WHEN veteran television producer John Parsons called me, I was extremely flattered.
“Steven Seagal wants to talk to you. He wants to do a movie with you,” Parsons said.
A reporter was gonna make a buck off of a movie Seagal would produce? I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
But at that particular time, my day job demanded that I go to South America. Parsons later told me, “Steven Seagal is really pissed.”
I was apologetic.
But months later, I got the impression that not only did Seagal still carry a grudge, maybe he was sending me a message.
Because in his 1996 film “The Glimmer Man,” which the tough-guy actor produced and starred in, there was a shocking slaughter. The victim – a Mr. Dunleavy.
Dunleavy is not a name you get out of the telephone directory.
“Steven Seagal – he’s completely delusional,” said James Daluise, the designer and artist who was a defense witness yesterday in the racketeering case against Peter Gotti and six other gentlemen.
Seagal claims the group tried to muscle its way into the film industry by extorting him.
But, like Daluise, I think the Buddhist bozo with a screw loose has a scary imagination.
“Seagal wants to be a mobster, he wants to be an Asian warrior and wants to be reincarnated,” Daluise said.
“At one time, when I believe he called himself ‘Rimpocha,’ he demanded that 50 people kiss his hand.”
Daluise, a guy who knows his way around the city, says: “I don’t think drugs are involved.” He said Seagal has been “totally delusional” since he and his wife divorced.
Daluise was not at the Gotti trial yesterday to be a rat – but he did prove that one accuser’s out to lunch and that the feds’ allegations against these “mobsters” are nothing more than delusions.
As defense attorney Joe Tacopina put it, “So far, when it comes to violence, we have not had a hangnail.”