Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

by Bill Mason

  It’s not my style to meddle, and especially not in the joint, but there was a good chance my friend Bernie was going to get killed in the next few minutes. I couldn’t just stand there and watch it happen, or leave and pretend I hadn’t known. Before I could give it a lot of thought and possibly change my mind, I sped up and headed for the guards. One of the ones reaching for Mace saw me from the corner of his eye and whirled on me. I quickly put up my hands and took a step back, realizing I should have yelled out or done something to let him know I was coming, rather than have it look like I was trying to sneak up on him.

  “He’s a friend,” I said. “Let me talk to him.”

  The guard stared at me, and then another one nodded to him. As they stepped back, Bernie began whimpering, not quite understanding what was happening.

  I called out to him and asked how he was doing. Breathing heavily, he didn’t say anything back, but at least he stopped waving that piece of lumber around. I talked to him soothingly, and as I did so, the guards began backing away, and the farther back they got, the calmer Bernie became. Eventually I was able to walk him toward the door, and as we passed through into the yard, one of the guards whispered to me to get him to the infirmary.

  Once there, I got Bernie to sit down on a cot. He no longer seemed threatening, just sad and lonely, and he soon lay down and threw his arm over his face. At that point two guards hustled me out, and as I went through the door, one of them said, “Next time, mind your own fuckin’ business.” It was a good lesson in never showing up a guard, even if it was in everybody’s best interest to do so.

  By morning, Bernie had been transferred to Chattahoochee. There are no second chances in the system, and I never did find out what had led Bernie to pick up that two-by-four in the first place, or if it had even been his fault. All I knew was that as soon as he was seen to be a potential troublemaker, out he went to an even tougher pen, a place he clearly didn’t belong, just so the guards wouldn’t have to risk a blot on their records if he should act up again.

  I taught GO LAB for a couple of months, then worked in a storeroom outside the front gate. If you’re waiting for more exciting parts, there aren’t any. The most exciting part of my day was brushing my teeth. I don’t know how to convey to you how awful that kind of relentless boredom can be. Imagine yourself sitting in a bad traffic jam. For a year. Then try to imagine some higher-up testifying before a congressional committee about what a good job his department was doing moving the traffic along, which is how I felt about prison officials thumping their chests over how well they were preparing inmates for reentry into the real world.

  Spend some time in prison and chronic recidivism is no longer a mystery.

  A year after my transfer to Zephyrhills, I was released on one-year parole. It was a glorious day, obviously, but also a bit strange, because I had trouble getting used to the idea that I could walk around freely and use my own name without the constant fear that I might be captured and locked up again. I had an unshakable feeling that I was going to be greeted at the front gate by a bunch of federal agents with fresh charges to lodge against me, but it didn’t happen.

  The prison officials gave me a hundred bucks, with the understanding that I was going to get a bus ticket to Fort Lauderdale. Instead, I hired a car to take me to the Tampa airport, where Fran had arranged to have a prepaid ticket waiting for me. Tampa is on the west coast of Florida, the Gulf of Mexico side, about halfway up the length of the state, and it was about a two-hundred-mile flight to Fort Lauderdale, where I was met by my daughter Laura. It was a joyous reunion, and then we were off to do some chores.

  First stop was the motor vehicle bureau to get a new driver’s license, in my own name this time. When I went to the window, the lady on duty started pulling forms from a shelf and asked me if I was renewing.

  “No,” I said. “Mine expired.”

  She looked at me suspiciously over the tops of her reading glasses. “You ain’t been drivin’ all those years?”

  “No.”

  This was getting awkward. When she kept looking at me, I said, “I was in prison.”

  “Oh,” she said, with not a trace of surprise, and went back to gathering the necessary forms. “You gotta take all the tests again. You got I.D.?”

  Laura had already picked up my birth certificate from Barbara, and the prison had given me a social security card with my correct number on it. I took the written test, then went out and took the driving test, and soon afterward walked out of there with my real identity intact for the first time in years. How strange it was going to be getting used to not having to think carefully before providing my name and other identifying information when asked.

  Next stop was Richard Delisi’s auto body shop in Pompano to pick up Fran’s Mercedes. He’d completely restored it, and even though I wanted to head over to Barb’s house and didn’t want to be away from Laura yet, after all the effort Delisi had put into the job, I felt obligated to stay and talk with him for a while. I introduced Laura to him, then sent her home.

  Delisi wouldn’t accept any money for all the work he’d done. “But we gotta celebrate your release,” he announced, and pulled out a bag of weed. Some of the guys gathered around and lit up, but I declined. I could just see myself getting busted for DUI on the same day I got out of prison. I didn’t even want to be around the stuff, but didn’t want to run out on a party in my honor, either, so I stuck around for a while. It was then that Delisi proposed to me that I go in on that score I told you about earlier, the one in which we were each supposed to clear a million bucks.

  “One big score,” he said. “Just one, and we’re both on easy street forever.”

