by Bill Mason
I also couldn’t help thinking about what it was doing to Barbara. The look on her face when I told her I’d been shot was one I never wanted to see again, but I’d seen it two days later when she peeled back the covers from my devastated midsection, and I imagined it yet again when Dan ran down the details for her by phone. As to the confused and panicked faces of my kids, not even the intense physical pain was enough to force those images out of my mind.
After ten days of wallowing in such troubling introspection I was crazed to get out of the hospital even though I still didn’t feel so hot, and reported to Dan that I felt great. The next day he released me with a stack of post-op care instructions and enough medicine to ensure I wouldn’t have to get any prescriptions filled in Florida.
Barbara didn’t say much when I got home. I’d lost twenty pounds in ten days, but she’d been worried to death about whether she’d ever see me alive again and seemed as drawn and spent as I was, and I could only imagine what was going through her mind. At least we didn’t have to worry about my business; Augie had jumped in and was handling things for me.
She didn’t crash down on me over the next few days, either, but I developed pleurisy and my gut got as bad as it had been two weeks before. When I insisted on flying back to Cleveland alone, she didn’t bother to argue but just began packing two bags. It was hard to read the expression on her face. Even if I survived, how long would it be before something else happened and she had to go through it all again, and how many times would there be before finally she lost me altogether?
I never did find out who shot me. Chuck the cop and his wife passed away many years later without ever having learned that stolen, bloodstained loot had once been stashed in their garage.
All in all, a horrendous experience. Needless to say, I got over it and didn’t learn a damned thing.
8
Prospecting
THAT’S WHAT professional salespeople call it. “Prospecting” is what you do to locate potential customers. Unless you work at a retail store with a lot of foot traffic, if you depend upon customers for your living, you have to work to identify who might be likely to buy something from you before you can begin selling to them. If you hawk aluminum siding, maybe you drive around a neighborhood looking for weather-beaten walls, or if you’re a caterer, you keep your eye on engagement announcements in the local papers.
Another important part of the standard sales cycle is called “qualifying” the prospect, making sure the potential customer is worth selling to. If you’re pushing Cadillacs and the guy you just lured in asks you to cash his unemployment check, you’re probably wasting your time.
In my case it was a little different. I wasn’t looking for customers but for people I could steal from. This was a surprisingly difficult part of the job. There were a lot of well-off people in South Florida, but just because somebody looks rich doesn’t mean he’s a good prospect. A lot of nouveaux riches wear everything they own at one time, giving the impression there’s more stuff at home, but it’s like the guy who wraps a hundred-dollar bill around a roll of ones: All glitter and no gold. That’s okay if you’re the type who likes to stick people up face-to-face, but that wasn’t me. I didn’t use weapons and I never thought a handful of jewels was worth somebody getting hurt, including me.
Most high-end thieves are well known in criminal circles and get bombarded with all kinds of leads. The better leads are those specific to a thief’s specialty. Somebody who is an expert in lifting valuable paintings might get a tip that a collector is in the process of moving, meaning his collection might be vulnerable for a few days. Somebody who specializes in the theft of high-tech secrets might hear from somebody inside a company who knows the security systems inside and out. Same goes for armored-car robbers and truck hijackers. However it comes about, the tipster expects to get something out of a successful score, usually some kind of commission as a cut of the net proceeds. The amount will depend on how specific and reliable the information is. The thief’s problem is to separate the good tips from the ones that are junk, or the ones that are stings, meaning that the police planted a false tip to try to trap the thief in the act.
Some of the best sources of leads are fences. A fence is someone who specializes in turning stolen property into cash. Some things are harder to fence than others, and the size of the cut the fence takes on the deal is related to the difficulty and risk of laying off the loot. As an example, gold is fairly easy to convert because it can be melted down, completely concealing its source, and sold off in chunks through legitimate preciousmetal dealers. Illicit drugs in bulk are also pretty easy, because dealers are always ready to pay top dollar in cash with no questions asked.
Fine art, on the other hand, is extremely difficult to get rid of. It’s easily identifiable and therefore has to be either ransomed back to the original owners or sold to private collectors who have no intention of ever displaying the pieces in public. The middleman’s take on these kinds of deals is tremendous, because his job in turning the art objects into cash is almost as difficult and risky as the thief’s was in stealing it.
The point here is that fences have a vested interest in keeping their supply lines flowing and therefore are motivated to provide thieves not only with lots of leads but with well-qualified ones. After all, they don’t want their best sources wasting time on small scores, and they sure as hell don’t want them getting busted and put out of commission. That cuts off a revenue stream and presents a significant danger should the thief decide to give up the fence in exchange for a lighter sentence.
This doesn’t mean that fences are always reliable, nor are they necessarily tuned in to the specific eccentricities of the people they’re dealing with. Blute Tomba, my primary fence in Cleveland, knew how I felt about meticulous planning and avoiding violence but once tried to talk me into ripping off a New York jewelry salesman who called on him about once a month. In addition to the fact that Tomba didn’t have much information we could use in planning the job, it would have involved a weapon, so I refused, although I continued to do a lot of business with him.
