by Bill Mason
Speaking of “cut,” that’s the third C and refers to how the final stone was shaped from the chunk that was originally mined. A diamond in the ground isn’t very impressive to look at, and the final gem-quality stone must be liberated from within. Extreme care needs to be paid to the roundness, depth and width, as well as to the uniformity of the “facets,” the flat planes that form the diamond’s surface. A classically cut diamond is roughly the shape of a child’s spinning top, except that all the edges are straight rather than round. Light entering the diamond bounces around inside and then reemerges through the top. If the diamond is cut too squat, light will leak out the sides and the stone will lose brilliance. If it’s too deep, light will escape out the bottom and the appearance to your eye will be dull.
But if it’s cut just right, with all the facets at exactly the correct angles to one another, most of the light that enters the diamond will come shooting out the top surface, and the stone will look almost as if the inside was generating its own fire. The classic cut is called “ideal,” but there are also a lot of “fancy” cuts, such as the oval, emerald, radiant, marquise and pear.
The fourth C is “color.” A diamond reflects light in much the same way as one of those triangular prisms you might have toyed around with in science class, except that it’s much more complicated. Internal reflection breaks normal white light up into the various colors of the rainbow, which sparkle in your eye as “fire” when they emerge. If the diamond has any color in it, usually a yellowish tinge, it’s like looking at it through sunglasses. The color acts as a filter and reduces the fire. So, traditionally, the most beautiful and valuable diamonds are the ones with the least color. A nearly colorless one-carat ideal-cut diamond with slight inclusions might go for about forty-five hundred dollars, whereas an absolutely colorless stone with the same inclusions could fetch nearly twice that. I say “traditionally” because, as with a lot of extremely expensive things that essentially have no intrinsic worth whatsoever, fashions come and go. Diamonds with some color are usually considered less valuable, but those with a lot of color are often highly coveted if the color is uniform throughout. This is especially true of yellow diamonds, but other colors have gone in and out of style over the years. Regardless, however, clear or blue-white diamonds have always been at the very top of the quality heap. (Diamonds sure do make you wonder about people: Why would someone pay thousands extra for quality only a trained gemologist could detect, and even then only with a magnifying glass? No wonder scam artists and advertising professionals are never at a loss for work.)
Aside from the carat weight, all of these quality factors are, to a certain extent, a matter of judgment, so it’s easy to see how Blute and I could go around and around arguing about individual stones. Neither of us really had the upper hand in these negotiations, but we were both motivated to come to an agreement. Maybe he had other guys who came to him with goods, but I was right there, right now, with top-quality merchandise, and he didn’t want me to walk while there was plenty of profit to be made. He also knew that I brought him much better gems than most of his suppliers, and he wanted me to remain a continuing good source.
As for me, I had other fences I could go to, but I didn’t like the idea of carting gems around all over town. Besides, given the volume of business I did with Blute, there was less risk than with other guys I didn’t know as well. He also knew my ability to grade stones and didn’t waste too much time trying to bullshit me.
So it was in both our interests to act reasonably and get the deal done, and our debates were a pretty logical give-and-take based on the true merits of the stones. Where we couldn’t agree, or when there were items he just didn’t want, we’d set those aside and he’d make a lump-sum offer for all the rest, and then we’d bat that number around a little. In the countless times I’d brought stuff to Blute, we’d never once failed to make a deal, and did so again on this occasion.
With that out of the way, and my red-hot booty converted into cold, comfortable cash, I was free to spend the next few days visiting with Mom and my aunt and attending to my real estate affairs.
Let’s get back to prospecting.
Most evenings when I was in Cleveland, I’d take my mother and aunt out to dinner. I’d always felt bad about abandoning them when I’d moved the family off to Florida, especially since they’d both lost their husbands and were alone. I felt an obligation to spend as much time with them as possible and was glad that I had reasons for getting back there so often.
Once in a while I’d head down to Bill Welling’s shop on East Forty-ninth Street. His bank-robbing days were long over and he’d become downright respectable. Never having been arrested, he had no record and went to work for Cleveland’s school board, where he was to serve for over thirty years. Always a hard worker, he eventually got into a position where he traveled to various schools all over the city. That left him with a lot of free time, so he turned some of his less than savory skills with his hands to legitimate purposes and started up a business with his brother, John, making prehung doors and doing the occasional kitchen remodel. Because nearly all of his employees had other day jobs, most of the work was done at night, and the little shop became a hangout for friends. Welling always had a cold keg of beer set up, and everybody who showed up pitched in to help out with the carpentry.
Welling may have gone legit, but a lot of his buddies were still in the life. Some of them came by the shop for the camaraderie, but a lot of others really needed the few bucks they could make sawing lumber and assembling frames for Welling. Makes you wonder about the net benefit of being a criminal, but a lot of these guys are like degenerate gamblers who think they have to hit only one big score and they’ll quit. Yeah, right. Truth is, no gambler or crook I ever knew—including me—ever actually had in mind a number he was trying to hit. So no matter how much they won or stole, they had no way to know if they’d crossed the magic threshold and could quit. This was purposeful, of course, and subconscious: For gamblers and crooks, it’s rarely about the money.
