King of the autograph hunters
Radio Man stands above every other ‘grapher’ on earth, said Drew Schwartz in The New York Times. His secret? Start with rescuing Amal Clooney and teaching Robin Williams to play a bum.
ON A BLUSTERY February evening in midtown Manhattan, opposite an unmarked side entrance to the Ed Sullivan Theater, a crowd of more than 60 people stood crushed against a row of steel barricades. They all knew that at any moment, Harrison Ford would arrive for an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” They elbowed and cursed one another, jockeying for position, each clutching a sheaf of photographs for Ford to sign.
They weren’t fans—not most of them, anyway. They were “graphers,” who make a living by hounding celebrities for autographs and selling them to the highest bidder. For many of them, graphing is a full-time job. Some have been at it for decades. They can flip a single signature for anywhere from $25 to more than $1,000, depending on a star’s cachet and how frequently they sign. A Harrison Ford autograph, for example, retails for about $750.
At 5:30 on the dot, a black Escalade pulled to a stop in front of the theater. The rear door swung open, and the pack of graphers across the street broke into a frenzy. “Harrison!” they hollered. “Harrison, please!”
Slumped near a dumpster by the stage door, a disheveled man with a mane of gray hair and a wild beard let out a grunt. He clambered to his feet, reached into a grocery bag and pulled out an overstuffed FedEx mailer, inscribed in large, looping cursive with a note. “Thank you, Harrison,” it read. “Love, Radio Man.” He staggered past the theater’s security team and approached the Escalade. “Harrison!” the man called as Ford climbed out of the back seat. “How are ya?”
Ford grinned. “Radio,” he said warmly. They shook hands. Fifty feet away, the graphers behind the barricades bellowed in a desperate chorus. “Listen, I’ve got some photos for you,” the man said, handing Ford the package.
“Sure, sure,” Ford said, accepting it. They made small talk. Ford asked after the man’s health, and the man asked after Helen Mirren, Ford’s co-star on the Yellowstone spin-off 1923.
“Good to see you, Radio,” Ford said. He slipped into the theater without acknowledging the graphers screaming his name.
They would have to wait until he had finished his interview.
There are probably at least 500 professional graphers in the world, according to Justin Steffman, founder of the autograph authentication company AutographCOA, and at least 150 of them are in New York, the world capital of the trade. And right now, they are working at full tilt. All winter long, celebrities have been flocking to New York to campaign for projects up for various film and television awards, culminating in the Oscars. For graphers, collecting signatures during awards season is like fishing at a trout farm.
But none of them do it quite like Radio Man.
RADIO MAN—LEGALLY known as Craig Castaldo, though no one ever calls him that—has been graphing in New York since the early 1990s. Over the years, he has managed to charm a small army of celebrities into accepting his hefty packages of photographs, which they sign and return to him. Where most graphers would be lucky to get more than one signature from a star at a time, Radio Man regularly nabs dozens, sometimes hundreds. He considers the A-listers who sign for him his personal friends.
After his exchange with Ford, Radio Man made his way to the Park Hyatt to pick up a package that Sarah Michelle Gellar had left for him at reception. It was adorned with a heart in black Sharpie, along with a handwritten note: “Only for you, Radio.” Inside were 43 signed photographs of Gellar.
“It’s amazing how they take to me, these actors,” Radio Man said. “A bum! I don’t understand it.”
Radio Man, 72, lives just above the poverty line, in a basement apartment in Yonkers he rents for $900 a month. He commutes into the city each morning on his bicycle, a 13-mile journey that takes him about two hours. He said he survives exclusively on food he gathers from free pantries and movie sets.
Though he could make a small fortune selling his autographs directly to collectors, his grasp of the necessary tools—photo databases, printers, the internet—is tenuous at best. Instead, like most graphers, he peddles his merchandise to a dealer, who in turn hawks it at a significant markup on eBay and other, more obscure autograph marketplaces.
Leaning against a wall outside the Park Hyatt, Radio Man pulled out his phone and made a call. A few minutes later, a silver sedan pulled up to the hotel. A tall, middle-aged man with close-cropped hair and a manicured beard stepped out of the car and into the frigid night. Radio Man handed him the package of signed photographs from Gellar, and the man accepted them without a word. He hurried back to the warmth of his car, leaving Radio Man alone next to his bicycle. “Hey,” Radio Man called out to him. “You got six bucks so I could get a tea or something?”
“I don’t have any cash on me,” the man said. He ducked into the car and drove away.
The man, Radio Man’s de facto handler, supplies him with his FedEx mailers of photographs. Once Radio Man gets them signed, the handler sends them to a dealer based in Florida, who is rumored among graphers to be a millionaire. All told, the autographs Radio Man received from Gellar are worth approximately $6,000. He was paid about $300 for them.
“Let them make all the money they want,” Radio Man said. “I don’t care. As long as
I get to see my friends.” By “friends,” he meant the celebrities who have taken an unlikely shine to him since he stumbled into their world more than 30 years ago.
