Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

by Bill Mason

  There was over five thousand dollars in that safe, which may not seem like a lot of money now, but in 1962, to a new family man working as a building manager, it was nearly a year’s salary. Nevertheless, about a week later I offered half of it to Sam. After all, he’d tipped me off to the opportunity. To my great surprise, he wouldn’t take a penny, no matter how hard I tried to convince him he had it coming.

  I finally gave up, but I had to ask: “Why me? What made you think I’d do it?”

  He shot me a cockeyed, knowing grin. “Had a strong feeling you maybe had, I don’t know”—he waved a hand in the air as he searched for the right words—“kind of a knack.”

  That took me back a bit. I hadn’t even known I had a knack. What had Sam seen in me I hadn’t known was there? “But if you didn’t want any part of it, why put someone up to it in the first place?”

  The grin started to fade. “Owner’s a real sonofabitch. It was right, somebody ripped him off.”

  And he figured—somehow—that I was the guy. Interesting. It wasn’t like Sam, as straight as they come, had special insight into the criminal personality. He’s been a friend of mine for over forty years and I don’t believe he’s ever had so much as a parking ticket.

  Kind of a knack. Even while I was rolling that safe along the creek bed, I’d been struck by how many things I’d failed to anticipate that, in retrospect, seemed so obvious. I’d never cracked a safe before, so I shouldn’t have assumed I could do it right on the spot. Maybe I should have scoped out someplace closer to move it to, so I could come back with the car to pick it up. Should I have rented a truck or borrowed one?

  Despite that self-criticism, I had a great sense of accomplishment at having been able to pull it off anyway, to think on my feet when problems arose, without having panicked or given up and without any help. It wasn’t lost on me how great a role luck had played in my eventual success, but I also credited myself with the ability to take advantage of that luck.

  I decided that Sam was right: I had a knack.

  A lot of things started clicking after that experience. As scary as it was to have been doing something that foolish and risky, there was an eerie feeling of familiarity about it. It wasn’t one of those past-lives kinds of things, or déjà vu, exactly, but something else, like putting on a pair of shoes that look weird as hell but fit perfectly right out of the box, as though they’d been made with you in mind. Strangely enough, the fact that I now had a nice pile of cash—ostensibly the reason for having done the job in the first place—seemed of almost secondary importance.

  I’d always been fascinated by crime, the outlaw aspect combined with the extraordinary creativity of the more celebrated criminals in both real life and fiction. I was certainly not unique in that fascination. Newsstands in the fifties overflowed with magazines about crime fighters and criminals, writers like Mickey Spillane regularly topped the bestseller lists, and On the Waterfront, Twelve Angry Men, Witness for the Prosecution and Anatomy of a Murder were all Oscar-nominated movies when I was a teenager. Crime as mass entertainment is a staple of American culture, and the bad guys are portrayed sympathetically at least as often as the good guys. (If you don’t believe me, who were you rooting for in The Godfather?)

  I remember when thieves broke a hole through the roof of the Franklin Simon department store on Shaker Square. The papers described how they ripped the layers off the safe and cleaned it out. The whole town was talking about it, but very few people were shaking their heads and clucking their tongues over how awful it was; instead, their faces were lit up with excitement and wonder as they endlessly recounted every detail. Little kids were clambering around rooftops pretending to be the robbers, and I don’t remember any of them pretending to be the police or detectives.

  As I mentioned earlier, without realizing it I was getting schooled in the fine art of thievery from several quarters, starting with those apartment-building maintenance guys I spent a lot of time with. But all that was just technical stuff; what remained was for me to be around people for whom the criminal life wasn’t the distant, unimaginable world “normal” citizens thought it was. I’d bought my ’49 Ford convertible from a man named Tony Tarrascavage, who owned an auto body shop on the next block. I hung around that shop a lot and was pretty handy and quick to learn, so Tony taught me how to use an oxyacetylene cutting torch just to give me something to do and keep me from getting underfoot. His shop was a hangout for a lot of shady guys, many of whom are now prematurely dead or serving long prison sentences. Once they got used to me, they no longer clammed up when I was around. They talked about crime constantly—and knowledgeably—and it was fascinating to listen to their conversations. At first it threw me pretty good, because these characters weren’t just turning over garbage cans or throwing eggs at cars, but it’s said you can get used to damned near anything, and after a while I got used to the idea that there were a lot of people in the world who didn’t live like my parents. The first time you hear about a bank robbery from an actual participant it blows your mind, but after the tenth or twentieth time it loses its power to shock, and after that it starts to sound almost normal. When you spend a lot of time inside this strange and unfamiliar world and begin to see that career criminals aren’t necessarily a bunch of snarling, wild-eyed dogs, what they do starts to seem less and less alien and forbidding. I imagine that professional assassins, whether employed by governments or gangsters, go through the same kind of psychological adaptation until they’re like Clemenza in The Godfather telling one of his men not to forget the cannoli after they just whacked another wiseguy.

