On the back-end of a bender, on December 30 of that year, he heard that one of his enforcers was blabbing about the gang's acquisition of a MAC-10 machine gun.
Guglielmo decided he'd show the snitch what a MAC-10 could do.
At around 4 am, Guglielmo kicked down the enforcer's front door and opened fire in the kitchen. "Then I went over by his bedroom," Guglielmo remembers, "screamed his name, and shot a bunch of rounds through the wall at body-level." The enforcer dove out a window.
The police arrived: 16 tactical officers armed with shotguns, automatic rifles, and tear gas surrounded the house. Captain Dale Robinson — jolted out of a sound sleep by a panicked patrolman — set up a negotiating center in the vacant house next door, trying to talk to Guglielmo while Guglielmo fired out the windows.
At one point, a local girl, only 13, rode up on her bike. She knew Guglielmo from a local party house, thought he was cool, wanted to see the crime scene for herself.
Not long afterward, Guglielmo stepped outside, MAC-10 in hand. Robinson gave the order: if Guglielmo came more than halfway up the walkway, police snipers should take him out.
But Guglielmo retreated indoors. He crouched beneath a window on the second floor and thought about killing himself.
By the time he finally surrendered to police, it was daylight.
Guglielmo gives a tour of his crib, which is decked with perks he always wished for — a sleek basement bar with a stripper pole; a walk-in closet full of flashy belts and boots; custom orange chopper in the garage. But what really stands out is an ornate mural, painted by a friend, that covers the entire cathedral ceiling above his den. One corner of the piece is a depiction of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with one characteristic tweak — one of the horsemen is Tony Montana.
The phone rings. It's Christina Poulicakos, the mother of Guglielmo's five-year-old son, Giovanni. Today, she's with Giovanni at Boston Children's Hospital, where the boy is undergoing a series of evaluations.
Poulicakos calls Guglielmo nearly every hour. She tells him that Giovanni is sleeping after an exhausting day with doctors.
"Give him a kiss and tell him daddy loves him," says Guglielmo.
THE MISSING PIECE Guglielmo brought the same ferocity he once showed as a street thug to the search for a marrow donor for Giovanni, shown here as an infant. |
Nine months after the Manchester stand-off, a 23-year-old Guglielmo was found guilty on three counts of first-degree attempted assault, and later sentenced to 22.5 to 45 years — the maximum allowed for the verdict.
In Concord state prison, an aptitude test revealed that Guglielmo was barely smarter than a seventh grader. For the man who'd thought of himself as a big-time gangster, it was humiliating — the first time he'd felt shame. Calling home to family in New York, Guglielmo asked his mom to buy him a dictionary, and his sister to buy him the New Hampshire criminal-justice and procedure manuals.
Within a year, he earned his GED and enrolled in a legal-aid correspondence course with the Blackstone School of Law.
