by Larry Lawton
They got away cleanly, but the robbery was a small one.
“I didn’t get much,” he said. “My take ended up being about $130,000. This was where I learned my lesson not to rob retail stores.”
The closest Lawton came to serious legal problems came in December of 1994 after a trip to New York, where he met his buddy Joey Grillo. They two men were close. Grillo made a lot of money selling cocaine, a business Lawton chose to avoid.
After one of Lawton’s robberies Joey asked if he could borrow $35,000. Lawton, flush with cash, knew Grillo was good for it and made the loan. While Lawton was in New York taking care of business at the Homestretch, Joey met him there and repaid the money. Lawton was driving back to Florida by himself, and he wanted company so he flew up Junior, one of his crew, to drive back with him. Lawton warned Junior in advance, “If we should ever get stopped by a cop, just tell them you wash my limousines and you know nothing.”
In addition to paying Lawton the $35,000 in cash, for the trip back Joey gave him a gift of five grams of cocaine in half-gram packets, ten little packets in all. Lawton put the packets in the center console of his rented Mitsubishi Diamante.
Lawton had been drinking at the Homestretch Bar before he left.
“It was the beginning of December, and I was freezing my balls off,” said Lawton. “It was two in the morning, and I was going 80, and I got stopped by two New Jersey State troopers.”
It was a rent-a-car, and the police ran his name and number. One trooper went to the passenger door, and the other ordered him to stand outside behind the car. The first trooper leaned into the car and opened the glove compartment. The $35,000 in cash fell out right in front of Junior, who was sitting in the passenger seat. There were stacks of hundred dollar bills.
The cop asked Lawton “Where did you get this?”
“I sold my Corvette,” Lawton said.
“You have a receipt?”
“No, I sold it on the streets of Brooklyn. That’s the way you do things in Brooklyn. A guy offered me money for the car, and I gave him the car and title. The title was in the glove compartment, and I gave him the car.”
The other policeman meanwhile ordered Junior to get out by the side of the road. When his partner opened the middle divider, he discovered the packets of cocaine.
Said Lawton, “Right then and there they took me down to one of those outpost station houses they have in Jersey. I was sitting in the holding cell, and I knew what they were thinking, that I was a drug dealer. They were figuring out what they could do to me.
“No doubt they knew I was associated with the Gambinos. They called in a detective. The first thing I wanted to do is talk to my lawyer. I called him. It was two in the morning. His wife answered and said he was at a bachelor party. I beeped him. I put 911 on the beeper, a sign of an emergency.
“While I was waiting for him to return my call, they put me back in the holding cell. I could hear them interrogating Junior. They said to him, “You’re involved with organized crime. That guy is no good. What are you doing up here?”
“Junior said, ‘All I know is I wash the guy’s limousine, and he told me to come up and drive down with him.’ Junior was sticking strong.
Lawton’s lawyer, Keith Belzer, called him back.
“Larry, you know the drill. Don’t say anything. When you get to the county jail, you’ll be out in no time.” Belzer’s father owned the Hound Dog bail bond company, across the street from the Ft. Lauderdale courthouse.
Lawton went in front of a magistrate judge, who sent him to the Atlantic County jail. They impounded the Diamante.
Lawton was sitting in a cell wearing his Bally of Switzerland shoes. A man in the cell with him was distraught, moaning and groaning that he couldn’t raise a hundred and fifty dollar bail.
Lawton told him, “Shut the fuck up, you fucking punk. When I get out of here, I’ll bail you out too. Just shut the fuck up.”
“Will you? Will you.”
“Sure.” And he did.
“I was treated like gold there,” said Lawton. “They let me make phone calls. The cops who arrested me were up all night.
“I said to one of them, ‘You know I’m going to be out of here before they finish the paperwork, don’t you, you prick. What do you think you got here? You got nothing. You got me with $35,000. What else you got? Five grams of coke. That’s petty.’
