Big Stick-Up at Brink's!

by Behn, Noel;

  “The rigged truck’s got secret peepholes, too. We got lots of ’em put in so you can see from all directions.

  “So now we got this lovely-looking canvas truck, and them rotten bastards tried to rob us, tried to charge fifty or a hundred more than they said they would. They were six days late in delivering, too, and the excuse they give is needing to send away for the metal buttons. They didn’t have the right kind of buttons to snap her down, so they send away and try to charge us extra. Whoever heard of a hundred bucks for buttons? But there’s nothing I can do about it because Barney already paid them cash on the line.”

  Tony Pino screwing up his face and flashing his ticlike grin and hopping up and down in place as if he had to take a leak and couldn’t get his fly open—that was the description Jazz Maffie gave to show how very much Tony Pino wanted the suits and at the same time didn’t want any outsiders to know where his new plant was. Tony Pino meeting the two outsiders on a side road late at night and making them get out of their truck and first tying bandannas over their eyes and then putting brown paper bags—without eyeholes—over their heads and making them lie in the back of their own truck so they wouldn’t see where Tony Pino and Jimmy Costa were driving them—these were the nutty lengths Jazz Maffie related that nutty Tony Pino went to to get hold of the suits and make sure that the outsiders wouldn’t learn the whereabouts of his plant. Tony Pino driving the truck right under some nutty secret wall he was always talking about and letting the two outsiders take off their double masks and unloading the 200 suits and putting them on racks and then, before re-blindfolding the two outsiders, taking them over to the manhole in the back and taking off the sewer cover and warning them about the bottomless pit and dropping a couple of stones down the pit to illustrate how long it took to hit bottom and then warning the two dazed outsiders that that’s where they’d wind up, down there in the bottomless pit, if they ever told anyone about the plant—that was the finish of Jazz Maffie’s story to show just how paranoid Tony Pino was about keeping his joint a secret.

  “A plant was becoming a big problem,” Sandy Richardson relates. “We had everything set to go on the score, but we ourselves had nowhere to go. We had no plant. We couldn’t make plans about a count or even know where to pick up the guys if we didn’t have a plant.

  “Skinhead had a plant. As a matter of fact, he had several plants and he offered them. But listen to this: Skinhead refused to let anyone in those plants; Skinhead had the balls to suggest all the money be turned over to him after the score and that he would count it by himself and tell us how much there was.

  “I’ll tell you something that is hardly easy to believe—Anthony was all for that idea.

  “I told Anthony that for myself I’d call off the score rather than let Skinhead get his hands on one extra cent that wasn’t his. I believe everyone else felt this way. The count would be made with all of us there. All of us would go through the load and get rid of the bad stuff [new bills that had consecutive and therefore possibly traceable serial numbers]. All of us would divvy up the good money. If Skinhead wanted to hold the money for some of the guys, like he was supposed to, he could, after it was counted.

  “What this meant was that Anthony would have to use Blue Hill [i.e., plant/garage]. I think at that time only Costa and myself had been inside. Maybe Mike had, too, but no more than four of us.

  “But Anthony didn’t want to use it. A piece of work this size would mean you had to ditch your plant after the count. You wanted nothing that was traceable. You get rid of everything. Anthony, plain and simple, didn’t want to give up Blue Hill, so we had no place to go.”

  The man in the black DeSoto with New Jersey license plates drove past the gray Dodge standing in the Mount Hope Cemetery parking lot twice before pulling in and stopping some thirty yards away. He left the key in his car, walked in the darkness to the empty Dodge, got in and lit a cigarette. He heard his DeSoto start up and speed away.

  Costa drove the DeSoto to the adjoining Calvary Cemetery and parked in a dim service driveway. Pino got into the back, hoisted the two suitcases on the floor to the seat, opened them, snapped on his penlight and stared down at an array of brand-new pistols and revolvers. After considerable examination, he removed six .38 caliber revolvers, four .32 caliber revolvers and two .45 automatics. The suitcases were snapped shut and put back down on the floor, but not before Pino had deposited $250 in one of them.

