by Bill Mason
It was a Tuesday evening, and therefore perfect. Security people guarding private residences tend to relax on weekday nights, as those are the least likely times for people to be out.
This was the first time I’d ever used a police scanner. It was a portable unit, and I’d made a kind of shoulder holster that held it securely under my arm. The wire connecting an earpiece ran underneath my shirt. The point of the scanner was to buy me time to clear out if somehow the police got alerted to my presence. The unit continuously checked each of the individual frequencies used by the police, running through all of them about once per second. Whenever it detected that one was being used, it would lock in on it and play it through the earpiece. When that particular transmission paused, it would go back to scanning all the frequencies again until it found another one in use.
Mandel being who he was, it was a sure bet that the slightest suspicion of something amiss would bring half the force running amid a flurry of radio chatter. It was one of the risks of robbing rich people: If you think Joe Six-Pack gets the same response from the local constabulary as the heavy-hitters, you’re living in a fantasy world. It’s not that cops and firemen think the rich are any better than you or me. Quite the contrary, in fact, but what they do know is who is in a position to make the most trouble for them if they don’t show up right away.
I was midway between two major suburbs, Lyndhurst and Beachwood, and had all the police frequencies for both places set up on the scanner. Getting them was another bit of brilliant spy work. When I went to buy the unit, I acted as a reluctant purchaser, unconvinced that this gadget would be any fun. The store owner, a former cop, said, “Come on, you can pick up all the police calls on this thing!” Baloney, I said. “I’m telling you,” he replied. “Here, watch.”
He pulled a slim book from beneath the counter, thumbed through it for a few seconds looking things up, then entered all the Lyndhurst police frequencies. Naturally I expressed amazement, and asked him if you could put in another town at the same time, like, say, uh, Beachwood? “Absolutely!” he said with delight, referring to the book again and entering all of those as well. “Hot damn,” I cried with naked joy. But now I wanted that book, too.
I looked around, wondering how tough it would be to break into this place, grab the book and split. I’d be in and out so fast, I could probably risk tripping the alarm and get away in time. Problem was, once the owner realized the book was gone, it might cause problems. For all I knew, the police departments would change their frequencies immediately.
Maybe I could break in quietly, copy the pages I needed and slip away without anybody knowing what I’d taken, or even that I’d been there at all. The owner was a former cop, which is probably how he managed to get his hands on the book in the first place, so he wouldn’t be stupid about security. Was it possible he even took it home every night to keep it safe?
No matter how I decided to go about this, I needed to see what the cover of the book looked like. I picked up the scanner and hefted it a few times. “Do you have any smaller ones? Not much room in my apartment.”
“Let me have a look,” he said, then turned away to a glass display case.
I leaned over the counter as if to follow his gaze, then flipped the book closed and turned it toward me to read the cover.
RadioShack. $1.95.
I stifled a laugh, then told the guy the scanner he’d pulled out would probably be okay, and did he happen to know where I could get one of these frequency books?
“Right here,” he replied, pointing to a shelf I hadn’t noticed before. There were about sixty or seventy copies. The one he was using covered the entire Midwest and had the frequencies for police, fire, the FBI and just about every other public service you could imagine.
For less than fifteen dollars I bought a set that covered the entire country.
I have to admit that I was more on edge than usual as I drove up to a spot across the street from the condo. Armed security guards have a tendency toward hero complexes, especially when they’ve been on the job for a long time but haven’t had an opportunity to do anything other than man a booth. They’re aware that if they’re efficient at their jobs, serious incidents will be few and far between and people will subconsciously come to take them for granted, or wonder if they’re necessary at all, or perhaps even consider them to be nuisances.
Security guards, unlike cops, not only have a propensity to overreact when an incident occurs, they’re also not as aware of the appropriate “rules of engagement.” The guy who shot me in Pompano was a good example: No cop in his right mind would have put a bullet in somebody who was running away from him down a hall.