  I told him I’d think about it, and as quickly as I could after that, I made my exit. Six hours after walking out the gate at Zephyrhills, I was tooling down the interstate in a shiny Mercedes.

  Barb’s reaction upon seeing me again was less enthusiastic than I might have liked, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. To start with, I’d shown up in another woman’s car, which, while logistically sensible, probably wasn’t the most sensitive thing I could have arranged. More important was that since I’d last disrupted her life for the umpteenth time, she’d become quite comfortable being on her own and was handling things well. The last thing she needed was this unpredictable troublemaker reappearing to screw everything up once again. She also didn’t need me to be critical of how she’d kept the house up, and while I made a conscious effort not to overwhelm her, I suppose I couldn’t always hide my disapproval of some things. As annoyed as she might have been, though, she didn’t make a point of reminding me that we’d now been divorced for four years and it wasn’t any of my damned business how she handled things. Marriage or no marriage, there was no denying that I still figured large in her life.

  Parole isn’t a simple free pass, but carries with it a number of conditions. Fran’s, for example, stipulated that she couldn’t see me. There’d be nothing they could do to me should we get caught together, but Fran could wind up in prison. Under other circumstances such restrictions might have seemed not only harsh but downright un-American, because there are few situations in this country under which people can interfere so obtrusively in the personal lives of others without some due process. But given the choice between those sometimes maddening limitations and being in the joint, it’s an easy call.

  Another condition was that I live in Barb’s older brother’s house in Hollywood. That one was kind of funny, though, because the overworked parole board apparently hadn’t gotten around to discovering that Bob and I had been busted together years before for trying to knock over a gas station. Wonder if they’ll read this and find out they’d ordered a parolee to live with a former partner in crime.

  I hadn’t even made it to the door of Bob’s place before I knew that that wasn’t going to work at all, parole conditions be damned. His two sons lived with him, and both were serious delinquents. Given all their other problems, housekeeping was down on the prior
ity list somewhere below choir practice. There were junk cars strewn all over the driveway and yard, and the house itself looked as though someone had taken a bulldozer to the outside and then heaved a grenade through the doorway. Now admittedly, I’m a convicted criminal and not one to be tossing criticism of others around lightly, but I’ve always been personally neat and I’ve told you what a maintenance freak I am when it comes to dwellings. And even though I’d slept in some of the worst holes the state of Florida had to offer, this place just made me sick. Paint was peeling everywhere, and even the filthy floor tiles were buckling and curling. This was the utopia I’d dreamed of every night for well over a year? My solitary little cell had been a lot cleaner than this, and not much noisier.

  It was a shitty end to a shitty day. In prison you spend most of your time visualizing what it’s going to be like when you get out, and even though you’re not stupid or naïve and know it won’t be exactly like you remembered it, you still know it’s going to be eight kinds of wonderful compared to the joint. Inside, people tell you when to get up, when to eat, when to go to bed and sometimes even when to take a shit. You ache for the freedom to make your own choices about little things, so much so that the thought of something as ridiculous as just being able to walk into a fast-food joint and order a burger is almost enough to make you dizzy. Then I actually get out and find that my ex-wife isn’t happy to see me and I’ve been ordered to live in a smelly shit hole. I remember thinking, What must this be like for guys who get released and have nobody and nothing to go back to? No wonder the same people keep going back to prison; what do you expect when you send ex-cons right back to the same environments that got them into trouble in the first place?

  I was supposed to report to my parole office within twenty-four hours of my release, and I lay awake all night dreading that meeting, which at least took my mind off what a pig sty I was holed up in. What would the P.O. be like? Would he be too overworked to pay attention to me, which would be a blessing, or would I get one of those insecure martinets who liked to lord it over people who couldn’t fight back? From there my mind jumped to all the new problems I’d be facing, and I remember being so crazy with worry that at one point I started to consider how much easier life was back in the joint, where you traded a thousand little problems for one great big concern that you couldn’t do anything about anyway, so why worry?

  I had one good card in my hand, and that was that I already had a job lined up, as a salesman for the Broadway Prehung Door Company. It was owned by none other than Bill Welling, who would make all the right noises when the parole officer called him to check up on me. To a P.O., a parolee having a good job was the next best thing to his going into the priesthood. It was the ideal way to keep the P.O. off your case, and my only concern about that was, being out of practice for so long, would I be able to keep snookering the guy, since there really was no such job.

  The next morning I cooled my heels for half an hour waiting for this meeting and trying not to let my annoyance show. I thought about telling the P.O. that I’d had a job but was going to get fired because he made me late, but this was no time to be a smart-ass. I knew the drill: You had to look straight and remorseful and respectful, even though everybody in the system knew it was all bullshit.

  Finally, the little twerp comes out and calls me into his office. Right there in front of him he’s got my folders with the words “Escape Risk” and “Organized Crime” screaming from the covers. I couldn’t believe those damned things were still labeled like that, especially the organized-crime one. “Escape risk” I supposed I could see, even though I’d never escaped. I just hadn’t shown up that one time.

