The Art of the Heist

Twelve

Given the complex trajectory of my life, it’s difficult to pinpoint any one event as utterly definitive. The Forbes Museum, the Ellsworth jailbreak, the Back Bay shooting: there’s no doubt each of these incidents altered the course of my future. Yet even after six years in Walpole these changes were not irreversible. At any time, it seemed, I could re-chart my life toward legitimate success, through either music or school. Even after the Roslindale bank heist the way remained entirely open, the possibilities endless.

But all that changed the night Ralph brought Tommy Sperrazza and Johnny Stokes into the Beachcomber. Though I would not know the full extent of their influence on the course of my life for a number of years, the appearance of these two men marked a point of no return.

I had met the pair a few months earlier, when my band and I played a concert for the inmates at the state prison in Concord. Sperrazza and Stokes were both active in the Concord Jaycees. As former president of the Walpole chapter, I was allowed to speak briefly with all the Concord members after the show. Neither man made much of an impression on me at the time. In fact, it was only later, after Sperrazza reminded me of our first encounter, that I recalled meeting him at all, and then only vaguely. It was an inauspicious beginning to a relationship that would have dire consequences for all involved.

Though still in their early twenties, Sperrazza and Stokes were already hardened criminals. Both had spent the better portion of their lives in state-run institutions, as either juvenile wards or adult convicts. Now they were on the run, having escaped from Concord while on work furlough.

“What do you say we let them in on our next job?” Ralph asked, pulling me aside at the bar late that evening.

I hesitated. I loved Ralph like a brother, but his temper could make him unpredictable in stressful situations. Sperrazza and Stokes were clearly cut from the same cloth. The thought of having three loose cannons as partners did not sit well with me. But having been a fugitive myself on more than one occasion, I could not possibly turn my back on the pair.

Besides, in planning our next bank robbery, Ralph and I had both acknowledged that we would need at least one more set of hands, if not two.

“Okay,” I agreed. “But they play by my rules. No one gets hurts.”

In many ways our partnership with Sperrazza and Stokes was a perfect match. Since escaping from Concord the fugitives had robbed several banks. But their methods, which involved walking unmasked and with revolvers drawn into whatever bank they stumbled across, were crude at best, dangerous at worst. The fact that they had not yet shot someone or been wounded themselves was a miracle-though avoiding bloodshed seemed to be of little concern to the pair, who, as escapees, had next to nothing to lose.

If Sperrazza and Stokes were too brazen in their tactics, Ralph, Sal, and I were not brazen enough. We all knew we’d gotten lucky with the Roslindale bank in that the building hadn’t been sufficiently alarmed. If it had been, our early morning arrival would have been detected right away. We’d have to hit our next bank during business hours.

If there was one aspect of our strategy that didn’t need refining, it was the timing. Clearly, planning our robberies to coincide with a scheduled armored car pickup was the best way to maximize profits. Not to mention the fact that such timing ensured that the tedious job of collecting and bagging the money was already done for us.

The bank we chose for our first job with Sperrazza and Stokes was in Danvers, a small town north of Boston, not far from Salem, Massachusetts. I was familiar with the area from previous trips to Maine. Danvers was just off Route 1, the road we always took when driving up to see my mother’s family in Sullivan. The bank had everything we were looking for in a safe and profitable hit: it was large enough to be worth our while, small enough that security wouldn’t be extreme, and most important, it was close to the highway, meaning we could slip away with relative ease.

As with the Roslindale heist, we did our homework, scouting the bank for several weeks before finalizing our plans. We were pleasantly surprised to learn that the employees not only bagged the money for the armored truck but brought it out from the vault in anticipation of the truck’s arrival. If we could hit the place just before the truck got there, it would be a shamefully easy score.

It was my idea to add a switch car to the mix, meaning we would use one car-preferably a freshly stolen one-as our initial getaway vehicle, while leaving a second car parked somewhere close but out of sight. As the most experienced driver of the group, it was decided, I would man the getaway car, while Ralph, Sperrazza, and Stokes went in. Sal had opted out of this particular heist.

