The King of Con: How a Smooth-Talking Jersey Boy Made and Lost Billions, Baffled the FBI, Eluded the Mob, and Lived to Tell the Crooked Tale

by Thomas Giacomaro, Natasha Stoynoff

Overview

A Jersey boy with a knack for numbers, a gift for making people trust him, and an all-consuming hunger to rule the business world, Tom Giacomaro could convince anyone of anything.

As a teenager, Tom Giacomaro began working in the mob-laden New Jersey trucking industry. A charming, brash-talking salesman with a genius-level IQ, he climbed the ranks and let his lust for money and relationships with New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago crime families send him spiraling into a world of drugs and violence. And that’s only the beginning.

In The King of Con, Tom details how he hashes out a deal with the FBI, agreeing to become a crime informant in an effort to avoid jail time—only, he continues his high-finance, white-collar scheming, luring celebrities and other high-profile contacts to invest multimillions in his new business ventures. When it all comes crashing down, Tom is thrown in prison for over a decade, yet, even behind bars, he’s able to get what he wants from anyone . . . and he eventually finds a way to get released early.

Cowritten by journalist Natasha Stoynoff, The King of Con is the unforgettable true story about a man who became hooked on living life to thrilling and dangerous excess, until he was humbled by the FBI, by the US Attorney, and by life itself.

Now, Tom is back in his old New Jersey neighborhood. His old business cronies and mob contacts are calling, his palms are itching to make billions again, and the US Attorney’s office is watching. Will he stay on the straight and narrow, or will he steal back his crown of crime as the King of Con?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781944648022
Publisher:	BenBella Books, Inc.
Publication date:	09/25/2018
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	539,319
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Thomas Giacomaro was the owner and president of dozens of million-dollar companies, as well as M&A consulting firms that acquired, consolidated, and sold privately held companies in the fuel, energy, trucking, transportation, commercial and residential, recycling, and waste industries. Sporting a genius-level IQ and a near-perfect score on his college boards, he attended and graduated from William Paterson University with a degree in Business Administration.

Natasha Stoynoff is a two-time New York Times bestselling author with 13 books to her credit. She graduated with a BA in English from York University in Toronto and studied journalism at Ryerson University. She began her career as a newspaper reporter/photographer for The Toronto Star and columnist/feature writer for The Toronto Sun. After working freelance for TIME magazine, she became a staff writer at People for more than a decade. She lives in Manhattan, where she writes books and screenplays.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

SINS OF THE FATHER

Dad calmly walked back to the car and dropped the blood-streaked bat on the floor beside my feet.

A prison shrink once told me that by the time we're seven years old, we are who we are for the rest of our lives, and there's usually shit-all we can do about it. Our brains are hardwired forever, and it's too late to change anything.

Too late to go from bad guy to good, or from sinner to saint — as Father Stanley might have said. Unlike the shrink, Father Stanley thought you could change your fate in the time span of one confession.

"You've reached the age of reason, Tommy," he pronounced, solemnly, as I knelt in the jail-cell confines of the dreary confessional to make my very first confession, soon after my seventh birthday.

"From this day onward, you are morally responsible and accountable for all your actions. You have free will to choose your behavior."

Well, I gotta be candid with you. If Father Stanley was delivering a message from his god, my parents and I never got the memo.

Because by 1960, the year I reached this age of so-called reason, my father had been beating the crap outta me for years and I was already an accomplished thief. So apparently the Giacomaros of North Haledon, New Jersey, didn't do so good with this morally responsible accountability thing. Or ting. That's how the guys I run with say it.

My father, Joseph, went out bowling and card playing every Friday night. He'd return home stinking of booze and strange perfume, carrying a thick wad of bills he'd won gambling. Dad was an accountant; he was smart with numbers and knew how to get money outta people from right under their noses.

And so did I.

I'd be wide-awake when he staggered in at 4 am — even as a kid, I slept only three to four hours a night, a habit that wore down my mother's sanity — and listened closely as his footsteps echoed down the hall, into the den, then downstairs to the basement where he'd pass out asleep. He always slept in the basement on Friday nights so my mother wouldn't wake up and know what time he got home.

I'd lie motionless under my blankets until I heard his floor-rumbling, boozy snoring through the floorboards directly below me.

And that's when I'd rob the motherfucker.

Armed with a mini flashlight, I'd slip out of bed, move silently down the hall, and tiptoe into the den. I'd quietly slide a chair across the floor until it nudged against the bookcase — that's where he stashed his wallet, on the top shelf. If I stood on the chair and stretched my arm as high as it could go and fished around, sooner or later my gloved fingers would bump into the thick leather lump. Yeah, I wore gloves when I slept — still do, but I'll get to that later.

