Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

by Bill Mason

  With a little digging I found out that the yacht belonged to the lady who owned Hollywood Bread, which was pretty famous stuff at the time. Henry Miller even mentioned it in an article he wrote just after World War II. They were later to have some trouble with the FTC over weight-reduction claims they made in advertising, and I think they eventually went out of business. The old Hollywood Bread building in downtown Hollywood, Florida, is still a local landmark.

  Anyway, each year this lady invited a bunch of people who were going to the ball to join her on the yacht and thereby avoid the maddeningly interminable drawbridge delays that were a fact of life for motorists down there. She made a party out of it, and people would begin angling for invitations for the next year barely before the current year’s ball had even wrapped up.

  That yacht looked to me like a wounded seal must look to a great white shark. Once I’d gotten it into my head that it might be possible to pirate the thing, I couldn’t shake it loose. I quickly came to the conclusion that there was no way to do it solo, which cooled me on the idea. It would also involve guns, which I didn’t like one bit. You’d have to keep fifty guests under control, along with four crewmen, and it would only take one wannabe hero in the crowd to do something really dumb and screw the whole thing up. Without some serious ordnance pointing at them, it would be too risky.

  The plan would be to come up to the boat from behind once they were in open ocean, climb aboard with grappling hooks and generally take over. We’d disable the radios first, then the engines, then relieve everyone on board of their goodies. Back into our own boat and off to a spot where we planted a car, then sink the getaway boat and be on our way with millions in jewels. It would be a whole lot more complicated than that, of course, but the concept of being a twentieth-century pirate was simply too inviting to let go of completely.

  Inviting enough that I was willing to reconsider some of the rules that had served me so well in the past? Maybe I’d been too much of a hard-ass about not using partners or weapons and never robbing premises with people on them. Had I unwittingly been passing up some fabulous opportunities because of an antiquated code of proper procedure?

  I’d already run it past Augie and my buddy Bill Welling, just for laughs. They joked back and we had some fun discussions, and after a while I knew they were in. Now here was Derek Johnson, asking if I knew of a way to make a bunch of dough, both of us knowing exactly in which direction he was looking. I’d already come to the conclusion that to do this job right would take four men. Now, I didn’t trust Derek—it takes me a helluva lot longer to get to that point than I’d spent with him—but I sure as hell trusted Augie and Welling.

  Trying to sound as casual as I could, I told Derek I didn’t really know of anything specific, but how would he feel about driving a boat for a few hours for a flat ten grand?

  He sat up. “Driving it where?”

  “What’s the difference?” I answered, staying on my back with my eyes closed. He knew what I meant. First, if someone offers you that kind of money to drive a boat, it’s probably not to deliver a load of stone crabs. Second, if I’d wanted him to know, I would have told him.

  He saw the point. “Sure, no problem,” he said eagerly.

  What a jerk. I should have known from that alone to stay as far away from him as possible. In the movies guys are always walking into risky situations on no more data than a wink and a touch to the side of the nose. In the real world, if you want to stay alive and out of trouble, you ask a million questions until you know the color of the shoelaces your backup driver is supposed to wear. But here’s Derek, not knowing if I plan to dump a body or run a load of drugs or God knows what, agreeing to take part. Dumb as I was for including him in the caper, at least I had the good sense not to let him know what was going on.

  It was about that time that the Fort Lauderdale Tactical Squad started following me, although I had no idea at the time.

  That unit had been formed by the police in response to the state’s Career Criminal Program, which mandated local police departments to target known habitual offenders and make an attempt to apprehend them in the commission of serious crimes. Needless to say, I fit the mandate perfectly, but how on earth could they have known that?

  They began following me day and night, and those TAC boys were very good. It’s not hard to do good surveillance if you’ve got the budget for it. It just takes a lot of men. Contrary to popular belief, the more crowded and busy the city, the easier it is to maintain a tail, because it’s more difficult to spot the guys who are watching you. It’s when you’re out in the boonies that it’s nearly impossible to follow somebody without him copping to you.

