by Bill Mason
I wasn’t able to follow the Mandel trial closely. It was covered in detail in the newspapers, but, as I was in jail at the time on an unrelated matter (the trial took place four years after the robbery), I wasn’t really keeping up and had to piece it together afterward. You can’t imagine how shocked I was to discover I’d become a key component in a trial about a crime that, to the best of my knowledge, the police hadn’t even suspected me of committing.
This is somewhat oversimplified, but the basic contention of Mandel’s attorney, Donald Traci, was that security at Acacia-on-the-Green was so lax, just about anybody could have gotten in without being detected. He cited the unlocked roof door as an example.
The management company’s attorney, John Martindale, countered that security was top-notch, and only somebody with extraordinary skill could possibly have gotten in. This, of course, was bullshit, as you now know, and not just because of the unlocked roof door. Frankly, that was a very minor lapse. Had it been locked, it might have kept out a teenage vandal, but for an experienced burglar of even moderate skill, all it would have done was add a few minutes to the job.
I’m not trying to downplay what I accomplished by pulling off this score undetected. It was a good job, one of my best, but just because it was me doesn’t mean that nobody else could have done it. That the sliding glass door to the Mandels’ unit was not alarmed was unforgivable, especially when there was a huge atrium completely open to the roof leading right down to it. That there were no interior sensors to detect motion was also a serious breach. The underlying assumption seemed to have been that there was no sense doing any of those things because it would be impossible for anybody to get onto the roof in the first place, which was nonsense. If I’d learned early on that the guards were a lot more attentive than they were, making a casual entrance into the building risky, I would have found a way to climb the outside walls, which I’d done many times, or gotten into the garage in a service vehicle.
It also occurred to me later that had I not forgotten to unbolt the door to the unit, the management company’s lawyer might even have tried to pin the robbery on the Mandels themselves. After all, aside from the building superintendent’s confirmation that the Mandels had returned home to find their apartment locked from the inside, there wasn’t a single piece of evidence to prove that anyone besides Joseph and Florence had actually been inside the unit. No trace of my presence had ever been found.
I was never charged with the robbery. Nobody ever questioned me about it, and no evidence was ever presented that I was even in the state when the crime was committed. The same was true for Fran, who had been in New York and didn’t even know what had happened until her return. But the trial was a civil proceeding, not a criminal one, and the defendants were not bound by the rules of criminal procedure in trying to make a case against me, however hypothetical. If their attorney could convince a jury that I might have done it, that could be sufficient to get the management company off the hook. After all, just because “the greatest cat burglar in the world” robbed the condo doesn’t mean it had bad security.
You’ve got to love a legal system in which a defendant can base his case on the guilt of someone who wasn’t even charged with the crime. It’s like me being convicted of accepting a bribe you were acquitted of giving me.
It’s also the only system in which a case like this could take four years to come to trial. That delay actually helped the defense. Fran and I were arrested in September of 1984 (we’ll get to that later), and the investigation leading up to it disclosed hard evidence that we had known each other at the time the Mandels had been robbed. Martindale called to the stand Chagrin Falls police chief Lester LaGatta, who produced dated photos that had been seized in a raid and that showed Fran and me together as early as 1980.
Far and away my favorite part was when Martindale flew in my old nemesis, Fort Lauderdale deputy police chief Joseph Gerwens, who told exciting tales of my skill and derring-do and called me “a master burglar who makes Jack Murphy look like an amateur.” (He was referring to the notorious “Murph the Surf,” who stole the Star of India sapphire from a museum in New York, and I hated the comparison because Murphy was a vicious degenerate and, despite his very real intelligence, often behaved like a complete idiot. I was to meet him a few years later and I liked him in person even less than I did from a distance.) Gerwens said I was the only person who could have done the job, and I would have found that flattering except that it was complete bullshit, another failure of imagination. Gerwens also probably wasn’t nuts about the fact that I’d slipped out of his clutches and, even worse, that I might have been back in action pulling scores. Looking back on it now, I don’t think he ever really hated me personally; he just hated criminals, especially those who went out of their way to thumb their noses at the law and its enforcers. When he gave his testimony in the Mandel trial, he apparently smiled through a lot of it, and observers told me he never expressed an ounce of animosity toward me.
The defense tactic didn’t work completely—the jury refused to believe that anybody could have broken in if the system had been working properly—but it probably saved the management company some money. Mandel still won his case, but instead of the $1 million he sued for, the jury awarded him $500,000. My guess is that, given the fake stuff, a half mil would just about have covered the real loss, although maybe not what he’d actually paid had he not known about the fakes.
Like I said in an earlier chapter, nearly everyone I robbed made money on the deal. The Mandels would have, too, if they’d had the jewels insured. Instead, they just broke even, and they were lucky to do that, because there’s one especially ironic twist to this whole affair that the participants were totally unaware of.
