by Bill Mason
Anyway, I now had a financial security blanket and felt that I was one step closer to moving to South Florida.
That feeling of security was a bit premature. Even though the press soon forgot about the theft, the cops didn’t. They were dead determined to solve this one, and one of the things they were sure to be doing, in addition to hoping an informant showed up, was keeping tabs on the local fences in case any of the stolen items turned up.
I wasn’t worried about informants, since I worked alone and no one else knew I’d been involved. The fences were another story, though, and I decided I wasn’t going to worry about that because none of this stuff was going to turn up. I was still employed and had regular rental money coming in, so I was in no hurry to convert the loot. Determined not to make amateur mistakes—Diller had undoubtedly described each piece in detail to the police, who would have notified every pawnbroker and jeweler in the entire region—I forced myself to be patient and sit on the haul.
Nearly ten years would pass before I finally decided to see what could be done with the goods. I took some of the pieces to a jewelry store on Madison Avenue in New York, prepared with a creatively elaborate story of how they’d come into my possession, but nobody asked a single background question. After leaving the goods on consignment, I had a momentary jolt of panic when I saw them displayed prominently in the window the next day, and breathed a sigh of relief when they were sold to a private European buyer two weeks later.
That experience emboldened me somewhat. Later, when I was a fugitive, I got dressed to the nines one day and strolled into Christie’s, one of the world’s most prestigious auction houses. Believing it would be entirely too coincidental for Diller to show up at a sale, I adopted the moniker “John Welling” and presented some pieces to be auctioned off. Nobody seemed to care about the origin of the jewels. Even when they asked if I wanted to have pictures of them printed alongside the catalog text and I blurted out “Absolutely not!” in too loud a voice (Diller might not attend the sale but who knew if, like many others, she liked to browse the catalog?), nobody blinked an eye. They were much too eager to get the pieces and the commissions to question why I’d reacted so strongly.
And speaking of John Welling . . .
Until now, nobody knew that I had been the one to rob Diller, although some people had their suspicions. On Friday nights a group of guys from my school days hung around a neighborhood bar in Shaker Heights called The Place. John Welling—the real one—and I worked as a team on the one pool table, taking on all comers at eight ball for a buck a game and a beer each. He and I had been good friends since we were in Shaker Heights High together. Many years later when I became a fugitive, he would help me craft a duplicate identity of himself—including a driver’s license, a passport and credit cards—I could use to evade the authorities and that I would also use to auction jewelry at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. John was of medium build, like me, but his Perry Como face was far softer, almost babylike, and he looked anything but threatening when offering bets around the pool table.
One night about eighteen months after the score, John and I had a large winning streak going for us at The Place and quite a few beers already laid to rest. In the resultant happy glow, he pulled me aside, threw an arm across my shoulder and said, “I gotta ask, man: Were you the guy who pulled the Diller job?”
I prayed that he was too loaded to sense the shock that raced through me. Strictly a solo practitioner, I made a point of keeping my little hobby to myself. It wasn’t that I took pride in that level of discretion, it was simply the surest way I knew to protect myself. For this grinning, reeling guy to hit me with a question like that right out of the blue, and eighteen months after the fact, was like a body blow, and I needed a few seconds to make sure I was composed before answering.
I was sorely tempted to tell him. He was a good buddy and it was clear there was some admiration behind the question. But even as brain-fuzzy as I was, my carefully thought out, ongoing survival plan kicked in, as if on autopilot. “You gotta be kidding!” I said with a laugh, shaking off his arm and heading back to the table for the next game. “I’da done that job, you think I’d be in here shooting pool with a lowlife bum like you?”
He laughed back, but I had a nagging feeling he didn’t believe me and I felt bad about trying to convince him that he’d guessed wrong.
I was also troubled about why he’d seen fit to ask me about the Diller score in the first place. He knew that I hung around the Highlander a lot. Had I given him some inadvertent hints in casual conversation that I was knowledgeable or curious about fields of endeavor far removed from real estate?
It wasn’t until sometime later that I found out his brother, Bill, was a bank robber, and then it became clearer. When you’re close to that life, you become ultra-sensitive to bits of inside jargon, behavioral cues to a special kind of carefulness or watchfulness—a whole host of largely subliminal signals that someone has a lot to hide. I hated lying to him, but I got away with it, and why not? I’d deceived my own wife so many times, it was becoming second nature.
John eventually found out the truth, and a lot more besides, as the years passed and his brother became one of the very few people I trusted with my life.
Like I said, nobody knew “the gang” had been me, a gang of one. Unfortunately, years later I robbed Diller a second time, and that job didn’t turn out nearly as well. In fact, it pretty much ended my career.
But that was still way off in the future. Here and now, the Diller score had given me some valuable lessons about the lifestyles of the highly visible and the logistics required to rob them. Why bother taking off celebrities in the first place? When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said it was because that’s where the money is. Well, the rich and famous are where the jewels are.
Good prospects were easy to spot because celebrities, especially those in the entertainment professions, live in a culture where it’s not only acceptable to show off, but expected and encouraged. Five minutes watching an Oscar telecast is all you need to prove that to yourself.
