Made Men (4 page)

newspapers and on the TV news, or they simply didn’t care. Otherwise, why would Michael Reed have headed straight back to his usual barber at the Unisex Salon on Prospect Park West to drop fourteen dollars on a haircut? Barber Lou Amato got a measly three-dollar tip and was thus inspired to tell the
Daily News,
“I saw his picture in the paper and I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, I cut a bank robber’s hair.’ ”

From there, Reed walked down the street feeling mighty munificent. He walked into a local corner store where he was well-known and gave the owner a dollar he owed her. He then bought himself a carton of strawberry milk.

“All singles,” she said. “He acted very normal. It was unbelievable.”
Within hours after the newspapers printed a number to call the police with information about the suspects, the cops had received no fewer than fifty-six tips. It did not hurt that there was now a $26,000 reward. All over Windsor Terrace people were dropping quarters into pay phones. Mel and Mike, after all, weren’t exactly well liked in the neighborhood. At Farrell’s bar, for instance, the bartender— who also managed to call the tip line—made it clear that Reed was considered a bit of a skell, and was therefore unwelcome on the premises—“not even to use the bathroom.”
But worse than all of the humiliation was the fact that one of the Three Stooges was now in the custody of the FBI, and Ralphie was sure he knew which one.
It had to be Mel, and Mel knew Richie’s first and last name. Whether or not he knew Ralphie’s name, Ralphie could not be sure. Certainly Richie had mentioned it once or twice. And even more certain was that the FBI could not in their right minds believe that Moe, Larry, and Curly had thought this thing up. As a liquor-store owner from Windsor Terrace told the
News,
“They weren’t smart enough for that. Someone had to come to them and offer a deal.”
Someone indeed.
Ralphie reached out to Sal to have a talk. They met for coffee.
Sal: “You want some coffee?”
Ralph: “You drink the coffee.”
Sal: “I’ll drink any fucking thing. I mean, I don’t give a fuck.”
Ralph: “I got a fucking headache.”
Sal: “All right, then. What are we gonna do? Let’s really start thinking.”
Sal then informed Ralphie that he’d heard a kid from the neighborhood was at a local funeral home and was saying that Melvin Desmond Folk had $25,000 stashed at his house and then the federal agents came around and were asking the kid questions. Sal said the kid told them, “I was just talking out of my hat.”
Ralph said, “Sally, you know, you gotta believe one thing. You gotta believe you’re dealing with fucking morons, this whole neighborhood.”
The FBI picked up Michael Reed on Thursday, the fifteenth of January. He was actually staying at the home of a friend right there on Twentieth Street in Brooklyn where he hung out all the time. A retired NYPD detective who’d known Reed for years from Windsor Terrace had identified him within a few hours of the robbery. That same day a photo of Richie Gillette was circulated to police stations across the nation.
Around 7:30
P
.
M
. on Friday, January 16, a passenger on a California-bound Amtrak aroused the suspicions of railroad security because he was chain-smoking and flashing money around. The man was approached by security in his sleeper car as the train pulled into Albuquerque, New Mexico, and was asked a few questions. The man wore a Green Bay Packers jacket and produced an ID with the name George Grillo. He said he was from New York and was headed to San Bernardino. He consented to a search of the cabin and a drug-sniffing dog reacted to his red duffel bag. Inside, Amtrak agent Jonathan Salazar found lots of cash and an ID with the name Richard Gillette. The cash was confiscated because Gillette couldn’t explain it. Agent Salazar did not arrest the passenger but instead headed back to his radio car to check both names. When Gillette popped up in the computer as wanted by the FBI, Salazar returned to the sleeper and discovered his man was gone.
The train had by now pulled out of Albuquerque and was headed out into the frigid desert night. Amtrak ordered it stopped and the local police in Albuquerque began searching for Gillette, street by street. A waitress pointed him out in a bar called Famous Sam’s, but he ducked out the back door. An hour later they tracked him down to a nearby hotel. At 8:30
P
.
M
., January 16, 1998, Gillette was arrested by the FBI and charged with participating in the daring January 13, 1998, robbery of Bank of America from inside the heart of the nation’s safest building.
In less than four days, the Three Stooges were in the custody of the United States government. Nearly all of the stolen $1 million in lire, francs, yen, and good old American dollars was still unaccounted for.

Sal: “Hey. I’m not ’fessing up to nothing. I don’t give a fuck. The only one I told, between me and you, believe it or not, is my wife.” Sal stopped talking.