Many of the traditional sources of leads were closed to me. For starters, I was a loner, with a strict policy of never taking on partners. That’s how I managed to stay out of trouble for so many years. As a result, few people on the street had any idea I even existed, so nobody ever came to me with a great “nick.” That may have made prospecting a little tougher, but on the other hand, I wasn’t walking into any setups, nor was I likely to find that someone else had done the job while I was still planning it because he’d gotten the same tip from the same source. And I didn’t have to share a cut of the proceeds with anybody except the fence.
It wasn’t my style to wake up one day and decide I had to pull off a job. I was in good enough shape financially, between stealing and my legitimate real estate businesses, that I never had a material need to commit a robbery. It was more of an opportunistic thing, keeping my eyes and ears open during active but relaxed canvassing.
I read all the society pages carefully, studying who was who in town, what was going on and what was coming up. I also frequented a lot of society functions. I “cleaned up nice” as recruiters liked to say about promising job applicants. In a business suit or formal evening wear, and without my wedding ring, I was usually able to waltz right into a large private party or gala event. It got to the point where my presence was not only tolerated but expected, and mine became a familiar face among a large segment of South Florida’s social elite.
I grew attuned to these people and, when presented with a new face, was able to ascertain fairly quickly what I was dealing with. Separating the upwardly mobile wannabes from the seriously moneyed was a matter of observing not only how people handled themselves but how other people behaved in their presence. When somebody new showed up draped in what appeared to be diamonds and emeralds, I wouldn’t assume anything until I saw them at a number of subsequent soirées. Of the ones who reappeared, I tried to note whether
they wore the same or different baubles. Did they mingle with the same people; did people who’d snubbed them earlier now show more deference; where were they seated and how did that change over time? What I was trying to determine was whether they were worth the tremendous amount of investigation and planning it would take to relieve them of some of their more burdensome possessions.
Prospecting and qualifying. All part of the job and not much different from that Cadillac salesman. Sort of.
* * *
“Ghost Thieves” Rob Sleeping Woman of Millions in Jewels
* * *
Astonished police rule out inside job, say victim had no reason to set up “impossible” robbery
* * *
“I never even knew someone was there until I woke up and found everything gone,” says badly shaken victim
* * *
Truth is usually a whole lot less strange than fiction. I almost hate giving away what really happened because of how it’s going to disappoint all those people who thought it had been done by Martians or something.
After we moved to Florida, I visited Cleveland roughly once a month. I would spend a day or two working on my properties and also meet with the Cleveland Management Company, whose properties I handled in Miami. If I’d had any successful scores, I would also bring along some goods to sell to Tomba.
My visits were purposely irregular. I never told anyone but my family when I was going, and I didn’t make appointments to meet Tomba until I was already in Cleveland. I also didn’t carry a lot of stuff with me, but would spread it out over several visits. All of this was to minimize the possibility of getting set up or ripped off by some cop or crook who would have the gall to rob me of stuff I robbed from somebody else.
A secondary reason for fencing loot in small quantities was to get a better price, but there was an attendant risk in breaking stuff up this way. It meant that I was carrying stolen property almost every time I went to Cleveland. I liked to maintain as much distance as possible between me and my ill-gotten gains—like keeping stuff in work lockers, never at home—so traveling around with it was pretty nerve-racking. I liked to check the stuff through rather than carry it on my person. That way, if I saw that there were a lot of cops hovering around baggage claim, I could always walk away and leave it.
One time I landed in Cleveland and found myself the last person standing at baggage claim after all the bags had been picked up. I made my way to the lost-luggage counter and met up with a steely-eyed woman of considerable bulk who looked at me the way I imagined a rattlesnake looked at a rabbit. Can’t say I blamed her much. How would you like to work in a job in which every single person you dealt with was pissed off and hostile and had nobody to take it out on except you?
She stared at me without saying anything, so I took the initiative. “My bag didn’t show up.”
No shit, said her world-weary eyes as she slapped a form and a pen down on the counter. After I filled it out, she took it without a word and got on the phone.
“It’s in Pittsburgh,” she said upon hanging up.
I waited. She waited.
“So what happens now?” I finally said.
“Until the plane gets here, nothing!” Like she’d rehearsed the script and had been itching to pounce on me.
I hated being at the mercy of people who had me by the balls, but I held any smart remarks in check. “When will that be?”
She consulted a piece of paper and said, “Four-thirty.” Two hours from now.
“Is that certain?”
“I said it’ll be here.” Pure ice. She picked up the form again. “Is this your correct address?”
“Oh, you didn’t say you wanted my correct address.” My charming little attempt to soften her up.
It failed miserably. “If this is your correct address, we’ll deliver it when it arrives.”
“I’d rather wait for it,” I informed her.
“We can deliver it.”
“I can wait.”
“Suit yourself.” She turned away, through with me. “But if it doesn’t show . . .”