  Costa drove the DeSoto back to the Mount Hope Cemetery parking lot, stopped, snapped the lights off and on twice before extinguishing them for good, left the engine idling, got out of the car and hurried into the bushes. He watched the dark figure of the man leave the Dodge, walk to the DeSoto, get in and drive away.

  Costa abandoned the stolen Dodge on an isolated street in Quincy, strode around the corner to his own car and headed home.

  “Joe McGinnis coming in for a full share? Oh, that was a real beauty. You could have knocked me down,” states Jimmy Costa. “For chrissakes, Tony had been screwing guys out of their shares all his life, and along comes Joe McGinnis, and Tony screws him into money.

  “When Tony brought in Barney and McGinnis, they were only supposed to have one share between the two of them. Tony said he wanted Joe in because Joe was helping with his deportation, but he would have wanted him anyways. That was the deal Tony made with Mike and Sandy to let Joe in, Joe only getting a half a share. The trouble was, no one outside of them and me knew it.

  “When Mike and Sandy and Jimma didn’t want to show up at all those crazy meets in Tony’s house where nothing happened, Tony acted pissed off, but it was okay with him because Joe’s share was riding. Tony let a lot of things ride on purpose. If you let something ride too long, you forget about it. That’s what happened with Joe’s share. But the time we got around to working out all the things Joe was supposed to do it was too late to bring up him only getting a half share. Sandy and Mike are the kind of guys who aren’t going to screw up the works when it’s going good. They won’t screw it up if it’s going bad either. So they kept quiet and swallowed Tony weaseling Joe in for an extra half share. But I don’t think Mike ever forgave Tony for it.”

  Joe McGinnis’ assignments were indeed numerous and important, as Pino outlined:

  “Okay, we all agreed Joe don’t count no money by himself. But we can’t have all the other guys at the same place counting too. Right after the haul lots of people have to get back in circulation. So we decided some other fellas will stay with the sugar and count up maybe two or three million. We don’t want all the sugar in the same place overnight. So that’s Joe’s first responsibility—taking the first couple of million when it’s been counted by somebody else.

  “Okay, the real count comes the next day. At noontime. Whichever fellas wanna be there can. It’s always up to the fellas if they wanna be at a count or not. With Joe around I figure every one who can humanly be there will.

  “Okay, now we have the second count. We divvy some of the money there. Then Joe takes what’s left. That’s another responsibility. We know what we got in good money and bad money. Joe gets rid of all the bad stuff. If we got big bills—thousanders—he burns them, too. Now lots of the guys don’t wanna have their share on ’em after a big score like this. So Joe will hold it for them. He takes all the good money and puts it someplace safe. He’s the keep. When the fellas want some of their share, Joe delivers it to them. He ain’t only the keep, he’s the delivery boy too. He’s gotta get rid of everything else, too. He’s gotta get rid of all the sacks we lug the money out in. We been watching Brink’s for a year, and that money of theirs is packed in bags or wrapped in paper. Sometimes that stack of thousands has paper bands around them. He’s gotta get rid of all that, too. So that’s what he’s gotta do when it comes to money.

  “Now he’s got other things to do. He’s responsible for ditching that rigged truck. He takes the truck away from the piece of work and scrubs her clean. Gets rid of the prints. Then he strips off the ribbing and burns i
t.

  “And all the little white laundry sacks, they stay on the truck, too. And the rope and tape they stay on the truck. Everything that stays on the truck after the score, that’s what Joe’s gotta get rid of.

  “No one touches the pistols,” Tony pointed out. “The pistols don’t stay on the truck. They come off the truck after the job, and I take care of them. The pistols are my responsibility.”

  Disposal of the costumes was Jimmy Costa’s postrobbery assignment.

  A meet was made in Tony’s living room and the weapons brought out. Jazz selected the .45 caliber automatic. Mike opted for a .38 caliber revolver. Sandy favored a .32 caliber revolver. Jimma, Gus, Specs and Henry were recalled picking either .38s or .32s.