The problem is that the world is full of crazies, and it only takes one nut to ruin your day. John Lennon’s tragic death at the hands of a deranged gunman marked a kind of turning point for those who live in the glare of publicity. If a gentle, peace-preaching guy like that could get gunned down, no public figure was safe. On top of that, they couldn’t hope to predict from what direction danger might arise. Ronald Reagan wasn’t attacked for political reasons; it was because some screwball was trying to show off for an actress he’d never even met. Who could have seen that coming? So celebrities have been forced to take extraordinary measures to protect themselves.
But prior to the Lennon shooting in 1980, security wasn’t quite as tight as it is now.
Just before I moved away from Ohio, Robert Goulet was performing at the MusiCarnival in Cleveland, the same place Phyllis Diller had been appearing when I robbed her the first time. He liked to wear a lot of heavy gold jewelry and a flashy rock or two. I’d like to be able to tell you a fascinating story of some wildly creative and daring caper, but I can’t because it was such an easy score. I had the system down pat by then.
On the next-to-last night of his run, I followed Goulet’s limo from the show to the Blue Grass, the place Diller liked to go to dinner. I rode up in the elevator with him, saw which room was his, came back the next night and helped myself to all his stuff. Frankly, there wasn’t too much there; I guess he pretty much wore it all when he was performing.
I fenced the goods to a guy named Richard “Blute” Tomba (more about him later) but broke one of my cardinal rules and kept a piece for myself, a watch. It was a silver Seiko with a blue face, nothing particularly fancy or expensive, but I liked it and wore it for many years. When I went to prison in Florida a few years later, I forgot to take it off before being processed in, and prison officials stuck it in my personal property envelope. When they gave it back to me fifteen months later, the d
amned thing was still running. I’ve often thought about approaching Seiko with the idea of endorsing such a terrific product. (“Even in prison, it keeps on tickin’” or “Don’t do a second more than you have to.”) It ran beautifully for over thirty years, until I finally lost it just last year while river rafting with my grandsons.
6
Scaling the Heights
BARBARA SHARED my dream to move to South Florida. She in particular hated the winters in Ohio; squeezing the kids into snowsuits and then peeling them off several times a day, walking around in dirty slush and mopping it off the floors, dressing against the damp, freezing air every time you just wanted to go out for a paper. I wasn’t much of a fan, either, which was not untypical of anybody who managed property. Protecting your tenants from Old Man Winter was a no-win game. If you busted your ass to get everything plowed, shoveled and cleaned within half an hour of a snowfall, nobody noticed, but if there was a dime-sized patch of ice on a walkway somewhere, there was hell to pay.
When we finally decided to make the move, the management company I worked for tried to entice me to stay with offers of a lot more money. When that didn’t work, they asked if I’d be interested in helping them identify properties to buy in Florida, which I could then manage. I jumped at that one and, over the next few months, made several business trips (i.e., on the company’s nickel) to scout the territory for them, and for Barb and me as well.
On one of those trips I took Barb with me. We visited with Norm and Janie Tripp, whom we’d known when they lived in Shaker Heights. Norm, a lawyer, couldn’t stop singing the praises of Florida in general and the Coral Ridge Isles area of Fort Lauderdale, where they lived, in particular. At some point when we could get a word in edgewise, we told them we were already planning to move down. They were thrilled and insisted on taking us down the street right this minute to see a neighbor of theirs named Sam Hyman, who was selling his house. He’d retired down from New York, and though his wife loved Florida, he himself hated it.
The two of us gulped when we saw Sam’s place. “Don’t worry,” Janie said, “once you get past the paint, it’s really a nice house.”
It was hard to see past the paint, though, to visualize what it would look like once you made it normal. The outside of the house was pink. I don’t mean some pale sandy color, or just the trim, I’m talking pink, as in shocking pink, and every square inch of the place. It looked like a giant marshmallow Easter candy, or something you might find in Disneyland next to Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Inside, everything was lavender, purple and more pink, and that included the ceilings. No wonder Sam hated Florida.
But it really was a fine place otherwise, with three bedrooms and three baths. Norm and Janie, who had kids around the same ages as ours, told us the school system was exceptional, too, and that it was one of the nicest neighborhoods in Fort Lauderdale. I didn’t know as much about the real estate scene in Florida as I did about the one in Ohio, but as a result of my scouting trips I knew enough to know that the asking price was reasonable.
After we’d wandered around the place for a little while, Sam got me aside and said, “Look, the wife’s bitching we’re not going to get enough for the place, but she’s just trying to hold things up. If you give me our asking price, I’ll slip you back ten grand under the table. You’re in real estate, so let’s not bullshit each other. You know it’s a great deal.”
I mumbled something about how, yeah, it was a good deal, but I wasn’t sure we could afford to buy it. He said, “You can’t afford not to buy it. You know what’s going on around here. You get stretched, you can resell it in a year and make ten, twenty G’s.” He looked around and shuddered. “Once you get rid of this fucking paint.” Then he pressed the keys into my hand and told me he was going back to New York for a week. “Look it over, you and the wife, as much as you want.”
