Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief Read online

  The Hammer condo was third from the top on the far right, just above the shuttered windows. I got out onto the ledge from the leftmost unit on the same floor.

  I wasn’t going to need any of the tools I’d brought, so there was no sense making a trip next door and back. I grabbed a pillow off the bed, stripped it, then emptied the jewelry box into the pillowcase. At that point I’d been there just five minutes but was already anxious to get the hell out, so I didn’t bother looking around for additional goodies. Incredibly, not only was the front-door alarm unarmed, but neither of the additional locks had been engaged. Had there been any way for me to know that in advance, I could have avoided that walk along the ledge.

  I went across the hall and got my unused tools from the guest unit, closed the window I’d left partially open and wiped down the sill. After locking the door behind me, I walked down to the third floor and retrieved the grappling hook from the fire-extinguisher case. The pillowcase full of jewels tucked under my shirt, I lowered myself down to the ground, shook the hook loose, then headed across the street and straight to the water’s edge, where I walked two blocks to my car. Once safely away from the building I started going over everything in my mind. Had I left anything at all up there that could be traced? I thought I’d been careful, but I wasn’t above second-guessing myself.

  I drove to my office and allowed myself a quick look at the loot before stashing it. There were a large number of diamond pieces, mostly bracelets, earrings and pins, and some beautifully worked gold items, including an exquisite gold filigree bracelet. The most outstanding item was a custom-made pin in the shape of a rose. It had diamond-encrusted gold petals that folded open to reveal a three-carat diamond mounted inside. It was absolutely stunning. What a shame it would have to be broken down and sold in pieces so nobody could recognize it and tie me to the heist.

  The police never did find out who’d done the robbery, nor did they figure out how the “thieves” (they assumed there was more than one) had gotten in. It was a major embarrassment to everybody concerned: the building’s managers, who had assured their tenants of world-class security; the police, who weren’t able to figure out how the job was done and had no clues or leads; and the Hammers themselves, who would rather the outside world didn’t know they’d left a fortune in jewels lying around their condo and hadn’t set the alarms. It seemed to be in everybody’s interest to keep the whole incident quiet, so no mention of it appeared in any of the local media.

  Four years later, when the police still hadn’t identified a single suspect, I would confess to having been the thief.

  Part

  I

  1

  Beginnings

  MY NAME is Bill Mason. If that name is not familiar to you, then I’ve done a good job of keeping things to myself, which was my way of keeping myself out of jail, at least most of the time.

  In a “career” spanning nearly three decades I’ve stolen many millions of dollars’ worth of jewelry, gotten shot and almost died, wrecked a good marriage and raised three great kids despite their father’s odd (pre)occupation. Although law enforcement authorities were aware of many of my scores, I’ve never been convicted of stealing jewels.

  I’ve taken rare gems and jewelry from the likes of Robert Goulet, Johnny Weissmuller, Truman Capote and Phyllis Diller (twice), and even cracked a safe belonging to the underboss of a major Mafia family. I’ve also had some scores that didn’t work out, including attempts to rob Marvin Davis, Elizabeth Taylor, Margaux Hemingway and the McGuire Sisters.

  I’ve been chased all over the country by local cops, state cops and the FBI, some of whom I’ve even developed odd sorts of relationships with. And on the subject of odd friendships, I was the key figure in a major scandal involving a prominent heiress that shocked Cleveland high society.

  I didn’t have very good reasons to steal; I was by no means poor and my upbringing was perfectly normal, so when you get right down to it, the reason I stole was because I felt like it. Call it a personality defect—many have thought so, including me—but I didn’t really need the money.

  This book is by no means a justification of how I chose to live my life. I was a criminal and there is no justification for that unless you’re starving or living under a system where the laws themselves are unjust or you’re forced to break them for some higher purpose. None of those motives was applicable in my case, and I wasn’t some kind of Robin Hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor, so you’re not going to find any excuses in these pages.

  Rather, this book is simply a description of what I did, how I came to do it, how I felt about it and how it affected those close to me. The reason I can tell the story now is that I’m no longer “in the life” and the statute of limitations has run out on the last of my scores.

  Everything you’ll read is true, with the exception of an occasional hazy date, imperfectly recalled conversation or altered name. In some cases, people who were robbed of precious gems, jewelry or cash are going to learn for the first time who it was that stole them. A good many of my targets, including the Mob, were convinced all along that they were hit by a gang and will be surprised to find out it was just me, acting alone.

  I don’t expect any more forgiveness from friends and family for the pain I caused them; what I’ve already received from them is well beyond what I had any right to expect. I just want them to understand a bit more than I was ever willing—or able—to explain while the events in this book were taking place. This is their story as much as mine.

  I think the most extraordinary thing about my life is how ordinary it was—at least if you don’t count my little hobby of stealing jewels.

