Big Stick-Up at Brink's!

by Behn, Noel;

  “You gotta meet me then. Listen, mister, and listen good.” Tony lowered his voice, spoke slowly. “I’m making you a part of history. The other fella can’t get over tonight, so you’re gonna be number three, see? The third man in all the world to see something history’s gonna be writing about soon.”

  “I don’t want nobody writing about me!”

  “They ain’t. Not about you. They ain’t gonna know.”

  “I think you oughta let the other guy go third.”

  “I told you, he ain’t available. Now be there like I said.”

  “Oh, well, listen, Stretch. I have something to tell you. I been talking to some other people. You know, talking to them about this and that.”

  “You saying you’re quitting us and joining up with another crowd?”

  “Oh, I haven’t definitely joined up. We’re just talking it over.”

  “I don’t believe what I’m hearing. I don’t believe you’re selling us out.”

  “Well, I thought we was out of business. After not hearing from you all this time, I thought you was in the can. Me and the Polish guy started making other arrangements.”

  “Gus, too?” Pino yelled. “You can’t do this to me. We’re ready to move. We got to go on something hot right away.”

  “Oh, well, I can’t guarantee nothing, Stretch, but out of old friendship I’ll do you a favor and have a look.”

  The door leading from the common garage on Hull Street to the auxiliary garage in the front of the building used by Brink’s was closed. Pino backtracked, led Maffie down the hill, around the corner and into the ground-level garage on Commercial Street.

  “Oh, I heard all about Tony Pino walking around under a shopping bag. Sandy Richardson had been keeping me and Gus posted ever since Tony Pino told him he found the pete. I wasn’t burned up about Tony Pino not calling for so long himself, but Gus was some. Gus was a funny guy, too, so we decided whoever Tony Pino called first would give him a hard time. He called me first.

  “When he couldn’t get in the first door, I told him I wanted to go home. When we got up to the slide doors [leading to Brink’s garage from the ground-floor stairway] and they squeaked, I told him everyone in town must’ve heard the squeaking and I was getting out of there.

  “Tony Pino was talking a mile a minute and being polite. He told me how we were all going to be millionaires the rest of our lives and all of that. He was doing everything he could to keep me there. It was killing him that I could walk away without seeing what he had to show me.

  “Let me tell you something—I was impressed. Everything I saw when I got up into the joint impressed me. Even if I was impressed, I wouldn’t show that I was. When other people don’t get excited about what Tony Pino is excited about, it makes him really crazy.

  “So when I walked over and saw the pete, I looked at it without even a smile and said, ‘This is all you got to show me?’ Tony Pino about fell over when he heard that. I even think he started hopping up and down. He has a funny little hop dance he does, up and down, when he gets out of control. He did that dance, and he said, ‘You big dumb cluck, you big this and that—.’ I keep playing this indifference, but it’s hard to keep a straight face. Tony Pino always makes me smile.

  “I think I almost smiled, so I said, ‘Hey, this is all nice, but I gotta go back and have my meet with those other people. The ones I may go into business with. We have some work to discuss.’

  “Now that about collapsed Tony Pino. He started talking to himself about big, something about if you wanted a big job, he’d show me the biggest. Tony Pino went over beside the safe and takes off a clipboard. He brought me this clipboard and said take a look.

  “I use my [pen]light and looked at the clipboard. It’s got a list of every shipment and how much it’s worth. Now I don’t pretend I’m indifferent anymore. I add up what’s in the safe every day of the week. The smallest is three million and change, and the biggest is over six.

  “Tony Pino saw I’m impressed and he said, ‘Well, are you impressed?’

  “‘Oh, sure, I’m impressed. This is something,’ I said.

  “‘Then kiss it.’

  “You know what crazy Tony Pino wanted me to do?” asks Jazz Maffie. “He wanted me to go over and kiss a safe. Hell, I don’t even kiss my own wife if people is looking.”

