Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

by Bill Mason

  That meeting took place two days later. Krinski reported that his surveillance team, which included bogus telephone-company personnel up on the poles around Mill Creek Lane, had yet to spot me and couldn’t be sure I was actually in the house. For one thing, Fran’s Mercedes had heavily tinted windows and the field agents were unable to tell who was in the car as it came and went. Somebody else, and I don’t know who, suggested that even if they could confirm I was there, the house was a bad place to try to capture me, because I’d probably already planned a way to escape using the ravine. They eventually decided I had to be taken elsewhere, even if it took a lot more time and expense waiting for me to move. (Of course, I didn’t know any of this was going on at the time. We pieced it all together from various sources later on.)

  Suzi and I had made plans to meet in Atlanta and then drive to Tallahassee to visit Mark at school. Fran was going to fly to New York the same day to spend the weekend with her older daughter, who was teaching at the prestigious Dalton School. At the airport Fran and I separated to check in for our flights after agreeing to meet and say good-bye before boarding. I went to Delta and Fran went to Continental. As I was standing in line, I suddenly felt hands come all over me from behind. I started to react but got hold of myself quickly. It couldn’t be a mugging, not in the middle of a crowded airport, and there was nothing casual about the way these guys grabbed me. There were also at least four of them, because I counted three hands on each arm, one on my neck and one at the small of my back. Even if I managed to inflict a little damage, I wasn’t going to get away.

  “William Mason?” a voice from behind me asked. I still hadn’t seen any faces.

  “No,” I answered. “You made a mistake.”

  I knew that life as I had known it was over, and my mind was racing as they turned me around and slapped cuffs on me, never letting go of me as they did so. These guys were the size of refrigerators, and I was glad I hadn’t tried to do anything. From the fact that there were four of them, I guessed that they’d spoken with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department and knew about their standing policy regarding arresting me. I also guessed that they weren’t part of some local-yokel police department, but they were in plain clothes so I couldn’t tell where they were from.

  As they hustled me outside, I counted about thirty other plainclothesmen, some of whom were now pulling on blue jackets with “FBI” stenciled across the back in yellow. I learned later that I wasn’t far off—there were actually twenty-five—and that Fran had been trying to find me to say good-bye and had to get on her plane having no idea what had happened. Because it was utterly unlike me not to be where I said I’d be, she’d gotten a little frantic. I was glad that she hadn’t found me and seen what was happening. The agents knew exactly where she was, of course, but had let her board her flight anyway.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” one of the guys still holding me recited, and I exercised it to the max. I didn’t say a word, not even my name. I didn’t even answer when they asked me if I understood my rights—kind of a dumb question anyway, just after you tell somebody he doesn’t have to answer any questions—and this really made them mad, but what the hell did they expect? That I was going to break down on the spot and confess everything so they could get some gold stars on their J. Edgar scorecards? To their credit, though, they didn’t handle me roughly even when nobody was looking.

  They took me to some federal building in downtown Cleveland and put me in a holding cell with a phone. I didn’t know how long I’d have access to that phone, so the first call I made was to Katie. I told her to call Fran in New York and tell her what was going on, and then Bill Welling, and then to have Suzi paged at the Atlanta airport and ask her to come here. Once that was done, I was able to relax just a little and start making calls of my own to get a few things going.

  By late that afternoon Suzi and Mark had already arrived and Fran was on her way back, and something dawned on me. There I was, absolutely helpless, a guy who’d spent his life taking from people, especially women, and in a few short minutes I was able to mobilize an intensely loyal army of people eager to help me out. No way did I deserve any of that, yet there it was, and it made those extremely stressful hours a bit more bearable.

  I had a lot of time to think about my situation. The feds had pretty much given up on trying to question me, since I wouldn’t cooperate or even say a word to them, and Arthur Krinski was one pissed-off little agent. I also didn’t really have anything to do once I’d gotten my friends and family into motion. All I could do was issue instructions and then sit back. Mostly what I did when I sat back was worry, especially since I’d had to talk to them by phone instead of during a visit. Had the feds been listening in, they’d have had a hundred ways to use the information against me without ever letting on that they’d eavesdropped.