During the week, Barb and I went to the house three or four times. On the last visit, we made love on the sofa in the living room. Afterward I said, “Let’s do it. Let’s call Sam right now, because if we see these godawful colors one more time, we might change our minds, and it’s too good a deal to pass up.”
Barb agreed, and I called Sam from his kitchen. “Take back the mortgage,” I told him, “and we got a deal.”
“Done!” You could hear the relief in his voice fifteen hundred miles away. “I’ll have my lawyer put together the papers right away. But it’s a deal, right?” I assured him we meant it.
Barb and I returned to Cleveland to make arrangements for selling our place there, and Norm called to tell us that Sam had already completely cleared out of the house. This was a week after our verbal agreement, before any papers had been signed. Can’t say I blamed him; I couldn’t imagine how he’d lived in it as long as he had.
We made several extended trips down to Florida over the next few months. We painted the place ourselves, and I added a fourth bedroom. The house had a secluded pool, and after a hard day’s work we’d always enjoy a skinny-dip before dinner.
I also found a two-hundred-unit complex for sale on Bay Harbor Islands, just north of Miami Beach. The people I worked for in Cleveland came down to have a look and liked what they saw. We made an arrangement to start another management company, then they bought the place and rented an office for me right in Fort Lauderdale. Everything was falling beautifully into place, and before long we said our sad good-byes up north and moved into our “new” house. We were an instant hit with the neighbors, even before they got to know us, because they were so enormously grateful that we’d rid the street of that stomach-churning eyesore.
We fell right into the suburban lifestyle of Coral Ridge. It really was a wonderful neighborhood, with plenty of kids of various ages running around all over the place. Evel Knievel lived right down the street; Joe Namath was on the next block over.
Before we moved in, the house across the street was sold to a retired New York City cop and his wife. Chuck and Jean were great people, and Chuck in particular was a real practical joker, so it wasn’t too long before Suzi, Mark and I started pulling all kinds of gags on them. Our kids were only ten and eight (Laura was barely two years old and not yet in on the fun and games) but had the knack of seasoned pranksters for coming up with wild and crazy stunts and a dad all too willing to help pull them off. The best was when I’d found some newsprint at a garage sale. It was in a roll six feet high and about a mile long. One weekend when Chuck and Jean were out of town, we wrapped their entire house in the stuff, leaving nothing but their television antenna sticking out the top. Watching them drive up on Sunday evening was hysterical, but they knew instantly who’d done it. Just for laughs they left the house that way for two days, until the fire department showed up and made them take all the paper off. They were right, too: One spark and the whole place would’ve gone up. Chuck and Jean were to become close friends over the next couple of years.
The neighborhood kids hung around our place all the time, because we always had our own kids outside and I’d play with the whole bunch almost every evening. There was very little traffic in the street, and we’d play baseball, hide-and-seek and a lot of touch football, depending on whether older or younger kids happened to be around. We’d alter the rules so as many could play as possible. Laura was too little to join in on her own, so when my team got the ball, we’d give it to her and I’d run down the field with her on my shoulders, everybody on the other team yelling in protest because she was too high to reach and tagging just me didn’t count. Barb would occasionally join in if it was a game she liked. The kids also liked to play on a rope I had hanging from a tree in the backyard. I’d always set up something like that wherever I lived, and made it a point to climb up and down several dozen times a day, using only my arms. The littler kids liked to climb onto my back while I did it, which made it an even better workout.
The only other adult to regularly join in the games was my buddy Bill Welling, who by then had started spending his winters in Florida and was a frequent visitor to
our house along with his brother, John. Welling was a bear of a man, huge and muscular—“Irish truck driver” comes to mind—and sometimes when there were kids on the other side big enough to tag Laura even on my shoulders, Welling would pick me up and carry both of us around, and nobody could touch her.
There wasn’t a lot of excitement in our little area, so when something did happen, it got our attention. One Sunday morning I heard some glass breaking. At first I thought it might have been a baseball hitting a window, but a few seconds later there was another crash, so I went outside to have a look. Chuck had heard it, too, and was already on the sidewalk. He saw me and pointed up the street, where some guy was beating the crap out of a Mercedes with a baseball bat. Just hitting it over and over, smashing glass, cratering the hood and roof, trying to knock the fenders off. I recognized the guy, although I didn’t know him other than to wave hello in passing. He was in his own driveway, and I’d seen the car there before, too. After the police came and calmed him down, they told us there wasn’t much they could do. It was his wife’s car, but in his name, and if he wanted to destroy it, that was pretty much his own business. Although it was the big talk of the neighborhood for weeks, let’s face it, it wasn’t really much of a story. I mention it only because a few years later I’d have cause to remember it.
Later that year we bought a boat and spent a lot of afternoons running up and down the Intracoastal and venturing out into the ocean to fish. On long weekends we’d go to the Keys or the Bahamas, and Bill and John Welling and I went on diving trips when they were in town.