they specifically assigned him to put the handcuffs on Jimmy Burke. And, you know, very matter of fact, he and Angelo, no trouble, uh, but they didn't say a word and and they didn't, you know, I remember Angelo saying in the interview, you just have to do what you have to do. We didn't, we we uh as I said, they didn't have enough, you know, to to prosecute either one of them. But their demeanor was, you know, listen, you you have a job to do, we have a job to do, do what you have to do.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

Seppi was reportedly responsible for many of the cleanup murders ordered by Burke to silence potential witnesses. Were you able to connect him to any of the murders? No. No, just all reported.

SPEAKER_02 6:23

Um, you know, he interests again, interestingly enough, you know, on that edict from Jimmy Burke that uh, you know, don't go out and spend your money. He did, and uh he lived till like 1984 when he was murdered in his bath beach apartment with his girlfriend over drugs. So he got involved in you know in drug dealing, and and that's that's how he met his demise.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

And you would br you brought up earlier that Louis Roast beef kaffour and his wife Joanna and their pink Mary Kay Cadillac, from what I've read in the newspaper articles, neither them nor the car was ever recovered. No. You're correct. You're correct.

SPEAKER_02 6:56

Yeah, so some of the people, so some of the bodies were recovered, but uh like Stax Edwards and um trying to think who else. Uh Frenchie McMahon, I don't think he was I don't think his body was ever recovered either. So Jimmy Burke did a alleged reportedly did a good job uh hiding those bodies.

SPEAKER_00 7:11

Another victim of Lufthansa was Tommy Tugun's D. Simone's girlfriend, Teresa Ferrara. Right. Can you kind of go into what happened to her?

SPEAKER_02 7:19

No, I think she was a she was a hairdresser in uh in Belmore, Long Island, I believe. I th I I thought from what I recall, I think witnesses had seen her coming out of the coming out of her place of business and being hustled into a car and never being seen again.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

But as far as what what happened to her, no information along those lines. Did they ever find Maury or Martin Krugman's body, or he's another one that just kind of vanished off the face of the earth? Boy. Uh I yeah, I think he just vanished. I don't think his body was ever recovered. After Henry held held flipped, did you have any interactions with him? I did not.

SPEAKER_02 7:52

I was off the squad by that point. You know, you're talking about but do have a lot of friends, you know, a lot of the people remained on the squad. And one of the interesting things that came out of, you know, his debriefing was Ed McDonald, who plays himself in the movie. Um, and actually I I spoke to him about you, we had some questions about some things from my book, so I do use him in the I do name him in the acknowledgments. You're a great guy. I guess they're at the final stages and trying to make clear to Henry that you can't hide anything. This is a deal. You renege on your deal, you you not tell us about one homicide or one uh you know one robbery that you were involved in. All bets are off. So uh almost as a matter of fact, uh he just says, Well, uh you guys aren't interested in the fact that we fixed some college basketball games, are you? And you know, what do you mean? Well, we fixed some college basketball games. We got some two players on uh Rick Kuhn and I think at the other the point guard's name. We got them to uh throw games. What school is that? Boston College, where Ed McDonald actually went. He went so on the front page of every newspaper about a week later, Sports Illustrated and everything, you know, uh Boston College is brought to the fore is brought to the forefront of um you know big a big scandal, huge scandal. And those guys went to jail, Rick Kuhn and the other guy went to jail.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

So you were uh originally you were in the beginning stage of this case, and it's all speculative, but what do you think happened to that stolen money? Just your opinion.

SPEAKER_02 9:24

Yeah, I mean, you know, Jimmy Burke, you know, they they they divvied it up. Some everybody got got something, and then uh I guess they kicked up some to uh to Paul Vario. But Jimmy Burke uh, you know, was the reported engineer uh of the Lufthansa robbery and held on to the money. And then, you know, was whoever had to be cut in on it was cut in on it as far as as far as the mob was concerned. You know, it's all kinds of things. John Gotti was involved in this, and so uh there probably were a lot of people whose palms had to be greased here, but um I think he just held on to the money.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

It certainly wasn't yeah, that's that's that's my feeling. So while we're on the subject of the mafia, you were involved in a huge undercover operation in Brooklyn targeting insurance fraud. Could you go into that?