Now was no time for second-guessing myself. I found a good spot across the street but out of sight of the guard booth. My tools were in an elegant leather carryall, and I had a thin but very strong rope wrapped around my waist and out of sight under my expensive leather jacket. I didn’t have to check the scanner, because I’d loaded it up with fresh batteries and had been listening to it for the past half hour just to make sure there was no special police presence in the area tonight.
At about six forty-five I saw Mandel’s car pause briefly at the booth before driving off to dinner. I checked my watch and settled in for fifteen minutes, which was the time limit I assumed after which they wouldn’t return for any forgotten items.
At seven o’clock I reached under my arm and turned the volume on the scanner down, then removed the earpiece and let it hang down inside my jacket. After setting a gray fedora on my head, I put the car key on the floor mat, picked up the carryall and got out, checked that the door wasn’t locked and slammed it shut. The key I’d left on the floor wasn’t attached to any other keys, so I wouldn’t have to fumble around with it if I was in a hurry.
I walked toward the driveway leading to the guard booth, intending to stop about twenty yards before I reached it. That would give me a chance to wait, unseen, for a good candidate bunch of people to go in with as well as to take a few deep breaths and steel myself. I’d have time to enter the grounds a different way and join up with them at the door to the building.
But just as I started to slow down, a taxicab pulled up and a group of five people tumbled out, and they were perfect: young, boisterous but not obnoxiously so, smiling and joking with the cabbie and clearly headed for a fun evening.
It was too good to pass up. I pulled the fedora down lower on my forehead and smoothly blended in with them as they passed the booth and waved jauntily to the guard inside, who smiled back and waved them on through to the building.
I turned my head well away from the camera in the booth, and then away from the one over the main door to the building, flashing a bright smile to the young lady on my right to cover the moves. “Looks like you’re all heading to a fun time tonight.”
“Heading for a bore,” she said with a laugh that was echoed by the others. “That’s why we had a few first!”
A guy behind me jerked a thumb back toward the booth. “Sure got this place locked up tighter’n a drum,” he said as he pushed a button to call up to whomever they were going to visit.
“Good thing,” I said, declining to look where he was pointing. “You can’t be too careful.”
“Absolutely,” another guy said as the door was buzzed open. Then he held it open for me. As I stepped through and thanked him, he said, “All kinds of lowlifes looking to rip people off.” I nodded in sympathy with his trenchant observation.
“Where you headed?” the same guy asked as we all got into the elevator. I waited until he punched a number—it was 3—and said, “Top floor, thanks.”
We exchanged some more thoughts on security until we stopped at 3. We all wished one another a good night and they got out.
This was going very well.
I’d been unable to see the condo window from the street and was relieved when I got to the atrium and found that the apartment was dark. That would not only make it easier to move around inside but also made it
more likely that nobody had been left at home. I did nothing but watch the place for about ten minutes anyway, to see if any lights got flicked on or if there were other signs of life.
I’d put my earpiece back in after leaving the elevator, and the scanner continued to check the police frequencies, pausing every now and again for some routine bit of conversation between dispatch and a patrol unit. “I’ve left there, I’m here now, I’m going somewhere else, where are you, didn’t see anything . . .”
It was annoying as hell. Each transmission started and ended with a burst of static, which sounded all the louder on that dead-quiet roof on which I was trying to make absolutely no noise. Trying to anticipate the next bit of scratchy dialogue was like the Chinese water torture, and it was making me jumpy. Worst of all, it was interfering with the most potent tool in the arsenal I carried, my own senses. I was used to relying on them, and while I didn’t mind adding information to the mix, I very much minded compromising my eyes and ears. I was straining for any sounds coming from inside the condo, and every time the scanner latched on to a police transmission, it took me a few seconds to “reset” my hearing so I could start listening again.
Ten minutes passed and it was time to move. I had started to unzip my jacket when another gush of static shot through my head. I reached under my arm and turned the scanner volume all the way down. Better to crank it up and check every few minutes than go nuts waiting for the next blast of irksome noise.
I pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves and started unwinding the rope from my waist, turning my body with each loop so the rope wouldn’t coil up and become difficult to handle. I wrapped one end around a nearby smokestack and secured it with the small climbing carabiner I’d attached to it that afternoon. Carryall slung firmly across my shoulder, I lowered myself over the lip of the atrium and began climbing down hand over hand.
I paused again once I was down, but there was no sign of movement in the apartment. It was time to get down to what I’d assumed was going to be the toughest part of the job, getting past the alarms protecting just this unit rather than the building in general. I couldn’t count on the Mandels having left them unarmed, although I was hoping for that, and not unreasonably, since most people heading out for less than a few days rarely bothered to set them.
The sliding glass door leading from the interior of the apartment to the open-air area was locked. That meant that even if the alarm system was unarmed, I’d have no way to know and would have to assume everything had been switched on, so I needed to deal with that before anything else.
I couldn’t find a magnetic trip. I couldn’t find any wires leading away from the slider, which, I also noticed, didn’t sport the kind of warning decal alarm companies liked to slap all over the place, more to advertise themselves than to scare away intruders. I didn’t see any telltale blinking lights on a wall panel inside the unit. Either this was the most sophisticated system I’d ever seen or . . .
No way. I steeled myself against a loud and raucous alarm going off and jimmied the sliding door open. It was easy, which made perfect sense, because who’d bother to put a good lock on a door that was assumed to be impossible to get to in the first place?
Regardless, I went still to listen for any signs that I might have tripped something completely hidden, and took the time to look around.
The apartment was incredible: huge and filled with expensive furnishings, art all over the place and that unmistakable look and feel of having been professionally decorated so that it seemed more like a museum than a place in which real human beings actually lived.
My target was the dressing room, but first I turned up the scanner to check for unusual radio traffic, then turned it off, walked to the front door and slid the heavy dead bolt home. In case of trouble that would buy me some time.
The place was unbelievably quiet. The good news, which was minor, was that it would allow me to easily hear signs of trouble. The bad news, which was major, was that there was no noise to mask any sounds I might make. You might think that an absence of people in the vicinity is a benefit to a thief, and it usually is, but there’s nothing like a lot of hustle and bustle to mask that a robbery is taking place.
The dressing room was also enormous, and there were drawers, cupboards and cabinets everywhere. I wasn’t worried about having to search through all of them, though, because it was a sure bet that these people had hung out the standard sign saying, “It’s all here”: one cabinet that was locked.
I found it right away and picked it easily (why put a sophisticated lock on a cabinet whose sides could be cracked open with one good sneeze?) and nearly fainted at the sight of the treasures within. Diamonds, emeralds and rubies glittered like Christmas decorations, and the drawer seemed to groan under the weight of all the gold. I remember thinking, With all this beautiful stuff still in the cabinet, what the hell must she be wearing to dinner! One diamond ring alone was easily in excess of fifteen carats, even though the stone itself didn’t appear to be of top quality.
I scooped everything into the carryall, then slid the drawer back and relocked the cabinet. It may seem like a useless thing to have done, but my feeling has always been that there is no sense red-flagging that a robbery occurred. The more time it takes for it to be discovered, the more time you put between the score and the onset of any investigation. The passage of time makes it more difficult for witnesses to recall details or at least to assign specific times to things they saw and, if you’re very lucky, might make it hard for anybody even to know on what day the job was done. That makes the matter of an alibi for a detained suspect a whole lot easier, because “Where were you last night between seven and ten?” is a much different question from “Where have you been for the past three days?” Florence Mandel might come home and go right to that cabinet to stow her evening’s baubles and discover what had happened, but then again, she might not get around to it tonight, or even tomorrow.
