Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

by Bill Mason

  It was only when I became a fugitive and the possibility loomed that life would never be the same that the last of her resolve began to wither. Living apart from me gave her more time to think and more perspective, and all that should have been surprising to me was how long it had taken her to realize that this was no life for her and our kids.

  All of this was vague in my mind then, and I kept up my end of the argument about us starting a new life until she settled it by taking off back to Florida with our daughter. I realized at that point that asking for a divorce had been her reason for coming to Cleveland in the first place. If there had been even the slightest shred of doubt in her mind, the slimmest possibility of my convincing her that I’d turned things around, I’d blown it out the window by demonstrating my inability to avoid associating with a fast crowd that could easily land a hunted fugitive in serious trouble. It was over.

  It was the saddest day of my life and still remains so, and all the blame fell squarely on my own shoulders.

  I truly did understand where Barb was coming from, but it didn’t make me any less hurt or angry. For the first few days after she left, I didn’t want to see anybody, and didn’t, but then I found myself badly wanting to talk to Fran. I don’t think my feelings for her deepened, necessarily, because they’d been pretty strong for a while by that time, but there’s no question that the nature of our relationship changed once I gave in to the reality that the future I’d envisioned for Barb and me was no longer a possibility. The baseline assumption Fran and I had been operating under, that what we had together eventually had to end in light of the practicalities of our respective home lives, had suddenly changed. Neither she nor I knew exactly what that meant, but we both felt the shift in atmosphere.

  Being with Fran again eased the pain, but I still moped around for a couple of weeks. Then I did what I do best when I need a break from the stresses of everyday life.

  18

  “The Perfect Heist”

  From the Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 25, 1980:

  * * *

  Thieves Grab Million in Jewels

  by John P. Coyne

  It was described as the perfect heist, the largest burglary in Lyndhurst history, and the $1 million caper.

  On Tuesday evening, Joseph C. Mandel, an executive of Premier Industrial Corp., left his plush penthouse apartment in the Acacia-on-the-Green complex to take his wife to dinner. When the Mandels returned at 10 p.m., they found the deadbolt lock on the door locked from the inside. After a security guard helped him get inside his apartment, he discovered $1 million in jewelry, including family heirlooms, had been stolen.

  Lyndhurst Police Sgt. Anthony J. Cecere said the burglars had evaded a sophisticated security system. Cecere said the complex has a guardhouse where all visitors are stopped unless they have permission to visit someone and security guards monitor closed-circuit TV pictures of the doors in each building 24 hours a day. “These thieves apparently knew exactly what they were doing,” he said. “It was the perfect heist.”

  Mandel . . . has offered a $10,000 reward for the return of the jewelry, most of which was described as “one of a kind.”

  * * *

  Four years later (December 8, 1984):

  * * *

  $500,000 Awarded in Lyndhurst Jewelry Heist

  by W. C. Miller

  Joseph and Florence Mandel moved to a plush condominium complex in Lyndhurst after 25 years of home ownership because they believed the larger building would afford more security. Their former home had been burglarized three times over the years, and they felt secure after moving to the complex in 1977.

  But on September 23, 1980, while the Mandels were dining at a restaurant, burglars broke into their penthouse suite at Acacia-on-the-Green and made off with $1 million in jewels. The jewels—diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and other gems—were never found.

  It was the largest heist in Lyndhurst history, a well-planned crime that still is unsolved.

  The Mandels sued the then-managers of the complex, alleging the burglary was aided by lax security, and yesterday won some relief. A jury awarded them $400,000 plus about $100,000 in interest. The company’s lawyers claimed security measures were adequate.

  “We still really don’t know who did it . . .” [Mandel’s lawyer Donald] Traci added.

  * * *

  Following this one in the news made me almost as nervous as doing the job in the first place, although some amusing moments helped to relieve the tension.

  First of all there was the old assumption that it was done by “thieves” rather than one man acting alone. Then there was the contention that there was no way the security systems could possibly have been working correctly, because nothing human would have been able to get past them.

  I used to feel a little flattered by stuff like that. Upon further reflection, though, I decided that maybe admiring comments on my thieving skills were well-disguised criticisms of lapses in law enforcement’s detecting skills.

  Former astronaut and Eastern Airlines CEO Frank Borman coined an incredibly apt phrase in 1967. Testifying before a House committee investigating the deaths of three astronauts during a ground test, Borman attributed the disaster to a “failure of imagination.” He said that the engineering team had been unable to envision such an occurrence in the first place, and therefore were completely unprepared to prevent it or deal with it when it actually happened.

