by Bill Mason
I also had a portable oxyacetylene cutting torch, asbestos gloves, a leather apron, a flip-down face mask and two extra tanks of fuel. I’d gotten a lot of experience with cutting-type torches at Tony Tarrascavage’s auto body shop, and I was pretty sure that, if all else failed, I could cut my way into the safe. The downside was that it would take a lot more time and throw off a good deal of smelly smoke. I would use it if I had to but left it in the car for the time being because there was almost too much to carry as it was. I had everything packed in a long canvas duffel bag that probably weighed 150 pounds. One of the crowbars was too long to fit inside, so it was strapped between the handles. This made the huge bag even more awkward, but not knowing in advance exactly what I’d need, I had to have it all with me to minimize trips back and forth.
I never did solve the problem of making sure the room adjoining the office would be vacant. I’d even briefly considered checking in to it myself, maybe wearing a disguise, but dismissed that as too dicey. I could have had a friend from another town check in for me and then disappear, but there were plenty of good reasons why I wanted to work alone and I’d sooner abandon the job than change that policy in the heat of the moment. I’d just have to chance that the room would be empty.
It wasn’t. More bad luck. An elderly couple checked in on Sunday, the day before I was planning to do the job.
I work well under pressure, and by the time they’d gotten their luggage in from their car I’d already come up with an idea. But it required them to leave the room, and there were no signs of life over the next few hours, not even a trip for a bucket of ice. Worse still, I couldn’t observe their door directly because someone would notice me hanging around on a secure floor for no reason, so I had to stake out the stairwell doors at either end of the ground-floor corridor instead.
My eyes were so fixated on those doors for the rest of the afternoon that I started to get dizzy, but finally, at around six, one of them opened and the couple emerged. It looked like they were dressed to go out to dinner.
I waited until they got into their car and drove off, then grabbed a few hand tools I’d prepared and went up to their room. I stuck a strip of celluloid between the door and the jamb, pushed the lock bolt back and went in, heading directly for the bathroom. Kneeling beneath the sink, I loosened the nut connecting the cold-water supply line until it began leaking, then bent the edge of the fitting so it couldn’t easily be retightened. It took less than a minute and then I was back at the door, when something occurred to me: As accessible and obvious as that fitting was, it wouldn’t take a plumber much time to replace it. Even if the couple moved to another room, a maintenance guy would have all of Monday to work on it, and someone else could then check in.
So I went back and loosened the nut all the way, until water came pouring out and began soaking the carpet. A few minutes later I tightened it back down to a trickle. I wasn’t looking for a major emergency here, just something that would get these people into another room and make sure this one didn’t get handed to anyone else the next day.
I didn’t stick around to watch the old folks raise a ruckus on their return, but when I came back in the middle of the night to make sure Little Ange made his usual cash drop, I checked the location of their car. Sure enough, it was now on the other side of the complex.
As far as I was concerned, I’d passed what pilots call the “go–no go” point and, barring any last-minute snafus, was fully committed. Everything was in place and there was nothing left to do but wait out the next twenty-four hours.
I went on a picnic with my family on Monday. It was a wonderful day but a mistake: Nothing can make you more apprehensive and fearful about losing your freedom than spending the day with people you love just before risking it all on a frankly self-indulgent adventure.
My plan that night was to sleep until midnight, but I should have realized how impossible that would be and planned for it. Instead, I tossed all over the place, which turned out to give me just the excuse I needed to get out of bed, because by that time Barbara was so relieved to see me get up I didn’t even have to make up a story.
I checked everything for the thousandth time, then drove to the Highlander. Little Ange showed up right on time, and within minutes of his departure I had opened the door to the flooded hotel room and left it ajar so I could get in quickly after I’d hauled my gear upstairs.
When I returned, I heaved the bag up onto the bed to keep it dry. The place smelled musty because of the wet carpet, and there was a squishing sound as I walked across it to the far wall with my drywall knife out and ready.
Getting through the wall was even easier than I’d expected, and there was plenty of room between the sixteen-inch studs to squeeze myself through. The safe was the first thing I saw and, as advertised, it was a monster, over six feet high, with double doors. I could feel my heart beating and, despite the limited time available in which to work, forced myself to stop, get calm and listen for any noises that might signal I’d caused a disturbance of some kind.
I took advantage of the lull to assess the situation. In the dim light of my pencil flashlight I could see that the combination dial on the safe was about six inches in diameter, just left of the dully shining handle. I looked at my watch. It was 3:40, and I figured I had about three hours before anybody was likely to come by.
The office was windowless, so I turned on the light, then reached back through the wall to get my tools and equipment, which I arrayed within easy reach of the front of the safe, along with a bottle of water to keep myself from getting dehydrated during what was sure to be a long stretch of hard work. I rolled an office chair over so I could get comfortable, did a quick examination of the safe’s hinges, took a deep breath and rolled up my sleeves. I’d start with the drill set on its highest speed and take it from there.
