Robert Dacunto says the "American government is the biggest gangster in the world." Turns out he should know.
Dacunto, 48, is part of a core group of Staten Island Tea Party volunteers known as the "road crew." They organize rallies, confront politicians, fire off letters to editors.
In an interview, Dacunto trashed Social Security as a "massive Ponzi scheme" and said the Founding Fathers would be horrified to see the country they created.
"They'd be looking to cut taxes and entitlements and start a second American Revolution," he said.
What he didn't mention was his June 2000 arrest in a $3.1 million Mafia stock scam.
Federal prosecutors said Dacunto, as a licensed broker, took bribes to tout stock in worthless companies. Gangsters in on the caper sold their insider shares when the value peaked, leaving the victims - many of them senior citizens - penniless.
Prosecutors said he reported to a Genovese crime family associate and pocketed $112,000 in ill-gotten gains. He pleaded guilty to four counts of conspiracy in 2001.
Asked about his role in this swindle, Dacunto said, "I'm not going to tell you I'm an angel. It was the Wild West on Wall Street. I made stupid mistakes."
He spent 15 months in prison and, along with 60 co-defendants, was ordered to repay the $3.1 million stolen from the victims.
He repeatedly missed payments, records show, and in 2006, Manhattan Federal Judge Gerald Lynch threatened to toss him back in jail.
To date Dacunto has paid $2,171, records show. He's still fuming that the unsatisfied federal judgment tarnished his credit rating.
"It's affecting my life and my finances, and I'm about to sue the federal goverment," he said. "They cannot be allowed to get away with this."
Wave Chan, 42, a real estate agent on the lower East Side and the son of Chinese immigrants, sums up the movement's mantra: "I love my country," he said. "I fear my government."
Chan said he had never voted in his life - until rising anger over the humongous health care bill and bailouts that "robbed the needy to give to the greedy" led him to volunteer for Tea Party 365 in Manhattan.
He says he developed a rigorous work ethic laboring in his family's Chinese restaurant in Poughkeepsie: "I grew up washing dishes and peeling onions when I was 10 years old."
Like many in the movement, he carries a dog-eared copy of the U.S. Constitution at all times, as well as his birth certificate, photo ID and Social Security card.
"I do it to make a point," Chan said. "I don't care if President Obama was born in America or not - or if he was legally elected President or not. I just want to be able to prove I was born in America."
John Kenneth Press, 45, an administrator at an East Side hospital and president of the Brooklyn Tea Party, calls himself a champion of "culturism."
"It's the opposite of multi-culturalism," he explains. "It says we have a Western majority culture in this country - a European Judeo-Christian culture - and the right to protect and promote it."
He came east from L.A., where he taught history for eight years. His start-up Brooklyn chapter now has a Facebook page with 600 members.
After completing his doctorate in the history of education at New York University, Press worked as an adjunct professor at Vaughn College of Aeronautics in Flushing.
Asked where he wanted his picture taken, Press choose the iconic George Washington statue opposite the New York Stock Exchange. "He was one of the first culturists in the new republic," he said.