Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

by Bill Mason

  I tried to focus my eyes and made out a mass of shiny curls, a mink coat and a huge diamond ring. Naturally drawn to the ring and totally focused on it, I almost didn’t realize it was me she was addressing when she shouted above the din, “I know you!”

  “No, you don’t,” I mumbled back, and tried once more to locate the door.

  “Sure I do,” she answered with a bright smile. “You’re Bill Mason.”

  “Wrong guy,” I insisted, and began deploying elbows in an effort to get away.

  “I don’t think so,” she laughed, and held out her hand. “Francine. You were in my high school class and you managed the building where my in-laws live. I saw you in the garage all the time.”

  Francine? Couldn’t be . . .

  I took a closer look. If we’d been in the same high school class, she must have been my age, forty, but this was about the best-looking forty-year-old I’d ever laid eyes on. Her face was as beautiful as it had been in high school and she had the body of a model; not one of those stick figures who look like human clothes hangers, but curvaceously filled out. Come to think of it, I’d heard she’d done some modeling. I’d also heard she’d married well, some big-shot industrialist, which made sense, because Francine had been born into some pretty serious money.

  Her father, Milton Kravitz, was a genuine rags-to-riches American success story. He and his brother Julie started with next to nothing and worked themselves hard, getting to a level where they and a friend could buy the Pick-N-Pay supermarket chain, the largest in Cleveland but struggling to stay afloat. They turned it around brilliantly, and eventually acquired Finast supermarkets as well. Despite his wealth, Milton remembered his roots, and it would have gone against his grain to send Francine to a private school. In 1956 he and his wife moved to Shaker Heights so their daughter could spend her last two high school years in a top-drawer public school. I remembered that she was an ace student, active in several clubs and the girlfriend of the star player on the football team. Years later the Cleveland Plain Dealer would call her “a glittering fixture of our city’s social whirl.”

  As I explained earlier, Shaker Heights High was public, and the only thing that determined whether you went there or not was your address. But that didn’t mean that students from different sides of the tracks did a lot of mingling. For all I associated with the likes of Francine, we might as well have been on different planets.

  Fast-forward to some twenty years later in a crowded Cleveland bar. There was no way out of this now, so I stopped shoving and looked up. “Francine Kravitz?”

  “It’s Loveman now,” she said as I finally took her hand. “Has been for about twenty years.”

  “Loveman,” I repeated as we tried to move away from the crush, knowing damned well what her last name was now. But I pretended otherwise, still not sure if this was a safe situation for me. “Rich guy, right?”

  It was a dumb thing to say. It only made sense that she’d married someone who was also to the manor born. Francine Loveman was a well-known figure in Cleveland society, generally referred to by the press as an “heiress” or a “socialite.” I sometimes wondered what it must be like to have your entire life reduced to such insulting abbreviations, especially ones for which the male equivalents were rarely used.

  Francine took no offense at my crude remark and laughed easily. By the time we finally made it to a wall, we’d already discovered we had something in common. Francine’s eldest daughter was the same age as my daughter Suzi, and both of them had started college the previous fall. On this particular day, Francine had decided to step away from her life of charitable boards and other high-toned volunteer work and see what Saint Patty’s Day was like at the Ground Floor.

  “It’s so crazy in here!” she marveled. To avoid the crowd she and her sister and brother-in-law had grabbed a table with a built-in Pac-Man machine and had stayed there until Fran spotted me.

  Something occurred to me. “How come you never said hello when you saw me in your in-laws’ garage?”

  She smiled coyly. “My mother-in-law told me you were a bad man.”

  Great. “She was right,” I said, smiling back and trying to give her the impression I was anything but.

