by Bill Mason
The feds had a lot of pull at the jail and made things as bad as possible for me, probably because they’d been in touch with the Fort Lauderdale police, who still hated my guts. Although races were segregated, as they are in all jails and prisons (the joint is one place where reality, rather than romanticized politics, reigns supreme), I was placed in a max pod with thirty black guys even though the white pod was right across the hall. The jailers probably assumed I’d be beaten to death or something but hadn’t counted on the fact that a handful of those black inmates had read about me. From their many and varied experiences in the system, they’d learned that Cuban prisoners in Florida had referred to me as “El Gato,” the cat, and they thought I was way cool. They peppered me with more questions than the FBI had. I knew that there was probably at least one informant in there who had been planted by the feds, so I was careful to stick to stuff the cops already knew. To say I was treated respectfully by those guys would be an understatement. I was in that pod when Fran was arrested, and they were great about staying off the phone so I could call the house over and over until she finally answered and told me she’d been released.
My folder had big red block letters across the front saying “Organized Crime” and “Escape Risk.” That might not sound so terrible, but it was. Jailers are just civil servants, guided by rules and regulations and fearful of making mistakes. Their major preoccupation isn’t the welfare of the prisoners in their care, it’s keeping their jobs and preserving their pensions. When an inmate is branded as “O.C.” or an escape risk, all it means to jailers is more-than-normally-severe consequences for them if he breaks out or takes a hostage or secures special privileges or gets caught dealing drugs inside. When you have those big red letters on your folder, jailers take special pains to make sure you don’t do any of those things. They don’t give a shit how tough that makes your life, and they also know that their supervisors won’t give a shit, either.
I didn’t help matters much, I have to admit. As I’ve said, I wasn’t very cooperative when I was arrested, and it wasn’t just by keeping quiet. They took me downstairs to get fingerprinted, which was normal, but then they told me they were going to use some special procedure that included the sides and tops of my fingers, my palms from all different angles . . .
“Forget it,” I said.
“What do you mean, forget it?” one of them asked. “You gotta get fingerprinted!”
“Then fingerprint me, but forget about inking up my whole damned hand.”
“Listen—”
I took my hands off the table. “Get a court order.”
I didn’t really much care how they were going to print me, but I was angry and didn’t feel like rolling over for something I’d never heard of just because they said so.
Dumb mistake. They threw me in solitary and kept me there until the court order came through. After that I was real easy to get along with, but a couple of days later they put me in isolation—no visitors, no phones, twenty-four-hour lockdown—and kept it up for four days. Never gave me a reason and never told me how long it would last. It fucked me up, just as they knew it would, because I had no way of knowing whether anybody outside knew what was happening to me (they didn’t), and I couldn’t tell what was going on out there. I conjured up all sorts of insane fantasies of my house being seized, friends and family being taken in for questioning, bargains being struck without my knowledge and even that I’d been reported as escaped and presumed dead so that prison authorities could do anything they wanted to me.
Sure it was nuts, but when all you’ve got for company is your imagination and your anxiety, they can team up to produce the worst enemy you’ll ever have.
Meanwhile, the feds went to work on Fran. First, the head of the FBI’s Cleveland field office came to the Moreland Hills house to offer her a deal.
“Your boyfriend’s never getting out of prison,” he told her. “You might as well save yourself and tell us what we need to know.”
“If he’s never getting out,” Fran shot back, “what do you need me for?” And that was pretty much the end of that conversation.
So they went to see her parents and told them what a badass I was. They even said I was suspected of four murders, which they backed up by showing them copies of newspaper clippings they’d found in the house, the ones Barb had sent me every time one of the old Atlanta gang got whacked. They tried to get Fran’s father in particular to influence her to rat me out in exchange for a free ride for herself and pointed out that the Moreland Hills house where the incriminating evidence was found was in Fran’s name, not mine. If their goal was to scare the hell out of her parents, they succeeded, but they couldn’t shake Fran.
About ten days later, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, Fran was home alone with the dog at the Mill Creek house. I happened to be on the phone with her from jail, when she suddenly gasped and told me that a string of police cars was pulling up in front of the house.
“They’re going to arrest you,” I told her.
“What do I do!” she whispered hoarsely.
“Don’t give them any trouble whatsoever,” I told her. “And don’t say a word.”
“They’re surrounding the house!”
What the hell did they think she was going to do . . . shoot it out with them? I hung up and called Jack Levin to tell him what was happening and get him over to the courthouse to meet Fran.
“Friday night,” the lawyer mused out loud. “They figure they can keep her in jail all weekend and scare the shit out of her.”
“Hell or high water, I want her bailed out.”
Levin was at the courthouse when the police arrived with Fran. They booked her on charges of harboring a fugitive, receiving stolen property, possession of a blank prescription pad and drug possession. There was one especially peculiar charge that demonstrated how much they were willing to stretch to put the screws to her: theft of trade secrets. The “trade secrets” were the contents of Phyllis Diller’s address book. That was also the stolen property she was supposed to have received. I asked Levin how she could be charged with both receiving something and stealing it herself.