  At another meet, Tony watched intently as Gus and Henry, both in their regular topcoats and soft hats, emptied their trousers pockets, walked up to two tape marks on the floor, closed their eyes, walked forward with one hand outstretched, stopped when Tony touched that hand, seated themselves cross-legged, took the bulging white laundry bag Tony gave them and, waited for further instructions with their eyes closed.

  “We practiced putting on the costumes,” Geagan relates. “We marked out the back of the truck on Tony’s floor. We knew it was going to be dead black in the truck. We couldn’t let any lights go on in the back of the truck, and we weren’t letting anyone say a word back there when we went in. We don’t want any cars on the road driving past and seeing a cigarette being lit in a truck they were supposed to think was empty. We don’t want a car pulling up next to us at a stoplight and hearing voices inside a truck they’re supposed to think is empty. We don’t want any kind of noise back there. And we don’t want any noise when they’re sneaking up to the vault. That was why we had the men empty their pockets. We don’t want change rattling. When the men get on the truck, all they will carry in their pockets is a dollar bill or two to get home on or their car keys. We’ll take that from them, too.

  “We practiced everything they had to do on the truck in Tony’s living room. And we practiced everything we would have to do in the joint there, too. Then I took all the men into Brink’s, and we practiced right there in Brink’s. We practiced a half dozen times in Brink’s.”

  The light in the fifth window went out. Pino, Richardson and Geagan waited on the highest terrace of the playground stairway until the Pontiac they knew two Brink’s employees would be driving off in passed overhead on Hull Street. They entered the common garage on Hull Street and made their way around and into the Brink’s offices.

  Doors were the main concern, particularly the locks in the doors beyond the three nearest the Prince Street main entrance for which they had keys.

  “We were considering making even more keys,” states Sandy Richardson, “but no doors beyond the first three were ever locked. From that corridor [i.e., the corridor just beyond the No. 3 door which opened into the front hallway] there were three more doors before you got to the screen in front of the vault [i.e., No. 4 door from the corridor in the counting room, No. 5 door, Dutch doors from the counting room into the payroll wrapping room, No. 6 door from payroll wrapping into the front of the vault room].

  “There was some concern over the gate going into the vault [room]. It was a slide gate that latched from the other side. A pickup latch. As I remember, that was our biggest problem. We would be standing with our pistols pointing through the screen and telling the workers inside to come and lift that latch. We knew how it worked fairly well by now since we’d been opening it for almost a full year. If those workers balked and made a move for a gun, one of our guns might go off, and we didn’t want that to happen.

  “None of us are killers. We did all this work and planning to make sure no one got hurt—including ourselves. Even if no one got hit, guns going off would blow the job, so this gate was vital. That was why it was vital that two of the guys got into the back of that room [the vault room via the door from the check-in room] when we got up to the screen. The workers wouldn’t feel inclined to try something if they were caught in the middle. All we wanted was to make sure they threw down their guns. If they didn’t feel inclined to open the latch, one of our guys from the back could do it or Jazz could climb over the top. That screen wall was about eight feet high, and Jazz had climbed over it in nothing flat once or twice.”

  The two men standing around back would have to pass the door in the money cage, crawl through the metal box opening which had no door and enter the vault room through the door from the check-in room. Neither of these two doors had ever been found locked.

  “I believe this is when we decided Henry would lead the guys in,” states Sandy. “Henry was our best pickman. If any of those doors inside were locked—and that would have been the first time that ever happened to us—Henry could open them in a wink. Therefore, there was no need to make any more keys. I doubt if we would have had time if we had wanted to. We were just about to go. All that was needed was a plant.”

  Jazz Maffie responded to the call from Stretch, left Jimmy O’Keefe’s restaurant, drove to the Harbor Motor Terminal, pulled in beside the gas pump and rolled down his window.

  “How much you want, Mister?” Pino, decked out in greasy overalls, asked.

  “Who’s paying?” Jazz replied.

  “You’re paying, this is honest goddamn gas.”

