This is an excerpt from the radio show Our Metropolis, a half-hour issues and affairs program that airs Tuesdays at 6 p.m. on KUNV 91.5-FM and is hosted by the Greenspun Media Group’s John Katsilometes. Tune in next week to hear the rest of this interview with memorabilia dealer Thomas J. Riccio, a key figure in the O.J. Simpson incident at Palace Station in September and author of the book Busted! The Inside Story of the World of Sports Memorabilia, O.J. Simpson, and the Vegas Arrests (Phoenix Books, $25.95):
We have a lot of authors who have been toiling for years trying to get published, and you managed to get a book out there largely as a result of circumstances. How did this happen, and why did you write this book?
The [financial] advance helped. I’m not going to lie. I had four [publishers] who asked me about writing a book, and the other three wanted to do A-to-Z about O.J. People at Phoenix Books knew me; we had worked together before when I had Anna Nicole Smith’s diaries … When my mug shot came out, and I was a “sleazeball, ex-felon, ex-con,” writing the book would give me a chance to write about the good stuff that happened as a result of the bad stuff.
It was your room at Palace Station that was used in this sting operation so O.J. could retrieve some of his stolen personal items and memorabilia. How did you make contact with him to arrange for this?
Basically, what happened was I got a call back in August from a guy named Alfred Beardsley [a Simpson memorabilia collector] … He called me and said he’d seen me on the news talking about the Anna Nicole Smith diaries, and ... he said he had O.J.’s stolen goods. This was stuff taken from O.J.’s home in Brentwood; the local police were taking it out of the house, and O.J. got a tip from somebody he knew in the police department that they were going to take it. This guy, Mike Gilbert, went to take it, to save it. … We called O.J. because I had done a signing and had some past experience with him. So he came up with this idea that if these guys aren’t going to give it back to me, let’s say that we have a buyer. I did a deal with him that he was going to sign 200 books and [in return] I would set this up. That’s what I signed up for, but something somewhere along the way went bad.
How so?
He came bursting in the room with these guys—which, by the way, I let him in the room, but they came running in and then they pulled out guns and everything; that’s something I had no idea was going to happen, and that’s why we have all of these charges today.