  Similarly, I eventually came to realize that when a detective or security expert used a flattering phrase like “superhuman” in connection with one of my scores, what he was really doing was covering up his own failure of imagination. If he couldn’t figure out how I’d pulled off the heist, he retreated behind the excuse that the thief must have been a “human fly” or “the best there ever was.” What other explanation could there possibly be, other than that the detective wasn’t clever enough to figure it out, which is not something a law enforcement professional is anxious to admit.

  You could clearly see a variation on this theme in the Mandel lawsuit. The condo managers, as the basis of their defense against Joseph Mandel’s accusations of security lapses, contended that the security systems were more than adequate and were all up and running. Therefore, the wizards who pulled off this caper must have had nearly magical powers. How did they manage to float over the walls without tripping any alarms? How did they make themselves invisible as they walked past the security guards? How was it possible that none of their images ever appeared on any of the dozens of security cameras planted all over the complex? It was the only strategy available to the defendants, because the alternative would have been to admit that their security systems were inadequate.

  The police added to the mystique, marveling as they did over the “perfect heist,” maintaining that there was more than one perpetrator and confessing complete bafflement as to how the job was done. As part of their investigation they went beyond their own in-house people and queried experts from all over the country, including the FBI.

  What they didn’t do was ask a professional thief.

  As it happened, they did come tantalizingly close to the truth but were left dangling for lack of any hard evidence. This occurred during the Mandel vs. condo management company lawsuit, in which the Mandels alleged that lax security made the theft possible. An astute attorney for the defense pointed out during the trial that two other people had joined the Mandels for dinner that night. They were the parents of none other than Francine Loveman, and wasn’t Ms. Loveman known to be running around with a suspected jewel thief named Bill Mason? Isn’t it possible that Francine arranged for the Mandels to be out with her parents so Mason could rob them?

  And if that was the case, then the management company couldn’t be held liable for lax security, because, according to the Fort Lauderdale police, Mason was the best cat burglar in the country, maybe the best there ever was, and how could anyone claim that security was inadequate just because Bill Mason got past it? That would be like saying a j
ail was inadequate because Houdini managed to escape from it. No building could be secured against Bill Mason!

  I’m not bragging here. I’m just telling you what went on in the trial.

  It was generally perceived to be a desperation move by the defense attorney. As it happens, though, he was the only guy involved who had it even half right. But by making me out to be superhuman, he missed the real point, which was that getting into that condo complex was so absurdly easy, I’m almost embarrassed to say how I did it for fear of disappointing anyone who actually thinks I really was some kind of a ghost.

  I have a friend who does this absolutely mind-blowing card trick. All you have to do is think of a card and then tell him what it is. With you watching his every move, he’ll slowly take a deck of cards out of a box and fan them open, and your card will be upside down in the deck. It’s the damnedest thing I ever saw. There’s no way it could be done unless he was psychic. I begged and cajoled him for months to tell me how it was done because it was killing me. When he finally broke down and showed me, it was such a letdown I was sorry I ever asked.

  The Mandel case is a good example of why I don’t believe in UFOs. When confronted with strange phenomena in the skies that have no immediate explanation, many people have a tendency to jump to the conclusion that we’re being visited by extraterrestrials. But what they’re really demonstrating is the failure of their imaginations to conceive of more ordinary explanations. You’ll rarely find a professional stage magician who believes in UFOs or psychic phenomena, because he knows how incredibly easy it is to fool people. And for some reason I don’t really understand but which every professional magician knows as gospel, the more intelligent your audience, the easier it is to pull the wool over their eyes.

  My goal, though, wasn’t to fool a boatload of very competent detectives. All I wanted to do was to rip off some jewels.

  One afternoon in July of 1980 I was lying around Katie’s backyard with some of her friends, playing backgammon with her then-husband, Tom, between cooling dips in the pool. They’d all been out to some fancy party the night before and were gossiping idly about all the swells they’d rubbed up against. Despite various degrees of morning-after sobriety, they were nevertheless recalling in impressive detail what everyone had been wearing.

  The subject of Joseph and Florence Mandel came up. “You should have seen this diamond ring,” somebody gushed. “Must’ve been the size of a golf ball!” I wondered if anybody could actually see my ears perk up at that, and I lost the next three backgammon games as I listened intently while pretending intently not to.

  Joseph Mandel was always referred to in the press as an “industrialist,” which I’ve come to understand is the same thing as a “businessman,” only bigger and more important and generally involves making something other than just money. The Mandels were one of the most prominent families in Cleveland. Morton Mandel, Joseph’s brother, was chairman and CEO of Premier Industrial Corporation, and Joseph himself was chairman of the executive committee and owner of 20 percent of the company’s stock. (Premier has since merged with Farnell Electronics to form Premier Farnell PLC.) In 1982, Morton led a massive and hugely successful effort to completely revitalize the crumbling and decaying “MidTown Corridor” section of Cleveland, and this was only one of many of the more visible philanthropic endeavors in which they were engaged, operating through a handful of charitable foundations.

