Gangster Redemption Read online

  “I was sitting at the kitchen table with my wife, and I thought, Fuck this shit. It’s too much work. I’m making too much money. This fucking place has got to go. I’ll get the insurance money.’”

  Lawton decided the way to get rid of it was to burn it down. He didn’t know what he was doing, and he had no idea how good the fire marshals were, and they are good. His first attempt was to try to light the ceiling on fire, “just fooling around to see if it would light.” Lawton held the lighter up to the asbestos ceiling, but it only made a mark.

  Then he told himself, Okay, on Sunday I’m going to do it. The pizza parlor had an alarm system. He wondered. What do I do?

  The pizza parlor closed at seven on Sundays. Lawton had arranged to go to a friend’s house with his wife to sit in the Jacuzzi and drink some wine. Lawton’s wife didn’t know he was going to burn it. She never said a word. Lawton never once questioned her loyalty to even question him.

  Before they left the pizzeria Lawton set a garbage can on fire, set the alarm, and walked out. He went to his friend’s house and waited for his beeper to go off telling him what number to call so he could learn his place was on fire.

  “We went into the Jacuzzi, drank wine, talked. I didn’t get a phone call. What the fuck?”

  Later that evening Lawton returned to the pizzeria. There was no sign of a fire. He walked in. The fire had gone up the wall, but had gone out. Nothing else caught on fire. So he took a lighter, and he lit the pizza boxes piled in the back of the restaurant. He put the alarm back on, walked out, and drove home.

  Fifteen minutes later he got a call. “Your pizzeria is on fire.”

  “I drove down to the pizzeria, and the whole plaza was ablaze,” said Lawton. “Fire trucks were everywhere. The smoke from the fire wiped out four other stores. There was a beverage store, an insurance place, and a barbeque restaurant. I wiped them all out of business.”

  “My God, oh my God. My pizza place…”

  The fire adjusters came in, and they talked to Lawton about his insurance. Little did he know that the fire marshals had started an investigation. They discovered three origins of the fire, the one where he hit the ceiling with the lighter just to test it, the one on the side of the wall, and the pizza boxes.

  “So holy fuck, they know it’s arson.”

  But that wasn’t what he was saying to the fire marshals. He told them, “I don’t know who did it. My cook has a code key. The cleaning person has a code key. I have one. My wife has one. A friend has one.”

  “So now the insurance company won’t pay up, and I take them to court. And I lose. And a detective from North Lauderdale tries to get me for arson. He calls my wife in. He says, ‘We know he did it. It’ll be okay. Just tell me…’

  “She kept saying, ‘I don’t know anything. I don’t know anything. I don’t know anything.’ I said the same thing, and eventually they dropped the case.”

  One great irony was that a couple weeks after the fire two of the other store owners approached Lawton.

  “I’m sorry you’re pizza parlor burned down. The good news is that I’m getting my insurance money.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The Daytona $800,000

  After Larry Lawton burned down his pizzeria, he needed to find a legitimate job. How else could he explain his income derived from his bookmaking and loan sharking operations?

  “You have to have something on the books,” he said. “Someone I ran across, a guy I didn’t even know, told me there was a job opening for someone to run a security company.”

  Lawton had always wanted to carry a concealed weapon, using the excuse of wanting to protect himself from anyone trying to rip him off, so he took and passed the test to become a private detective certified by the state of Florida. The license allowed him to carry a gun. It also enabled him to get the job as the operations manager of the University Security Company.

  “University Security was owned by a man by the name of Paul Eidner,” Lawton said. “He was a pretty good guy and we became friends, or at least I thought we were. My secretary used to love to give us both blow jobs, and she liked to eat pussy, so then we’d bring in another broad, so it was a wild time. I loved it.

  “Paul brought me in to work for him at University Security because he saw he was smart and street smart as well. He wanted to do things on the edge, and even over it, but he didn’t have the balls -- things like overbilling, ghost billing, and paying people off.

  All the skills Lawton learned in New York City came into play. He immediately began scamming. First he studied his accounts. University Security did security work for condo associations and hotels, and it also had a contract with the school board of Broward County.

  “The secret of running a security company is to bill as many hours as possible at eight dollars an hour while paying his employees the minimum of $4.25 an hour,” said Lawton. Better yet, Lawton saw, was taking in the eight dollars an hour and not paying anyone anything.

  Lawton went to the Bahia Mar Hotel, where he paid the hotel manager cash under the table to inflate his hours. As part of the deal Lawton was comped a suite at the hotel any time he pleased.

  His most profitable arrangement was with the school board of Broward County. The job of the company was to provide security to the schools, both during the day and also at night.

  “I paid a guy by the name of Russ Cochrane five hundred a week, and for that money he signed off hours for guards that were never there,” said Lawton. “I was getting eight dollars an hour for every hour a guard was on a building. I paid them minimum wage -- $4.25 an hour. If a school had a broken window, it had to put a guard there. Sometimes I’d hire a kid to break windows at school buildings. Now they had to call me for guards. I made a ton of money.”

  Lawton was operations manager in charge of a hundred employees. As a result of his organizational ability – and his scamming -- the security company thrived.