“I thought you said it’ll be here.” Dumb move! Backing one of these spitting cobras against the wall almost guaranteed a full frontal assault in exchange. As she started to get her hackles up, I raised my hands in helpless surrender and backed out of her space.
Two anxious hours later the flight from Pittsburgh arrived, but my bag didn’t appear on the carousel and nobody came by to give me any information about it. There was no way I was going back to confront the baggage monster, so I started wandering around and eventually found it sitting alone in a corridor. I picked it up and walked out, unchallenged, just as anybody else could have done.
I’d usually go straight from the airport to my mother’s apartment and call Tomba right away. Within fifteen minutes I’d be in my mother’s car on my way to either his store or his house. This hello-gotta-run greeting kind of threw Mom the first few times, but she got used to it.
Richard Tomba was one of the few good things—actually the only good thing—to have arisen out of my thirty-day incarceration in the Cuyahoga County shit hole some twelve years prior. I was very quiet and had determined to mind my own business, but I quickly found out that things inside aren’t the same as they are outside. Inside, there’s no place to go to be by yourself, so you’d damned well better form the right associations, or things could get ugly in a hurry.
One of the other prisoners was a guy named Vinny “Big Head” Garamendi. I never asked him why he was in jail, because I was afraid he might tell me. Big Head took a liking to me and was always chatting me up on the exercise range. He would laugh and tell me how I should be a gigolo and not a crook, as though there was some kind of difference. As my brief stay drew to a close, he told me about the bar he hung out at on 105th and Euclid, and said I should come look him up after he got out. A few months later I did; Richard Tomba happened to be there that night and Big Head introduced us.
“Blute” Tomba and I struck up a conversation and I learned he owned what was then one of the biggest and most prestigious jewelry stores in Cleveland. (Speaking of “biggest,” I should also mention that Tomba was called “Blute” because he weighed about four hundred pounds and looked like Bluto in the Popeye cartoons.) It wasn’t too big a leap, based on his presence in this spooky bar and the friends he seemed to have, that Blute was into more than advising young couples on engagement rings. When he told me he did a large business in “family jewelry brought over from the old country by immigrants”—in other words, completely untraceable stuff—it was pretty obvious that he was a fence. At the time, I found it irrelevant yet fascinating, but Blute and I became friends and stayed in touch, and later I found him extremely useful.
It was also a good lesson in the utter uselessness of surface appearances. After Blute, I was never again shocked by the corruption that lurked in the dark waters just below glittering respectability.
By this time I’d known Blute for years, but I still checked around carefully whenever I went to his house or store, looking for signs of a setup. Once you’re a crook, you tend to think like a crook all the time, and it becomes more and more difficult to trust anybody completely. Like a stage actor who gets butterflies night after night, no matter how many times I’d visited with Blute to fence stolen goods, I never got used to it. Because of that, as well as the danger of being in possession of illicit jewels, I liked to get it out of the way as soon as possible.
Blute and I would retire to the back room of his respectable jewelry store and go through the stuff I’d brought him. A precious metal like gold went quickly, because that was based strictly on weight and purity and what the market conditions were on the street. Gems, however, were a different story. We’d spend two or three hours weighing stones and examining them carefully. We each had our own jeweler’s loupes, handheld magnifying glasses with high-quality optics. Blute would peer at a stone, then hand it to me with a detailed rundown of why it was junk.
; “Loaded with inclusions,” he’d say of a diamond.
“Barely noticeable,” I’d come back, “and the clarity is outstanding.”
He’d shake his head. “Yeah, maybe, but there’s this yellowish tinge . . . ?”
Blute was a certified gemologist, a credential I chose to forgo myself rather than someday have to explain why someone in real estate would have undertaken the training to evaluate gems. Nevertheless, I’d studied intensely on my own and was as good at it as he was, and he knew it.
My specialty was diamonds. The king of all jewels, and the most expensive despite their rarity being almost wholly artificial—De Beers SA tightly controls how many come onto the market each year in order to keep prices high—diamonds are evaluated according to the four C’s. “Carat” is the most objective quality factor, and refers to the diamond’s weight. It’s a very old term derived from “carob,” a seed that doesn’t vary much in weight and was used as a unit of weight going all the way back to ancient Greece. It takes about 142 carats to make an ounce. Because larger diamonds are more rare than smaller ones, the value per carat is much higher in a larger stone, so a two-carat diamond is worth much more than two one-carat diamonds of identical quality. (“Carat” shouldn’t be confused with “karat,” another jeweler’s term that refers to the purity of gold.)
The second C is “clarity.” Most diamonds have internal flaws, called inclusions, usually caused by traces of minerals. Clarity is graded based on the number, size and type of inclusions. A “flawless” diamond, one that has no internal or external faults, is very rare and very valuable. These days a one-carat ideal-cut stone with inclusions barely visible to the naked eye might be worth just under five thousand dollars, whereas a flawless diamond of the same size and cut could go for over seven thousand dollars.