by Bill Mason
I knew they maintained a windowless office on a secure second-story floor of the hotel that required a key for access. There were about fifty hotel rooms on the floor in addition to the office, and a stairwell at either end of the long corridor.
I had my own key, and when Little Ange entered at one end, I went in the other, and up the stairwell. I wanted to take off my shoes to keep the sound down but would have had a tough time explaining my bare feet if someone came upon me at that late hour. I counted on the length of the corridor to prevent any sounds from reaching Little Ange.
Knowing he was likely heading for that office, I’d brought along a small periscope I’d made out of an empty paper-towel tube, two mirrors and some Scotch tape. I got down on the top steps and set it on the floor, so I could see around the corner without being spotted. If anybody came upon me, I’d roll over on top of the ’scope, act drunk and say I tripped.
I watched as Ange appeared at the other end of the corridor, opened the office door and went in. He stayed for about five minutes, then came out, turned to set some kind of an alarm and left.
Without the black bag.
The Highlander’s imposing front building, containing the main office and supper club, was located on a very busy street in a suburb just outside of Cleveland. Behind it was the hotel, which was made up of a pair of two-story high-roofed wings separated by a large swimming pool and patio. Private balconies faced the pool on the second story of each wing.
Behind the hotel were eight apartment buildings three stories high, each containing about a hundred units. Rose Marie lived there, as did many of the restaurant employees and the girls who worked in the key club.
The Highlander was a large and bustling place, with a lot of activity going on all the time. It was easy to move around without attracting attention, especially for someone like me, a familiar sight around the complex. I’d even taken Barbara there on a number of occasions, not only to the restaurant but to the pool. All of this made it easy for me to continue my observations unnoticed.
The Mob office was the second door in on the secure floor. The first door opened into the chambermaids’ supply room, which had an alarm and was locked at night with a heavy dead bolt and a separate padlock. All the rest were ordinary hotel rooms. The supply room generally remained open during the day so the maids could easily get at their carts, vacuums and linens. A security guard came by frequently while it was open, but by chatting up a couple of maids it was no trick for me to get a look at the alarm sensor on the door, which was a simple magnetic trip.
I was never able to see into the office, though. The door was never left open, and trying to be present at the exact moment that someone went in or out was much too risky.
The laundry room down on the first floor was underneath the maids’ supply room and the office. I’d have guessed that it would be operated at night, but it never was, which made sense. If it were, the hotel would’ve needed two complete sets of bed linens and towels. By running the laundry during the day while the chambermaids worked, they wouldn’t require nearly as much stock.
That was fine with me, because an empty laundry room below would help to muffle any noise I might end up making.
I had to make a lot of assumptions. One of them was about the type of alarm on the office, but the way Little Ange set it told me a lot. He didn’t enter any combinations or press multiple buttons; it looked like he just flipped a switch and shut the door, which made it likely that it was the same kind of simple trip as the one on the maids’ room, a reasonable construction decision that bolstered my conviction somewhat.
The next assumption was about where the alarm actually rang if tripped, and that almost certainly had to be the front desk. That it might be connected to the local police station wouldn’t make any sense, because the front desk was manned twenty-four hours a day and could out-respond the police hands down. Couple that with the absurd proposition that the owners of the Highlander would ever call on the police for help with a security problem, and it was a dead certainty that the alarm signal never left the complex. It was even likely that the office alarm shared a wire down to the front desk with the maids’-room alarm.
It was significant that I’d never heard an alarm go off when Ange opened the door. In those days, before such sophistication as digital delay circuits and motion detectors, most setups would trigger the alarm when the door was opened, and the ringing would stop as soon as a switch in a hidden location was flipped. Walk down any street in a retail section at opening time and you’d hear dozens of alarms going off for three or four seconds at a time.
But since there was no such sound when Little Ange opened that office door, it confirmed that it must have sounded at the front desk. The clerk would know when the office was usually entered, and would expect a few seconds of the alarm and ignore it. Anything else, and I had little doubt that a few highly motivated thugs would quickly be summoned to dispense a bit of instant justice to an intruder, who would have no warning whatsoever that he’d even set off an alarm.
Dealing with that alarm was the first challenge.
The second was the roving guard, and that was mostly a question of learning his habits and hoping that they were very regular. If he made his rounds like clockwork, I’d know just how much time I had to work with and could plan accordingly. If his walks around the complex were random and too closely spaced, I might have to call it off altogether.
The third challenge, and the biggest one, was how to get into a safe I’d never seen. Rose Marie had been in the office once and I’d heard her tell some people at the bar about “this gigundo safe” in there. She’d put her hand, palm flat, way above her head for emphasis, so I knew it had to be a monster. Even though my skill with safes had improved since the mini golf course score, I still couldn’t crack one like you see in the movies, so it would have to be a brute-force entry. That would take time and made the matter of the guard even more important.
Finally, there had to be enough money in the safe to make the whole enterprise worth it. It was now early June, and the next time there would be a high likelihood of a good haul would be the Fourth of July. I’d already learned that a number of private parties were planned for that weekend, so that was my target, Monday night specifically, when the coffers would be fullest and not emptied until the banks reopened on Tuesday.
