Like me, my father was a very social man. Like the great American humorist, Will Rogers, he never met a man (or woman) he did not like. His talent for making friends is what led him to make the rapid climb up from bus boy to hotel manager. All this changed, of course, when Fidel successfully overthrew the tyrannical butcher, Fulgencio Batista. But when Cuba’s revolutionary government took over the hotel my father was relieved of his position. Cuban guests and small farmers replaced Hollywood stars, foreign royalty and American gangsters. Instead of catering to the wealthy and celebrated the hotel became the setting for the foundation of the National Revolution Militias and of the Committees for Defense of the Revolution.
In the years that followed the Revolution, the world’s first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, stayed at the hotel, along with Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Josephine Baker. But by this time my father was “retired,” and therein began the long days and nights of plotting to escape the island of his birth, the island he used to love so dearly. Sadly, he never accomplished that dream. He died in 1975, when I was only five years old, leaving my mother to care for me and my two sisters.
It wasn’t until 1992 that I finally fulfilled my father’s dream by escaping to America along with my two sisters, only months after the death of our beloved mother.
Libraries continue to remind me of the land of my birth, but at the same time they reaffirm my love for America and democracy, where books are not banned and thought is not controlled.
Someday, when Fidel and his brother, Raoul, have departed this earth, perhaps I shall return to Cuba. But then I will return only as a visitor, because America is my home now.
The first library I visited in New York City I search of a trail for Francis Hoyt was the main branch on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. I could have remained in those hallowed rooms for days, but I was on a mission, a mission to see if Francis Hoyt was in town and, if so, what kind of research he was doing so that we might predict where he would begin his latest reign of terror.
I moved from room to room questioning the librarians, showing them a photograph of Francis Hoyt, a mug shot taken shortly before he was incarcerated. There was not a glimmer of recognition from anyone. I even showed it to the guards and other employees of the library, but none of them remembered seeing the man in the photograph.
When I had exhausted all possibilities at the main branch I crossed the street to the Mid-Manhattan Branch, where I went from floor to floor, showing the photograph. The result was the same. No one recognized him.
It was lunch time and although I was tempted to keep to my mission I heard my wife Esther’s voice inside my head, “Manny, you know how you get when you don’t eat. Your blood sugar falls and your temper rises.” Esther is always right and that is why I listen to her, even if it is only to her voice in my head. I found a coffee shop where I ordered my favorite, a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich on white toast, with extra mayonnaise. I like ordering a BLT, which to me sounds so American. It is the perfect combination of vegetable, fruit, and pork and when it is visited by the proper amount of mayonnaise the perfect sandwich is created. I even like the crunchy sound it makes when you bite into it. Does it sound like I enjoy my food? Indeed, I do.
By one-thirty I was on the bus up Madison Avenue, headed for the Society Library on 79th street, between Madison and Park avenues. It is a library I had never visited, only heard about, but as the bus rumbled past 72nd street, I felt in my heart that this is where my path with Francis Hoyt would finally intersect.
As it turned out, I was right.
Francis Hoyt
I bore easy. That’s why as a kid I hated school. Boring teachers. Boring subjects. Boring students. Boring. Boring. Boring. Hour after hour with nothing much happening. Just a lot of bullshit. I like to get up and move around. School? That was just a bunch of sitting around on your ass listening to some moronic teacher who didn’t know shit about what life was really like.
I cut school all the time. Only got caught once or twice. I think the teachers were happy to get me the hell out of there. When he found out, my old man whipped my ass good, even though he couldn’t have cared less about my cutting school. Any excuse to beat the shit out of me worked for him. He certainly wasn’t any role model, if that’s what fathers are supposed to be. He dropped out of school by the tenth grade. That’s because he was dumb as shit. Me, I did well even in the classes I missed. I liked books. I liked reading. I just didn’t like what they were giving us to read in school. Silas Fucking Marner? Ivanhoe? Tess of the Fucking D’Urbervilles? You gotta be kidding.
I liked knowing more than anyone else, especially the teachers. So why did I have to waste my time listening to a bunch of boring shit taught by a bunch of boring old maids? I kept myself busy with other shit, shit that would put money in my pocket.
By the time the bus pulled into Charleston, South Carolina I’d had about enough. My legs ached and the old lady who got on in Savannah and sat next to me wouldn’t shut the fuck up. So, I waved goodbye to Greyhound and looked for a half-decent motel to check into. It took a while, but I finally found one with the help of Yelp. I like Yelp. Only I think they ought to rate guys like me. No secret the kind of reviews I’d get when it comes to breaking into houses and stealing shit.
The motel was on the fringe of the city, which is perfect for me. Not too expensive, but not a fleabag dump either. The idea is to be as invisible as you can, always flying under the radar. It’s not so much that I was afraid of someone finding me here in Charleston, but it’s so easy to fall into bad habits.
