Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

by Bill Mason

  My reason for wanting to go to New York, at least the state if not the city, involved a business opportunity, so let me step back about a week.

  Saratoga was an interesting town. For most of the year it was a sleepy little burg, but for one month every summer it became one of the most glamorous places in the world. When the horse-racing season opened, so much old money came to town, you could practically smell the difference between thems-what’s-got and the rest of us.

  The center of it all was the Gideon Putnam Hotel, located off the beaten track in a state park a short way out of town. Named for the founder of Saratoga Springs, who settled there in 1795, it not only played host to short-term visitors but was also the favorite haunt of the old-guard horsey set—owners, breeders, buyers and wannabes—who rented houses in Saratoga and spent the whole month going to parties, balls and the fabled Saratoga Race Course. The hotel had a patio bar right near the front entrance that offered an absolutely ideal view of everybody coming in and out. You could sit there and nurse a drink for hours and just watch, without arousing the least bit of suspicion. With Fran at my side, that was what I had come to Saratoga to do.

  Presiding over the entire social scene was Marylou Whitney, about the closest thing this country had to royalty. She wasn’t born into money, though. In 1958 she became a member of two of the nation’s wealthiest families when she married Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, direct descendant of Eli Whitney, who’d invented the cotton gin, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, who’d made a vast fortune in railroads. Marylou was in and out of the Gideon Putnam all the time, and on this particular Sunday afternoon she arrived in a horse-drawn carriage, dripping with so much jewelry it was all I could do not to drool all over our table. As tempting a target as I’ve ever had, she had a fabulous house just outside of town, but when I took a look, it was filled with servants, which pretty much ruled out the possibility of getting into it.

  A week before we were to meet in New York with Katie, I flew up from Puerto Vallarta and met Fran in Saratoga. We checked in to the lowest-priced room at the Gideon Putnam, which still made it the most expensive hotel I’d ever stayed in. Neither of us knowing the first thing about horses, we’d spend our days at the racetrack anyway, with twenty-eight thousand of our closest friends, betting on names we thought were clever or on horses who acted up being led out of the paddocks or who were mentioned in the conversations going on around us. Needless to say, we lost consistently and would then go back to the hotel to watch the evening’s comings and goings. Even if I didn’t manage to pull off a score on this trip—and although our money was draining away at an alarming rate—I was still compiling an incredible mental list of future prospects from places like Palm Beach, Monte Carlo and the Middle East. I think Fran had a pretty good idea of what was going through my mind, but we never discussed it.

  The Gideon Putnam had the least amount of security of any hotel I’d ever seen that catered to people of means. The place seemed to be managed and run by college students, who worked almost all the positions from front desk to kitchen help to chambermaids. Because the hotel was located inside the state park, the only police that ever seemed to come around were forest rangers. This made it all the more disappointing that by the time Fran and I ran out of money and finally had to leave, I hadn’t been able to come up with a way to take off Marylou Whitney.

  On the other hand, I did have a set of master keys to the entire hotel that I’d lifted off some college kid’s room-cleaning cart.

  Fran and I checked out and went back to Cleveland together. The following week I returned to Saratoga Springs by myself, without telling Fran where I was going. While heading to the patio bar at the Gideon Putnam my first day there, I saw an incredibly elegant lady leaving the hotel with an entourage, apparently heading out for the evening. She was wearing some exquisite jewelry, and since nobody around there wanted to be seen wearing the same stuff twice, and there were a lot of parties, I could only assume there was a whole load of goodies sitting back in her room. It was a rare, opportunistic moment. No planning, no preparation . . . I didn’t even know what room she was staying in. But those master keys were starting to burn a hole in my pocket.

