Big Stick-Up at Brink's!

by Behn, Noel;

  McGinnis related all this to Pino in a low, controlled, even-tempered voice. And without the least bit of rancor he also said something to the effect of let’s damage the queer rat once and for all, huh? Whaddaya say to shotguns?

  “Now that’s when I start realizing Joe McGinnis could be a menace,” said Pino. “I been getting along good with Joe, and I liked him a lot. And I went along with him when it came to not letting in O’Keefe, but that was for a different reason. I didn’t want O’Keefe in ’cause we didn’t need him and ’cause I knew he couldn’t do time without having a nervous breakdown, that’s all. It was nothing personal, see what I mean?

  “Let me tell you something, O’Keefe ain’t my favorite person, but he’s in on the job and holding his own. Once a man’s on the job, you let him alone. But Joe was getting out of self-control. He had this hard-on for O’Keefe that wouldn’t go down. He don’t know how to put his personal feelings on the side for the good of all of us. What’s happening is he’s coming in with a pack of lies that don’t add up to two cents.

  “So now I call McGinnis on his lies and tell him to keep them to himself. If he don’t like O’Keefe being in on the thing, he can go and hand in his resignation.

  “But I got the other problem, too. I got an obligation to the fellas, see. I don’t wanna keep no useless rumors alive and go starting trouble. But I gotta let ’em know something’s been said. And I gotta make it clear to O’Keefe to keep his trap shut around women. One of McGinnis’ spies sees Specs saying hello to a nun, Joe’ll probably say he’s selling out to the Pope.”

  Tony believed he told Mike something to the effect of the cops hiring some new women rats who sat around bars drinking and getting crooks drunk so they could hear, suggested to Mike that somebody should warn O’Keefe to watch what he said in public. Mike recalls that he told Jazz that Tony told him that Helen Whatchamacallit was getting drunk a lot and mouthing off and that somebody should tell O’Keefe to clam up. Jazz recalls that he told Gus that Mike told him that Tony was hopping mad because Specs was getting drunk a lot and bragging in front of dames in some bar and that somebody should talk to O’Keefe about keeping quiet.

  A day or so later Jazz told Mike and Mike told Tony that Gus had taken the matter up with O’Keefe and that O’Keefe had said, “Sure, whatever you boys want.”

  Pino and Costa, costumed as electric company repairmen, walked up Prince at 2 P.M. on a Monday afternoon, stopped at the metal bearing the Brink’s crest and number 165—a door Tony knew was always kept unlocked for entering and departing office personnel during the day. Costa inspected the doorframe as if looking for wire. Pino unscrewed the lock tumbler, replaced it with a “slug” or “dummy” from his vast collection of tumblers.

  “Tony went around the corner and down to this locksmith on Hanover Street,” Costa states. “An old Italian guy—I think his name was Remo. I go up the block and watch the door to make sure no one spots the slug. Tony has his key made and comes back. We go up to the door again and switch it around. Put the regular tumbler back in.”

  Later that night two would-be robbers entered Brink’s through the front door.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Trips to Washington

  The sun began to set a little later each evening, rise a little earlier—and the bug loomed larger than ever. Tony, under the alias of a McGinnis associate named Russo, went over to Andrew J. Lloyd Company’s Washington Street store and for $99.75 in cash, purchased a Bausch and Lomb Spotting Scope, a telescope with which he hoped to accomplish what the binoculars had failed to do—get a view of the numbers on the combination dial as the Brink’s vault was being opened in the morning.

  Gusciora and Specs O’Keefe assisted in the removal of at least two more tumblers from Brink’s—the metal door at the top of the entrance steps leading up to the company lobby, the door leading from the lobby into the long hall—waited inside the premises at night while Tony drove off to have keys made from the tumblers. In at least one instance he drove off to Dorchester and used a key man named Jake Dana.

  And a long ladder was carried across the rubble, hoisted onto the stage of an abandoned movie palace and set in place. Pino climbed the rungs while Costa held the base and lashings were cut and the silver screen came crashing down, was gathered up and transported to the recently whitewashed and window-covered garage at Blue Hill Avenue and was laid out and scrubbed with soap and water.

  And Barney and Jimmy Costa spotted a massive electric company repair truck outfitted with a hydraulic tower, and Tony, dressed as a woman, came back late at night and cased the vehicle in a company parking lot and felt this is what was needed for the burn—that the huge semi could somehow be backed down into the playground behind Brink’s and the tower raised and the high voltage line and burning equipment passed through the fifth window and right up to the vault. But no one else agreed.

  Then there were non-Brink’s matters, some good, some bad. Pino’s December 8 sentence for the theft of twelve golf balls not only had been reduced to a year probation, but now the entire case had been filed and therefore couldn’t affect his deportation. The crew’s regular thieving was going well, and the boost couldn’t have been more lucrative. And on the negative side, on the very predawn morning Tony was planning to use the telescope for the very first time.…

  “The goddamn cook gets drunk,” Pino exclaimed. “The cook who’s been making the wonderful fifty-nine-cent family stew over at my diner. So I put away the spyglass and run over. He’s lying out in the middle of the sawdust floor in the kitchen, and I see his shoes is missing. Both his shoes. He’s lying out in the middle of the sawdust with socks that don’t have no toes in them sticking up. So I feel around in the sawdust. I find one of the shoes, but I can’t find the other one. It’s nowhere. I look at the big pots of stew and say, ‘Oh, my God!’

