Gangster Redemption Read online

  During the robbery two customers walked into the store. Larry always looked good, so he walked up to the customers, who had no idea a robbery was taking place, put the gun to them, and said, “This is a robbery. Come with me.” He walked them to the back of the store and tied them up. Two more came in, and he tied them up. Then two more, and two more, and two more, until he had ten people tied up lying on the floor of the jewelry store. He was running out of flex cuffs, so when the last two customers came in, he was able to tie their hands, but not their legs. He told them not to move if they knew what was good for them.

  Each time customers came in, he would ask them, “Is anyone waiting in the car for you? Do you have to be anywhere?” Each time the answer was no. And then he’d tell them, “Close your eyes, and don’t you open them. If I catch you with your eyes open…” Lawton never put a gag in anyone’s mouth. He didn’t want anyone choking to death.

  “I never wanted to hurt anyone, ever,” he said.

  In all his robberies Lawton took jewelry off a customer only once. If a woman was wearing a wedding ring, he never touched it. But on this day one of the customers became belligerent. He started talking big, and so Lawton, wanting to make sure he wasn’t a police officer, pulled the guy’s wallet out of his pocket. There was no badge inside.

  The customer was wearing a gold bracelet, and Lawton took it off and looked at it to see whether it was really made of gold. It wasn’t, and it infuriated him.

  “You phony piece of shit coming in here like you’re a big shot,” said Lawton. “You have fake fucking jewelry, you prick.” Lawton threw the bracelet back at him. One of the tied-up girls working in the store from behind the counter began to laugh.

  Lawton, concerned that someone might be waiting for one of the tied-up customers, reminded himself to get going.

  I have to get out of here, Lawton said to himself. He and his accomplice emptied the place of jewels, went out the back door, and kept driving all the way to New York.

  After his third heist it occurred to him that if he didn’t learn something about the value of diamonds, he would leave himself open to being cheated. There’s a school in Manhattan called the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) that teaches everything you’d ever want to know about diamonds. Lawton couldn’t risk enrolling officially, but he was told that one of the teachers at the school taught a class for anyone who didn’t want it known he was taking his classes. The instructor taught in his apartment three nights a week for two weeks. There were six other “students” in Larry’s class where Larry earned his master’s degree in diamonds.

  It was in this class that Larry learned about the importance of the cut of a diamond.

  “He’d pull the felt out, and he’d show you how different diamonds are cut,” said Lawton. “He demonstrated a round diamond, an oval diamond, and a princess cut. He explained why a round diamond was worth more than a marquis – it’s easier to resell.

  “The cut of the diamond is measured geometrically. 5.6 is a perfectly cut round diamond. A good diamond will have six facets.

  “He showed us how the reflection of light works into a diamond. He took a diamond and put it under a table where there was no light.

  “‘If it still reflects,’ he said, ‘it’s a good cut.’

  “He also taught us about color. The range starts at D and goes all the way up the alphabet scale. The lower the letter, the better it is. He showed us how a diamond expert can hide a chip. They are slick. They’ll hide it under a facet or put filler in there to hide it. But with the proper cut you can make an F diamond look like a D. I’ve seen one two-carat diamond ring go for $7,000 and another one go for $100,000. Same size, but a different cut, clarity, and color.”

  His education complete, Larry Lawton then discovered the mother lode of jewelry stores, H. Stern Jewelers located in the Fontainbleu Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. He paid the store a visit, masquerading as a wealthy contractor, and after a quick inventory, he determined the store held twelve million dollars in diamonds and jewelry.

  This is my store, Lawton told himself. It had so much inventory Lawton decided he needed to talk to his fence before doing anything further. The fence was well-aware of H. Stern Jewelers. Lawton told the Genoveses, “It’s between ten and twelve million, and I’m going to get my forty percent. I want four million for the job.”

  They agreed. The deal provided that he would get a million dollars up front, and a million every two months until he was paid off. They also advised him that if he pulled it off, he’d have to leave Florida for a while, because the heat would be too great.

