Gangster Redemption Read online

  His biggest score came after Lawton drove around the wealthy Maryland suburbs of Washington DC, scouting jewelry stores. He settled on one in an area near Tyson’s Corners. The jewelry store he was casing was closed on Monday, so on that day Lawton drove to Washington to visit the White House and do some sightseeing.

  “I’m a history buff,” he said. “Did you know I can name you forty-four presidents? I can name you every president who got killed in office, and who killed him. Eight died in office. Four were assassinated. I know who the longest serving was. The tallest. The fattest. I’m kind of a savant. I can tell you how many countries there are in the world, their capitals, the smallest, the largest, and their populations. I love history, and that’s why I went to the White House.

  “I went to the White House with my binoculars, and when I was looking up on the roof, I saw one of the secret service guys looking down on me with his binoculars.

  “It was winter. A cold day, so I wore a jacket. I always made sure I had on a nice leather jacket or a long coat that makes you look like a businessman. The coat I wore that day was one of the long coats given to me by the Coast Guard.”

  The store near Tyson’s Corners was perfect because there was construction going on in the mall plaza which made it harder to see into the window of the jewelry store. In front of the store was a boardwalk made of wood.

  “The store had display cases in the window, but they were covered in felt so you couldn’t see what was in there from outside the store,” said Lawton. “That’s good for me. That store was made to be robbed.”

  The owner of the store was a wholesaler, Lawton’s preferred target. These were the jewelers who sold to other jewelry stores. The store owner in Maryland was selling to all the little guys all around him. As soon as the store owner showed Lawton his box of loose diamonds, Lawton knew this was going to be a big score.

  “The Maryland job was a two-man job. My accomplice was in the car. We stayed in a shitty motel – I always stayed in shitty motels, and I kept a low profile.

  “I knew when I entered the store that there were two employees, a guy and a girl. First I took down the guy. The girl wasn’t going to give me any trouble. I tied them up with flex cuffs, pulled the bags out of my stomach, started filling them up, and then I walked right out the back into a construction site – a perfect spot. When there’s a construction site, no one questions a thing when they see a car.

  “I put the jewels in the car, and away I went. I always wished I was a fly on the wall so see how long it took them to get out of the flex cuffs and for the cops to arrive.

  “I drove straight to Brooklyn, my typical MO. It was only about a six-hour trip. I called my fence on the way and told him I was coming.

  “See you tomorrow at one.” I stayed in a shitty, little motel in Jersey just across from the George Washington Bridge. I took the jewelry out, spilled it out on the bed, and looked at what I got. By this time I knew quite a bit about diamonds, and I could see this was quite a haul.

  “I brought them the diamonds the next day at one sharp, and they handed me $400,000 in hundred dollar bills. That meant the jewels had been worth $1.1 million at least. I got my usual, around forty cents on the dollar.

  “As I told you, I would always put my money aside for Dominick off the jump street. He got $50,000 in his envelope, and then I would pay off my crew. My accomplice made $70,000 for that robbery.

  “I came home and counted my $300,000 on the coffee table. I told my wife, ‘You can keep anything under a fifty.’ There were fives, tens, and twenties sometimes because sometimes I’d steal cash out of the jewelry store’s register. Sometimes I’d get as much as two thousand dollars in small bills. I gave her five grand one time, and she loved it. I’d tell her, ‘Go buy whatever you want.’ She never wanted for money.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The Single Life

  While Larry Lawton was living the life in southern Florida, his wife Roselyn was feeling neglected and unhappy, and with good reason. As a mob wife, Roselyn didn’t dare question Larry’s comings and goings. Larry had several laws he laid down for the marriage. Among them: when he was away Roselyn was never to check up on him, never to call to find out where he was, and never to even beep him.

  “If I was out, I was out,” said Lawton. “And I’d come in at all hours. She stood up for me during the pizza fire incident. She was a good mob wife.