By the time the day of the robbery arrived Sperrazza and Stokes were champing at the bit. Not accustomed to having to wait, and lacking all appreciation for the benefits of planning, the pair had complained constantly about wasted time, pressuring us to speed the process up. In fact, our divergent views on the merits of planning would be a constant source of conflict on every heist I pulled with the two fugitives, as would our philosophies concerning the treatment of civilians. Sperrazza and Stokes had little regard for human life and were known to use violence at the slightest provocation. I, on the other hand, was adamantly opposed to harming anyone except as an act of self-defense.

With the money from our previous jobs Ralph had bought a car wash and garage in Brockton, which he used as a combination chop shop and storage facility for his ever-growing automobile theft enterprise. He had also worked out a system with a friend in the Walpole license plate shop who, for the price of a few well-placed bribes, was able to send him clean car tags. All of this meant we had nearly unlimited access to untraceable switch cars.

Early on the morning of the Danvers job Sperrazza, Stokes, and I met Ralph at his car wash, where he already had a clean switch car tagged and waiting.

“Either one of you so much as touches your gun,” I told Stokes and Sperrazza as we went over the details of our plan one last time, “and this is the last job you pull with us. Understand?”

One consequence of the extended periods of time Sperrazza and Stokes had spent in institutions was that, when confronted by an authority figure, they could often be surprisingly pliant. But this was not always the case, and I had to be careful how I played this card. Fortunately, on this occasion my threat worked. After some initial hesitation, both men agreed.

With the matter of the use of firepower settled, we set out from the car wash. Ralph and I rode together in his Lincoln, while Sperrazza and Stokes followed behind in the stolen switch car. We arrived in Danvers just before opening time, parked the Lincoln in an alley close to the highway, and rode the last few remaining blocks to the bank together.

As planned, I waited outside in the switch car while Ralph, Sperrazza, and Stokes went inside. I’d been slightly reluctant to take on the position of driver, knowing the lack of self-control common to all three men. But the role was absolutely crucial to a successful getaway, and in the end, having secured Stokes and Sperrazza’s promise that there would be no violence, I’d decided it was worth the risk to have me behind the wheel.

Still, I was nervous as I watched the trio pull their masks over their faces and disappear through the front doors of the bank. As I waited for them to come out again I strained to make out the activity in the lobby through the front windows, nervously listening for gunshots while at the same time keeping my ears open for the sound of police sirens.

Fortunately, everything seemed to be going smoothly inside, and I heard neither. The threesome were in and out of the building in a matter of minutes-far less time than it would have taken to make a conventional withdrawal-each carrying a heavy canvas deposit bag. Ralph slid into the front seat beside me, while Stokes and Sperrazza piled into the back. I hit the gas and we were out of the parking lot before the doors slammed shut.

“Everything okay?” I asked Ralph as we sped away.

Ralph nodded, peeling his mask off, but his expression was that of a father who’d been left in charge of two unruly children.

“Like taking candy from babies,” Sperrazza gloated.

Stokes chuckled. “You see that asshole in the suit? I thought he was gonna piss himself for sure when I pulled out my forty-five.”

“No guns,” I yelled over my shoulder. “I said no fucking guns. Remember?” In the rearview mirror I saw Sperrazza shrug.

It was a gesture I normally would have felt compelled to answer, but at the time I had more pressing things to worry about. At least no one got hurt, I told myself, letting the subject go, turning into the alley where we’d left the second car.

Ralph opened his door and leaped out, followed by Stokes and Sperrazza. Moving quickly, the three men transferred the bank bags to the trunk of Ralph’s car, then climbed into the car themselves.

“See you back in Roslindale,” I called. Then I pulled out of the alley, heading for Route 1 and the city.

So successful was the Danvers heist that over the course of the next year and a half we used the same template to rob nearly a dozen banks, always hitting our targets just before the arrival of the armored truck, always using a switch car in our getaway.