I leaned back to grab the drill and felt the chair start to tip, so to balance myself better I reached for the handle on the safe.
Which promptly snapped downward with a loud click.
So startled I nearly tipped over completely, I put down the drill and sat up straight, staring at my fingers wrapped around the handle, which now faced downward instead of sideways. Stunned, and hoping against hope, I blinked a few times and then pulled. The huge door swung open easily.
Now that’s what I call luck.
In addition to the money in Ange’s black bag, the safe was filled with cash stacked in neat five-thousand-dollar bundles. There were some nice pieces of jewelry, too, and I grabbed those first, then stuffed as many bundles of cash as I could fit into my carryall and threw it through the wall along with Ange’s bag. I gathered up all that unused equipment and pushed it back through as well. Once I’d gotten myself through, I repacked my gear and strapped the carryalls onto my back, then began to drag everything back down the hallway as quietly as I could. I left such a trail of sweat behind me, it was a good thing that DNA tests weren’t used in those days.
Less than an hour after first pushing back the lock on the vacant room, I quietly pressed the trunk lid of my car closed. I stopped by one of my buildings to stash the loot and equipment in an unused locker, and was back home and in bed before five A.M. Barbara never even realized I’d been away.
That was lucky, too.
I could no more sleep after the job than I could before. Even two large glasses of vodka did nothing to calm a nervous system still oozing adrenaline. It was all I could do to just lie there fighting the urge to get up every five minutes and look at the haul, to convince myself I’d really pulled it off.
Wednesday afternoon I headed back to the key club, as usual. There’s an old adage about a criminal always returning to the scene of the crime. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but what I did know was that the worst thing you could do to draw attention to yourself when you were under the gun was to change your habits, so I wasn’t about to change mine.
I’d barely gotten my first drink in hand before I was regaled with the story. “Buncha guys
hit the Anges for a bundle!” one besotted middle manager gushed, trying to sound more like a gangster than someone in charge of an accounts-receivable department.
Somebody else chimed in with a dollar figure. “And some jewels, too,” he added. A third guy said the amount was even higher. It went on like that the whole time I was there. I guess the amount rising with each successive telling of the tale was somehow supposed to make the story, and therefore the storyteller, more important. The real amount was a little over a hundred thousand dollars, but these guys were already up to five times that.
When I shook my head and took a deep swig of my drink, it might have looked like sympathy for the Lonardos, or resignation at what this world was coming to, but it wasn’t that at all. It was amusement over the fact that everyone assumed a whole gang had pulled off the job. I took it as a compliment, and it was fairly evident that, even at this early stage, I was pretty good at this stuff and, with practice, could get a good deal better. Was it any wonder that my thoughts were already turning to the next score?
Angelo “Big Ange” Lonardo, underboss of the Cleveland Mafia, shown during his 1977 arrest for the murder of another mobster.
There was one other thing I thought about, much later, and that was what was likely to occur when the Lonardos realized there’d been no damage whatsoever to the safe. Little Ange wasn’t going to remember that he’d forgotten to lock it—or admit it if he did—which meant they’d assume that either some extraordinarily skilled safecracker had opened it or someone who knew the combination had. I didn’t even want to think about the future prospects of anyone on that short list of possibilities.
A little historical postscript: About twelve years after I pulled this job, a power struggle erupted that eventually led to a Mob war in Ohio and an unusually intense investigation by federal, state and local officials. (Its repercussions were still being felt as late as 2002, when James Traficant of Ohio became only the second person since the Civil War to get kicked out of Congress.) One of the more shocking developments occurred when Angelo Lonardo, at the age of seventy-two, turned government informant after being tried and sentenced to life plus 103 years for drug and racketeering offenses. At the time, he was the highest-ranking mobster ever to testify for the government, and his courtroom appearance helped put away Mob bosses from the Genovese, Lucchese and Colombo Mafia families. Afterward, Big Ange went into the federal government’s Witness Protection Program and engineered his own disappearing act.
Little Ange died of natural causes in 1998, but as far as I know, Big Ange is still living somewhere in northeastern Ohio, with no idea who hit his safe those many years ago.
Until now. I sure hope he’s the forgiving type . . . or too old to care anymore.
5
Glitz
SOMEONE ONCE said of flying that it is hours of utter boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. The life of a big-ticket thief is something like that, although I’d substitute “normalcy” and “exhilaration” for boredom and terror.
Discounting for the moment the occasional score, my life in the mid-sixties really was quite uneventful, and happy as well. I had a wife and kids I adored, although I didn’t spend nearly enough time with them, for the usual and perfectly ordinary reason: I was working too hard at my perfectly ordinary job.
