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?”