Gabe Ugliano

Gabe Ugliano is Percy's disrespectful and cruel stepfather in The Lightning Thief.

History
Sally Jackson, Percy's mom, choose to marry him to protect Percy. Gabe had an awful smell, which was described by Percy as "moldy garlic pizza wrapped in gym shorts". He was said to have been nice to Sally and Percy for "the first thirty seconds they had known him", and afterward showed his true side as a "world-class jerk".

He abuses Sally and treats her awfully, and hates Percy; the feeling is mutual, and Percy often gets into trouble with him. He plays poker everyday with men as disgusting as he is. One of his poker buddies, Eddie, is slightly sympathetic to Percy, but is often drowned out by Gabe's angry words. Gabe managed an electronics mega mart as his job, though usually home early so he could play poker.

The Lightning Thief
After seeing Sally and Percy off in his Camero, he returns to his poker game. After they crash and Sally is taken captive, Gabe goes on Barbara Walter's show and lies about Percy, saying he's a troubled, dangerous boy who destroyed his Camero and killed his wife. Gabe squeezes out a few tears for the interview, and Percy later sees it on television, and it causes him no small amount of fury.

When Sally is released by Hades, she reappears in her apartment with Gabe. He is furious, because he has to return the money he got off her life insurance money. He then makes her return to work, saying she has a month's salary to make up and she's better get started. He is ballistic when Percy returns (Percy promised all of Los Angeles free appliances from Gabe's store) and says he's going to press charges against Percy for destroying his Camaro. Sally tries to defend Percy, but Gabe moves as if to slap her, and she falls silent.

Percy realizes that Gabe has been hitting his mother, and takes out his pen (Riptide) but knows it won't work against Gabe; "Gabe, by the loosest definition, was human". Gabe mocks him for the pen, and tells him he has five minutes before he calls the police.

Percy leaves to his room to pack, and his mother tries to convince him to stay, but Percy insists that it won't workout with Gabe there. He then notices that his father Poseidon sent Medusa's head back to Percy for a choice, in a box on his bed. Percy speaks to his mother about it, and he and his mom agreed to turn him into stone.

Sally convinces Percy to leave first, and let her save herself. Percy is worried about leaving his mother in Gabe's hands, but Sally's eyes harden when Gabe says a taunting good-bye to Percy, and Percy is convinced that he had left her in very capable hands after all.

Percy returns to camp, and later gets a letter from his mom a week after he left. She says that Gabe has mysteriously disappeared (she had reported him missing to the police but she said she didn't think they would ever find him) and in a completely unrelated subject, Sally made her newest work of art, "The Poker Player." She says she destroyed the box of 'tools' he left her (Medusa's head) and that she had gotten so much money from selling the statue, that she had put down a deposit for a new apartment and made a payment on her first semester's tuition at NYU, and that he would be free to come home, and that she had put down a deposit at a good school in the city.

Percy later decides to return home, and does, his mother welcoming him back with open arms.

Physical description
Gabe is said to be fat, looking like 'a tusk-less walrus in thrift-store clothes', has a double-chin, and is bald but for three black hairs he has stretched over his scalp. He is a heavy smoker of cigars, chews tobacco and drinks heavily, and is not a very good worker. He manages the Electronics Mega-Mart in Queens, and was known for collecting paychecks and spending all the money on cigars and beer, while leaving Sally to pay for everything else. Whenever Percy was alone with him, Gabe forced him to provide his gambling funds, threatening to punch him if Percy complained to his mother.

Gabe is said to sniff money out like a blood-hound, and it is the only situation besides poker in which he uses his brain.

Gabe doesn't have respect for women, or anyone for that matter. He abuses his wife, and rules over her like she is his servant, which she puts up with, in order to hide Percy from monsters, until she turns him to stone. He also seems to have been doing more than just talking about grief to his grief counselor, Sugar, a blonde woman that is seen once, holding his hand on TV.

Film
In the film The Lightning Thief, Gabe is portrayed by Joe Pantoliano.

In the film, Gabe is shown to be much more violent towards Percy. Once Percy came back to warn Sally about what happened at the museum, Gabe came up to attack him, but Grover stepped in and kept beating Gabe with his crutches.

At the end of the movie after the credits, it shows him breaking the chains of the fridge after reading the warning note from Percy and looking at Medusa's head therefore, turning into stone.