SPEAKER_02 10:08

Yeah. Uh back in late 83, early 84, we had uh an informant that uh brought to our attention that he had he owned a truck repair shop in Richmond Hill section of Queens, right on Atlantic Avenue in the Van Wick Expressway. He had two partners, and they strictly did truck repair. And he was a towing guy. He he was on the rotation tow uh you know for for many years. So one of these guys that races to the scene, and and in any event, he brings to our attention that he's approached five to six times a week to take insurance jobs. And presumably what he does with those cars is in the truck repair shop, they take the car apart, they take the engine out, break down the engine, they take the glass out, they take the seats out, take the bumper off, they take tires off, the radio. Very often what the public doesn't realize is, you know, sometimes cars when you break down the parts are worth actually, you know, with some years on the car, uh are worth more than the car itself. So we thought we would try you know, the FBI back in those days, Vic, really didn't have many undercover operations. A guy like Joe Pastone really paved the way for us to be able to get funding from FBI headquarters to do something like this. What we did was we combined our uh forces, and um what the informant told us was that he was willing to turn over his junkyard, which was in the East New York section of Brooklyn, at the corner of uh Liberty Avenue and Montauk Street, right kind of like in the city line area, and it was a working junkyard. So uh we had a nice trailer in there, and he had all the props. He had uh, you know, engine parts, doors, shells of cars. So this was a real working junkyard. So what our uh technical people, equivalent to the police department's taro section, came in and videoed and audioed the trailer, so anybody that came in there to do business with us, you know, would be captured on tape. So um we started to be introduced by the informant to that what we called middlemen, people in the neighborhood that facilitated giving up a car. So Vic wants to give up his car. He knows that the corner guy at the gas station is somebody that you can approach and the car will disappear and you'll be able to collect the insurance money. So he introduced us to a series of 26 middlemen, used car dealerships, a couple of new car dealerships, auto-body shops, collision shops, places like that. And a lot of these guys were low-level organized crime associates. The most prominent of them was a guy named Tommy, fat Tommy Stabil. And for your listeners, goodfellas, fans, in the beginning, when they're panning Robert's lounge and they were introducing all the people in the neighborhood, I think Anthony Stabile is the first one mentioned. Now that's Tommy's brother, who was gunned down on Cross Bay Boulevard, maybe about a year or two before we met Tommy. And right at the outset, the the uh one of the entrees to Tommy was the informant had Tommy was a Shylock, and uh the informant had borrowed$3,000 from Tommy. So the informant thought it'd be a good idea, you know, this behooved be a great, great idea for the federal government to start paying off his loan to Tommy Stabile. So that's actually what we did. And Tommy said, as long as you're paying me, I don't care who pays me. So in addition to doing business with Tommy and getting insurance jobs from him from the neighborhood, what we were doing was paying off the loan that the informant owed him. And surprisingly, Vic, it shocked the hell out of me and my partner. In the beginning, Tommy took a liking to us. Uh, you know, we were working, young working guys, and he took a liking to us. He shared in the third or fourth meeting, he's telling us about his brother getting murdered on Cross Bay Boulevard, and he's telling us to be careful. There's a lot of treacherous people out there. It really shocked, I mean, it shocked the hell out of us. We were in the beginning, there were people that looked at us some, you know, sometimes, and you're you're wondering, am I saying the wrong thing? Am I believable as an undercover agent? Do they think I'm I am who I say I am? All these guys, you know, they passed by our yard to check us out. A lot of them were nervous. A lot of them were nervous, but they did business. Tommy, right from the outset, he went, he, there was no question that Tommy thought we were legit, as I put in the book, to kind of reinforce that the day of the takedown, a year later, after we wind up getting 156 cars from the middlemen, enough to fill an airplane hangar at uh Floyd Bennett Field. And I let me just briefly go into how this works. So Vic is is one of the middlemen, and Neil and George, the undercover agents, have been introduced to Vic. And you have a car owner in your neighborhood approaches you with a uh Chevy Malibu and says, you know, can you get rid of this car? So you said, give me the keys, give me the registration, and wait to hear from me. So you you beep, we've no phones, you beep us, we come to your trailer on Rockaway Boulevard, which was a Tommy head, and we turn the he turned the car over to us. Sometimes they were drivable, sometimes they weren't drivable. In the beginning, amazingly, we we didn't have enough funding for a flatbed. We used a uh New York City Police Department tow truck with the decal scraped off. So it was blue and white. So you can understand, you can understand some of the middlemen saying, Who the hell are these guys? So uh, but they did business with us, and then very shortly thereafter, we were uh actually got the funding to lease a nice flatbed. So sometimes the cars were drivable, sometimes they weren't drivable. Tom Tommy or Vic, in this case, would turn over the keys of registration to us, and we would call our squad. The detectives and agents would meet us out in Floyd Bennett Field, inventory the car, make copies of the keys, copies of the registration, create a folder for the car. So we have that car on Monday morning. We get back to Tommy or to Vic rather in Thursday or Friday and say the car is gone. And this is all naturally on tape. And then he contacts the car owner, car owner waits till like Friday, maybe to report. And they say, Well, we were out in Long Island at the Massa Piqua Mall, and we had golf clubs in the car, we had all kinds of, you know, thousands of dollars worth of items in the car, Christmas gifts. Car was mysteriously stolen. Meanwhile, the police department and the FBI had the car for a week. So it was a very successful case. But to go back to when Tommy was arrested that morning, he's in the car. They didn't give the agents and detectives any trouble at all. What's this all about? So you knew two guys named George George and Neil? Never heard of them. So he really, he really, uh, you know, he Tommy was old school. He wasn't giving anybody up. We get into the office, and the idea was for us to approach each one of these guys to see if they would cooperate. And so we walk in, and he's thinking that they're just parading us in the room with him. And he says, Oh, I see they got used too. And so my partner actually said to him, he said, It's George O'Neil, Tommy, but it's actually agents George O'Neil. And Tommy was a guy that liked to be in control of things, and he kind of looked up us and said, Not bad, not bad. He's really believable. In the in the following, in the meetings that followed with his attorney and court appearances and everything, he always extended his hand to both of us. He was he was pissed off at the informant, but old school guy didn't take it personal. Um and uh unfortunately for him, trouble, he was one of these guys, as I say in the book, who couldn't keep out of trouble, and uh went to jail for five years and then moved to Florida. We had heard from his uh parole officer a couple of times uh as he relocated down there, and then he got involved in a uh uh big conspiracy case in South Florida and got sentenced to 14, 14 years in in jail. You know, he's probably in his 50s at that point. So it was a great case. It was a great case. Um, you know, as I said, people like Joe Passone uh in that in that famous, you know, where he portrayed Donnie Brasco in the movie, uh guys like that paved the way for us to be able to do these things. The FBI in the past, just they under the Hoover era, there was no such thing as um undercover agents. Uh they were afraid that agents would be corrupted, you know, by by the mob. So uh they really traditionally backed off organized crime. That's probably the highlight of my of my career, really was. Was Tommy Sabil a made guy? I don't believe Tommy was ever made, no. No, just an associate. But he's right in there with the Jimmy Burr, you know, with the those are all associates of him, Tommy of his, Tommy D. Simone, Henry Hill. He was right in there with them.

SPEAKER_00 18:45

Three cops were also arrested in that case.

SPEAKER_02 18:47

They were cops, a fireman, an attorney, doctor, the Catholic woman of the year. Remember the old Catholic newspaper, The Tablet? She was named the Cat She was named the Catholic Woman of the Year, gave up her car. I mean, this press conference was very dramatic. I mean, you had the police commissioner, Benjamin Ward, you had the assistant director of the New York office, you had um uh oh, what's his name? The U.S. attorney, Ray Deary, who's now a federal judge, Raymond Deary. He Raymond Deary gave the press conference. He said, We have a doctor, we have a lawyer, we have police officers, we have firefighters, all people that you would never expect would do something like this, you know.

SPEAKER_00 19:26

So yeah. So it's so true. And I grew up in a neighborhood where 50 cents worth of gas was a way of getting rid of your car. And then when I went to the autocrime division, obviously the case that you did paved the way that it was done. And I can tell you the Brooklyn team, the Queens team, the Bronx team, we could do one of those cases just like you did. It'd make a big splash in the paper, and you could start another case up 30 days later, and people would be willing to hand over their car like it was nothing.

SPEAKER_02 19:55

Absolutely. And you talk it's funny, you talk about the gasoline. One of the things that Tommy Stabil tells my partner and I as as we start to do business with him, and it's maybe a month into it, and none of the cars are showing up. He says, I don't know what you're doing with these cars. He said, But when I used to hand these cars off to kids in the neighborhood, then wind up on the Belt Parkway, he says, and there's a big investigation, and the money gets held up, the people don't get their checks, they come back to me, they bitch to me. He says, I don't know what you're doing, keep doing it. So uh which was pretty which was again, you know, it's uh just another feather in our cap that we were working, organized guys, we knew what we were doing.

SPEAKER_00 20:32

There was a certain amount of trust there with the both of us. You were involved in a case that fascinates me that targeted a Gambino crime family heavyweight Mickey Boy Paradiso. Can you go into that?

SPEAKER_02 20:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

Why do people cooperate with the government, Vic, you know, or with the police department?