Lawton and Junior each were given a $25,000 bond. Lawton returned to his holding cell and called his lawyer. His bail bondsman in Fort Lauderdale posted his bond, and he was out. It took all day. It was six at night when Lawton walked out of the cell.
Lawton called the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, and they sent a stretch limousine to the Atlantic County Jail to get him..
“You want to call a cab?” he was asked.
“I got a car coming,” Lawton said. He sure did. A limousine.
“I didn’t have any money,” said Lawton. “They took it all. I only had a few hundred dollars in my wallet, and they actually left that in there. I took the limo to the Taj Mahal, and I was so tired I almost fell asleep on the stairs.
“The next morning I flew home on the first flight from Philly. It left at seven in the morning. Missy was waiting for me.
A few months later Lawton and his attorney returned to New Jersey, and they had to go back a second time and a third. In the end his lawyer made a deal.
“I got five years probation, and in exchange the courts and the cops would steal $12,000 of my $35,000,” said Lawton. “On top of stealing my $12,000, they wanted me to pay court costs and pay the probation, because I had to be transferred from New Jersey to Fort Lauderdale. Who’s the real criminal?”
Lawton said to his lawyer, “Hey, what the fuck is going on? I do the extorting around here.”
They dropped the case against Junior.
“I paid cash to make it go away. Over a couple years my legal fees cost me $70,000. Who was robbing who?”
CHAPTER 7
The Last Heist
Lawton decided to hit the road with his three assistants to see if there was a promising jewelry store to rob in the state of Pennsylvania. He wasn’t going to bother looking in the city of Philadelphia proper, but was sure there would be a promising store in its suburbs. He found the perfect target in Fairless Hills in Philadelphia’s outskirts.
“It was in a plaza, and the angle was right, everything was right,” he said.
Lawton went into the store. There was only the owner. As always, he did his best to get to know the man, and when he was standing away from the buzzer, he jumped the counter, put a gun in his face, and put flex cuffs on his hands and feet.
As usual, Lawton shouted at his victim to get down and be quiet.
Lawton and one accomplice were emptying the store of all the diamonds, when they saw a woman walk up to the window, cup her hands, look in, and see the robbery taking place. Lawton would later learn that the woman had her antenna up for anything unusual because a couple weeks before someone had gone onto the roof of her store and stole an air conditioning unit. Because of the air conditioning unit robbery, Lawton found out later, she came by to investigate when she heard Larry yelling at the jewelry store owner.
“We had to leave in a flash,” he said. “The owner had five guns in the safe. We had already put them in my bag along with the jewels.”
Lawton usually watched the tied-up victim up to the last second, but because of the woman looking in the window, he was distracted. The owner somehow got loose, and while Larry and his crew were running out of the store, he ran and found another gun he had hidden.
“As usual we had left our car -- with a stolen license plate -- parked in front of the store,” said Lawton. “We booked outside, and just as we left the store shots rang out. The front window of the store shattered right next to us. I was
thinking, Holy fuck, the guy got out of his handcuffs and found a gun. I don’t know how he did it, but he did. We sprinted a few steps to the car and jumped in.”
Lawton was behind the steering wheel, and as he looked up through the windshield, he could see the store owner level his gun right at his head. Lawton ducked. The store owner shot. The bullet went right through the windshield dead center right in middle of the driver’s seat. The bullet scraped the top of Lawton’s head and struck his brother, who was in the passenger seat, in his back and then in his arm.
Lawton’s brother screamed, “I’m hit. I’m hit.”
“Where? You all right?”
“Just get out of here.”
“I’m heading to the hospital?” Lawton would have dropped him there if it meant saving his life.
“No, no, get back to Brooklyn.”
It was a Streets of San Francisco getaway. Lawton turned the wheel, spun the tires, raced through the parking lot, and took off heading for Brooklyn. In his rearview mirror, as he sped away, Lawton could see the jewelry store owner aiming his pistol.
He had his route all planned. He knew the plate was fake, so he wasn’t worried about anyone taking down the number. Lawton remained calm. He had planned for contingencies like this.
