Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

by Bill Mason

  But Fran’s parents quickly got over their initial hurt and believed her when she said she knew absolutely nothing about that score. On her side was the fact that there was not a shred of evidence to connect me with it and I’d never been charged with it. There was just a ton of speculation and a newspaper clipping about the burglary found during the search of the Moreland Hills house. What’s more, Fran truly didn’t know anything about it, and her sincerity must have come across to her folks.

  That spring, Fran got herself an incredible sweetheart deal, but it came about in a weird way.

  It hadn’t been a promising start. Her case was being heard in front of Judge Terrence O’Donnell, who was known for handing out harsh sentences. In exchange for her pleading guilty to obstructing justice and receiving stolen property, prosecutors dropped all the charges involving assisting and protecting me. The deal also involved a reduced sentence, to be determined after O’Donnell received a pre-sentencing report from the probation department. As part of his review of her case, he decided to watch a videotape that the police had made of their search of the Moreland Hills house. The taping wasn’t unusual; cops often taped themselves during searches not only to show where evidence was found but to prove that they’d acted properly.

  While watching the tape, O’Donnell thought he recognized something being lifted out of a box as belonging to someone he knew. He phoned up the police and told them about it, reporting it as a possible theft and insisting they investigate. Fran’s lawyer immediately leaped on this as a way to get rid of O’Donnell and, hopefully, draw a more lenient judge as a replacement. They used O’Donnell’s report to the police as hard evidence that he knew someone who might have been one of my victims, which would prejudice him unfairly against Fran. O’Donnell said that was nonsense, but the very fact that he’d reported it to the police as a possible theft was enough to back him into a corner he couldn’t get out of. That his wife had watched the tape along with him didn’t bolster his defense of his judicial integrity.

  It was a long shot, but O’Donnell soon announced that he would bow out, even though he insisted he didn’t personally know the people he thought were the rightful owners. He said that “to avoid the appearance of impropriety and to promote the integrity of the judiciary,” he was going to let Fran vacate the guilty plea she’d entered as part of the deal. He flatly refused to discuss that decision with anybody, but it was a sure bet around the courthouse that he’d intended to send Fran to prison, despite the pre-sentencing report he’d gotten that recommended probation.

  The new judge was Francis Sweeney, who never took probation department recommendations. By that time Fran had a new lawyer, Gordon Friedman, who wrote a mini-bio of her that made her sound more like a candidate for sainthood than for a reduced sentence. He pointed out that she’d been division chairman of a cancer fund drive, had done volunteer work at Mount Sinai Hospital, sponsored the Cleveland Ballet and worked with retarded children. He saved the best for last: Fran had organized a Jewish women’s group at Brandeis University with the wife of Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio.

  What it was in particular that moved Judge Sweeney, no one knows, but moved he was. He gave her two years’ probation and two hundred hours of community service. Despite Fran’s refusal to cooperate with authorities, there was no jail time and no fine. Involved law enforcement people were pretty incensed, and while they hadn’t pressed for her to go away for a long stretch, they’d insisted back when the case was in front of Judge O’Donnell that she do at least a few months. The police had told him that they suspected me in a large number of jewel thefts of fashionable homes and estates, and that many of the victims were friends of Fran or her parents, implying that Fran had helped me gain access to those places. The police had also told O’Donnell that they’d seen her carrying bags of “potential evidence” from the Moreland Hills house to a private safety-deposit center. Fran’s lawyer had pointed out sarcastically that they were also bags of “potential” groceries—and how much potential was the judge going to base his sentence on?—but O’Donnell had sure looked like he was buying the prosecution’s arguments.

  Judge Sweeney, however, was having none of that. He was one of those tough but fair types who wasn’t about to be intimidated into doing something based on allegations for which not a shred of proof had been offered. Much as it might have pained him, he waved aside all the speculative bullshit they were throwing at him and instead cited Fran’s complete lack of a criminal record and former good deeds in the community. “Justice was served,” he said. “There was no good reason to put her in jail.” I should note, however, that this judge who couldn’t be intimidated had pronounced the sentencing early in the morning before law enforcement authorities had been able to get there and watch him do it.

  It happened that he’d made the right call. Fran certainly knew I was a fugitive and had participated in my evasion of authorities, but she hadn’t helped me commit any burglaries, at least not knowingly.

  The cops had a point as well. I did do a few—not all—of the jobs they suspected me of. But in America you’re not supposed to be punished for being suspected of something. Hell, if that were allowed, everybody would be in jail. Besides, this particular hearing didn’t have anything to do with me, it was about Fran. Even though the cops were convinced I’d pulled a lot of those jobs, they didn’t have any reason to suspect she’d known about them.