  Fran and everybody else involved on my side were nervous enough to begin with, but the next morning my arrest was front-page news in every newspaper in the Midwest. There was no doubt in my mind that the authorities were in the process of obtaining a search warrant for the house. Our lawyer told us that there wasn’t any basis for a search—the house was in Fran’s name only and there was no probable cause that could be established—but I was way past believing that everybody followed the rules. I didn’t know how long we’d have, so I didn’t waste time getting started on a little housecleaning.

  Earlier in the day, Suzi had gotten a large amount of cash out of a bank box that was in her and John Welling’s names. Now I needed to get it out of the house. I had Fran put it in a brown grocery bag, then she, Suzi and Mark drove to Private Safe Place, an outfit that rented out safety-deposit boxes. They signed up for one, using assumed names, and stuck the bag in it. Some magazine feature writers later reported that there was other potentially incriminating stuff in that paper bag, but there wasn’t.

  Unbeknownst to any of us, though, Fran had left a hundred thousand dollars of the cash back at the house, which she thought she might need to bail me out. She didn’t want there to be any delay in getting the cash together once bail was set, and I appreciated that, but I wished she’d talked it over with me first. She could always have gotten it from the private safety-deposit box, and waiting an extra hour or two wouldn’t have bothered me. The one place it shouldn’t have been kept was at the house.

  Keeping the cash on hand was deliberate on Fran’s part, but there were some other things that had simply been forgotten, among them the clipping about Joey Cam’s murder that Barb had sent me from Florida, a newspaper article about the million-dollar robbery of the Mandels that was headlined “The Perfect Heist” in inch-high type, and bunches of other clippings that, while certainly not illegal to possess, sure as hell didn’t look good.

  According to the Sun-Sentinel, there were also checkbooks that “showed that Mason routinely shuffled huge amounts of cash from bank to bank.” There were no such checkbooks, but you try arguing with someone who buys his ink by the gallon. Then try doing it from jail.

  They did get one item right, though, and it was the worst one of all: Phyllis Diller’s address book, which Fran had been keeping under the bed.

  It was a daytime-only search warrant; I have no idea why.

  I was on the phone with Fran Saturday morning when two dozen official vehicles arrived at the house carrying agents from the FBI, the DEA, U.S. Customs, the IRS and the Chagrin Falls Police Deparment. Fran stayed on the phone and read to me the search warrant they presented her with, which said I was suspected of a home-invasion robbery that happened in Chagrin Falls. Never mind the fact that I’d never robbed an occupied house in my life, at least if you didn’t count that sleeping drunk woman at Blair House. Anticipating the search, I’d arranged for our lawyer to be at the house. He checked over the warrant and told Fran it was all proper and she had to let the cops in. The search took all day, and I called her periodically and almost shit myself as she reported to me what they were coming up with.

  They found the news
paper clippings, Diller’s address book, the hundred thousand dollars in cash, a box of .38 ammo and a photo album with some risqué photos that were meant to be funny rather than lewd. One picture that caused a bit of a ruckus was a shot of my cousin Dan Renner with a woman the local cops recognized instantly. She used to arrive in one of her two Rolls-Royces, looking like the prim and proper lady Cleveland society assumed she was. Well, she wasn’t, but there was no damned reason the cops could have for wanting that picture other than to use it to exert pressure. I spoke to my lawyer and insisted that he demand all the photos back. Surprisingly, he was eventually successful, probably because the police were absolutely determined not to compromise their case by doing anything that wouldn’t look completely on the up-and-up in court. By that time, though, the press had made it out to look like we’d been shooting porn movies.

  They also found a lot of jewelry. Fran told them it was hers and that she could prove it, but they took it all anyway. They tried to get her to talk, telling her there would be no charges against her if she told all she knew about me. She refused, as did Mark and Suzi, although Fran was pretty shaken by the thought that charges might be leveled against her.

