by Tod Goldberg
“I think I want you to stop avoiding whatever it is you wanted to ask me about your friend the banker,” I said.
“He isn’t exactly a banker,” Barry said.
“Stunned,” I said.
“He actually robbed banks.”
“With a gun or with hundreds of bad mortgages?”
“Funny thing,” Barry said, “he was known for not using a gun.”
“Just charmed people into giving him their money?”
“He actually robbed safe-deposit boxes,” Barry said. “That was his thing. Or it was until he got caught.”
“I’m not busting your friend out of prison, Barry.”
“He’s out. Did a full bid at Glades, got out after twelve years for good behavior. You know they got cable in prison now?”
“I’ve never been to prison,” I said.
“But you know such places exist?”
I checked my watch. This was now fifteen minutes I’d never get back. Across the way, the Germans were now trying to set fire to the pools of spilled beer on their table. “Barry, I don’t mean any offense here. We’re friends. You’ve done me a lot of favors. But if you don’t tell me what you need in five minutes, I’m going to ask those German tourists to set me on fire.”
Barry nodded once but then didn’t say anything for a moment, which I took to be a bad sign. Barry isn’t an especially chatty guy. Oh, he’ll go on at some length about things he’s really interested in—forgeries, gold bullion, places one can purchase black-market kidneys on the cheap—but what makes Barry an especially good financial criminal is that he’s quick to get in and out of a situation.
“Hypothetically,” Barry said, “say you found yourself stuck in a place with no way of really earning a living.”
“Hypothetically.”
“And you had a mother that was driving you crazy, but you loved her, and didn’t want her to suffer, so when she got sick and you couldn’t afford her bills, you did the one thing you’ve been trained to do just to keep up with your mom’s prescriptions and medical appointments.”
“Have you been watching me, Barry?”
“Even Charles Manson had a mom,” Barry said. “And besides, this is all hypothetical. Your mother is sick, lots of bills, you have a skill set that allows you to pay those bills off with a minimum of exertion, hypothetically, don’t you do that? I mean, for your mom.”
Thinking of all the things I’d done for my mother, Madeline, was like sticking pins in my eyes. I nearly died cleaning out the calcified remains of Tater Tots beneath the seat of her car just a few weeks previous. “Hypothetically, what did this friend of yours end up doing?”
“He might have robbed a stash house out in the Everglades.”
“Either he did or he didn’t.”
“I thought we were still pretending this person didn’t really exist?”
I pointed at my watch. “Two minutes,” I said.
“Then he did.”
“And how is this now my problem?”
Barry exhaled. “See, here’s the thing, Michael. I like to think that you and me, we have a nice working relationship, right? You scratch my back, I scratch your back, and in the end, we both feel good, right? Just two guys who like to scratch each other, metaphorically speaking.”
“Tick, tick, tick,” I said.
“Now, a homeless person, a person with no real friends, whoever scratches a homeless person’s back, you know? You have an itch, you have to rub yourself against a wall or something, right? You following me?”
“Not in the least, Barry, but please continue. I have to know where this ends up.”
“My friend—we’ll call him Bruce—he’s been on his own for a long time and now he needs someone to scratch his back, but maybe I don’t have long enough arms. Or maybe I just don’t know how he likes to be scratched.”
“Barry,” I said, “speak English.”
“He wants to give what he stole back.”
“Really.”
“Most everything.”
Most everything. Two words that might equal the entire sum of human knowledge, but probably included drugs and guns. Maybe it just meant baseball cards and Three Dog Night eight-tracks, but probably not.
“And this is from his warm core of altruism?”
“There might be some extenuating circumstances, but that’s the rub on the deal. I thought maybe you could help him out. Stand behind him. Look menacing. Maybe send Fiona to lay a little ground fire. Whatever it takes.”
“This Bruce,” I said, “he have a last name?”
“Grossman.”
I wrote his name down on a napkin. “Let me have Sam check him out. He turns out to be a fraud, he can play Robin Hood all by himself.”
