A Pitt-Stop in CNY
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
By Frank Herron
Staff writer
About 9 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 14, a Gulfstream G-IV jet swooped into Hancock Airport. It pulled over to Piedmont Hawthorne Aviation in Mattydale.
The pilots, who had been diverted to Syracuse because of storms on the East Coast, had asked for a limo. Soon, a nine-passenger vehicle was on hand to whisk the jet's passengers where they really wanted to go - New York City.
Squeezing those six people into a nine-person limousine for a trip from Syracuse to Manhattan just wasn't going to cut it, though, for three of them.
That's when Richard Sitnik, an employee at Piedmont Hawthorne, caught the eye of one of the trio, someone named Brad Pitt. And a widely reported celebrity tidbit was born.
Pitt looked at Sitnik and asked, "What do you drive?"
Sitnik, then 18, told Pitt about his 2000 two-door Chevy Blazer.
Sitnik, who was almost at the end of his work shift, heard, "Let's take it."
The "us" meant Pitt, fellow actor George Clooney and Rande Gerber, a business partner of Clooney who is married to model Cindy Crawford.
They piled into Sitnik's Blazer and headed for Manhattan at about 9:30 that night. The route went south on Interstate 81 to Scranton, Pa., and east on interstates 380 and 80. They got to Manhattan about 2:30 a.m.
Sitnik drove the whole way. His passengers rotated their seats, with Clooney, Pitt and Gerber each taking a turn at shotgun....
The trip went well, and Richard was relieved to overhear Clooney say, when it was over, "Well, this was definitely the best way we could have done this."
Not everything went perfectly, though.
During the trip, Pitt lost his watch.
"I looked all over for it. I couldn't find it," Richard says.
The passengers paid him nearly $1,000 for his troubles and put him up in the Mandarin Oriental hotel. He didn't have too much time to enjoy his digs in the luxury hotel. He had to drive back to Syracuse in time for his early-afternoon shift on Monday at Piedmont Hawthorne, where he helps with luggage and customer service.
Before heading to the airport, though, he drove by his mother's workplace, Hiawatha Fasteners on East Taft Road.
"We all had to touch the seats," she laughed.
If only it was Eva Longoria and me in the car!!
Hey, at least this might cure some of S2K's female posters of their fear of flying...