When I was in the joint I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. There wasn’t much else to do. A lot of stupid people say you learn how to be a better criminal when you’re locked up. Think about that. Pretty ridiculous, right? I mean, what the hell can you possibly learn from some dude in the cell next to you? He’s in the cell next to you, for Chrissakes, which means he got fucking pinched. Probably more than once. You’re in the joint with fuckin’ losers. If they were geniuses they wouldn’t be there in the first place. Even me, I did a stupid thing by letting myself be talked into taking assholes along with me on a job. At least I learn from my mistakes. Not these dudes. Most of them are repeat offenders and they’ll keep coming back because they don’t fucking learn. They love to talk about all the shit they’ve done, but how far do you think I’d get listening to them?
When I was a kid my mom used to make me go to church with her. That lasted until I was maybe eight or nine. Same with Sunday school, which I didn’t like any better than regular school. We had to read a whole bunch of stuff by a whole bunch of saints. I didn’t pay much attention to any of it, except something this guy Thomas Aquinas once wrote. I never forgot it. I even memorized it because I figured it was an important lesson. “If a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think of robbing, and from robbing he comes to drinking and Sabbath breaking; and from that to incivility and procrastination.”
That’s exactly what I mean. It’s a slippery slope, man. One thing leads to another. And there are always consequences to what we do, so you have to be on your toes all the time. You gotta always be ready for something going wrong. Preparation and anticipation. Those are the keys to success. And I learned that lesson very early on.
Once I checked in, I took a walk to shake off the foul smell of that bus and get a little exercise before finding a place where I could get a decent meal. I need to keep in shape, just like any professional athlete. I let myself go, lose a step, I’m in deep shit. I’m forty-two-years-old now. That’s fucking ancient for someone who does what I do the way I do it. But I hate those motherfuckers who say they like working out. I fucking hate it. But it’s essential to what I do. Cops, they’re rarely in shape. You should see some of them. In a footrace, I’m gonna wear them the fuck down. I can run five, six miles easy, without hardly breaking a sweat. That’s because I run at least three times a week. I hate it, but I do it. I figure I keep in shape I can go at least another dec
ade, maybe longer. Only when I can’t do what I do at the level I’m doing it now will I think about quitting. Until then, I’m just gonna get better and better.
There was the smell of late spring in the air, as the trees and flowers were beginning to bloom. Honeysuckles? Maybe that was it. I used to hate that smell because it meant summer was getting closer and that meant the old man would be all over me to get a fucking job.
“Get your lazy ass off the couch,” he’d yell, and if I didn’t get off quick enough I knew what was coming next. The toe of his work boot or the back of his hand. Or, if he was really pissed, the belt would come off. By the time I was a teenager I was quicker than he was, especially if he’d been drinking, so he rarely landed one of those blows. But it wasn’t because he wasn’t trying. And if he did connect he’d start laughing, like it was funny. Like it was some kind of big joke. I fucking hated that damn laugh. It made me want to punch him right in the fucking face. Let him fucking laugh about that.
Didn’t take long to realize the last place I ought to be was home, so I did what he taught me to do. I lied. I told him I had a job. It was always something he couldn’t check, not that he would’ve ever taken the time. All he was interested in was how much money I made. He wanted all of it. “It’s about fucking time you paid your way, Francis. The free fucking ride is over, kid.” That’s what he’d say, like I was living in some fancy hotel and we had a butler and a maid. Hotel from hell was more like it.
Every week I made sure to give him a little something just to keep him off my back, just something to keep his hand away from his belt. But the dough wasn’t from the kind of work he thought I was doing. It was what I made stealing shit and selling it for whatever I could get.
At first, it was easy shit, like stealing bikes, or shoplifting from stores. But after a while I graduated to breaking into houses. At first, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and a couple times I nearly got caught. But somehow, I got it done. Maybe that’s because the neighborhoods near where I grew up, nobody could afford security alarms. It’s not like they had all that much to protect. And maybe that’s because I did it during the day, when no one was home. I never took anything big. Maybe I’d find some cash lying around the house. Or a radio. Or some cheap costume jewelry—I wasn’t going to find much of real value. I took anything that looked like it had some resale value. I didn’t care how much.
I could always find someone to buy what I grabbed. I’d go to neighborhoods across town where no one knew me and try to sell it. I could get as much as fifty bucks for a good bike, one of those racing jobs with the thin tires. No one asked any questions. They didn’t care if it was stolen. If they said anything about it being hot, I just told them to throw a coat of paint on the damn thing and no one would ever know the difference. I never told them my real name or where I lived, just in case the cops tracked the stolen goods down and tried to find out who sold it. I didn’t really think there was much chance of that, since it was all penny ante stuff. Besides, people in my neighborhood usually didn’t make it a practice of going to the cops.
Even back then I was pretty good at covering my tracks. I always wore a baseball cap pulled down over my forehead, so no one could get a good look at my face. I never took anything I didn’t think I could turn into cash easily. I always thought ahead, thought about ways to cover myself. I knew the mistakes that got people pinched. That wasn’t going to be me.
