Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

by Bill Mason

I didn’t care if he believed me or not, so long as he got it all down. King’s believing me wasn’t part of our deal; I just needed it on the record. But, like I said, he was a decent guy, so I proved my claim. “You know that gold filigree bracelet you found at my place?” I waited for him to nod. “Show it to Mrs. Hammer.”

  King thought about it, then banged his closed fist on the steering wheel and muttered “Christ!” between clenched teeth.

  We rode in silence for a few minutes, then he said, “You have help?”

  I couldn’t tell if he was simply curious or, since I was no longer liable to prosecution for that robbery, if he was maybe trying to get me to give up accomplices he could do something about, so it wouldn’t be a total loss. I told him no, that I was alone. It was the truth and I had nothing to lose.

  I turned around to make sure Zeidwig was taking his own notes, in case King conveniently forgot to jot one of my confessions down. Before the detective could get past his shock and figure out what was going on, I told him about half a dozen other scores. Big ones. I directed him to several addresses, gave details only the real thief could know and answered all his questions. I even answered questions that weren’t directly related to those thefts. Far as I was concerned, if Detective King was the one who brought them up, they were part of the deal.

  I don’t think he much cared about that technicality. He looked like he was about to shit his pants and didn’t even bother trying to pretend, like he was in control of this situation. He and the assistant district attorney had fucked up, but good. I’d just copped to some of the biggest heists in the county’s history, a few of which had made the front pages, and there was no longer a damned thing anybody could do to me for any of them. As we continued driving, I also made sure to connect every single piece of jewelry they’d taken from my house to jobs I was confessing to. So much for any possession of stolen property charges.

  When I’d run through everything and we were finished, we headed back to the station house. King was quiet and thoughtful, and I saw no reason to start up any conversation.

  Zeidwig, who’d barely said a word since we left the parking lot, spoke up now. “I trust you’re satisfied, Detective?”

  King didn’t answer right away, then looked at me and said, “One more thing.”

  Zeidwig sat up straight, but before he could mount a protest, King, still looking at me, said, “Tell me how you did Hammer.”

  “That wasn’t part of the—”

  King impatiently waved my lawyer back down. “Off the record, Mason,” he said. “Strictly between you and me. For all I know, you were holding that bracelet for the guy who really did it.”

  He turned his attention back to the road, and I glanced at Zeidwig, who shrugged: Up to you; there’s no obligation. That was true. I’d already confessed on the record, so whether King believed me or not was irrelevant. They could never come after me for it. Why should I tell him anything more?

  King sighed and shifted uncomfortably. “I was the lead on that case.”

  Now I understood. “Off the record, right?”

  He nodded, and then I told him.

  Except I didn’t tell him what he really wanted to know. Instead, I danced around those details. I told him I’d gotten into the apartment without breaking anything, that none of the alarms had been set, that the only trace of my having even been there was the missing jewelry. Of course, he already knew all that, and since I wasn’t giving him what he wanted, he was starting to make noises about doubting my confession. King was smart and a pro, and he was working me; he knew damned well I’d done it, and he also knew it didn’t make any difference to me whether he believed me or not, so he was hoping to goad my ego into convincing him.

  I told him the date I’d pulled the job and described half a dozen standout pieces that were not in my home when it was searched. I told him the layout of the apartment, exactly what the jewelry box looked like, even what time the Hammers had left for dinner. I didn’t tell him how I’d gotten in and out. He knew it was useless to press me, so he gave up.

  But I had a question for him. “How come there wasn’t a single word about it in the papers?” That had been fine with me, because publicity was the last thing I wanted or needed, but I was curious.

  King mumbled something about not wanting to embarrass the Hammers and then quickly changed the subject. I think it had a lot more to do with not embarrassing the police. I found out later that there had been some acute humiliation over their inability to make any headway on the case whatsoever before finally giving up altogether. They assumed it was an inside job of some kind, maybe a doorman or a guard, maybe some maintenance guy, maybe even a family member with access to the place. They got so desperate, they’d even entertained the notion that Armand Hammer had done it himself, for the insurance money, but that was so absurd, they wisely got over it. Imagine a multibillionaire pulling that kind of a scam.

  There was also the matter of the usual “human fly” and “phantom” theories they’d allowed the papers to trot out with increasing frequency every time there was a baffling robbery. They’d been doing a lot of that lately and had to know there would doubtless come a point at which some savvy reporter would start to wonder if the police were going to fall back on that sorry bullshit every time they failed to solve a crime.

  Of course, they had no way to know at the time that nearly every one of those scores had been pulled by the same guy. They wouldn’t know that until the day I rode around in a car with Detective King and confessed to them under the cloak of immunity.

  I felt bad that King was burning with so many questions he wanted answered. But the fact is that even though I was in some pretty deep trouble at the moment, I didn’t know whether or not I’d be back pulling scores on his turf someday. What was the point of revealing trade secrets? There was absolutely nothing in it for me to tell him how I’d done those jobs. Or maybe there was.

  “If I tell you how I got into the Hammer place,” I said, “will you get the Ramada charges dropped?”

