Writers Tricks of the Trade Issue 3 Volume 9 | Page 29

S POTLIGHT I NTERVIEW
S AL M ANGIAVILLANO
TECHNO WIZARD AND FORMER BANK ROBBER
This is actually an old interview from the days I wrote for Examiner.com.
This piece about Sal Mangiavillano, known as “Fat Sal, “ was such a fun
Spotlight Interview, I wanted to share it again. ~Morgan St. James
S
al was born in Buenos Aires, Argenti-
na, in 1964. His parents were from
Agrigento, Sicily, and had moved to
Argentina after World War II. Sal’s uncle
on his mother’s side was a made man in
the Gambino family. Around 1970 he
summoned Sal’s family to New York,
where they settled in the Bensonhurst
section of Brooklyn. you, and were you actually a member of the
Gambino family, or were you independent?
Sal was a bank robber who worked for
several crime families, but he’d never killed
anyone. He has been quoted as saying, “I
once shot at a ceiling in a club when I was
18, but yeah, there was certainly others [on
the scene] more qualified than me to kill
people.”
As we chatted Sal said this was the sec-
tion of Brooklyn where Ralph Kramden, the
character Jackie Gleason played in “The
Honeymooners” lived. He said it had been a
Jewish neighborhood, but when his family
moved there it was mostly Italian. There
were still Jewish families in his neighbor-
hood and the kids used to play stickball in
the street. One side of the block was Jewish
and one was Italian. They didn’t mix, but
Sal said he had some Jewish friends and
even had a picture of himself in a yarmulke
at a Bar Mitzvah. According to some of the articles I’ve read about
you, when you were young you were involved in
chop shops in Brooklyn and that’s where you
honed your technical skills. You’ve been called a
natural techno wizard, and in fact your expertise
in computers and surveillance equipment led to
capers dubbed “Fat Sallie Productions.” How did
chop shops relate to computers and
surveillance?
Sal, many of the people I’ve interviewed said
that they became members of a crime family
because their fathers or uncles were, and it
seemed the normal thing to do. Was that true of
F ALL 2019
I’ll be honest with you. I’m fourth genera-
tion, second generation American. My uncle
was a made member, my grandfather a made
member and my great-grandfather was a made
member of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. They didn’t
want me to have any part of the life. Still, I was
kind of a member of the Gambino family but
ran a crew of my own.
The papers would refer to me like that
whenever we did something that was
planned one hundred percent. The chop
shops didn’t relate to my computer skills,
but knowing how to plan things out in the
right order was what I learned. There was a
lot of surveillance equipment, and that’s
linked to a lot of electronics. It just came
naturally to me—you know, me being able
to learn about electronic surveillance
equipment. We actually planted a wireless
camera inside the bank vault. Things like
that were done, and that’s why they called
it “Fat Sallie’s Productions.” Everything was
planned out.
P AGE 25
W RITERS ’ T RICKS OF THE T RADE