Richie arrives in upstate New York in the spring of 1999, a few months after Analyze This opens in 2500 theaters. (The film would go on to gross more than $100 million.) I know this because I tracked him down. (“Cousin Vin! Where you been?") Jocelyne, in a breathy French accent invites me to their First Annual Narrowsberg International Film Festival. (WTF!) My cousin is now become Jean Paul Belmondo?
A thousand miles away, I feel the old, mad Richie virus singing in my blood. (Surely, he’d find a place for me, his cousin, in the festival.) I fight it off, instead profiling another mad actor, Eric Roberts then living along the Hudson River.
Richie appears in Narrowsberg, a flyspeck along a bend of the Delware River. He arrives draped in black leather with a bodyguard named “Mondo” and a black Cadillac like one of Boccaccio’s shimmering young nobles in the Decameron. More likely, the plague-bearer in “Masque of the Red Death.”
Sixteen spoken lines and he opens the “Richard Castellano School of Acting.” Forty-two people sign on. Sixteen lines and the merchants and an ill-starred chicken farmer named Borg are convinced their hamlet will become “the Sundance of the East.” Sixteen lines and Richie announces he is starring in a gangster movie—Four Deadly Reasons—to be shot, for some unfathomable reason, in Narrowsberg. A good citizen, he wants to include local actors and investors.
A lord, he struts, lapels flying like F-16s, down Main Street, shouting at everyone he meets, playfully shoulder-punching stolid burghers like they’re goombahs (compares).
“What is it?” he demands as if he cared.
His life an open book, mostly fiction: the gas station he told me he’d robbed is now an armored car. (In a courtroom, he will shrink it a shoe store.) He has “$2 million stashed away.” He’s killed people and danced away from “ten contracts” on his life. By the Gowanus Canal, these fantasies would have been dismissed with a knowing grin, a playful “slap in the head.” On the Delaware, they’re intoxicating, an opportunity, unspoken, "to wet their beaks in the champagne fountain of celebrity.
Mornings, he storms into the Chatterbox Café on Main Street and announces he's buying everyone breakfast, then breezes out without paying. He brings in crews of “walyos” (guaglioni, affectionate Neapolitan slang for street corner guys) from NYC to people his movie. He scatters checks to wide-eyed vendors like rice at a Bensonhurst wedding. John Borg, the chicken farmer, turns out to be a cinephile. Richie "casts" him as a “Marshall Dillon-type” character. Borg lives in a double-wide trailer; he invests $154,000, hardly chicken feed.
Time passes, seasons change; checks bounce like cherry blossoms, then falling snow. A year later, in August 2000, Four Deadly Reasons is screened for the people of Narrowsberg. Richie is nowhere to be seen. This screening is later described on This American Life (see link below) as “…a hastily produced, 15-minute montage of scenes from the movie. It was like a porn film without the sex scenes—awkward dialogue, noodly soundtrack, gratuitous use of bikinis and double entendres, and, most offensive, no scenes with people from Narrowsburg” (italics added).
What next unfolds is best described in a series of articles that ran in the Sullivan County Democrat over the next two years (http://www.sc-democrat.com/archives/2000/news/08August/11/niiff.htm). In short, Richie’s dizzy trajectory is blunted. He's hit with four felony counts out of a cornucopia of extravagant malfeasance; named as defendant in at least 16 civil suits involving rental cars, equipment, meals, disgruntled actors. Even Mondo turns on him. Richie is forced to get a restraining order against his own bodyguard, certainly a first in the industry. Then his own attorney sues him.
The alleged felonies involve a scheme to secure SAG cards for aspiring actors (“Cousin Vin, I got the money!”),essentially the same con he’d successfully pulled with real wise guys in Brooklyn. Gangsters are more likely to dispose than depose you.