SPEAKER_02 20:47

Why did they cooperate with law enforcement? Money, sometimes, and in this case, revenge. And Mickey Boy's Mickey Boy at that time was a maid guy. He passed away this February, and reportedly at the time of his death, the he was the consigliere of the uh Gambino family. So he this is a guy who lasted a long time, rose up through the ranks, is an old school guy, you know, would never cooperate, did a lot of time in prison for a lot of different things. So it's August of 86, and we had arrested Mickey Boy uh initi when I was initially assigned to the truck hijacking squad in Queen's office back in uh 1978. And Mickey Boy uh was a stolen load of coffee, and he was really one of the first people that we uh that we that we arrested in a big case. It was a Colombian coffee, and he I think he went to jail for about five years. So uh here it is, August of 86, and his brother, Philip Paradiso, Philly, uh who had a real checkered past of his own. He had in 1972, uh he and a and a uh colleague Frank Marici had robbed Regina Apache's church on sixty fifth street in Brooklyn, beautiful, beautiful church, of somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of uh religious artifacts. And it was reported That Carlo Gambino interceded in that, all in the New York Times, which I have the whole article in my book. So uh in any event, in August of '86, we meet Philly on the boardwalk of Coney Island. We got handball games going on in the background, and uh it was like something out of a movie. And he comes there clad in his Tony Soprano, you know, Adidas uh warmups, white sneakers. What a character. What a character. He had been cut out, what he told us. He had been cut out of the sale of the family home. His sisters and other brother, brother or brothers, I think there was like, I think there was five or six of them. Uh Mickey Boy was the only one who didn't want to give Philly any money. And Philly, you know, in Mickey Boy's defense, Philly had a drug habit. He also was a heavy alcohol user, so he had some dependency issues. So Mickey Boy wanted to cut him out of the of the uh sale of the family home. So Philly at the outset told us, I can tie my brother to a murder. He said, My my friend Frank Marici, who you I mentioned before as uh being his co-defendant in the Regina Pachas case, Philly, strangely, what junkies will do, he robbed Frank Marici's home one afternoon, and uh the wife came home and he just he left and he just went like this, like, don't say anything. And uh she, of course, told her husband when he came home. He goes to the precinct, files a report. Philly, being a career criminal, is arrested and sent upstate for a stint. And uh Mickey Boy winds up murdering Frank Marici off the Bay 8th Street exit of the Bell Parkway in the snow and clips the newspaper clipping out of the uh paper, sends it to Philly upstate. This one's for you, kid. So uh this is what he tells us at the at the uh at the outset. So um he says, I can I can give you other things. Do you know who Jimmy Hydell is? Yes, we know who Jimmy Hydell is. Low-level uh associate of the Gambino family, tied to Mickey Boy, reportedly doing hits at the time with uh with a couple of colleagues. So I can give you I can meet with Jimmy Hydell and record conversations and elicit information from him. So a month later, we start to wire Philly up and he meets with Jimmy Hydell. Within the first couple of meetings, Jimmy Hydell admits to murdering, kidnapping, murdering, and burying his girlfriend, Annette D. Biyazzi in Staten Island. The murder of a guy named Jack D'Angelo, who Mickey Boy suspected of being an informant. Mickey Boy's in Lewisburg with Jack D'Angelo. He suspects him, it was a drug-related case, of being a DEA informant. He has Jimmy and his coll his two colleagues, Nikki Guido and Robert Behring, who is an ex-transit cop, hit Jack D'Angelo. A month later, a guy named Jack Trinetto, also a Staten Islander, living with Helen Baring, Robert Bering. So I'm a I hope I'm not giving you too many names here. No, that's quiet. Robert Behring's wife, who apparently screwed Robert Behring out of a deal. They also murdered Jack Trinetto. So within a month, Jimmy Heidel has admitted to participation in three murders. Philly, knowing the way Philly was at the time, we knew he wouldn't be a good witness. And the ADAs that we were working with, we had approached the Brooklyn DA's, the Rackets Bureau, the Brooklyn DA's office, two ADAs who we worked with, Eric Seidel and Eric Krause. They felt Philly wouldn't make the best witness. We need to introduce an undercover agent. So I actually was selected to start working with Philly in an undercover capacity. And the first person I met was Jimmy Heidel. So this was October, the week of October 18th, if I'm recalling it correctly. And uh it was early in the week, I think it was a Monday. Philly arranged to meet Jimmy outside of Sullivan's bar on 89th Street and 3rd Avenue in Bay Ridge. So it was the three of us. And the my entree, the way Philly introduced me, was I had Department of Motor Vehicle connections, really good connections. They could register tag cars or insurance jobs. I told him, literally, I said, I can I can register a donkey cart if you bring me one. Just in the business of making money, this intrigue, Jimmy, he seemed to be agreeable to doing business. It wasn't a long meeting. It was outside, you know, uh right on the corner, probably about 10 minutes, 10, 15 minutes or so. So we agreed to start doing business. After that meeting, that was the last time that we ever saw Jimmy. So what in the interim to back up, back up a little bit that spring, or actually the year before, Paul Castellano was killed on December 16th, 1985. And I think as most of your listeners know, John Gotti seized power of the Gambino family, and it pissed off the heads of the other families. In particular, what's his name? The the uh the odd father. Shvanny. Shivani the Chinjigante. So they hire a hire a munitions expert, the Genovese family, uh, and the other family, the other four families collaborate. Anthony Queso is given the contract, Gaspipe Queso uh of the Lucchese family is given the contract to kill John Gotti. So he hires a munitions expert, and at 86th Street outside one of the social clubs, they wire this car, they put a bomb in the remote control bomb in the car. John Gotti does not get in the car, but the underboss of the Gambino family, Frankie DeCico, does get in the car. Frankie DeChico was very close with Mickey Boy, so Mickey Boy takes exception to this, as did the whole Gambino family. And Mickey Boy has Jimmy Heidel, Robert Baring, and Nicky Guido attempt to kill Queso, which is a set now we're up in September of 86, a month after Philly meets, we meet Philly actually. He starts doing business with Jimmy, and they try to kill Queso. It's a botched hit, and now Queso is furious. So Queso, as again, many of your listeners probably know, has two major case squad detectives, Steven Caracapa and Louis Eppolito on his payroll for$4,000 a month, and they are contracted to kidnap Jimmy Heidel. So five days, literally five days, on a Saturday afternoon after I meet Jimmy, Jimmy is snatched by the what who that were known in the media as the mafia cops by Epolito and Caracapa and brought to Queso, where Queso admits in 60 minutes that um he tortured him until he gave him who hired him to do this. So after that, queso, much much like Jimmy Burke went one one-on-one after uh one by one, rather, after the Luftanza people, he wanted revenge for the other two people that were with Jimmy and who Jimmy had given up, those being Robert Baring and Nicki Guido. So on Christmas morning, my partner George Hannah calls me and says he just got a call from our detective partner, George Terra, who was on his way to the 7-6 precinct on Union Street in um in Brooklyn where Nicki Guido was uh was murdered getting into his car. Unfortunately, it was the wrong Nikki Guido. There was a guy that worked for us, was known at the time as for the phone company, and the Nicky Guido with Jimmy Idell wasn't a phone company employee. So uh George actually went to the detective squad and and uh I guess he was poking around at the crime scene talking to some of the detectives, and then he sat down with them, and George tells them, I think they got the wrong guy. And you know, the detective the detectives they they they don't know anything about our case. So they're saying that they look he's he I remember George saying to us, they looked at me like I was nuts, you know, like why do you say they got the wrong guy? And you know, it was kind of too sensitive to uh to start explaining, but they did get the wrong guy. About a month later, Robert Bering, sensing, sensing that he's uh probably going to be next, starts cooperating with us. And uh one of the first things he does is bring us to the grave of Annette D. Biazzy in Staten Island, and they had poured lie over her remains, and uh it was uh yeah, a very, very gruesome site. So uh that's and then I think I'm trying to there was approximately 10 homicides that were that that that Philly actually pointed us in the in the direction of solving. And then ultimately the big prize supposedly was to get Mickey Boy. So Mickey Boy is eventually indicted over the frank murder of Frank Marici, and Philly is our unfortunately our only witness. That didn't end well. It was uh we went we went out to California, myself and my partner George. Mickey Boy was in prison. He was in Lompoc in Santa Barbara, and uh two Brooklyn EA squad detectives and myself and George uh flew out there, drove up to Lompac, brought him back to LA County, LA County jail to stay overnight, and then brought him on a flight. And kind of a humorous thing is that morning when and and Mickey Boy, I have to say, we're going down the Pacific Coast Highway, and Mickey Boy. Mickey Boy's in the car, and we we couldn't shut him up. I mean, he wasn't happy to see us, and he and we told him what the case was about murder, Frank Marici, and oh he's you know, you gotta be kidding me. But he was talking about the Yankees, the Mets, Mayor Koch, how he missed New York, and how nobody bothers him in prison. It was we were quite surprised. He didn't talk about anything that we wanted him to talk about, but he uh he was very pleasant. So the next morning we're at LAX, the four of us. Uh of course we get on the plane first. Mickey Boy must have had four cups of coffee. We get on the we get on the plane, flight, we're all the way in the back. The flight attendant says uh the pilot wants to see one of you. One of the one of the detectives goes up, comes back after conversing with the detec with the detective, and he says, What was the what's the charge? Murder. He can't eat, he can't go to the bathroom, and he can't leave his seat. So, I mean, you know, it's about what almost a six-hour flight to New York. They and when he told Mickey Boy this, and the flight attendants are all crowded around us, people are coming on the plane, and you know, they all knew what the deal goes. Mickey Boy's in the middle, they got two detectives on one side, two agents on the other side. Flight attendants are all around us. And so Mickey Boy says, he says, uh I'll piss all over this fucking plane. He says, You gotta be kidding me. He says, I just had four cups of coffee. He said, I'm gonna sue the pilot, I'm gonna sue all you women, the you see flight attendants, I'm gonna sue the detectives, sue the agencies, I'm gonna sue the airline. He says, All right, I'll piss in my pants if I have to. Anyway, the flight attendants were very kind, and Mickey Boyd did go to the bathroom. He did eat, so we didn't follow the pilot's directive, but it was kind of humorous. But in any event, he he's indicted for murder about a year later. It's front page news on the New York Post, brother versus brother. And Philly was the main witness. He was a combative witness, he played right into the defense attorney's hands. He was kind of slouched down, you know, like in in the in despite all the coaching from uh Krauss, who, you know, who was the prosecutor at the time, he just didn't make a good witness, and Mickey Boy was was acquitted. So that was pretty unfortunate. We thought we had a pretty good case, but that's what happens when you have a bad witness. I just wanted to go back a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 32:55

