Cops and Robbers

Tom

In the weeks after my visit with Vigano, I got to learn an awful lot about stocks and bonds, and about brokerages, and about Wall Street. I had to, if we were going to take ten million dollars away from there.

Wall Street itself is only about five blocks long, but the brokerages are scattered all around that whole area down there below City Hall; on Pine Street and Exchange Place, on William Street and Nassau Street and Maiden Lane.

I’ve heard the Wall Street district described as the only part of New York that looks like London. I can’t say about that, since I’ve never been to London, but I do know it has the narrowest and crookedest streets of any part of the city, with narrow sidewalks, and the big bank buildings crowding as close to the curb and each other as they can get. Writers all the time talk about that section in terms of “canyons,” and I can see why. With the streets so narrow and the stone buildings so tall and close together, the only time the sun shines on Wall Street is high noon.

For the first time in my life I was beginning to see that breaking the law could be just as complicated as upholding it. I’d always thought of the police side of things as being tougher than the crook side, but maybe I’d been wrong; there’s nothing like standing in the other guy’s shoes to make you sympathize with him.

There were so many details to figure out. How to do the robbery, for instance; whether it should be day or night, whether we should try for a diversion, just exactly how we were going to work it. And how to be sure we were taking the right bonds; before this, neither one of us had known zip about stocks and bonds. And how to make a getaway after the robbery in those narrow crowded streets. And how to hide the loot afterward until we sold it to Vigano; which was ironic, since all along we’d been telling each other we had to steal something that didn’t need to be held onto or stowed out of sight.

But there it was. And the brokerages didn’t make it any easier. They were guarded like banks; no, they were tougher than banks.

Let me tell you just how tough they were. First of all, there’s a special section of the Police Department with headquarters down in the Wall Street area that deals with nothing at all except stock market crime. There are cops in that section that know more about the financial world than the editor of the Wall Street Journal, and those cops keep tabs on the brokerages all the time, talking to the personnel directors, talking to the security directors, checking up on their ways of handling things and protecting themselves, and always no more than one phone call away in case there’s any kind of trouble.

And then there’s the internal security departments. All the big brokerages have them; private uniformed guards, security files, closed-circuit TV, and all of it run usually by an ex-cop or an ex-FBI man. Guys that treat a stock brokerage as though it were a top-secret atomic-testing laboratory, and whose entire job is to see to it that none of the millions of pieces of paper that flow through Wall Street every day ever gets stolen.

Of course, some do. But most stock market robberies are inside jobs, and there’s a good reason for it. Stocks and bonds, like dollar bills, carry serial numbers. Usually, the only way to steal securities and get something for your pains is to be an employee of a stock brokerage and alter the records so the brokerage isn’t aware that anything has been stolen. With bearer bonds, it’s possible for somebody like Anthony Vigano, with his expertise and his contacts, to alter the numbers and peddle the bonds back into legitimate channels, but other than that an inside job is the only kind of job possible on Wall Street.

But even if it weren’t, even if there were any point in breaking into a stock brokerage and stripping the vault, they’ve gone out of their way to make things tough. For instance, a couple of years ago a bank down in that area closed down, and a restaurant was going to move into the space they left vacant. Before they could, though, they had to pull the vault out, and they had one hell of a time doing it. Not only was it wired with all kinds of alarms, not only did it have sixteen-inch-thick concrete walls reinforced with steel rods, but it actually had two separate walls all the way around the vault, and the area between the two walls was filled with poison gas. The workmen taking the vault walls down had to wear gas masks.

That isn’t merely being tough; it’s being insane.

Still, Joe and I had an edge over the normal safecracker or the normal dishonest employee. We had the facilities of the Police Department to help us, to provide us with material for the robbery and specific information — such as blueprints of alarm systems and other security measures — on whichever brokerage we finally decided to concentrate on.

There was one that looked promising, called Parker, Tobin, Eastpoole & Co. They were in a building near the corner of John and Pearl streets, and I went down there one day to check them out. The building had the typical small lobby of that area — they really don’t like to waste space, those financial people — and three elevators. Parker, Tobin, Eastpoole & Co. was on the sixth and seventh and eighth floors, but I already knew it was the seventh floor I wanted, since I’d checked out the alarm-system on file at Police Headquarters downtown.

The elevator was pretty full, and three of us got off together at the seventh floor. Which was good; it gave me a chance to hang back and look at things while the other two went forward to the counter.

The elevator had opened onto a fairly large room, much wider than deep, divided the long way by a chest-high counter. The security arrangements seemed to be typical for a large brokerage. Two armed and uniformed private guards were on duty behind the counter. On the wall in back of them was a large pegboard with maybe twenty plastic ID tags hanging from it, plus room for about a hundred more. Each tag had a color photograph on it of the person it belonged to, plus a signature written underneath. Mounted on the short wall down to the right were six closed-circuit television sets, each showing a different area of the brokerage, including one showing this reception area I was standing in. Above the sets was the TV camera, turning slowly back and forth like a fan. On the other short wall, the one down to my left, was a second pegboard, smaller than the first, holding about twenty-five ID tags marked in big letters: VISITOR. Doorways at both ends of the room led into the work areas.

There was a steady stream of activity around the counter. Arriving employees were picking up their ID tags, departing employees were turning them in, messengers were delivering manila envelopes. I got to stand there for maybe a full two minutes, checking things out.

The first thing I noticed was that only one of the guards dealt with the people who came to the counter. The other one stood back by the rear wall, keeping an eye on things; watching the people, looking over at the television sets, staying alert while his partner did the detail work.

Then there were the television sets. They were in black-and-white, but the pictures were crisp and clear. You could see the people moving around in different rooms, and you could make out their faces with no trouble at all. And I knew this bank of six sets would be repeated probably three or four other places on this floor; in the boss’s office, in the security chief’s office, in the vault anteroom, maybe one or two other places.

It was also more than likely to be going on video tape. They have video tape now that can be erased and recorded on again, the same as regular sound tape, and that’s what they’d have. They might keep the tape for a week or a month or maybe even longer, so that if it turned out later that somebody had pulled a fast one, they could run the tapes through again and see who was where at what time.

“Can I help you?”

It was the guard, the one who dealt with people, looking across the counter at me. He was brusque and impatient, because of the amount of work he had to do, but he wasn’t suspicious. I stepped forward to the counter, trying for the world’s most innocent and stupid smile. Pointing at the television sets, I said, “Is that me?”

He gave a brief bored look at the screens. “That’s you,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“I’ve never been on television before,” I said. I looked at the screen as though I was fascinated; and to tell the truth, I was. I’d worn the moustache again, and I was amazed at what I looked like with a moustache. Totally different. I wouldn’t have recognized me if I met me walking down the street.

The guard was getting impatient. He looked me over for manila envelopes and said, “You a messenger?”

I didn’t want to hang around and pester him for so long that I became memorable. Besides, I’d seen all I was going to see out here, and there was no way I was going to get inside. Not today. I said, “No, I’m looking for the personnel office. I’m supposed to come to work here.”

“That’s on the eighth floor,” the guard said, and jabbed a thumb toward the ceiling.

“Oh,” I said. “Then I’m in the wrong place.”

“That’s right,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said, and went back over to the elevators and pushed the button. While waiting, I looked around some more. You sure had to admire their security. And yet, this was the likeliest prospect.