  Despite the usual warning sirens going off in my head concerning my safety, I found myself drawn to her. She seemed to need to talk, and I was happy to listen. That wasn’t easy, though, and after a few more minutes we couldn’t stand the noise anymore. Her sister and brother-in-law weren’t ready to leave, so I offered to drive her home. Plowed though I was, she accepted. During the ride she mentioned that her father, in addition to owning a good chunk of Finast, also owned a bowling alley next to the Highlander. I tried to keep a straight face when she said this; what was it about that hotel that kept it popping up so often in my life?

  As we drove, she told me that she’d gone to Ohio State after graduation but dropped out in her sophomore year to marry her high school sweetheart, a Dartmouth grad. Since then her life had been a whirlwind of civic and cultural activities, much of it with Jewish organizations that she and her husband avidly supported. I’d also heard correctly about her doing some modeling.

  She gave me her number before she got out of the car, and I stuck it in my pocket, not thinking I’d ever actually call her. But two weeks later I was back in Cleveland and did, and we met for coffee. Fran brought along her sister Katie, a free-spirited type four years our junior who drove a fancy Jaguar.

  Somehow we got around to talking about a terrible tragedy that had recently befallen the family. Fran and Katie’s much-loved uncle Julie had been kidnapped, held for ransom and murdered by an employee, the son of the cantor of their synagogue. I’d already known about it, as it had been major news both in Cleveland and nationally, but had never really considered how it had affected the family. Hearing the details from Fran and her sister drove it home for me, and it was not lost on me that this was not the kind of conversation they’d have with just a casual acquaintance.

  Some weeks later Fran invited me to an informal party around the pool at Katie’s, another big Shaker Heights house. Fran and I had a few drinks and played backgammon, and I was introduced as “Bill,” who lived in Atlanta and was in town visiting his mother. I was beginning to feel comfortable around these people and more and more attracted to Fran. The sirens in my head were getting louder, but even as I resolved not to let this go any further, I knew with a kind of helpless resignation that resistance was futile.

  I wasn’t able to get back to Cleveland for some months, but when I finally did, I phoned Fran and asked if she’d like to go to a party at my cousin Dan Renner’s house. He was the prominent surgeon who’d put me back together after I’d been shot, but Fran didn’t know anything about that. “One thing you ought to know, though,” I added before she could answer. “My cousin and his second wife are skinny-dippers. There’s usually a lot of naked people hanging around their pool, and some crazy stuff goes on.” I figured it was now or never and tried to picture how the “heiress/socialite” at the other end of the line was reacting as I recounted some tales of prior frivolity. Even though that kind of thing was very much in vogue at that particular time, I had no way to know if she’d be insulted, intrigued, shocked, curious . . .

  “Sounds like fun,” came the answer.

  When we got to Dan’s big house in the upscale Gates Mills community, absolutely nothing was going on. Doctors and other of my cousin’s hospital colleagues were sitting around, dressed and acting respectable, and it might as well have been morning coffee at an accountants’ convention. I sensed some disappointment in Fran and was worried that she might think all my stories were just so much bullshit.

  I pulled Dan aside during a lull—what the hell am I talking about; the whole damned party was a lull—and said, “What gives here? Where did you find these people?”

  He shook his head, understanding perfectly. “We need some kind of spark to get this thing moving.”

  Absent any other candidates to take
the plunge, so to speak, I stripped off every stitch of clothing and jumped into the pool with as big a splash as I could muster. It was as if a light switch had suddenly been flicked on, and in very short order nearly everyone was naked and in the pool, except Fran, who I doubted had ever seen a man other than her husband unclothed since getting married twenty years before. About ten minutes into it some guy with a neck brace and crutches rounded the corner. He took one look at all the nude bodies in the pool and seemed to undergo a miraculous recovery. Pausing only slightly to look around, as if to make sure no one from his insurance company was spying on him, he stripped off the collar, tossed away the crutches and dove in.