The trial was presided over by Judge John J. McMonagle, who heard my name brought up but didn’t see my face and apparently didn’t look at Chief LaGatta’s photos very carefully. He’d also been the judge in a lawsuit Fran had been involved in two years before, in which I’d testified. Back then, he’d seen my face but thought my name was John Welling. The judge was the only person in the Mandel trial who might have put the whole thing together, but he had no idea that the man whose skills Gerwens praised so highly was the same man he’d met right in his own courtroom barely twenty-four months before.
Part
IV
19
Domestic Tranquility
BARB FINALLY began divorce proceedings. I was still a fugitive and couldn’t show up at any of the hearings without being arrested, but I didn’t need to be there anyway, because I wasn’t contesting either the divorce itself or the division of property. She got everything we had, including two houses in Florida, all the bank accounts, several cars, the land in Ohio and so on. As far as I was concerned, she deserved it all, and that’s the way I wanted it, even though it wiped me out.
By now I’d been living in the condo at Georgetown Villas for about a year and a half, and when I was in town, Fran was over almost daily. When I traveled, to places like Florida, California, Saratoga Springs, Atlanta and Toronto, she would usually go with me. As much I liked being with her, I didn’t want to see the life she’d built for herself get ruined, and kept urging her to go home. How her husband tolerated her constant absences was beyond me.
Gradually, she came to know all about me, and still she wouldn’t leave. At the same time, she became great cover for me, usually without even realizing it. Fran had lived among the swells her whole life and moved easily in moneyed circles. With her at my side there was no place I couldn’t get into. She also had the uncanny ability to find out a woman’s entire life story in a single elevator ride. People loved to talk to her, and they’d spill things they wouldn’t tell their best friends.
I first discovered this knack because of a lawyer across the hall from me in the condo. Her name was Caroline Stracher and we were nodding acquaintances for the first few weeks after I moved in—a smile and a hello on the way in or out, that kind of thing. She seemed smart an
d nice and that was about it.
Then Fran ran into her. That evening at dinner she casually told me about Caroline’s childhood, her first boyfriend, how she decided to go to law school, her first job, the ups and downs she’d gone through as a female lawyer . . . Fran filled nearly an hour with details and had been with the woman for only twenty minutes.
A few months later Fran showed up one day and told me about an uncomfortable conversation she’d had with her father. Someone had told him he’d seen Fran’s Cadillac parked at Georgetown Villas every day for a month, and what was going on? I don’t know who that was, but it was interesting that they’d gone to her father instead of to her. I guess that’s how you do it in polite society.
Fran didn’t try to duck the issue, but told her father she’d fallen in love with someone and was kind of in trouble. Her father didn’t get into any of the standard judgmental rants you might have expected, just got right down to the practical side. “You’ve got to make a decision, and make it soon, because this is no way to live,” he told her, and there was no arguing with that. We were both forty-two at the time.
As I listened to her relate the story my heart sank, because I was sure she was going to break it off with me, then go home and reconcile with her husband and never see me again. I knew it was the right thing for her to do, but it didn’t make it any less painful.
“So I’m going to get a divorce,” she finished up.
I tried to talk her out of it, even though I desperately wanted to continue being with her. Like her father, I was trying to be practical. “I’m not an executive or a doctor,” I reminded her. “I’m a thief, for crying out loud!” I couldn’t even continue calling myself a real estate investor, since I wasn’t in that business at all anymore.
It didn’t seem to trouble Fran, so I reminded her that I was also a fugitive living under an assumed name, and what the implications of that were. “What happens if you throw your life with your husband away,” I asked rhetorically, “and a week later I get busted and sent up for twenty years?”
For someone who’d always lived in the lap of luxury, it must have been a daunting prospect to be left out in the cold like that, but Fran was adamant, and nothing I said could change her mind. I at least got her to sleep on it, figuring the cold light of a new day would instigate some clear thinking, but all it did was give her time to plan how to handle things as gracefully as possible. “I’m going to go talk to Caroline before she leaves,” she said over morning coffee. She went across the hall and hired my neighbor as her attorney, then filed the papers a few days later.
Things seemed to go smoothly, and it was a fairly amicable split. The only hitch was the size of Caroline’s fees for handling the case, which seemed to grow after she learned who Fran was and how much money her family had. Fran was pretty taken aback but didn’t really feel like making a big issue of it. Until we found out that Caroline had socialized with Fran’s husband during the divorce proceedings.
It wasn’t so much that Fran’s soon-to-be ex-husband was dating. After all, she was suing him for divorce and was carrying on an affair herself, so there were hardly any grounds for her to get huffy about it. But she thought that her own attorney being squired to the opera by the opposition in a lawsuit was an unforgivable breach of ethics, and she was damned if she was going to cough up inflated fees after that.