“I don’t think Robin Hood stole from people and then gave them their stuff back,” Barry said. “You’re thinking of The Thomas Crowne Affair. The one with that guy who was James Bond.”
“You get the point,” I said.
“Know what I don’t understand?” Barry said. “All these guys you see in movies, running around playing spies, how come no one ever kills them? Forty years James Bond has been running around killing people and no one bothers to just drop a bomb on him? He even went to the moon. Crazy, right?”
I stood up to leave, but Barry kept his seat. “This Bruce, he a good friend?”
“Taught me a lot of my tricks,” Barry said. “Back in the day, he was one of the best. An honor to the profession.”
“His mom really sick or is that just a story you told to get me interested?”
“I would have used a missing or dying kid. I don’t know how you feel about old ladies, but I know you got a soft spot for sick kids.”
“How do you know that?”
“Everyone knows that. Got a kid with cancer and you owe fifty large to the Mafia, Michael Westen can help you.”
I thought about that. It would have been a much easier way in. Helping a needy bank robber wasn’t exactly my wheelhouse. “Let me check this Bruce Grossman out,” I said. “I have questions, I’ll find you.”
“You always do,” Barry said.
2
Getting information on a person who has spent the last decade behind bars is not as easy as you would think. Department of Corrections records are pretty simple affairs—they give you details on the crimes, the sentencing and any other detainers the incarcerated might have. But if you want to know if the person was a confidential informant (also known, affectionately, as a snitch), or taught the Bible study class, or routinely beat the crap out of other prisoners or was your garden-variety prison predator, you need to know someone on the inside.
Alternately, it might help if you knew someone in the FBI, if the person you were looking into happened to be one of the most successful bank robbers ever. Fortunately, Sam knew a lot of people in the FBI.
“You know what I had to do to get this information?” Sam asked. It was the next day and we were sitting on the patio of the Carlito having lunch. I was eating mine. Sam was drinking his. There was a manila file folder between us that was thick with documents. I didn’t bother to open it as Sam’s favorite part of the day was always show-and-tell.
“Nothing you haven’t done before,” I said.
“Let me ask you something, Mikey,” Sam said. “You ever feel shame for anything?”
“Not a lot, no,” I said. The truth was that, of course, I felt shame for small things in my life. It’s the small things that tend to bother you. Things you wish you hadn’t said. People you wish you hadn’t hurt. Governments you wish you hadn’t helped topple. “But I’m human, Sam.”
“See, that’s the thing,” Sam said. He opened up the folder and pulled out a picture of the inside of a safe-deposit vault in a bank. All of the drawers were pulled out. “I look at this picture and I think, man, now that’s pretty impressive. Goes in. Doesn’t bother grabbing dye packs. Doesn’t stick a gun in anyone’s face. Just pops the boxes and gets out with untraceable loot. I feel some shame
in that admission. I mean, if the world were different and I hadn’t pledged allegiance to peace and justice and the American Way.”
“And here I thought you were talking about what you had to do to get the information,” I said.
“I don’t feel shame about that,” Sam said. “Just sore.”
“More than I need to know,” I said.
Sam looked off for a moment and I got the sense that he was trying to draw me into his sense of whimsy, or debauchery, or whatever it was he was trying to convey by looking off into the distance like a person in a perfume ad. Sam has many “friends” who are able to get him information by virtue of his long standing in various overt and covert positions. Some of them just dole it out because of the kindness in their hearts. Some do it because Sam gives them something. And some do it because, apparently, Sam has certain superhuman skills best left undiscovered by those who are unwilling to hear a play-by-play, which would include me.
“You ever heard of the Flying Lotus?” Sam asked.
“Is that a restaurant?”
“Oh, no, my friend. It is not something you pay for,” Sam said.