I took a quick look around the rest of the apartment but didn’t find anything of great value I could fit in the bag. One more check of the scanner and then it was back out to the atrium and up the rope. It took me a second to realize why it was a tough climb, but I smiled when it hit me: It was the extra weight of all the goods in my bag that hadn’t been there on the way down. (The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the “burglars” had shoveled all the jewels into two of the Mandels’ suitcases, but where they got that idea is beyond me.)
Just as I eased myself over the lip of the atrium and onto the roof, I realized I’d forgotten to slide back the dead bolt on the front door. The Mandels wouldn’t be able to get back in without help, and that meant they’d know something had happened. So much for trying to delay discovery of the heist.
But there was no way in hell I was going back down. I pulled the rope up and rewrapped it around my waist, hefted the bag once again and went down the stairs rather than the elevator. I waited until I heard some people in the lobby before coming out of the stairwell. I put the bag up on my shoulder, which shielded my face from all the video cameras, then walked out the main doors, past the guardhouse and onto the street to my car.
It couldn’t have gone smoother. There had been no surprises, no especially tense moments, and it looked to be a monster haul. The newspapers reported a value of one million dollars. Based on what they knew, that was fairly accurate, but “what they knew” wasn’t, as I’d find out within hours.
I dropped the carryall off at Welling’s shop, which I had the keys to, and went home. Fran came back from New York two days later. I never mentioned it to her, and acted surprised when she read it in the papers and told me all about it.
The next day I retrieved the carryall and got ready for a close look at the haul in good light, which is when I got my first surprise of the caper: The enormous diamond ring, which turned out to be a whopping nineteen carats, also turned out to be fake. It was a damned good fake, but two seconds under my jeweler’s loupe and there was no question about it.
Fighting back some welling nausea, I scrabbled around inside the bag and then just removed the tools and upended the whole thing on a workbench. Once everything was laid out, I started going through it one item at a time. There were plenty of other phony pieces, including a ten-carat diamond pin, but to my great relief there were a lot of real ones as well, enough to have made the whole job still well worth the effort.
I have no way to know whether the Mandels were aware of the fakes, or knew that they had now been robbed twice: once by me and once by whoever had sold them the phony jewelry.
I do know that they claimed the full million in their lawsuit.
By all media accounts, Joe Mandel was enraged at having been robbed. It wasn’t because of the monetary loss or because some of the pieces were irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind family heirlooms, or even because someone had the effrontery to invade his “space.” It was because he’d uprooted his family and moved them into new digs specifically for security reasons, and now some “thieves” had hit him again anyway.
Mandel didn’t get to be the successful businessman he was by taking things lying down. He filed a lawsuit against the managers of the condominium complex, and his claim was pretty straightforward: If the security system had been working the way it was supposed to, nobody could have robbed him. The fact that a robbery did occur was prima facie evidence that the system was either inadequate or not working at the time, and therefore the management company was liable.
Security was a big selling point in real estate, but most of it, like Acacia-on-the-Green’s, was junk. If you want to know how well a piece of property is secured, don’t ask a cop, ask a thief. Look at some sales literature for security systems and you’ll come to realize that the major point of most of it is to protect you from your own human fallibilities, such as forgetfulness, laziness and an unwillingness to be inconvenienced. Everything is as automatic as possible, so you don’t have to remember to lock a door or go through the awful inconvenience of pushing a button every once in a while. This is impossible to do perfectly, and thieves rely heavily on the complacency and carelessness of their victims. Most people who live in densely populated areas don’t even look up when a car alarm goes off, assuming that the car owner screwed it up again. The police get angry at false alarms, and this intimidates a lot of people into not setting their alarms at all. (The Los Angeles Police Department recently announced it would no longer respond to unverified burglar alarms.) Worst and craziest of all, people who have gone a long time without being robbed somehow get the impression that they’re therefore not likely to be robbed in the future, so why bother being diligent about security? All of this plays right into a thief’s hands, and sitting around debating the details of “systems” misses the whole point.