  “If you can’t control your wife, nobody is going to trust you to control anything else. And I knew that. Some guys couldn’t do it. I could. Roselyn never called the Homestetch or came in unexpected. That was the law.”

  But there reached a point where Roselyn couldn’t stand the empty feeling of abandonment and powerlessness any longer.

  Larry had flown up from Florida to Brooklyn with his brother David, Fat Tony, and another crew member named Mike to celebrate Fat Tony’s thirtieth birthday. They went to the Taj Majal to gamble.

  What a night it was. Larry hooked up with gambling buddy Roger King, the owner of King World. King, the distributor of Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and Oprah Winfrey, was betting ten thousand and twenty thousand dollars a hand in blackjack.

  “That’s when I realized what real money was,” said Lawton, who was betting a thousand dollars a hand.

  They attended a prizefight between heavyweights Burt Cooper and Michael Moorer. Lawton was sitting in the third row. Roger, one of the backers of Moorer, was ringside. Before the fight Roger introduced Lawton to Donald Trump, the owner of the Taj Mahal, who was also sitting at ringside.

  Larry and Roger bet on the fight. Larry bet an orange and white chip – a thousand dollars -- on Cooper to win five orange and white chips. When Cooper knocked down Moorer in the first round, Larry smirked at King.

  I’ve just won five grand, thought Lawton, who also realized that five grand to King was just a drop in the bucket.

  But Moorer recovered and knocked out Cooper four rounds later. After the fight the two went back to the high roller pit.

  Larry won $30,000 at the blackjack tables, and the next morning he returned to the tables while waiting for his limo to arrive to take his crew back to Brooklyn. He opened a table in the high roller pit and was betting a thousand dollars a hand. Before he knew it, he was down $30,000 when the limo arrived.

  The night before Larry had picked up a hooker, and they agreed he would take her to the Homestead and put her to work. Before going to the bar, Larry had the limo take him home so he could change clothes. He walked in and walked out without saying a word to Roselyn. He and his crew drove to the bar, and when he returned that night, Roselyn was visibly angry. When he said he was going back out again, she flung a set of keys at him. The keys whizzed by his face and broke a curio cabinet filled with dozens of Precious Moments figurines. Larry turned, glared at her, and walked out. As far as he was concerned, their marriage was over.

  Roselyn, badly in need of companionship, demanded that they move back to Brooklyn so she could be closer to her parents. To placate her Lawton rented her and their young son a three-bedroom apartment on 71st Street and 13th Avenue in Brooklyn. She lived there full-time, and he commuted back and forth from Fort Lauderdale, spending Saturdays with his wife and son, and Sundays with the mobsters at the Homestretch.

  In 1992 Larry and Roselyn divorced. Roselyn had grown up in Brooklyn around the mob life, and she knew all too well that if Larry stayed on his chosen path, he would end up in prison or worse, and she didn’t want that for her son.

  They had money, and she pleaded with him to leave Florida and open a liquor store in Brooklyn. Larry thought about it. He knew he had enough mob connections that he wouldn’t be shaken down like most liquor store owners in Brooklyn, but Larry was drawn to the mob life in a big way and just couldn’t break the ties. By the time of their divorce Roselyn was so bitter that she refused to allow Larry to see their three-year-old son
.

  Larry went to see Willie the Weeper.

  “When you’re in the mob, you don’t go to lawyers,” said Lawton. “You go to your mob friends.”

  “Willie,” Lawton said. “I want to see my son. Fuck all these people. I don’t care what the protocol is. This is my son. I want to see him.”

  Willie knew that Larry was half nuts and feared for what he might do.

  “Calm down,” said Willie. “Let me call Lenny and set something up.” Lenny was Larry’s father in law.

  Willie told Lenny, “Larry needs to see his son. I don’t want any problems around here.”

  Willie set up a meeting with Larry and Lenny at a Greek diner at 65th Street and 7th Avenue. On this corner a lot of mob guys hung out and went for coffee or a quick meeting, and left.

  They sat down for coffee. They made small talk, but there was no talk about what Larry was doing in the life, because Lenny well knew the life.

