Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

by Bill Mason

  Never use a partner was what I’d learned back in Ohio. That simple concept had kept me out of trouble for years. Then I’d gone ahead and broken that rule, had actually only spoken about breaking that rule, and whammo: Here I was.

  I didn’t mention any of this to Zeidwig when I emerged from the conference room some two hours later. I would have liked to let him know that I’d been right about the Lago Mar business being a load of crap and that he ought to be casting a more skeptical eye at what the police were telling him, but I didn’t want to get into a conversation about how a guy I’d considered hiring for a hijacking had turned on me. Besides, it really didn’t matter, because even though the police had lied to my lawyer, they could always argue that they were just trying to protect a confidential source, and they’d probably get away with it. Instead I told Zeidwig I wanted to subpoena every single cop who was at the Ramada and who had been involved, however slightly, in following me during the weeks prior. I also told him to subpoena the manager of the Ramada, the head of housekeeping and all of the chambermaids. I said I’d draw up a witness list and would include a bunch of real estate brokers from Fort Lauderdale and Miami, as well as guys from the Cleveland investment group who owned the properties I managed, who would testify that I had good reason to be checking on properties for sale.

  “And subpoena Gerald Ford, too,” I finished up.

  Already annoyed at how I seemed to be taking over management of the case, he slammed his pen down on the table and stood up behind his desk. “What the hell are you talking about!”

  “I spoke with him while the cops were watching me. Shook hands, too. If they thought I was such a dangerous and reprehensible character, how the hell come they let me walk right up to the president?”

  “Listen—” he started, but I was no longer interested in his opinion.

  “I got the right, so let’s get him in.” It wasn’t going to happen, of course, but I thought it was a nice touch.

  There wasn’t even a burglary charge on the table, because nothing was stolen, so the most they had was trespassing and this nonsensical “Possession of Burglary Tools” thing. Were they really prepared to put on a full-bore trial for that petty bullshit? The judge would laugh them out of the courtroom. They couldn’t even muster up the standard resisting-arrest baloney, because there wasn’t a single hint anywhere in my background that I’d ever been involved in anything violent. Even the records of my bust for the garage break-in years ago had a note stating that I’d offered zero resistance and had been completely civil throughout.

  The story the cops were telling about the bust itself was impossible. They said they caught me wiping fingerprints from the doorknob of Room 127 with my handkerchief. I knew they’d made that up because I never did it. That wasn’t much of an argument, of course, but what made their story impossible was that they couldn’t have seen it even if it were true. I was inside the room and they were outside.

  I hired a professional photographer to take pictures of the Ramada, concentrating on getting shots from every angle of the interior and hallways in the vicinity of Room 127. I had Zeidwig notify the Ramada manager that the reason he was being subpoenaed was to testify as to the authenticity of those photos. Damned if I can remember how, but I also got my hands on a list of the prospective jurors and used the trusty city directory as a starting point to learn everything I could about them. I was my own jury consultant before that term ever came into vogue.

  I called Bill Welling, who, as I knew he would, came down to help out. We set up shop in my garage and he got to work making a scale model of the hallways around Room 127. When it was done, he practiced assembling it for court and could get it out of the box and all put together in about three minutes. It would prove the police couldn’t have seen what they reported. Every time I opened my garage door, we could see one or two police cars parked in the street, guys inside with binoculars and cameras equipped with telephoto lenses, trying to see what we were up to. Welling did most of the work himself, because I was spending a lot of time in depositions.

  Part of the discovery process, a deposition is an official statement made by a witness in a criminal case or lawsuit. It’s done under oath, under questioning by the attorney for the side the witness will be testifying against. All those great courtroom surprises you saw on Perry Mason were largely fictional. In real life, defendants have the right to know what witnesses and testimony are going to be brought to bear against them, in order to be able to prepare their defense. That doesn’t mean that the witness has to tell everything he’s going to say, but what he does have to do is answer every lawful and relevant question that’s put to him by the opposing attorney. That means the attorney has to think of everything to make sure he doesn’t get surprised at trial. I sat at Zeidwig’s side for every depo and often passed him little notes with questions to ask the witnesses.

