Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

by Bill Mason

  I noticed one car in the middle of the bunch that looked like it had been trapped there, and just as I went by, I saw that it was Barb’s. Several of the police looked in my direction as a car horn sounded, and it took me a moment to realize that someone was honking at me because I’d drifted into the next lane.

  Despite shaking from shock and rage, I forced my attention back to the road and soon got off Route 1. I was eventually able to get behind the apartment building without coming into the eye line of the police. I got up to Welling’s place. He was alarmed to see me at the door but stepped back immediately and let me in.

  “What the hell . . . ?” he began as he closed the door behind me.

  I told him what I’d seen, which was all news to him. “You gotta go see what’s happening,” I said. He nodded, grabbed a pair of sunglasses and left me to go absolutely nuts with anxiety while he checked things out. He came back about twenty minutes later.

  “Barb’s sitting in the back of a police cruiser,” he reported, then held up his hand to fend off the next obvious question. “Hasn’t been an accident, I know that, but none of the cops would say anything else beyond that. They’re all just standing around, some of ’em with guns out.”

  I sat down on the living room sofa. I’d been standing the whole time without realizing it. “Has to be about me.” My instincts had been right after all; something had been up. If they’d arrested Barb, it must have been for harboring a fugitive. Had they been following me all day and then lost the trail somewhere?

  Barely before I’d settled onto the sofa I stood up and headed for the door. Welling asked me where I was going.

  “I’ve got to get the hell away from here.”

  That seemed to surprise him at first, my seeming abandonment of my wife in favor of my own skin, but he’s a savvy guy and it only took him a few seconds to realize why I had to go. “Yeah,” he said, and walked me to the door. “Without you they have nothing on Barb.”

  My mind seems to work best under pressure, and the situation was very clear to me. All I could do if I tried to “help” Barb was get her in even deeper trouble. If the cops saw the two of us together, it would strengthen their case against her for harboring a fugitive. And they’d certainly have me. Only one thing was for sure: There was no conceivable scenario under which I could get Barb out of that police car. Going down there now would make everything worse.

  “What I’ll do,” Welling said, “I’ll call Ray and let him know what’s going on. Then I’ll go hassle the cops, ask them why they’re holding my friend.”

  I’d started to say something when there was a knock on the door. Welling held up a finger for me to keep quiet and went to answer it. I listened from the kitchen as he asked who it was.

  “Police,” came the answer. “Can we talk to you for a second?”

  Welling called back, “About what?”

  “About a suspect,” came the answer, and I froze.

  Welling appeared at the kitchen doorway and motioned toward the ceiling, then pointed toward a hallway. I wasn’t sure what he meant but went anyway, then saw a set of stairs leading upward. An old rule when you’re being chased is never to run up, but Welling knew that one as well as I did, so he must have had a reason. I went up the stairs just as I heard him asking to see some I.D. and giving the cops a hard time.

  Sure enough, there was a back entrance on the second floor. The service stairway was deserted, so I went down and walked through a narrow alley to where the van was parked. There didn’t seem to be any activity and I was moving fast, so there was no way to stop myself without looking suspicious when I shot out into the parking lot just in time to see two policemen standing right next to my van. One of them was talking on his radio, and they were both looking right at me.

  I didn’t have a lot of choices here. To run would be foolish and dangerous. There were cops all over the place, and I would never get away and would probably get shot for my trouble. I might even get Welling and my wife into more trouble than they already were.

  I knew that I’d already broken stride coming around the corner out of the alley, but that would not have been an unnatural reaction for an honest civilian unexpectedly coming upon two cops. So I simply resumed walking.

  They did nothing but watch me as I walked past them, but one was still talking on the radio. It was possible he was calling for backup, because with all those other police in the area, why risk trying to take me with just two guys? They’d probably done their homework and would have heard from Fort Lauderdale P.D. that two guys trying to arrest me by themselves might not be such a good idea. (In reality, that was kind of an unfair rap; it was based on their surmise about my upper-body strength, but I’d never once resisted arrest.)

  It was also possible they weren’t sure who I was. These guys weren’t from Broward County and might not have been familiar with my face except from a mug shot. They’d be calling somebody else to the scene and providing a description at the same time.

  Whatever the reason, they were staying put. There was another garden apartment just a few yards away, and I walked into the back entrance, up to the second floor, and dumped my jacket. It was the most distinctive thing I was wearing and would be the first thing they’d look for. I left through the front entrance, then went in and out of two more buildings and into a third.

  I was still on NE 48th, and from a stairwell window I could see cops all over the place, about thirty or forty of them, and no longer just standing around. They were on the move, although it didn’t look very coordinated. I had no more buildings left and had to get the hell out in a hurry. If they came after me while I was inside, it was all over. Buildings like these were much too easy for the police to secure. They could surround one completely and there would be no way out.

