Big Stick-Up at Brink's!

by Behn, Noel;

Jimma Faherty had a propensity for reading. Poetry was a passion. So were scientific books and magazines, particularly those dealing with guns and explosives. It was, therefore, not surprising that Jimma had found an article on radar.

  Everything the crew was doing stopped. All the safe clouting and spotting and planning and meets. It was the holiday season, and as was true in the past and would be true in the future, Tony devoted himself exclusively to the Christmas Boost.

  “I make my year’s expenses, know what I mean?” Pino said. “If I don’t make anything all year, I can pay for my rent and necessities from the Christmas Boost.”

  This particular season Tony, Jimmy Costa and Big Steve netted approximately $7,000 per man for three weeks’ work.

  Predawn the first Thursday morning in 1949 Pino was positioned in the shrubbery off a sidewalk in East Boston. The Brink’s truck emerged from the Callahan Tunnel. Tony raised his binoculars, studied the white armored vehicle as it slanted right onto Paris Street and headed for the Chelsea intersection. No wires or antenna could be seen, and the magazine article Jimma Faherty had given him stated that radar systems required antennas.

  The progenitor of the money-moving industry, as well as the armored car, can technically be traced back to May, 1859, when in Chicago, Washington Perry Brink purchased a horse and wagon and had painted on the buckboard’s side, “Brink’s City Express.” The venture prospered and for the next sixty-one years remained a local Chicago operation almost exclusively dedicated to general cartage. Isolated incidents of Brink’s moving money occur as early as 1891, when a bulk payroll, believed to belong to the Western Electric Company, was transported. The following sixteen years saw the company expand these services to include not only bulk payroll delivery, but making up pay envelopes for certain customers and in some instances delivering them to individual employees, plus shuttling currency between banks. Introduction of government-sponsored low-rate shipping via parcel post and the emergence of Dr. Frank Allen in the company hierarchy helped shift Brink’s away from general cartage and onto the money-moving specialization. A 1917 payroll robbery of a Brink’s open touring car in which one of Dr. Allen’s sons was killed accelerated research for a safer means of transport.

  The first truly armored car was put into service in 1923. Windows were made of the newly perfected bulletproof glass. Light-gauge boiler plate steel was used for construction since the low-powered combustion engines of the day couldn’t propel heavy vehicles. Even so, it was a rolling fortress. Brink’s had a symbol—and the instrument which was to dominate the future money-moving market.

  Any pretext the company might have for being anything other than a transporter of cash and valuables was quickly dropped. Between 1923 and 1927 Brink’s opened twenty-seven U.S. branch offices from Los Angeles, California, to Boston, Massachusetts [which began operations on August 25, 1925], plus one in Montreal, Canada.

  In 1927 the first all-risk insurance policy ever to protect armored car service was issued to Brink’s with coverage of $2,500,000 by Commercial Union Assurance Company Ltd., London, England.

  Ninety days later, on March 11, 1927, a Brink’s armored truck with trailing convoy car set out for the Terminal Coal Company in Cloverdale, Pennsylvania. About twenty miles outside Pittsburgh the lead vehicle tripped a guide wire stretched across the road. Buried explosive charges detonated. The three-ton armored truck was blown into the air and crashed back to earth upside down. A second explosion, meant for the convoy car, went off ahead of schedule. The car careened but could not avoid the crater left by the first explosion. It pitched in head first, knocking all the guards unconscious. An ambushing gang of robbers swept down from the hills, gathered up the payroll valises and escaped with $103,834.38. Miraculously, none of the personnel in either vehicle was seriously hurt. Police quickly apprehended Paul Jawaski, a known murderer and wanted fugitive, and other members of the infamous Flathead Gang. All were either imprisoned for the robbery or executed for previous homicides. Thirty-eight thousand dollars in buried loot were recovered and turned over to Commercial Union Assurance, which had sent Brink’s a check for $103,834.38 three days after the robbery.

  The explosion pointed up a weakness company experts had long known about and were in the process of correcting: The armored car rode on a wooden frame and floor. More sophisticated engines and technology allowed for redesign, including an all-steel frame and armored steel floor. The robbery resulted in new security techniques for the vehicle’s crews. Routing of a money shipment must not become predictable. Measures to spot surveillers were instituted.

