Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

by Bill Mason

  Shortly after my divorce Mom called to say hello, and about ten minutes into the conversation she casually said, “Oh, I almost forgot. The FBI called me yesterday.”

  “The FBI?” I croaked, fear beginning to make itself known somewhere in my belly. But if they’d called her yesterday and she hadn’t gotten around to telling me until now, how bad could it be? “What’d they want?”

  “They want to come see me again,” she said brightly. “To talk about you, just like the last time.”

  That’s how bad. “You told them no, right?” I asked hopefully, trying to keep my voice as calm as possible so as not to alarm her.

  “I most certainly did not!” she said defiantly. “I have a chance to tell them what a good person you really are.”

  There’s such a thing as carrying sweetness and naïveté too far. My mother was a dear, kind woman, but how was it possible in this day and age for her to honestly believe that one conversation with her and the FBI would see the error of its ways and leave me alone? And where would I begin to explain how dangerous it was for her to meet with them at all, when the last time they’d come to see her, she’d served tea and found them all charming and well behaved?

  “Don’t do it,” I told her. “It’s your right not to tell them anything.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” she said.

  “Then don’t do it! Tell them you don’t want to set up an appointment and—”

  “But I already did,” she said.

  “For when?”

  “Why, this afternoon. Two o’clock.”

  Less than three hours from now. I practically begged her to call it off, but it was no use. She saw the meeting as both an obligation and an opportunity and she’d already given her word.

  “Where are you going to meet them?” I asked, resigned and thoroughly defeated.

  “Nowhere,” she answered, happy that I was no longer fighting her. “They’re coming here. I’m going to make tea.”

  Beautiful.

  My mother was of the generation that was brought up listening to Gangbusters on the radio and held J. Edgar’s name in reverence rather than suspicion or outright contempt. She believed that the FBI never failed to get their man, and that I was therefore doomed to a hunted life until either I was caught or they decided they didn’t really want me. She honestly believed that my only chance was for her to straighten them out regarding what a good citizen I was, despite the one or two “mistakes” I’d made along the way.

  At about one forty-five Fran and I parked her Mercedes half a block away from my mother’s apartment and I watched through binoculars as the agents pulled up to the building and got out. At least I’d get to see who was after me. I had a pretty good memory for faces and would be able to recognize any of the guys meeting with my mother should they ever just happen to appear somewhere in my vicinity.

  As before, there appeared to be no fallout from that meeting. Two months later Mom had to go to the hospital for surgery. She’d had a bout with cancer before, but this was much worse. Aunt Nell and I took her in and stayed there during the operation. When it was all over, a doctor came out and I knew before he said a word that it was going to be bad news.

  “It’s spread too much for us to do anything significant,” he said. “Best we can do is try to make her as comfortable as possible.” While she dies, he didn’t have to finish for us.

  She was still under heavy sedation when we went in to see her, and by the time we came back the next day, she’d fallen into a coma. They’d moved her into the ICU and had her on a respirator.

  Fran and I were supposed to go to Wimbledon, but we canceled the trip. I visited and sat with my mother every day, staying as long as I could stand it. Some days I’d bring my aunt with me, but when I didn’t, I would talk to my mother and tried to believe that she could hear me. I told her how much I loved her and how sorry I was for all the pain I’d caused her. I didn’t tell her about the gun I carried on every visit.

  I rarely went anyplace armed, but there was no way I was not going to see my mother in her last days and I was extremely nervous about the feds. I couldn’t exercise most of the usual precautions I’d come to rely on, and that sudden helplessness in the face of imminent danger was disorienting and acutely frightening. I’d park blocks away from the hospital and try to find walking routes that would keep me away from the streets and from looking suspicious to people whose property I had to cross. I discovered a large number of back ways into the hospital itself, some of which required jimmying locks without breaking them or leaving any other sign that they’d been tampered with. Once inside I had to study each face for signs of recognition or danger, staying alert for the little warning signals that would tell me when someone was on to me but trying not to show it, and I had to do that without staring. After sitting with my mother and trying to talk to her without betraying my intense anxiety and paranoia, I had to turn around and do it all over again to get out of there and back to my car. As for the gun, I had no idea what I would do if confronted, and thank God I never had to find out. To this day I still don’t know why the FBI didn’t stake out the hospital based on the high probability of my coming to visit my mother.

  It went on like that for ten days and was one of the most traumatic times in my life. I’d come home sweating and trembling uncontrollably, and for someone who was used to crawling around on high ledges and hanging from ropes, it was new and terrifying. I drank heavily to try to keep my nerves in check.

  I couldn’t give the hospital my phone number, so they had just my aunt’s, and she was the one who called to tell me Mom had passed away. I went to the hospital at four in the morning, but when they asked me if I wanted to see her, I declined. I wanted my last memory of her to be when she was alive, no matter how unresponsive she’d been.

  When I finally got home, I couldn’t find my little cat, Muchka.

