Richard Luthmann and I were back, and in the beginning, there were some fireworks, particularly in the debate over the war in Ukraine and Pete Hegseth’s nomination.
The most interesting story we covered was one recently broken on The Frank Report.
The story is about Frank Rossi, an alleged fraudster, and Frank Parlato, in his story, strongly suggests that Mr. Rossi is actually Guy Cardinale.
After leaving prison, Cardinale learned how to make money in the scrap business. He claimed he worked for TNT Scrap Metal. He signed a contract to sell 104,000 pounds of harness wire to Sigma for $1.11 per pound ($115,440).
Cardinale created email accounts and invoices under the name TNT. He opened a TNT bank account. He did not tell the real TNT owners since he knew they would misunderstand. Besides, he was just borrowing their name, like he did when he sold life insurance.
Sigma made a $35,000 down payment to Cardinale’s TNT bank account.
After collecting the money, Cardinale closed the account and transferred the money to his wife, Karen, but chose not to deliver the harness wire. He also refused Sigma’s request to return the payment.
The authorities investigated. Cardinale had learned in prison that if you want to commit crimes and stay out of prison, you become a cooperator or informant.
Cardinale decided to become both.Generally, Cardinale would think up the crimes, plan them, and use his charm to persuade some desperate person to help him, and they, not Cardinale, went to prison.
He never got charged for stealing from Sigma. He managed to get others indicted on other charges.
Cardinale is well-known to Mr. Luthmann.
Overall, the plan was masterful; Cardinale identified potential victims, opened bank accounts, and created companies with names similar to legitimate scrap and recycling businesses to sell and ship containers of scrap metal diluted with cheaper metal.
The valuable scrap metal was placed on top of the filler metal to convey the appearance that the entire container was filled with the valuable metal.
Cardinale and his partners began using aliases and recruited a blind person on disability to be the president of one of the companies.
Cardinale and his partners made more than $484,000 from fraudulent sales in six weeks.
Cardinale was fond of selling insulated copper wire, loaded in a container and shipped to China for recycling.
When GDB entered into a contract with Cardinale’s Omni (the one with the blind man as president) for the purchase of one load of the insulated copper wire for $140,000, the funds were wired, the container was loaded, sealed, and removed by truck for shipment to China.
When the container arrived in China, government X-rays revealed the container was filled with concrete and covered on the top only with insulated copper wiring.
Cardinale walked free by becoming a cooperator, but his partner and his lawyer, Richard Luthmann, went to prison.
But you can only do this for so long in the NYC scrap metal business.
The agile, simple, and effective Cardinale got into another business.
In the broadcast, Rick and I discussed this story, Cardinale, and how Cardinale managed to put Rick into jails for Cardinale’s crimes.
Don’t forget to check out the last time Rick and I interviewed Frank Parlato, particularly about the evidence he gathered showing that Jerry Sandusky is innocent.
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