As Radio Man tells it, he made his first famous friend when he was homeless. One winter day in 1990, he was walking through Central Park when he encountered a man dressed in rags, whom he took for “a bum like me,” he said. He offered the man a beer. “Do you know who I am?” the man asked.
It was Robin Williams. He was shooting The Fisher King, Terry Gilliam’s 1991 film in which Williams plays a vagabond searching for the Holy Grail. “You’re doing this all wrong,” Radio Man told him. “You’re not acting the way a bum should be.”
He introduced the actor to life on the street, showing him “where to go and what to do.” Williams patterned his performance in The Fisher King, which earned him an Oscar nomination, after Radio Man. Or so Radio Man claims.
In exchange for his guidance, the movie’s producers gave Radio Man $200 and a case of beer. They also cast him as an extra. From then on, he made a habit of hanging around film sets in New York, where he helped himself to food from craftservices stations and scored low-paying parts as a background actor. Graphing was an easy way to make money.
“I’ve been getting movies ever since,” Radio Man said. “Here and there, playing my role: bum, homeless guy, guy on a bicycle with a radio.”
But that’s just one version of the story Radio Man tells about his origins. Another version involves running a newspaper stand in the 1970s and being cast as an extra in The In-Laws, starring Peter Falk and Alan Arkin. Another involves sharing a beer with Bruce Willis on the set of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Yet another involves showing up to shoots with a boom box around his neck and playing it at full volume until someone paid him to leave, a racket that supposedly earned him his nickname. (“A cop was there and he said to me: ‘Hey, radio guy! Hey, radio person! Hey, radio man! Can you turn that down, please?’ And that’s how I became Radio Man.”)
Radio Man is a fixture on film sets in New York. He has appeared as an extra in dozens of movies, including Ransom,
Zoolander, The Departed, and The Irishman. He has a preternatural knowledge of actors’ whereabouts and shooting schedules. And he has forged something like a friendship with some of the biggest names in Hollywood.
ON A JANUARY night in Chinatown, Radio Man sauntered around the set of Wolves, a forthcoming movie starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, as if he were its executive producer. He weaved through packs of stagehands, chatting amiably with anyone who crossed his path. During a break in shooting, he shuffled over to Clooney, who was sitting in a director’s chair. “Clooney!” he shouted, followed by an expletive-laden insult.
“There it is,” Clooney said.
“You know where you’re going tomorrow?”
“I don’t know where I’m going tomorrow,” Clooney said.
“Under the Manhattan Bridge.”
“See, this is what I’m talking about,” Clooney said, as the production crew standing around him laughed. “You don’t need a call sheet. Radio Man is the call sheet.”
Clooney first met Radio Man in 1996, on the set of One Fine Day in Manhattan. The actor has “never not seen him” during a trip to New York since, he said. “Radio’s everywhere,” Clooney said. “Every hotel you show up at, Radio will be standing out in front of it going, ‘De Niro’s over at this, and Cate Blanchett’s over here staying at the Carlyle.’ He’s got all the intel.”
Radio Man endeared himself to Clooney, the actor said, after rescuing his wife, Amal Clooney, from a throng of paparazzi that had swarmed her on Fifth Avenue. Radio Man blocked them with his bicycle, hailed a cab and steered Amal Clooney inside, securing her escape. “He’s a great guy,” George Clooney said. “He’s a lovable mess, which we all are.”
About six years ago, Clooney got together with a few other actors and flew Radio Man out to LA. They sent him to the Oscars. He wore a tuxedo. He walked the red carpet. He sat in the audience. He brought a date.
A few nights after bumping into Radio Man in Chinatown, Clooney poked his head out of a white trailer parked on East Broadway and peered down the street. “Radio!” he yelled. Radio Man ambled over. Clooney strode toward him holding a large bag, trailed by a pack of photographers.
“Here you go, Radio,” he said, dropping the bag on the sidewalk with a thunk. “This thing weighs a ton, by the way.”
Radio Man reached inside and pulled out two bulging FedEx mailers. They contained 185 signed photographs of Clooney, worth approximately $18,000.
Clooney said that Radio Man is the only grapher he will take a package from. But he signs for all of them. “Every one of these guys who come over for autographs, it’s a business for them,” he said. “You try to help them out when you can.”
BACK ON THE set of Wolves, Radio Man cruised the streets of Chinatown looking for the director, Jon Watts. He was hoping there might be a scene he could sneak into. But the cameras were already rolling, and Watts was occupied.
Radio Man returned to his usual post outside Clooney’s trailer. It was closing in on midnight. He was standing near his bicycle and sipping a hot tea, killing time until the next break in filming, when he was approached by someone he didn’t recognize.
“Radio,” the man said. He held up an 8-by10-inch photograph, taped to a sheet of hardboard, of Radio Man. “Do you mind signing real quick?”
“What do you want me to say?” Radio Man asked. “Just, Radio Man?”
“Yeah,” the man said. “Radio Man.”
Radio Man signed the photograph in big, sloppy cursive. The man thanked him and walked away. It was hard to say if he was a grapher or just a fan.
A version of this story originally appeared in The New York Times. Used with permission.