On trial in Sullivan County Court, he chews scenery like Al Pacino in And Justice For All, constantly interuppting the proceedings, speechifying ignoring threats of contempt from the bench. (My brother Joe, no angel, concludes “Richie thinks the judge is a director.”) Ultimately, he plea-bargains, agreeing to restitution and a year in county jail, but doesn't appear for sentencing.
Reports circulate that he’d been found naked on the Verrazano Bridge about to commit suicide. (I don’t know what movie that was.) He's arrested walking “half-naked” in Manhattan and hauled off to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He claims he’s “taken too many shots to the head as a professional fighter.” (!) He checks into drug rehab, buying 90 more days of freedom. In Narrowsburg, folks are pulling their hair out, forget The Sopranos, this is straight out of Huck Finn.
Richie finally appears in court appropriately costumed in orange jumpsuit and shackles. Nonplussed, he asks Sullivan County Judge Frank J. La Buda to do him a "personal favor" and knock three months off his sentence. His daughter is getting married on Staten Island. “Can’t you find it in your heart to let me go to my daughter’s wedding?”
“This is not Let’s Make a Deal!” La Buda snaps.
Meanwhile, farmer and naïf, John Borg, who’d lost his life savings, is parading outside the courthouse with a hand-lettered sign reading “Hang ‘Em High!” Borg apparently couldn’t resist a final cinematic flourish.
Some of the money that dribbles into Narrowsburg over the next months to cover Richie’s $12,000 restitution ("investors" are out of luck) costs consists of $20 money orders, suggesting that our family and his old neighborhood friends didn’t forsake Richie once his star had dimmed.
****
The world changed on September 11th 2001. Richie didn’t.
The 7th edition of the “Queens International Film Festival” kicks-off in winter of 2009. Its founder and executive director is none other than Jocelyne Castellano (aka Jocelyne Castaldo-Castellano, Maria Jocelyne Castellano, Marie-Helene Rousseau and Marie Rousseau). Year after year, it turns out, festival vendors and exhibitors from Connecticut to Texas are stiffed on fees and equipment rentals, perchance even hot dog sales. When projectionist James Hill threatens to take his grievance to the media, a gravelly voice hisses over his phone: “I know you’re a smart guy and you’ll understand what I’m telling you between the lines: You won’t talk to nobody!”
By now, you can guess what movie that line is from: My Cousin Richie.
Like AIDS or Ebola, the virus that's responsible for either my cousin's genius or his criminality may be dormant, waiting for a suitable host to begin replicating madly. In 2012, one of Richie and Jocelyne’s myriad victims, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker named Dan Nuxoll (Rooftop Films), remains totally convinced the couple will make one hell of a documentary.
Rest assured Dan, Richie will find you.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/173/transcript
Part I http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie.html
Part II http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie-part-ii.html
Part III http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie-part-iii.html
Part IV http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie-conclusion.html
A thousand miles away, I feel the old, mad Richie virus singing in my blood. (Surely, he’d find a place for me, his cousin, in the festival.) I fight it off, instead profiling another mad actor, Eric Roberts then living along the Hudson River.
Richie appears in Narrowsberg, a flyspeck along a bend of the Delware River. He arrives draped in black leather with a bodyguard named “Mondo” and a black Cadillac like one of Boccaccio’s shimmering young nobles in the Decameron. More likely, the plague-bearer in “Masque of the Red Death.”
Sixteen spoken lines and he opens the “Richard Castellano School of Acting.” Forty-two people sign on. Sixteen lines and the merchants and an ill-starred chicken farmer named Borg are convinced their hamlet will become “the Sundance of the East.” Sixteen lines and Richie announces he is starring in a gangster movie—Four Deadly Reasons—to be shot, for some unfathomable reason, in Narrowsberg. A good citizen, he wants to include local actors and investors.
A lord, he struts, lapels flying like F-16s, down Main Street, shouting at everyone he meets, playfully shoulder-punching stolid burghers like they’re goombahs (compares).
“What is it?” he demands as if he cared.