  Lawton began casing the store from a piano bar across the hotel lobby, watching to see who was coming in and out. In the mornings he would act like a hotel resident. He’d put on his bathing suit, and he’d walk through the hotel to the pool, and as he slowly walked around pretending to be a hotel guest, he watched to see when the employees came and when they left. He saw that the store manager arrived thirty minutes before the guard to open the store. Two other employees didn’t come in until after the guard arrived, he saw. He would have a thirty-minute window of opportunity. Lawton needed to be out of the store before the guard arrived.

  Lawton suspected the store had a time lock on the safe. If there was one, he would have to wait until the manager opened up the safe in the morning. Lawton watched every morning as the store manager put the jewels out for display. Because of the time lock, Lawton couldn’t do this job at night. If anyone tried to open it earlier than the regular time, a silent alarm would go off, and the police would be right behind it. The only way he could pull this job off, he saw, was to kidnap the manager at his home at night and go with him to open the store in the morning.

  To find out where the store manager lived, one evening Lawton followed him from the Fontainbleu in Miami Beach north on I-95 to his home in Hollywood. After he saw where the manager lived – a nice house in a nice area -- he went and bought the supplies to carry out the rest of his plan.

  “I went and bought sticks that I painted to look like dynamite,” said Lawton. “I bought a clock and some wires. What I was going to do was enter his house at night and kidnap the guy. I was going to stay with him all night, strap the ‘dynamite’ to him, and take him with me. While I did that, I was going to have my accomplice guard his wife and daughter. My accomplice would have a walkie talkie.

  “I was going to tell the manager, ‘Listen, you’re coming with me. If you make one foolish move and this guy doesn’t hear from me, he’s going to kill your family even if I get caught. He’s going to kill your wife and kid? Is it worth it?’

  “I was going to strap the fake dynamite on him before we got into the car, and I’d tell him, ‘If you do anything stupid, I’m going to run from here and blow you up. If you try to have a traffic accident with me, and the cops come, I’m going to walk away and blow you up. If you’re in the car and I see you make any move to attract attention from the cops, I’m going to get out and blow you up. And your family will be dead.’

  “I figured since he was only the store manager, it wasn’t his diamonds, and he’d give them up.’

  “I wasn’t really going to kill anyone. After robbing the diamonds, I was going to call my accomplice and say, ‘Leave.’ I’d be out of Florida on my way to New York before anybody knew what hit him.”

  His four million cut was going to be Lawton’s retirement score. He had no worries about the Genoveses stiffing him. Dominick Gangi’s cut was $400,000, and there would have been a mob war if the Genoveses tried something funny and didn’t pay.

  The night before the planned robbery, Lawton and his accomplice, carrying his bag of props ready to go, waited in the bushes of the store manager’s home. The robbery was a go. The plan was to knock on the door, and when the manager opened the door, rush in and take him and his family hostage.

  Lawton’s heart was racing. This was
to be his biggest score, but it also was his most dangerous. So much could go wrong. As he and his accomplice crouched outside the home, a neighbor came walking by with his dog, who growled at them.

  “And that spooked me,” said Lawton. “Call it a gut feeling.”

  The growling of the dog broke the spell. Lawton in an instant decided the plan was too risky, and he called it off.

  “And luckily that happened, because kidnapping is a crime that has no statute of limitation.”

  *

  Though he passed on the $4 million from the H. Stern job, Larry still had enough money to become King of Fort Lauderdale. His two favorite passions were sex and gambling, and with the money from his jewel robberies, he had hundreds of thousands of dollars to indulge himself with both.

  “I was living the good life. I’d go out every night. I had a wife at home, I was getting blow jobs from my secretary, I had a gumada, a girl friend, I had a gorgeous hooker, Teresa, and I’d be banging other broads all day. I had orgies with couples, and I don’t know how I did it.”

  He indulged his every whim.

