T his story was published in partnership with the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out. Watch a video version here and subscribe to the show on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. It was the spring of 2014, and Chuck Sonntag just had his left leg amputated.
The rare bone disease he’d been struggling with all of his life forced him to get the surgery, just like it had taken his left arm. Now he was in a rehab center, trying to recover, when he got a call from an old friend, the political operative Michael Caputo. Growing up, Caputo, Sonntag, and a few more buddies had a crew they called the Big Tree Boys, a reference to their neighborhood of Orchard Park, New York, right next to the Buffalo Bills’ stadium.
They worked out a scam where Sonntag would use his disability to help the other Boys sneak into games. “I was in a wheelchair, and I would go around the gate and see what security guy would let me in for five bucks,” Sonntag tells me. “And then when he opened up the gate, all my brothers and my friends [would] jump on the other side.
” The break-ins continued, even during the off-season. Sometimes they’d let themselves in to see the Grateful Dead. At others, they’d do a bit of shopping.
“They had a lot of equipment over there. And so the first thing we hoisted was some bolt cutters,” Sonntag says. “And then we emptied out their tool supply, you know, the nice electric drills.
We filled up the garage and sold them. So yeah, we did pretty .