Inside Job

by Levinson, Len

  “I did, and since I was the newest man there, I was the first one to get shit-canned.”

  “Sorry to hear that, buddy.”

  “Looks like you’re not doing so well yourself.”

  “Oh, I’m not doing so bad considering I can’t get a job, my wife just left me, and I just got out of jail for aggravated assault against my brother-in-law.”

  “I had to move back with my mother and father. Couldn’t hack the rent anymore. They hassle me morning noon and night about getting a job. My father wants me to work in my uncle’s fruit stand—can you imagine that? Me selling fucking oranges on the street?”

  “I know. It’s unbelievable what’s going on out there.”

  “What’re you doing here anyway?”

  “Reporting my change of address.”

  “I just signed for my check. I’ll wait for you and we’ll go to the Firehouse for a couple of beers, okay?”

  “I haven’t got anything else to do.”

  So they stood in line together, bullshitting about Vietnam, women, and their days at the Police Academy. Finally Brody reached the front. He got the appropriate form, filled it out, and then he and Ricci left for the Firehouse.

  They got there around noon, ordered beer from the bartender, and carried them to a table in back. Then they went to the kitchen and got two hamburgers apiece and a big plate of French fries. Returning to the table, they ate and drank, and commiserated with each other.

  “If I’d have known this was going to happen to me, I would’ve gone the fuck to college on the G.I. Bill, man,” Ricci said. “The one thing they can’t take away from you is a college diploma.”

  “College diplomas don’t mean shit. They got college professors driving taxicabs, for chrissakes.”

  “But it’s better than nothing, which is what we’ve got. A cop can’t get any decent job at the salary level he’s used to. His experience can’t be used anywhere else except in those fucking protection agencies, and you know what they’re like.”

  Brody nodded. “I know. I went to one of them. I almost punched out the motherfucker who was interviewing me.”

  “I went to a couple of them, but I mean, who the fuck wants to be one of those phony cops you see working the Boat Show at the Coliseum, and shit like that.”

  “I know—I’d rather steal than do that.”

  “Me too.”

  “Well, the trouble with stealing things,” Brody said, “is that if you get caught, you go to jail.”

  Ricci sipped his beer. “Some guys don’t get caught.”

  “But most of them do.”

  “Only the dumb ones get caught.”

  “Maybe they’re not dumb. Maybe they’re just unlucky.”

  “Anybody who relies on luck is dumb.” Ricci pushed away his empty hamburger plate and reached for his glass of beer.

  Brody watched him, marveling once more at his resemblance to Al Pacino. They could be twin brothers almost. Brody drained his glass of beer and stood up. “I’ll get another round.” He went to the bartender and got two more glasses of beer, returning with them to the table.

  “Let me ask you something,” Ricci said. “Do you think you’re smart or dumb?”

  “I know how to take care of myself,” Brody replied, sitting down.

  “That’s isn’t what I asked you.”

  “Okay, I’m smart. I admit it. I’m smarter than a lot of people I’ve met who have big jobs and make more money than God.”

  “That’s what I thought. Well, I feel the same way about myself. Let me ask you something else: How pissed off are you?”

  Brody looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean how mad are you?”

  “I still don’t get you, Ricci.”

  “I’ll put it another way. Do you think you’ve been fairly treated by the city?”

  “Fuck no.”

  “Are you mad about it?”

  “Fuck yes.”

  “Mad enough to do something unfair back to the bastards?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like using the special knowledge we have to make a lot of money illegally?”

  Brody looked Ricci in the eye. “Depends what the odds were.”

  “Smart players make their own odds.”

  “Then it’d depend on what the stakes were.”

  “The stakes are limited only by a man’s nerve.”

  Brody lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the air. “I wouldn’t do anything illegal unless there was enough money in it for me to retire in comfort for the rest of my life and never have to worry about anything ever again.”

  “How much would that be?”

  “One million dollars for me.”