  “I went fishing. I went scuba diving. I did all of that. If I wanted something, I bought it. I had a gold Rolex, gold chains. I had one chain on my arm that spelled out L-a-r-r-y in diamonds. I had it all. That’s why when I went and robbed jewelry stores, I looked good, and they thought, He has money.”

  His neighbors knew Lawton was in the mob, but they didn’t seem to care. Every Fourth of July he would throw a party for a thousand people. It was called Larry’s Fourth of July Block Party. The entire block was closed down.

  ”I hired a ride company that brought The Whip, The Bounce House, a trackless train, and a bunch of rides,” he said. “The mayor – I was the godfather to his son -- and other city officials came. I had so much pull with the city that they brought Port-a-Potties. They shut the street off. No permits. The fire truck came, and they don’t usually bring the fire truck to parties. I had it brought there for the kids. I had clowns painting kids’ faces. I had Barney the Purple Dinosaur. I had a band and a DJ. I supplied ten kegs of beer, forty cases of soda, a thousand hot dogs, a thousand hamburgers, and six hundred ears of corn. I held a car show. All free for the neighborhood. I didn’t want any money, no donations. And I even donated money to charity. I knew a radio disk jockey, Larry Brewer from Melbourne, a city where my parents lived, and I’d say to him, ‘Tell me a home for abused kids that’s in need,’ and he would tell me, and I would go to Toys R Us and I’d buy two thousand dollars worth of toys for the children in the house. One time I visited the home and saw the kids didn’t have sneakers, and I bought them all sneakers.

  “I was generous, and people called me Robin Hood. The neighborhood knew I was in the mob. They knew I didn’t work, had all the money in the world. They assumed I was a drug dealer, which I wasn’t. No one knew exactly what I did, which was the way I wanted it.”

  Lawton still had the bug for gambling and loved the action at the casinos. He traveled to the Bahamas, Las Vegas, and Atlantic City to gamble.

  “I would go to all of these places comped. Once at the casinos in the Bahamas I lost $10,000 in twenty minutes, all the money I brought. I called Fat Tony, my right hand man. I had a safe in my house, and I always kept big money there. My wife didn’t even have the combination to the safe. That’s just the way we did it. My buddy, Fat Tony, had it.

  “‘Tony, go to the safe. Get ten thousand. Send Junior on a plane down here with the ten thousand.’

  “Junior was there the next morning. And I went back to gambling.”

  Lawton had carte blanche at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. They’d fly him first class from anywhere. Any time he was in Brooklyn and wanted to go, the casino would send a limousine for him. Two of the jet setters Lawton gambled with were Roger King of King World Productions and Pete Rose, baseball great and addicted gambler.

  “I was getting the suites on the 49th floor. Roger King was getting the penthouse, with butlers and cooks. Oprah Winfrey used to work for him. I used to do coke with him up in his room, and I’d gamble with him in the casino in the high roller pit.

  “One time Roger and I were in the high roller pit, and we were drunk on Dom Perignon. He always had guys with him, like I did. He told one of his guys, ‘Go to the cage and cash these chips in.’ They were worth about $250,000. The guy came back and said, ‘Mr. King, they want your ID.’

  “‘Fuck my ID. He’s not getting my ID. I’ll buy this place and fire fucking Trump.’ He started climbing up on a chair.”

  ““Roger, get down,” Lawton said to him.

  “Cameras were all over the place, but nobody said a word,” said Lawton. “The pit bosses and dealers were looking at him. If you’re a big shot, they don’t care what you do. All they want is your money.

  “I would do coke out of little bottles right in the casino, even though there were a zillion cameras. If you’re a big gambler, they don’t care.

  “I met Pete Rose through Roger. What a fucking junkie gambler Pete was. One night Roger, Pete, and I were up in my hotel suite playing gin for a hundred dollars a hand. Pete didn’t care what the game was. He just wanted to gamble.

  “Pete’s a competitor. I knew he gambled right from the beginning. But he gambled on his own team to win. He never bet against his team. He wanted to win at all costs. He was wrong, because he might let his pitcher go a couple more innings. You’re not looking at the bigger picture. But he was such a competitor. I never met a competitor like him. He’d bet roulette, blackjack, gin. He’d bet on two cockroaches walking up a wall. He didn’t care what you played. He wanted to gamble. He had a real disease.”

