Former Colleague Says Paul Canerio Threatened Him At Previous Job

COLTS NECK, NJ — A Chicago-area man who used to work as a freelance IT consultant for CitiBank says he had a run-in with accused Colts Neck murderer Paul Caneiro — and it wasn't pleasant.

Mark Bostrom, 60, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, Illinois, used to work in IT and crossed paths with Paul Caneiro in the mid-90s; he said he was stunned to hear of the gruesome quadruple murder when it was first reported the day it happened, Nov. 20, and quickly became national news. But he also felt compelled to share his story, where he said Paul threatened him one night, and vaguely implied he could kill him when they were both working at CitiBank.

It was an incident that scared him enough to inform the Chicago police department the day after it happened; the police never took a report.

Caneiro, 51, is currently siting in the Monmouth County jail, where he is charged with the heinous fatal shooting of his younger brother, Keith Caneiro, as well as shooting and stabbing his brother's wife, Jennifer, and fatally shooting their two young children. The Caneiro brothers operated an IT business together, Square One, but younger brother Keith had recently been talking about leaving the company to pursue something new. Prosecutors have only said that Paul's motive was financial, and refused to elaborate.

According to Bostrom, the incident happened in 1991. At the time, he was working for a friend's company as an in-house IT consultant for the Chicago branch of CitiBank. Paul Caneiro was flown into CitiBank's downtown Chicago offices several times a year, because his brother's company, Jay Martin Consulting (which later was re-named Square One) had landed a lucrative contract to install CitiBank's computer network nationwide.

As Patch reported, Keith started Jay Martin and to this day, he is listed as its sole owner. His older brother Paul was the first person he hired to help run the business, and Paul had the title of director of technical services.

"(Paul) would come in a lot at the time. They were the big guys making the Chicago office talk to New York," recalled Bostrom. "CitiBank would fly Paul in first class because he said he had claustrophobia. I was lower echelon; I was someone who set up the computers, and helped each executive learn how to use their machine and so on. "

Bostrom said he was 34 about the time, and Caneiro was in his mid 20s. He said he never met Keith; it was only Paul who would travel to the Chicago office.

Related: Picture Emerges Of One Caneiro Brother Thriving, Another In Pain

"Routers keep the Internet flowing and the Internet was much cruder than it is now: It was fairly regular that the network would come down, either accidentally or from Paul taking it offline," said Bostrom. "And employees would come in to me and say, 'It's down again." I would have to take some of the heat for that, but it wasn't really my responsibility at all. I wasn't supposed to touch the main router."

"It eventually became a real problem," he continued. "There was a lot of software that had to be updated on all the Macs and it would be easier to do it all at once if the network was up and working."

One night, Caneiro and Bostrom were alone together in the office. It was well after 5 p.m. Bostrom recalled that he had to do a major software update on all the in-house computers that night, and he wanted to get it done before midnight, when the trains stopped running.

The network cut out.

"I decided to say something to him. I made this joke out of it: I walked into the office where he was examining some blueprints and I asked him when the 'notwork' would be back on," he said.

Paul became enraged.

"He picked up a screwdriver off a table and said something like, 'You know, you could have a fatal accident back here,' while slowly moving the screwdriver up and down," he recalled. "It wasn't a stabbing motion. It was just clear he wanted me to see the screwdriver."

Bostrom said he was "pretty scared" at the time; they were alone together in the office, which was under construction at the time, and it was dark.

"It was like a death threat. I was wondering if I was going to take a bad fall, or get hit by a car on the way home. What did he mean? How do you know for sure if someone really means something? I took his tone as 50/50 - half kidding, half serious," he recalled. "But he was really angry at the time."

Bostrom said he immediately just left the office. Patch contacted his boss at the time, and he confirmed the entire account. That man, 55, who also lives in the Chicago area, asked not to have his name printed, or his company's name, because they are still in operation and IT contracts for major banks are an essential part of their business.

But he corroborated Bostrom's story.

"I remember he told me immediately after it happened and I was kind of unsure what do to," his boss recalled. "I was a little nervous about making waves with CitiBank, because we had this major contract with them. But I told him, look if you're scared enough about this you should tell the police."

The next day, Bostrom said he went to the Chicago police department and told them about the incident. He said they declined to file a report, saying it would be a merely "he said/he said" incident.

"I understood that," said Bostrom, but he kept his distance from Caneiro ever since then. "I just wanted to get something on record in case I ever had 'an accident.'"

And both men actually recall Caneiro as someone "with a good personality."

"He had this really superior attitude all the time; he had a big ego, but he was funny and he would joke around," said Bostrom. "I remember before this happened we would all go out and get lunch at Dick's Last Resort (a restaurant in downtown Chicago)."

His boss agreed — somewhat.

"Paul asked if I wanted to go out and get drinks with him after work, but I'm not really a drinking guy like that," he said. "I do recall he was always on the phone a lot with someone back in New York or New Jersey - who I can now assume was his brother."

"He sort of had this 'Man Behind the Curtain' attitude," Bostrom said. "The router would go down and Paul would be on the phone all the time and not telling you what he was doing and then it would magically start working again and he'd never explain. It was frustrating."

Bostrom first published his account of what happened on a local news blog he runs in Arlington Heights, Illinois: https://www.arlingtoncardinal....

Caneiro's defense lawyer, Bob Honecker, did not immediately respond Friday when asked to comment on these new allegations.

Screenshot from CBS News of Paul Caneiro's first court appearance.; via YouTube.

Read: Picture Emerges Of One Caneiro Brother Thriving, Another In Pain