In addition to Sperrazza and Stokes, who accompanied Ralph and me on many of these heists, we developed a regular crew, which included Bobby Donati, Billy Irish, two friends of Ralph’s named Joey Santo and Bobby Fitzgerald, and Ralph’s brother, Sal. David Houghton, who had become close friends with Bobby Donati after meeting him at my welcome-home party, occasionally joined us as a driver or lookout, though never as an active participant. David held a steady job and had never been in trouble with the law, and we all liked him enough to want to keep it that way.

My music career and these wild-one activities meshed nicely. My band was playing the college circuit by then, and these gigs, many of them in small, affluent towns like Danvers, provided me plenty of opportunities for scouting potential targets. Not all of them were banks.

My travels with the band had introduced me to a surprising number of small regional museums, most of which I had not even known existed. Many were associated with schools or historical societies. To my surprise, some actually housed pieces of real value. Few employed much in the way of security. I spent much of my downtime when we weren’t playing casing alarm systems and memorizing floorplans for possible return visits.

Over the course of the next several years, using the information I gathered, I would successfully rob dozens of museums. Most of them were in New England, but I also hit several prestigious institutions in New York City, Washington D.C., and Toronto. My methods varied. Sometimes I only planned the heist and left the actual breaking and entering to my crew members. Other times I used deception to get what I wanted. But the result was always the same. The combined take from these thefts was enormous, eventually numbering in the millions of dollars.

One of the first of these targets was the Mead Art Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts. One day while I was on my way to case a small bank in nearby South Hadley, I stopped into the Mead, which was part of the Amherst College campus. Small yet pretentious, with an overblown sense of itself-not unlike many of the young women who made up the college’s student body-the Mead possessed all the qualities I found particularly unattractive in a museum. But despite its unpleasant personality it nonetheless housed some interesting works of art, most notably the painter Robert Henri’s dark and seductive “Salome” and a fair-sized collection of Dutch oil paintings.

As I was winding up my leisurely tour of the galleries I spotted a small but interesting Dutch Baroque painting through the open door of the curator’s office and, wanting to get a better look, stepped inside. The act was entirely innocent on my part. But the curator, who returned to the office moments later, clearly did not see it that way.

“What are you doing in here?” he snapped, immediately identifying me as someone of a lower caste.

“I noticed the painting from the hall,” I said truthfully, motioning to the canvas. “It’s very pretty. Is it a Flinck?” By this point in my self-education, I could identify nearly every period in both Eastern and Western art, as well as most minor masters. Govert Flinck was well known for having been a pupil of Rembrandt’s.

The curator glanced dismissively at the piece, as if someone of my social standing couldn’t possibly appreciate its full aesthetic value. “This is a private office,” he said icily, not bothering to answer my question. “And I will kindly ask you to leave.”

I shrugged, my gaze passing discreetly over the window behind his desk, taking careful note of the lack of any visible alarm. The man couldn’t have understood the potentially dire consequences of his words. For a moment I actually pitied his ignorance.

“Now!” he said.

When I met up with Stokes and Sperrazza outside the bank later that afternoon, payback was the only thing on my mind.

“Either of you have pressing plans for tonight?” I asked.

Both men shook their heads.

“Good,” I told them. “I’ve got just the job for us.”

As museum jobs go, the Mead wasn’t especially memorable. Getting inside required nothing more than breaking a small pane in the curator’s window, undoing the lock, and climbing inside. But the personal satisfaction it brought me was on par with the most daring heists of my career.

The pieces we took were chosen more for their symbolic value than their monetary worth. From the Native American gallery I selected several beaded deerskin bags and a number of Navajo pots, the kind of artifacts a curator would be especially proud to have in his museum. We also took two Dutch oil paintings. One, which we selected from the main collection, was an exquisite Pieter Lastman rendering of St. John the Baptist. The other was a lovely church interior we took from the curator’s office; on closer inspection, it turned out to have been painted not by Govert Flinck but by his contemporary Hendrick Cornelisz van Vliet. Together the two paintings were worth nearly half a million dollars.