I wasn’t exactly “in real estate,” as I’d mentioned to the patrons of the key club when someone occasioned to ask. What I did on a daily basis was manage about five hundred luxury apartments in the Shaker Heights area on behalf of the landlords who actually owned them, nearly all of whom were my cousins. I was up in the morning and off to work, just like the accountants and store owners and carpenters and salespeople in the neighborhood. I collected rent from late payers, prodded vendors to make deliveries on time and kept an eye out for lazy maintenance men who painted around flowerpots. Very exciting stuff.
But income property fascinated me, and the hands-on experience I got in that job was invaluable. The more I did it and the more I learned, the more I wanted to be on the other side of the table, with the owners rather than the tenants and staff.
After finishing up at Case Western, I got my real estate broker’s license and managed to sell a few houses fairly quickly. I hadn’t put out a shingle or anything formal like that, but some elderly people who wanted to sell their large houses and move into one of the buildings I managed gave me the listings. Although showing open houses on a Sunday afternoon was not my idea of a good time, I had little trouble establishing rapport with prospective purchasers and did a good job for my elderly clients who would soon become my tenants.
All of this further stoked my interest in income property. I read every real estate investing book I could get my hands on, including ridiculous ones that promised to turn pennies into millions overnight. Even those had occasional pearls of wisdom, and I wanted to know it all.
Soon it was time to do something productive with all that cash I’d stolen from the Lonardos, and I began scouting around for some income property that might suit my inclinations and skills. In addition to the money, I had about thirty employees in mind who I was pretty sure would come to work for me. These were people I’d worked closely with, who appreciated my expertise and the respectful way I managed them, and whom I could trust to keep whatever I bought in top-notch condition. World-class maintenance was something I’d determined would be a hallmark of whatever I ended up owning.
Once I’d put the word out, it wasn’t long before I learned that a building with which I was already familiar was coming on the market. It was a stunning eighteen-unit Tudor that had won awards for its beautiful architecture. Every apartment was completely different, some with sunken living rooms and twenty-five-foot ceilings, others with spiral staircases leading up to cavernous master suites, and all with working fireplaces. I got dizzy at the thought that I might actually own it.
Not only was the Mafia money enough for a down payment, it was also enough to impress the local bank with my financial stature and apparent business acumen. They gave me a mortgage, and at the tender age of twenty-five I was landlord of one of the most prestigious buildings in the area.
But the pattern of secrecy I’d already established, and which would afford me so much protection throughout my life, extended as well to my legitimate endeavors. I never announced to the existing or prospective tenants that I was the owner of the building. I just let everybody think it was yet another acquisition by the management company I was working for. As for Barbara and my mother, they thought I’d borrowed a good deal more of the total amount than I actually had.
This harmless deception was reinforced by my hands-on approach to keeping the building up. I loved to do manual work and spent a good deal of time getting down and dirty with plumbers, electricians and carpenters (not to mention locksmiths) as we worked to improve the property. I was too busy to give much thought to my other little “hobby” and found it easy to keep my darker inclinations in check.
At least during the first year, when I thought I was on my way to becoming the Donald Trump of Cleveland. Savvy people in local real estate circles had noticed what I was doing and began sounding me out on other investment opportunities. I did some scouting around on their behalf as well as my own, quickly expanding the scope of the search far outside of Cleveland and Ohio, which was when I discovered Florida.
Miami and Fort Lauderdale were growing explosively as the seventies rolled around. Together with Palm Beach, they were the hottest winter-resort destinations in the country, attracting the rich and famous along with hundreds of thousands of lesser mortals with money to burn. These “snowbirds” were little affected by the growing hippie-led backlash against conspicuous consumption that was taking hold throughout the rest of the country, and took unselfconscious delight in parading their fancy cars, expensive jewelry and lavish lifestyles at every opportunity.
The temptation for an energetic young man of few scruples, few talents and a growing family—Laura had just been born, Suzi
was eight and Mark was six—was almost overwhelming. But . . . I still lived in Cleveland with my wife and three kids, bound to business responsibilities entirely of my own volition and making, and into which every bit of cash I owned was sunk. So for financial reasons alone, a move to South Florida was a distant, albeit persistent, dream.
To all outward appearances I was just another average hardworking American with big ambitions.
Summertime in Ohio was beautiful, and one of the season’s biggest attractions was MusiCarnival, a tented theater-in-the-round on the grounds of the Thistledown Race Track. It seated fifteen hundred and was originally intended to host summer theater, but it also drew some of the biggest names in entertainment. Duke Ellington performed there regularly, as did Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Robert Goulet . . . and a stand-up comedienne named Phyllis Diller.
I’d seen Diller, an Ohio native, some months before on The Mike Douglas Show, which was a morning program on Cleveland television at the time. The only thing I remember was the crazy amount of large jewelry she was wearing, and wondering if it was real. I didn’t give it much thought beyond that until I found out she was going to be appearing at MusiCarnival.
I bought a ticket for opening night but had waited too long and could only get a seat toward the back. Even from there, though, all the bangles and baubles she was dripping glittered brightly, and I got the strong impression that they were all the real deal.