Hitting up dad's wallet was like winning a lottery. It's what we in the money-stealing business called "easy money" — the sweetest kind. It was always a sure bet. I'd peel four or five twenties from the bulging billfold and return it to the shelf. Back in my room, I'd hide the money in a hole I cut in my mattress.

Early Saturday morning I'd knock on Eddy LaSalle's door to come out and spend the ill-gotten loot with me. Eddy's dad had some important job as a business executive in Hoboken. In looks and personality, Eddy and I were exact opposites. I was dark, wiry, frenetic, and never shut up; Eddy was tall, shy, blond, and stocky. But we understood each other, Eddy and me. We both had trouble at home and there was shit-all either one of us could do about it.

But on Saturday mornings with my dad's twenties burning a hole in my pocket, we hadn't a care in the world. Back then Bazooka chewing gum cost a penny a piece, and I was a kid with a hundred bucks to blow. I was a fucking millionaire.

First we'd go to the Rendezvous, a nearby shopping emporium that sold girlie magazines and comic books, and stock up on Superman. Two doors down was Jay's Luncheonette, where we'd hoist ourselves onto the counter stools and order deluxe cheeseburgers, French fries, and all the Coke we could stomach.

I loved the feeling of importance and power that the money gave me. Contrary to Father Stanley's little morality lesson, I had no remorse about stealing from my father's wallet. In fact, I was pretty confident that it was my moral responsibility to do so.

I ate fast, wolfing down the food like I was starving, and I was. But it wasn't a physical hunger. I was feeding emptiness, stoking a burning anger, and numbing a pain inside of me with the stolen money and fast food. Every bite I took was a conscious fuck you to my father.

"This'll show him," I'd say, as we sat stuffing our faces. Eddy would shove ketchup-drenched fries in his mouth and nod. He knew exactly what I meant.

I was five years old when I first saw my father's fierce Sicilian temper. We were driving home from a relative's house on a beautiful spring afternoon. My mother, Yolanda ("Lonnie"), was in the passenger seat and I was sitting in back reading a comic book. Even my father seemed in a rare good mood — that is, until the driver next to us swerved in front and cut him off. That driver obviously didn't know my father was the last person in the world you want to fuck with, and until that day, neither did I.

Joseph Thomas Giacomaro had been a technical sergeant in the US Marine Corps and had seen combat in both World War II and Korea. At a lean 5'8", he was neither tall nor beefy, but that didn't matter when you were a trained expert in hand-to-hand combat.

He returned from Korea after being discharged in 1954 with a trunk load of combat memorabilia: his banged-up canteen; a utility belt with a leather holster for a sidearm; two standard-issue field blankets; his camo-green Marine Corps jacket (which he wore once a week when he mowed the lawn); and his prize possession, a menacing, black-handle bayonet with a ten-inch blade. He kept the bayonet locked up in a closet and once, just once, he demonstrated how it was used.

My mother and I were in the kitchen, and she was showing me how to make tomato sauce. From an early age, she taught me how to cook and sew.

"You never know when it's going to come in handy," she used to say, as I stood on a chair and stirred the bubbling sauce. That's when my father came into the kitchen with his bayonet and drew the blade out of its fiberglass scabbard. Suddenly, cooking wasn't so interesting to me anymore.

"Did you use that to hit people?" I asked, hopping down from the chair.

"Hit people?" he scoffed. "You don't hit someone with a bayonet — you jab them, you poke them," he said, gripping the weapon tightly in his hand. He lunged across the linoleum and thrust his arm out in front of him. My mother and I both jumped back.

"You jab your enemy in the guts and then twist the blade to cut him up inside. One less enemy to worry about," Dad said to himself, smiling.

Like I said, Dad wasn't big, but he could fight. And anyone who knew him will tell you he had a certain lunacy in his corner — when he got worked up, he was a fucking madman.

On the road that day, Dad blared his horn at the other driver and screamed out the car window: "Pull over, you motherfucker!" A couple of minutes later, we caught up to the car at a red light and two huge, very angry-looking black guys climbed out and started walking toward our car.

Before they had a chance to say or do anything, my father had grabbed the Louisville Slugger he kept under the back seat and was on top of them.

"Joe, nooooo!!!" my mother screamed.

My father didn't swing the bat, he lunged and poked and jabbed the two men all over their bodies — in their stomachs, their chests, their faces, and then the back of their heads after they crumpled to the ground, begging him to stop.

"Fuckin' nigger motherfuckers," he hissed, as he kept on jabbing them as hard as he could. The fact that they were black made their beating twice as brutal as it might have been; my father was a racist son of a bitch.