  “So I’m reading all about how after they put in steel bottoms and retained them crews, nobody ever took a Brink’s truck again,” Tony Pino related. “I’m reading about it first up in the library in Providence, only they don’t have much about it. I wanna know about Brink’s trucks having radar, and all they wanna talk about is that president, Alden [Allen], I think his name was. The guy used to be a veterinarian. What wonderful things he done for the company, which I’m sure he did. Or they tell you about how they got fifty or sixty offices by then.* [Fifty-eight in the United States, six in Canada.]

  “Now I gotta go elsewhere, see what I mean? Libraries where Boston cops don’t spot me. Providence ain’t got enough. So I start going to other towns, other libraries. And they don’t have much—or nothing. So that’s how I get to Harvard. I go closer to home. I go to Harvard over in Cambridge. No cops are gonna figure a thief for going to Harvard Library. And Harvard ain’t gonna figure no crook is coming in with a divinity student ticket. You can always tell a student, but at Harvard you can’t tell a divinity student. They’re the craziest bunch you ever seen, so I go over to where they live and boost one of the tickets—library cards. I forget which was which.

  “Now I’m a student. I’m studying about Brink’s. Reading everything they got. Wait a minute! Something’s wrong here. This magazine is saying how slick these guards are, but the fellas I been watching over at Brink’s are sloppy and careless. And they’re older than they’re supposed to be. I figure it out. It’s the war. Them slick young Brink’s fellas is probably out fighting the war.

  “And I don’t find nothing about radar, and that’s when I get my break. I’m over looking up ‘radar’ in them files of cards they got, and some young engineer student is looking it up, too. We start talking about radar. He tells me no matter what, you can’t work radar without an aerial. On a truck you even gotta have it, know what I mean? The Brink’s trucks don’t have them kinda aerials.”

  It was ideal crooking weather—drizzle and darkness. Pino sat behind the wheel of the idling fire engine red Chevrolet and squinted out through the wiper-swept windshield watching the intersection of Paris and Chelsea streets in East Boston. Earmuffs pronged down on his porkpie hat. Binoculars, an empty milk bottle and a lunch bucket rested on the seat to his right.

  Hazy headlights and a dark outline of the Brink’s truck carrying the metal box appeared on Paris Street. The truck pulled to a full stop at the corner, then turned left and accelerated along Chelsea Street. Pino followed, maintaining a distance of about 200 yards. The silhouetted armed vehicle lumbered on several miles, then bore left along Saratoga Street and made another left onto Revere Highway [then Route 1, today Route 1a].

  Increasing rain prolonged the morning darkness and deterred traffic. Only a dozen and a half vehicles passed Pino’s red Chevrolet and overtook the moderately accelerating white armored truck. Tony used the incidents to vary position. Sometimes it would be he who passed a car ahead, only to drop back when another from behind overtook him, then to move up again. He was certain the precipitation would leave his headlights blurredly unidentifiable to any guard watching from the peephole in the rear of the Brink’s truck.

  The route continued north through the town of Revere and, as blackness dissipated to mawkish gray semidawn, on along the silhouetted towers and balls and runs of pipe latticing and the hulking tankers moored beyond a line of gasoline refineries.

/>   The Brink’s truck disappeared into a miasma from the Lynn marshes. Pino speeded up. He emerged from the fog just in time to see the square white back of the armored vehicle diminishing up Route 107. The red Chevrolet braked, skidded into a right turn, zoomed ahead and then, after a quarter of a mile slowed to a more leisurely pursuit.

  Once atop the Saugus. River Bridge, Pino glanced off to his right. A rain-swept vista of lighted windows in a red brick factory and office buildings spread as far as his eye could see. Pino needed no sign to tell him the complex belonged to General Electric. His hunch that this was where the metal box would come to rest was immediately contradicted. The Brink’s truck drove past the entrance, steering a straight course up Western Avenue.