  How laughable was the security at this hotel? Just inside the front entrance there was a large board studded with the kind of hooks you hang teacups from. When people arrived and left their cars with the valet service, the guy who parked the car would hang the keys on a hook along with a little tag listing the person’s name, make of car and license plate number. If they were guests of the hotel, he’d also write down the room number and leave the tag up on the board for the duration of the stay. All of this was right out in plain view. When this lady got into a mile-long car with the rest of her crowd, I made note of the license plate number, waited until all the valet guys were off parking cars, then wandered by the board and had myself a look. I found the tag with the matching license plate number, and, sure enough, there was a suite number written in as well. There was also a name, and a genuine electric thrill raced up my spine as I read it: “Du Pont.”

  I used the house phone to call the suite. I let it ring more than a dozen times, but there was no answer. Then I went there and knocked on the door, then knocked again and again, louder each time. Still no answer. I entered using my master keys and immediately found a jewelry box in the bedroom just off the living room. It was filled with glorious stuff, but I hadn’t brought anything to carry it in. I couldn’t use a pillowcase, as I’d be making my way out through the main lobby, and I couldn’t use any of Ms. Du Pont’s luggage, because it was all custom-made and there was a chance someone might recognize it. So I just picked out some of the best stuff—two diamond bracelets, a bunch of gold items, a ruby ring and one of the biggest but ugliest sets of pearls I’d ever seen—and put them in my pockets.

  I was back in my car and heading down to New York City twenty minutes later. To this day I don’t know which Du Pont she was.

  I’d brought along some goods I had to off-load (not from the Du Pont score, though; much too soon for that, although I had them with me), New York for a variety of reasons being one of the safest places for me to do that. First, there was no better place for someone on the run. The average New Yorker probably saw more faces in a day than someone from the Midwest saw in a month, but rarely noticed any of them. It used to be one of the few places where even a major celebrity could walk around and hardly ever get bothered, New Yorkers having seen it all and then some.

  Another reason was the vast array of places to sell jewelry without a lot of potentially embarrassing questions. Walk into most stores with a single diamond to sell and it’s no big deal, but walk in with a bagful of precious gems and you can elicit some suspicious stares. In New York, though, I could sell a hundred stones one or two at a time in different shops without ever leaving Forty-seventh Street. As for complete pieces of jewelry like elaborate necklaces and bracelets, Sotheby’s and Christie’s were my reliable standbys. I wonder how much other stolen stuff those prestigious old auction houses have sold over the years. (It would be several more years before the two of them would begin fixing commission fees, a scandalous collusion that cost art sellers some $450 million over seven years. The European Commission eventually fined Sotheby’s $20 million, which was less than 10 percent of their illegal take, making for a mighty good return on investment. Christie’s, having been the first to blow the whistle, never paid a dime in fines. And I’m a crook?)

  When I pulled up to the Sherry-Netherland, I noticed a black Mercedes parked right in front, in a clearly marked no-parking zone, but nobody was bothering it. There was no driver in the car, just two nasty-looking rottweilers. There was something awfully familiar about that car, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

  Fran and Katie had already checked in. When I got upstairs and met Richard Delisi, we both knew in an instant that we’d met before, and it took less than five minutes to figure out from where: He was the guy who’d beaten the crap out of his wife’s car with
a baseball bat down the block from my house in Coral Ridge, Florida.

  Not only that, he told me that the cops used to sit in his front yard to watch my house when I was feuding with them. He had no idea who I was or why they were watching me, but he’d come charging out of the house and tell them to get the hell off his lawn. Sometimes they’d come back anyway, so he’d turn his sprinklers on. Naturally, he’d made top ten on the police department’s shit list of uncooperative citizens, so we had something in common. That and the fact that we were both on the lam.

  Years later Delisi was arrested on the charges he’d skipped out on and served five years in prison. After that he was much too hot to go back into the drug business, but having served his time, he could safely go back to Florida. By the time of my own arrest in 1984 he was running an auto body shop in Pompano with his father. While I was in the joint, he did a major restoration job on Fran’s Mercedes (she’d gotten rid of the Cadillac by then). The day I was released he was there with the car and wanted to talk to me.