  I could see the gears turning in his head. He wanted desperately to get the details. I made it sound like I’d mentioned just the Hammer job as an opening gambit, thinking maybe he’d come back and ask for two or three others, a bit of negotiating. I had no doubt he’d go for the deal.

  But it wasn’t his call. “No way the D.A.’s office is going to let you off, Mason. Was up to me, sure, what the hell. But not those guys.”

  As a result, and against my own interests, the idiotic legends only grew. When the papers reported the deal, the same lamebrained reporters started up the human-fly bullshit yet again. (I bet they thought the Amazing Kreskin and Uri Geller were really psychic.) I suspected South Florida was about to dry up for me completely; every time somebody had some jewelry stolen, the cops would come around demanding to know where I’d been at the time.

  As claustrophobic and tense as that situation was, it was just as well that I didn’t know it would all crop up again, over eight years later and a thousand miles away. But I’ll fill you in on that when I tell you about how I robbed industrialist Joseph Mandel.

  10

  On Doing Time

  (continued)

  I KNOW, I know, I was supposed to tell you how I wound up in prison. I’m getting to that.

  Just because I’d pulled a good one on the police and district attorney didn’t mean they were about to slink away and quietly lick their wounds. To say they were pissed at me doesn’t begin to capture it. And to think I voluntarily closed a whole bunch of very visible cases for them. Some gratitude.

  They also did nothing to discourage the newspapers from printing wild inaccuracies. A magazine feature article I still have said I’d confessed to more than two hundred robberies. A newspaper said it was more than five hundred. The most I saw in any paper was an even thousand, which would have had me pulling a major score every two days for six years; and two publications quoted an anonymous police source as saying I was also suspected in several murde
rs and rapes. It wouldn’t have surprised me if they’d pinned the Lindbergh kidnapping on me as well. It turned out later that the two hundred figure in the magazine came right out of a police report, except that the writer had changed “suspected of” into “confessed to.”

  There were so many police cars cruising up and down my street every day, it was hard to believe there were any left in case there was a real emergency somewhere else in the city. Helicopters buzzed around overhead, including at all hours of the night. My neighbors hadn’t minded the police cars—crime in our immediate vicinity dropped to zero—but the choppers were noisy as hell, especially when they dipped down to nearly treetop level. That there was no real surveillance going and their only goal was to harass me was pretty obvious, because what the hell did they think I was going to do after confessing to all those crimes . . . go out and rob a bank?

  Sometimes, just for the hell of it, I’d get up around dawn, get into my car and drive slowly down the street with my headlights off. As soon as I got to the intersection, I’d flick on the lights and zoom off, then zigzag around for ten or twenty minutes, half a dozen prowl cars and a chopper or two following me. Then I’d duck into an all-night convenience store, buy a quart of milk and go home. That, of course, would only piss them off more, which made them step up the midnight chopper-buzzings, which made me even madder, and on and on it went.

  It made the neighbors mad, too, but when they’d call the police to complain, they were given an earful of what a dangerous criminal I was and how the police owed it to the community to keep me under surveillance. Since the neighbors all knew me—they trusted me to play with their kids and I was always helping out with minor fix-up chores—they assumed the cops were full of baloney. As one of them said to Barb over coffee one day, “If the police really think your husband’s another Dillinger, they’d arrest him, right?”

  One real consequence of all of this was that the cops and the D.A. were in no frame of mind to cut me a good deal on the Ramada bust. Zeidwig called one morning and said, “I got their offer. You’re not going to like it, but it’s the best you’re going to get.”

  I don’t remember all the details of what the deal was, but, as I expected he would, Zeidwig tried to talk me into taking it. I interrupted him and said, “I thought you were supposed to be on my side.”

  “I am on your side. I’m just telling you that I don’t think there’s any way they’re going to improve their offer.”

  What was with this guy? His attitude seemed to be that we do some negotiation over the offer and when the prosecutors refuse to give any more, we just take it. It didn’t even occur to him that maybe we should reject their offers and go to trial.

  I was annoyed that Zeidwig automatically assumed they had us by the balls and we had no recourse. Of what possible use was this guy to me if all he was going to do was roll over and play dead? I could do that myself without professional assistance.

  “They’re pretty pissed at how you got a walk on all those scores,” he pressed me, “and now they want—”

  “I’m pretty pissed, too, Howard,” I told him. “So tell them to stick it in their ear. I want a jury trial.”

  Zeidwig, who I was liking less and less, was dumbfounded at such a radical notion. “A jury trial! You think you can win a jury trial?”

  “Well, hell,” I responded, “even if I lose, it can’t be much worse than the deal they’re offering me now.” Actually, it could be a lot worse. I was just trying to leverage my negotiating position, something he should have been helping me with.

  He wasn’t at all happy with this and seemed more concerned with protecting his reputation in the legal community than with aggressively representing me. “You’re a criminal defense attorney,” I told him. “And I’m the highest-profile client you ever had. Get me acquitted and you can start doing talk shows.”