You were talking about did did John Gotti, do you think he sanctioned Gaspipes murder, or do you think Mickey Boy went rogue and just put that crew together?

SPEAKER_02 33:03

And I think they would they were John Gotti was very close with uh Frankie DeCico as well. So great question, Vic. Uh you know, wish I had the answer, but I would say that they probably were all in agreement, you know, that that uh whoever was responsible for this needed to be taken care of. And that's my own my my own thoughts.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Was Jimmy Heidel related to Paradiso? No, no. He was related to another another organized crime figure through marriage. Okay. And and one of the killers was uh well the assassins was this former transit cop Robert Baring. Right. You got to interview him, and he's got a lot of bodies on him. Did he offer any insight into why he crossed over to the dark side? I now I actually wasn't part of any of the interviews.

SPEAKER_02 33:46

My my part, you know, uh my partner George Hanna and George Terror, they they were the ones that you know completely you know debriefed him. Uh I I don't think I don't think he poured his heart out to them. He he just didn't want to get murdered by queso. That was the only that was the reason why he came forward. He uh he wanted to head off queso because he knew you know he knew probably what happened to Jimmy.

SPEAKER_00 34:08

Pulled a couple of newspaper articles from that time period and Guido, the real Nikki Guido, the the killer, he knew how dangerous gas pipe was, and he told Bering, I'm leaving, like I gotta fall off the face of the earth, because if gas pipe catches me, he's gonna put me on a table and cut my heart out and show it to me, and scared the shit out of Bering, who's a badass himself. And they both went and flipped. During your time with the FBI, you investigated truck hijackings and you dealt with a lot of up-and-coming mobsters. And uh on another podcast, you were talking about your your interaction with Big Joe Messina.

