The Right Choice

Previously on Number one Dad.

After dozens of buyers claimed they were cheated, the State Attorney General's Office filed suit yesterday against Meter Sales, Inc.

I'm wondering does he live in our house still?

I'm not sure where he is now, but I can say that he had a house when I last spoke with him.

Do you have his phone number?

I deleted his cell phone number, but the old house phone was working when we last spoke.

It is March ninth, twenty twenty two, and I am going to call my house phone.

Hello, we are not available now.

Please leave your name and phone number. After the beat, we will return your club.

My dad, It's Gary.

I am. I know it's been a long time, but I am calling you because I been thinking a lot about.

Memory full.

Okay, oh boy, I don't know what that means. Apparently the message I was just about to leave my dad, I guess it's full. So well, I have no idea what is going on. I got to figure something out here. This is Number one Dad.

I just called my dad. What Yeah, did you talk to him?

No?

I was leaving a message and it got fed off. I'm like halfway through the message and then it just.

Like just drop the call.

So I have no idea if if he got it at all, I don't know what are you gonna do.

I don't know. I feel like that's not good.

I know, I feel like I do I call back.

I don't know because I don't fall back.

I mean, I think you just have to like wait at this point, I don't know, wait and see. Maybe he'll pull you back.

I don't know. Well, I don't even know. I don't even know if it went it went through.

It was just like, oh, well I picked up was an automated message, Hey buddy, Yeah, I don't know. Well, waiting to see if my dad calls me back. I did some more digging on the concert pulled over the years. As I said in a previous episode Core Record Show, he was a defendant or plane if in twenty three court cases since nineteen eighty four.

But the biggest case he.

Was ever were involved in was when my father was sued by AT and T.

You have reached the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York for the Clerk's office Press one, thank you for calling the Eastern District.

Hi.

I was wondering if I could get case files for something that happened back in like the nineties. I've never done this before, but it's a public case, and I was wondering how I could go about finding this information before I.

Transchew over and you said, this is dating back nineties.

Correct, correct, nineteen ninety four through like nineteen ninety.

Five, Brooklyn Courthouse.

So my father was involved in a case in the early nineties, and I'm just trying to get information on that case that he was involved in.

Good morning to court.

Hi, I'm looking to pick up docs for a court case. Cent transcription for a case that was back in the nineties, and I was told to contact your number.

What is the title of the matter?

The title Veda versus at and t okay.

Very good. These are all documents that preceded electronic filing, so I would doubt very much that we would have them here in the court. All right, you should address a letter to our office, okay, and you can request that the court ordered the documents and have them sent back to the courthouse.

Do you know how long this process takes?

As soon as we receive the letter, will get the information to you. Is it's just a matter of looking it up in our files that we maintained here, so we could chenet around in a day and then the court can make copies for you. It would be fifty cents per page. You would come to the US Federal Courthouse in Centralized lovel We're just off of the EXS forty three A of the Southern State Parkway.

In the early nineties, my father owned and operated a small private pay phone come and he called Payphone Plus. He'd install payphones in various businesses across Long Island, New York City, and New Jersey. But being my father, he was less than truthful with how he represented himself. From what I know, he'd tell people he was an employee for AT and T, which was the biggest payphone provider back then. Well, AT and T got wind of what he was doing and went after him in court to

Your dad's an interesting person, and there are times I certainly missed that we're not in touch.

My cousin Mason grew up in Queens New York, only a few subway stops away from my father. They would see each other all the time as kids and as adults. My father's the one who got him involved in the payphone business.

He was a great cousin growing up.

He had personality, He was funny, he would get things done. He was considerate at times, but there frequently seemed to be a motive behind it. Actually got into the business because your dad. Okay, this is a good example of where your dad was looking out for me. Well, there were some enterprising people decided they wanted to be independent

I remember him having payphones, I mean his coverage was substantial. He had most toys, r usses, he had pizza parlors.

He had Bagel Boss.

Which is which is a huge bagel chain on Long Island. You'd have payphones and bars, you'd have them, strip clubs, gyms, I mean, you know, anywhere, any anything that was public that at a high volume of people.

I'm surprised he didn't want put up phones in yours and your sister's rooms growing up.

Because there's a chance.

To make something per call, right, So payphones became an attractive business for those willing to learn a bit of technology, a little bit of construction electrical software, and create a service team to go out maintain phones and collect the money, count it and deposit it in a bank.

How do you get approval to put a payphone in a restaurant, a bar, or you know, just a public area.

