Made Men by Greg B. Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

desert night. Amtrak ordered it stopped and the local police in Albuquerque began searching for Gillette, street by street. A waitress pointed him out in a bar called Famous Sam’s, but he ducked out the back door. An hour later they tracked him down to a nearby hotel. At 8:30 P . M ., January 16, 1998, Gillette was arrested by the FBI and charged with participating in the daring January 13, 1998, robbery of Bank of America from inside the heart of the nation’s safest building.
In less than four days, the Three Stooges were in the custody of the United States government. Nearly all of the stolen $1 million in lire, francs, yen, and good old American dollars was still unaccounted for. January 19, 1998
    In Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island and the Bronx and North Jersey, the bookies prepared. Sunday, January 25, was Super Bowl XXXIII. Two weeks out, Vegas had Green Bay as thirteen-point favorites over Denver. Now it was twelve points, Green Bay. This was the week that could make or break the bank. Usually during the week leading up to Super Bowl, Ralphie was excited. This was the event. More money was bet on this game than on any single sports event during the year. In the New York area, millions of dollars were at stake. Fortunes were acquired; fortunes were lost. Spousal abuse was rampant. Enough beer was consumed to fill several football stadiums. In years past, Ralphie had done well on Super Bowl Sunday. This year he was betting against the spread, picking Denver over Green Bay, trying to get himself excited about earning some money as he had in years past.
    But this was not years past. This was the week after the greatest failure of Ralphie’s storied career. And during the last seven days, Ralphie has heard some things. For one, Sal told him the Port Authority police and the FBI now believed Moe, Larry, and Curly could not have pulled off such a well-organized heist without help from someone of more substantive intelligence. That they had names of actual individuals. That Sal and Ralphie now had their names on a list.
    A few days before Super Bowl XXXIII, Ralph and Sal were driving around Brooklyn, headed for a seafood restaurant they both had known for years. Sal mentioned that the Port Authority police had been around to Sal’s office asking many questions.
    “They gotta be buzzin’ about you inside the building because they know your fucking activity,” Ralphie says.
“Everybody’s thinking,” Sal says.
“Yeah,” Ralphie says, “they know, huh. Because, remember you said, you’re gonna be all hot because of that building.”
Sal: “Everybody’s thinking I know about it.”
Ralph: “Really.”
Sal: “Hey. I’m not ’fessing up to nothing. I don’t give a fuck. The only one I told, between me and you, believe it or not, is my wife.” Sal stopped talking.
    Ralphie says, “Say it.”
Sal: “I told her my Jewish partner came over. I says, ‘Steve, listen, do you know me?’ And he knows me. Me and him do everything together. He’s embarrassed. I says, ‘Just tell me one thing. If I do get fucking nailed on this, if I gotta do twenty, will you look after my family?’ He says, ‘Sal, they will want for nothing.’ That’s all I needed to hear. So that’s why I tell my wife. She’s going crazy right before I’m locked up. I’m going alone.”
Ralph: “Yeah, of course.”
Sal: “Ain’t nobody coming with me. She says, ‘I know that.’ She says, ‘I knew it was you, you fuck.’ ”
They both laughed, but only for a minute.
Sal: “She says to me, ‘Why?’ I don’t know why. Who the fuck knows why?”
Sal said the Port Authority has two detectives working on the case and they have no leads. “Everybody’s protected,” he says.
“Richie is protecting us, that’s all I care about,” Ralphie says. “All right. So what do you want to do with this money? That’s the next problem. I don’t want to send it away again, I don’t want to keep it around me. You know what I