  Also in the room during depositions was the head prosecutor, assistant state attorney David Damore, representing the people. His job was to protect the state’s case, and he had the right to object to any of our questions he thought inappropriate. I chatted with him a lot during breaks, and we got to like each other. For some reason he enjoyed seeing the cops squirm, especially when Zeidwig and I cornered them into giving information they knew contradicted what other cops had said. He was a damned good prosecutor and thoroughly enjoyed putting bad guys away, but he didn’t seem to think I was that bad, and he was beginning to see that the people’s case wasn’t all that the cops had led him to believe. Once when we were alone in a hallway, he confided that he had a thing going with that pretty cop I’d held the door open for at the Ramada.

  “Your biggest problem,” he said that same afternoon, “is those master keys.”

  I nodded. No reason not to let him know I understood, but I didn’t say anything out loud. When I reported that to Zeidwig, he said, “What he’s doing, he’s letting you know that their case isn’t as hopeless as we’d like to think.”

  “But what about me wiping fingerprints off the doorknob? Everybody knows that’s bullshit!”

  “You’re right,” Zeidwig said. “And that’s why they won’t ever mention it.”

  That shook me up, and I asked him what he was talking about. They’d already mentioned it on dozens of occasions, and I’d never given them a hint of how we planned to thoroughly nuke their testimony on it.

  “They might figure it out for themselves. We subpoenaed the manager of the hotel, you had a photographer in there. . . . They might piece it together.”

  “So why don’t we bring it up ourselves?”

  It was a silly question, as I was to quickly learn. You can’t put words in the other side’s mouth at trial and then expect to make them look bad for things they didn’t bring up themselves. Even if it was in their written reports, they could always say they weren’t sure enough to testify to it, which makes them look honest and forthright and makes you look like a schmuck.

  “Don’t look so down,” Zeidwig said. “If they do bring it up, we nuke ’em. If they don’t, that’s one less thing they have against you.”

  But it still left us the problem of the keys.

  By that time the cops and I had a real mutual-hate thing going. I have to say, I don’t have a dislike for police. Quite to the contrary, I’ve had police friends and neighbors all my life, and still do. I respect what they do and have usually been treated civilly by them even when I was in trouble or under suspicion.

  But this was different. I didn’t hate cops, but I sure hated these cops. I knew they were terribly frustrated, having expended enormous resources on me only to come away with almost nothing, but that was part of the game and they should have simply gone on to other matters instead of pursuing this one so relentlessly. I’m not saying I was completely innocent—far from it—but there were an awful lot of really vicious crimes being committed in South Florida, most notoriously by drug smugglers, so no way was I worth the kind of attention being paid to me. If the citizens of some of th
e more beleaguered communities in Broward County had known about these lopsided priorities, I bet they would have rioted.

  I was still playing baseball and football in the street with neighborhood kids every night, and the cops would cruise by several times an hour. Every time they did, it would interrupt the game, and they made sure to go extremely slowly. They weren’t making too many friends among the impressionable youth of the area. Once in a while they’d roll down a window and say something nasty to me, just out of earshot of the kids. If I could also avoid being heard by the kids, I’d tell the cops to go fuck themselves. It was getting real petty and juvenile, and I wasn’t doing much to help the situation.

  I need to point out, in case it’s not obvious, that my behavior in this situation was so completely different from the way I’d lived my life up to then that it was as though my brain had been taken over by aliens. I’d always been described as quiet, even somber. I never bragged about or disclosed any of the things I’d done, and in those few situations where it was necessary to let slip a few details, I stuck with the unembellished basics. My entire modus operandi was never to call attention to myself, never to needlessly antagonize anyone and never to make it necessary for someone else to act against me because I’d let something go public. So why was I all of a sudden allowing myself to get drawn into a pissing contest with policemen, knowing full well that they held all the cards?