Okay, this is the early days of the payphones. I say, look, I can provide you quicker service, better service for your customers. Plus I'll give you a percentage of my revenue and you let me own and operate my phones and your premises. So that would have been the pitch that he or I or almost anybody would have made what were some.

Of the ways you wouldcall How he ran his business.

So he learned the technology first, and he used phones, equipment, and boards that were manufactured by AT and T. AT and T was the brand name in communication. I mean, even to this day, AT and T still has one of the largest networks of cell phone coverage.

Every day, over thirty million AT and T calls go through on the first try, thanks to a remarkably intelligent network that forecast traffic, anticipates tie ups, and determines that put its way around all in less time than it takes to dial AT and T the right choice.

He liked having the brand on there, and I remember one seeing a business card of his that had AT and T on it, and I don't remember, honestly if it had Payphone Plus or not.

So I think at some level there.

Might have been the thought on the part of people who were working with him that he was the phone company.

Do you ever say anything to him about that, the fact that he has a business card for a company that he clearly doesn't work for.

Having never been on a sales call with him, I can't say that he ever told a client or a prospective customer, hey, I am AT and T. But I do remember saying to him, when I call your number, that chime comes up as if it's AT and T.

Are you working for AT and T now? And he would laugh it off.

So I was under the impression that being confused with the big brand in terms of providing that phone service to customers was of interest to him. I said, sooner or later, aren't they going to come after you? This is a property of theirs, that brand, that logo.

My sister Jamie and I would often take along with my father while he serviced his payphones.

Some of the locations he would take me to and you know, and bring my daughter to work, and he'd have me wearing like this shirt that said AT and T and it had the logo on it, not knowing that you can't do that. You can't just use a company's logo.

Well you didn't know that.

He knew that, now, Yeah, he definitely knew that he couldn't do that. And these places weren't small time places like he had payphones in Costco, yes, which was a huge account, but they believed that they were working with AT and T.

That's right, he's scamming these big companies that are like signing off on these contracts, and now the contracts misrepresent him as if they're working with AT and T, and they were never working with AT and T.

When my sister and I would be on the job with my dad, it wasn't your normal experience of going to work with your parent.

He'd give me gum, so you know, here you're a kid. You're getting gum like awesome. Then he stops the car and he says, oh, you see that payphone over there, the gum I just gave you. I want you to take that gum and stick in the coin set. This wasn't his payphone. He would go to the nearest payphones surrounding his payphone and jam them up, or have me jam them up.

Right, I did the same thing. I did the exact same thing with them.

Get the wire.

He'd like have flyers and he'd cut the wire with Yeah, you always wonder if people always wonder, you know, back in the day when paypons existed and you go to get grab a payphone, the wire's cut.

That was probably many exactly.

He would say that his payphones were getting screwed up, so that's why he was doing that.

They were doing it to his which I do not believe.

Yes, but he had that those coins that were called slugs.

I think he named them that.

It looked like it was a quarter, but it was more like rigid and would get stuck in a coin slot. So I think that he like kind of shaped these slugs and then so that was another way to jam it up outside of.

Gum as well.

I remember he was breaking the headsets too with a hammer and then we would just drive off.

Yeah, he would stop it. Nothing to jam up this competition.

Literally, yeah, yeah, exactly.

I asked Mason if he was aware of any malicious or even illegal stuff that went on in the payphone business.

I mentioned that we would interact, we communicate with the phone because it was a computer, and that meant there was a board inside of our phone boxes. Well, those boards were frequently worth more than the money that was accumulating in the box, and there were people who devised

That was the thing my dad. He wouldn't even go just for the computer. He would take the entire phone. He'd grab a drill and take it right off the wall. While I'd be in the car. I was essentially a lookout and he would tell me to honk if I saw anyone coming.

That does not surprised me, but I can't say that he's done that.

I don't know that.

What caused you to end the relationship with my father.

It was a sad decision. I mentioned that it was over some business.

I wanted to know more, but Mason said he preferred not to get into the details of their falling out. I've always been curious about what my father was thinking, what he'd rip people off. Did he weigh the pros and cons of every scheme? Mason shared his thoughts on how my father operated.

Your dad always intrigued me because it always seemed to me that every one of us, when we make a decision.

We weigh the rewards and the risk. We don't want to fail.

We don't want to be embarrassed, we don't want to be punished, and we certainly don't want anything that could potentially lead to legal action. Your dad, however, stretched boundaries, and I think he got a great emotional payback when.

He succeeded doing these things.

I mean, he should have gone into politics, frankly, with that type of mindset would have been ideal for.

I am about to.

Get off the exit here on the Long Island Expressway. I am heading to the Federal Courthouse to get the AT and T documents.