I had a month to plan. Or to call it off.
I don’t know the exact moment when I’d made the decision to go through with this job, and to hit the Lonardos directly instead of taking off one of their glamorous customers, but by this time there was no question about it in my mind: If I could solve all the puzzles, I’d go for it.
The initial shock of the Kennedy assassination hadn’t even died down before the Warren Commission investigation was in full swing. It seemed that the more witnesses they interviewed and the more evidence they uncovered, the murkier the whole story became. At the time I was planning the job, the final report was still three months away from being issued, but already the accusations of a cover-up were loud and strident.
A good part of the focus was on Jack Ruby, who’d shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Department two days after Oswald allegedly assassinated Kennedy. Understandably, speculation had immediately arisen that Ruby had acted on behalf of members of a conspiracy that had planned the killing of Kennedy and wanted to silence Oswald.
What made all of this relevant to my situation were the stories that Ruby had been closely tied in with the criminal underworld. He’d grown up in Chicago, in a tough neighborhood where he’d been friends with local criminals, and those kinds of associations had flowered when he became a nightclub operator. He was a known gambler, he had visited Cuba as the guest of professional gambler Lewis McWillie, and his partner in his Vegas club had a criminal record.
All of this brought an extraordinary amount of unwanted attention to the Mob. I’m talking about the real players now, not the swaggering wiseguys who populated th
e lower ranks of foot soldiers, but the head men who, with one or two especially visible exceptions, kept a deliberately low profile because they had no need to strut in public. People who counted knew who they were, and that was all that mattered.
But with the Warren Commission delving into Jack Ruby’s background, and every Pulitzer-seeking investigative reporter pounding the pavement and pressuring sources in an attempt to one-up the commission, the Mob was as skittish, tense and twitchy as they had been back when the Kefauver investigation and Knapp Commission hearings were under way.
And Angelo Lonardo was the last person you wanted to be around when he was twitchy.
Big Ange’s father, Joe Lonardo, had emigrated from Licata, Sicily, in 1905, along with his three brothers and another set of brothers, the Porellos. He’d become wealthy dealing in corn sugar, which was the main ingredient in bootleg liquor during Prohibition. “Big Joe” was the original Cleveland padrino, or godfather, and the eldest Porello was one of his corporals.
Porello left Lonardo in 1926 to form his own corn sugar business with his six brothers, and they became Big Joe’s primary competitors. When Big Joe went back to Sicily to visit his mother and left his brother John in charge, he returned to discover that the Porellos had taken advantage of John’s lack of business sense and pretty much cornered the local market.
Seeking to avoid bloodshed, Big Joe offered to negotiate. The Porellos agreed, then had the two Lonardo brothers shot to death in a barbershop, after which Porello the Elder appointed himself the new capo of the Cleveland Mafia. As Porello’s power and influence grew, so did the rage and thirst for revenge among the family and associates of the murdered Lonardo brothers. One day in 1929, Big Joe Lonardo’s son Angelo, all of eighteen years old, drove his mother to the Porello headquarters and sent in a message saying that she wanted to speak to “Black Sam” Todaro, one of the Porello gunmen who’d killed the Lonardo brothers. As Todaro approached the car, Angelo pulled out a gun and emptied it into him.
Angelo was arrested for the murder and sentenced to life in prison, but he won a new trial and was released after serving only eighteen months. He later came to be known as “Big Ange” Lonardo.
This was the guy I was planning to rob.
The next weekend I followed Little Ange as usual, except that this time I peeled off toward the registration desk when he headed for the office. Feigning some mild drunkenness, I made small talk with the clerk at the counter. Sure enough, a moderate dinging sounded from somewhere beneath the desk at just about the time Ange should have been opening the office door. The sound stopped a few seconds later.
I’d guessed right, and all I had to do was disable that alarm sometime after Ange made his cash drop on the Fourth. I couldn’t do it in advance of that because the clerk would be expecting to hear it a little after three A.M. That meant that disconnecting the ringer right in the front office was not an option. What pretense could I possibly cook up to get under the counter in the wee hours of the morning that wouldn’t get me cemented into a steel drum and dropped into the middle of Lake Erie?
Two days later I dressed in rough work clothes and began walking around the complex with a worn clipboard and a set of tools strapped to my belt. I asked a lot of questions—it’s amazing what people will tell you if you look like you have the right to know—and easily located the electrical junction box. The next step was to identify the alarm wire, which I could cut after Little Ange made his drop. I felt a thrill as I picked the cheap lock and opened the box.
An incomprehensible profusion of wires confronted me. There were more than two hundred rooms in the hotel, and lines from every one of them fed through this box. Wires were jammed so tightly, they looked like a single solid mass, and I sweated as I pulled and twisted, trying not to break any as I looked for the one or two that would appear different from the others and tell me they were for the alarm.
I never found them. Half an hour of separating every individual wire in the mass only confirmed that the alarm wasn’t wired through the main box. Dejected, I nevertheless took the time to get everything back in place so as not to arouse suspicion.