His biggest problem was that there was a bullet hole right in the middle of his windshield, and he had to pay tolls. Lawton was sure the police were informing all the toll takers about the robbery.
Be on the lookout for an armed robber with shots fired. With a description of his rental car.
Lawton knew what to do. He pulled up behind an 18-wheeler, obscuring the view of his windshield from the toll taker, and when it was his turn to pay, he rolled a few feet past the toll booth, reached back and gave the toll taker the money. That way the toll taker couldn’t see the bullet hole in his windshield.
As he was paying, he heard the radio in the toll booth announce, “Be on the lookout….”
A minute later, and the toll taker might have paid more attention.
We got away with it, Lawton thought.
It took two hours for Lawton to drive to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He pulled up in front of the Homestretch Bar. There was dried blood on the top of his head and the side of his face. His brother had blood on his arm and back. His arm burned and pained him.
Lawton and his brother ran upstairs. Friends cleaned Lawton’s wound. He had nothing more than a scratch. His brother had a bullet in him. They patched his brother up and were able to get the trickle of blood to stop. Lawton’s plan was to fly his brother back to Florida and have him treated there.
Because Lawton’s rent-a-car was from Florida, not New York, he could replace the windshield. If the car had been from New York there would have been the registration in the window, and he wouldn’t have been able to replace it.
“I needed to get rid of the hole before I drove home,” said Lawton, “so Willie the Weeper called Bensonhurst Auto Glass, which is all connected.
“‘We need the car fixed.’”
Lawton went with the car because the diamonds were in the trunk.
“You don’t ask questions in Brooklyn,” he said. “They put in a new windshield, so I didn’t have to worry when I brought the car back.
Lawton called a buddy, a building contractor who used to be on the fringes of Raymond Patriarca’s mob in Rhode Island.
He said, “Hey, Uncle Mikey’s, Davey’s been hit. We have to find a doctor for him. He can’t go to the hospital with a bullet.”
“Uncle Mikey,” who hung out at the race track, called a doctor -- a veterinarian he knew from the track. There are a lot of knockaround guys at the track. This guy was one of them.
The vet said he could operate on his brother on a table in the home he was building. Lawton thanked him, but decided it would be better if his brother flew home so his mother could take care of him.
“I got my brother a flight,” said Lawton. “This was before 9/11. You could pay cash. You didn’t have to show an ID card. I put my brother on a plane and called my mother, who has been a nurse forever. My mom knew what to do, but she didn’t know what I did. I said, ‘Mom, Davey and I were playing with guns in a bar, and Davey got shot, and he has a bullet in him. You have to take care of him. We can’t call the cops. You know I have a record from the Atlantic city bust.’ I’ll go to prison.
“My mother used to be an emergency room nurse in Westchester Square hospital in the Bronx. She worked in a clinic in Palm Bay. She got some penicillin, and she fixed my brother up. She could see the bullet wasn’t in a bad spot and felt more damage would be done trying to take it out than leaving it there. My brother was lucky he had my mother. Without her, he might have died. Or gotten his arm amputated by a veterinarian.
“I flew my wife up to drive home with me. I drove to Little Italy, dropped off the diamonds and got my $70,000 for the job. On the way back to Florida I pulled into a rest stop along I-95, took the five guns from the jewelry store robbery we just did, and back by the picnic tables threw them into a lake.”
He continued his trip back to Fort Lauderdale without incident.
*
After the Fairless heist, the FBI flooded the area with agents and local police. They went to every jewelry store in the area. They asked, “Did anyone come in with the following MO: A nice guy coming in with a suit, asking about diamonds.”
Lawton’s usual MO was to case many jewelry stores in the area before robbing one. He had walked into a jewelry store about two miles away from the actual robbery. Lawton and an employee, perhaps the owner, a Jewish lady, discussed his buying a diamond worth $10,000. Lawton didn’t know whether she was suspicious or just wanted to offer him a better deal after he walked out, but she followed him and took down his license plate number.