  I had to cross the street somehow, but from the entryway of the building I could see two detectives, guns out, standing smack in the middle of it. They were looking intently toward Welling’s apartment building, which faced away from where I was. The only thing I could do was walk about twenty feet behind them and hope they didn’t turn around. This was going to be worse than inching my way along Armand Hammer’s slippery ledge, so I didn’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about it, and just stepped into the street and started moving.

  At first I kept my eyes nailed on the backs of their heads, then realized that made no sense. It would look unnatural to anybody else who might have been watching, and what good would it do me to know if they spotted me? So I turned my eyes ahead and just walked as normally as I could. That way, even if they did see me, there was a slim chance I might not get stopped. There was also plenty of traffic noise from Route 1, so they probably wouldn’t hear me.

  I made it to the other side and the two detectives never turned.

  There were still too many police around for me to try to leave the area, so I crossed Route 1 and walked into Holy Cross Hospital. I climbed up a few flights of stairs and found a large window with a commanding view of the parking lot, the back door to Welling’s apartment and the clustered police cars. Turned out I’d walked into the maternity ward. I lit a cigarette and didn’t have to fake looking nervous when a nurse came by to ask whom I was there for.

  I’d had a few seconds to plan for this. “My wife,” I said shakily, “my wife, she’s . . . a friend called.” I took a deep pull on the cigarette and blew a cloud of noxious smoke in the nurse’s direction. “She’s on her way here.”

  The nurse waved the smoke away in some irritation and walked away, which was just what I wanted her to do. That was about the time I realized that the television in the waiting lounge was tuned to a local station and they were reporting police activity in Coral Ridge.

  “The police are searching for a suspect,” I heard, “a white male about six feet tall, with a neatly trimmed mustache and beard, wearing brown trousers and a beige jacket.”

  Things were about to get hot. I couldn’t stay in that hospital forever and didn’t want to be trapped inside
a building anyway, but I also didn’t want to walk out just as the cops were deciding to shift to a different street to resume their search. So I stayed at the window for the time being.

  To my amazement, less than two minutes later I saw Barb’s car driving away. As she rounded a corner onto Route 1, I saw that she was at the wheel, and alone. What the hell was going on here? A few minutes after that, my other car appeared. Welling was driving, and he had what looked from a distance like his wife in the front seat and the couple they’d come to Florida with in the back. Three unmarked police cars I recognized from earlier pulled out after them.

  Was the search being called off? What kind of sense did that make? They’d seen me only a few minutes ago.

  I called Barb’s brother Augie in Hollywood from a pay phone in the waiting area. He came and picked me up, and as we drove away he said there were still plenty of police around. I couldn’t bring myself to leave the area just yet, not until I knew things were okay with Welling and my wife, so we went to a bar and I starting calling home every few minutes until Barb finally answered. By that time my nerves were so frazzled I could barely think straight, but there was no mistaking a lightness to her voice.

  “You won’t believe this,” she said. “The cops were staking out a bank robber. They knew he was in one of those buildings, but not which one, and when they saw me drop you off, they thought you might have been his partner.”

  So it hadn’t been me they were looking for after all. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Where did you go?”

  I told her that I’d been in Welling’s apartment when the police had come knocking. “I walked right past two detectives in the parking lot.”

  Barb said that the police radios had gone crazy at about that same time. Everybody had been shouting that they weren’t sure what the suspect looked like, and one guy was yelling that he had a description. When another cop asked him how he got it, he said that the suspect had just walked past him. By that time Barb had convinced them that neither of us had anything to do with a robbery, and that’s when they let her drive away.

  When I had my wits back, Augie and I drove back to the Coral Ridge area. He got out a few blocks from the apartment building and walked the rest of the way to retrieve the van from the parking lot. He then drove a very convoluted route back to Hollywood as I followed in his car to make sure the van wasn’t being tailed. Then we switched and I headed north on I-95 again.

  That evening I spoke to Welling from a pay phone at a truck stop. He’d refused to tell the cops anything, which made them suspicious as hell. After they left he’d rounded up his wife and the other couple and got into my car, then drove down to Parrot Jungle in Coral Gables with the three unmarked cars following them. It was a thirty-mile ride.

  “They followed you all the way?” I asked.

  “All the way?” Welling laughed. “They got out of their cars and followed us on foot all over Parrot Jungle for three hours!”

  Later we found out that the police weren’t actually trying to catch the robber, who’d hit three banks in the area. They had set up surveillance and were trying first to find out exactly what he looked like, and then they wanted to follow him, see if he had a partner and catch him with stolen money in his possession. But they’d blown the surveillance so badly—half of southern Florida knew they were there—they decided they had to arrest the guy immediately or he’d get away. They’d alerted the television and radio stations, giving them my description, then somehow found out what he really looked like, probably based on a tip. I think the public at large would be amazed at how many suspects are caught based on tips rather than brilliant detective work.

  The guy was eventually acquitted.

  17

  The Loveman Scandal

  (“FRANCINE, WE HARDLY KNEW YOU . . .”)

