BOWE DIETL
Mayoral hopeful is $477G behind on his taxes
HE’S ONE tough former cop who dresses to the nines, doesn’t hesitate to speak his mind and says he has big plans to be the next mayor of New York City.
But potty-mouthed, self-promoting private eye Bo Dietl is running a campaign that is at the very least unorthodox — if not suicidal.
For starters, Dietl has habitually failed to pay his New York taxes, and the state is chasing him for nearly a half-million dollars.
Making matters worse, in a city with an estimated 270,000 Muslims, he blames the state’s drive to collect unpaid taxes on a “Muslim guy.”
He’s entered the race dogged by lawsuits, including an action filed by former business partners who paint him as a polished swindler with a mammoth ego who gambled too much.
And he is surely the only mayoral candidate in New York City history to proclaim during a campaign: “I never bet on any cockroaches.”
In between mugging for the camera with a Staten Island pizza and dazzling the press corp with displays of his push-up prowess, Dietl chewed the fat with the Daily News last week about his longshot run for City Hall — but mainly to state over and over again that he’s a great businessman who is getting a raw deal from the state.
“Most people don’t pay the kind of taxes I pay,” he said. “I earn a lot of money and I pay a lot of taxes.” Well, that’s not exactly true. Records show the Department of Taxation and Finance slapped him with a tax warrant for $477,255 on Jan. 25. Warrants are issued after taxpayers ignore letters, phone calls and even doorknocks from agency employees instructing them to pay their bills.
This isn’t Dietl’s first go-round with the tax man.
Records show he has been dogged by warrants and other debts since the 1990s.
New York State hit him with five tax warrants between 2008 and 2015. One of the tax warrants, filed in July 2014, was for $481,843. He didn’t pay off that levy until March 2016. The other four warrants have also been satisfied.
Dietl points to bureaucratic incompetence for his tax woes — and a “Muslim guy” who worked for the Department of Taxation and Finance.
The employee had it in for him because he didn’t like his appearances on Don Imus’ radio show and Fox News, Dietl claims.
He said the tax warrants stem from a dispute between him and the state over his primary residence between 1996 and 2006.
“They were saying I was a resident of New York City,” said Dietl, who claims he actually lived in Long Island at the time. “This was a whole city tax b------.”
Dietl, who has an Upper East Side apartment and three homes on Long Island, said he spent years in tax court trying to fight the state on having to pay city income taxes but he eventually settled, agreeing to cough up a fixed amount.
“After seven years in court, it rips your heart out and you just want it to go away,” he said.
Dietl said he has started to pay down the outstanding tax warrant, ponying up $150,000 in March and promising the state to make monthly installments of $25,000.
“What I get angry about is I really was not living in New York City,” he said. “What p----s me off is the people who don’t pay their taxes.”
Dietl was also in a bind with Uncle Sam in the early 1990s and had to hit up pals to help pay off his federal taxes.
“He’s probably screwed a lot of friends but not as much as he did me,” said Americo Mongiello, a former NYPD cop who sued Dietl in Westchester Supreme Court in 2014.
Mongiello said he and his twin brother, James, gave Dietl a total of $150,000 in 1992 for a 30% stake in his private detective agency, Beau Dietl & Associates. Dietl offered them the opportunity because at the time he was unable to pay his taxes to the Internal Revenue Service, according to Mongiello’s lawsuit.
Under the deal, Dietl also promised to pay the brothers $200,000.
“We never got any profits out of him in two years,” said Mongiello, who knew Dietl from working in the same NYPD precinct in the 1970s.
Mongiello said he had enough of Dietl by 1994 and jumped ship. “He takes cases impossible to solve,” Mongiello said. “He takes retainers up front and then sucks clients dry. And then comes up with no results.”
After the brothers parted ways with him, Dietl paid them $47,500 of the promised $200,000 over a two-year period. But the brothers said they had to hound him over the next two decades to get additional money from him.
The lawsuit says the Mongiellos decided to sue Dietl when he refused to fork over the remaining money he owed, about $61,500. Dietl settled the case with the Mongiellos for $25,000 in June 2016.
He told The News that the law-
suit was a bunch of baloney.
“Why didn’t they sue me a long f------ time ago?” Dietl asked.