  Lenny’s parting words were, “Larry, come pick up your son tomorrow morning at eight.”

  Said Larry, “He didn’t even ask his daughter, because he knew it was the right thing to do.”

  *

  With his wife out of the picture, Larry proceeded to remodel his Florida house into a luxurious bachelor pad. He made the room upstairs into a gym with mirrored walls and a rubber mat floor. He bought a pool table with a hanging light, installed a nine-foot bar, and paid ten grand for a sophisticated sound system with five separate zones which could be controlled by a box in the living room. The parties at his house were legendary. He found any excuse to host a party. He celebrated every holiday – Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Flag Day, even Martin Luther King’s Birthday. He bought a sixty-inch TV set, and invited all his friends to watch the championship fights on pay-for-view TV. More than anything, there were girls.

  “I was a bachelor, and I liked it that way,” said Larry. “Not that I wasn’t fooling around when I was married, but it was different now. I had girls every day. This whole time I was living the large life with these girls. I knew all the girls in the bar, all the girls in the strip clubs. I’d bring over nine broads with three guys, and we had wild, wild parties.”

  At times nine naked bodies would be shoe-horned into his three-person Jaccuzzi. It was one long, wild orgy.

  At night Lawton and his buddies went to such clubs as Pure Platinum, Solid Gold, Joseph’s, and Flixx. Larry had a limo and a driver and although Larry didn’t use cocaine to excess, he used the drug to party with girls.

  “Most of the strippers are coke heads, and if you have coke, you can get any stripper you want.”

  He hung with the big shots of Fort Lauderdale. Customers were not supposed to be intimate with the strippers, but Lawton was friends with the club owners, and the bouncers didn’t dare say a word.

  “There’s a champagne room in every strip club,” said Lawton. “It’s where the high rollers go. They get broads to give them lap dances. They’d be naked and sit on your balls and dick, and whatever else you wanted them to do.”

  One time Lawton closed Pure Platinum at two in the morning, and with five girls, the owner, and Larry’s driver, laid an ounce of coke on the bar, took out his credit card, lined the whole ounce up for eight feet, sniffed coke for a few hours and partied, and then headed over to Flixx in Larry’s limo.

  Lawton’s behavior often skirted the law, but up to this time he hadn’t gotten into any major trouble until one night outside a Melbourne nightclub when Larry pulled his Caddy up over a curb and it stuck there. He had been drinking, and when he left the club and tried to leave, he couldn’t move his car. Angry and frustrated, he got out of the car, pulled his gun, which he always carried, and started blasting away at his car in the parking lot. After he put three bullets into the hood, he put the pistol back in his holster, went back to the bar, and resumed drinking.

  “I was crazy,” said Lawton. “I shot up the parking lot, and I ended up getting arrested.”

  While Lawton sat at the bar, four cops entered, their guns drawn. Lawton looked up to see the guns pointed at him. He raised his hands, walked out of the bar, and was searched. When they found the gun he was handcuffed and put in the back of the police car. He had a license to carry the gun, but he was arrested for discharging a fire arm within city limits.

  His parents, who lived in Palm Bay, the city next to Melbourne, bailed him out at four in the morning. His father, a sports junkie, never once questioned him about why he was arrested. Instead he began asking Larry sports trivia questions.

  “He knew I knew I was wrong,” said Lawton.

  Lawton picked up his Cadillac a day later. He noticed the cops hadn’t even checked his trunk.

  “What idiots!” said Lawton. “I could have had a dead body in there.”

  Charged with shooting a gun in public, Lawton had to return to Melbourne for trial. His appearance was scheduled for nine in the morning. He arranged for him, his lawyer, and two friends to go on a sixty-foot Hatteras deep sea fishing boat later that morning.

  Lawton had a good lawyer, who got the charges reduced, and Lawton was given two years probation. The case over, Lawton and his lawyer sped to the docks where the captain and his crew were waiting. On the boat were too prostitutes Lawton had hired for a thousand dollars a day each along with sandwiches and liquor.