I picked up the photo Sam had been looking at and hoped that would end the portion of the conversation that Sam seemed intent on explaining. The picture showed a Crocker Bank in Walnut Creek, California. The date stamp was March 23, 1983. Over twenty- five years ago. That didn’t seem right.
“How old is Grossman?” I asked.
“Sixty-five,” Sam said.
“A sixty-five-year-old man robbed someone’s stash house? How’d he get out alive?”
“Bruce Grossman could break into a prison and steal the bars,” Sam said. “The guy is a legend.”
Sam handed me a stack of photos. Bank of America in Deer Park, Washington. Wells Fargo in Chicago. Lincoln Savings in Tonopah, Arizona. Citibank in Miami. University credit unions in about thirty different small towns across the middle of the country. And this was just the 1980s. All safe-deposit boxes. The last photo he showed me was Grossman’s booking photo. He looked like an accountant: Trim black hair, no facial hair, woolly eyebrows, a funny smirk on his face.
“What’s he smiling about here?” I asked.
“Probably just surprised he finally got caught,” Sam said.
The photos of the vaults all had one thing in common: Apart from the missing items in the boxes, the vaults looked otherwise untouched. No blast marks. No broken doors. No blood or bodies or crazy writing scrawled on the walls declaring a death to capitalist pigs. Nothing. “How’d he get in?”
“They think he rented a safe-deposit box, disabled the cameras and went to town. They also think sometimes he worked at the bank. There’s some thought he worked for a janitorial service. And some people think he’d spend the night in the air ducts. Sometimes, it looks like the Starship Enterprise beamed him in. All of this is supposition. Guy never admitted anything. They assume these are all his jobs, but he only got nicked for the last one he did.”
One thing bank robbers and spies have in common is that you’re only as good as your last job. There’s a reason you don’t hear much about old bank robbers or old spies: Botch the job and there’s usually someone with a gun waiting for you.
“He ever hurt anyone?”
“No,” he said. “Way he got caught? Technology crept up on him. Years and years he’d been busting into these old branch offices, or banks in small towns, tiny credit unions, that sort of thing. In 1997 they found him inside the safe-deposit vault of that old Seminole Savings and Loan out in Doral. He got in through the roof but broke his leg on the way down. The bank had just installed laser-lock doors on the vault and that was it. Boy was stuck.”
“And they weren’t able to put these other jobs on him?”
“Nope,” Sam said. “Never even left a fingerprint. They only tried him on the Doral job.”
Sam handed me the rest of the file and I spent a few minutes reading through the documents. “Says here the FBI tried to bring him on to help their bank robbery unit,” I said.
“He would have walked after six months,” Sam said. “Did his whole bid instead.”
“Twelve years is a long time,” I said. “Glades isn’t exactly Club Fed.”
“Maybe he’s one of those guys who believes in rehabilitation.”
“Maybe he’s one of those guys who believes it’s safer on the inside,” I said. “He stole a lot of stuff from people if these photos are to be believed. Have to think there are some people who’d like to see him dead.”
“That’s the crazy thing,” Sam said. “He found things he thought had some significant sentimental value for someone? He’d mail it back to the bank with a note of apology.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would he do that?”
“Why do you eat yogurt?”
“I like the way it tastes.”
“Maybe he liked apologizing.”
My cell phone rang. It was my mother, Madeline. Just like always. I hit the MUTE button. Sam’s phone rang twenty seconds later. He looked at it and hit MUTE, too.
“You give my mom all of your phone numbers now, too?”
“Mikey, she can be very persuasive.”
Since returning to Miami, my mother, Madeline, has inserted herself into all of my deepest—and most mundane—relationships. It’s as if all the attention she didn’t give me or Nate as kids she’s trying to make up for now, which is a nice sentiment, if not a completely exciting thing to actually live with. “Attention” for my mother often means me coming to her house and repairing the toaster oven or the top-loading VCR.
Anyway, my mother’s call reminded me of something important. “Anything on his sick mother?”
