Captain Pranks
by Brian Hickey
02.24.05

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."

 

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