Coin Man

This feature screenplay is based on a true story and an adaptation of the mob memoir YOU THOUGHT IT WAS MORE, by Louis "The Coin" Colavecchio, Andy Thibault and Franz Douskey. It's got shades of GOODFELLAS, but the focus on hustling, scamming and counterfeiting make it unique in the mob genre. Instead of showing us how to make pasta sauce, Louis shows us how to have his own house robbed to collect insurance; how to rip off the phone company on long-distance calls with a gadget that fits inside a Marlboro cigarette box; how to get out of a speeding ticket after driving 140 mph in a DeTomasso Pantera on a Rhode Island highway; and how to tool-and-die high-quality counterfeit game chips and slot machine coins to rob 36 casinos in Las Vegas, New Jersey and Connecticut of millions of dollars. "If I didn't hit your casino for at least two hundred grand," Louie says, "consider it an insult." Even after he got caught and was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison at Fort Dix, N.J., Louie enjoyed the last laugh. The U.S. Treasury paid him a consultant fee of $18,000 to learn how his manufacturing dies had outlasted those of the U.S. Mint. Not bad for a guy who started out hustling sweaters. "What? You thought it was more?"