  Fran also told me they had seen the receipt for the rented safety-deposit box. I told Mark to go over there, empty out the box and mail the contents to Barb in Florida. He did that, and on his own also left a little smiley face in the box for the FBI searchers. Chip off the old block, at least in some ways. I think he inherited some of my deviousness but has enough brains not to act on it.

  By the time the authorities left late in the afternoon, Mill Creek Lane was crowded with neighbors and reporters. Interestingly, none of those neighbors was ever on television or quoted in the papers. I guess the reporters were looking for the usual “I always knew there was something fishy about those people” comments but didn’t get a single one.

  What I remember most about those couple of days were my kids. I thought I already knew them well, but the way they handled themselves blew me away. I know I’m inviting some sarcasm here—after all, they were trying to help a criminal evade prosecution—but you have to remember that, as far as they were concerned, they were just doing whatever they could to help their dad. What kids wouldn’t do that for a father they loved?

  Suzi had been paged at the Atlanta airport, where she was waiting to pick me up. She called Mark and then scrambled to find herself a flight. Both of them were in Cleveland that same day. No second-guessing, no hesitation . . . Dad was in trouble and they simply came. I didn’t even know at the time, because phones in the jail were cut off at eight o’clock.

  Early the next morning they came to the Cuyahoga County Jail and finessed their way into an off-hours visit, which is extremely difficult to do. When I was brought to the visitors’ room and saw them, I was so stunned, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I took a minute or two to do both.

  Mark looked around and said quietly, “I don’t know how much time we have. I’m not even sure why they let us in this early.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Suzi asked.

  That’s when I had her take the money out of the box. “They’ve probably got every bank record we have,” I told her. “They’ll know about the box.”

  My kids did everything I asked, and did it flawlessly, without wavering or questioning me. I tried to make sure I didn’t have them do anything that would get them in trouble—I relied on my lawyer and attorney-client privilege for the touchier stuff—but I also didn’t kid myself that sufficiently motivated police and prosecutors could make anything look like aiding and abetting. The kids were at the house with Fran when it was searched, and were a great source of strength for her.

  You have a lot of time to think in jail. I decided to use that time to beat myself half to death thinking about what kind of heartless bastard puts his loyal and utterly innocent kids through that kind of hell.

  The newspapers did a pretty good job of parroting how the authorities wanted the search portrayed.

  It was reported that jewelry was found hidden in boxes, plastic bags and a motor-oil can, and that the police thought the pieces matched up with items that had been reported as stolen in the area. In fact, it really was all Fran’s.

  The police connected Diller’s address book to the robbery two years before and gave that to the papers, accompanied by a lot of self-congratulatory preening about the brilliance of the FBI in tracking me down after a “five-year nationwide manhunt” and about the excellent teamwork between the FBI and the Chagrin Falls P.D. in capturing me. They didn’t mention that their brilliance included the tip special agent Arthur Krinski had gotten from Rod Smith, and I had to laugh when they reported the cash they’d found as $98,500 instead of $100,000. False precision was an old trick to make suspiciously round numbers not look like they’d been made up.

  They were also pretty smooth about explaining the grounds for the search warrant. The problem they faced was that I was wanted only on a fugitive charge. The only way they could legally search anything was if they had “probable cause” to believe it would help them find me. Once they had me, there was no longer any justification for conducting a search. Although I was suspected of being a jewel thief, there were no warrants and no one had formally charged me in connection with any thefts. As a matter of fact, I’d never been charged with stealing. So there was no probable cause that would justify a search for stolen goods.

