Con Kid

For most of his professional career, Sabatino operated out of a house in Ocean Ridge, an upscale oceanfront community in Palm Beach County. The house, owned by his uncle, Richard Sabatino, was once a waterfront villa with a four-car garage, expansive windows, a pool, and a hot tub, all with unobstructed ocean views. These days it sits in extreme disrepair, abandoned. The walls have been gutted to the framing. Some windows are broken. Chipped tile dominates the patio, and the pool is empty save for a thick green sludge stewing on the bottom.

That home is at the center of a federal criminal complaint against the uncle. In late 1995 Richard Sabatino pleaded guilty to illegally receiving a shipment of stolen Italian shoes valued at nearly a quarter-million dollars. Two of his accomplices in the shoe caper were also convicted of unrelated crimes: participating in a racketeering conspiracy that included kidnapping, robbery, and the distribution of cocaine and heroin.

A federal judge sentenced Richard to two years incarceration and ordered him to pay more than $200,000 in restitution. In a fresh set of federal charges, filed earlier this year, Richard Sabatino is accused of trying to hide his ownership of the Ocean Ridge house as well as two Bono's rib joints in Palm Beach County, to avoid paying his penalties.

In 1982, as part of an ongoing investigation into organized crime at Manhattan's Fulton Fish Market, Richard Sabatino was charged with a fraudulent scheme to obtain $57,000 worth of fish and lobster from a seafood company in Ramsey, New Jersey. He still lives in Palm Beach County, but could not be located for comment.

Organized crime is central to Jimmy Sabatino's identity. Often he is the one to bring up the connection. He once told a friend that 75 percent of his business was in the music industry and the remaining 25 percent was in the "family" business, meaning the Mafia.

"That's a bunch of bullshit," counters a member of South Florida's multiagency Metropolitan Organized Crime Intelligence Unit who insists on anonymity. "Who [in organized crime] would want a guy like him around? How can you trust him? Everything he does draws attention, and attention is usually something you try to avoid."

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First-class airline tickets, luxury hotel rooms, limousines, cell phones, pagers by the boxload, scores of computers -- it's impossible to document the number of scams Sabatino has pulled off. The victims include Polygram, Disney, Delta Airlines, and American Express. By simply posing as Tommy Mottola's nephew he used the Sony name to defraud Mac Warehouse of $60,000 in laptop computers, New York's Waldorf-Astoria of $16,000 in rooms and services, and the Marriott Grand Marquis of more than $20,000. In Los Angeles he ran up a $16,000 bill at the Ritz-Carlton. His rap sheet spans the globe.

"He's embarrassed many, many companies," says Max the security consultant, who asserts that Sabatino has committed many more crimes than he's been charged with. "I got after him pretty good every time he went after us, but other companies get so embarrassed they hide in the woodwork. Often they won't press charges, preferring instead that the whole thing just disappear."

Max has assembled a Sabatino file five inches thick. Inside it are pictures of the young con artist, the names of other companies he's targeted, of hotels he's ripped off, and police detectives Max has spoken to over the years. Sabatino occasionally calls him just to talk, sometimes from prison. "Jimmy's a likable kid," Max says. "He's a criminal, though. I had a guy from a hotel in New York call me up to say that he sees a discrepancy in this bill for $33,000. He asked if I knew anyone named James Sabatino. When the guy found out all that Jimmy had done, he realized [Sabatino had] run up a hell of a bigger loss than that."

Sabatino's methods are simple, though they usually require a bit of advance work. Say he's targeting a hotel. The first thing he does is write a letter to a major company such as Disney or Polygram. The response invariably comes back on the company's letterhead and is signed by a company official. A few days before checking in, he'll fax the hotel's front desk with a letter from the official at the company announcing that James Sabatino will be staying at the hotel and that the company will be paying all his charges. Usually it's no more complicated than that, though Sabatino is willing to put in extra work when necessary.

"He'll call a company and say he'd like to speak to the comptroller," explains Max. "Then he'll ask to be directed to the comptroller's comptroller, then to the comptroller's comptroller's comptroller. Finally he'll go, 'Gee, I'm doing the budget. I've got the first four numbers of the budget code [the numbers he needs to bill a hotel room to the company] and I'm having trouble getting the last four numbers.' He gets information from whoever he talks to, and from that they wind up with a problem."