Dietl said that, long before the brothers’ lawsuit, he gave them more than $250,000 to pay back their loan. He said he only settled the lawsuit because he felt sorry for them.
“No good deed goes unpunished, I guess,” he said.
Dietl made a name for himself as an NYPD officer in 1981 by tracking down the assailants in the rape of an East Village nun that horrified the city.
When he retired from the force, he opened a private detective and security firm. His swagger, off-the-cuff talk and knack for self-promotion made him a local celebrity.
That fame led to bit roles in movies like “Goodfellas.” It also led to his 1988 memoir “One Tough Cop.” A movie based on the book came out in 1998.
Over the years, Dietl has dabbled in different businesses. Some tanked, like a cashstrapped New Jersey security company he bought and failed to turn around. Others have made him a healthy profit.
In 2001, Dietl invested $75,000 to start a Pennsylvaniabased vitamin supplement company, N3 Oceanic Inc. Within four years, he made more than $5 million in profit from the company, court records show. He sold the company about 10 years ago.
The Queens-raised Dietl said his street smarts and business chops make him the right candidate to take on Mayor de Blasio in the fall.
While announcing his run last month, Dietl mocked de Blasio’s 6-foot-5 frame, referring to him as “Big Bird.” (Mongiello said Dietl is barely 5-feet-8 and “takes all his pictures on his tippy toes.”)
Dietl also called de Blasio a “corrupt person” in regard to the now-closed probes into his fundraising. The private eye, who voted for President Trump, also said he knows how to negotiate with the commander-in-chief over federal funds for the city.
Dietl is running as an independent and has so far taken in $390,471 in donations for his campaign. His fund-raising lags well behind that of de Blasio and Republican candidate Paul Massey.
Mongiello thinks voters shouldn’t roll the dice on Dietl because he saw firsthand how Beau Dietl & Associates operated.
He said when he worked at the firm, Dietl’s gambling took a toll on the firm. Dietl would spend Sundays on his couch calling in football bets to his bookie, Mongiello recalled.
“He’d bet on anything,” Mongiello said. “Probably even two roaches going across the floor.”
Dietl told The News he gave up gambling five years ago.
“I never bet on any cockroaches. Football, yeah. Casinos, yeah,” he said.
But before he quit being a high-roller, he was making breathtaking bets. Dietl wrote in his memoir about betting thousands of dollars on a single game.
He also bragged in an ABC News story in 1998 that Trump would send his personal helicopter to fly him to his casino in Atlantic City.
“I’ve lost hundreds and hundreds of thousand dollars here in the Taj Mahal,” he proudly told ABC.
Dietl also once got hot under his tailor-made shirt’s collar when he thought a Las Vegas casino looked into his tax returns. He sued the Mirage Hotel for $25 million in 2001, accusing two of its high-level employees of bribing an IRS worker to hand over his 1995, 1996 and 1997 returns. The casino workers wanted the documents to determine his credit line, according to the federal lawsuit.
A judge eventually dismissed the case.
Mongiello said also he cut ties with Dietl over the memoir.
Dietl liked to send copies of “One Tough Cop” to troops overseas. He also handed out copies to new clients.
When he ran out of books, he ordered up another press run of 10,000 copies. Then he rented a space for $900 a month to store the books, Mongiello said.
Mongiello said he later learned that Beau Dietl & Associates financed the press run and covered the rent.
“I was flabbergasted finding out we had to pay for it,” he said.
Dietl said he never rented an office. Rather, he said, he sent all 10,000 copies to Desert Storm troops after meeting Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.
Over a rapid-fire series of phone calls to The News last week, Dietl repeatedly called the Mongiellos liars.
He said that Americo Mongiello served 18 months in prison after being convicted in 1979 of lying to a grand jury about a shooting during a drug bust while a police officer.
Mongiello said he served time but maintains his innocence. However, he pointed out that Dietl knew about his past when they went into business together more than 10 years after his conviction. Moreover, Mongeillo said his twin doesn’t have a criminal record but also despises Dietl.
Either way, Dietl said the brothers didn’t deserve the settlement. “I really feel I didn’t owe them anything, but I really felt sorry for them.” he said. “I guess I’m guilty of being a nice person.”