  This was a serious-money family. They’d been robbed three times in their Shaker Heights home, and it wasn’t much of a mystery why: Florence enjoyed bedecking herself with expensive baubles when she was in public. They’d moved to an upscale condo in Lyndhurst for the higher level of security, but as I listened to the people around the pool describing last night’s party, it seemed to me that Mrs. Mandel still hadn’t gotten it. What was the point of more guards and bars if you went around advertising the prize inside?

  Acacia-on-the-Green (which I guess is what they tore up to build the place and then named it after) was so exclusive and secure, you couldn’t even get into the lobby to look somebody up on the tenant reader board. It was time to muster up all of my magical skills and international intelligence connections . . . but I decided to go to the public library instead. There, I looked up the address and got the Mandels’ phone number and unit number, then, after that grueling five minutes of work, walked over to the county building office and looked up the construction plans for the entire complex. The attendant behind the desk, a regular Pinkerton, offered to make copies if I needed them. I didn’t take him up on it, because the numbering system for individual units hadn’t yet been devised when the plans were drawn up, so I couldn’t tell from the drawings alone which unit belonged to the Mandels. I had to know that in advance.

  I can pinpoint the day I paid my first visit to Acacia-on-the-Green: July 29. The reason I remember is that on the day I’d originally intended to go, July 27, fifteen midwestern states and portions of southern Ontario in Canada were rocked by an earthquake centered in northern Kentucky. Alarms had gone off all over Cleveland and there were police cars and fire trucks everywhere. Although damage was minor, the whole city was jumpy and on edge, which meant that people were going to be more vigilant for anything unusual. Just two days later, though, I felt that things had calmed down considerably.

  The two buildings of the condo were located on busy Cedar Road and were part of a complex of buildings backing up onto a golf course. I parked my van with blacked-out windows across the street and started watching.

  I didn’t have to watch for long. The first thing that surprised me was that although all vehicle traffic in and out was controlled through a single guard gate that I assumed was manned around the clock, the grounds themselves were wide open to pedestrians.

  Several nights later I walked onto the property to have a look around. I noticed that all the exterior doors on the buildings, even the ones in sight of the guards, were monitored with television cameras, which undoubtedly were recording continually. It was a pretty good setup and I couldn’t see how it could easily be defeated. And I still didn’t know where the Mandels’ unit was.

  The next night I returned, but this time in my shifty robber’s uniform, which consisted of a hand-tailored business suit of no particularly noticeable flair. Clean-shaven and with my hair neatly combed, I waited for a group of people to appear. Once they got past the guardhouse, I joined up with them as they neared the main door of the building. One of them opened it with a key card, and another one politely held it open for me. We shared an elevator. They got out about halfway up and I went all the way to the top.

  Finding the Mandel suite was easy—they had their name on the door—and I got a good line on where their windows would be on the outside of the building. Most of their unit fronted on the golf course, and part of it faced the space between the two buildings. I counted off steps from each end to nail down the position.

  Next stop was the roof, and I was already thinking about what I’d need to get out onto it once I found out how it was secured, but I can’t say I was terribly surprised to find the door unlocked. A failure of imagination again: If you can’t picture somebody getting into the building, why would you worry about how to lock inner doors?

  I found the approximate location of the Mandels’ windows by pacing off the steps I’d memorized before, then began walking along the edge, looking over the side for patios. I didn’t necessarily need their patio, just one that would afford me reasonable access to theirs. I was so intent on examining all the nooks and crannies that I hardly noticed the atrium until I almost fell into it.

  Peering over the edge, I saw that the atrium opened right into the middle of an apartment. Having been startled into forgetting my step count, I went back to the far wall and started again, taking care to make my steps soft in case someone was home underneath, and could hardly believe it when I hit the right number at the very moment I reached the atrium: It led right into the middle of the Mandel unit, and there was nothing bu
t a sliding glass door separating one of their rooms from the open-air area below me. This was their idea of security?

  The only real question I had left was when. That was answered when Fran casually mentioned to me a few days later that Joseph Mandel had invited her parents to dinner the following Tuesday to celebrate his wife’s birthday.

  “Were you invited, too?” I asked her.

  “I’m going to be in New York,” she reminded me.

  “Oh, right. So where’s the party?” I asked, trying not to let her see me start to turn blue as I waited for the answer.

  “The Ground Floor,” she said.

  Not Mandel’s condo, I heard.

  I let my breath out slowly. “Sounds like a great idea.”