  Part of it was probably that the whole situation had already gone public, and that aspect of it was out of my control. I was also facing charges, which I hadn’t had to come to grips with since I’d broken into that garage as a teenager. And these were a lot more serious, with no quick deal on the table. To top it off, some of the charges were completely bogus: In order for the police to save face and justify that ridiculous expenditure of department resources, they had to demonize me and see to it that the charges and subsequent sentence warranted all that effort.

  The harder they pressed the case, the harder I felt I had to hit back. Having been on my own for so long, relying only on my wits to protect me, I wasn’t at all comfortable placing my fate in the hands of an attorney who didn’t appear to have as much enthusiasm for my defense as I did. The harassment the cops were subjecting me to was petty and sophomoric, and had I been thinking straight, I might have had the resolve to ignore it, to make sure that none of that bickering could be laid against me. But when caravans of squad cars began cruising past my house, scaring the hell out of my kids, and when uniformed officers hurled profanities and threatened me as they drove by, it wasn’t in my nature to stand there and take it. I rationalized this by telling myself I had to let them know they weren’t dealing with some pansy who was going to lie down in front of their legal juggernaut; they had to know I was going to fight them tooth and claw. Fact is, though, what the police thought shouldn’t have been my main concern. What mattered was what the prosecutor and jury thought, and if I’d played it differently, I wouldn’t have riled the entire police force into putting pressure on the D.A. to let me have both barrels. If I’d lain low and played nice, it might have faded a little from their memories as they turned their attention to more pressing problems. Instead, their hatred of me kept escalating as I hated them back.

  It was about then that I first met Ray Sandstrom, who was to figure large in the rest of my life. I also met his client Steven Simonson, that amazingly nervous guy I told you about whom the guards in prison liked to play jokes on, the one who had disguised himself as a priest to commit a robbery.

  Simonson was going to trial on those charges in two weeks, and Sandstrom came to Zeidwig with an idea. I can still conjure up almost verbatim the conversation that followed, because it made such a strong impression on me.

  Simonson was out on bail pending trial, as was I, so the four of us met at a bar in Hallandale. Ray Sandstrom looked like a real character, with deeply etched features and a big, droopy mustache. He was given to wearing flashy suits with wide lapels and a lot of jewelry: bracelets, gold necklaces, fat rings on half his fingers. That was part of the way he thumbed his nose at what he called “the power structure.” Much later I’d think back to this first meeting, and the early intimation I had that Ray Sandstrom was the most volatile third rail in South Florida’s criminal defense community.

  The flashy lawyer wasted no time in laying out his plan. “Thing is,” he said to Zeidwig, “your guy [me] fits the description the police have of the phony priest better than my guy [Simonson].” He turned and addressed me directly. “What I want to do, I want to call you as a defense witness and ask you a whole bunch of questions that make it look like you were the priest, not Simonson.”

  I stared at him like he’d just landed from the planet Bonkers, but Zeidwig never batted an eye. Whatever he thought, he knew Sandstrom wasn’t crazy, and he also knew he wouldn’t waste our time, that there had do be something in it for us. “Then what?” he prompted.

  “Mason gets all pissed off and huffy,” Sandstrom answered. “He takes the Fifth and refuses to answer anything I ask.” He paused and looked at each of us in turn, to make sure we were following. Zeidwig still had his poker face on, and I have no idea what I looked like because all it was to me was nuts. “At that point I declare him a hostile witness,” Sandstrom went on.

  “Bet your ass I’d be hostile.” Those were pretty much my first words of the meeting.

  Sandstrom nodded sympathetically. “And who could blame you? But your refusing to answer means my client isn’t getting the justice he’s entitled to. Asking the judge to declare you hostile means you’re not cooperating voluntarily. You’re fighting me to save your own ass, and there’s not much anybody can do about it, because you have a right to protect your ass. Constitution says so. And right there we have a real whopper of a dilemma.”

