February 24-March 2, 2005

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Captain Pranks

JANKS' NO THANKS: "I said no. Smelled trap all over it. And besides, they'd have to pay me $50,000." : courtesy Captain janks

by Brian Hickey

Tom Cipriano is a 39-year-old gas-station employee from Montgomery County. Once a week, he hosts trivia night at the Tex-Mex Connection restaurant across the street from his house. But in his spare time, Cipriano is public enemy No. 1 for television- and radio-show screeners.

It usually goes a little something like this: Cipriano, aka Captain Janks, calls news outlets under the guise of an official who needs to get word out about something important to the public. Generally, he says, they put him right on the air. From there, the live airwaves are Cipriano's to do with as he pleases. That usually means dropping Howard Stern's name or a codeword that fans immediately recognize, i.e. Baba Booey. He hits them locally — Lynn Doyle's CN8 call-in show is particularly easy pickings, Cipriano says. And he hits them nationally, once identifying himself as Mayor Ed Rendell before telling Rosie O'Donnell that she was "a fat pig."

"It's not what I do that's the funny part. It's the reactions I get," he says, adding that Rosie didn't much like it. "But the fact of the matter is that the media wants the story so bad that they don't bother to check their sources. You just can't believe anything you see on TV."

So, when a January snowstorm shut down Philadelphia International Airport for the first time in nearly a decade, NBC 10's John Blunt and Dawn Timmeney were predictably unsuspecting when they went live to a phone call from airport spokesman Mark Pesce. Until, of course, "Pesce" said, "Howard Stern rules, dickheads." In and of itself, the call wasn't anything unusual for Cipriano. But what he claims happened next was.

"A couple days later, I had a knock at the door. There were three people, two men in three-piece suits and a woman. They identified themselves as being from WCAU, Channel 10, but didn't tell me their names," recounts Cipriano. "Then, they offered to pay me $1,000 if I'd stop calling [them]. I said no. Smelled trap all over it. And besides, they'd have to pay me $50,000."

Cipriano, who says the only local station he won't call is Channel 3 since it shares a parent company with Stern, won't impersonate emergency workers or call during disaster coverage. Doing so, he says, is "rankly antisocial." Still, he mocks the media's reaction to his hijinks.

"It's like they're saying they don't want me to ruin their sensationalistic moment with one of my own," he says.

When contacted by phone last week, Pesce didn't seem all that upset but was well-familiar with Janks' calls (Pesce is a common Janks target). He worries that they can detract from actual messages he has to spread but, "it's more a nuisance than anything else," Pesce says.

Officials at NBC 10, however, said they didn't pay Cipriano any sort of visit.

"That," says spokeswoman Eva Blackwell, "is not the sort of thing we do. I can assure you nobody from here took the time to do that."