  “Clean my window and give me a road map, okay?”

  “I can’t talk to you, doing that. I gotta talk to you filling your tank with gas.”

  “Fill my tires with air.”

  “The air pump’s busted. Tell you what—I’ll only charge ya twelve cents a gallon.”

  “The guy who split the other half of the gas truck you grabbed only charges me six cents.”

  “Why do you always have to bust my back?”

  Jazz shrugged, smiled, got out of the car and watched Pino fit the nozzle into his tank.

  “I been thinking,” Tony began. “Why don’t we take the sugar to your father’s house?”

  “Oh, that’s nice of you, but my father’s got diabetes. He never uses sugar.”

  “Not that kinda sugar. The real sugar. The haul.”

  “Oh, that sugar.”

  “Look, we gotta arch it south, right? We can’t be going over no goddamn bridges. We gotta go down around where most of the fellas are getting on or off.”

  “Where are we getting on and off?”

  “I’m working on that. But it’s gonna be south. Your father’s house is south, see?’”

  “So’s your house.”

  “My house is a goddamn apartment. You can’t take seven million bucks into your own apartment and count it.”

  “Oh, you wanna take it to my father’s house and count it, too?”

  “Yeah, do the count.”

  “With my father and mother and my sister there?”

  “We’ll treat ’em to a movie.”

  “What’s playing?”

  “Whaddaya mean what’s playing?”

  “At the movies.”

  “How the hell should I know what’s playing? I don’t even know when we’re going to hit the joint, so how can I know what’ll be playing when we do?”

  “Oh, well, when you find out, let me know.”

  “Fuck the goddamn movies. What about using your father’s house?”

  “How can I get him outta the house until I know what’s at the movies?”

  “What the goddamn shit ass movies got to do with anything?”

  “Unless we know what’s playing, we won’t be able to get him out of the house. He don’t like movies, so it’s gotta be something good.”

  “Whaddaya mean he don’t like movies?”

  “He doesn’t speak English too well.”

  “My father doesn’t speak English any better than your father and he loves movies.”

  “Oh, well, let’s send your father to the movies, land we’ll take the money to his house. He lives farther south than anybody.”

  “We can’t do that!”
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  “Why not?”

  “My father would goddamn kill me if I pulled a trick like that.”

  “A trick like what?”

  “Bring eleven fucking thieves and a hot haul into his house. He’d go through the floor.”

  “Well, I don’t know if my father would go through the floor or kill anybody. All he’d do would be call up the cops and get us all thrown in the can!”

  Sandy wouldn’t hear of taking the haul to his home, and anyway he had plans for the house after the haul. Costa was even more adamant when it came to displacing his wife and children. Henry Baker turned almost as gray as his hair on his graying head when he was solicited. Tony had better sense than to suggest such an idea to Mike Geagan. Gus and Specs lived in hotel rooms when they were in Boston, and no one even considered driving as far out as Stoughton, where Specs’s wife and adopted son lived and Gus’ people had a farm.

  Pino used these rejections and impossibilities to reurge the gang to accept Joe McGinnis’ offer. The gang was agreeable—if Joe would let them all come to his plant for the count. Joe still wouldn’t hear of it and suggested they use Tony’s plant at Blue Hill. Tony still wouldn’t hear of it.

  Maybe Joe McGinnis had stolen more than $109,000 on a single armed robbery in the past, but none of the other crewmen had. Not that the $109,000 haul from Sturtevant was all that paltry. It had set a new record for the Greater Boston Area. It held up pretty well against what journalists commonly considered the largest armed theft in U.S. history—$427,000 taken from the Ruble Ice Company in Brooklyn, New York in 1932. There were larger thefts on the books—more than $1,000,000 taken off a train in Illinois and close to $2,000,000 coming from a bank in Nebraska—but these were the distant past, and the hauls included stocks and bonds as well as cash, and newspaper statisticians tended to stick solely to currency taken, so as far as most were concerned, Ruble was king and Sturtevant was a member of the court.