  There was another aspect of all that publicity that struck me the wrong way. It seemed that anybody in the Cleveland area who’d lost a few pieces of dining room silver anytime over the previous few years, or had his golf clubs pinched from his car or a television set stolen from his living room, now assumed that I was the perp. Nobody seemed to pay attention to the fact that nearly all of my scores were high-value, high-risk and a lot more involved than a simple crash-and-dash for pocket change. The common thread connecting my jobs was the challenge of solving puzzles and overcoming formidable obstacles, and I didn’t enjoy being mistaken for a kleptomaniacal shoplifter.

  Nobody seemed to pay much attention to one additional condition that had been imposed on Fran, as though it was no big deal and nowhere near severe enough to substitute for the fact that she’d be serving no time in prison: She was forbidden from having any contact with me at all for the entire two years of her probation.

  The newspapers seemed to get wind of everything the authorities were planning even before my attorneys or I found out. A few days after Fran’s deal was arranged, we read that in addition to pursuing the old charges from Florida, the feds wanted to press their own case for the fictitious passport. Shortly after that we were informed—at the same time the press was—that I was also being investigated for the murder of Joey Cam, because of the clipping Barbara had sent me that was found during the search. I admit they had a point about the passport, but the murder rap was just something they cooked up as negotiating leverage for whatever deal they had in mind to strike with me in order to avoid a protracted trial.

  I spent about three months in the Cuyahoga County Jail while all of this was going on, then my wild and crazy lawyers in Florida, Ray Sandstrom and Fred Haddad, had another of their wild and crazy ideas. They thought that if they brought me back to Florida I might be able to get bail, and they also thought it possible for me to fight and beat the original case. I resisted for a while, having no wish to walk back into a jurisdiction where I knew the police had a bad jones for me, but I eventually agreed. It was Fred who pointed out that I was actually safer inside the legal system, where there were some pretty strict rules, than I’d been when I was free and therefore at the mercy of whatever hogwash the police could concoct.

  One Sunday, after the mountain of required paperwork had been completed, I was shackled and cuffed. Looking like Hannibal Lecter, I was escorted to Cleveland Hopkins International by two cops from Florida and two federal agents who were the size of NFL linebackers. The feds signed some handoff papers and the two Florida guys and I flew to Fort Lauderda
le.

  Ray had set up the bail hearing for the next morning. Barb showed up and offered as collateral the mortgage-free house she’d gotten from me in the divorce. Unfortunately, ten FBI officials from Cleveland also showed up, and their show of force worked: The judge denied bail and remanded me back to custody, and Ray and Fred went into a huddle with state, federal and county prosecutors.

  The “huddle” lasted three months and then Fred came in to lay it out for me. He started by telling me that feelings were no longer running as high against me as we’d thought.

  “The county prosecutor is the lead on the case,” Fred said, “because the main warrant is for the fugitive charge and that’s a county matter, and he doesn’t seem to be a bad guy. The assistant U.S. attorney isn’t out for blood, either.”

  I looked at Fred warily. “What about the cops?”

  “The cops? Oh, they want your balls in a paper bag.”

  We both laughed, and he explained that the cops had no official say in how I was handled.

  Then he sobered up. “On the other hand, all these guys have to work together, and when the cops kick and scream, the prosecutors listen. The problem you’ve got?”

  I knew what the problem was. “I pissed them off.”

  “Worse than that,” Fred said. “You made them look stupid. And there’s no walking away from making them look stupid.”

  “So what were you guys talking about for three months?” I asked.

  “We were talking about how to get out of this with the least pain for everybody.”

  Fred said that the prosecutors had openly admitted that their case against me wasn’t as tight as they’d like it to be. I was definitely dead on the forged passport, but as far as skipping out on my trial five years ago, if Ray and Fred could get the original violation-of-parole hearing reopened, there was a chance I might walk on that one.

  On the other hand, that strategy could fail. “And you might be looking at twenty years,” Fred said.

  It was easy to see how this was shaping up. No way were the prosecutors going to just drop the charges, but they’d as soon not take their chances on a trial, either. That meant there was some wiggle room to negotiate, and there was only one thing I had to offer. “So how much time do they want me to do?”

  That was really the heart of the matter. What Fred had already told me could have been dispatched in the first five minutes of that huddle that had taken three months.

  “A nickel,” he said—five years—then held up his hand when I started to react. “They’ll give you credit for the time you already spent—”

  “Including the ninety days waiting for this offer?”

  Fred nodded. “And once all of this has blown over and the papers aren’t staring at it so hard, and assuming you behave in the joint, they’ll listen to a parole plea.”

  “And everybody agrees?” Meaning everybody at the county, state and federal levels.

  “Yep.”

  Fred didn’t bother telling me what a good deal it was; it was obvious. They could give me five years each for the phony passport and driver’s license alone. With the deal, I’d do less than two years, and when I came out my slate would be wiped completely clean. No more running, no more looking over my shoulder, no more false identities . . .

  “One condition,” I said, nevertheless.