  “I get out the big ladle and go up to the pot of stew cooking on the stove. There’s two big pots of family stew, one on the stove cooking and the other sitting in the sawdust cooling. There’s nothing in the one on the stove, so I go after the one on the floor. I put the ladle in and sense something. Out comes his goddamn shoe.

  “Now I got a predicament. The diner’s full of customers waiting for their family stew. Little kids and whole families waiting. So I taste the stew that had a shoe in it. It’s not bad. I dump in a coupla bottles of ketchup and some peppers. Now I serve a little up to one or two customers I don’t know so good. They love it. I serve it all up. The customers tell me they never had such good stew. So I forget everything and stay there a couple days till the cook sobers up.”

  The motion-picture screen was painted by Pino to resemble a red-brick wall and was raised and rigged to the ceiling some ten feet inside the garage doors at the Blue Hill plant. It now constituted a “fake” wall which could be raised or lowered by guide ropes at the side—it would be kept lowered even after a vehicle had entered, would not be raised to expose the remaining two-thirds of the garage until the doors had been firmly closed and locked.

  And a dog, a very small dog, raced out across the tar paper and grrred and grabbed hold of a cuff and grrred harder, tugging at Tony’s pants leg just as he had lain down at roof edge to use his telescope on the Brink’s vault opening. The next time Pino came to the roof he brought dog candy he had been forced to purchase, and that did the trick, but he still missed the vault opening. And the next time, as he was just about able to make out the markings on the combination dial, a cloudburst occurred. The time after that Joe McGinnis sneaked up on him. And a time or two after that Gus and Maffie sneaked up to see how he was doing. But it didn’t make any difference. The telescope wasn’t strong enough to pick up the markings clearly. “Mr. Russo” returned the spotting scope to the Lloyd Company and received a rebate check—a check that was cashed at Joe McGinnis J.A. Café, Inc.*

  Emphasis shifted to tunnels, those tunnels running under Boston which might carry the alarm wires between Brink’s and American District Telegraph’s office at St
ate Street. Nothing of relevance could be found in the library. Tony, with Costa, took to the sewers near the alarm company’s headquarters, found little of merit and ended up by sneaking into the office building’s subbasement.

  Tubes and cables were seen in profusion, but there was no way of knowing which, if any, ran between ADT and Brink’s.

  “So I sneak from the subbasement right into the regular basement,” Pino stated. “I see where their alarm room is; only I can’t tell what cable hitches in where. I go all through the building and can’t tell.

  “Okay, now I tell the fellas we only got two choices when it comes to tunnels. We can blow all the wires up right in ADT’s basement or outside in the sewer near Brink’s. The only thing with that is we don’t know if we got the right wires. We never found wires going to the pete.”

  Joe McGinnis suggested that if someone could get into ADT’s executive offices, perhaps information relating to the alarm installation at Brink’s could be found.

  Gusciora and O’Keefe received the assignment, gained entry to the main floor of the building, read the tenant directory board, sneaked up to the third floor and into the offices of American District Telegraph and in a file drawer marked “B” found a folder titled “Brink’s—Commercial Street” and brought it back to Pino’s apartment.

  “And whaddaya think’s the first thing I come across when I start looking through it?” Pino asked. “It’s a letter or something from the insurance company showing Brink’s is insured for five million. We already know that from reading their mail back at Prince Street. And whaddaya think’s the next thing I find? It’s this letter Brink’s wrote to ADT. Brink’s is bellyaching about the cost of the alarm. I think it was sixteen or nineteen dollars a month, and Brink’s was saying they was getting robbed and wanted it cheaper. But the big thing is the name of the alarm. The alarm on the pete. It’s called a phonet. Now we know what the hell we’re looking for, a phonet.”

  Pino and McGinnis brought the file to a former MIT student and supposed electrical/mechanical expert by the name of Sullivan. Sullivan scanned the contents, found no way of beating the bug with the enclosed material, suggested that he go to the U.S. Patent Office in Washington and see if he could pick up the plans on the phonetalarm.*

  The night after they had stolen it, Gusciora and O’Keefe sneaked back into ADT and replaced the Brink’s file. Sullivan traveled to Washington.

  “Okay, this MIT expert comes back from the patent office, and he’s loaded down,” Pino stated. “He’s got plans and blueprints, and he can tell you everything you gotta know to build a phonet. Everything about how it works. The only thing he can’t tell you is how to shut it off. It’s wireless. Electronic.”

  Sullivan made two more trips to Washington and the patent office. Neither journey provided information on neutralizing the bug.

  The days were much longer by now.

  Tony Pino made two decisions: to sell the diner as soon as possible and, after the summer layoff, to take Brink’s on the heavy.