Sam reached into his pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper that had his scribbles on it. “Bruce’s release address is registered to Zadie Grossman, age eighty-eight. I’m going to guess that’s not his hot young wife.”
He handed me the paper. It was an address in Aventura, a section of North Miami known for its extensive Jewish community, notably a large senior citizen population. Not exactly the kind of locale one wants to find themselves in after doing more than a decade of hard time, but then maybe he missed his mother’s cooking.
Still, there was something interesting about this. I owed Barry a favor or two hundred, but I had to think that a sixty-five-year-old man, ex-felon or not, living with his mother meant something.
If you really want to know about somebody, meet them when they are around their parents. When you’re a spy, this isn’t something that happens very often. You walk into the Libyan Embassy in Qatar and ask for Salim and Salim’s mommy, the odds are you’re not going to get either of them. But follow Salim for a few weeks and you’ll see how often he eats at his mother’s house, how often he complains to his wife that she doesn’t make Sharba Libiya as well as his mother does, how often he calls his mother to just check in, make sure everything is okay, and how little regard he gives to his wife’s welfare, you know you’ve got someone you can manipulate.
Or at least someone who isn’t going to stray too far, lest his mommy needs him.
I needed to get out of Miami.
I flipped through the file and came up with several photos of a house. The address matched the one Sam gave me.
“Why is the FBI still watching him?” I asked.
“The FBI doesn’t watch people, Michael, you know that.” Sam reached across the table and took the file from me and fished around for a few moments and then pulled out a photo of an older gentleman wearing a red V-neck sweater, tan pants and red loafers. He carried a black satchel in his hands. “This is what Mr. Grossman looks like now.”
“Looks like time did him,” I said. There were lines around his eyes that brought to mind the inside of trees. The weird thing was that he was missing most of the pinkie on his right hand. “What happened to his hand?”
“Belt-sanding accident inside,” Sam said.
“What kind of accident?”
/> “Someone tried to take off his face with a belt sander, got his finger instead.”
“They keep him separate from the population after that?”
“Doesn’t seem like it. Records show he was in general population the whole time,” Sam said. “So, doesn’t look like he snitched.”
“There goes your rehabilitation angle,” I said, though the truth is that if you’re in prison, it’s probably better for your long-term mortality to not snitch.
“Hey, maybe he had a revelation upon release,” Sam said. He had a point, though not much of one. “Any guesses on what’s in that satchel?”
“Girl Scout cookies,” I said.
“Guess again.”
“A chisel and hammer.”
“One more,” he said.
“Why don’t you just tell me?”
“You’re not fun to play games with,” Sam said. “Anyway”—he was excited now, which was obvious since he stopped drinking the multiple beers he’d been nursing since we sat down and was now just toying with a knife—“that satchel contains the current membership list of the Ghouls Motorcycle Club. Your friend Mr. Grossman is in the process of surreptitiously dropping it off in front of the FBI field office on Northwest Second.”
“Why would he have . . .” I began, but then stopped. “They’re not watching him, are they? They’re protecting him.”
“Not quite,” Sam said. “They’re just curious how an ex-con living with his mommy happened to run across this information and then felt compelled to drop it on their doorstep. Especially since he could have just as easily dropped it with some members of the Banshees and solved a lot of problems.”
The Ghouls and the Banshees were the biker gang equivalent of a family feud gone wrong. The Banshees splintered from the Ghouls a decade ago, and the resulting war between the two groups was one of those organized-crime wars that the authorities were usually happy to let happen; as long as they just killed one another, there was a net gain for society.
“He had to know there were cameras,” I said, which made me realize: He had to know there were cameras. And there it was. The extenuating circumstance Barry mentioned. The stash house belonged to the Ghouls Motorcycle Club, an outlaw gang whose propensity for violent crime made even the Hells Angels seem like an esteemed group of kind and generous fellows with a shared interest in motorcycles. If he was dropping off their materials at the FBI office in broad daylight, and in a bright red sweater no less, that meant he was scared.