  “Tony knew better than to ask me to kiss anything,” asserts Mike Geagan. “We went in through the upstairs garage [via the Hull Street common garage]. My first thought was stealing a couple of the trucks there. Tony had the keys to all of them. Steal a couple of their uniforms, too. You put a couple of our men in their uniforms, in there late in the day, and they won’t know you don’t belong there until it’s too late. That was my first impression.

  “When we got inside and I saw the clipboard, I forgot the stickup. On one night alone they had seven and a half million in there. On another night it was six. The two smallest nights were three and five. That was worth taking time for. It was worth seeing if we could beat the bug and blast the safe open.

  “I always felt we had to blast,” Mike asserts. “This was a big boy made out of old steel. It wasn’t hard to cut, but it was slow. The sides were in concrete block, so we’d have to burn through the door. That door could be two foot thick. That’s a long burn through any kind of steel—two feet. Tony and me talked about the new methods of burning—the latest torches. We kept that on the shelf. The first thing was killing that bug. Finding the wires and cutting them off.

  “When I went in, there were parts he hadn’t been to. Sandy and me gave him a hand after that. Every night one of us was in with him. Never two of us. The rule was never more than two men inside at one time.”

  “We got out of their front hall. The big metal door was on the left. It went down the stairs, two flights, to the front door [165 Prince]. We didn’t touch that yet. We kept on going down looking for wires. We got underneath the place in the basement. We had to be careful with the wires down there. Wires from all over the building were down here. ADT is a sharp outfit. They’ve been at the game a long time. Best there is with alarms. They know how to trip their own wires. Have their alarm wires bugged, too. We had to look for bugs on bugs.”

  T&T was the acronym used. Jimma Faherty had extended another T, TT&T—Tony’s Tour and Tony’s Talking Tour, respectively. Jimma, the fourth crewman to take it, had entered the building by the Commercial Street garage. Stanley Gusciora, fifth, came in by way of the second-level common garage on Hull Street. For both men the tour really got under way once the squeaky twin fire doors into the Brink’s section of the garage were opened and wedged. There can be no doubt that for both men the junket definitely deserved an extra T. Tony’s travelogue was uninterruptable and, because much more, if not all, of the premises had been scouted by this time, far longer than suffered by Geagan.

  Both Jimma and Gus in their tour had to wear handkerchief face masks and gloves. It would never do to go the easy, short way while the harder, longer was available—not to Pino in his puffy prime. Jimma and Gus, each in his turn, got down on their hands and knees and followed Tony under the half door in which the money box had once sat, up behind the money room cage, out into the vast counting room and into the corridor leading toward Prince Street.

  A door to the right was entered before the end of the corridor was reached. This was new territory, space scouted and proclaimed free of bugs only days before. All had windows looking out onto Prince Street. First came the general office and then the manager’s office and then the superintendent’s office and the supervisor’s office. The girls’ washroom and, beyond it, the girls’ locker room were also visited.

  The next leg of the TT&T began back in the corridor leading from the counting room. To this point, Tony had seldom lost a chance to condemn the cheap locks in every interior door along the way, to point out not only that they were cheap, but that the doors were either kept open or unlocked. Here, at the door leading from the end of the corridor into the small front l
obby facing onto Prince Street, he guardedly called for caution. “This one the dumbbells sometimes lock, so what we’ll do—” The door was opened, and a wedge affixed at the bottom to keep it from closing. The door to the left of the lobby was metal. It was always kept locked. Another wedge came out.

  The metal door opened onto a three-story-high stairwell. Just beyond the concrete landing was a flight of concrete steps leading down toward the playground side wall of the building, a half flight ending at a small square landing. The steps here, also concrete, descended in the direction of the Commercial Street side of the building. The stairwell prompted silence and caution from Pino. Once he had reached the landing at the bottom of the second half flight of stairs, he pointed at the metal door and whispered that this was the main door, the one on Prince Street numbered 165 and to which the Brink’s shield was affixed. This door was never to be touched. Yes, Tony had scouted it for wires already and found none, but you still couldn’t be sure. If Brink’s were to use a second trick from its bag anywhere else besides on the vault, it would be here. “I’m telling you again,” he told each man in his turn, “never touch it.”