Caroline sued, and who gets called as a witness but yours truly. Swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth and so forth, I was sworn in as “John Welling” and testified before Judge John J. McMonagle on Fran’s behalf. Aside from my name, I did tell the truth, and Fran won the case.
By that time I was no longer living at Georgetown Villas.
My daughter Suzi was at Kent State, just an hour away from Lyndhurst. She got along well with Fran and was a frequent visitor to the condo. Just after starting her third year in college, she came to tell me she wanted to quit school and travel. I tried hard to talk her out of it, but I lost that argument, too. I did get her to agree not to formally drop out, and she promised she’d eventually go back to finish her degree.
Suzanne, my firstborn, was a special child and is a special woman. Although generally high-strung, she gets almost eerily calm in stressful situations that demand clear thought. Fiercely devoted to family, she would do anything any of us asked with no questions. I didn’t realize at the time that I’d be counting on this quality before too long.
We planned her trip together, and then the two of us went to New York. After a few days of sight-seeing, I put her on a plane to London. Later that day while I was moping around bemoaning my eldest’s departure, Fran called to tell me she’d found a perfect house to rent. It was on Mill Creek Lane in Moreland Hills, which was part of the city of Chagrin Falls, barely half an hour outside of Cleveland, and she was right; it was perfect. It was at the end of a long, private lane in a heavily wooded area and overlooked a deep ravine. The place was gorgeous, and Fran, her divorce proceedings now well under way, wasted no time snapping it up and moving in with her youngest daughter.
I helped them move in and happily dove into a few projects to fix the place up to their liking. Once they were comfortably settled, I was over there all the time, having dinner or just hanging out and basically soaking in the serenity of being in their company.
My only concern was Muchka, a cat who’d adopted me. He followed me everywhere, and I was very attached to him. The problem was that I’d bought Fran’s daughter a cocker spaniel puppy for her birthday. We named the puppy Killer, which was pretty funny because she was so small and sweet. We didn’t know how those two animals would coexist in the same house, but the first time we put them together, they curled up into a single ball of fur and went to sleep. They did the same thing every night thereafter, and two months after Fran rented the house, I gave up my condo and moved in with her and her daughter, once again finding myself in a warm home with a family I loved.
We lived almost like a normal family for about a year and a half, and the house was always full of visitors. Various boyfriends of Fran’s daughter were around all the time, usually around her but always around the refrigerator. My son, Mark, and my younger daughter, Laura, spent a lot of time with us in the summer, and we also got a lot of visits from my cousin Dan. (Suzi by this time had traveled all across Europe and then gone to New Zealand to be a sheepshearer, which I thought was a hell of a thing after I’d paid for two years of college, but it seemed to make her happy.)
I got along well with Fran’s kids and even her parents, who were over often. Even though I had no visible means of support, they didn’t ask a lot of questions. Fran told them I owned some income property and they let it go at that. I especially got to like her father, a great guy and an astute businessman. He was interested in real estate and property management, and since I knew something about both, we spent endless hours talking and soon became good friends.
When a photo of Francine and me ran in a society newspaper, I was identified as “John Welling.”
Fran knew about my burglary sideline, but I did very little work at this time. In the evenings I rarely went out, because I didn’t want to be seen in and around Cleveland. Occasionally we’d go to Dan’s or Bill Welling’s or Katie’s, but only once did we go to a big social event, a testimonial dinner for the man who’d succeeded Fran’s uncle Julie as Pick-N-Pay chairman. We ended up with our pictures in the paper (the caption identified me as John Welling) and it rattled me pretty good. We never did anything that visible again, at least not purposely, but I was still so glad to have a home that I was happy to mostly stay in.
Fran’s younger sister Katie was one of my favorite people in the Kravitz family. Just as Fran had at first, Katie was content to take to the life their father had carved out for them. Even as she struggled through a second bad marriage, she was reluctant to confront head-on whether it was the life she really wanted.
Early on in my relationship with Fran, she and Katie told me about a major dope dealer named Richard De
lisi they’d met in Las Vegas. Originally from Fort Lauderdale, he was then operating somewhere in New York. He played blackjack for huge stakes and had his own planes fly him in more money when he lost. Fran and Katie got along well with him, and since the two of them had been talking for weeks about a visit to New York City anyway, they thought it might be fun for the four of us to meet there. Didn’t sound like my kind of guy, and meeting with a drug dealer probably wasn’t the smartest move for a fugitive, but I had another reason to go to New York, and it was far enough off the path of the authorities who were looking for me.
At the time, Fran was still married and living at home and I was spending a lot of time in St. Petersburg, Florida, but I was in Puerto Vallarta when we began making arrangements for this trip. The plan was for the three of us to stay at the Sherry-Netherland in New York City, and Delisi would meet us there.