Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

by Bill Mason

  Part

  II

  9

  On Doing Time

  A MAGAZINE feature writer once wrote that I didn’t like jail. Really? I was shocked. I always thought jail was so comfy and relaxing that you were supposed to like it and want to come back again as soon as possible.

  Of course I didn’t like it. A basically solitary guy who had everything he could want on the outside now in a place with no privacy, constant noise, awful smells that never went away and sociopathic degenerates who would cut your throat for a pack of cigarettes . . . What the hell was there to like?

  Some guys were used to jail and could do a stretch easily. “Easy timers” didn’t have much of a life on the outside. They spent most of their time hanging out with their buddies, bullshitting all day and never doing anything except the occasional idiotic convenience-store robbery or mugging or B&E of a house whose occupants didn’t have much more than the burglar did. For these guys, jail wasn’t all that different from the street. A few more rules, sure, but “three hots and a cot” and no worries about drive-bys or bill collectors.

  That wasn’t me. I was the kind of guy who was said to pull “hard time.” I had little fear of other inmates because I could take care of myself and they seemed to sense that, but for someone as fun-loving, outdoorsy and family-oriented as me, jail was like a living death. I wasn’t afraid of anything in prison, just of being there. It was the only thing in the world that truly terrified me.

  There are a lot of common conceptions about incarceration, some very true, others less so. For one thing, it’s widely believed that you can’t just keep to yourself and do your time quietly and expect to be left alone, that it’s vital to form alliances, to hook up with the right people, so you have a protective “family” that will ensure that you come to no harm. As it happens, this is largely true, except that it’s not a universal truth. It depends on which institution you’re in and, even more important, who you are and how you handle yourself.

  Some guys come into the joint so scared, they’re practically peeing in their pants. Sometimes they are peeing in their pants. They’re not career criminals and all they know is what they’ve seen in movies and on television. Those dramatic forms are not real good at communicating the basic truth of prison life, which is grinding, maddening, excruciating tedium, so they tend to concentrate on moments of high drama and action. The newcomer is terrified of being gang-raped on his first day by half a dozen three-hundred-pound psychotic black guys who’ve been without fresh white meat for weeks, and who will follow up the party by beating the guy to death just for laughs.

  Things like that happen, sure. There are stabbings and murders, too, but not nearly as often as sensationalistic media portrayals would have you believe. Fights are another thing, though, and there are plenty of those, but the most depressing reality of prison, other than not being able to be with your loved ones, is boredom.

  I came into the Broward County Jail in Florida for a three-month stretch (I’ll explain why soon) at the age of thirty-six with my back straight and showing no fear. I cast dirty looks at the more intimidating of my fellow inmates, which got me a lot of catcalls and derisive remarks at first, but I kept it up and didn’t look away. The jail wasn’t well designed, and was kind of just an afterthought extension to the courthouse, so there was no exercise yard—in effect, we were on twenty-four-hour lockdown—but I did chin-ups by the hundreds on the cell-block bars to demonstrate my upper-body strength. It wasn’t to show off but to make sure guys knew I wasn’t some couch-potato white-collar embezzler who couldn’t and wouldn’t defend himself. Early on I established that I wouldn’t take too kindly to someone trying to fuck me in the ass, that I’d rather get killed fighting back and would make sure to seriously damage my attackers in the process. In short, I gave the impression that I would be more trouble than I was worth, and I was left alone.

  Time goes ever so slowly on the inside. If you just dwell on your situation and your problems, it goes even slower and you can easily drive yourself crazy, so occupying your mind is the first order of the day. Because of the virtual twenty-four-hour lockdown, food was passed through the bars into the cell blocks by trustees (“model” prisoners with jobs that let them move around more freely), so you couldn’t even break up the day by going to a dining hall for meals. Gambling was the big thing to do, and cigarettes and food, especially desserts, were the big items to gamble for. Most of the fights arose over gambling losses.

  I was lucky in that I loved to read, and while there was no prison library in that underfunded, undermanaged facility, there was also no objection to prisoners having books brought to them by visitors. I also spent a lot of my time figuring out how to escape. I didn’t plan to actually break out, I was just trying to keep my mind occupied, but I was intrigued by the possibility and drew up a lot of detailed plans, if only to pass the time. The conclusion I came to was that it would be a relatively easy thing to do if you had the right help on the outside. Alone, it would be very difficult.

  Not impossible, though. Because of my experience managing buildings with elevators, I knew that the elevator doors on every floor had small emergency overrides at the top. It took a special U-shaped key, which you pushed in the slot or keyhole and flipped to release the sliding door and open up the elevator shaft. This also automatically stopped the elevator car if it was in motion, no matter where it happened to be located at that time. While I was especially bored one day in the prison, I made a key out of metal ballpoint parts. During my trustee shift on the fifth floor, I tried it out when nobody was around and I was sure none of the cars was moving. The doors popped right open, and I saw that it would only be about a four-foot jump to reach the cables. If you held a towel in your hands, you could slide down one of the cables to whatever floor any of the cars happened to be on, jump to the top of it and ride it until it stopped on a floor below the jail. Kids in the Bronx do this all the time; it’s called “elevator surfing,” and aside from the fairly frequent deaths that result, I suppose it’s fun. Once you were stopped at a lower floor, you could open the door above the one the car was stopped at and, assuming you didn’t run into a judge or some cops that knew you, out you’d go, looking like just another greasy elevator repairman. In that antiquated jail everybody wore street clothes.