  The second-to-last lap of the TT&T began back upstairs in the counting room. The trespassers kept low and angled toward the windows overlooking the playground, were right up against the windows when they passed through the Dutch door—the unlocked and open Dutch door—and into the payroll wrapping room.

  At the opposite door of the payroll wrapping room, Tony again signaled for total silence, got down on his hands and knees and, for no requisite reason except effect, crawled out in front of the slanting wire barrier.

  There on the other side of the grillwork loomed the vault.

  This then was the TT&T, the psychological device Pino would forever credit with convincing Faherty and Gusciora not to abandon Brink’s. Forever the others would dismiss this boast out of hand. The briefest of peeks at the pete sitting there, they would avow time and time again, was enough to divert the most pious of cloth toward the rankest of thievery.

  The meet, as best can be remembered, was made in either the first or second week of February in Tony’s living room. Mike was there, and Jimma and Sandy and Jazz and Gus. It was evening, and Mary served whiskey along with the coffee and cake. Mary left, and Tony brought the meet to order. The six of them, he intoned, were “setting sail on a spectacular piece of work.” They would have to pull together and do what had to be done. He certainly had. Fifteen times in five weeks, he told the gathering, that’s how often he’d been inside Brink’s. On four or five other occasions or maybe six, he’d been outside peeking the joint. Since the aborted grab of 48 Truck on Federal Street he’d been up at North End “every single night”—well, not every night; there’d been some trouble with a cook and Jimmy Costa. Jimmy had burned up $45 worth of stew. But he’d been there almost every night, and oh, the wonders he had beheld. He began relating the wonders.

  “Nobody said it wasn’t wonderful,” declares Mike Geagan, “but Tony forgot we’d been in there and seen for ourselves. He forgot he had told each of the men what he went through.

  “Tony’s the greatest crook that ever lived. He’s a genius. The Captain. We worked for him and did what he told us to do. Sometimes he overdoes and gets off the track in his enthusiasm. You have to get him back on the track.

  “I got things back on the track. I didn’t have to tell the men Tony was right about the B&E. We all knew we were going after the biggest haul of all. When you do that, you need as much time as you can have. You don’t want to rush like you have to do with pistols.

  “I told the men—that’s before we got started—I told them I thought the six of us could handle whatever there was to do. I still do. Six was all we needed to grab her off either way.

  “I told the men that anything we said between us in that room stayed between us and nobody else. I didn’t want anyone shooting off their mouth. We went through that with another big haul [Sturtevant]. Right when we were ready for the clout, word started spreading around town. We almost had to call it off.

  “This was the biggest thing of my life and any of theirs. This was seven million dollars that we knew of. We could all quit and be set for the rest of our lives on that. I was quitting. No one had the right to spoil it for the others. I was the one who said if anybody opened their mouth, we should give them the death.”

  No concrete suggestion came up for detecting the bug other than what was being done at present. Tony would continue looking for wires. Should this effort fail, all seemed content with Pino’s assurance of coming up with alternative plans for neutralizing the alarm.

  Discussion turned, to methodology and personnel for opening the vault. Peeling was totally out of the question. They could peel for two full days and nights and still have half the layers of metal to go on a box this size.

  Burning was a sure bet, but a slow bet. The standard butane torch would possibly take as long as five hours cutting through a vault door as thick as Brink’s. There was another consideration here. Tony was primarily a peeler. He’d worked with torches all right, but not on anything so huge as to require five hours of flame. He wasn’t even sure if five hours were the maximum assessment or if butane was the most efficient fuel under these conditions. Mike and Sandy didn’t know either, and they had always been the backup burners on crew torch jobs in the past. To burn and burn correctly, chances were that an outside expert would have to be involved—if not to sit under the tent erected at the vault door and wield the torch, then surely to give advice on equipment and technique.