I watched through the car window, trembling, as my mother sobbed. When Dad first jumped out of the car, I was worried he'd get hurt in the unevenly matched fight. Back then, he was still a hero to me. I proudly wore his Marine Corps jacket and belt when Eddy and I played army in the woods.

But it was those towering black guys who didn't stand a chance. When my father was done with them — it was over in a couple of minutes — they lay in the street, curled up and still, as a frightened and confused crowd began to gather. Dad calmly walked back to the car and dropped the blood-streaked bat on the floor beside my feet.

"Two less enemies," he muttered.

He got behind the wheel and sped away. The only sound in the car the rest of the way home was my mother's whimpering. I have no idea if those two men lived or died.

* * *

A few months later Dad started beating the shit out of me, too.

For reasons I didn't know or understand, he'd snap — he'd fly into a sudden rage and chase me all over the house until he cornered me, usually in the dining room.

"You're no fucking good!" he'd shout, as he hit me hard with his open hand. I'd yell for my mother to help, but what could she do? How do you stop a maniac?

"Not the head, Joe, don't hit him in the head! Not the face!" was all she could offer. She was afraid I'd get brain damage, or that everyone in church would see my bruises. Back then, it was normal to take a swipe at your kid, and it wasn't anyone else's business. But even for that era, she knew what he did to me was too much.

I'd crumple to the floor just like those guys in the street, and then he'd spit out the words to me that he'd repeat for the next forty years:

"You will never, ever, amount to anything," he'd say, looking down at me. He looked like a monster. "You. Are. Nothing!"

When it was over, I'd run across the backyard to hide in the woods behind our house and sit on a rock and cry. I'd stay there for hours, embarrassed to go to school or play with Eddy because everyone would see the purple blotches spreading across my arms — defense wounds.

Please, god ... make my father stop hitting me. Please help me, god.

From my rock, I'd hear him go after her. My mother was so bony, thin, and frail; her screams would travel through our open windows, rise up in the woods to reach me, then fall silent.

The next morning she'd wear a scarf to try and hide the welted handprints around her throat.

"Please, don't call Uncle," I'd beg her. My mother's truck-driving brother, Anthony Foglia, was a Teamster and built like a brick shithouse. He was the only one I knew who had the balls and strength to kill my father if he wanted to. But despite the beatings my father gave us, I couldn't stand the idea of him getting hurt. So whenever I could, I'd get in between his hands and my mother's throat, even though that bit of heroics always cost me a second pounding.

I assume it was my father's abuse that drove Mom to drink, just like it drove me to steal. She'd start on her wine at 5 pm — "the bewitching hour," my father called it — in anticipation of his arrival home from work at 6 pm. As soon as he walked through the door, he'd pour himself the first of many vodka martinis or straight-up scotches of the night. But he'd hit me whether he was sober or drunk; that didn't make a difference.

My beatings continued — two or three times a week — until I was sixteen. My mother wasn't so lucky. Her sentence went another forty years, until my father died.

And that's why, Father Stanley, I chose to steal my father's money when I was seven. That's why it was reasonable for me to take revenge on him with my small act of petty larceny without feeling the least bit guilty.

That's when getting back at my father started.

I'm not sure it ever ended.

CHAPTER 2

THE MAKING OF A CRIMINAL MIND

The less I reacted, the harder he hit; but nothing he did could make me even flinch. And I refused to stay down.

I was born on January 30, 1953, in Paterson, New Jersey, and grew up in the leafy, upper-class suburb of North Haledon. My parents were also born in Jersey and so was one grandparent, while the other three stepped off the boat from Sicily.

When I was a baby, my mother used to tie my hands to the high chair while she fed me so I wouldn't make a mess — in handcuffs at six months! As soon as I could walk, she tied me to the backyard clothesline with a ten-foot rope so I wouldn't escape the confines of our yard.

I was so hyperactive that I barely slept, and I got worse depending on the lunar calendar.

"You're possessed!" my mother used to say, "and it's worse during a full moon."

I couldn't figure out if I was born bad, like my father insisted, or if I became that way. Did he hit me because I was bad, or did I act out because he hit me? This I would try to figure out as I sat on the rock in the woods. More than a few shrinks tried to pick my brain to untangle the mess in there, too. I do know that around the time my father began beating me, I started getting into trouble.

In kindergarten at St. Paul's elementary school, I refused to nap like the other kids or stand and put my hand on my heart to pledge allegiance to the flag — not because I didn't love my country, but because I couldn't stand being told what to do. I also couldn't sit or stand still, never mind sleep in the middle of the day. No one talked about attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder back then so instead of getting help from a school counselor or being pumped full of Ritalin, as they do today, I was simply labeled A Bad Kid.