One evening, about five years after we’d moved to Florida, I’d been at Welling’s relaxing over a cold one and struck up a conversation with a guy named Wayne, who worked with Welling at his school-board day job. He was a talker, this guy, and me being a listener, it was a natural match. As we worked through a few more beers, Wayne got more and more chatty and didn’t seem to notice when my attention occasionally drifted. Eventually he got around to telling me he had a second job, washing windows at some luxury apartments in Shaker Heights and Beachwood. That got him into a series of boring stories about how he wasn’t paid enough, worked too hard, wasn’t appreciated and so on. Seems he wasn’t particularly grateful that these overstuffed swells were supplementing his income. Behind his tales of slow payment and niggling complaints I could sense some self-pity, and suspected that the residents of those posh digs probably had one or two problems with Wayne’s work. I had nearly nodded off when he started to rant about one lady who particularly rankled him.
“Old biddy,” he spat. “A widow, with too much damned money and too much damned time. Does nothing but drink all day and bust my balls, bitching about this and that. I miss one little spot, she tells me do the whole thing over, but when I come to collect? Always a problem. Ain’t like she’s gotta wait for a welfare check, the rich old bitch.”
My eyelids reopened. I grunted something to indicate that I was still listening, and it didn’t take more than that to send Wayne off on another tear.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” he said bitterly, “all the dough this old broad’s got. Closet full of jewelry, necklaces and bracelets scattered all over the damned place—”
“Ah, bullshit,” said a voice behind me. I turned to see Welling drawing some beer from the keg. He let the handle on the spout snap back, winked at me with a slight smile, then gestured toward Wayne with his glass. “Probably all fake.” Welling knew exactly what was going through my mind.
“Bullshit on that!” Wayn
e shot back. “I seen the stuff, and I’m tellin’ you, it’s the real deal!”
After Welling walked away, I plied Wayne with a few more beers and kept him talking, asking harmless-sounding questions about what the apartment looked like, and did the lady ever go out, that sort of thing. He was happy for the willing ear and gushed on for another forty minutes or so, knocking back beers while I nursed only one the whole time.
When I was sure we had some good rapport going and that he was pretty soused, I said, “I know a bunch of people over at Blair. Who is this lady, anyway?”
Sometime later Wayne finally staggered his way out of the shop. I took Welling aside and asked him if Wayne had any idea what he was talking about when it came to jewelry.
“Probably,” Welling answered. “His brother’s a jeweler.”
I hoped Wayne would wake up the next morning with a vicious hangover and forget everything we’d talked about.
Having thus prospected a new customer, it was time to qualify her.
I had another few days in Cleveland working on my properties. I freed up my nights after telling Mom and my aunt that there was a lot to be done before I went back to Florida, and spent those evenings researching this miserly old lady with an apartment full of jewels.
First stop was the Shaker Heights Public Library to check out the city directory. Wonderful things, city directories: They were like reference books for thieves published at public expense. From that single volume I learned the woman’s phone number, how many phones she had, her suite number in Blair House, her dead husband’s occupation and similar information for all the people who lived over, under and around her. That took all of half an hour, then it was off to the building itself for a look-see.
Blair House was one of a row of upscale apartment buildings in eastern Shaker Heights. I guess its pretentious name was supposed to evoke an image of the U.S. State Department’s official Washington residence for visiting dignitaries, but this was a pretty posh place in its own right. It faced onto Van Aken Boulevard, while the back overlooked the exclusive Shaker Heights Country Club, which had been built in 1913 and was considered one of the outstanding gems of famed golf course architect Donald Ross’s career. The whole neighborhood smelled of old money.
Blair House’s security system consisted of an intercom and a television camera by the front-door reader board. If you rang somebody, they could look at you on television if they wanted to or just buzz you in based on your voice. Of course, if their television didn’t happen to be on and tuned to the right station, they couldn’t see a thing. In those days most televisions were still running on tubes rather than transistors, which meant it was doubtful a lot of people turned on the television and sat around while it warmed up whenever they got a call from downstairs. It would be easy to bluff my way in if I had to.
But I didn’t want to, and hunted around a little instead. First thing I came to was the service entrance. Using a screwdriver, I put some pressure between the door and the jamb and they separated easily, exposing the latch mechanism. I had with me a tool I’d made, a thin but strong piece of metal curved into an S shape. It slipped easily around the door and behind the spring bolt. Pushing it slightly shoved the bolt back and the door popped open. I now had the run of the building. (I could just hear the police questioning building management about why they didn’t have better locks, and the inevitable king of dumb-ass responses: “But we’d never been robbed before!” As though good security was something you needed only after you got hit.)
