BUSTED: The Inside Story of the World of Sports Memorabilia, O.J. Simpson, and the Vegas Arrests

Thats how I would sum up this book. The OJ robbery is really inconsequential to the true story of this book. It’s only a backdrop to a life that was lived to the fullest (sometimes foolishly) straight from the man who lived it. Truly an amazing tale of love, luck, money, and greed. Its a terrific book from someone that lived a life that Hollywood probably wouldn’t be able to create in any movie. Good Luck with the rest of it Tom!
Rating: 5 / 5

If a bland life story “Catch Me If You Can” can be made into a movie, this book should be too. Riccio’s life story would be unbelieveable if it wasn’t true: escaping from jail, winning the lottery, beating Vegas, successful entrepenuer and a life filled with being in the middle of breaking news events from OJ Simpson to Anna Nicole Smith. Truly a one-of-a-kind story. This book is a page turner and an easy read and better entertainment then the 10 bucks you would pay to see any of the lousy movies that are out now.
Rating: 5 / 5

Looks like this book is going to be made into a Movie!

(See Coverage Below)

I’m really looking forward to this adaptation. If the film is half as good as this book, – It will be a Huge Blockbuster!

TITLE: BUSTED!

LOCALE: New Jersey, California, Las Vegas

AUTHOR(s):Thomas J. RiccioSETTING: Urban

WRITER A CLIENT?:NoPERIOD: 1960s-Present

STUDIO: N/AFORM:BOOK, 212

PRODUCER:N/ABUDGET: Medium

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GENRE PRIMARY: Memoir

SECONDARY: Drama

CHARACTER BREAKDOWNS:

THOMAS RICCIO (M/Teens-40s) Easygoing, business minded ex-con who falls into the collectibles business during the height of the 90’s baseball card craze; has an uncanny ability to make good deals and find great luck, only to continually lose everything. (LD)

ALBERT BEARDSLEY (M/40s) Loose cannon and obsessive fan of OJ Simpson; borderline psychotic and dangerous; completely unbalanced though he tries to present himself as a legitimate promoter and memorabilia dealer. (FE)

OJ SIMPSON (M/60s) Football star best known for his hard-partying, and his acquittal for the brutal double-murder of wife and her lover; short tempered and paranoid. (FE)

IRENE RICCIO (F/40s) Long-suffering, patient wife of Tom; met him when she was only 18 and struggles to tolerate his rollercoaster of unemployment, gambling highs and lows, and incarceration. (FE)

JEFF WOOLF (M/30s) Tom’s business partner; teaches him the ropes of running a successful auction house and is impressed with Tom’s talent for finding long shot, high profile moneymakers. (FE)

CHARLES EHRLICH (M/50s) Unpredictable, foul-mouthed crony in OJ’s posse; agrees to pose as a dealer to set up Beardsley in Vegas, allowing OJ to retrieve his property. (CO)

LOGLINE: A collectibles dealer with a knack for amazing runs of both good and bad luck looks back on the events leading up to his involvement in the Las Vegas robbery incident that landed OJ Simpson in prison.

SYNOPSIS:THOMAS RICCIO (40s) has led a life of ups and downs. As a teenager, he quickly learned he could make more working a scam than with an honest job. He worked the tables in Atlantic City before graduating high school, but throughout his youth, one thing remained a constant: his love of all things baseball. During the 1980’s collectible craze, Riccio buys cards at garage sales and turns huge profits selling them at trade shows. After a vendor cheats him on a deal, Riccio steals a suitcase full of rare coins from him, which he learns have a value of over $500,000. He slowly sells them off, but they’re traced back to him by the FBI, and he winds up in prison. Amazingly, he only serves a few months before he escapes, headed for California.

Riccio gets a job at a small hobby shop and meets IRENE (18), who loves him despite his troubled past. When he’s stopped for a minor traffic ticket, he comes up as an escaped convict and is sent to a brutal maximum security prison. After he gets out on parole in 1986, he and Irene get married as Riccio struggles to find a job. It’s tight for a few years, but amazingly, he wins a lottery jackpot of over three quarters of a million! He opens a baseball card shop and makes a huge profit distributing cases at a 300% mark-up. The market changes in the mid 90’s, and Riccio’s over-zealous buying leaves him hundreds of thousands in debt. He tries to make up his losses in Vegas, but winds up losing even more. Desperate to turn a profit, his store turns into a seedy pawn shop, and he once again gets in trouble when he buys a case of stolen coins. He’s sent to prison, an even harsher sentence for repeat offending, and when he gets out in 1994, Irene divorces him.

