FBI tapes capture senior cititzen suspects alleged crime talk — and senior moments

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Joseph Jerry "The Monk" Scalise. \ File Photo

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Updated: February 22, 2012 8:06AM

The mob-tied thieves were dangerous men — with access to guns, tear gas and lock picks — as they planned to rob an armored car and break into a Bridgeport home of a dead mob boss, authorities said.

But they were also senior citizens — with the typical complaints and chatter of senior citizens as captured on secret FBI transcripts that were released Friday as the trial wrapped up for one of the men, Arthur “The Genius” Rachel, who is 73. Rachel’s two colleagues, Robert Pullia, 70, and Joseph Jerry “The Monk” Scalise, also in his 70s, pleaded guilty earlier in the week to racketeering. Both men face about nine years behind bars when they are sentenced.

The FBI stuck a listening device in Scalise’s van. And while investigators captured talk of the men alledgedly planning crimes, they also caught them in some senior moments.

“Yeah, we just gotta . . . forgot what the f - - - I was talking about. Uh, tomor . . . tomorrow, he’s gotta do something, Thursday,” said Scalise in one conversation recorded in March 2010.

The next month, Scalise was talking to Pullia about threatening the daughter of late brutal mob boss Angelo “The Hook” LaPietra, who still lived in the family’s Bridgeport home. The men mistakenly believed loads of loot was hidden there.

Pullia suggested telling the woman: “Any alarm goes off, we’ll kill ya.”

“The uh, the uh — what the f - - - was I going to say,” Scalise initially responded.

The seniors marvelled at the new technology the kids have these days.

“You gotta see the things that iPhone does,” Scalise told Rachel in another conversation. “The things you can do with it are amazing.”

Scalise, in fact, is believed by authorities to have used Facebook to try to track down relatives of a government witness in the historic Family Secrets mob trial.

They worry about losing their touch.

In the case of these men, that allegedly meant picking locks.

“If you don’t work with them picks every day . . .” Rachel allegedly said at one point in a conversation in April 2010.

“You lose the feeling,” Pullia said.

“Yeah, you lose the touch real quick,” Rachel agreed, according to the transcript.

The men also get cranky at times.

When the daughter of LaPietra inadvertently made surveilling her difficult by not turning on a lot of lights in her home, Scalise got ticked off.

“They sit in the f - - - - - - dark,” he said. “That’s f - - - - - - got me stumped . . . no lights on in the house.”

But there are also some advantages to senior citizen status.

For instance, if you want to “flatten somebody,” dress like a young gang-banger, and no one will blame an old man.

“You wanna flatten somebody, put on the, the black sweatshirt with the hood and the, and a hat, and the baggy pants. Just run up and blast them . . . they’ll blame it on the kids. And then run,” Scalise told Rachel.

And the veteran police officers who used to recognize such veteran criminals as Scalise, Rachel and Pullia on sight are retired and no longer working the streets.

Scalise noted “there’s no coppers that know us today.”

Prosecutors and defense attorneys are expected to submit their closing arguments in writing as part of Rachel’s bench trial on Monday, and U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber is expected to rule shortly afterward.