Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.

Henceforth, these book reports will be a time-saving device. You need not read entire books anymore. Read these condensed versions instead. You'll have that much more time for your own blog.

Today I read "Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief", by Bill Mason with Lee Gruenfeld, published in 2003.

This book reminded me somewhat of Frank Abagnale's book, "Catch Me If You Can". Both are about street smart men who challenged themselves intellectually and physically through relieving others of their valuables.

Mason, however, derived particular pleasure from stealing jewelry of the rich and famous. It was not necessary for him to be a thief. He led a perfectly normal life in mainstream society-- had a wife and three children, owned a suburban house in Florida, and had a good career as a real estate manager. There must have been a flaw in his character that led him to continue his crime spree until he was caught.

His family knew nothing of his exploits. But they soon found out. The author describes years of legal shenanigans after he was caught for the second time, in a suspicious situation. He was on parole at the time, and his getting caught produced serious consequences. However, due to lack of evidence, the charges against him were minor. He shrewdly worked out a verbal deal with the arresting officer, whereby he would have no charges leveled against him for confessing to all crimes he had committed previously; the police did not want the media to publicize certain things about the incident, that would embarrass them. The police were plenty embarrassed by all the unsolved heists in recent years (that Mason had committed). They thereafter sicc'ed the Fort Lauderdale Tactical Squad on Mason. He and his family were spied on and harassed, during all of the years of legal wrangling.

Mason's lawyers were cozy with the local court and law enforcement personnel in Broward County and the state of Florida. But, since some of the crimes Mason committed were in Ohio, that state and the Federal government also desired to punish him under their jurisdictions. By some clever, offbeat legal actions on the part of his lawyers, Mason was out on bail for some of this time. Jail was an extremely stressful place to be, and he did not want to return there at any cost. Yet, being free for the moment, and having an uncertain future, he felt compelled to go out drinking with his lawyers every night, thereby eventually destroying his marriage. Unable to cope with the impending possibility of going to prison, just before he was supposed to attend a hearing that might seal his fate, he became a fugitive.

While he assumed the identity of a friend of his who was also in the criminal underworld, he took up with an heiress who got a divorce in order to take up with him. Although Mason had possessed a character flaw that prompted his criminal behavior, a part of him must also have been lovable. For, his family and his new girlfriend continued to be supportive throughout all of his ordeals. They continued to visit him during his time in hiding.

When Mason's mother died, his children and ex-wife came to pay their respects. He proceeded with extreme caution about being seen with them, because he knew the cops would be tailing them. The more elusive he became, the madder the cops got. Finally, law enforcement closed in on the family, searched his and his girlfriend's house with a questionable warrant, and found what they wanted to find-- suspicious items such as newspaper clippings, Phyllis Diller's address book, one hundred thousand dollars in cash, lots of jewelry and ammunition from a .38 caliber revolver. The press ate it up. A number of different law enforcement entities, including the FBI, licked their chops at the prospect that they were finally going to nab the outlaw that had embarrassed them for so long.

The county, state and federal authorities had to decide whose law would apply. Since Mason had made the cops look stupid, they urged the prosecutors to give him a maximum sentence; perhaps twenty years. The crimes for which there was evidence, were passport forgery, identity fraud, failure to attend a court hearing, and violation of parole. The case was not so open and shut, and the prosecutors did not want a trial to be held, at which Mason might be acquitted. They therefore offered a five-year sentence with credit for time already served. Mason took the offer. He served one year in state prison and was released on parole.

After all that, he still had the burning desire to pull off one more heist. Like all of his previous others, this one took months of planning. Finally, he thought he was ready. He almost got himself killed. A metal ladder went clattering down about 16 floors of a condo in Naples, Florida. He needed to use the ladder, having brought fewer tools than usual to the job, because he did not intended to commit the crime that night. Upon realizing a "now or never" opportunity, he decided to seize it, despite the fact that he was not quite fully prepared. The ladder made so much suspicious noise, he had to abandon the job. He was extremely grateful that he was not caught. Thereafter, his addiction to theft was cured.

Epilogue

He married his heiress girlfriend, and has remained amicable with his ex-wife. His kids are grown up, and have become successful. He is very sorry for all of the emotional turmoil he caused to his family, and can't understand why they still love him. And he still does not know why he did what he did.

Ms. Moffett's First Year

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.

Henceforth, these book reports will be a time-saving device. You need not read entire books anymore. Read these condensed versions instead. You'll have that much more time for your own blog.

Today I read, "Ms. Moffett's First Year", by Abby Goodnough. After reading the first few pages, I thought it was going to be an advertisement for the Fellowship Program run by the New York City public school system. But it actually turned out to be a detailed critique of it. There were many controversial education issues raised, ranging from special education to the curriculum, to the extent to which a teacher should have a relationship with the students.

The story focuses on one Fellow's trials and tribulations in her first year of teaching. It was also the first year of the Program (the 2000-2001 academic year). The Program offered a tuition-free master's degree (night school), with limitations and restrictions, of course, to people accepted to the Program. School administrators were resentful of this perk that new teachers got. Some were still paying off their student loans.

