Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

by Bill Mason

  On my way back into the building I stuck a small pin in the cylinder of the front-door lock and pulled the door closed behind me. I could still get out, but nobody would be able to get in while I was inside, which could buy me a few valuable seconds in case of trouble.

  It took less than five seconds to jimmy open her door with a thin strip of celluloid. I stepped in and closed the door behind me, and had to smile as I looked around. The place was every bit as messy as her hotel room at the Highlander had been. Her jewelry was also in plain sight again, and I scooped it all up quickly, along with what looked like a personal address book about the size of a paperback novel. I was out in a few minutes.

  Downstairs I couldn’t get the pin out of the lock. It wasn’t that I was being a nice guy in trying to get it out; it was that you never want to leave more red flags around than are necessary. The fewer clues you leave, the longer it takes for someone to realize that something happened while they were gone. This can buy some precious time if you come close to getting found out while you’re still getting away.

  But it didn’t look too good for me to be standing around fiddling with a door lock, especially since I was now holding stolen goods, which would make it a tad more difficult to explain myself if some alert cop decided to come snooping around. So I left it alone and got the hell out of there.

  I hadn’t even gotten around to looking over the haul and making some preliminary estimate of its worth before the morning papers did it for me. It was about sixty-five thousand dollars, and if Diller was as honest in filing her insurance claim this time as she had been when I first robbed her (turned out she was), it would be a fairly accurate number. At least in retail terms. From a fence I figured to get maybe a third of that, so it was a disappointing haul.

  I felt bad reading that she’d had to climb through that high window—the paper said it was because the door handle came off in her hand, which was nonsense—and I bet she gave the limo driver some grief for not waiting until she was inside this time. She also must have had a hell of a walk to find a phone and report the robbery, because it seems I’d knocked out telephone service to three-fourths of Ravenna.

  The papers also made a big deal of the fact that this was the second time she’d been robbed while performing in the area. It was written off to coincidence, of course, and it didn’t seem to occur to anybody that both scores might have been pulled off by the same thief. (Or thieves, the police and reporters predictably referring to me in the plural again.)

  I showed the address book to Fran a few days later. It was a treasure trove of the private addresses and unlisted numbers of hundreds of the rich and famous—Anne Bancroft, Rock Hudson, Carol Burnett, George Burns, Bob Hope—and Fran was absolutely riveted as she went through it page by page and line by line.

  The job had been a piece of cake, but not too long afterward, I would come to wish I’d never seen that damned phone book.

  I may be giving the impression that everything I planned came off without a hitch and that I always walked away with bagsful of dazzling stones. This is probably a good place to put that notion to rest.

  Surprisingly often, I spent time and money planning a score only to discover that there was hardly anything worth taking in the first place. Once when Barbara and I were still together, I took her to Key West for a weekend holiday. We stayed at the Pier House Resort, a magnificent place that likes to advertise its address as “the corner of Duval Street and the Gulf of Mexico.” On Saturday evening we went into the legendary Chart Room Bar for cocktails before heading out to dinner. Sitting at the bar was Truman Capote and another guy we didn’t recognize but who seemed to be his boyfriend. It was only around six o’clock, but Capote was already three sheets to the wind. Barb and I sat down at the bar and struck up a conversation. Capote barely seemed to know I was even there, but he was mesmerized by Barb and talked her ear off. His friend, on the other hand, seemed to like me. It was clear from the conversation that the Chart Room Bar was their main hangout.

  Capote, sporting quite a bit of rather gaudy gold jewelry, kept on drinking and telling story after story. He looked at his watch once in a while and said he had to meet Tennessee Williams later for dinner. After about two hours he could hardly walk, but his friend managed to drag him away from the bar. Barb and I helped them out to the parking lot, where I took note of Capote’s car.

  I drove back down to Key West by myself two weeks later and saw both of them at the bar on Friday night. Rather than go in, though, I waited in the parking lot for about two hours, then followed them to dinner on the other side of the island. I waited in that parking lot and then followed them home, which was fairly close to the restaurant. I went there the next afternoon, waited for them to head out to the bar and was inside the house probably before they got their first drink down. Turned out that Capote either wore most of the gold he owned or had a hiding place too clever for me to find. I was barely able to cover my room and gas with what I took.

  I didn’t even manage that when I broke into Bob Hope’s room at a ritzy spa off Dixie Highway in Pompano Beach. He was performing somewhere in the vicinity and had gotten a lot of publicity, along with his wife, Dolores, who wore an awful lot of jewelry in the pictures. I didn’t know which room they were staying in but took a chance that it was the “Presidential Suite,” which was easy to find because of the words “Presidential Suite” emblazoned on the door in huge gold letters (another “Come rob me” invitation). I picked the lock, and although I’d gotten the right room there wasn’t a single thing worth taking.