  The owner of the boat was showing one of Lawton’s associates how nice his boat was when Lawton pulled up, jumped out of the car, and said, “Let’s go. Let’s get this thing underway.”

  The owner wanted to show Lawton around the boat.

  Lawton, impatient, looked at him with killer eyes and with all he could do to control his temper, told the owner, “I rented this boat. Get the fuck off before I throw you in the fucking water.” The boat captain, who knew Lawton from previous trips and knew he was a big tipper, ran down the ladder and told the owner, “I got this. Let me get under way.” The captain, looking at the two girls, knew he would be taken care of quite nicely.

  The boat took off. Lawton and his associate were in the fighting chairs, and the two beauties were taking off their clothes at the back of boat, showing Lawton and his buddies their comely attributes. The girls were 25 years old and very accommodating. Once out in the ocean, the emphasis wasn’t on fishing

  “While we’re out in the ocean, the girls are blowing guys and fucking everyone,” said Lawton. “I sent a girl to the captain to give him a blow job, and while I was in the fighting chair, I caught a dolphin. I was screaming, and no one was around. They were all down below having sex. I brought the fish in, and it was half eaten by barracudas. Nobody cared. All this was was a party. It’s what we did. That’s the way the life was: broads, good times, and good company.”

  Lawton’s security company, meanwhile, was making big money from all the illegal payoffs he set up, but when he went to the owner and asked for $50,000 he was owed for all his hard work, the owner reneged, saying the company wasn’t making nearly enough money for him to be able to pay him.

  “I thought the owner and I were friends,” said Lawton, “and when he said no, I took it personally.”

  Lawton took the company check book and wrote himself a check for $9,900. He did that because checks under $10,000 weren’t reported to the IRS at that time.

  Said Lawton, “I went to the broad in the bank who I was fucking on the side, and I had her cash the check, because the owner’s signature was on it, which I forged. When this motherfucker found out, he went to the police and filed a complaint. The police put out a warrant for my arrest. I had no idea.”

  Lawton in the interim on a whim went on a seven-day cruise. After playing a round of golf with a couple of buddies, he sidled up to the golf course bar and immediately was captivated by the looks of the bartender.

  “Hey, you’re beautiful,” he said to her. “You want to go on a cruise?”


  “He’s not kidding,” his two buddies said to her. “If he says he’s going to take you on a cruise, he’ll do it.”

  The woman was skeptical at first but then agreed to go. A week later they boarded a cruise ship in Fort Lauderdale, and after one day she made the grievous mistake by admitting that she was falling in love with him. She was giving him google eyes, one thing more than any other that Lawton didn’t want.

  Lawton wasn’t looking for a relationship. He went on the cruise with the idea of meeting a slew of girls. The first night out they had a toga party. Everyone was wearing a sheet that covered their underwear. Lawton had nothing on underneath.

  Lawton and his bartender/date were at the dinner table, when she started to express her feelings for him.

  “She wanted to love me, and all I wanted was sex,” said Lawton.

  When she asked why he was looking at other girls, Lawton went into a rage. He got up from the table, went over to the office of the ship’s steward, and told him, “Get this bitch out of my room. I don’t give a fuck what it costs. Get her her own fucking room.”

  Lawton enjoyed the cruise, partying every night with different girls. Little did he know he was being watched, because of the felony warrant out for his arrest. He was lucky because the night before the ship came into port he threw the bottle of coke which he used with the girls to party into the ocean.

  The next morning the ship pulled into port. At six thirty in the morning Lawton heard a knock at the door.

  “Steward,” a man said. When he opened his cabin door, two custom agents stood there pointing their guns at him. Lawton was one of three passengers they arrested and handcuffed.

  Lawton was standing on the stairs of the ship with the other two under arrest when one of them kept saying, “It’s not me. It’s not me.”

  Lawton told him, “Shut the fuck up. I’m a criminal. I know. It is you.”