Sister Ann patrolled the rows of desks like a gestapo officer. She was in her eighties and wore a heavy black habit and a starched-white cornette that projected from her head like Satan's horns. During her rounds, she often found good reason to stop at my desk and yank my hair or jab my head with her ruler — her version of the bayonet. It wasn't the pain that bothered me — I got it way worse at home. It was the humiliation I felt in front of my classmates when I'd put my head down on my desk and sob. A bunch of those kids bullied me for years.

Crybaby!

When one ferocious ruler attack left a gash across my ear, my father saw it and recognized it wasn't his own work. He marched into the rectory, dragging me with him, to confront Father Stanley — it was one of the few, perhaps only, times he ever stood up for me. Apparently it was okay for him to beat his kid until he was black and blue, but god-dammit there was no way in hell anyone else could lay a hand on me.

"You and your people," he said to the priest, "keep your fucking hands off my fucking kid." My father was not a religious man and he harbored no reverence for nuns and priests.

* * *

My parents moved me to a public school with no ruler-wielding nuns — Memorial School in North Haledon — but I got in trouble there, too. Pranks like putting tacks on kids' seats or shooting spitballs made me a regular in the principal's office.

"What did you do this time, Thomas?" the principal would ask.

"I didn't do it!"

"What didn't you do?"

"I dunno. Whatever it was, it wasn't me!"

I was excellent at convincing him there'd been a misunderstanding, or that I was the innocent victim of some other kid's scheme of the day. As I convinced him, I convinced myself, too. Yeah, yeah, that's what happened. It's the truth! Or maybe the principal was a soft touch because he'd seen the bruises peeking out from under my shirtsleeves. Whatever the reason, he felt sorry for me and I played to his sympathy.

"The teacher picks on me," I'd say, eyes downcast.

"Okay, Tommy. You can stay in the office for the rest of the day. Go sit in the corner."

Only I couldn't sit still there either. So I ran errands and organized files for the secretaries, who hugged me and fed me cookies. I learned an important lesson by being sent to the principal's office: that my bad behavior would be richly rewarded. Hanging out with the secretaries was a vacation next to the rigid structure at home, where my parents — both undiagnosed obsessive-compulsives — ran our house like a military boot camp.

After my father was honorably discharged from the Marines, he began working full-time as an accountant for a highfalutin firm in Clifton. He was so smart, number savvy, and precise that he could make any ledger line up like the blades of grass along the edge of our driveway. He'd lie down on the front lawn in the evenings and clip each individual blade of grass by hand to make sure their heights were uniform. His own father was like that, too. Grandpa Sal owned a barbershop in Paterson and he'd trim each hair on people's heads until it was just so — one strand at a time. (My mother's father had a barbershop, too. Later on, I learned that one of them was a front for a numbers racket.)

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The King of Con"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Thomas Giacomaro.
Excerpted by permission of BenBella Books, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Prologue: Man Overboard, xi,
PART I,
CHAPTER 1 Sins of the Father, 3,
CHAPTER 2 The Making of a Criminal Mind, 11,
CHAPTER 3 High School Capo, 24,
CHAPTER 4 Blood on the Streets, 35,
CHAPTER 5 Highway Robbery, 41,
CHAPTER 6 Whitey and Jimmy, 52,
CHAPTER 7 Golden Tongue, 60,
CHAPTER 8 An Unmade Man, 76,
CHAPTER 9 Mobbed Up, 89,
CHAPTER 10 Sleeping with the Fishes, 105,
PART II,
CHAPTER 11 Angels and Demons, 119,
CHAPTER 12 Buying, Bleeding, Busting, 132,
CHAPTER 13 Life on the Lam, 143,
CHAPTER 14 Informants, 157,
CHAPTER 15 A License to Steal, 169,
CHAPTER 16 Two (Other) Nickys and a Funeral, 183,
CHAPTER 17 Other People's Money, 196,
CHAPTER 18 The Man Behind the Curtain, 211,
CHAPTER 19 Unbreakable, 223,
CHAPTER 20 Food, Family, and Friends of Ours, 242,
CHAPTER 21 King of the Cons, 255,
CHAPTER 22 Freedom, 268,
Epilogue: Every Day Is Christmas, 281,
Acknowledgments, 287,
About the Authors, 289,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The King of Con is for real and his story reveals how big money, big business, and the mob really work. Required reading.”

—Nicholas Pileggi, author and screenwriter of Goodfellas and Casino

“Tom Giacomaro is a master manipulator and natural-born crime boss you’ll love to hate and hate to love. His life story is a roller coaster ride of high finance, underworld intrigue, and dazzling riches that will leave you exhilarated, exhausted, and wanting more.”

—Nina Burleigh, New York Times bestselling author of The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox and national political correspondent for Newsweek