SPEAKER_02 34:43

Yeah, so one of the great, one of the really fortunate things for a you know, for a bunch of young guys that just came into the FBI. There were two very, very busy squads in the office, the bank robbery squad and the truck hijacking squad. And they so busy they had two squads. So um we were working six and seven days a week. And hijacking's back, that was the bread and butter. Anyone who watches Goodfellas in the beginning, what does Ray Liotta say? It was like, you know, anytime we wanted money, we robbed the airport. It was like better than Citibank. So uh that's exactly what they did. And they had a lot of people in the neighborhood, well placed, that work for the airlines and work for trucking companies. You know, rather than sticking a gun in somebody's face on the running board and saying, you know, pull over, they just give the load up in that one scene when um the truck driver parks his rig out in front of the diner and Joe Pesci and uh Ray Liotta are outside that Tommy D Simone and and uh um uh who's the other character? Uh Henry Hill, sorry, were outside. He said, and he's he leaves the keys in the truck and he comes, he says, Oh, they just stole my they just stole my rig outside. It was a give up. He he gave the gave the load up. But this was a great squad to be on, and and it was really my first introduction to dealing with low-level organized crime figures, associates. And all these people that we arrested, it seemed like within the first two years of working on that squad, all went on to bigger and better things. And Joey Messina was actually one of them. So I write about in the book that a lot of people on our squad, I spoke about Mickey Boy earlier and being tied to that coffee load. You know, coffee a valuable commodity, uh, color TVs, Estee Lauder Perfume, expensive women's clothing and men's suits, Brooke Brooks Brothers suits. My first two cases are Hearts Mountain, Flea and Tick Collars. And the second one, tied to Joey Messina, were at the time the Cadillac of baby strollers, Parago, Super Bye-bye baby strollers. So we get informant information that these uh strollers are in a particular uh storage location in Mass Meth, Queen, which was the home of Joey Messina. And Joey was, we believe, meet at the time, but he was a young guy since 1978. So uh he's a young guy. We were told, very, very surveillance conscious. He made me within the first hour of me sitting, it was literally it's like something on TV where he's peering behind behind a uh a corner and he saw me. And I I I mean, I was a sufficient distance away, but I remember radioing my colleagues and saying, I just got made, I got to pull out of here. Uh Joey was in control of that load, but we never tied him to the load. The guy that we arrested, again, didn't give him up, but there was no question that Joey was in control of that load. In later years, needless to say, he rose up the ladder to become the head of the uh banano family. Were you shocked when you found out he cooperated? Very shocked, yeah. Yeah. And my my my old partner was the supervisor of that squad. You talk about, you know, coming full circle. He was the George Hannah was the supervisor of the banana squad when they brought him down. And I had asked George recently, somebody on another podcast asked me, you know, what happens to all the money that these guys, you know, have. And and George shared with me that um when they were getting Joey to cooperate, and the reason why he cooperated was that he had the federal death penalty hanging over his head. He decided that, you know, he would he would uh cooperate with the government. So um, you know, part of that is is divulging uh his assets. And uh I guess he had$13.5 million in assets,$7 million of that was in cash. And I'm told that his family walked in with cardboard boxes full of seven million dollars to 26 Federal Plaza. And the rest of it was uh real estate. It was, I think, two or three homes, uh$6.5 million in homes, one home in Howard Beach. I don't know where the other homes were.

SPEAKER_01 38:43

So um I guess I guess crime does pay when it comes to money.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Until it doesn't.

SPEAKER_01 38:49

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

Let me throw some other banano names from that time period. Did you have any dealings with Vinnie Gorgeous Bassiano or Anthony Bruno in Delicato?

SPEAKER_02 38:58

No, I mean, you know, Anthony Delicato, uh I know he's one of the guys that uh, you know, that was Galanti Brasco. They get the three guys that are murdered in the basement there. You got Joe Pastone cutting up bodies, which really didn't happen. But um Anthony and Delicado, we have I I write in the book, if I can digress a little bit, I write in the book that we had a good relationship with a still to this day, he's a personal friend, with a towing service in Sunset Park. And up until we met this guy, anytime we recovered a load of stolen property, the agents had to load all the stuff on those baby strollers I talked about. There were 746 of those. It was the night before Thanksgiving. My squad is cursing me out. It's eight o'clock at night, and we're loading 746 baby strollers onto a tractor trailer. The company, you call the company, they're ecstatic that you got their property back, but they send a 75-year-old man driving a rig. It says, uh, this isn't it's not my contract. So then we come upon this gentleman who provides this service for us, and he shows up at the scene with the crew and he does all the work. So what what he also started to provide a service for was digging up bodies for the uh police department and the FBI. So these call digs when they think a body is buried below you know beneath a social club or something, he comes in to do this. So he was actually the one that recovered the bodies of the three guys that were plotting against Sonny Black in the movie uh Dominic Napolitano in Don Nebraska. So Anthony Indelicato was one of them. So another interesting story that I write about in the book was Mafia cops related. When Bert Kaplan decides to cooperate, uh old-time hijacker in jail, his daughter's a Supreme Court justice in Manhattan. He has a grandchild. He realizes he's never going to get out of jail to see the grandchild. He starts to cooperate. So he testifies in open court that Epalito and Caracappa kidnap an Israeli businessman on Nostrand Avenue and bring him to a garage, a nearby garage which was under construction, and he's actually buried. Somebody else shoots and kills him. He's buried underneath concrete, literally entombed in concrete. When Bert Kaplan began to cooperate and they focus in on that area, they call our friend, the towing guy, and he says, with a jackhammer, literally, he called me that night to tell me what had happened. He's in one area of the parking uh that particular floor, nothing. In another area, nothing. And then the third area, all of a sudden there, the concrete's coming up, and they start to see tarp underneath. And Israel Grunwald, the Israeli businessman, he said he was virtually entombed. This was 20 years old, his body was there. He said the tie was perfectly knotted. He said his hands, just like he was in a coffin, his hands were uh across his body, and he said he looked like he was asleep. The suit, everything was was perfect. So um he was the gentleman who actually uncovered those uh the three, I think I got the other two guys' names, but the three guys that were murdered by Sonny Black's uh gang.

SPEAKER_00 42:06

Another guy that I'm I've always been fascinated with and you dealt with was Lucese heavyweight pun intended, fat Pete Chioto. Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:16