  When I decided to write this book, I thought one of the more interesting aspects of the effort would be to reflect on my childhood days and try to identify those experiences that pushed me in such a questionable direction. I’d read some biographies of unusual people and there always seemed to be large forces prodding them inexorably toward their destiny. The way those books were written, you’d think it was impossible for them to have turned out any other way than they did.

  But biographers, and that includes autobiographers, tend to focus on those things that support the impressions they’re trying to establish. The way they write makes it seem that absolutely nothing else was going on in their subjects’ lives other than the handful of specific events and experiences that turned them into musicians or politicians or scientists.

  Fact is, children are bombarded with all kinds of influences, and it’s nearly impossible to tell which ones had which effect. Just because it makes a good story doesn’t make it true. My guess is that Newton would have figured out gravity whether that apple had hit him on the head or not, if it ever really hit him in the first place.

  I think what’s actually going on is that childhood is like an allergy test for talent. If you’ve ever been tested for allergies, you know that the doctor rubs your skin with hundreds of different substances until one of them raises a welt. In the same way, a kid comes across hundreds of opportunities to uncover some latent talent until one of them hits, and then his course in life starts to take on some direction. Sometimes it’s obvious, like when a seventh-grader is six feet tall and can dribble a basketball blindfolded with either hand, or a grade-schooler builds a radio out of old washing-machine parts.

  Sometimes it’s not so obvious, as in my case. I could climb trees like a monkey and take apart all kinds of machines and put them back together; there was little that frightened me and I could keep my mouth shut while listening. But so what? How did those thing add up to a career?

  It wasn’t until I went out and tried to steal something that I realized what my odd collection of skills might be good for.

  As I said, nearly everything about my life was ordinary, including my early childhood.

  I was born in 1940 in a small West Virginia burg called Hundred. It was in Monongalia County, which was known as the mother county of northern West Virginia because eighteen
other counties, some in Pennsylvania, had been carved out of it since its creation in 1776. Hundred was about three miles and fifty years from the Pennsylvania border, rural and mostly dirt-poor.

  Many of my earliest memories were wrapped around the things people generally did in those years to support the war effort and not go broke. It was a time of great thrift, and, like other families, we saved everything: foil from cigarette packs, cooking fat, string, paper . . . anything that might conceivably be turned to a further purpose rather than discarded. We didn’t know at the time to give it a fancy name like “recycling.”

  There were nightly blackouts, even in the heartland, where the likelihood of an attack was pretty remote, unlike in the coastal communities 350 miles to the east. I can still easily summon up the fear I felt as a four-year-old—depending on the darkness to keep us safe, hoping that the Germans couldn’t see our small town and drop a bomb on us.

  It’s an easy leap, I suppose, to the conclusion that my strong need for financial security and the comfort I feel in darkness were shaped at that time, but thousands of kids scrimped pennies and sought refuge from the enemy behind blackout curtains without turning into criminals, so who knows?

  Don’t get me wrong, though, because aside from the occasional stresses of wartime, it was a great time and place to be a kid. I was the adored only child of educated parents. I had acres of open land on which to roam and explore, farm animals to play with and the kind of delicious freedom available only to children in wide-open rural areas.

  Best of all were the trees. As far as I was concerned, they were put on earth for me to climb, and I was good at it. By the time I was five, I was able to climb without using my legs, just my arms. When horizontal branches were too high to reach from the ground, I was often able to shinny right up the trunk, like a koala bear.

  Things changed when I was six. Both my parents were teachers—Ella, my mother, taught third grade in the local elementary school, and Ora, my father, was a gym teacher and coach at Waynesboro High School in Pennsylvania—but the region was in dire straits. Monongalia County, an apparent spelling error on early documents, was named after the Monongahela River. It meant “river of crumbling banks,” and that pretty much described what was happening to the local economy. My father found a better-paying job but had to go to Detroit for it. He was gone for long stretches at first, but that became too much, and he eventually decided to move us all to Detroit, where we lived with my aunt Nell. She had two children, and they became like my brother and sister. Still, I missed West Virginia and kept alive the hope that we’d move back there someday.

  But about two years after that move my father was offered another job, and as much as he didn’t want to relocate us again, this was too good to turn down. My uncle, who owned two apartment buildings in Cleveland, hired Dad to manage them, and we moved to Shaker Heights. Taking up residence in that more affluent neighborhood was quite an occasion for my parents but devastating to me.

  Shaker Heights had high-rise apartment buildings, paved streets and sidewalks, and hand-planted trees with wire fences around them to keep kids off. It had neighbors who were ten feet away instead of a ten-minute walk, and many of them were the well-off kind who liked children polite and quiet and clean. One quick glance around the concrete-and-asphalt prison of Shaker Square Apartments and I knew that my days of running in fields, milking cows and climbing trees were behind me for good. I doubt either of my parents truly understood how miserable that move made me. I was lonely and despondent, and used to daydream about running away from home and going back to West Virginia. Eight years old and convinced my life was already ruined.