It wasn’t long before I was bringing in a few hundred a week. I was smart about it. I didn’t go around spending it like I was some kind of pint-sized Rockefeller. I knew that would only bring attention to myself. I’d give my old man his cut, maybe ten, twenty percent, just to keep him off my back, then I’d stash most of the rest. What I didn’t put away I used on cigarettes—I smoked then, but gave it up when I got serious about what I was doing—and maybe a little weed, every once in a while. Or I spent it trying to impress girls by taking them to the movies and dinner. I loved the movies, especially the gangster films. My favorite was Goodfellas and yeah, I liked the Godfather movies, too. But Goodfellas, I just couldn’t get enough of that flick, what with that brilliant Lufthansa heist. I must’ve seen that flick a dozen times, taking mental notes on how they pulled it off, and the mistakes they made after. They still don’t know exactly who has the take from that. And if they didn’t start spending the dough and knocking each other off they probably never would’ve been pinched.
Once a thief always a thief, I guess, and before long, as I strolled through the quiet, tree-lined streets of Charleston, I started thinking about getting in a little practice session. After all, I hadn’t broken into anything in almost a month and I was afraid I might be getting a little rusty, you know, losing that edge. Breaking into houses is like a muscle. You don’t use a muscle, it gets flabby and after a while it doesn’t work very well. But there was more to it. I missed the excitement, the high. It’s like a fuckin’ drug. You don’t do it for a while and you start to crave it. The only way you’re going to get over that craving is to either start planning another job or do one.
After a half hour or so of aimless walking, I wound up spotting what looked like the perfect house. It was on the outskirts of the city, set back far enough from the sidewalk so I’d be out of the line of sight of passing cars or anyone who happened to be walking by. Surrounded by hedges, it was one of the many two-tiered historic houses I saw all over town. I was immediately taken back to the old days, when I hit at dinnertime, looting valuables from the upstairs master bedroom. This one would be a piece of cake, using the column to climb up to the second-tiered porch, which I was pretty sure opened onto the master bedroom. It was tempting to go back to the old days, when I busted in when people were awake, but those days were behind me. I was the new and improved Francis Hoyt. I was the Francis Hoyt who went in and out on the ground floor. No more climbing trellises and shimmying down drainpipes.
I walked past the house slowly then stopped to make it look like I’d forgotten something. Then I continued a few feet before I turned and retraced my path back to the other end of the house. I did this a couple times till I seared a mental picture of the lay of the grounds and house into my mind. It was now almost seven-thirty and darkness had begun to fall. It was close to dinnertime so the upstairs of the house was dark while the downstairs was all lit up. I stopped in front again and checked my watch, as if I was waiting for someone. I could see into one of the large windows at the front of the house. There was a partial view of a dining room table. I could make out a man seated at the head of it. He was in shirtsleeves. He had a fork in his hand. He was waving it around. Like he was lecturing someone at the table. A kid, maybe. Or his wife.
Most burglars get caught because they’re stupid. They do dumb things. They’re just asking to get caught. One guy I met in the joint told me he brought his dog along with him and tied him outside while he broke into the house. Someone saw the dog there, got suspicious, and called the cops. How stupid can you be?
Truth is, burglary is one of those crimes where the odds are with the house. I once heard a cop admit that the clearance rate on burglaries is maybe fifteen percent. I’ll take those odds any time. Cops hate investigating burglaries because the clearance rate is so low. It’s a waste of their time. My jobs are in a different category, not only because of the high value of the goods I steal, but also because of who I steal from. You steal from someone poor or even middle-class, no one gives a shit. You steal from someone rich, suddenly you’re Public Enemy Number One. Do I mind that? No way. I like it, man, I like it. They talk about the dude who steals several hundred thousands of dollars’ worth of swag, not the one who steals something worth a few thousand dollars. That don’t even make one of those fillers on page eighteen.
Even from as far away as thirty feet, I could tell what the alarm system was. And giving me a little help was one of those ridiculous decals on the window announcing the alarm system company that protected the house. Thanks for the helping hand, guys.
Sometimes, people put these things up thinking they’re going to scare off burglars. Maybe it works with amateurs but no real thief gives a shit about a fucking decal. Any pro worth his salt can tell whether there’s a system installed just by just checking the house out. Sticking on one of those things on the window just tells me and every other thief, “look, we’ve got plenty of stuff worth stealing but we’re just too goddamn cheap to put in a real system.”
Wireless is one of the best things that ever happened to us because it gives us two shots at disabling the system. One way is that we can walk right up to the front door and suppress the alarm. The other way depends on the system being used. Certain wireless alarm systems rely on radio frequency signals sent between the door and the window sensors to a control system that then triggers an alarm when these entryways are breached. The signals either deploy any time a tagged window or door is opened, whether the alarm system is enable or not. When the system is enabled, the alarm will be tripped and send a silent alert to the monitoring company, which contacts the house’s occupants and the cops. But the system can fail to encrypt or authenticate the signals sent from the sensors to the control panels, making it easy for someone like me, with the right equipment, to intercept the data, decipher the commands, and play them back to the control panels whenever I want.
Second Story Man Page 6