So we're we're we're on surveillance on Cross Bay Boulevard on New Year's Eve, 1978, what, two weeks after Lufthansa? And just because you're you're working doesn't mean that your standby responsibilities you're you're uh absolved of your standby responsibilities. So some of the responsibilities we had in the Queen's office was any time anything happened at the airports, either LaGuardia or JFK, which back then, you know, you hear about these days. I my wife and I were watching TV the other night, and somebody was arrested, causing a disturbance on the plane. Doesn't seem like it has the severity of that it was taken very seriously back then. Crime aboard aircraft or interference with flight crew were the U.S. Attorney's Office was all over that. So we got called quite regularly uh out to the air, you know, to uh the airports to uh middle of the night. But in this case, there was an anonymous call on New Year's Eve into the office that four men were seen loading stolen liquor into a bicycle shop on Avenue U in Brooklyn. So those two guys, Al McDonald and George Hanna, had a break off while we were sitting on Cross Bay Boulevard waiting for our guys to move, which didn't happen on New Year's Eve, and they wind up arresting four men, one of whom was young Pete Kyoto. So a year or so later, they go to trial, and we were uh writing the book, it was kind of humorous. They were before Judge Jacob Mischler, who was uh, you know, long time, longtime sitting judge in the Eastern District, a no nonsense judge. Two of the defendants were brothers, and uh they had a lot of family members there, one of whom had a very attractive wife, and she couldn't sit still and every 15, 10 or 15 minutes she'd Be up parading in and out of the courtroom with her four-inch heels. So at one point, Judge Mitchler with Al McDonald on the stand, Al McDonald was he was an attorney, had a master's degree in criminal law from NYU, was a debating champion in Boston in high school, BC law graduate, very, very smart guy and unflappable guy. And he's on the stand, and uh the judge is admonishing this uh this young woman, say, Who are you? And he goes, Oh, I'm so-and-so, the the wife of the defendant. Well, why are you getting up so much? And you know, she's embarrassed. The whole gallery is watching. What the Judge Michler goes on to say is you're distracting me, you're distracting the gallery, and you're distracting the witness. And so all of a sudden he puts Al McDonald in the crosshairs, and poor Al didn't say a thing. So fast forward about 15 minutes later, we're all out in the hallway, and Al is standing there, and the woman comes up to him with her hands on her hips and like say, Was I bothering you? You know, and so this poor guy uh got more than he bargained for. But Peter obviously later went on to bigger and better things and became a capo in the Lucchese family, and uh, you know, after a life of truck hijacking. And to show you how, you know, I'm sure he had the same thing in the police department, the uh Lucchese squad, the organized crime squads were right on the other side of the wall from us. They would frequently come over, talking like early to mid-80s, with pictures, surveillance pictures of social clubs. Do you know who this guy is? All of a sudden, this monstrosity is getting out of a Mercedes-Benz, and we're all looking. That's Peter Ciotto. He was, he believe me, he was not thin when he was arrested in 1978, but he had gained, he, I mean, he was well over 400 pounds. And as probably a lot of your listeners know, he's brings his car into a Staten Island gas station for some repair, and he's shot 12 times. And literally, you know, it was probably the extra weight on him that saved him.

SPEAKER_00 45:57

But shortly after that, he went into the program. Yeah, he he ran a foul of Gaspipe because he was gonna take a plea. And Gaspipe wanted it, I didn't, I think didn't want him to take a plea or wanted him to run it by him. And he turned to Al Diarco, who was running the family while Gaspipe and Amuso were on the run, and he said, These guys got a habit of calling someone a rat and then killing him. He goes, I'm safer inside. And he was gonna it was he just went to get his car fixed. They had his phone bugged and they knew he was gonna get the car fixed. And he had two or three guys because they knew he was a huge guy and he carried, and they lit him up and he still lived, and then they shot his sister. And I think they shot another relative too, just to get their point about it, but he he cooperated. Yeah. You've got a funny story about Gambino heavyweight Lenny Di Maria.

SPEAKER_02 46:43

So I want to say 1981 or 82, and we get a call, everybody gets a call from home on a Saturday that uh a stolen cigarette load that we knew about is being offloaded onto rental trucks at one of the Brooklyn piers. So we all zoom into Brooklyn and we can see taking pictures, we're safe distance away. And then we had been on the phone with the U.S. attorney's office and we told them what we had, and they said, okay, go do what you have to do. So lights and siren, we go flying. And the humorous thing is I think there were five defendants, and a lot of them were Peter Chiotto types, and they started to run. I don't know where they this is this big, huge Brooklyn Pier, they can't run anywhere except maybe to jump in the water. But we wind up arresting five people, one of which uh was Lenny DiMaria, which was kind of shocking that a made guy was actually out there doing loading and unloading of trucks. So as they as they were putting the handcuffs on him, he he says, uh, I didn't know you guys work weekends. He said, We wouldn't have been here if we if uh, which is in the annals of all the characters that we met, that's one of the more humorous stories. And at his subsequent trial, U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hameron Hank Bramwell, he had a reputation for being a heavy sentencer, he uh he catches uh Lenny T. Maria winking at one of the female jurors. So when the jurors left for either lunch or break, whatever it was, Lenny was uh was reprimanded by the judge uh not to be doing that again. So, you know, a lot of these guys, you know, I'm sure you had interaction with people like this, treat them decently, and they're gonna be, you know, they're not gonna divulge uh where, you know, who's responsible for the Brinks robbery. You know, they they were very a lot of them are real humorous. And Thomas Carbonero, another guy that we that we uh arrested uh early on, you know, in our careers, Thomas Carbonero was like a he was like a fire plug. He was he was a very heavy guy. He had huge hands and huge fingers. My partner, Bob Joyce, think try to fingerprint him three or four times. And this is the old thing, you know, with the ink and everything. And he it keeps smudging, and we think he's fooling, you know, we think he's trying to give us a hard time. So he says, you know, keep your fingers still. And he says, You get the fattest fingers I ever saw in my life. He says, You built like a human bowling ball. So he says, Well, you two guys, I'm on the thin side. My partner was on the thin side. He says, uh, you guys look like you like you could use a good meal. He says, You're probably married to Irish girls. Everybody knows they can't cook, you know. So, you know, just funny stuff back and forth. They don't take it personal.

SPEAKER_00 49:12

Yeah, just like in The Godfather, it's business for them. Yeah, some of them could be quite funny. I mean, I wouldn't let my guard down around them, but you know, no, of course not. You've got them in the cells, you you're transporting them, like you said, Mickey Boy, you've got to take them to the bathroom. I mean, you're basically married to this person for hours or days, and you got to deal with them. And like you said, sometimes it's the most they'll just say something, and it's like, I've been following this guy, taking photos of this guy, and he's got a personality, you know. It's it's it's a lot different than what I'm hearing on the wiretap or what informants are telling me.

SPEAKER_02 49:45

I mean, either you wouldn't think that keyboard news without Mayor Koch was, you know. So, you know, may Mayor Koch was an iconic New York mayor, you know, and uh he's talking about the Mets and the Yankees. So, yeah, like you say, it's not some of the not any of the stuff you're listening to on the wire, but they surprise you. They put their socks on every morning just like you do, you know.

SPEAKER_00 50:04

I found a newspaper article with your connection to a longtime gaudy um Confederate Anthony Tony Roe Trampino. Can you go into who he was and how you arrested him and try to get him to cooperate? So that's part of the of the Philly Paradiso case.