“While I was casing her place I had not yet put on the stolen plate,” said Lawton, “so she got the license plate number of my rental car, gave it to the police, and they found it registered under the name of Tony Banko, my friend who rented the car for me. I had used his credit card. I was listed as the co-driver.
“Well, Fat Tony weighs 350 pounds. I don’t look like Tony. The FBI saw there was an alternate driver, and sure enough, it was me. They ran my name through the data base and saw I had a record for possession of cocaine and that there had been $35,000 in the glove compartment of my car.
“Then the FBI took my picture to all the jewelry stores around the country that I had hit, and they said, ‘Do you know this guy?’
There was a chorus that responded: “That’s the guy who robbed me.”
“Six of twenty store owners I robbed pin-pointed me exactly, and they had a bunch more who were 95 percent sure it was me,” said Lawton. “They had tapes of me buying coffee at a WaWa store in Savannah, Georgia. I never used a mask, because I never anticipated I would be caught. An eyewitness doesn’t mean much if you can’t tie it to anything.
“I was golfing the day I was arrested. My wife had said to me, ‘I think I’m being followed.’ My mind was thinking of who it might be. Is it the cops? Is it another mob family trying to rob me? I wondered.
“I called a friend of mine and told him to take all the guns out of my townhouse. So everything was out of the house when on a Monday afternoon at around five my wife Missy was taking a walk to the mailbox with my fifteen-month old daughter Ashley when I heard her scream, ‘They’re coming.’
“I was sitting around a table with my brother and another guy who was involved in my bookmaking operation. Since this was a Monday they had come down from central Florida to pick up the week’s bookmaking sheets and records.”
Lawton went to the door, and it flew open. The FBI came running in with guns in my face. He turned around, and he could see more agents coming through his patio holding guns and rifles. The next day the Palm Bay police surrounded his mother’s h
ouse in Palm Bay, Florida. His sister answered the door.
“We have a warrant for the arrest of Lawrence Lawton.”
“He’s in jail,” his sister said.
“When I was arrested I had about $3,000 in cash in my pocket, and I was wearing expensive jewelry,” said Lawton. “I asked the FBI guy if I could give it to my wife. He said I could. The FBI wasn’t bad. When they caught me, they said, ‘Man, we’ve been looking for you for a long time.’”
The cops also arrested Tony Banko because he had rented the car. They drove Lawton to Opolaka, where they had built a new FBI headquarters. When he arrived there he saw that they also had Tony. Lawton’s thought was, I hope he shuts up. Tony knew what Lawton did, of course, but he was never involved in a robbery. Tony said, “All I know is I rented a car for him because he doesn’t have a credit card.” And they ended up letting Tony go. There was no evidence for him to be arrested.
They then took Lawton to a federal holding facility in Miami. He was hoping to win bond, because if he got out on bail, I was going to flee to Costa Rica.
“My dad and I were very close,” said Lawton. “I took him all over the country golfing. I even took him to the Bahamas, Hawaii, and everywhere. My father, who was crying at the hearing, offered to put up his house for bail. I would have paid him back as I had a lot of friends who I was protecting, and they would have given me the money.
“My lawyer said, ‘Your honor, the government says he’s a flight risk. He had a case in New Jersey in 1994, and he flew back and forth from Florida, and he never jumped bail.’”
When the judge agreed, the prosecutor jumped up and said, “Your honor, “He has ties to organized crime. He’s a danger to society. You can’t give him bail.”
The judge was silent for a few seconds, and then said, “Okay, he’s a threat to society.” Lawton was remanded. No bail.
Said Lawton, “Then I was kidnapped – not exactly but pretty much kidnapped -- at three in the morning I was pulled from my cell, handcuffed, shackled, and put on a plane and taken to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. For three days I was in transit. I was fed nothing but a bagged lunch, which consisted of an apple, a pint of juice, and a pack of outdated stale crackers. I had no shower, and I stunk.