Ralphie says, “Say it.”
Sal: “I told her my Jewish partner came over. I says, ‘Steve, listen, do you know me?’ And he knows me. Me and him do everything together. He’s embarrassed. I says, ‘Just tell me one thing. If I do get fucking nailed on this, if I gotta do twenty, will you look after my family?’ He says, ‘Sal, they will want for nothing.’ That’s all I needed to hear. So that’s why I tell my wife. She’s going crazy right before I’m locked up. I’m going alone.”
Ralph: “Yeah, of course.”
Sal: “Ain’t nobody coming with me. She says, ‘I know that.’ She says, ‘I knew it was you, you fuck.’ ”
They both laughed, but only for a minute.
Sal: “She says to me, ‘Why?’ I don’t know why. Who the fuck knows why?”
Sal said the Port Authority has two detectives working on the case and they have no leads. “Everybody’s protected,” he says.
“Richie is protecting us, that’s all I care about,” Ralphie says. “All right. So what do you want to do with this money? That’s the next problem. I don’t want to send it away again, I don’t want to keep it around me. You know what I mean?”
“My fucking head hurts when I think about it,” Sal says. “I says to myself, I’m sitting here talking on the computer and I’m talking to this fucking girl in Florida. I wanna go see this girl in Florida. She’s a Jewish girl. She’s fifty-four years old. She is fucking twenty years older than me. She’s very attractive, though. I like that in older women. She wants me to come down and spend the weekend with her and I am talking to her and I’m thinking, ‘I can do this. I know I can fucking do this.’ But why ain’t I doing it? I don’t know what we did wrong.”
Ralph: “Well, you had it right the first time. I don’t know what we did wrong.”
Sal: “We didn’t. We did everything fucking right.”
They pulled up to the restaurant and walked inside. Ralph ordered a half-dozen cherrystone clams, an order of shrimp, and a Coors light for himself, and a sixteen-ounce Coke for Sal.
“Medium sauce?” asked the waitress.
“Medium sauce,” Ralph says, turning back to Sal. “Feels funny without Richie here. Ah, he’ll be all right. I don’t know the answer anymore. You know when you don’t know the answer anymore?”
Sal: “Right.”
Ralph: “You get fucking razzle dazzle, dazzle razzle. I’m fucking losing my speech. I’m losing every fucking thing.”
For Sal, there were certain pressures. Believing he would become a wealthy member of society once the World Trade Center score came rolling in, Sal had gone out and done a little spending in anticipation. Specifically, he’d dropped $20,000 on a new, improved bathroom, another $22,000 on an upgraded kitchen, and another $8,000 to tidy things up in the living room. All on his credit cards.
“Now all these bills that are coming, I got to take care of my credit cards. Oh my God, you got to see my cards. Oh man. I got the guy that came yesterday for the granite. I’m staying away from everybody.”
Ralph had similar problems. He owed a particularly nasty member of the Gambino crime family named Joey Smash $40,000. Joey Smash was so unpleasant he had two nicknames—Joey Smash to his face, and “the Ugly Guy” behind his back. Joey Smash knew all about Ralphie’s World Trade Center caper and had decided Ralphie was sitting on a pile of money and holding back. Again and again he reached out to Ralphie to remind him of the money he is owed.
“He says, ‘You know, you’re gonna be all right, you know.’ I says, ‘Joe, what are you fucking worrying about?’ I says, ‘Monday, I start bringing you money.’ I gotta cash this fucking money. I gotta pay him. Hgggggh. He’s driving me crazy. He’s like a fucking old washwoman.”
And Joey Smash was not the only one who knew about Ralphie’s involvement in the caper. Other wiseguys out there from Bayonne to Bensonhurst were speculating, which was something they often did when they thought somebody might have some money they could acquire. Some had even offered to help out. There was this Jimmy Gallo, a crazy guy from New Jersey who shot his partner Joe Pitts many years ago. He’d suggested to Ralphie he could find a place to exchange foreign capital for U.S. dollars. All he wanted was a mere 50 percent. Fifty percent! Ralphie was furious about it. And now Sal was telling him that somebody was bad-mouthing Ralphie as a beat artist.
Ralph: “Beat artist? How can you be a beat artist? Is that what they’re trying to say? Jerk-offs. Yeah, fuck them. I don’t pay attention to them. People are just buzzin’ because they don’t fucking know how to get around us. Don’t you understand? Everybody wants to know how to get involved in this fucking thing, you understand?”
Sal: “Everybody’s got an opinion.”
It was a matter of not having enough information. These people out there calling him a beat artist clearly did not have enough information to know exactly what he was going through. And Ralphie himself did not have enough information to dig himself out of his hole. He could not be sure what the police knew and what they did not know. He didn’t worry so much about Melvin Desmond Folk or even Michael Reed, because they didn’t really know him and could say little to implicate him in the heist. Richie Gillette was an entirely different situation. There was a chance Richie Gillette might talk, and then they would come for him. That was the most likely scenario. But Ralph could not be sure. Richie’s cousin was already calling Ralphie asking for money to send to Richie, who was still sitting in a New Mexico jail cell. Ralphie had to decide whether sending money was a good investment. If he did not send it, obviously Richie would talk. If, on the other hand, he did send it, Richie could decide to talk anyway, and then the money would have been wasted.
There was one other option. He could turn to Vincent Palermo, a smart, well-respected guy everybody called Vinny Ocean. Ralph was aware that Palermo was doing very well financially, and that he was known as a man who could come up with sensible resolutions to allegedly insurmountable problems. Ralphie could go to Vinny Ocean, borrow some money, pay off Joey Smash, keep paying off Richie Gillette, and slowly exchange the pile of foreign currency he was sitting on. The only problem was Vinny Ocean was out of town, headed to San Diego for Super Bowl XXXIII, and there was no way to reach out to him until January 26 at the earliest. Usually this would not have been a big problem. But each day the weight grew heavier. A quick solution was essential.
Sitting in the restaurant with Sal, Ralphie tried not to think about his many problems. He asked Sal if he’d put on weight. Sal replied, “You don’t know how to eat clams, so I’m going to teach you. Look. Let me show you. Watch.”
When they were finished, Ralph had to pick up his daughter and get her to a basketball game. He and Sal went their separate ways, promising to keep talking until they figured out what to do.