  Once beyond a small business section, the white armored vehicle turned left. Pino pulled up to the curb and parked at the corner of South Street. The view across Western Avenue to the corner around which the Brink’s truck had driven was obscured by a cluster of trees. He got out, strolled up the sidewalk and gazed off to his left. The street the white armored car had turned into was actually a private road leading past a guardhouse and open gate and on toward a maze of high red-brick factory buildings. Farther ahead the Brink’s truck was backing toward an opening in a structure to the left. A fourth of the way in, it stopped. The driver got out.

  Pino crossed Western Avenue and walked casually toward the complex, looking for some company sign or name painted on a building. None could be seen. He neared the guardhouse and open gate, noting that workers were passing by unchallenged and without displaying credentials.

  Pino increased his pace and strode through the gate. The guard was reading a newspaper. He continued up the roadway and peered into the opening where the Brink’s truck stood parked. The metal box was being pushed across the garage floor behind.

  “Say, fella,” Pino said, stopping a passing workman, “where do I find induction research?”

  “Induction research?”

  “Yeah, you know, them gizmos that keep telling submarines where they are. I work on them down in Virginia. They sent me up here to help out.”

  “You better ask over at personnel. Two buildings up to your right.”

  “They said I’d see induction research right when I come through the gate,” Pino took a slip of paper out of his pocket and feigned reading it. “See a sign saying induction research. This is Massachusetts Development Company, ain’t it?”

  “This is General Electric.”

  “I thought I seen General Electric back down near the river.”

  “That’s General Electric, too.”

  “You got two different operations in the same town?”

  “It’s all part of one. This is mainly administration and paymaster. Some manufacturing. Down near the river is mainly manufacturing.”

  Sandy Richardson elbowed his way up to the bar and squeezed one shoulder through.

  “My God, it looks like New Year’s Eve in here,” he commented to a man swaying on the stool to his right.

  “Only payday friend, payday.” The semidrunk stared at Richardson’s pea coat and knit watch cap. “You a sailor?”

  “Merchant mariner.”

  “Lemme buy one.”

  “Sure you can afford it?”

  “When you work for GE, you can afford it and more,” the semidrunk replied, flagging his pay envelope, then using it to get the bartender’s attention.

  “Pay pretty good at GE, huh?”

  “The best. Not a man in this room with take-home of less than a hundred and a half. And tomorrow morning, when the boys get off the night shift, then you’ll see genuine spenders.”

  “They pay even better on the night shift, do they?”

  “Yup.”

  “Never heard of a place paying on Thursday night and Friday morning. How come they don’t pay Friday afternoon like everyone else?”

  “They do. They pay the morning shift.”

  “Then when do you work?”

  “Afternoon shift.”

  “Three shifts? Christ, you must have five thousand guys working here.”

  “More. I hear it’s around twenty thousand. Hey, Apples. Apples! Goddamn ya, Apples, give my sailor friend here a drink, will ya?”

  “What’ll it be?” a bartender apparently named Apples yelled over.

  “Gin and Coke,” Richardson shouted back.

  “Hey, Apples, how many guys you think GE’s got working for it altogether, twenty thousand?”

  “Twelve thousand two hundred!”

  “Can’t be that little, Apples.”

  “It’s twelve thousand two hundred. Half the boys from paymaster drink right here. They told me.”

  A man down the bar differed with both opinions. He said he worked in personnel and that GE employed 26,000.

  The Brink’s truck reversed gears, backed halfway into the garage at the GE plant, stopped at an angle. Pino sat up against a building across the way, munching a sandwich, as the driver got out and headed to the rear of the truck. A Brink’s guard remained in the cab. Four men, two who were definitely armed, came forward from the rear of the garage. The two with guns deployed took up sentinel some twenty paces apart, just beyond the rear of the truck. The two other men and driver disappeared from Tony’s view momentarily, then reappeared, rolling the metal box toward the rear of the garage. The pair of armed men followed slowly after, turning and looking about.

  Several hours later Pino climbed the steps to the floor above the garage. Once in the lobby he determined this was the paymaster’s office and that it was too well secured to, attempt going after the estimated $2,500,000 Brink’s had just delivered by safe theft.