  On a different occasion Fran and Katie were staying at that same spa. After a day of doing whatever it is you do at spas, they would have dinner with all the other guests, then adjourn to the lounge. Richard Delisi and I joined them one evening for dinner. They were on special diets, but we as guests could have whatever we wanted. After a day of working out, Katie was ravenous and ready to kill Richard and me because of all the good stuff we were wolfing down while she was eating things like butterfly wings and grass soufflé. After dinner we all went to the lounge and were introduced to some people. One was Margaux Hemingway, and while one doesn’t like to speak ill of the dead, she was as snooty a bitch as I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet.

  On the other hand, we also met Yolanda Betbeze, the 1951 Miss America who’d refused to honor the tradition of the crown-wearer modeling bathing suits for Catalina, a major pageant sponsor. Thereafter considered a pioneering Miss America, Yolanda was also very active in the civil rights movement. She was so down-to-earth and warm that none of us wanted to break off the conversation as the evening wore on. She had an apartment on Park Avenue and houses in Georgetown and Palm Beach. Fran and I called her once when we were in the D.C. area, and she insisted we stay in one of her guesthouses. A really generous, top-flight lady it never occurred to me to rob. Well, okay, it occurred to me, but I never entertained it seriously.

  Margaux wore quite a bit of jewelry in the evening and I assumed she would leave it in her room during the day. She stayed on after Fran and Katie checked out, and I went back to the spa by myself. Since there were a small number of guests and all of them knew my face by then, I had no trouble hanging around. During the daily pampering when Margaux was reliably trapped beneath mud or whatever, I picked the lock on her room. No gems of any kind, a couple of pieces of gold, none of them worth the risk of alerting the police to the presence of a burglar.

  When the McGuire Sisters, probably the most popular female vocal group of the fifties and sixties, were performing in Canton, Ohio, I saw in the paper that they were scheduled to do a radio interview prior to one of their shows. I followed their limo from the theater to find out where they were staying, then hung around until the limo came back to take them to the radio station. They had three large rooms right next to one another, and I used a piece of celluloid to get past the cheap locks on all three. Not one had anything except costume jewelry, which I didn’t bother to take. I doubt they had any idea anybody had even b
een in their rooms.

  There was one time that I didn’t follow through simply because I didn’t have the heart. Carol Channing was performing at the MusiCarnival in Cleveland and staying at the Blue Grass. I did some casing and decided it would be a fairly easy and straightforward job, but then I saw her show and she was so sweet, it caught me way off guard. I figured maybe it was just part of her act, so I followed her around a bit, but damned if she wasn’t every bit as friendly and lovable offstage as on. Just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  There was one nonscore I regret to this day. Fran and I had taken a cruise from Acapulco to Los Angeles, then checked in to a hotel to spend a few days in and around Santa Monica. As was my habit, I picked up a paper to have a look at the society pages, which in Los Angeles is really coverage of the entertainment industry in the “Calendar” section of the L.A. Times. I read that there was to be some kind of party for Neil Diamond at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and one of the guests would be Marvin Davis, a billionaire oil tycoon who was breaking big-time into the entertainment business. In fine Hollywood style, his wife was pictured in the column wearing scads of jewels.

  Fran and I checked out of the Santa Monica Hotel and in to the Beverly Hills Hotel. She fit right in, looking like one of those people who everybody thinks is a celebrity but can’t place, which was great cover for me to wander freely about the hotel and learn the layout. The Davises arrived on Friday for the Saturday-night party, occupying one of those famous bungalows separate from the main building. We saw them go through the lobby twice, and two things caught my eye. One was that Mrs. Davis always wore a king’s ransom in jewelry, even during the day, but never stopped at the hotel’s safety-deposit boxes to put them away or pick them up. The other was that they’d brought some security with them. The bodyguards were very discreet and kept their distance, but they were unmistakable and there was no safe way for me to follow the couple out to see which bungalow they were in.

  Saturday evening rolled around and Fran and I sat near the Polo Lounge to watch the parade of notables: Burt Bacharach, Gordon Lightfoot, Diana Ross, Robert Wagner . . . and enough jewelry to open a Harry Winston franchise. When Mrs. Davis finally came swooping through, her necklace alone could have fed a small country for a year.

  The party had its own security people, so the Davis bodyguards fell back and eventually went outside. I followed, hoping they’d lead me to the bungalow, but it didn’t happen. Finding it was going to be very dicey, I started to wonder if maybe Mrs. Davis was wearing everything she’d brought and the risk might not be worth the possibility that there was nothing left in their room. Safety had always been my highest priority, and there was a new wrinkle this time: Fran was with me, and I’d never pulled a score with her anywhere in the vicinity before. If I got pinched, there would be no way to avoid her becoming involved. I made the decision to back off.

  Some time afterward thieves in the south of France hit the Davises’ room while they were out at dinner and got away with twenty million dollars in jewels. Those should have been my jewels. Lord only knows what I might have found in their bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel that night.

  At least that hadn’t been a lot of work for me, and the stargazing was great fun. It wasn’t always as easy to let one go, though.

  I’d been interested in Elizabeth Taylor for a long time. Her collection of pricey baubles was legendary, and I knew she (or her various husbands and handlers) paid attention to security. The combination made for a tempting challenge. Over the years I’d read extensively about her. One of the things I took note of was that, while Burton was filming Night of the Iguana, he and Liz had fallen in love with Puerto Vallarta and bought a house there. In that relatively remote location, a heist might be easier than in one of the better-known and better-populated locations Liz tended to frequent.