  Ricci nodded slowly. “I wouldn’t do it for less than a million either, and you’re right, you’d want to get it all in one shot, because you’d stand a chance of getting away with it if you just did it once, but if you did it twice or three times, you might get careless and fuck up, and the cops would know about you and be looking for you anyway.”

  Brody puffed his cigarette. “That’s right. If Willie Sutton had used all his brains to make one big kill at one big bank, he would never have gone to jail. His problem was that he was crazy. He actually liked robbing banks.”

  “He probably liked prison life, too. Some guys do.”

  “Let me ask you something, Ricci. Are you mad enough?”

  “I’m mad enough and I’m man enough. My life has been ruined. I got no fucking future at all that I’m interested in. I think I’d rather be in jail than be fucked up like this, and I hate the thought of jail.”

  Brody ground his teeth together. “I’m so sick of eating shit this past month that I’m about ready to blow my top. Look at us. We fought the fucking gooks in Vietnam, and what did it get us? They said we were war criminals. When I got off the ship in San Francisco people spat on me. I had my ass on the line for two years over there, and nobody gave a shit. Okay, then I come home, and my military background helps me to get in the N.Y.P.D., which was my dream since I was a little kid. Everything goes all right, I make detective third grade, and choom, all of a sudden I’m on my ass in the street, living in a fleabag rooming house, and I gotta go to court in two weeks for punching out my asshole brother-in-law. I don’t know about you, Ricci, but I’m ready for something. It scares me to be this ready for something, because when I see it coming along I’ll jump on and ride it to the end no matter what.”

  Ricci grabbed Brody’s wrist and looked into his eyes. “Are you mad enough to kill, Brody?”

  “Are you?”

  Ricci’s eyes flashed. “You bet your fucking ass.”

  Brody made a fist. “I’d kill any son of a bitch alive for a million dollars, and his brother too.”

  “And his sister?”

  “And his sister.”

  Both men glared at each other, and let the awareness of their mutual confessions sink in. They’d seen the determination in each other’s eyes, the anger in their faces, and the hatred in their hearts.

  Ricci leaned forward. “Then let’s fucking do something about it!”

  Brody considered that, then said, “What?”

  “A bank.”

  “We’d need two more men at least, which means we’d have to take four million at least, and you’re not going to get that much in one bank hit. Don’t forget, we want to do it all in one shot.”

  “If we can get four million dollars in one shot, that’ll put us up there with the Brinks Robbery and the Purolater caper in Chicago.”

  “I don’t want to be up there with them, because they all got caught. We don’t want to get caught.”

  “But they were professional crooks, and we’re not. We were cops, good cops, and we know the way cops work. We’ve got an edge that no other crook ever had. It’s like having a spy in the Kremlin.”

  “The main thing,” Brody said, “is to figure out an objective that’ll net us four million dollars. We’d both better think about that part firs
t.”

  “Let me ask you something, before I start wracking my brain on this. Are you really willing to go through with this.”

  “Yeah. I’ve had it, Ricci. I really have.”

  “I have too. Let’s shake on it.” He held out his hand.

  They shook hands over their empty hamburger plates.

  “Okay,” Ricci said, “where can we get four million dollars?”

  “Well, one possibility would be the central clearing house bank of one of the big bank chains. If we could somehow go in at night, and break open their main vault. We’d need a lot of high explosives.”

  “We’d have to get away fast. A helicopter.”

  “How do we get a helicopter?”

  “Steal one.”

  “Who’s going to fly it?”

  “We’ll get somebody.”

  Ricci nodded. “Okay, no problems so far. Which bank?”

  “Why not Chase Manhattan? I read in the paper that they fucked the city most over the municipal bond issue.”

  “Okay, we’ll have to reconnoiter it first. When do you want to do that?”