  As it turned out, my escape plan was probably overengineered. About six weeks after I got out, a Cuban wiseguy I’d met briefly when I was inside hid in a supply room near the main phones. In the middle of the night he cut a hole through the floor and wriggled himself right into a judge’s chambers, then made his way out of the courthouse. As far as I know, he hasn’t been heard from since. Pictures of the hole he cut were in all the papers.

  That escape may have been what led to the eventual revamping of procedures in the prison and put it on a more professional footing. Since there were never any prisoner counts, and the guards entered the cell blocks only in extreme circumstances, it was four full days before anybody even realized the guy had escaped. Seems his lawyer came to see him and sat steaming for an hour, only to be told his client was gone. The newspapers had a field day with that one.

  Tedium was just as much a factor for the guards. They were basically underpaid civil servants trying to get through the day without going crazy, getting hurt or losing their jobs. The only thing that broke up the monotony for them, other than disturbances or the occasional beating, was when they had to move an individual prisoner around. You’d think a guard could just go directly to the correct cell, but this place was so badly organized that prison officials didn’t know which four-man cell a guy was in, only which block he was on.

  The prisoner being called would go into a little holding cell that led outside the block. Sometimes the guard would have to wake him up first or wait for him to get dressed. Any kind of delay and the guard would harangue him to hurry up. I don’t know why they always did that—what the hell else did the guard have to do that was so important?—but they always did. The prisoner
would then be released to the walkway and go with the guard. One detail that struck me funny was that the prisoner’s name was always written on a piece of paper the guard carried. Maybe it was so the guard wouldn’t forget who he was after on the long walk down the outside tier.

  Isn’t that incredibly exciting? And that was generally the highlight of the guard’s working day.

  Which was just fine with them, because the only other thing available to break up the day was trouble. Guards genuinely fear trouble and therefore have a tendency to overreact to it. It’s not that they hate the prisoners; they may have contempt for them and little respect, but it isn’t about hatred. It’s just that when trouble starts, it ups the probability that something is going to go wrong and the guard is going to suffer for it, either an injury or a reprimand on his record or outright loss of his job. So they like to quell disturbances quickly, and they really, really don’t like troublemakers.

  Most of the guards in the Broward County Jail liked me. I never made trouble and was always polite and cooperative, but I never sucked ass, either, which they understood. They also understood when I had to stand my ground against an inmate who was bothering me, and there were never any consequences from those occasional confrontations. It was a good “working relationship,” I suppose, and it paid off. When I needed something, like a phone call or some other special privilege over which the guards had control, I was rarely denied.

  Not everybody in the jail was under sentence. Some were being held in custody pending trials or hearings because they couldn’t make bail or bail had been denied them. There was no telling how long those guys would be there, so they weren’t given any kind of job.

  I was under sentence and so I was made a trustee on the fifth floor, the main receiving center for all the new prisoners coming in. The fifth floor was run by a decent guy named Sergeant Richard Howard. He had about half a dozen other guards under him. My job was to answer the phone, take messages as to who was wanted where, make sure all the new prisoners got some sandwiches and things like that. Not very taxing work, but it filled the day. There were always four or five guards standing around doing zilch, telling stories and generally trying to pass the time. They never seemed to mind that I was always on the phone, and never asked whom I was talking to. It had taken me about an hour to figure out how to use the phone to make outside calls, so I talked to Barb quite a lot.

  One of my most important jobs was to make sure I didn’t get blamed for the dopey jokes the guards liked to play. Their favorite was to take a new guard and have me give him a slip with the name of a prisoner in the furthest block, a guy named “Jack Meoff.” So here goes the poor innocent greenie, who is determined to do a good job on his first day, walking down the whole tier calling out “Jack Meoff!” in front of all the degenerates located in the blocks. They would get the biggest kick out of this, and the old-timers who were in on the gag would yell things like “Jack’s asleep. We’ll get him up.” When the new guard finally realized what he was doing, he’d assume it was something I’d put him up to, especially since all the other guards were looking so innocent. Shows you how truly monotonous it was when dumb gags like that could spice things up.

  They loved to pull any kind of joke, however cruel. One involved a prisoner named Steven Simonson. I knew him because we had the same lawyer, Ray Sandstrom, and I had a bit of a beef with him because his sentence and mine were kind of intertwined, which I’ll get to later. Simonson had some notoriety as a thief, and he’d been sentenced to two years for a robbery in which he’d posed as a priest, knocked on some lady’s door and then stolen her jewelry when she answered.