Riccio moves on to selling celebrity memorabilia, starting with online auctions of Hollywood artifacts and autographs. He partners up with successful dealer JEFF WOOLF (30s) on an auction brokerage. Just as her death becomes front page news, Riccio obtains Anna Nicole Smith’s diaries. Shrewd, Riccio realizes that if he promotes the hype surrounding the diaries and not just the auction itself, he’ll really cash in. He becomes a hot item on the talk show circuit, promoting the auction and offering pay-per-view downloads of the dairies. His tactics catch the attention of other Hollywood vendors, and soon his company has deals for high profile items and estate sales. One person who becomes fixated on Riccio’s success is ALBERT BEARDSLEY (40s), a dangerously unbalanced man who is completely obsessed with OJ SIMPSON (60s). He wants Riccio to find a buyer for a surplus of goods stolen from OJ’s trophy room years ago by his old agent. Riccio doesn’t want to get caught again for dealing in stolen goods, and decides the best thing to do is to tell OJ, the rightful owner of the goods, who has possession of his stolen property. OJ is furious and wants his stuff back, but Riccio wants to get the police involved. When he finds the LAPD and FBI both unsympathetic to anything having to do with OJ, Riccio uneasily decides that they’ll have to take matters into their own hands.

They set Beardsley up in Vegas, with OJ’s unpredictable friend CHARLES EHRLICH (40s) posing as the buyer of the stolen goods. Ricco makes sure to set up a hidden tape recorder, and when OJ bursts into the room behind Ehrlich, he’s accompanied by a huge posse, some wielding guns. OJ is tried for armed robbery, but Beardsley isn’t charged for selling the stolen property. Angry and wanting to protect his own name, Riccio releases his tapes to the police, and simultaneously sells them to TMZ. Thinking he’s protecting himself, Riccio is shocked when everyone views him as a conman in the middle of the exchange, setting everyone else up. Though the police drop all charges against him, Riccio’s reputation is ruined, costing him some high profile deals. Dejected, he’s forced to sell his share of the business to his partner, and move on from the collectibles trade. Still, as he looks back of the crazy ups and downs of his life, he knows his next streak of luck is just around the corner.

COMMENTS: Written in a compellingly unapologetic and revealing tone, this book sparks with potential. Riccio’s sometimes sarcastic, always realistic depiction of his past transgressions is consistently interesting. Though he does take time to defend his role in the OJ ordeal, he’s the first to admit that he’s made mistakes, and never tries to polish his tarnished record. This creates an interesting dynamic: his sometimes pathetic, always entertaining antics seem to beg for acceptance, but never approval. Still, significant tightening and streamlining is required to shape this story into a compelling narrative.

Riccio’s tone and darkly comic approach to his tarnished past is refreshing and amusing. He’s obviously wise to the Hollywood gossip scene, and his story plays out like an E! special, complete with ups and downs, love and divorce, and of course, prison time. Still, it’s an informative glimpse into the sometimes corrupt and wildly unpredictable world of collectibles, especially his experiences during the boom-time of the early 90’s baseball card craze. It’s a sad but somewhat funny progression to see how Riccio bought collections for pennies, sold them for tens of thousands, and still wound up in debt. There’s some potent drama here, as well as some truly unbelievable sequences: he manages to literally walk out of prison, and somehow ends up repeatedly involved in FBI stings. If structured correctly, this could be a very funny trajectory with an unlikely yet always engaging protagonist.

While the book opens with a defense of his involvement in the OJ incident, Riccio’s personal stories and the re-telling of his past run-ins with the law are far more compelling. The OJ events could make for a terrific bookend in an adaptation, as the heart of the story is Riccio’s rollercoaster of a life. As Riccio has no problem admitting he’s into everything for the money and doesn’t care how trashy it makes him, his defense that he just wanted OJ to get back his stolen memorabilia can seem thin at times, suggesting further development is required to justify this uncharacteristically selfless behavior. The theme of luck and unpredictability is certainly the strongest theme in this memoir: it almost seems as though he’s not entirely behind the wheel of his own fate, which could also be an interesting aspect to play up.

Though Riccio’s life is certainly interesting, it sometimes plays out like a cheesy TV movie, requiring more subtext and depth to flesh it out as a theatrical. Tonally, there’s definitely potential to flesh out a MATCHSTICK MEN type style here, balancing comedy and drama as the story requires it. One sequence that stands out is a jaw-dropping yet laugh-out-loud funny event involving the sale of his home: he discovers his house has been ransacked by the homeless, and in a fit of rage burns their sleeping bags in his back yard. Oddly,he is jailed for arson, and forced to sign over his truck over to the homeless as compensation. It’s an odd turn of events that defies legal logic, but in the grand scheme of this odd life, it’s believable. By fleshing out sequences like these, the script could really inject more depth into Riccio’s character, making for a meaty yet painfully funny role.

Overall, Riccio’s life story is an entertaining mash up of good and bad luck that culminates in his entanglement in the trial that sent OJ to jail. It’s a fast-paced, exciting and often amusing story that requires deeper subtext and emotion, but suggests solid potential.
Rating: 5 / 5