“They don’t have to worry about that now,” he explained. “Later they’ll figure out which is the easier case to make and drop the other one.”
The newspapers reported all of this the next day but left out a few things. One was that the drug possession charge was based on three one-hundredths of a gram of cocaine dusting the inside of a tiny glass vial found during the search of Fran’s house. Another was that the prescription pad belonged to Dr. Daniel Renner, my cousin, whose name was printed clearly on every page. Dan was at our place all the time and he must have dropped the thing. Neither Fran nor I even knew it was in the house.
Levin told the Common Pleas judge that Fran had a spotless record, had been active in Cleveland’s Jewish community, had run a day-care center and sponsored art shows and a whole slew of philanthropic events. Any other judge in the country would have recognized that her arrest was a police pressure tactic and that she wasn’t any kind of flight risk and set her free on her own recognizance. This judge, however, not only set her bail at fifteen thousand dollars but imposed on it the condition that she have no contact with me whatsoever. On Levin’s advice she agreed, and they let her go the same night. If I hadn’t been on the phone with her when she’d gotten arrested, she might have spent the night in jail. As it was, a few hours just being booked was traumatic enough for a Jewish princess.
When Fran was released, she spoke with the reporters gathered in front of the courthouse. “Every jewel taken from that house was mine from my first marriage of twenty-one years,” she told them, further explaining that many pieces were family heirlooms. “In fact, a diamond watch they took has my grandmother’s initials on the back.” She told them about how she’d tried to give the police a copy of a list of all her jewelry she’d drawn up for her insurance company years before, which would have gone a long way in proving it
all belonged to her, but they wouldn’t take it.
She also insisted she knew nothing of any crimes I’d committed. “We made grapevine wreaths, grew tomatoes and stayed home a lot,” she assured them, and also said we liked to go into the countryside to watch birds. “I know it sounds corny, but it’s true.” She was convincing, but someone kept leaking stuff to the newspapers, like the contents of private letters from Fran to me in which she referred to me as her “desperado,” as though that were some kind of smoking gun. I’m surprised that they didn’t print that her daughter’s adorable little cocker spaniel was named Killer.
It got worse. I had my own hearing before the same judge to try to get my bond reduced from the ridiculous two million dollars. It was reduced all right: to zero. He revoked it altogether and ordered me held without bond, and sure enough, right after that, it was reported that I “was believed to be responsible for the . . . breaking and entering of the C. S. Harris home on South Franklin Street where both occupants were bound and gagged and the family dog was shot.” Now, I have to admit that using that incident to get a search warrant for our house was pretty clever. Even though it was blatantly absurd and unconstitutional and not much different from the kinds of malicious crap that got criminals thrown into jail, you had to admire the creativity.
But why feed the papers that kind of bullshit? That was just spite and an attempt to mount public opinion against me. The cops and FBI were probably really steamed that I was being portrayed as a “gentleman bandit” and wanted to put a stop to it. They went to work on Fran again, who still was not allowed to see me, and got her to agree to a meeting. Taking her parents and lawyer with her, she sat across a table from some agents and federal prosecutors who offered her complete immunity if, while hooked up to a lie detector, she’d tell them all about my criminal activities. To motivate her, they ran down everything of my criminal past they knew about or suspected or could make up. Her parents made sure she understood the implications, but they stopped short of trying to pressure her the way the feds wanted them to. Fran, in terms more appropriate to her pedigree than “stuff it,” told the authorities to stuff it.
Afterward she directed Jack Levin to try to do something about the court order forbidding her from seeing me. Levin wrote a flowery plea about “star-crossed lovers” that was so sugary you could get cavities just reading it, but it worked. Fran went to the beauty parlor, got dressed in her Saturday best, then stood in line at the jail for two hours of suspicious looks and whispering from deputies and more “hardened” female visitors as she waited to see me. As awful as it made her feel, she did it week after week without complaint.
The pressure on my friends and family never let up. One night when Bill Welling and Suzi came to see me, some cops stopped them as they were leaving and started asking Suzi questions. They ordered Welling to get lost, and made some pretty serious threats, including arrest, but he wouldn’t leave Suzi’s side and she wouldn’t say a word, so they let them both go. As it turned out, the police were only buying some time: They’d broken into Suzi’s car and searched it while they were hassling her and Welling.
Only one thing surprised me in a positive way. Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter James Neff had an interview with my old nemesis, Deputy Chief Joe Gerwens of the Fort Lauderdale police department. Gerwens regaled Neff with stories of how I used to pull scores in his jurisdiction. “He was going up and down the sides of high-rise condominiums,” Neff quoted him. “They had extremely good security systems and guards,” and I’d never tripped a single one of them. Neff wrote that Gerwens at one point laughed and said, “Funny thing. Neighbors used to see him going up and down a rope tied to a tree, hand over hand, like in the service. They thought that was just the way he worked out.” He also described how I’d cooperated with the police and cleared up “some 40 burglaries,” but understandably never mentioned how I’d tricked them into letting me get away with all of them.
In the last paragraph of the interview, Neff quoted Gerwens again: “A nice guy, well-spoken and very good looking, very charming to talk to. It was fun working a case with him.” You would have thought we were old drinking buddies or something, the way he went on about me, rather than a cop and a criminal who’d been at each other’s throats for two years.
