Added to that was an atmosphere of paranoia inspired by an incident that occurred just before noon on February 26, 1993. On that day, a group of Islamic fundamentalists drove a yellow Ryder van into the garage underneath One World Trade, parked it in a spot near a bearing wall, and quickly drove away in a beat-up sedan. A few minutes later the van, which contained canisters of liquid hydrogen and extremely volatile urea nitrate, blew into a thousand pieces. In all, six people died and thousands more were injured. A class of suburban elementary-school students was trapped in an elevator for hours. Thousands of employees had to trudge down thousands of stairs through thick black smoke, emerging from the building with their faces smeared with soot, coughing and wheezing and happy as hell to be out of there.
Ralphie knew all about this from his friend Sal Calciano, a guy from the neighborhood in Brooklyn who had worked inside the Trade Center twenty years. Calciano was a supervisor with American Building Maintenance, the company that kept the Trade Center clean, and he’d been inside one of the towers when the bomb went off. He’d carried a woman who was having problems breathing down many flights of stairs. He’d helped many others find their way out and then stayed outside watching for his coworkers, making sure they’d all escaped.
Then, in the weeks and months that followed, Sal told Ralphie, the building changed. Consultants were hired. Reports were drafted. Jersey barriers were trucked in and laid end to end around the entire building. Steel gates were erected to shut down access to certain parts of the plaza between the towers. Huge concrete flowerpots were plopped down in front of building entrances nobody had ever noticed before. And there were cameras. Lots of cameras, covering every angle—on every floor, in corners, in elevators, in dark garages. Twenty-four/seven the cameras ran, recording the face of every individual who entered or exited. And after the bomb, the building management made every employee who worked in the building wear a special plastic identification tag so they could keep track of who was doing what.
The inspiration for all these changes was simple—it’s one thing when some terrorists from across the sea drive into your building and blow it up once. To allow such a thing to happen twice was simply out of the question.
Just last month Sal had told all of this to Ralphie as the two were sitting in a car in Brooklyn. Ralphie had been working on Sal for weeks. During their talk, Sal had finally agreed to hand over to Ralphie one of those special new ID badges the Port Authority gave out only to trusted employees like Sal.
Sal told Ralphie other things as well—such as the precise day and time the Brinks truck arrived each week with money to be delivered from Bank of America’s many branches to the bank’s foreign currency unit on the eleventh floor of One World Trade. He told Ralphie which freight elevator the guards took, how many guards stayed with the money during the eleven-story ride, how much time it took to get to the eleventh floor, approximately. He couldn’t say exactly how much money the Brinks guards transported on any given day, but he knew it was a lot because the bags sure looked heavy.
Ralphie had much in common with Sal. Both had grown up near the South Brooklyn waterfront. The two men knew many of the same knock-around guys who hang out at social clubs, putting money on the street and gambling on nearly anything that moves. Ralphie always enjoyed hanging around with these guys, and he picked up a very specific type of education as a result. Stealing things, for instance, had become his career. He had been arrested many times and had cobbled together an impressive record that culminated in charges brought by the United States attorney for the Eastern District in Brooklyn in 1987 involving fraud and larceny and general felonious behavior. In fact, Ralphie had just finished paying off the fine he had incurred in that case just a few weeks ago. Over the years he stole many things from warehouses on the Brooklyn and New Jersey waterfront and sold them to a fence in a wheelchair named “Wheels.” Ralphie was definitely a knock-around guy himself. He told stories about Joey Gallo and Joey Gallo’s lion, although it was never sure that he ever actually met Joey Gallo or his lion. Ralphie had lots of brothers, some of whom had gone to jail at one time or another.
“In 1972,” he confided to Sal, “me and my bro Tony were on a hijacking case. Four brothers in jail at one time. My mother did not know which way to run.”
For all his knocking around, he didn’t have much to show. He was also forty-one and worried about putting his two kids through college. He put sunscreen on his bald spot and obsessed about his weight. “I can’t believe how fat I got,” he said. “Fucking fat.” He drank his coffee black with Sweet’N Low, liked to get a manicure once in a while, and could spend endless hours discussing the good things in life—caviar, champagne, the correct cigar. He drank Dewar’s and smoked Mohegans. He was vain as hell, but very talented at getting what he wanted by convincing others that they were smarter than he was.
“If I’m rich or poor, I act the same,” he said. By this he meant, in good times or bad, if there was a scam to be had, Ralphie was a willing participant.
Ralphie on Ralphie: “Everybody says if you ask anybody in the neighborhood, Sally, he’s a stand-up guy. They don’t tell you what he does ’cause—”
Sal: “They don’t know it.”
Ralph: “They don’t know. Nobody knows my fucking business. Nobody knows what I’m fucking capable of. Nobody. They summize...”