There was nobody around, and a few seconds later I was at the lady’s suite, which had two doors, neither of which was closer than fifty feet to a neighbor’s. The main door had three sturdy locks on it, but the service entrance had—you guessed it—one. I guess the thinking was that if somebody tried to rob the place, they’d opt for the main door. It was the kind of thinking that could make my life easier, but I also had to assume that the tenant wasn’t stupid. Maybe the reason the service entrance had only one lock was that it was dead-bolted from the inside. If that was the case, I might not be able to get in through the inside doors.
The suite was one of the apartments facing the golf course, so I went back outside and around the building. It was a moonless night with little light trickling in from the street, and I was able to take my time as I looked around. The only units with patios were the penthouses on the top floor. If I were to drop down and go through a window, I’d have to pass by one of those, another chance of being seen, which meant I’d have to do the job when neither the lady nor her upstairs neighbor was home. As it happened, she was home right now. I made a mental note of the day of the week and the time.
I got just one more chance to go back there during that trip to Cleveland, and then I had to return to Florida. I tried to push Blair House to the back of my mind, but it was difficult. Once a potential score got into my brain, it lodged there like a virus until I either pulled it off or rejected it as too risky. On my next three trips I revisited the place several times.
This was a lousy way to case a job, dropping in months apart. I couldn’t establish any kind of schedule for the woman—were there nights of the week she regularly ate out, or played bingo, or went to the movies? Hell, I didn’t know if she drove a car or even owned one. I didn’t want to enter the building any more than necessary. Had I run into anybody, I had plenty of good reasons ready for being there, and I always took care to dress neatly so as not to arouse suspicion. But I don’t care if you’re Laurence Olivier: When you know in your mind you’re up to no good, there’s no way in hell to act completely natural, and you’re too nervous to accurately assess whether you’re giving yourself away.
I did have to find out about a car, though, so one ice-cold morning just before dawn I went into the building again and down to the garage. The parking spaces were numbered by unit. (Blindingly obvious security tip of the day: Don’t do that!) There was an attendant on duty, but he was asleep, so I was able to find the right spot and check out the car. It was a four-year-old Cadillac, in pristine condition, no scratches anywhere. I might have been tempted to conclude that she rarely drove it, but I figured she just paid the attendant to clean it regularly and probably busted his chops about it the same way she busted Wayne’s about the windows. Now that I knew what the car looked like, I could watch for it going in and out and see if some kind of pattern made itself evident.
I went back upstairs and planted myself in the far stairwell on the lady’s floor. It was about six-thirty A.M. now, just before a normally high traffic time when people would be going to work and maids and service people would start arriving and puttering around. They’d be taking out garbage, bringing in groceries, carrying around tools, delivering things. . . . Having worked in and around apartment buildings for years, I was very attuned to the patterns of life within.
I sat there for three and a half hours, all tensed up and alert, and never saw or heard a damned thing. Was everyone in this place dead? When I’d had enough of that, I walked right up to the elevator, down to the lobby and out the front door to my car. Never saw a soul the whole time. That might sound like good news, but it was just the opposite. Lots of traffic was good, for several reasons. First, it made the presence of one more body less noticeable. Second, it allowed you to zero in on a pattern and assess its regularity. But seeing absolutely no movement at all meant that whatever movement did occur would be random, unpredictable and potentially dangerous.
Months more of this kind of frustrating casing gained me little new knowledge. Seems that I’d simply have to come to the building, fully prepared, as many times as necessary, and just keep going home until she finally went out one night. And when she did, I’d have no idea how long she’d be gone. This was one I’d really have to think hard about before I committed. I’d given up on plenty of scores I’d spent much more time and effort on when the stars simply refused to line up correctly. One decision I did make, though, was to target the service door to the apartment rather than the front door.
I didn’t want to screw around with three separate locks, and it would be easier to talk my way out of monkeying with the service entrance should I be confronted.
Winter passed slowly into spring, and still I hadn’t moved on this job. I’d gone by the place dozens of times and she was always home. It was starting to seem as though the only way to get this done would be to camp out with the place in view twenty-four hours a day for a week, and there was no way I could do that. Besides, as far as I was concerned, this still wasn’t a “fully qualified prospect,” and I wouldn’t put that kind of effort into it.
I was back in Cleveland again in late May and decided to stick around over the Memorial Day weekend. I came in on Thursday evening and made my usual trip to Blute Tomba’s jewelry store, unloading a small chunk of a recent score and walking out with ten thousand dollars. Normally I’d want to dump the cash in one of my work lockers as soon as possible, but as I drove along Warrensville Center Road, I caught sight of the Shaker Heights Country Club and impulsively turned toward Van Aken Boulevard. I left the car about a block from Blair House and took a casual stroll to see what was going on. Same old shit: The lights in her apartment were on and I could detect some movement within.
I came back Friday night. Same thing. This was really turning into an exasperating waste of time and I started to think about how I could get rid of this irritating stone in my shoe and just forget about it. That wasn’t easy to do, though, unless there was some obstacle that couldn’t be overcome. But if the problem was just lack of information or a timing issue, it was hard to call the whole thing off, because the solution could be right around the corner.