Less than two months later Gerwens would come up from Florida to tell the jury in Joseph Mandel’s lawsuit that I could have robbed their condo no matter how well the security system was working. His testimony was supposed to bolster the condo management’s contention that the best security system in the world couldn’t be expected to keep a master thief out. When Mandel’s attorney pointed out that there was no proof Fran and I had known each other at the time, Chagrin Falls police chief LaGatta was called to testify and produced photos found by police in the search of the Moreland Hills house showing that Fran and I had indeed known each other when the burglary was committed. Mandel’s attorney countered that nobody could even prove I’d been in Cleveland at the time, to which the management company responded that it wasn’t their aim to show I’d actually done it—they really didn’t know—just that I could have, and therefore the security system wasn’t necessarily deficient.
With fans like that . . .
What came to be known as “the Loveman Scandal” broke out following the search of the house, then really swung into gear when Fran was arrested. The “good girl gone bad” angle was simply too delicious for the media not to exploit to the hilt, and it rocked the normally unrockable Cleveland high society.
She was on the cover of the Star every day for a week, and every time she went to her local grocery store, she had to cope not only with federal agents tailing her (men in business suits reading cereal boxes for half an hour were pretty easy to spot) but with headlines blaring out of the racks near the checkout stands. “Blue-Blooded Heiress and the International Jewel Thief” screamed one, along with a picture of Fran that nearly filled the page. She’d done some modeling and the tabloids had no trouble getting their hands on dozens of professionally shot portraits. Accuracy wasn’t one of their especially high priorities, either. They kept giving me “international” status, even though I’d never pulled a job outside the country. Come to think of it, up to that point the only other countries I’d even been to were Canada and Mexico, and those were as “John Welling.”
What made it worse for Fran was that everybody in the grocery store knew her, but she could hardly shop somewhere else, because her father owned the place.
The Plain Dealer’s James Neff took a particular interest in Fran’s case and wrote a series of articles with clever titles such as “Tarnished Gem?” He was really into implying things by posing tantalizing questions like “How could Francine, once a glittering fixture of our city’s social whirl, be involved with an international jewel thief on the lam?” and “What, if anything, did Francine Loveman know about her lover’s activities?” But at least he could write, and he wasn’t stupid, and I’ll admit those weren’t exactly idle questions he’d asked. Neff was the reporter who broke the story that the Mandel score had taken place while the Mandels were at dinner with Francine’s parents.
Others weren’t so thoughtful or fair. One of the more memorable headlines from the Star was “Charming Jewel Thief Stole a Fortune—and Heart of Heiress Who Sacrificed All for His Love.” The reporter, who was not named, made me out to be an overpowering Casanova and painted Fran as some kind of demure, submissive debutante who’d fallen under my spell rather than a fiercely independent and self-possessed woman who’d made a bold and risky decision to walk away from her comfortable life. Of all the things Fran had accomplished in her life, “heiress” was the adjective most journalists chose to describe her. That same month the cover article in Cleveland Magazine was titled “Why the Lady Loved the Outlaw: The Tale of a Shaker Heights Divorcée and Her Dangerous Romance with America’s Top Jewel Thief.” In that subtly nuanced style magazines are noted for, the story was presented as that of a thrill-seeking socialite sheltering a
criminal who’d been the focus of a five-year nationwide manhunt. They said she was obsessed with me, and implied that she’d gone crazy. Anything, it seemed, was fair game other than the notion that Fran had a mind and will of her own.
And I was hardly the object of a “nationwide manhunt,” at least not in the traditional sense. That was the same phrase the FBI would use when they tried to pressure Fran into giving me up. Sure, they were looking for me and were ready to pounce on well-qualified tips, but it wasn’t like they had a thousand guys fanning out all over the country desperate to catch me. For one thing, I wasn’t violent, which automatically reduced my priority. My M.O. was well known to law enforcement people at various levels, and they’d later tell reporters that working my case was a plum assignment, and why not? Instead of hiding in putrid dumpsters or staking out squalid crack houses, the guys tailing me went to fancy parties, tooled around on boats for days at a time, brushed shoulders with the president of the United States and never had to worry about getting shot, at least not by me.
All of this slanted coverage had a devastating effect on Fran, but she held her head up and wouldn’t let it show. To my amazement, her old friends from the circles of money and power rallied round and, with rare exception, stuck gamely by her. Her parents did, too, despite being very hurt at first by the intimations that Fran had helped set up the Mandel score. Joseph Mandel’s lawsuit against the condo’s managers was taking place at the same time that Fran’s case was proceeding through the courts. Deputy Chief Gerwens from Florida was in town to testify for the management company, and the newspapers were covering the trial like it was the Rosenberg atomic spy case. Even though I hadn’t been charged with the heist or even accused of it by the police, the papers just couldn’t let go of the defense’s contention that I could have done it. I didn’t blame the attorneys; it was the only defense they had, so they ran with it. It wasn’t their fault that the tabloids were hell-bent on keeping alive the titillating possibility that I really had done the job.