  He hadn’t been able to crank back his lifestyle enough to match his new, legitimate income. Dead broke, he had a plan to bring in one last load. He asked me to come in with him and his brother, and assured me we would each clear a million bucks. All we had to do was receive a shipment of weed, haul it up to New York and sell it in one shot. I needed money after prison and it was a tough one to resist, so I thought about it for a few days but finally said no. There were just too many people involved, and I’d gotten burned on a drug deal once before, when Gary Pierce took me for twenty-five thousand dollars and almost got me busted. Besides, I’d never gotten out of my head the image of Delisi going after that Mercedes with a baseball bat, and didn’t really feel like being in business with that volatile a personality.

  He found another guy to go in and went ahead with the deal. Sure enough, there was an informer, and the police were waiting when the plane landed. Delisi is now doing a mandatory sentence in Florida. I make it a point to call his mother and father once in a while to see how he is. Not too good, as it turns out, but still hopeful about his appeal. He’s been in for twelve years now, and his anticipated release date is 2034. I hope with all my heart that this guy isn’t going to die in prison for wholesaling marijuana when possession of small amounts isn’t even a crime in some states anymore. Meanwhile, rapists, child molesters and murderers routinely draw far less time.

  That was a close call for me—I did seriously consider his proposal—but ending up like Delisi would have been all my own doing and fault. There was another close one involving Katie, though, and this one was a pure accident I never saw coming.

  Katie was breathless with excitement because Kris Kristofferson was coming into Cleveland to perform. She had a long-standing crush on the guy and was dying to meet him, but had never really considered the prospect of actually doing so. When she and Fran told me about this, giggling like schoolgirls, I said, “Just for laughs, why don’t you find out where he’s staying?”

  They went to work and found out he and his entourage were staying at the Marriott in Beachwood. I went over there and spotted some of the band members at the pool, and within ten minutes had struck up a conversation. They were very friendly and we got along well, so after about an hour (and a few rounds of drinks, on me) I mentioned that I had a friend who would like to meet Kris.

  “No problem,” one of the guitarists said. “Come around to the stage door after the show.”

  When we did that, the security guard had my name and let us in. The guys greeted me like an old friend, then introduced us to Kris. Fran and Katie behaved like the ladies they were, and I guess that must have made an impression, because after about a dozen interruptions from fans, managers, groupies and various hangers-on, he said, “Listen, why don’t you guys come on over to the hotel?”

  Kris had a huge suite at the Marriott, which the hotel had stocked with enough food to start a small restaurant. After we got comfortable, Kris pulled out some killer weed, and it wasn’t long before we were all carrying on as though we’d been best buddies since the cradle.

  He and Katie hit it off really well and became good friends. The two of them would come over to our house in Moreland Hills whenever he was in town. Kris always brought some great smoke and we’d do up a storm together. He was so warm and easygoing, I kept forgetting what a big celebrity he was, and that was what almost got me into trouble.

  It happened at one of his concerts in Cleveland. He’d given the three of us tickets in the middle of the front row, and for some reason I was late getting there. The performance had already started, but when Kris spotted me making my way up the aisle, he suddenly stopped the show and waved his arms at the guys working the lights. Before I knew what was going on, there was a spotlight shining right on me, then I heard Kris calling me up to the stage. Of course, he had no idea I was a fugitive trying to keep a low profile.

  I climbed my way up and tried to stand with my back turned to the audience, but Kris spun me around and then introduced me as his buddy John Welling. Fighting down panic, I had no choice but to flash my face to several thousand of his fans and hope that none of my unfans were there and might recognize me. One bear hug later Kris finally let me get back to my seat, and I was so scared, I’m damned if I could remember anything else of the show at all. I didn’t know until later that Fran’s parents were also in the audience.

  So aside from some pretty exciting moments here and there, life was fairly normal for me for about a year and a half.