  *Lloyd Company records indicate the rebate check was dated January 24, 1949. Pino insists he used the eyeglass until late February and possibly into early March.

  *Phonetalarm, the actual name of the sound detection device first patented in 1925 by Richard M. Hopkins, longtime chief engineer for American District Telegraph.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Night or Day?

  The light in the fourth grate-fronted window went off. The man in the muffler and square-shouldered Brink’s jacket and stiff-beaked cap walked past the three illuminated windows fronting the empty counting room. He stopped near the door in the rear. The first, second and third windows over the playground turned dark.

  Attention shifted to the tall, narrow window nearest the corner of the building, nearest Prince Street—the stairwell window. Unfailingly it had gone black only moments after the counting room was deelectrified. Now it didn’t.

  The binoculars skipped back over the darkened windows. A light went on in the fourth—in the payroll wrapping room. The man in the cap and square-shouldered uniform jacket was searching for something. He reached for something. The light went out. Almost instantly a light flared behind the third window—the light from a match. The binoculars bore in. A square-shouldered and capped shadow stood just inside the grating. A bright tip glowed near its top, then lowered, raised again, glowed again, lowered. The shadow moved along the second dark window, stopped in front of the first dark window. The red tip rose once more, glowed hot once more and disappeared. And the shadow, too, disappeared.

  The lights in the stairwell window went out. The guard in the square-shouldered uniform jacket and hard-beaked cap emerged from the door at 165 Prince Street and started up toward the Commercial Street corner.

  The binoculars rose and swung up along the rear of the building, stopped on the one window that was still illuminated, the fifth window, and focused in. A gaunt, balding man in shirt sleeves stood at the wall counter to the right, making notations in a ledger. Several paces farther back and to the left a second jacketless man, resting on a knee directly in front of the open vault, lifted a white cloth money sack off a cart, held it close to his spectacled eyes, lip-read something from the attached pink sheet, then handed the bag to another coatless man standing just inside the vault. The man standing in the vault and the man kneeling before it both were wearing holsters and guns. The man at the counter to the right didn’t seem to be armed.

  A fourth Brink’s employee, also in glasses, emerged from the door at the rear, stepped forward to the counter running along the left-hand wall of the vault room, picked up a spindle and began searching through the impaled pile of yellow pages.

  “Now that’s the fella who should always have his pistol on him but don’t,” Tony said. “That fella just came in from the rotunda. He’s the rotunda guard, so there ain’t no excuse for him not carrying his pistol. But like you see, he don’t. I only seen him do it once. The fella who’s there other nights never does.”

  “What about the fifth man?” Geagan, who was watching through his own pair of binoculars, asked.

  “He’s a long crapper. He’s in the back taking that long crap of his. When he comes back, he’ll go up and take over in front of the pete. That’s his usual place. He don’t wear his pistol either.”

  The fourth Brink’s employee ripped one yellow page from the spindle and walked directly back through the door to the control room [rotunda].

  “How long does he stay in there?” asked Geagan.

  “You never know,” Pino answered. “He keeps coming in and out when it suits him.”

  “So he’s looking right into the garage half the time?”

  “Yeah.”

  A fifth Brink’s employee entered the room, sipping a Coke. He, too, was in shirt sleeves. He carried no weapon. After putting the bottle down, he walked to the front of the open vault and took over from the man who was kneeling.

  The fourth Brink’s employee emerged from the rear, took a step or two, stopped and seemed to say something.

  “He’s the tough one, isn’t he?” Geagan commented.

  “If we come through the garage, he sure as hell is,” Pino agreed.

  “Even if we come in through the front, he can give us trouble,” Mike said. “We have to get them all bunched together. We can’t be taking four of them and have a fifth one walk in on us from that position.”

  The man in the control room did pose a difficult problem, but not the only one. At this early stage Pino wasn’t sure whether the stickup should be perpetrated at night when the vault room staff was preparing to close or in the morning just as the office was opened.

  Pino spent many long pre-daybreak hours along Prince Street, gave hard consideration to taking Brink’s by sneaking in before dawn and waiting for the man who had the combination for the vault to show. But could the robbers effectively hide on the premises until then or would they be forced to seize, bind and gag each arriving company employee—employees who ent
ered the upstairs offices through two different doors in the rear as well as one in the front. Tony concluded the latter would be the most likely circumstance. He had on certain mornings counted as many as twenty-five workers going in by the 165 Prince Street door alone before the vault was opened. And what assurance was there that when the man with the combination did appear, he’d ever, under the worst of coercion, open the vault for them? Were Tony and his crew willing to torture hostages to reinforce their threats? Were they prepared to find where the safe opener lived and wait until he left for work and kidnap his family—assuming he had one—and when he arrived at Brink’s warn that the dear ones would be killed if he didn’t comply? Were they willing to kill family members? Kill hostages?

  Assuming they did get the safe open in the morning, what about the getaway? The streets in the Copps Hill area posed strategic escape problems at night and empty. After the vault had been opened and looted, it would be the beginning of rush hour; almost every avenue would be jammed with industrial and commercial traffic—it would be nearly impassable.