  I’D BEEN living as a fugitive from Fort Lauderdale authorities and the Florida-based FBI for nearly a year. Believe me, there’s not a damned thing glamorous or enchanting about being on the run from very skilled people who get paid, promoted and emotionally rewarded for catching you. They get to call all the shots, because everything you do is purely defensive based on what they do, and the farthest you can ever get away from them is just one step from being caught.

  I was still holing up in Atlanta motels, checking in under various assumed names and paying cash so as to leave no paper trail. I still traveled back and forth to Cleveland quite often, probably more than I should have, staying either at Bill Welling’s house or with my aunt Nell. She lived on Shaker Square, in a building I used to manage that was still owned by one of her other nephews. Barb came to visit for New Year’s, and it was an anxious, frantic and depressing weekend of furtive trips between Welling’s place and two different motels. As wrenching as it was when she finally left, I think we were both relieved.

  My mother lived right around the corner from Aunt Nell, and I knew I was still under active pursuit because the FBI had paid her a little visit. She invited them in for tea and stonewalled them completely, staunchly refusing to provide any details as to my whereabouts while insisting that I was a nice boy who couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong. From what she told me, the conversation apparently went something like this:

  “Mrs. Mason, when was the last time you saw your son?”

  “Well, I remember that we were together at a cousin’s birthday party about, let’s see, would have been about a year ago. Yes, I saw him a year ago.”

  “But was that the last time you saw him?”

  “Can’t remember if it was the last time, but for sure I saw him then, because he brought along the cutest windup doll as a present. That’s Bill, all right, very thoughtful.”

  “So have you seen him since?”

  “Since what?”

  “Since that birthday party.”

  “Would you like another cup of tea?”

  “Sure. Have you seen him since that party?”

  “Well, I really can’t remember. There was this other time when I made him and Suzi a big lunch. He brought flowers, a big bouquet.”

  “Was that after the party?”

  “No, after the party everybody went straight home.”

  “What I meant was, did he have lunch with you sometime after that party, or was it before?”

  “I really don’t know. Is it important?”

  “Very important, Mrs. Mason.”

  “Then it’s a shame I can’t remember. More tea?”

  And so on, for over an hour. It may sound funny in the telling now, but it was pretty nerve-racking to know that federal law enforcement officials were trying to get my mother to give me up. I kept a very low profile on my visits to Cleveland. The few people I unavoidably ran into who did know me had no idea I was on the run.

  I also never flew, just drove. An airport is like a tiny sieve that gathers huge numbers of people into one small spot before disgorging them to their scattered destinations. As far as a fugitive is concerned, it’s like being herded through Checkpoint Charlie, because it’s relatively easy for cops to stake out an airport. All you need at the gate of an incoming or outgoing flight is a single officer watching faces, and there’s no way to avoid being seen, because every passenger eventually has to go through the boarding area.

  But there’s no practical way to place every road leading into or out of a city under surveillance, and if you’ve got a clean (meaning “unsuspicious”) car, driving is the best way to go. I still had the new but otherwise utterly nondescript Ford van that, while technically stolen, was completely clean on paper.

  I also had the solid set of identification documents identifying me as John Welling. I never did get stopped by the police but was confident that my wallet full of legitimate-looking I.D. wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if I had.

  The most trying time of all was when my mother had to go in for a mastectomy. I left Atlanta to be with her in Cleveland, even though the FBI would surely be stepping up their surveillance in anticipation of my doing
just that. Regardless, I visited her in Saint Luke’s every day along with Aunt Nell, varying the hours I went to the hospital and using the service, basement and E.R. entrances whenever I could. Hospitals are not especially security conscious except for guarding their narcotic supplies, and it was easy to find alternative ways to get in.

  After several unnerving days of such skulking around and refusing to cut the dangerous stay in Cleveland short, I was ordered by Welling to blow off a little steam before I imploded. Along with his wife, brother and a vanload of crazy Irishmen, he dragged me into downtown for the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. They started drinking at around nine in the morning, and as soon as the parade was over, we began hitting bars one after the other, getting rowdier with each one. I stayed well behind them in terms of consumption, but “well behind” these guys still put me far in front of your journeyman boozer.

  By the time I left them at around six, I was pretty well sloshed. Hospital visiting hours ended at seven and I rushed in with only thirty minutes left, smelling like a brewery and fairly disheveled as well. My mother was recovered enough to register her disapproval of my condition, and the visit wasn’t very pleasant for either of us. When I left, I was in a foul mood and didn’t want to go back to my aunt’s. The last thing I needed was another drink, so naturally I decided to go out and get one.

  Barbara and I owned the land lease under an east side restaurant and bar called the Ground Floor, a chic watering hole for the Shaker Heights crowd. The restaurant was upstairs, so I headed downstairs for the bar and knew I’d made a mistake the moment I opened the door. The place was so packed, it was an effort just to turn around, and someone in my condition would never be able to get anywhere near the bar for a drink. After several minutes of uncoordinated maneuvering that didn’t get me anywhere, I did my best to aim for the door and found my way blocked by a drop-dead-gorgeous redhead.