Writers Tricks of the Trade Issue 3 Volume 9 | Page 30

I ran a bank robbery crew and most of
us were associates of one family or another.
Many of us were associates of the Gambino
family. There was a Supreme Court ruling
on one of the jobs and it gives you a lot of
information.
You stepped up to being the organizer of a ring
that knocked over night deposit boxes in many
places, committing around thirty robberies from
New York to South Carolina. You would net
anywhere from thousands to hundreds of
thousands per job before your arrest in 1996.
People today mostly use ATM machines, not
night deposit boxes. How would that have
changed what you did if you were still involved?
Where we used to make a lot of money
was in the low income areas in minority
neighborhoods. What we would do is target
night depositories used by commercial es-
tablishments. Now it’s not like it was in the
nineties. Years ago there was one we got
$650,000 out of. Take out a few screws and
there wasn’t much more to it. We had sort
of a Robin Hood mentality. If I knew you
and knew you had $10,000 in your pocket-
book, I wasn’t going to rob your pocket-
book, you know. To me, someone who
would do something like that was a lowlife,
know what I mean? You rob from the gov-
ernment, well, that’s the government.
What about your plot to shut down ADT security
systems so your gang could rob at will. It’s been
compared to an Ocean’s Eleven-type caper.
What are the chances of something like that
being pulled off in today’s electronic society?
It would be the same way we did it. The
newspapers wrote that we didn’t shut it
down, but we actually did shut ADT down.
We were robbing a bank, another crew was
pulling off a burglary and another crew was
robbing another bank, so there were three
going on at the same time! We affected all
five boroughs. We weren’t out to hurt no
one. We were just out to steal money. We
F ALL 2019
grew up with it. We really didn’t feel it was
wrong. When we were twelve years old we
knew who was in the Mafia. There were
mink coats and jewelry all over the place.
Everybody knew they were in the Mafia,
okay? We looked at it like an honorable
thing.
How did you get the nickname “Fat Sal”?
I’ve had that nickname since I was
twelve. I was a chubby kid. I’m about 5”10
and I’ve been down to 220, but I’ve been as
high as 400.
You were deported to Argentina in the mid
nineties, but snuck back into the country
through Canada on a jet ski. That’s a pretty bold
endeavor. How did you manage to pull that off?
That’s correct. I was down to about 225
pounds then. I did it over by Buffalo, New
York in the area of Niagara Falls. The Niag-
ara River is about 100 yards wide where I
decided to cross it. There are boat washes
all over the United States. You pull right up
and they wash your boat. There’s one on
the Canadian side and about 150 yards
away there’s one on the American side. So
what I did was I launched it on the Canadi-
an side and a guy had a car for me on the
American side. So I just tied up, got in the
car and drove away.
There’s a story about how Thomas “Huck”
Carbonaro approved showy but not overly
violent tactics against a Brooklyn man who had
made unwanted sexual advances toward Huck's
niece. I think it’s hilarious. Could you tell me
about it?
The women on the jury loved it. In
1994, Carbonaro called on me to beat up
his niece's Brooklyn landlord, who had
been making advances to her. "I told him I
had a better idea," Me and an associate
filled a fire extinguisher with fluorescent
pink paint and thinner and sprayed the
P AGE 26
W RITERS ’ T RICKS OF THE T RADE