  People with something to hide tended to open up to me. It might have had to do with the fact that I was a patient and interested listener, or maybe that’s just flattering myself and there was something about me that told career criminals I was a fellow traveler at heart. I honestly don’t know, but throughout my life people were always telling me things they probably wouldn’t even tell their shrinks. And in the environments I was hanging out in, a lot of hardened crooks told me a lot of interesting things.

  Still, at that point I didn’t see myself as a career criminal, just an ordinary guy dedicated to his family and his business. Our son, Mark, was born about a year after I hit the golf course, and I didn’t pull another robbery until another six months had gone by, and that was a purely opportunistic and unproductive situation: A lady was out at the opera for an evening; I broke into her apartment and got very little (although I did get my first nickname in the papers: the “Opera Burglar”). Like an unwitting gambling junkie, I really believed that all I needed was one great score, and that would be it for me, and I was cocky enough to think I was ready to pull off something significant before calling it quits. I had no idea that I was about to uncover an irresistible appetite that had nothing at all to do with money.

  4

  Luck

  A MAJOR score is an intricate puzzle that needs to get solved, but all the detailed planning and meticulous preparation in the world don’t mean a thing if the gods aren’t on your side. Luck is a critical factor, and it would seem to be the only one you can’t do anything about, although, as golfer Ben Hogan once put it: “The more I practice, the luckier I get.”

  On the other hand, Hogan never pushed his luck by trying to rob a safe owned by the Mob.

  In the months following John F. Kennedy’s assassination there was a sadness in the air, the feeling that something had changed forever, but nobody was quite sure what. No one seemed to know how to behave or what was to be done next, as if we were all in some kind of strange limbo, waiting for a sign that it was appropriate to move on. That pervasive uncertainty weighed on me; I got restless and itchy and decided I needed to go out and steal something big. I can’t say I’d been particularly vigilant for opportunities after the miniature golf course and “opera” job, but now I concentrated, trying to push the process a little instead of just waiting for something to fall into my lap.

  Which is not to say that I was now
a full-fledged thief—after all, I’d done only two jobs in as many years. But I’d done them well and thought that if I could pull off one more great big one, I’d be set forever and would never have to do it again. A truly original thought, that one.

  There was a very exclusive private club I’d been going to one or two afternoons a week, an obvious source, but I hadn’t really worked it. I decided to become more aggressive, not just listening in on random snatches of conversation but poking here and there, drawing people out with some innocent-sounding questions.

  This club was the kind where all of the members had their own keys to the front door. It was located in a Cleveland landmark known as the Highlander, a complex that included a good-sized hotel and a number of upscale shops and restaurants. It was a place where the upper crust could let loose and feel secure, because the Highlander was owned by a man named “Big Ange” Lonardo and his cousin “Little Ange.” Big Ange was underboss of the Cleveland Mafia, and if there was one thing the Mob was particularly good at, it was protecting their business interests. They were not about to let anybody hassle the clientele, nor would the Lonardos themselves ever try to take a customer down, because rich people with money to burn constituted a renewable but fickle revenue source. Let those paying patrons get the slightest suspicion that the Highlander was less than a safe haven and they’d move on to another watering hole in a New York second.

  The most visible part of the complex was a large and very swank supper club that offered nightly entertainment. Along with the old-money crowd from neighborhoods such as Shaker Heights, it hosted a lot of heavy-hitting politicos, businessmen and hoods. It was the spot in town at the time for those who wanted to be seen rubbing shoulders with others who wanted to be seen, and its exclusivity derived primarily from its high prices.

  The key club, on the other hand, was truly exclusive, populated by the real elite whose concern was privacy, not visibility, and who wanted the company of others similarly inclined. It was expensively fitted out, the food and drinks were first-rate, and the waitresses, all clad in Playboy Bunny–style attire, were beautiful.

  I didn’t have my own key to the club. That’s because I wasn’t actually a member. I just picked the lock whenever I wanted to get in. It had only two pins, and I’d done it so often I could let myself in as fast as someone with a legitimate key, so I no longer had to wait until nobody else was around. (Later in life, friends would joke that I picked locks when I was in a hurry because using a key was too slow.) Once inside I simply acted as if I belonged, and no one ever questioned my presence. They all thought I was a big shot in real estate, a business I knew something about and could discuss knowledgeably if I had to.

  The clientele was composed mostly of business executives, unwinding after a stressful day—or sometimes in the middle of one. The club generally opened at around eleven in the morning, and by noon there were a surprisingly large number of people already drinking.

  I was accepted in the club as a regular by virtue of my frequent presence and air of belonging. The waitresses pretty much knew what I was up to, although not why. They just thought I was a well-dressed, not-painful-to-look-at gate crasher who enjoyed the club and its denizens. They all liked me, especially after they thought I’d started up a thing with Rose Marie, who handled the bar and padded my drinks onto other people’s expense-account-subsidized bar bills so I never had to pay.

  Since my function was to listen and learn, I didn’t say much, mostly just grunted and nodded encouragingly at others who felt compelled to tell a complete stranger intimate details of their lives. Assuming I was a kindred spirit in the brotherhood of loose capitalist ethics, they casually revealed tales of indictable business practices as though they were recounting the weekend’s golf scores. Had I been a blackmailer or an extortionist, I would have been in hog heaven, but I was a budding thief and none of this was doing me much good.