  Then I decided to nick Phyllis Diller a second time.

  20

  Striking Twice

  (or Not at All)

  PHYLLIS DILLER was performing at the Carousel Dinner Theatre, which had been built in a converted supermarket in Ravenna, Ohio, about thirty miles southeast of Cleveland. It later relocated to Akron, with much fancier facilities, and became the largest professional dinner theater in the country, but even back in Ravenna it was still a great place to see a show.

  My problem in planning this job was that Ravenna wasn’t exactly Times Square. Once the show ended at the Carousel and the cars cleared out, the place looked like a morgue, except with patrolling police cars. I couldn’t park down the street and just wait for her limo to leave and follow it, because I’d be about the only car out there.

  I found a phone booth about a quarter mile down the road. I could pull over and pretend to make a call without arousing suspicion, so long as I didn’t stay there too long. I called the theater and said I was a limo driver with a cranky boss and I needed to know, as precisely as they could tell me, when the show let out so I could be there waiting for him. Luckily, I got someone way down on the food chain rather than some office big shot. A bureaucrat would know when the show was scheduled to let out, but it was the working-class stiffs punching the clock who’d know exactly when it really let out, and know it to the second.

  I assumed Diller’s limo would be up and out of the Carousel parking lot before the crowd got out there and jammed everything up, so I stationed myself in the phone booth a few minutes before that. As soon as I spotted the limo in the distance, I left the booth and got into my car, prepared to follow once it passed by. It never occurred to me that it would go anywhere but Cleveland, since there weren’t any decent places to stay in Ravenna, and I was surprised when it made a left turn onto Bryn Mawr, a side street right across from the phone booth.

  I waited about half a minute before following, and as soon as I turned, I saw the limo stopped at the side of the road a few hundred yards up. I could see Diller walking into a small four- or six-unit apartment building, and as soon as she was safely inside, the limo made a U-turn and headed back my way. I kept going, passing the apartment building without slowing down, until I was sure the limo was gone, then I turned around.

  There was a larger apartment complex next door with a big parking lot. I left the car there and walked back to the smaller building. There were lights on in a unit just to the left of the front door an
d a few steps up. The curtains were drawn, so I couldn’t see inside, but it had to be hers, because I walked around the building and there were no lights on in any other apartment. I looked around a little to get a feel for the place. There were buildings all along that side of the street, but across the way there was only open farm acreage, bare now because it was late November.

  The next evening I came back at around five o’clock with binoculars and wearing dark clothes and headed into the field. I came early because I had no idea if she would go to dinner first or leave for the theater just before show time, and I froze my ass off waiting for that limo to come and pick her up. I walked around and jumped up and down a little trying to keep warm, and kept my mind occupied by taking notice of as many details as I could, like a telephone junction box sitting smack in the middle of this otherwise empty field.

  The limo finally showed up at seven-thirty and picked Diller up. She’d left the lights on in her apartment, but the rest of the building was still dark. As frozen as I was, I waited another half hour in case she’d forgotten something and had to come back, then I crossed the street and spent ten minutes trying to get my stiff fingers to pick the lock on the front door. I walked up the six steps to her apartment and stood there, listening. There were two units on her floor. Music was coming out of hers, but nothing from the other one. I remembered how she’d left the radio on back at the Highlander when I’d robbed her the first time, and thought it a safe bet that there was no one in the apartment.

  The door to the place looked like a cinch, but I liked to cover all my bases. Remembering the telephone junction box, I decided to go back out to the field and buy a little insurance. I didn’t want to have to deal with the front lock again, so I left the door slightly ajar on my way out.

  My intention was to cut the phone wires so no one could call the police if they spotted me. I had no trouble getting into the junction box, but I was blown away by how many wires were crammed into the damned thing. I guessed that the box had been installed when the area was a lot smaller, and rather than replace it as the population grew, they just stuffed more and more wires in there. I had no way to know which went where, so I cut them all.