  Later that night in a guest bedroom Fran and I made love for the first time. No doubt her inhibitions had finally come undone as a result of an afternoon of nude people cavorting in the pool, as well as frequent departures by various couples for some shenanigans. I couldn’t tell then if it was me she was giving herself to, or the idea of me, someone far removed from her respectable world of volunteer work, cultural events and formal social engagements. If she noticed my gunshot and surgery scars, she didn’t ask or say anything, and I wondered if she simply didn’t know the proper etiquette in such situations.

  And I had my own confusions to deal with. I have to admit that this wasn’t the first time I’d been unfaithful to Barbara, but the other wanderings off the straight and narrow had been emotionally insignificant. With Fran it was different, though, and not just because Barb was a thousand miles away and I was on the run and lonely. There was hint of a real connection, and the last thing I wanted to do was encourage it, knowing as I did that this had to be a temporary thing.

  Whatever wild stuff was going on at the party, Fran would have none of it, and we managed to keep to ourselves until we said our good-byes and left. We saw each other frequently after that, even though she knew I was married. What the hell . . . so was she. Interestingly, she didn’t know much else about me, certainly nothing about my criminal activities, and that might have added somewhat to the intrigue. Maybe she was afraid to ask for fear of finding out I was a traveling shower-curtain salesman or something. After all, as far as she knew from her mother-in-law, I was just a building manager and onetime “bad boy.”

  About a month after Dan’s party we were there again, and Fran left to go home while I was asleep. When I awoke, I saw that she had forgotten her jewelry, including a four-carat emerald-cut diamond ring she’d left sitting on the nightstand. Feeling like I was going soft, I called her to meet me later in the afternoon so I could return everything to her. We met for drinks, and as I handed over the ring, bracelet and two necklaces, she said, “Do you know anything about jewelry?”

  I stifled a cough and said, “A little. Why?”

  “I’ve got some stuff my mother-in-law gave me and want to find out something about it.”

  By this time it was obvious she was a bit smitten by me, and I cared about her as well, so I figured it was time to come just a little bit clean and break this thing off before it got out of hand. I told her I knew a good deal about jewelry, and then sugarcoated a highly abbreviated version of how I was framed by the police and hounded by a zealous prosecutor into my current predicament. I fully expected that bit of information to scare her into getting out as soon as possible, but it backfired. She only got more intrigued and soon after that even signed up for a Gemological Institute of America course in diamonds. I never took a course in jewelry, but my practical experience was the kind you can’t get out of books, and I helped her whenever I was in town, which was becoming more and more often. Fran’s social prominence still carried a lot of weight in the city, and one time she borrowed a full set of master reference diamonds from Marc Gluchov, a high-end Beachwood Place jeweler, when she was getting ready for her certification exam. I heard later that the poor guy almost had a heart attack when he found out who she’d been spending time with.

  I finally left Atlanta for good and returned to Cleveland, despite serious misgivings that I might be getting complacent about my fugitive status. At first I took a room at a motel and rented it by the month. Fran was over three or four days a week but always went home at night. We couldn’t really be seen in public and didn’t go out, except to Welling’s or my cousin Dan’s, but we were so hungry for each other that staying in wasn’t much of a burden.

  After several months of this Fran told me a friend of hers had a very private two-bedroom condo for rent in the Georgetown Villas in Lyndhurst. I knew it was dicey, but by then I missed having an actual home so much, I thought it would be worth the risk. I took the place using my “John Welling” alias and set up housekeeping. First thing I did was indulge my legitimate paranoia and build an escape hatch in case the police came through the front door. I cut a hole in the ceiling of a closet that would let me climb up to an attic, then marked out where I could break back down into an adjoining condo and get away. This contingency arrangement made me feel a little better about the chance I was taking.

  It was wonderful having a place like that, and having people come over to visit. By this time Dan was in the process of separating from his second wife, and he was a frequent visitor to the condo with various girlfriends in tow. The guy had a libido like a hamster and once had four different women in there at various times on the same day. I don’t know where he found them or how he got them to do the things they did. On the outside these were prim and proper ladies of some substance and community standing, but once behind my closed front door it was like aliens took over their brains and insisted they copulate immediately and often. I don’t know; maybe there really is something to being a doctor.