  “Why not first thing tomorrow? We’ll put on suits and go to town. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Chapter Twelve

  At ten in the morning the next day, Brody and Ricci walked into the main branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank at one Chase Manhattan Plaza in the Wall Street area. They wore topcoats and suits, but somehow they didn’t look like business executives. They were a little too tall, a little too broad.

  The long row of tellers was on the right, the bank officers were in back, and the high tables customers used to write their checks were on the left. Behind the bank officers was a huge walk-in safe, its round door wide open. You could see the gear mechanism and the twenty-four bolts, each three inches in diameter, that held the door shut.

  Brody and Ricci stopped at a table in back, and Brody pretended to fill out a withdrawal slip while both of them checked everything out.

  “It won’t be hard to get in here,” Ricci said. “We can come right through the window, or maybe we can case the joint and see if anybody arrives during the night with money deliveries. It’s possible that money is brought to or taken out of the safe at night, and if we show up at the right time, we can walk away with everything.”

  “Yeah, we’ll have to infiltrate the place somehow to find out the schedules. Maybe one of us could get a job as a bank guard here, or even at another bank.”

  “Hey, that’s a good idea. That way we could plan the job from the inside. It would take time, but what the fuck, we got nothing but time on our hands right now.”

  “I don’t mind taking some time to get a million dollars.”

  “Me neither.” Ricci looked sideways at the vault. “Yeah, we’ll have to do it from the inside. That vault door would be a motherfucker to blow open. We’d have to use so much explosive that we might bring half the building down on our heads. It’s the same kind of vault as the one in the Property Room at Police Headquarters, and you’ll have to go through about twelve inches of hardened steel.”

  Brody tore the withdrawal slip off the pad. “Let’s go outside and talk this over.”

  “Right.”

  They turned and walked toward the door, their hands in their pockets, moving along at a brisk pace. Then Brody started slowing down. Ricci slowed down too so as to stay beside Brody. Suddenly Brody stopped, his mouth hanging open as if he’d seen a ghost, or maybe his mother-in-law.

  “What’s the matter?” Ricci asked.

  “Holy fuck, I just thought of something,” Brody said as if in a dream.

  “What?”

  “The Property Room.”

  “What about it?”

  “There’s seven million dollars in the vault.”

  Ricci’s eyes widened. “Hey, you don’t mean . . .”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

  Ricci’s forehead became wrinkled. “Jesus, why didn’t I think of that before!”

  “Seven million dollars in cash.”

  “And it’s easier to get into than here.”

  “I think it’s time for a beer,” Brody said.

  They walked out of the bank, and on the sidewalk they stopped and grinned at each other. Passersby might have thought they’d just concluded a big business deal, or had just bumped into each other after being apart for years.

  “It’s a fucking fantastic idea,” Ricci said.

  “There’s more money than any bank, and it’s got only one guy at the desk.”

  They walked across the street, slapping each other on the back. In one of the narrow alleys of the financial district, they found a little gin mill that looked as seedy as the Firehouse. They went inside, got two beers from the bartender, and sat at one of the empty tables. It was scarred with cigarette burns and the initials.

  “It should be easy,” Brody said rapid-fire because the idea excited him so. “We’ll just put on our uniforms, push in a couple of those big canvas containers on wheels, and hold the fucking place up. If we’re fast we’ll be in and out before anybody knows what happens.”

  “There’s just one problem—how do we unlock the safe? They change the combination every day.”

  “We just put a gun on the patrolman on duty in the Property Room. He’ll open it.”

  “What if he doesn’t.”

  “He has to.”

  “He doesn’t have to. He might decide to be a hero. You know what some cops are like, put yourself in his place. You’d probably rather be dead than be known as the cop who opened the vault of the Property Room for some crooks because he was afraid of a gun.”

  Brody nodded his head. “You’re right. Well, you’re the expert on the Property Room. How do we open the safe?”

  “I don’t know. We have to get the combination somehow.”

  “How many people know the combination?”