I'm hoping that there's.

A good amount of information in there shed some light on what actually happened. But it's been five days since I called my dad and.

I still have not heard that from him.

So he maybe didn't get the message. Maybe he did get it and doesn't want to talk to me. Or that's not even his number, and that's he doesn't live at the house anymore. So these are the things that are going through my head right now.

And I am here.

How are you uh to the clerk's office?

Okay, do you.

Have a god?

Yeah?

I I am now leaving the Federal Court House. I wasn't able to record anything. They took all my recording equipment I had. I didn't think that they would do that, but yeah, they took it. Uh, but I got I got the documents, so I am uh yeah, I gotta I gotta go through all this stuff. Hey, babe, Hey, I just picked up the court documents.

Oh my god, Wow, did you read anything yet?

No, it's like a ton of stuff. So it's gonna take me a long time to go through it.

Are you on you a home?

Yeah?

Well, I'll be home in like two hours.

I'm gonna stop by my house, my home, You're gonna go now?

Yeah, I know, he said the way.

I just feel like I have to like be getting some sort of sign.

If he's there.

And oh my god.

Well, I mean just keep like keep me posted as best you can.

I will be careful, baby, but I love you. Bye.

There's no doubt in my mind that Manny could have been anything you wanted.

Mark palm Mary is a professor at Mercy College, but for two years in the mid nineties he works for my father.

He probably just didn't have the patience to go through the front door. Could he have been a detective, absolutely, Could he have been a professional photographer, absolutely? Could he been a lawyer. Yeah, And I use those examples because I actually saw him play those roles.

Mark men my father when he was going into a senior year of college at wake Forest, where he was the pitcher for their baseball team. Soon after my father hired him to give me pitching lessons.

I never thought I'd ever talk to you again.

Well, it was amazing to hear from you, obviously, And one of the interesting things I realized that I often do think of Manny and speak of him and tell some of those stories from those days. So we met. Right after my fourth year of college, which was my last year playing baseball. I started a little bit of a small business, really trying to become a private pitching coach for high school kids, little league kids, whatever. You know,

What started becoming like your task with the payphone company.

So my job was to get to the phones, replace the full coin box with an empty coin box, put the heavy box full of quarters and nickels and dimes in the car, and drive to the next phone. And he would prepare like a list with the addresses, and we'd come up with a kind of strategy in terms of the order of the phone that made sense. You know where they were in. They were on Long Island, they were Queen's, they were in Westchester, and they were

He had tons of accounts and he was NonStop collecting.

It was NonStop, and we bring all the boxes into the basement of your home and he would empty had this machine that would just count quarters, you know, you would just dump these thousands of quarters into this huge funnel. And that was a normal day. And I could be just on my own for that, or sometimes I would ride with Manny and we would be doing that together. So that was like the job description kind of way

Payphone plus became just one of the reasons my father employed Mark.

The job got more interesting in that it wasn't always directly related to the payphones. It would be like, oh, I need you to sit in the car outside the courthouse. He had a business, I guess in the eighties, so something to do with furniture or Veta sales, and my job for it was at least three hours. It was just to sit in the car which was illegally parked, you know, so that it like right in front of the court, Like he can't park right in front of the courthouse.

But that was manny.

It was another time he parked right in front of a fire hydrant and I alerted him to this. It was a you know, massive ticket on the windshield, and he took out his camera and said, so the garbage bag zero in front of the restaurant. Let's put those all around the fire hydrant. And so he buried the fire hydrant in garbage bags and then took a series of photographs to prove that the garbage, you know, obscured the fire hydrant, and he had no idea there was one there and that was you know. So he had

In the first episode of this podcast, I mentioned that my father used to drive a blue Chevy Caprice because it looked just like a cop car. Well Mark actually got to go along and purchase his car with my father.

And one day I always said, we're going to New Jersey today, we're getting a new car. So I had brought my car and I drove us to this like junkyard in Carney, New Jersey, and he had this relative who was a former like Israeli Defense Forces Air Force pilot, some tough, mean looking and just amazing figure. And this man was just standing on this heat smoking a cigarette and he's like, that's my cousin. I wish I remember his name.

He had.

It was an Israeli name. Wow, yeah, amazing slomoh yes, so he walks us to this what looks like it's a refurbished cop car, this blue repainted. It was so obvious that it was once a cop car somehow, even though there was nothing to read on it or whatever. But you know, one of the telltale signs was the big flashlight thing on the driver side near her. And so I remember, Manny, game cash. The guys kept saying, Manny, this car is clean, Manny, very clean as fast. You know.