  He leaned back on his chair. “My guy is getting the short stick because Mason won’t say what he knows. And if Mason is forced to say what he knows, then he gets fucked because he’s not supposed to have to incriminate himself. It’s like dueling rights.”

  From the corner of my eye I could see Zeidwig nodding. “Except only one of them is actually on trial,” he said, “and that’s your guy. So at that moment he’s more important, because he’s in jeopardy.”

  “Right.” Sandstrom let his chair drop and leaned forward with his forearms on the table. “Better to let ten guilty men go free than put one innocent man in jail. Bible says that somewhere, right? So the only solution is for the judge to grant Mason complete immunity so he can testify.”

  Now I got it. Sort of. “What the hell do I need immunity from the priest job for? I didn’t do it!”

  “Fuck the priest job!” Sandstrom shot back with a smile.

  Zeidwig grabbed my arm and squeezed. “You still deny the priest job, but it comes off lame. Then Ray here, he says something like ‘Who are you kidding, Mason? What are you, some kind of angel? You telling this court you didn’t intend to rob that Ramada?’ ”

  “At which point,” Sandstrom said, “you cop to the Ramada thing. ‘Hell yeah, I was out to rob the Ramada, but I sure as hell didn’t dress up as no priest!’ Now you’re off the hook for Ramada because of your immunity, the jury thinks you did the priest job, too, or at least they’re so goddamned confused, they have reasonable doubt about whether Steven here did it, and they acquit him.” With a huge, smug grin beneath that walrus mustache, Sandstrom spread his hands and said, “Everybody walks away happy!”

  “Except the prosecutor,” Zeidwig threw in.

  “Fuck the prosecutor,” Sandstrom snapped at him. “He’s not my client!”

  I still remember what I was thinking at that moment like it had been laid out in glowing neon: Goddamnit . . . now this is my kind of lawyer!

  Zeidwig shook his head and looked down at his hands. “It’s not ethical,” he declared.

  Sandstrom rolled his eyes at the ceiling, then looked at me like Where the hell did you find this guy?

  I waved my lawyer to silence and asked Sands
trom a bunch of questions. Zeidwig started fidgeting and at one point said imperiously, “I cannot suborn perjury! If I know in advance my client is going to lie on the stand, I—”

  “Show me where he’s lying,” Sandstrom challenged him.

  Here I was fighting Zeidwig again. Like I didn’t have enough worry and stress and a mile-long list of things to do, I had to waste energy wrestling with my own lawyer?

  We broke up the meeting, but over the next few days I met with Sandstrom and left Zeidwig out of it. We had it nailed down pretty good, and then just before Simonson’s trial the assistant D.A. made him an offer: two years on some lesser charge. Simonson, so nervous and panicked he hadn’t slept right in months, took the deal, so we never got to see if our plan would work. I was enraged at the cowardly little prick, but at least I’d gotten to see a real lawyer in action.

  I thought Ray Sandstrom was absolutely the cat’s nuts. He wasn’t so much about wanting to get guilty people off; he was simply the most rabidly antiauthoritarian human being I’d ever met. “People in charge” who threw their weight around pissed him off. He’d conjured up all kinds of crazy strategies and delaying tactics for Simonson, and whereas I’d had to kick Zeidwig in the ass to get him to think outside the box, you practically had to strap Ray down just to keep him on planet Earth.

  I had Zeidwig conduct a few additional depositions, just to make sure David Damore knew how committed I was to the case. One of the people we deposed was Joseph Gerwens, a police officer who’d been at the Ramada that day. He would later become chief of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. I didn’t think about him much at the time, but he was to figure in my life more than once.

  Two days before my trial, Damore called Zeidwig and asked for a meeting. We went to the D.A.’s office, got a couple of cups of coffee and sat down.