Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

by Bill Mason

  I looked up.

  “You coughed on me.”

  I’d done no such thing, but I didn’t say a word.

  His eyes narrowed, and movement around us ceased. “I said, you coughed on me.”

  I still refused to say a word.

  “You heard what I said?” he demanded

  There was no use arguing; he wasn’t looking for a factual debate, and all I could do by talking was make things worse. If I stayed quiet, maybe he’d just insult me and then turn away and let it go. I couldn’t believe that this guy would risk pissing off the guards, or that they wouldn’t step in and break it up when they saw what was going on, but at that early stage in my Lake Butler experience I didn’t realize that the guards loved it when two prisoners went at it. That’s why a couple of them were standing off to the side smiling and making no move to intervene.

  “Motherfucker!” the big guy mumbled, and began to draw back his fist as the men around us stepped away.

  It was one of those defining moments in life that I knew in an instant would color my whole experience in prison, and not just the short time I’d be spending at Lake Butler: Whatever got linked to me in the next few seconds would stay with me and determine how I would be treated no matter where in the system I ended up. So even though this guy towering overhead outweighed me by over a hundred pounds and was no stranger to violence, I really had little choice in the matter.

  I took a small step back and kicked him in the nuts.

  I felt a hundred pairs of astonished eyes staring at me as he went down like a sack of flour. Keeping every trace of emotion off my face, I looked down at him as though coldly assessing whether I had hit him hard enough to keep him from getting back up or if I would need to hit him again. Then I stepped over him and resumed my place in line, as though nothing unusual had happened and I could give less of a shit than if a mosquito had gotten in my way. Throughout the whole episode I never said a single word, and I like to think I never showed any sign of fear.

  The point wasn’t to prove how tough I was. It was to demonstrate that I was volatile, unafraid and unpredictable, and that even though there might be plenty of guys who could take me in a fight, why start something with somebody who was guaranteed to give you trouble? I knew I’d be fine so long as I didn’t get transferred to the same institution as this hulk moaning on the floor behind me was headed to.

  It was that bad every damned day, but it lasted only two weeks and then they transferred me to a minimum-security facility down the road. All that surrounded it was a six-foot fence, and the guards were downright civil. I thought somebody must have finally figured out I didn’t belong with the hard guys, but six days later I was moved again, to the maximum-security fortress in Raiford, about forty miles southwest of Jacksonville. Something was going on that I wasn’t being clued in on.

  Now, you might think that I didn’t have a legitimate beef—after all, I was a convicted felon, and prison is prison, right? But prison is not prison, and there are some pretty strict protocols when it comes to incarcerating people. One of those protocols says that a nonviolent offender who is doing less than two years against a five-year sentence should be on work release or, at the very worst, in a minimum-security facility. So why was I being housed with rapists, serial killers and armed robbers?

  The reason, as it turned out, was that the feds were systematically entering pending charges against me into the National Crime Information Center computers. There was nothing to stop them from doing that, since all it meant was that they were thinking about charging me with something, and who was to say that they weren’t? But the effect it had, which was intended, was to signal to the prison authorities that I was a bad guy and should be treated as such. Since the manner of my treatment was not a matter of law but up to the discretion of the prison system, there wasn’t anything my lawyers or I could do about it except argue to get the charges yanked out of NCIC. Out the charges would come, and then fresh ones would be lodged. The feds had no problem with this little game; so long as my status looked like it was up in the air, the prison authorities were justified in assuming the worst about me.

  What I said about my previous stretch still held: The overriding feature of prison life is maddening, will-sapping tedium. Raiford was divided into two dormitories of about 250 inmates each. There was nothing to do all day except walk around a small track and wait in line for the phone. Other than the occasional fight, meals were the only thing that broke up the day. Fights were not a problem for me, though: Word of my little overreaction at Lake Butler had, as I’d intended, spread around the system, and nobody thought it in his interest to find out if I’d explode again if provoked.

  I was lucky in that I could read (don’t laugh . . . that put me ahead of quite a few guys in there) and Fran had managed to get a bunch of books to me. I spent a lot of time immersed in the bestsellers of the day, and also writing letters, and the more literate among the inmates were grateful to me for passing on the books when I was done.

  I took an awful lot of ribbing from fellow inmates when these two magazines hit the stands. For Fran’s family and friends, the impact was a lot less amusing, and the parole board considering my case didn’t laugh much either.

  Many of the letters I wrote were to Ray and Fred asking them to concentrate on getting me the hell out of maximum security. They went to work with their usual zeal, and about four months after I entered Raiford, I was transferred to the Zephyrhills Correctional Institution, a medium-security facility about halfway between Orlando and St. Petersburg. It was surrounded by two ten-foot fences topped with razor wire, and armed guards in Jeeps were stationed at each corner. There were a lot of lifers locked up there, but the level of violence was much lower.