  I was on the move in and around St. Petersburg, Florida, hiding out under my “John Welling” identity. I bounced around among various motels and also stayed with Barb’s brother Augie, who was still a close friend despite the divorce. He was bringing in the occasional load of grass, and I met some of the people he was working with but wasn’t particularly taken with any of them. I kept telling him how suspicious I was of those guys and how little I’d trust them, but he was making piles of money and wasn’t being as particular about his associates as he should have. In other words, he listened to me about as much as I’d have listened to him had the situations been reversed. (Sure enough, one of those guys turned informer when the police put pressure on him, and Augie spent a long time regretting that he’d ever become involved with the guy.)

  I got into the habit of disappearing whenever Augie’s pals were around, and it was during one of the times that Augie was planning to bring in a couple of boatloads that I decided to head down to Puerto Vallarta to check out Liz’s digs. I still didn’t like the idea of flying, but it was better than being trapped on a boat, so I flew out of Tampa with my new passport. Even before I’d gotten to my room in a small hotel, I’d already found out where Liz’s house was. My little bit of broken Spanish was all I needed: Everybody in the town knew where the place was and was used to hearing the question from tourists. I realized that I could ask all the questions I wanted without arousing the slightest suspicion, which was a real luxury. Bartenders working near her house were a great source of information and for a few bucks were willing to talk all night. The toughest part was separating fact from fantasy; it seemed those guys liked to make the stories as dramatic as possible, but when accounts from different bartenders matched, I assumed they approximated the truth.

  I don’t remember if she and Burton were still married at the time, but arguments between the two of them were legendary in Puerto Vallarta, and screaming matches often spilled out of the house and into the street. There were plenty of alcohol- and drug-laden parties, too, and it was all of this visibility that made it easy for everybody to know whether she was in town or not. Right now she wasn’t, but the house was occupied by servants who lived in the basement somewhere toward the rear of the property.

  Incognito in Puerto Vallarta.

  The house was in a hilly area, and there was a street that wound around above and allowed a good view down onto the building and grounds. In Bermuda shorts and a flowery shirt, I looked like just another tourist as I took pictures from every angle. There was a large central courtyard in the rear with rooms on three sides. The main house connected to a smaller house across the street by a kind of skyway. Thinking like a property manager, I eventually decided that the main bedroom was at the front of the house, about thirty feet above the street, with a small porch that faced the ocean. What more could a cat burglar of my climbing ability ask for?

  By starting on the upper roadway I could easily reach the roof of the house next door, work my way across to a wall, rappel down to Liz’s roof and then drop onto the little oceanfront porch. Piece of cake. All that was left was not to alert the servants in either Liz’s house or the one next door, not let any passersby or other neighbors see me, and then get Liz to tell me when her jewels would be in the bedroom and she wouldn’t be. That was something I’d have to piece together by staying on top of the society pages and gossip columns, and I knew it could take months. So after several days of intense casing, I flew back to Tampa, then up to Saratoga to meet Fran.

  A couple of months went by without anything to indicate Liz’s travel schedule. Then my cousin Dan Renner called to say he was going to a medical convention in Puerto Vallarta. He’d just been divorced from his second wife and was taking Denise, his girlfriend of the moment, and he wanted Fran and me to go down with them. Dan rented a condo in a fashionable tower complex, and Fran and I took a quieter place a little more out of town. It didn’t take very long to find out that Liz wasn’t in residence—some people have no consideration for the workingman—but I figured I might as well get the plan down pat so I could be ready to get there at a moment’s notice and pull off the heist without a lot of fussing around should th
e opportunity arise.

  The four of us usually spent the evenings at the outdoor bar of Fran’s and my hotel watching the incredible sunsets. One moonless evening I feigned a headache and sent the others off to dinner without me, then took a taxi into town and walked the mile or so to Liz’s. There was nobody home in either house. I got up onto the neighbor’s roof and worked my way across, eventually dropping onto the porch, where I faced two locked French doors. I peered into the room using my penlight and saw light blue walls, a canopied bed and a gigantic painting or photo of Liz herself on the wall. A minute later I climbed down the thirty feet to the lower street and walked away. I was ready; now, if only Liz would get with the program and cooperate.

  I could have gotten into that bedroom and checked around anyway, but I seriously doubted if she would leave anything of value during her long absences, and because of the way the doors were constructed there was no way of not leaving evidence that there’d been a break-in. Once that was discovered, they’d either alarm the place or make the doors more secure, ruining my chances of any future entry.

  I went to Puerto Vallarta three more times when I thought there was a possibility she’d be in town, but she never was.

  21

  Another Close Call

  MY AUNT Nell used to come over to the Mill Creek house all the time, but my mother refused. Even though we still got along and spoke all the time, as far as she was concerned, I was still married to Barbara and that was all there was to it. No way would she step foot in my house of sin.