Made Men (3 page)

side America’s most secure building on a busy weekday morning, hold up two armed Brinks guards carrying bags of cash for the Bank of America, and then wander out of the building with many bags of money in hand.

And not get caught.
The scheme was essentially Ralphie’s idea, and if it went off as planned, both his wallet and his reputation would reap enormous benefits. If, on the other hand, it failed, it would be Ralphie who would lose the most.
Ralphie had done the best he could to think of every angle ahead of time.
He visited the Trade Center buildings several times, although he had never actually been able to get to the eleventh floor, where the actual robbery would take place. He had scouted out the employee entrance in the main concourse and made note of the many cameras that Sal had warned him about.
The job was set for Tuesday morning at 8:30
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. sharp. That was when the Brinks drivers would arrive through the underground entrance to One World Trade. Sal had explained that in the basement garage, the guards would hoist many bags of money out of the truck and onto a stainless-steel rolling cart. Sometimes there were eight bags, sometimes ten. They would roll the cart into a freight elevator—always the same freight elevator—and ride to the eleventh floor. Sal let Ralphie know that it was always just two guards, although sometimes other workers at the Trade Center got on the same elevator for the ride to whatever floor they happened to be working on. This complicated things, but only a little. They were, after all, merely employees. They did not carry guns.
The plan was that three men personally selected by Ralphie for their felonious experience and grace under pressure would arrive at the World Trade Center concourse and find their way to the employee entrance to One World Trade. They had to show up at a little before 8:30
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. Timing was critical. Wearing their fake employee IDs, they would have to get past security and take the elevator to the eleventh floor. They were supposed to arrive early enough to account for other stops on the way to their destination, but not so early that they’d be standing around on the eleventh floor in their ski masks looking like the Munich Olympics. They were to keep their masks and guns inside the duffel bags until the elevator reached the eleventh floor. When they stepped out, they were to keep their heads down away from the cameras and quickly put on ski masks. At the same time they were to act in a quiet and calm manner, as if they were salary-earning civil servants shuffling off to jobs they despise just like everybody else. They were to wait for the freight elevator doors to open, which should occur at precisely or just about 8:30
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. They were to quickly enter the elevator before anyone got out.
Two of the three robbers would pull out handguns. Each was to disarm a Brinks guard while the third man handcuffed them with plastic-covered wire. All three would then quickly remove cash from the blue Brinks bags into the duffel bags each man carried. They were to then press the button to send the elevator to a top floor, step quickly out into the hall, and walk calmly away with their newly filled bags of money.
For any of this to take place, they would first have to find their way through the concourse to the correct passenger elevator. That might not be so easy. The World Trade Center concourse was a confusing windowless mall filled with overpriced retail outlets, chain restaurants, and the entrance to the PATH trains to New Jersey. It was easy to become disoriented because everything looked the same no matter which way you turned. At 8:30 on a weekday morning, it was an incredibly busy place, with thousands of commuters streaming in from Jersey to their jobs inside the thousands of offices of the Twin Towers. It looked like the Christmas rush every morning.
That was why on this day at 8:30
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.—four days ahead of time—Ralphie had come to the concourse with one of the men he chose to pull off this caper of the century. The idea was to get acclimated to the morning chaos. God knew, it wouldn’t do to get lost in the concourse on the big day.
Ralphie was with Richie Gillette, a guy from Windsor Terrace—another one of those Brooklyn neighborhoods that got a new name once the yuppies moved in. Richie was definitely not a yuppie. In fact, standing amid the morning rush inside the World Trade Center concourse, he looked more like a guy who might be featured on
America’s Most Wanted
than a morning commuter glancing at the Charles Schwab ticker on his way to work.
Richie was thirty-nine years old, stood five feet eleven inches tall, weighed over two hundred pounds, and hadn’t worked a steady job since June 1996. He smoked crack and had a seventeen-year-old son he saw only once in a while. His rap sheet was twelve pages long and dated back to the days when he was a mere sixteen-year-old lad, trucking back and forth between relatives who lived in Brooklyn and relatives who lived in Florida. His first arrest was for drug possession and bribery. Since then he’d been quite active, although never impressive. One of his most recent schemes involved stealing two bottles of EnFamil baby formula from a CVS on Third Avenue in Brooklyn. Why he stole baby formula was not clear, since he had no babies. Why he picked Bay Ridge was easier to understand. It was not the neighborhood in Brooklyn were he grew up, but it was nearby and thus convenient by subway. This was one of three men Ralphie has chosen for his caper. It was clear that Richie Gillette was not Cary Grant in
To Catch a Thief.
Richie, in turn, picked two of his neighborhood pals to help him carry out this dangerous daylight mission. There was Melvin Folk, a forty-four-year-old alcoholic with a tenth-grade education. He had a history of drug and booze problems. That meant sometimes he was addicted to drugs, sometimes he was addicted to alcohol. Usually he was addicted to both. He had been homeless for months since his wife and five-year-old son were burned out of their home in Queens.
Then there was Mike Reed, a thirty-four-year-old longtime heroin abuser. His parents had died of heroin overdose when he was eight. He was raised by his grandmother in the Bishop Boardman Apartments in Windsor Terrace and kicked out when it was discovered that he was stealing from elderly residents—including his grandmother. Just this week he had stolen food stamps from a homeless man.
This was Team Trade Center. To the uninitiated, it might seem that Ralphie had made a huge mistake, picking three neighborhood junkies with the intellectual depth of bouncing-head dashboard dogs. But there was some reasoning behind this apparent blunder. The idea was to pick three guys who would do only what they were told to do and nothing more. Ralphie let it be known to Richie that he was a connected guy. This was to imply that if Richie, Mel, or Mike ever gave him up, they’d have to live with the knowledge that some guy in a Le Coq Sportif jogging suit might come up to them on the street someday and shoot them in the forehead.
Richie was Ralphie’s go-to guy. Ralphie deliberately had little contact with Mel and Mike and kept himself behind the scenes. He never let Sal know the details and never let Richie, Mel, and Mike know about Sal. All they had to do was follow instructions, and each could expect to make $20,000. To three junkies from Windsor Terrace, that was a lot of cash.