  The last time I had seen Fran was when she visited me in jail back in Cleveland before she was given probation and forbidden to have any contact with me. I was so distraught when they made her leave, I couldn’t eat for almost two days, and I can only imagine how much worse it would have been had I known that it would be the last time I’d see her for a very long time. Now, though, I was able to phone her twice a day. Legally, while Fran wasn’t allowed to have contact with me, I was under no similar prohibition, so the Zephyrhills authorities didn’t care if I spoke with her. Also, since she and her daughter had moved back into her parents’ house, there was nothing to prove that it wasn’t her mother or father I was speaking to unless the police tapped the phones, and nobody thought there was any reason for them to do that; Fran was small potatoes and had probably already been forgotten by everyone except the probation officer supervising her community service. The phone bills from all the collect calls were astronomical, but Fran’s father paid them without ever mentioning them.

  About a month before I arrived, another prisoner had been paroled out. His name was Jack Murphy, but he was better known to the world as “Murph the Surf,” the most notorious American jewel thief ever and the guy Joe Gerwens of the Fort Lauderdale police had compared me to. Murph and two of his beach-bum cohorts broke into New York City’s American Museum of Natural History in 1964 and stole the famed Star of India, at 563 carats the world’s largest sapphire. He was caught less than forty-eight hours later (one of his partners gave him up; see what I mean?), did about two years in prison and in 1969 went back in for murdering two women. He became a born-again Christian and was let out of Zephyrhills on the condition that he come back to preach the Gospel to prisoners.

  The prison officials had given me a job as a gardener, with my own little ten-by-ten-foot plot to tend. That lasted a month, because I heard you could get twenty days knocked off your sentence if you took GO LAB, a one-week course on how to write a résumé, get along with employers, start your own business and things like that. I did it, and when my business background made itself evident, they recruited me to teach it. A week or so into it, Murphy made one of his frequent visits to Zephyrhills.

  I couldn’t stand the guy from the first time he came up to me. I have to admit
that I admired the Star of India job when it happened, at least the heist itself. A lot of people said Murphy was lucky, because building alarms had been turned off to save electricity and the battery powering the display-case alarm had died, but I knew that luck always played a part, and I didn’t count it against him. It was the aftermath in which he got caught—a circus of amateurish errors and careless planning—that lessened him in my eyes. He was an egotistical showboater through and through, starting with the fact that stealing the Star of India was a useless thing to do, because there’s no way to fence something that famous.

  Then I heard about the murders of the two young women who’d been captivated by Murphy’s smooth flamboyance, his brains and his gift of gab. All of a sudden this suave jewel thief, surfer and violinist wasn’t a lovable rascal anymore; he was a despicable monster who’d gotten so high on his own publicity, he not only snuffed out two young lives but dumped their bodies in six feet of water just a few hundred yards from where people had seen them go out on his boat.

  That was why I didn’t like it when Gerwens compared me to Murphy during the Mandel trial. Gerwens was referring only to jewel-robbing skills, of course, but I didn’t want my name anywhere near Murph the Surf’s.

  Now here he was, supposedly born-again and thereby so morally superior to us heathens that he would instruct us in the proper way to live our lives. He still looked like a degenerate to me and I wanted nothing to do with him, but for some reason he took an interest in me. The GO LAB classroom was in a small brick building in the middle of the yard and he kept coming around all the time, trying to strike up a conversation. All I ever said was “Hi,” and then got on with what I was doing, but he’d stare at me and then go off and ask other prisoners questions about me. Normally those guys wouldn’t respond to stuff like that, but Murphy was famous throughout the Florida prison system, which is how he got inmates to listen to his preaching: Most of them couldn’t give a shit, but they wanted to be able to say they hung with Murph the Surf.

  A couple of them told me that he had been asking about me, and I said to one guy who occasionally attended Murphy’s lectures, “Why’s he so interested in me?”

  “Probably wants to get in your pants,” he answered, then held his hands up in the air. “In the name of the Lord.”

  Murphy made me sick, and I tried to make sure I was in my cell whenever he visited the prison. It worked, and I never had to speak with him again.

  One of the days I remember most vividly was January 28, 1986.

  It may be a cliché to say they could lock up my body but not my mind, but it’s a concept I took very much to heart. A lot of guys inside just kind of surrender and don’t give a shit about anything, as though their stretch were some kind of purgatory so absolute and crushing there was no sense even trying to make the most of it. I’m not saying I made lemonade out of life’s lemons or any goody-two-shoes bullshit like that—prison is hell no matter what kind of attitude you have—but I wasn’t about to let myself just rot away.

  I was one of only two inmates in the whole place who bought The Tampa Tribune every day. The prison charged us twice the newsstand price, which is pretty interesting when you stop to think about it—they should have given it to us free and had literate prisoners read it out loud to those who couldn’t read for themselves—but I thought it was worth it anyway. Having some idea of what was going on outside the walls made me feel less isolated and disconnected.

  I had read that a space shuttle was being launched on January 22, and got to wondering whether it would be possible to catch a glimpse of it. Cape Canaveral was a full hundred miles to the east, but those launch vehicles let off one hell of a lot of smoke and they did go several hundred miles into the sky, so I thought it might be possible. The paper called for the weather to be crystal clear all over central Florida, too, so if it was ever possible to see something, that would be the day.