  The TAC Squad constantly changed personnel and cars so I wouldn’t be likely to notice the same vehicle in two different places. It was nothing for one team to sit still as I left an area and radio ahead for another team to pick me up, then leapfrog them to be ready for the next handover. I drove them crazy anyway, because I was always out inspecting properties. I’d stand in front of a building in an upscale neighborhood, walk around, check out entrances, maybe even take a few pictures. Radios would start to crackle all over the place, the TAC guys certain I was about to hit the place. They’d have as many as six unmarked cars gathered to pounce on me as soon as I made my move. Then I’d just leave and go somewhere else. One afternoon Augie and I took my boat out for a long ride, and there were plainclothes cops stationed on every bridge between Fort Lauderdale and Miami, tracking us and radioing in our position.

  Like I said, I didn’t know any of this at the time and had absolutely no idea that I was being tailed. Later, when the shit finally hit the fan, my lawyer got hold of all the surveillance reports and I eventually pieced it together. It was interesting reading, too. The most utterly innocuous things I did were seen as preludes to evil by the jumpy police. Ever since then I’ve cast a pretty skeptical eye on news reports dealing with someone suspected of a crime. Any high school newspaper reporter can dig up stuff that would make anyone at all look guilty if presented in the proper accusatory light. Just look what the media did to Richard Jewell, wrongly accused of being the Atlanta Olympics bomber. They made the guy look like a professional terrorist and he was completely innocent.

  The most tense moment of all, unbeknownst to me at the time, came when Barb and I attended a swank fund-raiser for the Florida Republican Party. Then-president Gerald Ford was there, and at one point he and I shook hands and spoke for a few seconds. Seems about two dozen earpieces went into overdrive as that happened, the local cops begging the Secret Service guys not to intervene lest their entire surveillance get blown, the Secret Service guys yelling for instructions from their agent-in-charge, the AIC yakking with the head of Fort Lauderdale TAC to determine how dangerous I might be. It all passed quickly and, at least to the guests, quietly, but imagine what heads would have rolled on that decision had I really been up to no good.

  I suppose I should have known something was up, but I wasn’t actually doing anything wrong, so my guard was down. My calm exterior might have saved my life, too, or at least prevented some broken bones, because if I’d been nervous as I approached President Ford, I might have ended up at the bottom of a pile of Secret Service agents, who are famous for overkill when protecting their man. (They almost crushed President Reagan to death on the floor of the car after he was shot, and are reputed to have actually broken one or two of his ribs in the process. Must be cool to say you roughed up the president, even if it was for his own good.)

  The Red Cross Ball was still a long ways off and I was getting restless. I’d found out from a broker in Fort Lauderdale that a Ramada Inn right on the beach had quietly gone up for sale. I was in no position to buy a hotel, and the real estate company in Cleveland wasn’t interested in it either, but it was a good excuse to do a little prospecting. I’d actually cased the place once before and, courtesy of the Schlage lock company, already had master keys to every room.

  I’d sneaked a peek at a master key on
a cleaning cart during an earlier visit and memorized the code number stamped on it. I wrote to Schlage on “Bay Harbor Management Company” stationery and told them I’d lost the master key to one of our apartment buildings but had wisely written down the code and put it in our corporate safety-deposit box. Those dear customer-service-oriented people overnighted a new one to me. (I do believe I sent a nice thank-you note.)

  But it only worked on the first floor. However, in that particular key system, a cheap one, the master for each floor differed from the other floors on just one pin of the five-pin lock. I knew that it was virtually certain to be either the first or the last pin. Since I already had one master key, all I had to do was obtain some Schlage blanks and copy the master a few dozen times, moving just one tooth, the first or last, slightly up or down with each new copy. I ended up with about forty keys representing every possible master for that particular hotel and tried them on a bunch of doors until I found the ones that worked.