face. Each carried a duffel bag that appeared to contain very little, if anything. Each bag contained a ski mask; two contained handguns.

The three men pushed their way through the morning crush to the employee entrance to One World Trade. At the security desk they flashed their employee identification tags. If the guard had looked closely, he would have noticed that all three employees had the same name. The three men signed in under false names and pressed the button for the elevator bank that would take them to the eleventh floor. One of them, Richie Gillette, kept glancing at his watch.

The three men got on the passenger elevator with a number of other employees. They tried to look as bored as everyone else. At the eleventh floor they got off, and when the door closed, they found themselves in a gray-carpeted hallway with no windows that led in two directions past numerous anonymous offices. They quickly pulled on ski masks and figured out which of the elevators was marked
FREIGHT
. It was 8:28
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. In a minute, the freight door opened.

Inside, the two guards began to push out the cart full of money. They looked up to see three ski-masked men. Two were pointing guns at them.

One of the men hollered, “Don’t nobody move! Everybody up against the wall!”
One of the cleaning ladies fell to her knees and began to pray loudly on the floor of the elevator. Later the guards would remember three men in ski masks in dark clothes, and that was all. A third man—it was Richie Gillette— handcuffed each of the elevator’s occupants with plasticcovered wire. The men were clearly nervous. They disarmed only one of the two guards. The other guard remained handcuffed in a corner with his gun only inches away in its holster during the entire robbery. While Gillette tied up the guards and the cleaning ladies and the rest of the stunned passengers, Mel and Mike pulled out box cutters and slashed open the top four of the seven money bags. They then began jamming the contents into their duffel bags, not paying much attention to the fact that most of what they were stealing was not manufactured by the United States Treasury Department.
They moved as quickly as they could, but time was passing quickly. They had now been in the elevator for nearly eight minutes, holding the door and pointing guns at seven prone people. The cleaning lady who had been praying on her knees was now weeping. The robbers decided to call it a day, leaving behind $1.6 million in U.S. currency in carefully stacked packages inside the bottom three blue Brinks bags.
One of the men hit the button for the twenty-second floor. They stepped out of the freight elevator into the hall, still wearing their ski masks. At this moment they were confronted with confusion. They had been told again and again to hide their faces, but also to look as calm and normal as possible. Wearing ski masks in a bank unit’s hallway seemed hardly a normal thing to do. Thus it was that all three men removed their ski masks at once. Only Richie Gillette, who had apparently picked up a modest amount of common sense over the years, kept his hood on. Richie and Mel carried one bag, Mike carried two. They strolled down the hallway with their bags weighted down by money, looking as relaxed as vacationers on the beach. Or perhaps they were maintenance guys headed over to check out the latest complaint about the screwy heating system that kept things too hot in the summer and freezing from December through May.
Stroll was what they did, over to a passenger elevator. They pressed the button and waited. Soon they were on board, headed back to the concourse. In a few minutes— by 8:45
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.—they passed out of a set of revolving doors at One World Trade and onto a crowded New York City street.
They had to be feeling pretty fine. This was, after all, the World Trade Center, a building transformed into a fortress as a result of the acts of crazed overseas terrorists. And they had just stolen lots and lots of money from inside that very building and walked outside an actual door onto the street.
At that moment, as Richie, Mel, and Mike headed out of the revolving door, Ralphie sat across the street in a parked car, watching. He saw them leave. He saw the bags in their hands. He saw them walk down the street. He knew that they were to take different subway routes to Brooklyn and meet up that night to split up whatever they had snatched. It must have been a difficult moment for Ralphie. There he sat, knowing that his three handpicked guys had somehow managed to come out of that building without being arrested. And yet he could not know what had transpired inside, he could not know precisely how much they’d stolen, and he could not, under any circumstances, walk over at that moment and ask.