  With barely a question to find out anything about me, this guy launches into a dramatic reading of the riot act, warning me about how straight I had to be and how clean my nose needed to be and yadda yadda yadda. The more he talked, the better I felt, because as strange as it might seem, guys like this are easy to con. They’re blowhards and know-it-alls, and what’s important to them is feeling important. So I tried to look cowed and impressed, nodding over and over as I listened with rapt attention, hanging on to his every word. When he got forceful, I looked away, taking the opportunity to size him up a bit more. There were folders stacked up everywhere, which told me that this guy was probably ridiculously overworked and didn’t have the time to delve into each client’s particular situation. I was going to tell him about the job, and about how I needed to do a little traveling for it, but I got the sense that he didn’t want one more scrap of work to handle or detail to think about than was absolutely necessary, and that my best course of action was to be as low-maintenance as possible, so I stayed quiet and just kept nodding.

  Back out on the street I decided that there was no way in hell I was spending another night at Bob’s, so I risked revocation of my parole by checking in to a motel on the waterfront. I thought it unlikely that my overworked P.O. would ever check up on me, but I called Bob and told him to say I was out should anyone ever come by. No one ever did.

  Over the next few weeks I did a lot of work on Barb’s house, mostly carpentry and painting. It was one of the only things I could think of to try to ease some of the guilt I felt, and it also allowed me to spend a lot of time with Laura. Mark was in college and Suzi was in South Africa, but Laura was in high school and still living at home.

  Although Fran and I were not allowed to see each other, no such restriction applied to her parents, who were in Florida. I liked them both a great deal, and although I realized what an emotional risk I was taking, I decided to give them a call. To my surprise—although in retrospect, knowing what kind of people they were, I really shouldn’t have been surprised—they were quite civil to me. Later on we got together and began meeting regularly for breakfast. Talking to Fran’s father about real estate and business made me feel almost normal.

  A month later it was time to report to the P.O. again, but it wasn’t the same one as before. The new one was a heavy young lady who was obviously not used to dealing with guys who were cleaned up, soft-spoken and otherwise acceptable in polite society. After about twenty minutes of casual banter and a lot of warm smiles, I started to wonder if this might not be a good time to talk about traveling for my job, when suddenly she says, “So how’s it going at work?”

  “It’s going great,” I said, then I let my face fall and looked down at my shoes. “Only . . .”

  “Only what?”

  “Only, I got a little problem.” I shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”

  But she insisted. “Maybe I could help. We’ve got some pull with local businesses.”

  “Thing is, I’m selling for them, and doing real good, but they want me to travel. They say a salesman who can’t go to where the customers are isn’t much use. And”—I waved around the room, taking in the whole parole system—“what with this and all . . .”

  “Well, hell, that’s no problem.”

  I looked up at her, all surprise and confusion. “It isn’t? But I thought—I mean, I’m supposed to stay—”

  “You got a good job and you’re keeping clean?” She flapped a hand at me, then pulled open a drawer and began hunting around for something. “No way we want to get in the way of that.”

  I watched as she found what she was looking for, a handful of forms. She started writing on them and said, “I’ll give you some permits that’ll let you travel for your job. Eastern half of the country okay?”

  I told her that would be just swell and walked out with permits that I could show to the police should I ever be stopped and have my name run through the National Crime Information Center.

  The next day I was off to Cleveland to see Fran, and we soon established a pattern. Each month I’d drive to Ohio and stay with her for a week or two. She was still on probation, so even with my newfound freedom it continued to be dangerous and tricky for us to spend so much time together in Cleveland. In order for her not to be seen with me, I’d never leave the house, and the only visitors
we’d have were Bill Welling and Katie. Then I’d head back to Florida to file my fictitious monthly reports, renew my travel permits and see Laura. Sometimes I’d stop in Tallahassee to visit Mark in college, or in Franklin, Tennessee, to see my aunt, who’d moved there while I was in prison.

  After a few iterations of this pattern, I rented a small two-room apartment down on New River by the week, and continued to commute back and forth to Florida while we bided our time waiting for Fran to get off probation. Our thought was to then move to New York City and disappear into the teeming population.

  A few months after my release Suzi called to say she was engaged and planning to get married in South Africa. She wanted Barb and me to come, but the parole people drew the line at my leaving the country. Laura was in school and couldn’t go, so I offered to stay with her and let Barb go to the wedding alone. During those two weeks, Laura and I had a great time, and while she was in school during the day, I managed to completely repaint the interior of the house and take care of a lot of needed repairs—still trying to make amends any way I could.

  If you play by the rules, the parole board will usually let you “off paper” early, but it seemed this bunch didn’t want to get any law enforcement people mad at them, so they made me go the whole year. Then I was declared rehabilitated and given my permanent release. I was still living off my ill-gotten gains and was mighty happy I hadn’t gotten into that deal with Richard Delisi, who was at the moment of my parole termination sitting in the Polk County Jail with no bond. That’s not to say that the notion of “one more big score” wasn’t swimming around somewhere in my head.