Episode #40: “Hide in Plain Sight”, from True’s 8 March 2009 issue.
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Hide in Plain Sight
A customer at a pizza joint in Palm Coast, Fla., complained about how his calzone was prepared. Rather than fix it, Richard Phinney says, the restaurant owner pistol-whipped him. When police arrived, owner Joseph Milano, 40, claimed Phinney attacked him, and noted that unfortunately, his security cameras had already been turned off for the night. When officers checked the cameras, they discovered the attack had been recorded, and it showed Milano had attacked Phinney. When confronted with that evidence, police say, Milano admitted the attack and was arrested for assault. And then it gets interesting: a newspaper reporter checked Milano out and discovered that he is actually Joey Calco, a mafia hit man for the Bonanno crime family who is in the federal Witness Protection Program after helping the feds bust his boss. The name of his restaurant: Goomba’s. (Daytona Beach News-Journal, New York Daily News) …The name of his next restaurant: Moron’s.
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Have you heard the follow-up to this story? that the “victim” also used a false identity- that of the name of his new wife’s ex-husband, Allegedly because there was a warrant out for his arrest for back child support. Big article in the Flagler edition of the Daytona Beach News-Journal on March 11.
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No, I hadn’t heard, since that came out several days after I wrote the story. They’re all the sort of twists and turns that no one would believe in a fictional movie. The follow-up story is here. -rc
I hope the hitman is going up the river, or at least that he is not a subscriber to This is True! He may have a response to the video…
“…They’re all the sort of twists and turns that no one would believe in a fictional movie…”
Fiction has to make sense.
Reality is under no such constraint 😉
Whoops! The link you gave to the follow-up story might have worked on March 16, but now it’s March 26 and that’s a dead link.
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Figures. I think it’s so dumb when papers pull their archives offline. I’m working like crazy to get mine online, because they bring me both new readers and income! Gee: I wonder why newspapers are failing, and I’m doing OK? -rc