  Simonson was one of the most nervous guys I’d ever seen. He was scared to death of jail and was always trying to talk to me in order to calm himself down, to the point where it got really annoying. One day a guard and I concocted a plan to pester him back. We sent another guard to tell Simonson to get all his things—“bag and baggage,” as we called it—because he was being sent up the river to Chattahoochee, known in prison circles as “the nuthouse.” The place had a horrendous reputation, and this poor guy stood by the door for two solid hours quivering in terror, until I finally took pity and told him it was a joke. It was mean, sure, but remember that this was no summer camp. Simonson was later moved to another prison, and Ray told me he’d been raped there.

  All of this idiotic fun aside, there was an incident very early in my incarceration that was very disturbing but also instructive. Incoming prisoners would arrive at the booking desk in all kinds of conditions. Some would be drunk, some would be in drag so elaborate it was hard to believe they were really men, and some were belligerent. On my second day there, an especially stupid guy swaggered in, confronted one guard and pushed a second one. As though some secret radio signal had flashed from one guard to another, four uniforms immediately set upon the guy, clubbed him to a bloody pulp, then threw his unconscious body into a solitary cell. From what I could see, one token poke in the ribs would probably have shut the guy up, but what he’d run into was the standard operating procedure when a new guy thought he could throw his weight around. It helped explain why most of the inmates were so well behaved all the time, and it also taught me a valuable lesson: It was okay to chum around with the guards so long as you never, ever made the mistake of assuming you were buddies. Over the next couple of months I saw some severely beaten prisoners who barely knew what hit them.

  That old jail has been torn down and a modern one built in its place. Brings to mind some lines from one of my favorite films:

  BUTCH: What happened to the old bank? It was beautiful!

  BANK MANAGER: People kept robbing it.

  BUTCH: Small price to pay for beauty.

  I should probably tell you how I got there. . . .

  Life was good for me in Fort Lauderdale in the mid-seventies. My real estate company was doing well and I was busy overseeing property in Miami and visiting potential acquisitions on an almost daily basis. I checked out larger complexes for the investment group back in Cleveland and smaller properties for myself.

  I’d completely recovered from my gunshot wound, although the entry, exit and surgery scars were still quite prominent and took a little explaining around the pool. As far as Barbara was concerned, I’d learned my lesson, but all I really did was push my sideline further under wraps. I was still regularly scanning the society pages for opportunities of a distinctly non–real estate nature.

  As quiet and private as I tried to be about that sideline, there was no way to keep something like that completely to myself unless everything always went exactly right, and life isn’t like that. One person who’d figured a few things out early on was Barb’s younger brother, Augie. Although he’d come to do some dumb things in his life, Augie was no dummy. About six feet tall, extremely handsome and multitalented, he was a hard-partying type but also thoughtful and a bit enigmatic. I liked him a good deal and also trusted him, although his judgment sometimes didn’t measure up to his personal loyalty, which was never in doubt.

  Augie had a fraternity brother named Calvin Johnson who lived in South Florida. Augie told him a few stories during some college beer blast or whatever, and Calvin probably passed them on to to his older brother, Derek. It didn’t take me long to figure out that old Derek wanted something from me.

  Derek began hanging around my house on weekends, sometimes with his wife. He’d swim in my pool, drink my booze and generally make small talk loaded with innuendos. Finally, lying around the pool one particularly warm day, he scratched himself, heaved a great sigh and said, “Seems I need some dough, Bill. A lot of it.” He rolled over and looked at me. “You happen’a know any way I could lay my hands on some money real quick?”

  He couldn’t have asked at a better time. Or worse, depending on how you looked at it.

  About a year before, I’d been out in my boat, tooling along the Intracoastal Waterway. In case you’re not familiar with the geography of southern Florida, the Intracoastal is a narrow
waterway dividing the main body of Florida from a strip of land that runs parallel to the coast. That thin sliver of land is where all the famous beaches are, like Miami and Lauderdale. The Intracoastal carries some heavy boat traffic, because you can cruise for miles without having to venture out into the ocean. While most people in Florida tend to think of it as a local feature, it actually runs all the way to Boston, in one form or another. It was created during World War II so barges could travel up and down the East Coast protected from attack by enemy submarines.

  It’s also the body of water you’re talking about when you talk waterfront homes in that area. There are thousands of homes and boat docks fronting the Intracoastal, and those are what I was admiring as I motored quietly, going nowhere in particular. Houses there can run into the many millions, and there are private boats that can easily accommodate dozens of party guests.

  I heard some music from somewhere off to my left, and looked in that direction to see a hundred-foot yacht looming up from behind me. There was a party going on, with about fifty people clad in tuxedos, evening gowns and—even from a distance it was easy to see—a whole lot of fine-looking jewelry. As I let the boat pass by, I recognized some faces. One was that of Bert Parks, the perennial and ageless host of countless Miss America pageants.

  Intrigued, I followed at a respectable distance. They went up the Intracoastal to Port Everglades, then turned east into the ocean, north again and all the way to Palm Beach. Altogether it was a trip of about fifty miles, but nobody on board seemed in much of a hurry. They finally docked alongside some extremely fancy digs and disembarked to join hundreds of other similarly clad swells at what turned out to be the annual Red Cross Ball.