  Fred tensed up. He’d already gotten everything he could out of those guys and there wasn’t any water left in the well. “What?”

  “Gotta be a state prison, not federal.”

  State prison is harder time, because of tighter budgets, chronic overcrowding, fewer statutory protections and less stringent oversight. But overcrowding and tight budgets also means you usually do less time, especially if you’re nonviolent, because they want to get you out of there as soon as possible. And I was willing to endure anything if it meant getting out sooner.

  I had another reason to avoid a federal prison, and that was that the feds who seemed to have it in for me had less influence in state joints. It was a cinch that without their interference, someone with the time I already had in on the nickel would be in minimum security and then out on work release within a couple of months.

  It would turn out to be another in a string of bad assumptions on my part. But I had no way of knowing that in advance, so Fred took my answer back to the prosecutors, and neither of us read anything into the fact that they agreed almost before Fred even finished speaking.

  23

  Back in the Saddle Again

  IN SOME ways, prison was preferable to jail.

  Jail is a holding pattern, an agony of ongoing uncertainty of the kind familiar to any schoolkid who spends a whole day wondering what the hell his father is going to do to him when Mom spills what he did. Inevitably, the punishment and accompanying finality are almost a welcome relief after all the anguished speculation.

  In jail there is no pretext of rehabilitation and very few quality-of-life considerations. Technically, you’re still innocent and being held only to make sure you don’t run away or cause more trouble prior to your next legal proceeding. There are no programs to help you become a better person because, officially, there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with you. Even exercise isn’t provided for, and the only time you get to see the sun is if you need to be transported for a proceeding. In Broward County, though, the jail and the court are in the same building. I never once went outside the whole time I was there. The only good thing was that a lot of the guys in the jail had already done state time, and I’d learned a good deal about what to expect.

  Prisoners who were slated to be transferred weren’t told about it until after eleven at night, when the phones were cut off. That way they couldn’t make plans to have somebody waiting to hijack the bus. I got the word on January 13, a Sunday, two days after I’d cut my deal. At around eleven-thirty, twenty of us were rounded up and brought downstairs, strip-searched and placed in a holding cell, where we waited for the bus to arrive after picking up some prisoners from Dade County. Everything went along smoothly until they found a handcuff key on some guy. They hauled him back to jail to be arraigned on some new charges, then put the rest of us through a much more thorough strip search. It wasn’t until two-thirty in the morning that I was shackled to another guy and placed on the bus.

  Our first stop was the North Florida Reception Center in Lake Butler, a processing facility just outside of Orlando for new inmates prior to their assignment to other prisons. The “lake” was just a larger puddle of swamp water than the ones around it, and the “center” was a brick-and-concrete room full of wooden benches and harsh neon lighting, staffed by some of the meanest sons of bitches I’d ever seen standing outside the bars. It was like marine boot camp, except that these guys were allowed to beat you, which they were happy to do if you so much as blinked too fast. The first thing we did was line up to hand over our personal possessions, and among the things I turned in was the Seiko watch I’d stolen from Robert Goulet. The clerk who took it stared at it for a long time before dropping it into an envelope. Then we were taken away to be stripped, weighed and measured and get a ten-second haircut that left us all nearly bald. After that we stood at attention for about two hours while a group of guards took turns yelling at us before we were finally put in lockdown cells.

  The next day saw a variety of productive activities. I was made to scrub the floor with a toothbrush but soon realized that it was one of the good jobs. Some guys were forced to stand at attention with their noses pressed against a wall. If they moved, they got a vicious slap to the head or worse. I saw two guys collapse and get carted away. One of the guards’ favorite activities was spitting in a prisoner’s face and reminding him that there was nobody there to protect him.

  I was pretty damned scared. There were all kinds of stories running around, including one about how the guards had beaten a prisoner and then chained him to his bunk and let him bleed to death. From what I was witnessing firsthand, it wasn’t much of a stretch to believe
that it could be true. Some of the guards were the third generation in their families to work at Lake Butler, and it seemed to me that everyday brutality against people powerless to defend themselves was baked right into their culture.

  I was one of the few nonviolent prisoners in the place. My bunk mate was an older guy and very quiet. I wasn’t able to learn much about him, but several years later I saw his picture in the paper when the police began digging up female bodies on his farm in Alabama. Seems the state of Florida’s idea of a good first step in getting me rehabilitated was to bunk me with a serial killer.

  There were ten prisoner counts a day. Once a week you got a cold shower. The rest of the time you tried to avoid the guards who were doing their best to find excuses to beat the shit out of someone and usually finding them. There were lines for everything, even going inside to take a leak, and it was on one of those lines that I had my first serious confrontation.

  We were waiting to go into the mess hall. Even with my head down I could see that the guy in front of me was massive, his back like an immense wall. All of a sudden he turned around and looked at me, a black guy with a head like a bowling ball. A very mean bowling ball.

  “What the fuck?” he said.