  “Let me think,” Ricci replied, looking into his beer glass. “The number comes from the Deputy Inspector in charge of Administration. The Property Room’s his bailiwick. He gives it in writing to the Sergeant of the Day. When the Property Room Officer comes on duty, he get the number verbally from the sergeant. It’s usually four numbers and follows a left-right left-right sequence. When the Property Room officers change shifts, the office-coming on duty has to get the number from the sergeant, not from the old officer.”

  “So the Sergeant of the Day always knows what the number is, and so does the Property Room Officer and the Deputy Inspector in charge of Administration.”

  “Right.”

  “But the only one who had it in writing is the Sergeant of the Day, and probably the Deputy Inspector.”

  “That’s the way I figure it.”

  “Okay, we can rule out the Deputy Inspector, because it’d be too hard to get to him.”

  “Right. Too many cops around.”

  “What leaves the Sergeant of the Day and the Property Room officers who are on duty during the twenty-four hour period of our operation. We could bring one of the Property Room Officers in with us and get the number from him, but that’d be too risky from a lot of angles. First of all, he might sell us out, because fucking cops’ll do anything to look good, or if he doesn’t sell us out, all the Property Room officers of that day will be under suspicion, and if one of them suddenly retires to Florida, or deposits a few million dollars with his stockbroker, they’ll know that something’s fishy.”

  “That leaves the Sergeant of the Day,” Ricci said.

  “Are you sure he has the number written down?”

  “ Yes, and they can’t leave it anywhere. They have to carry it on their person.”

  “So that means all we have to do is take it from him.”

  “Right. Just hit the motherfucker over the head and take it.”

  Brody sipped some beer. “How many guys do you think we’d need.”

  “I’d say four. One to drive the getaway truck, one to guard the door of the Property Room to make su
re nobody gets in while we’re pulling the job, one to bring the Sergeant of the Day to the Property Room on some pretext, and one to hold the Property Room Officer under a gun.”

  “Okay, so it’s up to each of us to recruit one man. And you’re going to have to be the driver, because you used to work in Headquarters and a lot of people probably know who you are. The guy on duty in the Property Room will probably be a buddy of yours.”

  “I’ll grow a mustache and sideburns.”

  “That’s not enough. You’d better stay inside. We can’t take any chances.”

  “Okay, no chances.”

  “We’re all going to have to wear patrolman’s uniforms, but we don’t have our badges anymore. Where can we have some phony badges made that look real?”

  “I don’t know. A machine shop of some kind?”

  “ Who’d know?”

  Ricci shrugged. “The only guys who know about getting stuff like that, phony identification cards, phony passports, guns, and shit like that, are the guys in the Mob.”

  “I don’t want anybody to know about this other than the four main guys.”

  “We’ve got to get badges from someplace. You can’t wear a cop’s uniform without a badge.”

  “Lemme think about it.”

  “The only other thing we’d need is some kind of police vehicle like a paddy wagon to take the money away in.”

  “That’s easy. One of us’ll just check one out as if we’re real cops. We know how to go about it. All you need is the uniform and the badge.”

  “We’ll also need a regular panel truck to transfer the money into, because there will probably be an APB on paddy wagons after we get away. And we’ll need the use of a garage.”

  “We’ll rent a truck and a garage.”

  Three guys dressed like janitors sat at the table beside them.

  “Listen,” Brody said to Ricci. “Let’s go out to my room in Queens and work out the details.”

  “Right.”

  They stood and left the saloon. On Fulton Street they went into a subway station and took the F Train to Roosevelt Avenue. At a liquor store they bought a bottle of bourbon, and at a five and dime they got a few big notepads. They went up to Brody’s room, and Brody sat on the cot while Ricci sat in the chair. For the rest of the afternoon they planned the intricacies of the robbery, writing down timetables and outlines, and drawing sketches of buildings and rooms. They continued their conversation over dinner at a cheap Chinese restaurant, and then returned to the room, where they continued working until midnight.