  But I knew what his problem was. He was a dealmaker, not a litigator, and his ability to make those deals was dependent on maintaining good relationships with the other side. If he took me to trial, he’d have to do everything he could to paint the police as inept, incompetent, maybe even corrupt. When it was all over and he had to sit down with them on behalf of another client, his reception would be, to put it mildly, chilly.

  I wasn’t supposed to have to give a damn about his problem. He was being paid to worry about mine and had sworn an oath to that effect. He was legally obligated to do everything possible within the law to get me acquitted. I remember years later being engrossed in the O. J. Simpson trial and utterly dumbfounded when Johnnie Cochran was criticized for “playing the race card” in getting his client acquitted. It showed me how a lot of people, many of whom should really know better, misunderstand our legal system. Had Cochran not played that card, he should have been prosecuted for malfeasance. His job was to do everything he possibly could on behalf of his client, even if that meant blaming the crime on invaders from Mars if necessary.

  I had a right to expect a similarly zealous effort from Zeidwig, but I was savvy enough about the world to know that I wasn’t going to get it. He wouldn’t deliberately compromise my interests, but I didn’t think I could count on him to go balls to the wall for me. I realized I was going to have to be a proactive client if I had any chance here at all.

  The first thing I asked him to do was subpoena all the police surveillance and other reports. “What do you want those for?” he asked.

  Tired as I was of fighting him at every turn, I explained anyway. I wanted to know what they were doing at the Ramada. Who were they really watching for and trying to nail? Was I grabbed up by mistake, and was this harassment just to hide their embarrassment at having gotten the wrong guy?

  That’s what I told Zeidwig. The other half of it was that I had an unprecedented opportunity to find out what the cops knew about me. Even though I was sure they’d been after someone else, I was bothered by the fact that they’d called me by name when they took me down and hadn’t seemed at all surprised that it was me.

  I’d done my homework and knew I had a right to those reports. There’s a legal process called “discovery” by which a defendant can subpoena anything that can be used against him, and the interpretation of what that involves is pretty liberal. The other side usually fights like hell not to disclose anything, and a judge makes the final determination of what is to be handed over. In civil litigation, discovery is often used as a delaying or harassing tactic. It’s not unusual in product liability cases, for example, for an attorney to request documents consisting of millions of pages, hoping this will be such a burden that the opposition will try to settle rather than go broke complying with all those requests. In similar fashion, criminal defendants often ask for things that law enforcement would rather keep hidden, for fear of compromising their sources. Sometimes they’d rather let the defendant go than risk blowing their secrets.

  So I settled in for a long wait after Zeidwig made the request for the surveillance reports, figuring this would drag on forever. Less than two days later he phoned. “I’ve got them,” he reported.

  “Got what?” It hadn’t occurred to me that it would be the reports. He offered to drop them off after work, but I was too excited and immediately headed down to his office.

  I expected maybe four or five pages of reading material. Cops are not novelists and they hate paperwork and hardly any of them can type well. When they have to write something up, it’s usually done in the fewest words possible. So I could hardly believe my eyes when Zeidwig pointed to a stack of paper on his desk nearly a foot high.

  “You’re the guy they were watching,” he said. “And not just at the Ramada.”

  I took the stack into a small conference room and started leafing through it, intending to get into the details later but anxious to get an overview. This was when I not only confirmed that it really was me they were watching at the Ramada, but also learned that I’d been under intense surveillance for several weeks prior to that, which made even less sense. That story about
seeing me back my car into a spot at Lago Mar was so patently absurd, the prosecutor wouldn’t dare try to get away with it at trial. And it couldn’t be because of all those big scores; they hadn’t even known I’d done them until I rode around with Detective King and told him. Truth be told, there was no reason the police in Florida should have been aware of me at all. The only thing on my record was the garage break-in back in Cleveland when I was practically still a kid, and it was such a small and inconsequential matter, there was no way it could have followed me to Florida. So why would the Fort Lauderdale police have undertaken such massive and expensive surveillance of me? Equally troubling to me, why had they done it at that particular time?

  I found the answer almost at the bottom of the stack of documents. It looked to me like it had been buried there deliberately, maybe in the hope that neither Zeidwig nor I would notice it. As I read it, I got madder and madder, but only at myself.

  Turned out old Derek Johnson, the friend of Augie’s I’d spoken with about driving a boat for the Red Cross Ball score, wasn’t so dumb after all. Venal, deceitful and traitorous, but not dumb.

  Derek had neglected to tell me that he had some legal troubles of his own. He’d hardly made it out of my backyard the afternoon we’d spoken about the job before he ran right to the cops and said he had some information he was willing to trade for a free ride on actions pending against him. He told them he knew about an upcoming score, except he didn’t know what it was or when it would take place, just that it involved me. They believed that Derek might have been on to something, because they knew that nobody, especially somebody who was already in trouble, would be stupid enough to lead them into a wild-goose chase, but they were ready to send him on his way anyway because his information was too vague. Then somebody decided to run a quick background check on me and turned up my old burglary conviction, and that got their attention. From there, they considered the few details Derek had given them—use of a boat, ten grand for a few hours’ work, a perpetrator they’d never heard of who’d come to town from a thousand miles away—and decided maybe something really big was in the works.