  They did, however, have the right to search the immediate person of someone freshly arrested. “Unnamed investigators” told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that they’d searched my luggage when I was arrested at the airport and found “notebooks with detailed descriptions of homes and property stolen from victims in Shaker Heights, Lyndhurst and Chagrin Falls.” The newspaper then got hold of the court affidavit filed by Chagrin Falls police chief Lester LaGatta in support of the search warrant for the house. In it he referred to those notebooks and said I was one of two men who’d committed a string of burglaries. He said we showed up in a truck, tied up the victims and “proceeded to then burglarize the homes, taking valuable items consisting mainly of jewelry, furs and cash.”

  By now you already know that if I’d done any of those things I’d admit it, so believe me when I tell you that the foundation for that search warrant was pure bullshit. I didn’t use partners, I didn’t use trucks, I’ve never tied anybody up in my whole life and I wouldn’t know what to do with a fur if one fell on my head. As for the notebooks they’d supposedly found in my luggage, that was a total fabrication. I never felt compelled to tell anybody about the scores I pulled, and I was so careful a thief that I wouldn’t even wear aftershave on a job for fear of leaving a telltale scent, so why on earth would someone like that write down the scores he pulled and carry them around with him? Once the magazine feature articles about me started appearing and the gist of my M.O. began to emerge, I imagine that whoever had spread the disinformation about notebooks felt like a jackass. Nothing about notebooks was ever brought up in any subsequent legal proceeding.

  We found out much later that the FBI had contacted Chief LaGatta and asked if he had any unsolved cases on the books that might possibly fit my known M.O. LaGatta came up with a robbery in which two men had tied up an elderly couple, machine-gunned their Doberman to death and escaped with two hundred thousand dollars in jewels and coins. Despite the fact that the elderly couple had stated positively that both assailants were black, and that the FBI knew I never used a gun—or a partner—they declared me a suspect anyway and that was how they got their warrant.

  The judge at the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court originally set a two-hundred-thousand-dollar cash bond, which seemed to satisfy everybody. But when the county prosecutor found out the next day that I had the money and was prepared to post it, he ran back into court and requested that it be raised to a million. Then, after the house was searched, he wanted it bumped to two million. The judge asked him if he was kidding, and the prosecutor launched into a speech about
how I’d already demonstrated I was a flight risk. “As a matter of fact,” he finished up, “the first charge we’re filing in this case is unlawful flight from prosecution.” The judge didn’t ask where the flight was from—it was Fort Lauderdale, where he didn’t have jurisdiction—but our lawyer, Jack Levin, stayed quiet, and for good reason: FBI representatives were in the room, and any hiccup in the proceeding would have prompted them to file a federal charge against me, which we were trying to avoid. The judge granted the prosecutor’s bail request, and a court spokesman rushed out to the front steps to announce it to the press and make sure they knew that it was a record, the highest bail ever set in the county’s history. Levin followed him to make sure he got his own statement in. “The two-million-dollar bond is unconscionable,” he said angrily. “They’re punishing him before he is convicted of anything.”

  As it happened, the FBI had the U.S. attorney file federal charges anyway, including falsifying my identity on the passport I’d had with me at the airport. On it my name was listed as John Welling.

  The story was quickly picked up in Florida. Fort Lauderdale papers reported that several other federal agencies were investigating me for possible interstate offenses, and also said nine Ohio police departments were checking their unsolved crime logs to see if there might be links to me. I expected that; police hate having open cases on the files, and here was a chance to wipe a whole load of them off the books just by blaming them all on me. The best part for them was that they wouldn’t even have to prove any of those links. They figured I was being competently prosecuted in other jurisdictions and would get what was coming to me there, so why should they spend time and money duplicating those efforts?

  Reporters kept trotting out that quote from the Fort Lauderdale police comparing me to Murph the Surf and also discovered that I’d been referred to by the cops as “the Beachfront Burglar.” (Not one of those investigative whizzes managed to find out that I was the one who told the police all those jobs had been pulled by the same guy, and it was only after I did so that they came up with “Beachfront Burglar.”) The more the Florida police went on and on about what a terrific thief I was, the easier it was for all those other jurisdictions to blame me for every crime they couldn’t solve.