Sal could relate to Ralphie. He lived twenty years in a three-family tenement on Twenty-third Street in south Brooklyn, a tough little no-name neighborhood that lies between the Brooklyn Piers and Greenwood Cemetery. Sal had not had it easy. His father was an alcoholic who threw Sal out of the house when he was thirteen and stepped in front of a train when Sal was thirty-eight. Sal had to identify the body. One of his brothers died in a motorcycle accident; his sister went to a party in 1984 and never came home. Another sister died from AIDS. He had a wife who was afraid to leave her house and a twenty-one-year-old son who still lived at home. Only his daughter seemed to have promise—she was an honor student at a Catholic prep school and was headed off to college, hopefully on scholarship. Sal thought “hopefully” because if not, Sal— at the age of forty-one and collecting only limited legitimate income—had no clue how he was going to pay for it. The way Sal saw it, Ralphie might just provide the answer.
He had known Ralphie for years and had come to believe that Ralphie was smart. Still, he liked him just the same because Ralphie was not the kind of guy to hold it over you that he was smarter. And Sal—who considered himself a kind of evil genius in his own right—saw Ralphie as a comrade in crime.
Now Ralpie and Sal both needed a score. Ralphie owned real estate all over Brooklyn, collecting rent from working people and people who didn’t work. With his many needs, this was not enough. Sometimes he had to hire junkies as superintendents and then forget to pay them because he felt he should place his limited supply of cash elsewhere. Such as in the restaurant he was trying to run down by Hudson River near the Brooklyn anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge. The idea of it was to grab on to the cigar craze that was sweeping New York as part of the biggest financial boon in Wall Street history. Plenty of yuppie types lived in nearby Brooklyn Heights and the neighborhood just south of the Heights that used to be called Red Hook. Some were even moving into the old factory buildings between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. People like Sal and Ralphie who had grown up in these old Brooklyn neighborhoods now felt like they no longer belonged there. Their only form of revenge was to gouge the hell out of the yuppie hordes at “upscale” restaurants like Cigargoyles. And perhaps at some point, such a thing would occur. But for now, Cigargoyles was an endless chasm into which Ralphie poured his hardearned cash and out of which he received nothing but aggravation.
“I’m tired of fucking earning,” he says to Sal. “I mean I want to fucking spend money with broads and have fun. You know, the usual bullshit. But I don’t want to sit in fucking social clubs all day either.”
Recently Ralphie had confided in Sal that he had a girlfriend
who liked to spend time in the best of Manhattan’s hotels.
Sal said, “How’s your wife doing? She’s nice. A very nice person, your wife. I met her a few times. Your daughter’s beautiful. And you got a girlfriend, too.”
Ralph: “I’m telling you, I can’t fucking afford her.”
“You know it and I know it.”
“I’ve got a wife. I’ve got a girl,” Ralphie says. “I’m telling you I’m so pressed up here. You have no idea. I’m fighting with my girl. I’m all day with her. My credit card is up to the fucking sky limit with these fucking hotels. Everybody’s running out of patience. I’m running out of patience.
“You know what?” Ralphie asked. “This is sad.”
Ralphie had come to the realization that he was, in fact, dead broke. Stealing maybe $3 million from the Bank of America inside the world’s safest building could perhaps resolve that dilemma.
January 9, 1998
The plan was either brilliant or insane.
The idea was to gain entrance to a secure area deep inside 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 A.M. 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 A.M. 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 A.M. 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 A.M.—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.
January 13, 1998 A little bit
past 8 A.M. on a chilly Tuesday morning, a heavily armored Brinks truck forced its way through the morning traffic and pulled up to the underground garage at the World Trade Center. A frigid drizzle fell from overcast skies. Security guards inside the Trade Center building waved the truck through and it proceeded to wind along the concrete labyrinth to a certain freight elevator that led to One World Trade Center. This was neither the first nor the last delivery of the day. Two Brinks employees remained in the truck, while two others unloaded seven blue Brinks bags from the bag onto a steel cart. Inside the bags was a mix of French, Italian, Japanese, and U.S. currencies totaling just over $2.6 million. Most of the American dollars were placed in bundles inside the bottom three bags. The top four bags contained mostly foreign money. Both guards carried handguns that were plainly visible. They pushed the cart over to the elevator, pressed the button, and waited. Inside they were joined by two cleaning ladies and three other building employees headed to work. The guards pressed the button for the eleventh floor and began the journey upward, headed for the Bank of America.
At about the same time three men strolled into the World Trade Center concourse in winter coats. Two of them—Michael Reed and Melvin Folk—wore nothing on their heads. The third, Richie Gillette, thoughtfully kept the hood of his Green Bay Packers jacket pulled up to hide his
face. Each carried a duffel bag that appeared to contain very little, if anything. Each bag contained a ski mask; two contained handguns.
Made Men Page 3