Surviving the Mob - Dennis Griffin [58]
“Taking her advice, I went to the precinct in Bensonhurst to make my report. Most of the guys there knew who I was. It didn’t matter, though. I had to do it to cover my tail. They took my complaint, then pretty much laughed me out of the station.”
After the scam came to an end, Andrew received regular phone calls from the bank asking him to come in to discuss his account. He never went. One day in late September, he was in a beauty parlor operated by a girl Robert Arena was dating. As he talked with Robert in the rear of the shop, he noticed a familiar figure in one of the chairs getting her hair done. It was none other than the female bank manager who had given him the $9,500 to pay his alleged employees when the Marriott denied payment on the forged check. Their eyes locked. The woman rose from her chair and started toward him. The salon was suddenly a place where Andrew didn’t want to be.
“I told Robert that he had to throw a body block on her or do something to stall her until I could make my escape,” Andrew laughs as he remembers the meeting. “He intercepted her when she was about halfway to me. He stood in front of her and said how she looked very familiar and wondered where he knew her from. She tried to get around him. But when she stepped to the side, he stepped with her, blocking her path. While they were doing that little dance, I beat it out the back door. I never bumped into her or anyone else from the bank again.”
Andrew had made a lot of money from the check scheme and was doing well with his marijuana business. Even though he could have paid Wild Bill Cutolo at least the fifteen thousand dollars back, he refused to give him a dime. To Andrew, it was a matter of principle. He wasn’t going to pay money he didn’t owe. His relationship with Wild Bill continued to deteriorate. It reached the point that Andrew couldn’t attend Billy Cutolo’s wedding. That decision opened up yet another issue that Wild Bill would later use against him.
For his problems with the elder Cutolo, Andrew blamed Mike Bolino, who’d defaulted on his loan. And although he liked the guy, he felt he’d been taken advantage of. When the opportunity arose, Andrew decided to repay Bolino in kind.
Mike Bolino approached Robert Arena and Andrew and said he had several hundred pounds of marijuana he wanted to move, and asked if they were interested in helping him unload it. They were. A meeting was set up with one of Mike’s partners, who said he’d get the pot to them in a couple of days. A few days later, they met at a diner on 4th Avenue in Bay Ridge, where Andrew gave his car keys to another one of Mike’s guys. He drove it away. About twenty minutes later he came back, parked the car in the parking lot, left the keys under the floor mat, and took off.
Andrew and Robert Arena went out to the car. They found two big bales of marijuana in the back seat and the trunk filled with three more, for a total of five hundred pounds. They took off with a friend following in a car behind them. If the cops tried to pull them over, he’d be the crash car, blocking the cops, even if it meant crashing into their vehicle.
“We drove away and within a couple of minutes, two cop cars were running up on us from behind with their sirens blaring. There we were, two organized-crime parolees in possession of a quarter ton of marijuana. That pinch would have been a parole-officer’s dream. We didn’t know what in the hell to do. Just as the cops got on the bumper of our crash car, they pulled to the right and went on past. I don’t know where they were going or who they were after, but it wasn’t us. When we came to the next intersection, our buddy pulled side of us. We looked at each other and broke out laughing. The tension was broken and we went on about our business.”
Over the next several days, they got rid of all the weed—a hundred pounds here, fifty pounds there. They made about two hundred thousand on the deal.
A few days later, Mike Bolino called asking about payment. That’s when Robert