His life an open book, mostly fiction: the gas station he told me he’d robbed is now an armored car. (In a courtroom, he will shrink it a shoe store.) He has “$2 million stashed away.” He’s killed people and danced away from “ten contracts” on his life. By the Gowanus Canal, these fantasies would have been dismissed with a knowing grin, a playful “slap in the head.” On the Delaware, they’re intoxicating, an opportunity, unspoken, "to wet their beaks in the champagne fountain of celebrity.
Mornings, he storms into the Chatterbox Café on Main Street and announces he's buying everyone breakfast, then breezes out without paying. He brings in crews of “walyos” (guaglioni, affectionate Neapolitan slang for street corner guys) from NYC to people his movie. He scatters checks to wide-eyed vendors like rice at a Bensonhurst wedding. John Borg, the chicken farmer, turns out to be a cinephile. Richie "casts" him as a “Marshall Dillon-type” character. Borg lives in a double-wide trailer; he invests $154,000, hardly chicken feed.
Time passes, seasons change; checks bounce like cherry blossoms, then falling snow. A year later, in August 2000, Four Deadly Reasons is screened for the people of Narrowsberg. Richie is nowhere to be seen. This screening is later described on This American Life (see link below) as “…a hastily produced, 15-minute montage of scenes from the movie. It was like a porn film without the sex scenes—awkward dialogue, noodly soundtrack, gratuitous use of bikinis and double entendres, and, most offensive, no scenes with people from Narrowsburg” (italics added).
What next unfolds is best described in a series of articles that ran in the Sullivan County Democrat over the next two years (http://www.sc-democrat.com/archives/2000/news/08August/11/niiff.htm). In short, Richie’s dizzy trajectory is blunted. He's hit with four felony counts out of a cornucopia of extravagant malfeasance; named as defendant in at least 16 civil suits involving rental cars, equipment, meals, disgruntled actors. Even Mondo turns on him. Richie is forced to get a restraining order against his own bodyguard, certainly a first in the industry. Then his own attorney sues him.
The alleged felonies involve a scheme to secure SAG cards for aspiring actors (“Cousin Vin, I got the money!”),essentially the same con he’d successfully pulled with real wise guys in Brooklyn. Gangsters are more likely to dispose than depose you.
On trial in Sullivan County Court, he chews scenery like Al Pacino in And Justice For All, constantly interuppting the proceedings, speechifying ignoring threats of contempt from the bench. (My brother Joe, no angel, concludes “Richie thinks the judge is a director.”) Ultimately, he plea-bargains, agreeing to restitution and a year in county jail, but doesn't appear for sentencing.
Reports circulate that he’d been found naked on the Verrazano Bridge about to commit suicide. (I don’t know what movie that was.) He's arrested walking “half-naked” in Manhattan and hauled off to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He claims he’s “taken too many shots to the head as a professional fighter.” (!) He checks into drug rehab, buying 90 more days of freedom. In Narrowsburg, folks are pulling their hair out, forget The Sopranos, this is straight out of Huck Finn.
Richie finally appears in court appropriately costumed in orange jumpsuit and shackles. Nonplussed, he asks Sullivan County Judge Frank J. La Buda to do him a "personal favor" and knock three months off his sentence. His daughter is getting married on Staten Island. “Can’t you find it in your heart to let me go to my daughter’s wedding?”
“This is not Let’s Make a Deal!” La Buda snaps.
Meanwhile, farmer and naïf, John Borg, who’d lost his life savings, is parading outside the courthouse with a hand-lettered sign reading “Hang ‘Em High!” Borg apparently couldn’t resist a final cinematic flourish.
Some of the money that dribbles into Narrowsburg over the next months to cover Richie’s $12,000 restitution ("investors" are out of luck) costs consists of $20 money orders, suggesting that our family and his old neighborhood friends didn’t forsake Richie once his star had dimmed.