after hour it continued. The press loved it! Three guys—in some reports “bozos”—managed to walk out of New York’s most sensitive building in broad daylight (whatever that is) with more than $1 million in cash. And they did it while showing their faces to no fewer than fifty-five hidden cameras. How about that! These radio and TV people were practically laughing out loud as they read their copy to the masses.

The mastermind himself—Ralphie Guarino—remained in a state of shock. He didn’t know what to think, except to know that whatever would come of this, it would surely be bad. During the previous twenty-four hours, after he watched his guys exit the towers, he headed to a rendezvous spot in Brooklyn. There he helped Richie and the other two guys count and split the cash. His first shock came when he got a look at the take. There was nary a dead U.S. president in the lot. Francs. Yen. Lire. Lots of lire.

“You know I got fucking bags of this Italian yen,” Ralphie told Sal later. “I don’t know, Italian lire. You know, eighty thousand of them making fucking ten dollars.”

There were some good old American dollar bills, but not a whole hell of a lot, and Ralphie was forced to hand over most of the U.S. cash to his three foot soldiers in stacks of $20,000 each. Counting the rest became somewhat tricky. Ralphie—a guy from Brooklyn—had little experience with the finer details of foreign currency exchange rates. They did the best they could. He arranged to have the bulk of the overseas cash hidden away until he could figure a way to exchange it for real American bills. He made sure to tell all three of his guys to get out of town as quickly as possible, and then he went on his way. He was happy that the job itself had come off, but talking with Sal Calciano, he was not so happy about the foreign aspect of the haul.

“Maybe we can figure it out on a computer,” he said. “I got to know what a pound is worth. I got to know what the Armenian dollar is worth. Excuse me. What a lire is worth. I mean, I look at the paper, but I can’t understand it. You know? It’s zero-zero-point-five. I’m not good at it. I have bad dreams about this.”

on page 3:
1.6M LOST IN WTC HEIST
.
That was bad. What was below the headline was worse.
There were two photographs, taken off surveillance cameras on the eleventh floor of the World Trade Center. In
one photo taken from Camera no. 4, the time was listed as
8:40:11
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. 1/13/98. There, for all the world to see, was
Melvin Folk. His face was as clear as if he was appearing
on
America’s Funniest Home Videos.
He might as well
have waved at the camera. Then right behind him came
Michael Reed, his jacket open, carrying two bags, oblivious. Richie Gillette walked behind the three, his face obscured by a hooded jacket. The photographs were precise
and clear. They offered time to the nanosecond and wellfocused detail of Mel and Mike’s collective mugs. “What’s the big deal about buying a hat?” Ralphie
asked Sal. “No good news. Can’t get no good news out of
this. Sitting on a million dollars. I never lied in my whole
life.”
Sal: “You know what I want? We need to get somebody
sharp.”
Ralph: “I mean, I’m so pissed. I should be. You know
what? I don’t mind. You want to get caught, you get
caught. These things happen, right? Can’t go to fucking
Mommy.”
But the details. The stories alongside those horrible
photos provided galling details.
“They knew the layout of the World Trade Center well,” one law enforcement source was quoted as saying. “They
seemed to know the delivery schedule.”
And worst of all—the newspapers reported that the
thieves left behind $1.6 million of mostly U.S. currency. “How can you only take two bags?” Ralphie asked
rhetorically. “Two bags whatever the fuck you take. He
was on the elevator. He saw it. I mean, I can’t believe they
did this. I think they just panicked.”
One question begat another, then another.
Ralph: “I mean I didn’t see them. You know, they went
by train. And then I saw them later on. So who knows what
they fucking did. You know they’re fucking junkies. All
right? I mean I hate to say the fucking word
junkie,
but I
mean, they’re fucking thieves.”
As the day wore on, more and more details of the Trade
Center robbery became a matter of public entertainment.
By the next morning, on the front page of the
Daily News,
it deteriorated into high comedy.