Crime: The Way It's Done
Whether it's armed robbery or running a brothel, there's a right way and a wrong way.
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BOB: In other words, not one robbery, but one type. If you run around robbing all liquor stores or all supermarkets or all hotels. Our first one was a service station that cashed payroll checks. I happened to be in the place two or three times before when I'd worked as an accountant nearby, but time enough before that the new man wouldn't know me. We looked it over three or four times, we went down and checked it out, and of course we knew he picked up his bank deposits for the bank money on Friday to cash payroll checks Friday night, Saturday and Saturday night, and Sunday. There's a lot of big businesses around there that get paid on Friday and they'd come in there and cash their payroll checks. From being in there before I know approximately what time he came back from the bank. So we just waited for him.
That day he came back and we relieved him of his money in the same bank bag he'd brought it in and we left.
It wasn't a spur-of-the-moment robbery. Nor was it a real planned robbery, I mean one that was rehearsed. We played it by ear. Every robbery—no matter how much you've rehearsed it—you've got things come up you didn't look forward to or into. And you've got to be, I guess you'd call it cool enough to play these things by ear and handle them as you go.
Each one of us has more or less a certain assignment in a robbery. In one particular supermarket we robbed my job was to get the manager and get the money. Ray's job was to keep an eye on everybody else. I was so intent upon this manager when I was getting the money that one of the clerks walked up from the back room and he walked not ten feet from me and I didn't see him. Of course my partner did, and he prceeded right there to take care of him, keep him at bay, so to speak. But I was so intent upon my job there and I know my back was taken care of that I didn't have to worry about anything else that I never seen the man and he wasn't ten feet away from me and almost in my line of sight. I had no idea at all that he was there because it wasn't my job to watch him. That was his job.
RAY: One thing that kept us out of trouble all those years, probably the main thing, was we never once went back to any old hangout. We never went back to the old bunch we used to hang around with.
BOB: You'll find in crime you move in different circles. In other words, when you first start off, you're a working man and you're accustomed to $70 or $100 a week take-home pay, whatever it is. And when you get the extra amount to where you can afford to spend $200 a week, well, you're way up. But it don't last long, maybe six weeks or two months. And then you get accustomed to that $200 and you start looking for something a little bigger and better to hit. Which you do. And then you move up into the $300-a-week spending bracket. And this continues, there's no stoppage. It's a plant that just keeps advancing. And as you advance, your mode of living and your clothes change in accordance with it, and your apartment changes. And you can't go back. In other words, if we went back to the first place we hung out, the first cocktail lounges and stuff when we were making $100 a week, and were going in there in a $500-a-week suit, somebody says, "Mmm, what's going on?" We're driving a new car, wearing new clothes, we got tailor-made clothes on, I got a monogrammed silk shirt on, and right away you get raised eyebrows.
So you got to drop your friends, too. What friends you make at each level, you got to leave at that level. You just disappear. That's what we always did and I think that's one of the things that kept us out of trouble so long.
Of course, at the stage we were living at about the only way we could of got any higher was to rob Fort Knox. But I couldn't find a way to get in there.
RAY: We never even associated with thieves or anything. If we had to have anything to do with them, we did it and that was it. We never ran around with them.
BOB: If we needed a third man or something, we'd call Eddie and Eddie would fix us up with somebody.
RAY: But we never socialized with those people.
BOB: We had a pretty good way of splitting money, Ray and I. We had a drawer in our desk at home and we usually kept about $2,000 in it. We had a safe deposit box too. When he'd go out or I'd go out at night, we'd take what we thought we needed, anywhere from $50 to $200 usually. When we came back in the morning, what was left over we'd put back in the drawer. When the drawer got down to $200, we'd stop down at the bank and bring it up to $2,000 again. And that was it.
I never knew what he spent, and he never knew what I spent. We never knew what we spent. The only thing we discussed is when he wanted to buy his girl a $700 stereo set she wanted, something with stereo hi-fi and FM and tape. Fine. We went down and bought it. And I bought mine an outfit to go out in. And so on. That sort of thing we'd discuss. But our evening's expenses, a date, always ran from $50 up, but usually it wasn't much more than $60 or so. A lot of times we didn't go out, we'd stay together. But that's the way we handled our money. That way we were never worried about "Did he get his cut?" or "Did I get my cut?" or "Is he spending more than me. Really, we didn't know.
When you're going out three or four nights a week, you can't keep track of how much you spend anyway. And there was no reason to bother with it. When we got low, we'd get money from the bank safe deposit box, and when the safe deposit box got low we'd go out and get it filled up.
We got three places in one day one time; I robbed one at eight thirty in the morning and one at two o'clock in the afternoon and he hit one at nine o'clock that night.
RAY: We were busy that day.
BOB: We were in three different parts of town. Three different places and three different cars. All three of those places had the money on the same day and it was either hit them now or wait a week. Financially we couldn't wait, so he hit one and I hit the other two. Boom, boom, boom. I was tired that night. It takes a lot of energy.
RAY: It does. There's a certain strain that you feel physically when it's over with.
Red
I LIKE CREDIT CARDS.
I could take one of your cards and go down the street with it here and make $400 or $500 in a couple of hours. As long as it don't have a picture on it. You know, something like an Enco card. You just go around buying tires and stuff like that and reselling them. You resell them at the next station.
Diner's Cards and American Express, they're no good because they've got the owner's signature on them, but a lot of cards don't. I got one guy's wallet once and it had about forty-five of those cards in it and a lot of them were unsigned even though there was a space, so I just signed there so the signatures matched.
I used that batch for about sixty days and it was worth—for my part of it—about $18,000. The FBI brought the cards in for me to identify and those onionskin papers measured about 123/4 inches high. That's a lot of those papers.
I got everything from watches to a girl. I was in the Hilton in Los Angeles and spent $75 on a girl there and got $4.25 change off of her. That's the way they operate there. They'll come up to your room with a voucher—they check to see if you've checked in on a credit card—and they just bring the voucher up there and write the card number in the space and fill out some money and you sign it.
This guy had good cards, all of them. One had an airplane rental thing, and he has a gas card for every kind of gas company I ever heard of. Even those little old DX cards. He had a Sohio card too and that's one of the best cards you can get. It covers lots of stations and you can travel with it.
I had a girl with me and I'd drive up to a service station and I'd put a story on these service station men. I'd say, "I just picked up this broad and she's on the make and I need a little cash. I can't write a check, so how about putting me down for four or five tires and giving me $70 or $80 and you just keep the tires." They do that. And we'd do it for eight hours a day.
Big Sal
I HAD A WHOREHOUSE ON Hardy Street in Houston. And I pushed dope, I had pills, I had weed. Anything you want, just come to Sal's. That was the rumor around town. But, hell, there was a dope connection on every corner, it wasn't nothing to have dope. So I run that whorehouse. It was a real big house on Hardy Street. I had nine girls. And I had a payoff. It was $125 a week.
I was real funny about that. The Federal man came down here when I got my time and tried to get me out and testify against the men that I had the payoff with. I told him, "I don't know what you're talking about." These same policemen had helped me get out of a lot of scrapes, because I did them a favor by saving their reputation as policemen. And what good would it have done me to send somebody, even a policeman, to the penitentiary?
I've never been bitter toward the police. Hell, if we didn't have police we'd have an animal world. Really. We've got an animal world anyway. Dog eat dog.
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