SPEAKER_02 50:19

So this is this is humorous. When we first took Philly to the DA's office to meet with the with the two ADAs, Philly had been arrested either a year or two, about a year or two before. And he they would see the CA's office seized$5,000. It was a drug case, and they seized$5,000 from from Philly and his partner, who coincidentally his name is Red Moran. So uh Philly said to the two ADAs, I'm very willing to cooperate, I'm very willing to wear a wire, I'm very willing to do all these things. You guys arrested me a year or so ago. You took$5,000 that belonged to me, you dropped the charges, I want that money back. I want that money back. And I remember them looking at each other like, yeah, you're not gonna get this money back. You know, but everybody knows it was it was a drug case. Well, if it was a drug case, then you should I should have been prosecuted. So he said, I'm just telling you, I want that money back. And that was the last anybody heard about the money. So there comes a time late in the case where Philly says to my partner and I, you guys know who Anthony Rampino is, right? Yeah, of course. Of course we do. I was upstate with him. He's a junkie, I can buy heroin from him. Really? Well, you know, we start to see, you know, Rampino was rumored to be either an actual shooter or a backup shooter of Paul Castellano. All of a sudden, we see ourselves solving the Paul Castellano homicide. So uh, yeah, sure, let's, let's, let's do this. The meeting's supposed to take place right in the parking lot of Caesars Bay, right off the Belt Parkway. Wendy's there at the time. I take Philly into a stall and I wire him up and I give him$5,000. That's what he he said coincidentally. The amount of heroin he's gonna buy is$5,000. So I have we have drunk people out there, nice crime squad, which is detectives and agents. We have organized crime people out there, testify thousands. Philly somehow lewes after like 45 minutes. When is he coming? And getting worried, Rampino's not gonna show up. All of a sudden, Philly is gone. He scooted across the Belt Parkway, and that was the last we saw of Philly. Took that$5,000, and for the next, I thought, I thought we're gonna be fired. I thought we were gonna be fired. I was the the most worrisome couple of days I I've ever spent. And we tried, we tried, we hit every fleabag hotel in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and we were right behind him all the time. Oh, we had to kick them out last night. They were making too much noise. We're he was in Times Square, every rat hole you can possibly imagine, till he finally shows up maybe five or six days later, and he hasn't got a dime to his name. So uh he spent that$5,000. Now, the FBI obviously, you know, we were in a bit of a jam, and uh Philly actually didn't know Anthony Rampino, and he actually couldn't buy heroin from him. The DA's office was willing to give him another chance, and they introduced an undercover detective who bought, I want to say, uh an eighth of a kilo, sizable amount of heroin from uh Rampino, and he was arrested. And I wasn't involved in the in the debriefing, but my partner, George Hannah, was and what Rampino says is I need to be out in the street, you know, in order to in order to be wired up against John. He was said he was willing to be wired up against John Gotti, and hopefully he gets he could get some admissions with respect to the Castellano homicide, and uh they wouldn't go for it, and uh so he went to trial and he actually did get sentenced to 25 years to life. But they had him on the fence, he they he was gonna cooperate, and then second thoughts, and he knew John would kill him, and uh so he decided not to and went to jail, and and I believe he died in jail.

SPEAKER_00 54:02

Supposedly he had uh he was feared tremendously in the New York State prison system. Like he had killed guys in prison and gotten away with it, allegedly. Rough character. Really bad dude. Yeah, and I I guess the only reason he didn't get made was because he had that heroin. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 54:19

Absolutely. He was kind of like the keeper of the Bergen Hunt and Fish. He l I think I think he lived right above it. You know, I mean, he apparently wasn't he must have been asleep when they they they installed a very I think it was the organized crime task force got in there and and put a bug in there.

SPEAKER_00 54:36

So um, but he was supposedly lived right above the place to try and be like the security guy. Neil, can you show up the story about the unluckiest man in the world, Joey Coyle?

SPEAKER_02 54:45

Yeah, so uh I'm honest, I'm I'm I'm guessing 1981 Vic, Puralita armored car is driving through the streets of South Philadelphia, and unemployed longshoreman named Joey Coyle and two of his friends come up come upon a couple of canvas bags. I guess the back door of the armored car was open.$1.2 million in cash. They scoop it up, put it in the car. His two friends get very nervous when they when they find out what they have. Joey thinks he just found like cotton candy and he's really excited. Apparently, people saw saw this whole thing transpire, copy down the plate. So the police now are starting to look for the owner of that car who's Joey Coyle. Now, Joey had uh a drug history. He starts to spread money around this instead of being low-key, as often happens with people like this. He starts to spread money around the neighborhood and the bars and restaurants and thinks that the mob is after him now. He got the Scarfall family is is breathing down his neck, and he's approached by one member of the Scarfall family who convinces him to give$300,000 that he's gonna wash the money in Las Vegas, you know. And uh, as I put in the book, you know, uh, he probably offered also to, you know, sell on the Brooklyn Bridge, too, you know, if he thought he was gonna get that money back. But I guess it's you know, this got a lot of publicity. We were in New York, so we're not working the case. It's a Philadelphia case. The five thing, again, it was uh it seems like a lot of things happened on Monday morning. I believe it was a Monday morning. We come into the office and supervisor says, get out to JFK right away. That longshoreman in Philadelphia found the money. Supposedly he's getting on a plane to Alcapulco, gave us the airline, we fly up the Van Wick Expressway, pull into JFK right in front of the terminal. And one of the things our supervisor said was he may be disguised. So he I could see him at the counter with this other guy, and there was black, see the dye, he had dyed his hair, and there's black running down the sides, sides of his cheeks, you know. He was actually grateful when we when we approached him and said, you know, hands on the counter, FBI. And uh we took him back to the JFK office. And he was very, again, another very, very uh likable guy. Said he when he writes a book, we're all going to be in the book, took all our names. They did make a movie about it, uh, starring John Cusack. I don't know what the name of the movie was, I never saw it. But fast forward whenever the trial was, I am testifying. And uh, the papers, this was a big media firestorm down there. Joey had played temporary insanity when he saw the money. He didn't know how to react, he was blinded and didn't realize he was breaking the law, he just saw all this money, and he developed a persona of like a Robin Hood character. And uh he had the media and the public right in his corner, and this was uh unrighteous prosecution, and uh so I get on the stand and I can tell the gallery didn't like me, the judge didn't like me, the defense attorney didn't like me. It was it was horrible. I put in the book, you know, for any of you listeners that are sports fans, I said, these are the same people who threw snowballs at Santa Claus during a Philadelphia Eagle game one time, and I'm on the stand, and everybody's just with their arms folded. I was looking out and I just said, Oh man, I want to I want to get out of here. So uh he was actually at one point the judge says to me, Speak up, Agent Moran. And you know, I think by my voice, you can see I, you know, I'm not a shrinking violet. I my voice is uh carries pretty well, but uh speak up, Agent Moran, we can't hear you. And Joey was uh acquitted. He was acquitted of all charges. So sadly, he had again he had a I think a meth habit, and uh a couple of years later um uh he succumbed.

SPEAKER_00 58:26

So uh sad. Last last question I'm gonna hit you with. You were involved in the investigation into the missing disappearance of E Aeton Pate.