  Even now I shudder when I think back on that day. There I was, blithely going off to case a hotel, not knowing that an entire platoon of cops was watching my every move. Had they been dumb enough to accost me as soon as I’d shown up, or somehow given themselves away, I could easily have proven that I was there to look over an available property. But they weren’t one bit dumb. Impatient, maybe, but not dumb.

  I hadn’t been on that beach for two minutes when I spotted a middle-aged couple in side-by-side lounge chairs. The lady was sporting a load of gold jewelry and a diamond that had to have weighed in at six carats, minimum. Who the hell wears that kind of stuff to a beach? you might ask. In Florida, maybe half the population. I assumed these two were hotel guests, and that was confirmed when a waiter came around with drinks and they signed for them.

  There were only about two dozen people on the beach area just behind the hotel. I sat down in another lounge chair and tried to look as much like a nondescript tourist as possible. I didn’t need a good view of the couple, just enough to see when they got up so I could follow them and try to determine which room they were in. I’d return at night to see if the wife was careless enough to leave her goodies lying around the room.

  During the next two hours, the beach began to fill up. At least fifteen people strolled onto the sand, all of them in their twenties and thirties. I was surprised to see that much business in a hotel that was being sold. I would be even more surprised later when I found out that every one of them was a cop. There were more in the lobby, more in the parking lot, and two on the roof. They were all there watching me, convinced I was up to something, and they were right.

  Finally, the two people I’d been watching started moving like they were preparing to pack up and go to their room. Not wanting to trail right behind them and be obvious, I rose quickly and walked to the hotel first. There was one door opening onto the beach. Inside, you could go left and up the stairs to the second and third floors, or go straight and then left to stay on the first floor. When I got to the door, I politely held it open for an exceptionally pretty young lady who was just coming out, then I walked straight through and onto the first-floor corridor. I was delighted to find that the doors to the first three rooms on either side of the hallway were wide open, probably because the rooms were being aired out for incoming guests. The hallway carpet was wet, which was not unusual in beachfront hotels, where people and their kids come in dripping after swimming, and the breeze blowing through would probably help to dry it out faster.

  I ducked into one of the open rooms and swung the door closed to within an inch, leaving it ajar just enough to be able to see into the hallway. As soon as the couple came into the hotel, I’d know right away if they were going up the stairs or heading for the first floor, where they’d have to pass right by me. I could then follow at a discreet distance and see which room they were in.

  A short time later they came in and walked right past the room I was in. I waited about ten seconds, stepped out, followed quietly, saw their room, then came back that night and stole a fortune in gold and diamonds and got away free and clear.

  At least that was the plan. What actually happened was something quite different. As soon as I opened the door and prepared to step into the hallway, I saw the pretty lady for whom I’d held open the door. She was standing right in the doorway, looking straight at me, a .38-caliber Police Special in her hands pointed at my head, and she was screaming for me to hit the ground, facedown. It was hard to make out her words because there were three other cops behind her also pointing guns at me and screaming the same thing. The only thing that came through clearly was my name: These guys knew who I was.

  As I’m lying facedown on this soaking-wet, musty-smelling and sandy carpet, one of the cops jams his knee into my back and handcuffs me. Only when I’m securely bound do the others back off with their guns. Two of them drag me to my feet and begin searching me, while the female and the remaining guy start teasing me about peeing in my pants, because I’m dripping from the wet carpet. This would be one of the favorite stories the Fort Lauderdale police would tell reporters about me for years.

  I didn’t really give a shit what they were thinking. My mind was racing ahead trying to see what they had on me. I couldn’t imagine why, if they’d been following me, they’d jumped the gun like that instead of waiting to catch me red-handed in some blatantly felonious act. What did they have that I didn’t know about? They were sure to find the master keys to the hotel on me, so they could make a case for possession of burglary tools, and I was pretty good for trespassing, too, but these were awfully chintzy charges. How would they explain that truly enormous expenditure of law enforcement manpower? If there were any serious crimes going on that the police were unable to respond to because of this business in the hotel, the department would surely suffer.

