THE MADMAN OF A THOUSAND FACES
Cesar’s arrest-laden odyssey before bust
The President Trump superfan suspected of mailing pipe bombs to prominent Democrats had a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality and bounced among bouts of rage, hate and flights of fancy, according to court records and those who knew him.
Cesar Sayoc Jr. has spent a lifetime on the edge of reality, unable to keep a job or a roof over his head and repeatedly running afoul of the law.
A Chippendales dancer, an Arena Football player, owner of a dry cleaner, and even a soccer player for Italy’s legendary A.C. Milan club — Sayoc claims to have done it all.
Yet when authorities hauled him away in handcuffs outside a Florida auto-parts store on federal explosives charges that could land him behind bars for 48 years, the steroid-abusing Sayoc was living in his van, friends and neighborshbors said.
Those who crossed him were shownown a dark side:e: In more thanan a decade of trying to make it as a stripper,r, he allegedly violently threatened fellow per-formers, accordingg to reports.
On thee strip-club circuit, hisis apparent weapons of choice included a syringe filled with HIV-infected blood and tuna-can lids strapped to his boots so he could “take out” another male dancer by stomping on the man’s face, colleagues told TMZ. An array of his mug shots over the decades show the most consistent thread in Sayoc’s tumultuous 56 years: run-ins with the law dating back to the 1990s, with a rap sheet encompassing drug charges, using a fake driver’s license, theft and domestic violence.
In 1994, an older female relative, possibly his grandmother, filed a domestic-violence complaint against Sayoc, the Miami Herald reported. Viola Altieri, who later tried to withdraw her complaint, died in 2006.
The Cesar Sayoc staring out from a 2002 mug shot — mouth open, curly hairline receding, wife-beater top baring his bulging neck — pleaded guilty to threatening to blow up the local power company for shutting off his electricity.
“I obviously think this person is not well,” a now-retired investigator who worked on the 2002 case told Miami’s WFOR-TV on Saturday.
But if you asked Sayoc, as lawyers did for a 2014 deposition in a Florida lawsuit, he was a giant success.
“I worked for Tootsie’s, produced them $13 million in lap dances,” he crowed. A manager for the male strip club couldn’t confirm the claim.
“I owned a club and I am partners in the Chippendales,” Sayoc professed.
The company has said Sayoc never worked there.
“No one dresses as crisp and fresh as me,” he noted, recalling club managers who would discipline workers for not dressing professionally — and who yelled at him for changing in the
club’s parking lot.
He once played soccer for A.C. Milan in Italy’s top-tier league, he told the lawyers, and also joined the Arizona Rattlers professional Arena Football team. The Rattlers had never heard of Sayoc, according to a report. There’s no record of Sayoc ever playing soccer for A.C. Milan.
It wasn’t just supposed professional accomplishments that set Sayoc, who is of Italian and Filipino descent but repeatedly claimed to be a Seminole Indian, apart in his own mind.
His mom was a local elected official in Aventura, Fla., and his grandfather Balthazar, reportedly a plastic surgeon, “built all the hospitals in the Philippine Islands.”
“Wow,” the lawyer deposing Sayoc responded.
The muscle-bound man who couldn’t make it as a pro wrestler was, according to himself, a classroom wiz, earning “three degrees,” in business, finance and biology.
“I want to become a horse doctor,” Sayoc rambled.
But at some point the fantasies turned to hate.
Debra Gureghian hired Sayoc last year to deliver pizzas in Fort Lauderdale.
She said his now-infamous van contained so many pro-Trump slogans and threatening images toward Trump’s critics that she would allow him work only night shifts.
He also kept bottles of liquor, dirty laundry and beheaded Bar- bie dolls in the vehicle, she said.
He was anti-gay, anti-black and anti-Jewish.
“He would tell me that we needed more Auschwitzes,” she told The Post.
Sayoc would tell Gureghian, a lesbian, that she was “deformed.”
“He said, ‘I really liked you as a manager but you’re going to effing burn, you’re an abomination, you’re a sinner,’ ” she said. “It was very hurtful. I did a lot of crying.”
Sayoc’s family was stunned Friday to see him charged with sending 14 pipe bombs to well-known Democrats, including billionaire George Soros, President Obama, Hillary Clinton, California Rep. Maxine Waters, former US Attorney General Eric Holder and others, his aunt told the Daily Mail.
“I almost fainted. I couldn’t believe it,” said Theresa Sharp-Russell, 74. “I was hysterical.”
Sayoc was “always a good kid when he was growing up,” said Sharp-Russell, sister of Sayoc’s mom, Madeline. “But then he just became a loner and rejected his family. We hardly saw him for years on end. When he came back, he needed a lot of help and we tried but he didn’t take it.
“I can’t begin to tell you how the family is feeling. My sister is in the hospital, she’s very sick. She never ever thought about something like this. Neither did we,” Sharp-Russell said.
“We are flabbergasted that he did this. He wasn’t a killer. I don’t think he owned a gun,” she added. “The only problem he had was steroids.”
Sharp-Russell admitted she hadn’t talked to her nephew in more than 10 years, but said he was “never political” in his youth.
“He wanted an identity, he didn’t know who he was,” she said. “I guess when he went to the Trump rallies, he felt at home with people like that.”
Although FBI Director Chris Wray insisted the devices sent through the mail allegedly by Sayoc were dangerous, his aunt hopes Sayoc “didn’t mean to hurt anybody . . . But you don’t do that. I’m 100 percent against what he did. But he did it and now he has to pay the consequences.”