  Lawton’s riches also allowed him to indulge in his every whim. As a child Lawton had been small, so small that at age 12 his grandfather sent him to Florida for a couple of weeks so he could learn how to become a jockey. Lawton always had a fondness for horses, and one afternoon while at home he was watching the movie Lonesome Dove, when he called up his associate Fat Tony and said to him, “Get the car. We’re going to buy a horse.”

  “What track are they running at?” he asked.

  “Not a race horse. A horse,” said Lawton.

  “What track?”

  “No, it’s a riding horse, you fucking nut.”

  “A trotter?”

  “Shut up. Get over here with the car.”

  Fat Tony drove over and picked Lawton up. They were in a Cadillac, and they drove to the Triple Cross ranch in Davie, Florida. Lawton had seen the sign: We sell horses. The three crosses out front made it looks like a KKK Ranch, but it was actually a ranch owned by devout Christians.

  “We went in the back to see a guy by the name of Mike Fletcher, who was a championship bronc rider. Here came two guys with New York accents dressed in slacks and two hundred dollar loafers in a Cadillac. Can you imagine what he must have been thinking?”

  “‘Listen, I’m looking to buy a horse,” Lawton said.

  “‘Are you for real?”

  “‘If I buy a horse, you have to show me how to ride it. I haven’t been on a horse since I was 12.”

  “‘Okay.”

  Said Lawton, “I went looking for one horse, and he ended up selling me two horses – I couldn’t ride alone. I bought two saddles, a trailer, the whole fucking thing – ten thousand dollars later. In cash. And then I gave him $600 a month to board the horses and muck the stalls, and if I came down, to saddle them. Sometimes I’d get stoned on coke or weed and ride around like a nut. But I loved the horses. All because I watched that movie, Lonesome Dove.”

  “What are you going to buy next?” Fat Tony wanted to know.

  The answer: a boat. There’s an expression: the two best days of a person’s life is when he buys a boat and when he sells it. Too bad Lawton had never heard that expression.

  Lawton had a buddy named
Nicky who owned a gas station in Brooklyn. Nicky was a mobster, and he brought Lawton to a wholesale dealer who sold him a twenty-six-foot cabin cruiser at the auction. Lawton attached the boat and trailer to his new van for a trip to scenic Lake George.

  They got on the highway, and the first thing that happened was that an axle on the trailer snapped, and one of the tires fell off. Luckily the boat didn’t come off the trailer.

  “Here we are sitting on the side of the road not knowing what to do,” said Lawton. “We called a tow service, and they towed the boat and trailer on a flat bed to a repair place, where it cost me a thousand backs to fix it.”

  Continuing on the trip it turned out that Lawton hadn’t hooked the trailer up right. They hit a bump, and the trailer came off the hitch, landing on the roadway, making a deep gouge in the tarmac, and when Lawton hit the brakes, the boat kept going and smashed into the back door of his new van. Fortunately, the chains held, saving the boat..

  Lawton stopped, and he and his three cohorts put the hitch back on and drove to Lake George in his dented van.

  “We got the boat to Lake George,” he said. “We rented an island there. It was a chance to get away. We put the boat in the water, headed towards our island, but we didn’t open up the sea water valve, and we burned up the motor. The boat actually caught fire.

  “We put the fire out, got towed back, and it cost another $4,500 to fix it. We went back to the island, and we had a good time, but I ended up getting a ticket for not having a spotter in the boat while someone was water skiing. What a fucking disaster!”

  The camping trip cost Lawton ten thousand dollars. He was so disgusted that when he got back to Brooklyn, he got rid of everything, including the boat and the new van.

  *

  Lawton worked at his jewelry store robbing business six weeks a year. Whenever his bankroll would drop below $40,000, he knew it was time to get back in the car, discover America, and find a new jewelry store to rob.