  I called Suzi in New Zealand and Barb in Florida and asked them to come and help with all the arrangements. (Calling Barb was not as strange as it sounds; after the divorce was finalized, we remained good friends and spoke frequently.) Suzi arrived first. As sad as the occasion for her visit was, we were happy to see each other and didn’t try to hide it.

  As she unpacked, I noticed her passport and something occurred to me, but I didn’t mention anything right away. We spent the next two days at Mom’s apartment sorting out her belongings and deciding what to do about them, and it was there I brought it up.

  “We may have a problem,” I said.

  “What?” Suzi asked, but kept on working.

  “I have a feeling the feds have your passport number on a tickler file. When you landed in the U.S., you may have triggered an alarm.”

  She stopped what she was doing and turned to me. “You think they followed me to you?”

  I shook my head. “Couldn’t have gotten organized that fast. By the time they were ready to mount a tail, you would’ve been long gone.”

  Suzi thought it over, then decided I was being too paranoid. “They knew Grandma was sick and didn’t stake out the hospital, right?” She laughed and punched me lightly on the shoulder. “Come on, old man . . . you’re not that important!”

  She was right about that but also wrong. “That’s why there might have been a delay,” I explained. “I may not be important enough for them to have put a tail on Grandma or staked out an airport full-time, but putting a trigger on your passport is a no-brainer. They’ve got thousands of those in effect at any time.”

  I had no way of knowing any of that for sure, but I knew for a fact that setting triggers like that was very easy. The feds could do it with credit cards, too. If someone they wanted to catch used a credit card, it would set off alarms at the authentication center, and a phone call to the appropriate agency—FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, DEA—would go out immediately, giving the exact location where the card had been used.

  Suzi wasn’t buying it completely but saw the wisdom of assuming the worst case. “So what do you think t
hey’d do?”

  I wasn’t sure, really, and thought about it out loud. “They went to see Grandma a couple of months ago . . .” I began.

  “Grandma!” she exclaimed. “What on earth for?”

  “They were looking for me.”

  “And they thought she’d tell them?”

  “Who knows what they thought? But she was a brick. Made them tea and told them what a good boy I was until they got tired of it and left.”

  Suzi smiled as she conjured up the image of her grandmother frustrating the FBI. Then the smile faded. “They’ll know she just died.”

  “Yeah. Then you show up. So they know family is coming in.” I let her think about that for a few seconds, then said, “We’re supposed to pick your mother and sister up at the airport tomorrow.”

  Suzi saw it right away. “You think they might set a trap.” When I nodded, she shrugged and said, “So I’ll pick them up myself. Not too hard to shake a tail around here.”

  “You watch too many cop shows on television,” I replied, but she was right. It’s easy to tail someone in a big city, where the stalker can hide himself in crowds. In less populated areas, it’s much tougher, unless you have whole squads of men and a helicopter or two, and Suzi had been right about something else: I wasn’t important enough to warrant that kind of effort.

  But if they’d wanted me badly enough to hassle my mother, they could surely stake out an airport. I had to get a better handle on just how important I was, and I wouldn’t learn anything if Suzi went to pick up Barbara and Laura by herself. I also needed to make sure she didn’t lead the feds back to me if they really were watching the airport.

  “Here’s what we’ll do . . .” I told her.

  We drove to Cleveland Hopkins International in two separate cars. Since I knew where Suzi was heading, I could follow at a safe distance without worrying about losing her and get a good view of whoever might be tailing her. I didn’t really expect to see anyone doing that, because they would have had no way of knowing where she was coming from, or when she’d be leaving, or if it would even be her. If there was going to be any kind of trap, it would be confined to the airport. Anything else would be much too manpower-intensive. Just to make sure, though, we both carried walkie-talkies.

  When we got to the airport, Suzi drove to a parking lot. I stayed well behind and out of the immediate vicinity but had a good view of where she was parking as well as the gate to the lot. She went into the terminal building, but I wasn’t able to see anything unusual among the people milling around or the vehicles waiting at the curb or driving slowly past. Either these guys were very good or they weren’t there.

  I got my answer about twenty minutes later, when Suzi, Barb and Laura came walking out of the terminal. I counted six men on foot tailing them, signaling openly to one another, since the women had their backs to them. Two of the men were also speaking into handheld radios.

  The two guys with radios followed my family into the parking lot as the others hustled off somewhere, and a minute later four unmarked cars suddenly materialized at the gate and blocked it completely. They must have assumed I was waiting in the car and were cutting off my escape. I could practically feel their blood racing as they anticipated their imminent triumph, and I must confess to a bit of malicious glee as I watched to see what would happen when they discovered that I wasn’t in the car.

  The two agents hung back as the girls headed for the car. One agent pulled a small pair of binoculars out of his pocket and stood still as he watched for a few seconds. Then he suddenly put down the binocs and reached for his radio. Obviously I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I could guess that he was reporting the nonpresence of their target: me.

