Carmen Centolella Contradicts Danielle's Story About Her Kidnapping

Article from NJ.com.

By:Vicki Hyman/The Star-Ledger

Follow "Real Housewives of New Jersey" star Danielle Staub has always downplayed her role in a kidnapping and extortion scheme in Miami nearly 25 years ago, when a drug deal gone bad led to her arrest and nearly month-long jail stint. The arrest, described in the true-crime memoir "Cop Without a Badge," was used by Staub's fellow housewives in attempt to discredit and shame her on the first season of the reality show.

Photo: Mike Derer/AP

But the victim, Carmen Centolella, now claims that the reality show star helped choreograph the drug deal, and that she pistol-whipped him and stuck a gun in his mouth during his two-day ordeal.

Share Centolella’s story diverges wildly from the tale Staub has tells in the pages of her memoir, "The Naked Truth." She claims in the book that she had introduced Centolella, a neighbor in her Miami apartment complex, to some friends who — lo and behold! — were drug dealers. Centolella got some drugs from them to resell, but then claimed a couple of guys robbed him and took the drugs, a story that Staub didn’t buy.

"The neighbor tried to do dupe them and make me look really bad," she writes (Staub doesn't mention Centolella by name in the book, though his name is in the court records). "The more I think about it over the years, the more I believe that he was hoping they would blame me and hurt me for his misdeeds. What a coward!"
Centolella describes Staub, then known as Beverly Merrill, as an acquaintance with whom he’d snorted cocaine with on occasion. He says he had no idea Staub had become a reality show queen until Staub’s ex-husband, Kevin Maher, tracked him down and asked him to testify in his defamation suit against Staub. Maher, the subject of "Cop Without a Badge," filed the lawsuit after Staub claimed that Maher repeatedly beat her and raped her during their marriage.

Centolella says Staub had bragged about her drug world connections, so he asked her to set him up with two kilograms of cocaine to sell to two men who also lived in their complex. The day of the deal, Staub arrived at his apartment with only one kilo of cocaine, telling him, "'We’re only going to do one at a time.’ She was very, uh, cocky." But the buyers ended up pulling a gun and making off with the cocaine.

Staub "starts flipping out on me," and dragged him to her apartment, where her boyfriend Daniel Aguilar, who was involved in the drug buy, was waiting, he says. (Aguilar is called Jorge in the book; he too is testifying for Maher.) Aguilar, Staub and another man took him to a safe house in south Miami and tied him up; Aguilar punched him in the face, and then Staub grabbed a 9mm gun, hit him in the back of the head with it, slapped him, grabbed him by the throat, and shoved the gun in his mouth, Centolella says. "You better get this money or you’re dead," he says she told him.

Centolella finally called his father in upstate New York to ask the money, even though he knew his father didn't have it. "At least I would get to talk to him if I wasn't going to live, to say good bye to him."

Staub has said she didn't have anything to do with the kidnapping, but admits that she did talk to Centolella’s father "about the $24,000 debt his son owed and that needed to paid in full immediately," she writes in her memoir. But Centolella's father contacted the FBI, who tracked down Centolella and his captors as they drove to a Western Union to pick up the money. Centolella was later charged with conspiracy to distribute drugs and served several years in prison; Aguilar too served time. Staub cooperated with prosecutors and got five years’ probation after pleading guilty to extortion.

After Maher contacted him, Centolella made sure to catch an episode of "Real Housewives." "I wish I could jump through the TV and wring her neck like she did to me."

Though the revelation of Staub's past misdeeds was the crux of the first season of the show, it has also surfaced this season in connection with an assault on Staub by Ashley Holmes, the daughter of fellow housewife Jacqueline Laurita. In the finale last week, Caroline Manzo, Holmes' aunt, asks Staub to drop the charges against Holmes, saying that Staub of all people should know what it's like to be young and make mistakes. Staub was not moved.

Meanwhile, lawyers for both Maher and Staub were in mediation on Friday in California, but Staub filed papers seeking to dismiss the case, claiming that she never made the remarks that Maher claims she did ... and that if she did, it couldn't damage his reputation any more than tales of his excesses in "Cop Without a Badge" did, E! Online reports.

"As far as my past is concerned, I have always been honest even when it was difficult to do so," Maher says. "I stand by what is printed in my book -- not all of it I'm proud of but most of it I am."