That Tuesday afternoon I sweated it out at my cover job in the restaurant, watching the minute hands of the wall clock crawl around, hoping desperately that Monk would contact me. He did, just before six o’clock. He didn’t say much over the phone, just told me to meet him Thursday afternoon at one thirty at the Manhattan end of the George Washington Bridge near the Eighth Avenue Subway entrance. That phone call started things rolling.
The Safe and Loft cops wanted to grab Monk and Larry Coster on sight when they appeared Thursday afternoon, but I talked them out of it, after a lot of wrangling. I pointed out that the most important thing was to recover the jewelry, whether they liked it or not, and that after we had the stuff back they could go around locking anybody up they wanted to, but they couldn’t spoil our chances at getting it back. Monk could be trying a dry run, with Corn Flakes or soap powder in a bag instead of jewelry, and I wasn’t taking any chances on that. I also pounded away on the fact that Larry Coster was the only one of the three we had any evidence against, and if they grabbed Monk too early they’d blow the case against him and we’d probably never even see Leon Schell. Finally they agreed to let me be the general, and we set up an elaborate trap.
Relays of my men and city detectives were to pick up the trail when I met Monk. I wasn’t sure that Larry Coster would be with him, but I thought he probably would be. Leon Schell was a big question mark, that much dough might make him come, but his cunning would tend to keep him in the background. There were to be no arrests until they got a definite signal from me; but part of the plan was to have city detectives scare off Monk and whoever was with him if I had possession of the jewels so that I could get away from them with the stuff — again only at a signal from me.
That part of the plan worked perfectly. Monk and Larry Coster pulled up in a cab right on time. They had another man with them, but it wasn’t Leon Schell. Monk was carrying a slightly oversized attache case, of dark brown leather. They hurried down the subway steps and waited for me on the halfway landing, out of sight of the street. Monk handed me the attache case and told me to follow Pete, the third man, wherever he went, and not to talk to any of the three of them for any reason. We separated, and I tagged along after Pete. It was easy to figure out what his part was. He was the steerer for the fence. If anything did go wrong they knew he couldn’t tell the cops anything because he really didn’t know what it was all about; and he would save the fence from any embarrassment of publicly meeting with known jewel thieves. My part was supposed to be the hot seat — if the cops grabbed me they’d just throw me on the griddle and keep turning me over until I was one well done hamburger.
We rode downtown on the subway and I saw three of my men in the same car — it was pretty crowded, even at that time of day. When we got off at Radio City I knew they were heading for the jewelry center in the city, and flashed signals for them to grab Pete and get him out of the way and to scare off Monk and Larry Coster. When I got upstairs and saw I was clear of them I hailed a cab and had him run me over to Grand Central Station. We had only gone a block when a detective cruiser fell in right behind the cab as an escort — the cops must have been using walkie-talkie radios. When I got to the station they piled out of their car and fell in place around me as I headed for the elevator to ride up to the floor our special office was on. Insurance companies maintain special security offices at all railroad stations and airline terminals for the use of jewelry salesmen and carriers. If they ever need to leave any valuables in a safe place overnight or longer the facilities are always available to them. The one in Grand Central is rather large — three big rooms with four armed guards always in attendance. Ten minutes after I get there the place was swarming with people. The president of our insurance company, along with his top brass, more than a dozen detectives, from Assistant Chief Inspector O’Leary down through Inspectors, Captains, and Lieutenants, a couple of Assistant District Attorneys, and some of my own men.
We were naturally anxious to see what we had in the attache case and tried to open it in a hurry, but that didn’t prove easy. Under the brown leather the entire case was made of a high grade steel. The two locks at either end looked ordinary enough but they were far from ordinary. I’m no lock expert, but I’d never seen finer ones in my life. One of the detectives knew a locksmith with a shop nearby, on Third Avenue. He went out and brought him back in fifteen minutes. That guy tried the locks for a half hour before he finally threw down his tools in disgust.
“I never seen nothin’ that tough to open,” he said. “The only thing I can do is use diamond pointed drills on them.”