  It was a decent living, but for Lawton it wasn’t good enough, and once Lawton experienced how easy it was to rob the Sunrise, Florida, jewelry store and to dispose of the jewels, he made the decision to make robbing jewelry stores his primary living.

  “The big thing I had learned growing up in the mob life was to never rob something if you can’t get rid of it,” he said. “You always have to have an out. Just like the Johnson Enterprises job. Before we took the merchandise I had met a guy at the Homestretch who had a plumbing company, and he had a contract with the New York Public School System. He was redoing bathrooms, and so he told me he needed pipe, toilets, and urinals. Who else wants to buy a urinal? You have to sell it to someone who wants it. Otherwise the stuff sits in a warehouse and eats up your money.”

  Before he burned his pizzeria, there was a wedding dress store just a couple of plazas away. Lawton noticed that it was closed Mondays. He was in New York at the Homestretch bar during one of his weekend visits, when he began talking to a man who owned a wedding dress store in Brooklyn. A light went off.

  “Do you want some wedding dresses?” asked Lawton.

  “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  “I’m next to a fucking wedding shop.”

  “I’ll give you three hundred a dress.”

  Lawton rented a truck from Ryder and drove it to the back of the wedding shop near his pizzeria. He had walked into the store during business hours, and he saw no evidence of an alarm system.

  “I figured the best way to empty the place would be to go around back and with bolt cutters open up the double doors in the back,” he said. “I put a big crowbar between those double doors, busted it open, and me, Junior, and a flunkie who worked for me took the wedding dresses out on racks. A hundred of them. The whole store. I emptied it. Every dress in the store. There were boxes in the back, but most of the dresses were on racks, and we rolled them right into the truck and drove straight to N
ew York.”

  The Brooklyn store owner owed him $30,000 but only had $25,000 in cash. Lawton didn’t sweat the other five grand.

  “We’re good,” he said.

  Another time a former employee of his called to say he was the security guard at the Miami Convention Center. There was an art show featuring Michelangelo and Picasso paintings.

  “Larry, do you want these pictures? I’m the fucking guard.”

  Lawton said he first had to make some phone calls. He discovered that hot art is difficult to fence because the publicity is great and the uniqueness of the stolen items makes them virtually impossible to sell.

  “I couldn’t get seven cents on the dollar,” said Lawton. “With all the publicity it wasn’t worth doing. Like I said, if you’re going to rob, you better have an out for the stuff.”

  For his jewelry store robberies Lawton had a ready-made outfit to buy the stolen gems. In six years he stole more than fifteen million dollars worth of jewels.

  “Two or three times a year for six years I took home a bag of cash with between seventy grand and a three hundred and fifty thousand in it,” he said. “We’re talking untraceable hundred dollar bills. Who’s got it better than that?”

  Lawton rarely felt remorse about robbing these establishments. The owners ended up with more money than he did after collecting on the insurance, and he knew from personal experience that most jewelry store employees routinely cheated their customers anyway.

  “The diamond business is the biggest crook business in the world – these jewelry store owners rob their customers every day.”

  The reason for that, says Lawton, is that the quality of a diamond is determined by the four Cs – carat size, color, clarity, and cut. The store salesmen, he says, will talk about the first three, but almost never talk about the fourth, the cut, which is actually the most important factor in determining the value of the stone.

  “The cut is the actual geometry of the diamond,” said Lawton. “It shows how light will go into a diamond, bounce off the side wall of the stone, go out the other side, and come up. If you take a real good diamond and put it under a table where there is little light, it will still glare back at you. But most jewelers don’t do that. They show you a diamond under a light, and it doesn’t mean a thing. I can show you a piece of garbage that will glare at you under a light.”

  Lawton says he knows that jewelers do this because several times while he was casing a store he would ask about a particular expensive stone, and he was almost never told about the cut.

  “I’d give my spiel about being a contractor, and tell the guy I wanted to spend about ten grand, and he would sit me down and supposedly teach me about diamonds. Diamonds are all about geometry, but these guys never tell you about the cut. And I would be thinking to myself, He’s robbing me. I want to spend ten thousand, and he’s showing me a stone that’s worth about four grand. It happens every day.

  “A diamond is the third-largest purchase you will ever make after a house and a car,” said Lawton. “Nobody researches how the diamond sellers get them, and few people comparison shop. They go into a store, and they are taken in by the salesman. The customer thinks, This guy is big in the neighborhood. He’s really good. But he’s probably the biggest crook in the neighborhood.

  “He’s like a guy who sells a used car. He’s not going to tell you about the engine that was under water and then fixed. Same principle. It’s a big sales game, and a lot of these jewelry store owners are criminals.”

  *

  The Sunrise robbery had been easy because it was a set up. A methodical man, Lawton with each subsequent robbery figured out better and better ways to do it. He pondered every variable.

  First he had to determine which stores to hit.

  “I would check out fifty stores to find the right location,” he said. “I’d get a phone book and look up the address of all the jewelry stores. The first rule: stay away from any store on MLK Boulevard, because the security at the stores in minority neighborhoods would be way too tight. You go to the high-end part of town.