  The launch was scheduled for late afternoon, when I’d be on GO LAB duty. There were five of us teaching, but only one at a time, so the other four got to stand around and scratch their asses, which was actually one of the better jobs available in the Zephyrhills prison. I arranged to be one of the ones out of the classroom then, and ten minutes before launch time I positioned myself looking eastward. It says something that not one person in the yard at the time was even remotely curious why someone would be staring intently at absolutely nothing. Like I said, most of them just didn’t give a shit.

  Well, so much for that experiment. I couldn’t see a damned thing and it was a bust. Except that the next day’s Tribune carried an article about how the launch had been aborted due to some technical issues. It was rescheduled for the next day, and I didn’t see anything then, either. Sure enough, it had been called off again, so I gave it another try on the twenty-fourth. This time, there was bad weather at one of the emergency landing sites somewhere in Africa, so it was pushed to the twenty-fifth, except then there was bad weather predicted at the launch site, and then there were other problems. But I didn’t give up, although my fellow GO LAB instructors were starting to get annoyed at my constant juggling of the schedules.

  On the twenty-eighth, right before lunchtime, there I was again, standing out in the yard by myself staring eastward. The guards must have thought I’d converted to Islam by then, but damned if I didn’t suddenly see a thin plume of white vapor forming in the distance. It was much brighter and clearer than I’d expected, and I was transfixed. If I could see that thing from so far away, I wondered what it must be like to stand just a few miles from it. Then I got to thinking about the astronauts who were being flung free of the bonds of gravity while I couldn’t even cross a street.

  About a minute or so after I’d first spotted the vapor trail, there was another puff of smoke at the top of the plume. I assumed it was the booster rockets being dropped off, but then a very bright glow appeared, a fireball, followed by smoke trails forming in a downward direction. It was then I noticed that the original plume was no longer growing. Even though I’d never seen a launch before, I knew right away that something awful had happened. Soon there was nothing to see but dissipating smoke.

  There was no sound at all. It was too far away. I looked around the yard and nobody but me seemed to have noticed. I turned eastward again and strained to find some indication that I’d been mistaken and all was okay but somehow knew it was hopeless.

  I didn’t know if there were emergency systems to get the crew away if something went wrong. Was it possible that those poor people on board were dead? All of a sudden my personal concerns seemed small and insignificant. Like millions of Americans, I desperately wanted to know the details of what had happened, if there was any possibility that it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

  There’s not much that can change life in the joint. The television in the cell block was tuned, as it always was at that time of day, to an exercise program. The inmates watching didn’t give a damn about fitness; they were watching the women in tight leotards, and looked ready to tear my head off when I asked if they’d change the channel for a second.

  I had to wait until noon, when the pay phones were switched on, to call Fran. She was at her father’s house and filled me in on the tragedy. All I could think about at first was that schoolteacher, then her family, then the kids who were her students and then my own kids. How fragile life was, and here I was pissing mine away. I felt that urge that others who had been jolted by the disaster were feeling, to be with people you cared about, but all I had surrounding me were cons so dense and oblivious, I couldn’t even get them to switch a television channel. I don’t know if it was just displaced self-pity or what, but the Challenger catastrophe hit me hard, much more so than I would have believed until it happened, and I had to deal with it alone.

  GO LAB was a nice diversion, but it didn’t make me forget how different, how dehumanizing, the culture inside could be. It seemed as though all the normal rules were left at the front gate, and I’m not just talking about the obvious kinds
of things you have to have in place when people are being held against their will. I’m talking about the very nature of how human beings interact.

  There was a mildly retarded inmate in my class named Bernie, who worked in the kitchen. At close to three hundred pounds and in for murder, he was a pretty scary guy until you got to know him. He was housed in my block and we somehow took a liking to each other. He was always coming around to my cell, and I’d help him with his schoolwork and with writing letters. He even had me come to the visitors’ room to meet his mother a couple of times.

  A side note here: Everybody in prison is in for murder or armed robbery or drug smuggling. Just ask them, they’ll tell you. What they won’t tell you is if they’re in for wife-beating or child molestation. Hard-core prisoners tend to be aggressively and self-righteously moral about some things, largely because prison is so abasing and dehumanizing that feeling superior to someone is one of the only ways of convincing yourself you’re not the complete piece of shit the system makes you out to be. Child molesters are among the most detested of all inmates and are terrified at the thought of the true nature of their offenses leaking into the yard. They tend to tell the most grotesque stories of murder and mayhem they never actually committed.

  As a GO LAB instructor, I had access to prisoner personnel files, and I can tell you that Bernie really was in for murder.

  Because I had to begin teaching early in the day, the guards would unlock the main cell-block door for me each morning and let me walk across the yard to eat breakfast before everybody else. I liked doing that because the mess hall was quiet and I could read. But one morning at about five-thirty it wasn’t so quiet. When I got to the mess hall, half a dozen guards had Bernie cornered. He was wild-eyed and raving, and waved a large chunk of two-by-four at them menacingly every time one of them took a step forward. Just as I was taking all of this in, two of the guards were reaching for the Mace canisters on their belts, and I knew that Bernie was in serious trouble. An inviolable rule among the guards was that you never, ever let a prisoner get the best of you, and if one tries, you make it absolutely clear to the others what an awful mistake that was.