  Explosives were a possibility, but even with nitroglycerine—the minimal amount of soup needed to blast a box of this proportion—the resulting concussion might shatter all the office windows running over the playground, send shock waves out into the immediate neighborhood, causing even more destruction; it could result in policemen and firemen hurrying to the scene prematurely. Once again, none of the five crew members gathered in Pino’s living room could be sure this would or would not occur. Tony had handled nitroglycerine before, and so had Mike, and on occasion Sandy, but never in amounts even close to what was being speculated on. For safety’s sake alone, a blast job of this magnitude could not be undertaken without the physical presence at the vault of an expert blow man. An outsider.

  Pino offered another possibility. What about the kids from New York City, the ones he and Mike and Sandy and Jimma had done time with at Charlestown? Those crazy chemical students who knew how to freeze a pete with liquid oxygen and then walk up and crack away the door like a block of ice? Those kids who had already made a couple of million bucks down around Manhattan, walking up and chipping away solid metal petes with an ice pick? If they were talking about bringing in outsiders, why not get hold of them? If they were not interested, maybe they’d give the crew the formula so they could do it themselves?

  Once again, not even Pino was sure the liquid oxygen worked or that it currently was being employed by the chemical students. Gang members had only heard that this was the case, heard thirdhand of a rather startling series of exploits, including the freezing of entire alarm systems in preparation for an ice crack. Tony liked to believe rumors of a grandiose nature such as these but, when it came to his own domain, talked more than he acted. Anyway, bringing in the chemists would mean two men, not one additional man, with whom to split the biggest haul of all.

  Tony turned the discussion back to burning. Since it seemed unavoidable that an expert would have to be brought in, why not find one who knew something about those newfangled high-power electrical torches that postwar technology was credited with perfecting? Nobody said they had to give a commitment right now, but why not talk to one of the fellows who knew about it if he could find him? Sure, why not, everybody seemed to agree.

  Deployment of manpower would follow the usual lines. All six would carry in whatever equipment there was. Jimma and Sandy would assist Tony and Mike with the burning, Jazz and Gus would guard the premises. If an extra specialist
were along and five hands were not needed in setting up, Faherty would prematurely join Maffie and Gusciora. Specification on where peeks would be kept would be made later by Pino and Geagan. All hands would help with loading on the loot and equipment.

  Tony brought up Costa’s name. No matter what method was finally employed to crack the safe, the six regular crewmen would have their hands full. Therefore, a seventh man should be assigned to drive—Costa.

  Costa had certainly proved himself behind the wheel of a car. But some one or other in the living room pointed out they might not need an extra hand to drive—not if they entered the premises by the shortest route possible, pulled their vehicle into the second-level common garage of Hull Street, drove across the auxiliary garage used by Brink’s, opened the door between the auxiliary space and main garage and pulled right up and parked in front of the guardroom door.

  Someone else pointed out that burning equipment, regardless of what was finally selected, would take up so much space that a car couldn’t possibly be used. Not unless, of course, one car was used for the equipment and another for the five robbers. Pino agreed that he didn’t want to use two cars but pointed out no final decision had been reached in regard to burning. The possibility still had to be explored. In the end they might decide on nitroglycerine. You could certainly fit all the men and nitroglycerine into the same car—driven by Costa. Gus and Jazz politely let it be known they weren’t riding in any car carrying nitroglycerine no matter who was driving.

  Someone else asked the most obvious question. Forgetting the equipment, how was it physically possible to fit seven men and $7,000,000 into the same car?

  One way or another, a truck would be going to Brink’s. And Jimma Costa wasn’t any great shake wheeling a truck.

  “Anthony, when he gets excited at meets, often says the first thing that pops into his mind without thinking about it,” says Sandy Richardson. “That’s when most of the outrageous ideas come out. Even if the others laugh, he’ll argue for them a few minutes and then give it up. Sometimes he’ll keep an outlandish idea hot for a few days, but not often.