Reputed Cicero street crew member Paul Carparelli wants a federal judge to give him a break when he is sentenced Monday for extorting money from debtors because he once served as a suburban firefighter.
Federal prosecutors, though, say Carparelli isn’t exactly firefighter-of-the-year material, according to a transcript of a secretly recorded conversation. He wasn’t keen on running into houses on fire for the few years he worked in west suburban Bloomingdale. “I said for twenty-eight grand a year, I’ll drive you, and you guys wanna go fight the fire, I’ll go get the donuts,” Carparelli is quoted as saying in a transcript of a phone conversation he had with one of his goons in March 2012.
Carparelli, 48, wasn’t high on helping people.
“It just wasn’t the job for me, you know. You gotta help them f—— people,” Carparelli said.
Particularly black people. Nor was he crazy about helping the elderly, who would call in the middle of the night with health problems and disrupt his sleep at the fire station, according to the transcript.