  I hated apartment buildings from the very moment I first laid eyes on one. If adults chose to live in oversized chicken coops, that was their business, but what’s the point of condemning a kid, and a country-raised one at that, to that kind of stifling confinement? Nevertheless, kids adapt; stuck for anything else to do, I started climbing buildings instead of trees. I discovered roofs and basements and they became my playgrounds. As a result I became friendly with a lot of maintenance men and building superintendents, and thereby got a first-class education in matters that Boulevard Elementary School didn’t seem to feel were important.

  People who take care of apartment buildings are underappreciated masters of many arts. They do the work of electricians, plumbers, carpenters, masons, painters, locksmiths, glaziers and machinists, often all in the same day. Something I noticed early on was that their orientation was 100 percent practical; they weren’t interested in the purity of craft, they just needed to get stuff working, and quickly, in order to avoid bringing down the wrath of demanding tenants.

  Imagine having all those skills and nobody to show them off to. Then imagine that a curious kid shows up; he’s interested in everything and he doesn’t start yawning every time you try to share your wisdom. He’s good with his hands, too, and helps out whenever he can.

  I learned a lot from those guys, not because I had any life plan or was consciously preparing for anything, but just because I found it interesting and fun. Always handy with things mechanical, I badgered maintenance men into letting me try to fix washing machines and refrigerators that they’d given up on as hopeless or not worth the effort. There was little downside if I couldn’t fix them, as they were slated for the junk heap anyway, but after I managed to get some things working again, I was allowed to tackle tougher jobs. A couple of guys also began taking time to teach me a few things.

  Locks were particularly fascinating. Precision mechanisms full of tiny springs and bits of metal machined to close tolerances, they got slammed and banged around all day yet hardly ever failed. About the only reason to take them apart was to change over to a new key, or if someone broke a key while fumbling to get a door open when he was drunk or in a hurry and left a piece inside the mechanism. When that happened, the quickest fix was to just replace the lock, but a couple of the handier maintenance men were able to dismantle the mechanism right down to individual components, put it all back together and avoid the cost of a new lock. I watched them do that for hours on end, began helping out and gradually got to the point where I could do it by myself. There’s no better way to learn how something mechanical works than by taking it completely apart.

  I was more comfortable around working adults than I was with my fellow elementary school students. Around kids and teachers I was very quiet, less interested in the kinds of questions they wanted me to ask than in those I really wanted answers to. The practical aspects of how things worked in the real world were of more immediate concern than whether you used “I” or “me” in a sentence. I remained a kind of introvert through high school, which somehow must have increased interest in me among the female student body. I wasn’t aggressive about pursuing girls but was never short of dates.

  As I got older, I began helping my father in the buildings he managed. I enjoyed the work, but the best part was that I got to read all the magazines the tenants discarded. The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post were among my favorites. I managed to earn some change running errands for tenants, and when I was old enough, I got a newspaper route. Here was one great advantage of apartments over widely spaced houses: I could deliver nearly five hundred papers on a Sunday morning, and the money I earned looked like a small fortune to me.

  Once I got into the upper grades, I started enjoying school more, too. I played a lot of football and was on a championship dodgeball team, and I even liked some classes, especially science and history. And even though I was getting up at five every morning to deliver papers, I still had enough stamina to go to a lot of parties and after-school events.

  I got along well with my father and felt a little bad for him at the same time because I thought he was getting the short end of the stick from my mother’s family. That was on account of Uncle Rudy, my mother’s brother, better known as Dr. Richard Renner. My mother’s family had struggled through some very difficult times to put him through medical school, and a
fter he’d become a doctor, he became the family’s pride and joy. He founded a prestigious hospital in Cleveland and was one of the city’s more visible and esteemed VIPs. Next to Uncle Rudy, it was impossible for Dad to measure up, and although he kept well hidden any resentment he might have felt, I had trouble doing the same. It wasn’t until much later in my life that it occurred to me to wonder whether my father’s constant struggle with severe ulcers might have had something to do with the stress of living in Uncle Rudy’s shadow.

  Dad and I saw each other a good deal because we were working together, and we also went to a lot of ball games. Which is not to say we were a pair of good old buddies on an equal level. He kept a pretty firm grip on me, and he didn’t kid around. One wild weekend I got a tattoo of a snake on my right arm, and managed to keep it hidden from him for nearly a year. When he found out about it, he threw a serious fit. You know the conventional wisdom that says you can’t remove a tattoo? Bullshit, even in the days before lasers. Dad dragged me to a doctor on 105th Street who froze my arm with dry ice and then took a high-speed rotating wire brush to my skin. That night as I was hurting and bleeding, all I could think about was that I’d have to go through it again after the first treatment healed. It ended up taking three scrapings altogether, removing every trace of not only that tattoo but also any desire I might ever have to get one again. I had to pay the doctor out of my own pocket, too. I generally behaved myself because of Dad and didn’t start fucking up in earnest until high school.