SPEAKER_02 58:34

Uh how do I how would I pronounce it? A ton. A ton. Eton Pate. So I I believe it's May of 79, Vic. And um it was largely a you know a missing person case in the beginning, but you know, Eton Pates is the reason why you see children's pictures on milk cartons, you know, and and it would used to be a popular thing. And this captured, he lived on Prince Street, right in Soho, and uh very well-to-do area. And this captured the attention, you know, international attention, local, national, international attention. It was a big thing. Uniformed police, plainclothes police, the police department put a full court press on this. FBI in the beginning, you know, no real involvement here at all. It's a missing person case. So I want to say, I want to say, boy, like like 80 or 81 sexual exploitation of children legislation was passed by Congress where the FBI started to get involved in those types of cases. And a task force was formed with the police department in the Queen's office. So several detectives from public morals were actually uh assigned to that task force. So they started to look into these things. So at one point, Nassau County arrests a guy named Martin Swithenbank in Nassau County, and he is a uh member of NAMBLA, National Man Boy Lovers Association.

SPEAKER_01 59:54

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:56

And he has photos in his possession that look like they could be Aton. So the FBI starts to get involved. Nassau County joins forces with the public morals guys and people from our squad, and we they open a case, uh, open a case on Eton Pates. So uh it was assigned to a fellow who I worked with for many years, a guy named Kenny Rufo, who uh later was transferred to who's a native of Baltimore and uh was later transferred there uh after the case. But Kenny, Kenny had the Eton Pates case for a number of years, traveled internationally, and at the outset, when we opened the case, what we were doing was coordinating with the police department to maybe do some re-interviews of people that to give a fresh, a fresh look. And the police department was very happy about this. Uh, you know, maybe you guys will as well have better luck, you know, than than we did initially. So uh Kenny brought me on quite a few of those. And the first time that I went with Kenny, we went to the Pate's home at on Prince Street. And I can remember walking in, the father Stan was uh was sitting actually at at a at a desk, and there was a sign-in log. You can imagine over the course of a couple of years, the hundreds of people that were in and out of that apartment. He wanted a record of that, and everybody who, no matter who they were, law enforcement or not, they signed the book and what agency they they represented. I remember looking in the back, big, big, beautiful apartment, 14, 16-foot ceilings, and uh Mrs. Pates, Julie Pates, kind of in the background. And she was she was very pretty. She had long hair all down to down to her lower back. She had a pair of jeans on and a blouse. And uh I saw her just kind of look at us and kind of gave a faint smile. And as I write in the book, you know, she probably had so many people in and out of the apartment, and she was hoping that today would be the day that some good news might be brought, you know. And unfortunately we weren't weren't bringing any good news. But uh, we started to re-interview a lot of uh children in the neighborhood that um associated with Aton. So the backstory is that that the first day that he uh he's begging his mother and father to go to the bus stop alone for school. He's six years old, and they finally give up and say, Okay, you win. And she walked him downstairs, and that was the last they ever saw of him. He never got to school. He never got to school. So we had a suspect, a guy named uh Jose Antonio Ramos. There was a babysitter, babysitter, and a um person that used to walk him to the bus or pick him up from the bus that was Ramos's girlfriend. And that girlfriend had a child who Ramos not only was alleged but admitted to sexually abusing. So Ramos actually became uh, you know, a target that ourselves in the police department thought might be responsible for this. And although there was never enough to charge him criminally, Vic, um he did the Paces did bring a civil suit, probably uh I'm not sure what year that was, but they brought a$2 million civil suit. And Jose Antonio Ramos was found civilly liable for the death of Eton Paitz for$2 million, and you know they never got their money. But then, I think in 2012, a guy in Jersey, uh, what's his name? Fernandez. Uh, I think his name is Fernandez, admits to relatives in New Jersey that he killed Eton Pace. So the police department rushes over there, they interview him. There's some questions about his mental fitness, but he is eventually brought to trial. Uh hung jury. There was a loan holdout in the first trial. He's tried a year or two later, was convicted on all counts, sentenced to 25 years to life this past November due to an improper charge by the judge. The case was overturned. And as of today, the DA's office has vowed to retry Hernandez once again for the third time. So sad ending. Kenny Rufo traveled all over the world. There were sightings in Germany, sightings in Israel, you know, depictions in the paper of what he would look like at age 20, things like that. Hard to imagine now. You know, he's older than my oldest daughter. He's he Eton would be in his 50s, but very, very tough stuff to work. I I didn't last long on that squad.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:10

I have three daughters, and I didn't last long on that squad. His um, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:17

Yeah, I think the first guy you mentioned, the the first suspect, he was the guy that was living in the drainage tunnel in in Van Cortland Park. Yep, yeah. Up in the Bronx. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Neil, please tell us about your new book, Stories by Former Special Agent and Bronx Native Neil Moran.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:34

I basically, Vic, I joined a writing group when I retired from full-time work back in June of 18. Uh basically, you stand up and and and whatever you want to write, poetry, twice a month we meet, and there's a lot of published authors there. And uh I was very intimidated when I first walked into the class. I didn't write about anything uh concerning the FBI in the beginning. And my teacher once said, you know, you should write more about what you know, as most people will tell you. And so I started to write a little bit about it and and uh seemed to be well received by the class. My teacher's urging, in the middle of trying to write a crime novel, which I got writer's block, and I got about halfway through, I got about 40,000 words. Uh, she said, Why don't you put some of these essays together in the form of a memoir? Put some of the personal ones you talk about growing up in your neighborhood, talk about your parents, grandparents coming from Ireland and the influence that they had on your life. This is all good stuff that people would like to read. And uh, you know, I this is not all cops and robbers. I do write about some other interesting things, you know. Uh I mean TWA Flight 800 is a case I worked on, and the impact of of seeing, you know, people's lives come to a screeching halt, you know, uh uh with a tragedy like that has a has a big impact on you. So I write about personal things and I write about a lot of the professional things. And uh I did thoroughly enjoy my time in the FBI and working with other agencies, primarily with you know with the New York City Police Department and some of the. uh lifetime friendships that we that we have now and uh uh some of the wonderful people I met. So uh that's uh that's basically what you know what the book is about.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:08

And again, what's the name of the book and where can our listeners pick up a copy?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:12

Yeah so uh it's it's on Amazon and it's uh stories by former special agent special agent FBI special agent and Bronx native Neil Moran.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:20

And I gotta add a disclaimer Neil no longer works for the uh FBI and doesn't represent the views or opinions of the of the FBI. Thanks. Neil Moran thank you for spending your time with us today. And thank you for having me Vic. And as always I'd like to thank everyone for tuning in especially my listeners and the Bronx Calgary Alberta Denver I get tongue tied sometimes. Denver North Carolina Seattle Washington Los Angeles California and Toronto Ontario if you worked in law enforcement or had an interesting criminal background please drop me a note on Twitter or Instagram at VicFerrari50. If you're watching on YouTube please hit the like subscribe and hype buttons and if you enjoy the content check out my Amazon author page just type in my name Vic Ferrari like the car where you can preview all my NYPD books for free. Thanks again everyone and I'll see you later this week