  *Gogarty.

  *For complete list and dates of Brink’s subsidiary companies see Appendix A.

  Chapter Eight

  The Snitch

  It was a matter of “golden eggs”—a master plan evolving from the simplest of logic. The crew had given up aspirations of cracking the vault they’d never located at Brink’s. The same was true for the vault Pino never found at General Electric. And because the exact whereabouts of both safes were unknown, the idea of armed robbing either premises was eliminated.

  There was a possibility of taking the estimated $2,500,000 in payroll by holding up the Brink’s guards and making off with the metal box when it was either being loaded on at the Chamber of Commerce building or being unloaded in the GE garage. The security Pino had seen at GE wasn’t insurmountable. At the Chamber of Commerce building it was, in the minds of the crew, negligible.

  But at this particular time Tony was short on experienced hands. Sandy was definitely available, but Maffie was still difficult to deal with. Jimma Faherty, who had helped the crew’s fortune soar his first three weeks home, had taken his share of the safe clout loot and gone off on several long benders. Even if Jazz and Jimma did come into the fold, that would bring crew strength only up to four hands. Pino needed more than four.

  Manpower to the side, there was another consideration.

  “You don’t wanna scare the duck that’s laying them golden eggs, see what I mean?” Pino said. “Mother of God, every one of them trucks I been watching load up was carrying golden eggs, see. Every one of them packages was going to petes somewhere. And maybe all the petes could be took!

  “Let me explain something to you. We weren’t in no position to take that box at Brink’s. Someday we would be. But once we did that, Brink’s is through forever. We killed the duck. All that loading routine I seen—them sixteen packages going on one truck and the ten going on the next—that’s gonna change. They’ll change the guards and where the trucks go to. Everything. And they’ll be watching for us, too. So we wanna keep away from Mr. Brink’s. We want him to go on snoozing like he’s been all along. We just wanna find out where the trucks is dropping them golden eggs. Don’t never forget, I spent a good couple of months watching them trucks load up in the morning. And that’s all bonus time, know what I mean? They do their loading before the sun come
s up in the morning. So I can watch ’em an’ still get in an honest day’s crooking somewhere else.

  He began in the bonus hours, went back to Brink’s before sunrise, chose Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday mornings. He counted money sacks and boxes and other containers being loaded at both the Federal and Congress Street doors of the Chamber of Commerce building. Armored vehicles were designated by the number of “packages” they carried—15 Truck Wednesday, 8 Truck Wednesday, 7 Truck Thursday, 12 Truck Tuesday. Only he didn’t select the 8s and 7s for following, kept to the 10s and above.

  And the tailing of the trucks didn’t go as easily as it had with the GE box out to Lynn. It was a block or two at a time; then he would return the next week for another block or two; he would be waiting ahead of a truck one Thursday, pull in behind it the next Thursday. One Tuesday morning truck required two months of tailing before he followed it farther than a mile and a half from Brink’s.

  Nor was the surveillance limited to one truck per morning. When he had followed the 5:30 Wednesday truck far enough away, he didn’t have to pick up its trail until 6:30 or 7 A.M.; he was able to follow the 5:45 for twenty or thirty minutes before. It was not unusual for Tony to tail three trucks on one particular morning. As each truck was racked farther away from Brink’s and the center of Boston, choices had to be made. On Wednesday mornings 17 Truck received highest priority. Then came 14 Truck. Tuesday was 11 Truck with no backup. Thursday became 19 Truck. And Friday—Friday was the prize of prizes, the goldenest of eggs in Pino’s universe—48 Truck.

  Then Mike Geagan returned from the Merchant Marine for good, and the crew became exceedingly busy on other scores, many that required early-morning casing. And Pino gave up trailing the Tuesday and Thursday trucks. Then the sun began rising earlier.

  “It’s broad daylight, and I still ain’t got nowhere with Wednesday Truck, know what I mean? I’m on a long road where they can spot me easy. So I give her up till next year. I’ll come after her while it’s still dark. I give them all up except for Forty-eight Truck [Friday morning]. I make up my mind and tail her no matter what.”