This was not getting off to a good start.
The problem of the alarm system was obsessing me, so I decided to work on some other aspects of the plan, confident that an answer would pre-sent itself to me along the way if I got in a less desperate frame of mind.
“How about a weekend out on the town? Just the two of us.”
My wife looked up from the paper, eyebrows raised in surprise. “What’s the catch?”
“We have to set new records for drinking and screwing.”
She pretended to think about it for a few seconds, then nodded. “I can handle that. Where?”
“The Highlander.”
Her mouth twisted sidewise into a sneer at the mention of a local place rather than some exotic foreign setting, and she went back to the paper. “Very funny.”
“I’m not kidding.” I sat down across from her and pushed her paper aside. “It’ll be fun, like another honeymoon. My mother’s already volunteered to baby-sit.”
She began to realize I was serious, so I pressed ahead. “No kids, no laundry, no cooking . . . We won’t tell anyone where we are and no phone calls, either. We can do whatever we want. What do you say?”
As I ticked off the list of things she wouldn’t have to worry about for three days, I could see her eyes soften and knew I had her.
It really was a fun weekend, and more like a hot courtship than a second honeymoon. We drank well, ate well and made love like teenagers, which only partially distracted Barbara from the fact that I kept looking out the window. Any less partying and she would have asked me about it a hundred times instead of the merely fifty or so she brought it up.
It wasn’t lost on me how much I was risking with respect to my marriage. Barbara had been devastated by what she perceived as emotional betrayal when she found out that I’d really been casing the miniature golf course for a robbery. My deceitful behavior had bothered her much more than the fact that I’d committed a Class A felony, and it took me a long time to persuade her that it was strictly a onetime aberration, and that I’d felt as bad about it as she had. The reason I was able to convince her was because I truly—truly—believed it.
And now here I was in a nice hotel, wining, dining and loving her, except that I was really casing the place for a robbery. I felt bad about it, but I was helpless; once the notion of knocking off that safe got planted firmly in my brain, it took over as surely as if it had been baked into my very DNA. This time, though, the outcome would be different. There would be no wet money plastered all over the house, and Barbara would never even know it happened.
At least it would if it worked and I didn’t get caught.
I learned a good deal over that weekend, and it buoyed my spirits more than I’d anticipated. The guard was lazy, probably a minimum-wager who wasn’t about to put himself in harm’s way for a few bucks an hour. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t raise an alarm, of course, but he made rounds just six times a night and spent the rest of it napping in vacant rooms. He must have known it was a Mob operation and assumed, logically, that no one in his right mind would make trouble there. The only reason I’d seen him check the maids’ supply room so often in the past was that it had been during the day, when the people who paid his salary were around to watch him work.
On the other hand, maybe the guard was a light sleeper and would waken instantly at the first sound of some kind of disturbance. After all, the walls were so thin I could hear the guy in the next room brushing his teeth.
The second day of our stay, in the wee hours of the morning, I walked up to the room the guard was napping in and could hear him snoring through the cheap door. I coughed lightly. Nothing. A little louder this time. Still nothing. I went into a combination asthma attack and full-scale smoker’s cough that started lights turning on and shining from under the doors of half a dozen other rooms, but the rhythm of the guard�
��s snoring didn’t change in the slightest.
Satisfied that this obstacle was safely out of the way, I started back for my room, when it hit me: I’d been so focused on the office door and its simple but exasperating alarm that I’d failed to try thinking outside the box: Why attack the toughest part of the chain rather than its weakest link?
If the walls in the rooms were that thin, how hard could it be to cut through one of them right into the office, bypassing the door and alarm altogether? I wouldn’t be able to do it through the supply room, obviously, because it was alarmed as well, but the office also adjoined an ordinary hotel room. Perfect!
Elated at the idea that I could cut my own door right where I needed one, it didn’t occur to me until later that day that I’d somehow have to make sure that the room next door to the office was vacant on the night of the job. So I’d merely traded one problem for another, but I was a lot happier with this one and put it aside for the time being to give the safe some more thought instead.
Although my safecracking skills might not have been very sophisticated, I was good with tools and mechanical things in general. Not knowing exactly what I’d be facing but certain the safe would be built like an armored tank, I gathered an array of equipment that would have made a professional salvage diver proud. I had a high-speed electric drill with carbaloid bits, two sledgehammers, chisels, hacksaws and a pair of crowbars, one of them extra long and with an angled tip to get more leverage.
My pride and joy, though, was a Porta Power hydraulic jack, which I’d bought especially for this job. The jack exerted ten tons of pressure through a rod coming out one end. I was planning on drilling into the outside of the safe, peeling back a small area of the metal using the Porta Power, chiseling the concrete on the interior between the layers, then drilling into the second layer of metal. Nothing except the chiseling would cause much noise. The Porta Power exerted a tremendous amount of pressure, but the only thing you would hear would be the metal shell of the safe ripping apart. I was hoping to cover that with the bedding and blankets in the hotel room. I also prepared a handful of rags and a bottle of alcohol for rubbing away my fingerprints in case any of the gear had to be left behind.