I mean that that was his mentality. He would just give off this false perception of who he is.

So at this point, now my friend Rich also was working for him. Rich was just like me, same kind of situation. He had this summer off. He was just trying to work. And so when I couldn't work, Manny said, you have anyone else that wants to work? Introduced Rich and man I'm still, you know, in contact with him, and we've always always told Manny stories together, you know, And so it's kept Manny alive, you know, for us, because that was just a profound summer.

We had just graduated college. None of us had real jobs yet.

Rich Patrick is an er doctor and one of Mark's good friends. He also worked for my dad for a couple of years in the mid nineties.

He always paid us well. It was always trying to help us out.

I mean, I think he always meant well, but we all knew that he was doing something that was.

Off, so Manny would like send us out. And your dad was always good to us. He would take us to lunch or he'd be like, hey, we're going to this place today.

And he would know the owner and then he would introduce us, you know, like we're with the owner of the restaurant.

Whoa you know.

That was a big deal, you know, right, And we would have lunch at these places.

He was always working some angle, working.

Some deal, but we were there just to like help out do something if needed.

I mean there was there was one time he took us along and he's like, hey, come with Mark, and you can bring Martinez. We have a third friend that used to come along.

But I think your dad used this to like tacitly intimidate somebody.

Really, there was some diner, some.

Some diner like deep in Queens places that we would never go off the beaten path.

It looked like the Diner and Goodfellas or something, you know, it was like classic diner.

He was like, guys, sit in this booth and don't fuck around, and we're laughing because we're like we always fuck he out.

What do you mean don't fuck around? That was like all we did all day long, you know what I mean. Yeah, And so we're.

Just sitting there strategically angled towards the where the guy stood, and this is a serious meeting and so we had to like keep straight faces. The owner wanted him to take the payphone out, and he didn't want to take the payphone out.

We asked Manny about it later. We were like, hey, what, like what what happened there?

Like?

And he was like, oh, well, he wanted to take the payphone out and I told him he shouldn't do that right now.

But I'm like, oh, you're just doing that.

It's like, oh, we were here to just to like intimidate this guy.

A little bit.

I mean, that's some of the pageantry that would go on, you know. One the wrong way to look at a lot of these experiences would be to assume that everyone that Manny was working with was on the up and up, and you had some tough characters. So wouldn't be crazy to want to show up, not alone to these places.

Mark recalled a story about one of the sketchier places my father did business.

I have a day, afternoon, and night with Manny, said we're going to head towards the city. We're going to go to Queens. So we got to go to this place in Rego Park and he said, I just want to let you know it's a strip club. We're putting a phone in the back. So we get there this place in Rego Park, and you know, we walked in and it was just like four or five guys, you know, who were by the bar or the dance floor or whatever.

One of the.

Guys just total textbook suit, slick back hair, built, scary comes back and he's like you come here. He's talking to me. He's like, come here, come to the bar. Manny, can I borrow him?

Yeah? Yeah, I go.

The guy brings me back into the main part of the of the joint and I see there's a woman topless woman up on the bar like move in dancing. No one's watching, it's just this and she's got like a bikini bottom on and the guy says, sit down. I sat down, and my first thought was like, I don't have singles. I don't have like, I don't have money. I got to like all I have are quarters like pouring out of my pants. And he takes out a beer. He pops it over and he's like, I want you

The interesting thing about my father, if someone close to him was in a jam, he would use his talents to mislead and deceive people to help them get out of it. Like the time he pretended to be a lawyer, he.

Actually represented me in quotations represented me.

This is exactly what he did all the time.

It's like a benign move where he's completely fraudulent.

He's as my attorney in a court with a judge.

So I go out to a bar in Huntington and as I'm leaving the bar, like this melee that has nothing to do with us breaks out huge fight. The cop says, hey, start walking, and I'm like, I'm waiting for somebody's like start walking. He like hits me, He like pokes me with his baton and I'm like whoa. I'm like oh, and I just turned around and put my hands up.

He's like, what are you a wise guy? And he just he blows me up. The guy blows me up.

He puts me in like a half Nelson.

He puts me up against the car.

They start giving me the business, like flash lights and batons on the side of the face and the ribs, you know, jeez. So I get arrested it I'm like, what the fuck. It was like misdemeanor, felony, melee, some all some crazy stuff.

You know.

It was like a crazy amount of stuff that they were trying to pile on me. And I'm like, look, I'm trying to go to med school here.

Yeah, and I didn't have money.

To pay an attorney, and your dad was like, I'll represent you. And so we show up in court and he's dressed all up.

