Surviving the Mob - Dennis Griffin [67]
“That experience gave me an insight into what it’s like to be an organized-crime boss—to have that kind of power over other people’s very lives. Just imagine having the ability to determine who lives and who dies. When those guys become bloodthirsty because their egos get the best of them, or maybe they’re mentally unbalanced, look at the destruction they can cause. It’s kind of a scary thought, isn’t it?”
As the summer of 1996 approached, Andrew found himself in dire financial trouble. His California marijuana connection proved to be less reliable than it first appeared and that income was inconsistent. Unable to commit street crimes as he had in the past, he was bringing in only enough money to pay his basic expenses and pick up a cheap car to get him from place to place. His already-grim situation was growing steadily grimmer.
“My ex-wife was always looking for more money for our son’s support. Wild Bill Cutolo was still insisting that I pay back a bogus loan. And Danny Cutaia was beating the war drums, saying that I’d been involved in Robert Arena’s murder. That scenario was the most hurtful because I would have done anything in my power to save Robert, even if it had meant dying with him and going out in a blaze of glory. So being accused of killing him was a hard pill to swallow.
“Around that time, I started seeing a girl named Charlotte. She was the niece of Greg “The Grim Reaper” Scarpa. He was a capo in the Colombo family and ran one of the most notorious crews in organized-crime circles. Greg had died a couple of years earlier and Charlotte and her aunt used to tell me a lot of stories about him. She was smart and knew how to keep a secret. We hit it off really well and before long she became my close friend as well as a love interest. We were almost inseparable.
“One day I got a beeper message from a Genovese bank-robbery crew I knew. There was a potential score coming up and they wanted me to take a look at it. It involved robbing a specific Brinks armored truck that operated out of the yard in downtown Brooklyn. The information was that if we robbed the truck around Christmas time, it would be carrying around three million dollars. I met up with [notorious bank robber associated with the Bonano family] Paul Mazzarese. Paul was older and grandfatherly looking, but he knew his stuff when it came to banks. Paul and me picked up that truck when it left the yard and followed it all day. Afterward, we talked about it. Paul said that he had an idea for something we could do a lot sooner than Christmas. That interested me, because in my financial situation, I didn’t think I could last that long.
“Paul lived in New Jersey. He cashed his checks at a Sovereign Bank branch. He noticed that the Brinks money truck came every Thursday and dropped off bags of money. But the procedure was lax: The bags were left on the floor next to the vault until an employee got around to putting them inside. And there was no partition in that facility between the customers and tellers. You could get to the money bags by simply jumping over the counter.
“So we switched our focus from robbing the armored truck in Brooklyn to taking down the bank in New Jersey. Our plan was for four of us—Paul, Tommy Scuderi, Joe Miraglia, and me—to do the robbery on the Thursday before a holiday weekend. I knew from doing bank burglaries that they usually brought in a hundred and fifty thousand or so more than usual then to fill the ATM machines for the long weekend. The next upcoming holiday with a three-day weekend was Labor Day.”
The week before Labor Day, the four of them waited at a diner along the highway for the truck to pass and followed it to the bank to get the timing down. They then bought some tape the same color as the letters and numbers on their license plates so they could cover the real letters and numbers with fakes.
The Wednesday before the robbery, they went to the bank for a final look. Paul explained everyone’s job one last time. He lived in a senior-citizen