  Meanwhile, I started pleading with Barbara to move away from Florida with the kids so we could be a family again. I figured that once she visited me and saw I was living like a normal human being in a nice apartment, she’d be tempted to forget all that had happened and give us another chance. While Cleveland would have been out of the question, I held out the promise of a place like Mexico or California, which I thought would be tempting for her.

  That summer she agreed to come for a visit. My mother and aunt picked up her and our youngest, Laura, from the airport and drove them to my aunt’s house. Despite my fervent wish to give the appearance of normalcy, I couldn’t let them anywhere near me until I’d made sure they weren’t being followed. Laura was just eleven, young enough to think all the intrigue was great fun, not old enough to know all the implications.

  When she finally saw my condo later, Barbara really liked it. It was a far cry from that maddening and paranoid New Year’s visit, and things went well for a few days, so I got a little bold and decided to prove I could walk around town like an ordinary citizen. Like the condo, it was part of my effort to demonstrate to her how much stability would be possible in our life together.

  “What do you say we go out for a drink?”

  Her eyebrows rose, but she didn’t otherwise comment on the advisability of my being seen in public. “Okay.”

  “Any place in particular?” I offered her the choice so it wouldn’t look like I was restricted in terms of my options.

  “How about the Ground Floor?”

  I winced inwardly but should have expected it, given Barbara’s and my business interests in the place. I considered trying to let Fran know in advance but opted not to. The odds of her being there at the same time seemed remote.

  Besides, despite her somewhat sheltered life, Fran was not naïve and could be surprisingly savvy about things. As much as we cared for each other and had great times together, she knew as well as I that it was simply an affair. I made no effort to hide how much I loved my wife, and Fran had no intention of divorcing her husband. She was aware that the reason I’d asked Barbara to come to Cleveland was to convince her to go along with my plans to reunite our family. Were it to work out, that would be the end of Fran’s and my relationship, and neither of us tried to pretend differently.

  Which didn’t make me any less nervous when she sh
owed up at the Ground Floor, her sister Katie in tow. As I’d assumed, though, both of them were exceptionally cool. They took to Barbara immediately, although Barbara wasn’t too happy when several people wandered by our table and casually offered us coke from their specially manicured fingernails. But we had a few drinks, everybody got along, I was loose and relaxed, and when we were invited to continue the party at Katie’s place I made no effort to try to get out of it. It may sound like an insanely risky thing to have done, but I’d lived with risk my whole life and it was like an old friend. I didn’t realize it was another warning sign that I was starting to get complacent as a result of my having eluded capture thus far.

  As the evening wore on, Barb must have sensed my easy familiarity with these people, and I think she suspected that I might have had something going on with one of the two sisters, but she couldn’t tell which and never brought it up.

  Sunday morning she said she wanted a divorce.

  It absolutely floored me. We’d been married for twenty years, and up until that moment I had taken the solidity of our marriage for granted, never once entertaining the thought that all the pain and hardship I’d brought down on her would come to this. I assumed at first that the previous evening’s casual drug use had thrown her into a tailspin, but an argument that lasted until Tuesday eventually disabused me of that notion.

  What had brought Barbara to this point was so obvious in retrospect as to be a monument to the human ability to deny reality. Almost since the day we’d met, she’d been subjected to nearly unbearable stress. As if the ordinary strains of marriage, child-rearing and modern life in general weren’t enough, she’d had the additional pressure of living with a professional criminal and never knowing if he’d be hauled off to prison. Even though she’d witnessed some of the miracles my extraordinarily tenacious lawyers had been able to pull off to keep me free, she’d also seen what getting shot was like. Bullets had little respect for due process, and no amount of courtroom wizardry could intervene if some quick-triggered cop or security guard or one of my bad-ass friends got off a lucky one. Still, she’d stuck by me.