According to police reports, Becker also recruited a Stonebridge Ranch neighbor, forty-three-year-old Joey Thompson, an unhappy salesman of heavy equipment with no past criminal record. Becker told me that Joey, depressed after losing $60,000 in the stock market, had come to him to talk about new career opportunities. Like Becker, Joey loved Stonebridge Ranch and didn't want to lose his home. "Whatever you're doing, I want in," Becker recalled Joey saying. Taking pity on his sad-sack neighbor, Becker replied, "Well, I've got something, but it might not be exactly what you're expecting."
Becker told his team that he would keep 65 percent of whatever was found in a safe; whoever was working with him on that particular job would receive the rest. (Typically, Becker would commit a burglary with either one or two members of his team.) Becker said he would pay all expenses and that he would purchase all the burglary tools, including two-way radios with headsets so that everyone could remain in contact during the heists. He promised they would hit the businesses only late at night, when no one would be there, thus avoiding the need to use guns and hold anyone up. And if anyone was arrested, he said, he would pay for his bail and his lawyer.
Whether he liked it or not, Becker was coming into his prime as a criminal mastermind. After spending the day substitute-teaching for his daughter's kindergarten class or playing shortstop for a Stonebridge Ranch league softball team, shouting out encouragement to his teammates, he would find himself sitting at his dining room table, sketching diagrams about how he could get into his next target. On Sunday nights, when he and Cathy watched The Sopranos, the HBO series about the fictional mob family that lives in a nice suburban neighborhood in New Jersey, he would instantly spot the mistakes that Tony Soprano and his mobsters were making when they committed their crimes.
For his own burglaries, he had his guys wear light-colored T-shirts or polo shirts, along with shorts or regular jeans, because he thought that anyone wearing too much black at night would look suspicious. He rented green or blue minivans for the burglaries because they blended in with traffic and were hard for potential eyewitnesses to remember. He also did all the driving, because he had learned how to stay calm, no matter what, when dealing with the cops. While casing a location in Dallas, for instance, Becker and his team were pulled over by a police officer. Becker lowered the window of the minivan and pleasantly told the officer that he was giving his out-of-town brothers a sightseeing tour. The officer, unable to detect anything suspicious, smiled back and told them to be careful because several burglaries had recently taken place in the area.
Regardless of Becker's ingenuity, it was hard to imagine that the Becker Crew, the name the cops would later give to Becker and his cohorts, would last long enough to make a name for itself. Julian, an eccentric sort, refused to wear baseball caps during the heists-he believed hats made a man go bald-which made him an easier target for identification. Dwayne would get so nervous that he constantly had to stop what he was doing to use the restroom. During one burglary, he unzipped his pants in the middle of the store and urinated on the floor. During another burglary, Paulo tried to lift a safe, lost his balance, fell on his back, and could not get up without assistance. On another job, the lumbering Paulo ran so slowly during a getaway that Becker was forced to drive toward him in the minivan to pick him up before he collapsed from exhaustion.
Becker told me that Danny was not quite focused during burglaries because he was worried about what Kim was doing in his absence. Occasionally, he would call her during a burglary just to make sure that she wasn't cheating on him with someone from the topless bar. As for Joey Thompson, he happened to own a high-powered torch that could cut through steel safes. Unfortunately, he wasn't as skilled with it as Becker had hoped. According to Becker, he and Joey broke into a company in Rockwall, a Dallas suburb. While using his torch, Joey burned the entire business to the ground.
The Becker Crew split time between Florida and Texas, going after safes in bingo halls, liquor stores, small supermarkets, self-storage businesses, camera shops, clothing outlets, gasoline stations, convenience stores, and restaurants, from Burger Kings to Red Lobsters. (A typical suburbanite, Becker didn't like to venture into the inner city because he was afraid of gangs.) If a safe could be moved, the Becker Crew would carry it into the back of the mini-van, where it would be taken either to Becker's garage if they were in the Dallas area or to Bill's garage if they were working along Florida's east coast. Or sometimes they would dismantle the safe right in the minivan, remove the money, and then dump the safe out the back doors. One time Becker watched his team dump a safe in the parking lot of a Lutheran church in Florida. A Lutheran church! Becker's very own denomination! "Guys, please, show some respect!" Becker yelled.
Becker told me that during 2001 and 2002, he and his crew pulled $650,000 from as many as one hundred safes in Florida and Texas. Sometimes, he said, they would strike three or four times in one night, the money in each safe ranging from a few hundred dollars to $50,000 or more. Other times, weeks would pass before Becker would round up his guys and do a job. During that period, police departments in Texas and Florida were beginning to sense, by the similar way the phone lines were being cut and the front doors carefully opened and the in-store surveillance videotapes taken, that one group was probably responsible for the sharp increase in safe thefts. At one point, at least thirty local agencies were on the case.
But amazingly, despite numerous hair-raising escapes, the Becker Crew was never caught. In one foiled burglary attempt in Texas, in which an alarm was accidentally tripped, Julian escaped from the cops by jumping over a fence, only to find himself in a small pasture where he was chased by an angry horse that kept nipping at his rear end. In Florida, Becker and Julian broke into Norris's Famous Place for Ribs in Port St. Lucie and came across an unmovable, five-hundred-pound safe. They started cutting it apart with a gasoline-powered saw that Bill had rented for them. But before they could get through the steel walls, they ran out of gasoline. They had Bill bring them a can of gasoline, and then they started again. By daybreak, however, they had worn out their saw blade trying to get into the safe. They drove to Lowe's hardware store, waited for the store to open so they could purchase a new blade, returned to the scene of the crime, began again, and then saw a restaurant employee arriving. As they were fleeing, Becker suddenly realized that Julian had left the rented saw, which could be traced back to them, in the restaurant. Julian ran back inside, dashed past the startled employee, grabbed the saw, and raced out. As Becker pulled away in the mini-van, a few police cars were gathering on the street in front of the restaurant, setting up a morning rush-hour speed trap. The police didn't realize until Becker was long gone that a burglary had been attempted.
When I asked Becker if he ever felt remorse about his chosen profession on Sunday mornings, as he sat in a church pew with his family, he told me that he constantly prayed for forgiveness. He said he also asked God to let him have one big score, so he could finally quit and fulfill his dream of living the noncriminal life. Although he did buy a few nice things for his family-a Rolex for Cathy and five-hundred-dollar porcelain dolls for his daughters on their birthdays-he was not that big of a spender. He was always trying to save money, he said, for that Chuck E. Cheese's franchise. When Becker took the family to Orlando for an expensive vacation at Disney World, he told me (and later told investigators) that he paid for the trip by having his Stonebridge Ranch buddy Joey fly there and meet him so that they could burglarize businesses at night after Becker had spent the day taking the children through the Magic Kingdom.