  I heard some tires squealing and glanced over at the gate to the parking lot. Sure enough, the drivers of the four cars blocking the entrance were scrambling to get them out of the way. In their haste two of them collided with a sickening crunch, which was followed by the involved drivers yelling at each other as passersby stopped to try to figure out what was going on. The driver of one of the other cars got out and motioned forcefully for them to pipe down and get the hell out of there, which they did just as Suzi’s car pulled into the center aisle and headed for the gate. By the time she got there, all four cars were speeding away, one of them dragging its rear bumper along the pavement and raising a shower of sparks and a terrible racket.

  Nerve-racking as it was, it was also funny as hell, in a Keystone Kops kind of way. But I’d had enough experience with embarrassed law enforcement personnel to know that they’d take all of this out on me if they ever caught me.

  There was a caravan following Suzi that she had no way of knowing about, but we’d provided for that in our planning. I waited until she was clear of the airport and keyed my walkie-talkie, then said, “They’re there,” and nothing else. Suzi keyed her radio for a second without saying anything, but the burst of static I got back let me know she had heard and understood and would drive straight to my mother’s apartment without going to the Mill Creek house first.

  A friend of Fran’s had helped us keep a death notice out of the papers, but, as we discovered, the feds found out about it anyway. There was no doubt that they were looking forward to the funeral, knowing I couldn’t stay away from that, but Mom had decided some years before to be cremated without a service. (Wonder what she would have thought had she known I’d be arranging for it in a Jewish funeral home.) We shipped her ashes back to West Virginia to be buried next to those of my father, and thereby gave the cops one less avenue of pursuit.

  I didn’t spend much time congratulating myself on my cleverness, though; the more elusive I became, the madder those feds were probably getting. It didn’t make them look good, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to persuade them to give up and go home. My guess was that they were operating on behalf of several local law enforcement organizations who’d agreed to lie back and let them capture me. If they came back empty-handed . . . well, in reality there was no “if” about it. They’d keep at it until they got me or I was dead, because the alternative would be too humiliating for them to consider.

  Because of all the work Suzi and I had done at Mom’s apartment for two days, I figured there wasn’t very much for Barb to do, now that she was here with us, except go through everything herself and make sure there was nothing in the giveaway pile that shouldn’t be given away. I thought I’d go crazy trying to get her to finish up so I could get the hell out of there.

  She and Suzi stayed in Mom’s apartment, but Laura wanted to stay with Fran and me in Moreland Hills. In case somebody was keeping an eye on her, I mapped out a convoluted route to get her there. Suzi put her on a train, part of greater Cleveland’s regional transportation system known as “the Rapid.” From there Laura transferred to a bus that was also part of the system, then a second Rapid bus, and I finally picked her up on Van Aken Boulevard and took her to the house.

  Beautiful and athletic, headstrong and moody, Laura is also ferociously loyal and committed to family, the one quality all my children share and maybe the one good thing they learned from me. She’s the most complex of my children, and I think we both realize that this is because she’s the one who spent the least amount of time with a father; I was gone for much of her childhood.

  Laura is nuts about animals, too, and wanted to play with Killer and Muchka, but I still hadn’t seen my cat since the day my mother died. When we got to the house, Laura and I spent hours searching the surrounding woods and the ravine and never found her. Killer missed her playmate and moped around the house the whole time Laura was there, and something about that poor little dog’s sadness seemed to intensify our own feelings of emptiness at the loss of my mother.

  It was a very tense and trying two weeks, but eventually we pulled ourselves together and got everything sorted out. We hadn’t seen another fed since the airport and I figured it was all right to finally relax a little.

  Bad assumption.

  22

&n
bsp; Sooner or Later

  SLOWLY, THINGS returned to normal.

  Barb and Laura were back in Florida. Suzi decided she wanted to tour the United States by car instead of going back to New Zealand and was out on the road, and Mark was in college at Florida State in Tallahassee. I’d distributed Mom’s money to Barb and the kids, which was the last thing that had to be handled in connection with her death, and I was back to living the suburban life and trying to grow a tomato garden.

  About a year after Mom died, I had to go to the hardware store. I took Fran’s Mercedes, the only car we had at the time, and as soon as I walked into the store, I saw a guy standing over in the lumber section toward the back of the shop. I recognized him as someone I knew from years ago named Rod Smith. As on a number of other occasions when I’d spotted people I used to know, I wanted to avoid recognition if at all possible. I didn’t think Rod had seen me, and I had a beard that would have made me difficult to recognize from a distance, so I wasn’t too worried. I made sure to keep my back to him as I picked up what I needed, paid and then left.

  Once outside, I saw him sitting in a car two away from mine, reading something. Just as I got to my car, I saw that what he was reading was some sandpaper. Obviously, something was way wrong here, but I was already standing by the driver’s door of my car and didn’t want to abruptly walk away, because it would make me look suspicious. I probably should have done it anyway.

  Smith had recognized me, all right, and he also knew I was on the run. He jotted down Fran’s license number, then called a friend of his named Arthur Krinski, an FBI agent. Krinski scoffed at first, then made a few phone calls. Less than two hours after that he’d ordered twenty-four-hour surveillance on the Moreland Hills house and began organizing a meeting with several other law enforcement agencies.