****
The world changed on September 11th 2001. Richie didn’t.
The 7th edition of the “Queens International Film Festival” kicks-off in winter of 2009. Its founder and executive director is none other than Jocelyne Castellano (aka Jocelyne Castaldo-Castellano, Maria Jocelyne Castellano, Marie-Helene Rousseau and Marie Rousseau). Year after year, it turns out, festival vendors and exhibitors from Connecticut to Texas are stiffed on fees and equipment rentals, perchance even hot dog sales. When projectionist James Hill threatens to take his grievance to the media, a gravelly voice hisses over his phone: “I know you’re a smart guy and you’ll understand what I’m telling you between the lines: You won’t talk to nobody!”
By now, you can guess what movie that line is from: My Cousin Richie.
Like AIDS or Ebola, the virus that's responsible for either my cousin's genius or his criminality may be dormant, waiting for a suitable host to begin replicating madly. In 2012, one of Richie and Jocelyne’s myriad victims, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker named Dan Nuxoll (Rooftop Films), remains totally convinced the couple will make one hell of a documentary.
Rest assured Dan, Richie will find you.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/173/transcript
Part I http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie.html
Part II http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie-part-ii.html
Part III http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie-part-iii.html
Part IV http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie-conclusion.html
I met this guy in a courtroom in Manhattan after being arrested for trying to "mug the Swedish ambassadors guests to America" (language translation problem, I was trying to sell a knife to buy PCP....honest!) on Park Avenue Sept 1990. So I was arrested along with my friend and we spent three days in the tombs before getting shuffled into court ankles shackled with 10-12 other idiots. Along the way I'd told the booking officer that I was homeless because I didn't want to hear my mother's shit about me being arrested. To my surprise when we were shuffled into court there is my mother sitting next to this guy i'd never seen before and he's way too close and yapping up a storm. I'll punch his face in I think to myself. Anyway, turns out that my friend gave his real info to the booking officer, his mom called my mom and my mom showed up to make bail. Guy yapping at my mom was of course Richie Castaldo and he was making moves telling my mom he worked for a lawyer who was "connected" and for X amount her boy (and his friend too) would never do any jail time. I think he got her for $1500, which was a waste as the Swedish ambassadors guests had returned to Sweden by the time our next court date arrived and the judge dismissed the case. He and mom became "friends" for a year or two and Richie once showed up at our house with a bullet in his thigh, the wound black and green and seeping out as it was obviously entirely untreated. Claimed he owed some cuts money, and that may be a rare truth outta his mouth. He tried to persuade an ex GF of mine over the phone to reconsider her breaking of my heart but alas even his silver tongue couldn't work that magic. Not unhappy that our paths crossed. He's the kinda likable guy that you know is full of shit but it somehow just doesn't matter. Shoulda been a politician as he's just a natural at telling people what they want to hear, not interested in real work and a born liar. Hope he's doing as well as he can wherever he is these days.
ReplyDeleteHey man, glad you made it to tell the tale. Unfortunately, Richie did not. He died of a heart attack and alone and probably broke in an apartment in Staten Island. Honestly, I'd like to see a death certificate, he may be out there over the horizon talking shit and scamming everyone he meets, but as you says, never in a cold cruel way.
DeleteAww, sorry to hear this, may he rest in peace. Life is weird sometimes like this. Feels right in a cosmic kind of way that I could share my brief recollection of his colorful life so relatively soon after his passing. Hopefully my little tale brought him back to life momentarily for you and gives you one more anecdote to remember him by. Peace.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I'd love for the death certificate to be fake and hear he swindled an insurance company and is now in Mexico promising the locals US citizenship. For a nominal fee of course.
Bibbo69: if anybody could pull it'd be that fuckin' Richie. My guess is the stress of so-much scheming just wears you down...He had an older brother, also my first cousin, Jimmy Psycho, went from a junkie to a Broadway star, to a junkie.
Delete