  “I would then steal a car or rent a car through a neighbor or somebody I knew. I’d say to my neighbor, ‘I’ll give you cash. I don’t have a credit card.’ He’d put me down as the co-driver, and I’d be in business.” The neighbor knew Lawton was in the mob, but he never questioned why he wanted the car. Lawton always paid him three or four hundred more than the actual rental cost.

  Lawton would drive through the city or town, riding around, looking for the perfect score. He’d pick seven or eight possibilities.

  “I was so good that just by riding around I could tell if a robbery could be done,” he said. “I always looked for a store in a plaza with a Publix or a Winn Dixie supermarket or a big box store like Home Depot or Loews, because I could stand out front of the anchor store or sit in my car and watch the jewelry store, and nobody would think anything of it. Who knew what I was doing? I could have been waiting for my wife to come out from shopping.

  “I also looked for a glass window in front of the jewelry store where the sun would be shining in in the morning, so a passer-by couldn’t see in because of the glare. To see what was going on inside, the passer-by would have to put his face up to the glass and cup his eyes. That’s why most of my robberies took place in the morning.”

  Alternatively Lawton wanted the store front window facing east or be obstructed by a jewelry display or maybe even a sale sign. If the window was facing west, he would rob the store as the sun was going down.

  “If the store was at a bad angle or if I didn’t have a situation where I could make a clean getaway, I’d pass it by. This was even before I went inside to scout out whether the store had a decent stash of jewels to rob.”

  “Once I went inside I wanted to see if the jewelry store had a lot of high-end diamonds. Wholesalers or high-end jewelers would have a thin box about two feet long, and inside that box would be small, folded envelopes with the diamonds in there, and very rarely would this box be hidden in the safe. It would be in a separate hiding spot.”

  One reason Lawton wore nice jewelry when he entered a store was to get the owner to bring out that box. Once Lawton saw the jewels in that box, he would calculate the value of that box alone. If the haul was rich enough, a light bulb would go off in his head.

  Lawton usually passed on robbing the stores from national chains because they didn’t have that box.

  “With those stores, if you wanted a diamond, they’d order it for you,” said Lawton. “That’s why I didn’t rob places like Zales or Gordons, though I once did rob a Friedman’s Jewelers. Friedman was a factory store – a store I don’t usually rob. It had no box in the back with loose diamonds. That’s why I only got a crummy hundred and fifty thou from them.”

  Once Lawton determined that the angle of the sun was right, he would then watch to see who worked in the jewelry store, what kind of cars they drove, and what time they came and left. He would case the store for up to a week or more, sometimes following employees home to see how long it would take them to get there. He had their name from the business card given to him, and he got their numbers from the phone book, and sometimes he would even call their homes to make sure they were there.

  “If the guy went back to a shitty apartment, there probably wasn’t much value in robbing that store,” said Lawton. “If he went back to a mansion, I knew a nice score was coming.”

  Lawton chose what he felt was the perfect jewelry store to rob in the city of Daytona, Florida. It was just off the main drag off the circle near the bridge heading toward the beach. There was a park across the street. Sometimes Lawton sat on one of the park benches smoking a cigar and cased the store. The store faced the inter-coastal waterway, but a big sale sign blocked the view into the store from the street. After staking it out, he saw the store had three employees, one of whom left at four in the
afternoon.

  “So from four to six in the afternoon they only had two employees, one less person for me to have to worry about. And from watching I saw that very few people came into the store in the afternoon.”

  Days before the actual robbery Lawton would get dressed up in slacks and a nice sports jacket, and would go into the jewelry store and get to know everyone who worked there. Lawton was an expert at deception. Sometimes he would put on a band aid or he would tint his hair – something to throw off identification by the victims.

  “For this robbery I wore glasses – fake glasses,” he said. “The glasses didn’t have a prescription, but they were nice. They looked good. I wore a Rolex. I had on a $13,000 diamond bracelet. I wore diamond pinky rings. When I’d walk in, the owner would think, This guy has money. I’m going to get a good sale out of this.”

  Lawton walked in, pretending to be browsing.

  “Can I help you?” the owner asked.

  “Yes,” Lawton said, “you can. I’m a contractor building houses in the area. I own a condo. I’ll be here approximately six months building three houses.”

  Lawton tried to pick an area where there was new construction so his story would seem plausible.

  Before entering the store, Lawton sometimes would have business cards made up. Of course, the card would have a phony name, but not a fictional one. The name on the card would belong to a real resident of the area. Before the Daytona robbery Lawton drove along the beach looking for unlived in condos boarded up with shutters.

  “I went into the lobby, found what the number was, and I would get the name of the owner off the board listing the owners. I’d look up the name and get the phone number, and for several days I’d call. The phone would ring and ring, and I kept doing that until I was certain the place was vacant. I then put that name and address on a business card, and I became that person when I went into the jewelry store.”

  Later on Lawton would learn that the FBI had gotten his fictitious name and number from the store owner, and when they checked for the whereabouts of the man on the business card, they discovered the condo owner was in prison. For a while the FBI thought this guy had sent an accomplice to rob the jewelry store.