I'm dressed up.

He's got like a briefcase with folders in there, the random folder.

Judge reads out the thing.

It's like just a stenographer all this stuff, and he says, I represent Richard Patrick. And he goes up to the front and he has a comfort with the DA. He's talking to the district attorney, you know, and I'm like, oh my god, and.

He's like presenting evidence.

So then they both break and then the DA goes to judge and then the judge says, Richard Patrick, would you please step forward?

So I went up there and.

Then the guy dropped the case, and so I felt like I owed him after that, and I told him that, and you know, he was like, oh, you could just take me on to a state dinner.

And I never got to give him the state dinner.

He loved access. Many that was, ultimately, I think like what drove him in these exchanges and this ultimately he had nothing to gain, but the sense that he had access, and maybe that played into the way he parked and felt like, I should just park here while I'm being deposed, you know, for whatever reason, whoever's suing him from the eighties, the s furniture, he should park like you know where the judge parks.

Why not?

And why not? Why shouldn't he get the respect of an undercover cop, you know, why not? Why shouldn't he have courtside tickets to the NIXT game with his son there and take great pictures with movie stars. Yeah, it might mean, might mean he got a fib a little bit, but who cares, you know, who's it hurting?

Nobody?

And he loved that and when it was over, he had a big kick out of it. We would be laughing about it, you know. It wasn't like he was like a psychopath or something and actually believed he was these things.

He didn't.

He was enjoying the you know, the pageantry and the game.

All right. I just pulled into my neighborhood. I'm about two hundred feet from my child at home. I just hoping I could get some sort of sign that my father lives here, because right now, I mean, I haven't heard from her. I definitely am getting a little nervous because I mean, if he doesn't live here, I don't.

I'm not really sure what my.

Next move is, so I I gotta figure that out. Alright, I'm gonna drive past the house, alright. There are no cars on the driveway. There's two giant shipping containers though on it.

Alright.

I could see in the backyard a little bit. I see a that there's a a kid's bicycle in the back that's weird, and one of those like little kid radio flyer.

Like wagons.

I am hold on, I am gonna gonna check the mailbox. Shit, nothing's in the mailbox. I have no idea this is his house right now. All signs are pointing.

To know.

What do you know about payphone plus? And how is presented not only to you initially, but to people that my father would do business with.

If someone straight out ass and I was there a few times for that, are you AT and T? And he would answer with the right choice, which was the slogan at the time of AT and T. You know, AT and T the right choice. And so that was like the first time I caught on, like, oh, you know, he's dodging that question. And I saw that the card, the business card had his name number, it said payphone plus, but it had like the AT and T insignia on it.

Watching him maneuver, that was where I thought the sort of mentoring came in, even.

Though it's not exactly how I would go about things.

But he had all these accounts where he, you know, went in there represented himself.

As AT and T people. You know, he would.

Convince them that, oh, you need a payphone here. That to me was the learning aspect of that job.

Is like I learned that you.

Could just sort of go into a place fearlessly and get people to buy into what you're doing.

Even though he's five seven, he walked in like he was six feet tall.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He owned the place.

Yeah, exactly, like even the.

Manager, he belonged there. And that's that's really the key to life. Like in court, he belonged in court representing me.

My father was unstoppable until all the AT and T stuff came crashing down.

I got call from him one day saying, this has been a bad week. He had been getting notices I believe from AT and T which will basically stop and desist orders.

Don't use our trademark.

Take our logo off of your business card, off of your stationary, get rid of the ringtone.

You are not AT and T.

This is proprietary, this is our intellectual property, this is our brand.

It's legally protected.

Then on October seventeenth, nineteen ninety four, I woke up at six in the morning to someone pounding on our front door. The next thing I knew our house was being rated by the US Marshals on the next episode of Number One Dad.

So what's the latest Gary? In tracking down your father?

Well, I saw my child at home and I'm not exactly sure if he lives there.

So both Rich and I eventually had to give testimony.

Manny was smart.

He never went to law school, but he learns the swords system.

Good Morning Calling mckas of AT and T Corp versus Manny vied.

Number One Dad is a production of Radio Point, Big Money Players Network and iHeart Podcasts, created and hosted by Gary Veter. Executive producers are Gary Veter, Adam Lowett, Alex Bach, Daniel Powell, Huston Snyder, Kenneth Slotnik, and Brian Stern. Written by Gary Veeter and Adam Lowitt, Produced by Bernie Kaminsky. Co producer is Taylor Kowalski, Edited and mixed by Ian Sorrentino at Little Bear Audio Recording engineer is kat Iosa.