  Other cops started showing up, everybody congratulating everybody else for having gotten their man. None of it made any sense. Then I heard an older detective speak into his radio and tell someone that I was in custody and that they’d found burglary tools on me, so they could go ahead and execute the warrant.

  “What warrant?” I asked the detective.

  He grinned at me. “The one to search your house, buddy-boy.”

  Shit.

  They walked me out to a prowl car and took me off to the station. Given the size of the caravan, you’d have thought they had the president in there.

  Except we weren’t heading for the station. We were going in entirely the wrong direction. I had a moment of panic, wondering if they were going to take me out to the Everglades, shoot me in the head and feed me to the alligators or something. I calmed down quickly, though. It made no sense to do something like that to a nonviolent criminal, no matter how much I’d frustrated them, and too many cops had been at the arrest scene to keep a secret like that.

  Then I realized we were heading for my house. As soon as we got there, they pulled me out, walked me up to the door and politely rang the bell. We all have certain images so crisply seared into our brains that nothing can eradicate them; one of mine is that of Barbara’s face when she opened the door.

  You read in books about how different emotions run around somebody’s face all at the same time, and it sounds like bullshit, but it isn’t. Shock—the dizzying kind—and confusion were the first things I noticed on Barb’s, and then fear so powerful she seemed to shrink. She looked from me to the cops and back again, very rapidly, as though trying to read the answers to every question she had. I felt so awful for her, I could barely breathe. Her eyes finally settled on me as she realized why my hands were behind my back.

  It was excruciating for me; when Barb needed me the most, I was the cause of that need. Humiliation and helplessness were all I had to offer her.

  It would have been different had she colluded with me and participated in my thievery, but she was completely innocent and didn’t deserve this. I knew she strongly suspected that I hadn’t gone straight even after I was shot, but what, specifically, I’d been
up to, she had no idea, and I don’t think she wanted to know. The kids and the house occupied most of her time, and while money was never an issue, she didn’t ask any questions about where it was coming from. Maybe she thought the property business was a gold mine, but Barb was pretty bright so I doubt it. My frequent nighttime absences might have become an issue under other circumstances, but I spent a great deal more time with my wife and kids than nearly any other father I knew, so it wasn’t like I was neglecting them. “Dad likes to go off by himself once in a while” is something they just got used to.

  That was about to end. Barb’s reaction to what she was witnessing as she stood in our doorway may have been agony for me, but the cops were used to that kind of thing, and they used it to their advantage. The detective must have instantly sensed that Barb was easily intimidated; rather than let her have a few seconds to recover and compose herself, he held out his badge, stuck out an envelope and said, “Warrant to search the premises, Mrs. Mason. I’m Detective King. May we come in?”

  Barb struggled to gain some kind of control. “I haven’t read this yet,” she said, without much conviction or authority.

  “Doesn’t matter if you read it or not,” King replied, waving Barb to the side as he stepped forward. “It’s still valid.”

  Despite her fear, Barb was fairly confident that there was nothing to find. After all, she was the one who cleaned and took care of the place, so she would know if something was amiss.

  I was a little less confident. I had been just about to leave on one of my Cleveland trips and had brought some things home to take with me to fence to Blute Tomba. I had some hope the cops might not find that stuff, but that dimmed quickly as I watched them work. These guys were prepared to spend the rest of their careers in my house if that was what it took. Not only did they badly want to bust me, although I still didn’t know why, they wanted to make damned sure they didn’t go limping back to the station house to explain why they’d mobilized an army against a citizen with only one very old line on his rap sheet and then shown up empty-handed. It wasn’t the cops I was afraid of, though. What was giving me the most anxiety was the thought of Barb’s face when she found out that I’d hidden stolen goods in our house.