True Crime
Journalists around the nation wanted access to Todd Becker, the all-American dad who also ran a safe-stealing ring, but only executive editor Skip Hollandsworth got him to talk.
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SH: It just seems like something out of fiction: this young fastidious father, who rarely drank and who didn't do drugs and who sang hymns at church, teaming up with his roguish relatives and a high school friend. "Why," I kept asking myself as I started to research the story, "would someone who by all accounts was so nice, so pleasant, and sometimes so corny with his old-fashioned birthday parties for his kids, want to work with relatives who inhabited the seedier side of life, who liked to sit in bars with neon signs out front, the kind of places where your eyes need about sixty seconds to adjust to the darkness when you walk inside?" What I realized was that he didn't quite know where else to turn. After all, he didn't associate with other criminals. He didn't hang out in criminal haunts. He had this odd altruistic streak—a desire to give others a leg up so they could live a better life like the one he had created for himself. I also think once the professional relationship began, Todd felt guilty at the idea of abandoning his friends and relatives in favor of more professional accomplices. Even when he realized these guys could bring him down, he stuck with them. He had this strange kind of loyalty to them, this belief that he could transform them. I'm not going to give away what happens in the end of the story, but in a tragicomic twist, he does exactly that.
texasmonthly.com: It's interesting that on Sunday nights he liked watching The Sopranos, the HBO series about a crime family in New Jersey.
SH: Just like Tony Soprano in the television show watched the Godfather movies, so too did Todd and his wife, Cathy, sit down to watch The Sopranos. I've often thought that Todd's story was a kind of clean-cut Yuppie version of The Sopranos without the violence. But it also deals with the same issues of American values and moral ambiguities and the American idea of success. It deals head-on with questions about family, community, crime, and ethics. As fascinating as Todd's story was, for instance, I found it equally fascinating the way the neighborhood dealt with him after his arrest.
texasmonthly.com: How so?
SH: Even when the news broke that Todd was a professional burglar, most people didn't scorn him. They still saw him as one of them—a guy who, like everyone, bends the rules a little to stay afloat in an upper-middle-class world, but who nevertheless loves his family and tries like hell to do what is best for them. He wasn't perfect. But neither were they. And he did live with old-fashioned values, which meant a lot. What's more, I think some of the neighbors who lived oppressed suburban lives quietly admired the fact that he had such courage to try something so risky. Here was this guy who by day lived the very kind of lives they did. But then at night he turned himself into a kind of modern-day Western desperado, stealing safes the way the old frontier bandits used to steal safes from stagecoaches or trains. He was like Sam Bass, the famous Texas outlaw of the 1870's who created a gang that robbed trains. Bass (like Becker) was admired because he never wanted anyone to get killed or hurt to get his loot. And Bass (like Becker) was only caught because a member of his gang betrayed him.
texasmonthly.com: What did you think of Cathy, Todd's wife?
SH: Some people speculated that she was the Bonnie to Todd's Clyde. Not true. She didn't participate in the crimes, but she certainly knew about them. She talked to me about lying in bed on those nights Todd was gone, terrified that the cell phone was going to ring and that Todd would be telling her to get the bail money ready, that the police were on his tail and about to bring him down. In one sense, she wanted a different life. But in another sense, she had made a Faustian bargain with herself. She had decided to ignore Todd's other life in order to stay in the Stonebridge Ranch world. What's interesting is the sympathy the other wives felt for her after Todd's arrest. They, too, had made their own lesser Faustian bargains: staying with their husbands whom they no longer loved or giving up their budding careers in order to raise their families. One of the more interesting anecdotes about Cathy that didn't get into the story because of a lack of space was the support group she found after Todd's arrest. She met other wives for lunch who told her that their own husbands had served time in prison for various white-collar crimes. Over soups and salads, she learned details about how to handle the home while Todd was gone and how to talk to the children about why their Daddy was going away.
texasmonthly.com: What do you think will happen to Todd and Cathy?
SH: Cathy has decided not to move and start over somewhere else. She loves Stonebridge Ranch too much. She has taken a job as a realtor and is staying in the house, because that's where she wants the children to be raised, regardless of what kind of stories they hear about their father at school. Todd will be out in five years and he says he will come right back to Stonebridge Ranch and start over. He says he's not going to go back to crime—if you want to see what he plans to do, read the next-to-last paragraph of the story—but some police investigators think prison will only make him a smarter criminal. After all, they say, he'll get a chance to talk about burglary techniques with other inmates. I don't know what he'll do. One thing I can guarantee: If he does go back to burglary, he'll use a new set of accomplices. The old Becker Crew is gone forever.
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