  A week or two after I’d decided to turn up the juice a notch, I was in the Highlander restaurant, drinking coffee and watching the sun come up. The restaurant was closed, and only employees and their friends like me were in there. I don’t know if it was because I’d been looking a bit bored of late or restless or what, but Rose Marie poured herself a cup of coffee and said, “Did you know there was another club? A private one?”

  Something about the way she said it put me on alert, as though she were letting slip a secret she’d debated with herself about telling me. I forced myself into feigned indifference and looked at her. “That so?”

  She nodded. “But not in the hotel. Couple miles away, I’m not sure where.”

  “Whose owns it?”

  “The Lonardos.”

  Now I couldn’t hide my surprise. These were the same guys who owned the key club. “Why a second club?”

  She shrugged. “Beats me. But I think there’s gambling there.” She took another sip, then set the cup down and started for the door. “What I hear, it’s high rollers only.”

  I thought I caught a petulant look on her face, which I didn’t understand at first. Was she afraid I was getting bored with the key club—and, by implication, with her company—and looking to move on? By the time that realization dawned on me, it was too late for me to say anything to assuage her worry.

  “I think Vinny’s a member, if you really want to find out,” she called back over her shoulder before heading out through the hotel lobby.

  To a thief, one tidbit of inside information can be worth more than a truckload of fancy tools.

  “Vinny” was Vinny Ovino, a regular at the key club. He was a drunk and a heavy gambler, the kind who would place a bet on which of two sugar cubes a fly would land on first, which explained where his money went but not where it came from. I knew him because he lived in one of the luxury buildings I managed at Shaker Square.

  Ovino was a real character, always swaggering around and bragging, but he seemed harmless enough and people tolerated him because he was colorful. He’d pay the bar girls one or two at a time to sit in his car and watch him play with himself, which was pretty easy money once they got used to it, and he paid well.

  More than anything, Ovino liked to talk, especially about himself, and it didn’t take long to get him to tell me about the other club, which was only open on weekends. The main attraction, as Rose Marie had surmised, was gambling. There was heavy book in horse racing, football and baseball, as well as high-stakes poker games, backgammon and craps.

  Everything about it screamed money at me. Serious money, too, because if someone like me had never even heard of it, this was an operation that didn’t need to advertise.

  Ovino looked at me slyly, then leaned in so close I could have gotten drunk off his breath. “Y’wanna see it?” he said with a wink.

  I pretended to think about it for a second, then said, “Nah . . . sounds a little rich for my blood.”

  He straightened back up and frowned. “Tell ya the truth, Bill,” he said, with what looked like an effort-filled reining in of his braggadocio, “it’s a little rich for mine.” He took a small swig of his Manhattan. “But the pussy is top-shelf!”

  I breathed a sigh of relief that I’d gotten off the hook so easily. There were two reasons I didn’t want to go there. First, I didn’t have the kind of scratch to participate in the gaming. I’m sure it looked like a warm, friendly place with a lot of old-world backslapping and glad-handing, but I had little doubt that watchful eyes knew exactly what everyone in the place was doing at all times, and it wouldn’t take long for somebody to figure out that I was taking up space and soaking up booze and not laying down any bets.

  Second, and more to the point, there was no way I wanted to be seen anywhere near that place. A little more digging and it might prove to be worth pulling off a job there, and until I had a fully formulated plan, I didn’t want to risk contaminating the waters if that plan called for my being a complete nonpresence. If it should prove to be of benefit to me to be seen there, I could always take care of that at some point, but
there was no way to reverse things should the opposite be true.

  I began checking it out surreptitiously to see if it might indeed be a fertile hunting ground.

  The first thing I noticed was that the patrons of this club were several cuts above what I had thought, up to that point, was the highest layer of Cleveland upper crust that would be seen in a Mob gambling den. From my car half a block away I recognized at least a quarter of the people going in and out, and recognized the clothes worn by another quarter as the kind of stuff you didn’t get in the local department store. To my eye they might as well have had their bank balances tattooed on their foreheads.

  It sure looked like the mother lode, but I entertained no illusions about what I’d be up against. Every one of these people had to know who was running the club, and it wasn’t the police they were looking to for protection. Were I to be caught, there’d be nothing as safe and comfortable as a jail cell at the other end.

  I had no idea what I was going to do at that point, but a familiar feeling told me that, as Sherlock Holmes might have put it, the game was afoot. I settled into a strangely calm kind of patience and committed to at least the first stage of any complex operation: watching and learning. I observed the place for several weeks and learned a good deal.

  The club closed just before three A.M. on Saturdays. Little Ange handled day-to-day operations. Through my binoculars I could see him come out a few minutes after the doors closed, carrying a black bag. He’d then get in his Cadillac and drive off in the direction of the Highlander. One night I followed him there, with a pretty good idea of exactly where he was heading.