The 40-something Ms. Moffett quit her job as a legal secretary to seek fulfillment changing young lives as a Fellow. She was assigned a class of about 20 first graders at P.S. 92 in Flatbush, Brooklyn, a depressed immigrant neighborhood.

There had been federally mandated teaching reforms instituted that year. States received education grant money for buying into various teaching methods, such as "Success For All". New York liked that method because it had worked for other school districts, and it was tailored for inexperienced teachers. Success For All provided the teacher with a script she was to read verbatim, and the same textbooks for all the city's schools. The teacher had a pre-fabricated lesson she need not lift a finger planning for.

Throughout the year, several different school administrators observed Ms. Moffett teaching. Sometimes she was given contradictory information about what to do in certain situations. In one incident, one student had a strong urge to continue writing a composition when it was time for the teacher to start teaching a different subject. One administrator criticized Ms. Moffett for letting that student continue to write, and said she should force her to stop writing and join the rest of the class, doing the next lesson. It was important for Ms. Moffett to assert her authority over the students.

Another administrator told Ms. Moffett it was okay to allow the student to continue writing, as it was so difficult to get students to focus on a particular activity, and the student would learn more or accomplish more, and her self-esteem might be boosted, if she were allowed to finish her composition, even if she missed the following lesson.

Ms. Moffett often fell behind the strict schedule dictated by educrats, trying to get the students to behave. Unluckily, she was assigned more unruly students than was usual for a class such as hers. There were about 4 or 5 who could not sit still, had the attention span of flies, and could not learn.

For the first month of school, one student's parent had to stay in the classroom, lest the student throw a temper tantrum if the parent left her. A few of the kids truly needed special education. However, it was extremely expensive to create a special education class just for these students. Keeping them in a regular class was also expensive-- in terms of teaching time taken away from the other students because the teacher had to waste time disciplining these problem students. Ms. Moffett put in requests to have these students tested for learning disabilities, but her requests were ignored. Instead, by the middle of the year, the students had either moved away, or been transferred to other classes or other schools. Ms. Moffett then got three new students in exchange, who could learn and were well-behaved. This changed the whole dynamic of the classroom. The rest of the year was much improved as an environment in which to learn.

Ms. Moffett was supposed to spend a specific number of minutes on each different subject. But if the students were so focused on say, a certain social studies lesson that it exceeded the 20-minute allocation on it, she would go overtime, and sacrifice the math period. In previous years, the school system had emphasized reading and writing more than math, but scores on certain primary school standardized math tests had been so low, and there had been such sweeping education reforms of late, that math was becoming important again.

School administrators severely criticized Ms. Moffett's ways in their evaluations, fearing a cutoff of funding from the State Education Department if the school did not follow the standards and practices set by the Department. On the day Department inspectors were to visit P.S. 92, the administrators went into Ms. Moffett's classroom and pressured her to re-decorate the classroom bulletin boards with student work that would be acceptable to the inspectors. Sometimes teachers even doctored students' work to make it appear that the students were learning more than they really were.

Deprivation was a major feature of many of the students' home lives. They didn't get enough attention, enough to eat, enough care in general. Ms. Moffett, being an idealist, had a strong desire to help improve the quality of the children's lives. Ms. Moffett chose her favorite students, as teachers will. She befriended one particular student who had a difficult home life. She took her to a children's performance of "Cinderella" outside of school on a weekend. Ms. Moffett knew it was an extremely risky thing to do. She would be in big trouble if anyone at the school found out she had done this. There would have been a very costly public lawsuit if anything happened to the child. The school strongly advises against getting involved with students outside of school, not just because there are liability issues. It is unfair to favor one child like that, when so many others are just as needy of the same treatment and do not get it.

Epilogue

The Teaching Fellows Program has been growing, despite the painful changes that had to be made to accommodate the recently enacted education reforms.

Ms. Moffett survived her first year teaching. Despite all of the negative feedback she received from her evaluators, and all the stress she had to endure, she realized that teaching is fulfilling to her. She completed her master's degree in three years, and is still teaching in the same classroom.

Bringing Down the House

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.

Henceforth, these book reports will be a time-saving device. You need not read entire books anymore. Read these condensed versions instead. You'll have that much more time for your own blog.

Today I read "Bringing Down The House" by Ben Mezrich, published in 2002.

It was about former students of M.I.T. who made lots of money at casinos, by "counting cards" playing blackjack. Most of the students were half-Asian. The initial leader of operation realized he would make the most money if he ran the team like a company, in which each member received a percentage of the profits, depending on the role they played, in contributing to the bottom line. He would train and lead a few teams at the same time. Some members got angry and broke off to form their own team. The author follows one six-member team throughout the book.

The members were mostly male 20-somethings, who enjoyed the thrill and challenge of making large amounts of money at the expense of the casinos. In the long term, unless a gambler possesses an incredible level of intelligence and counts cards as these members did, he will lose all of his money in the long run. The casinos, the members rationalized, were thieves. It is controversial whether counting cards is cheating. The rule of law has not deemed it illegal because the gambler does not physically change his probability of winning, whereas marking the cards or conspiring with the dealer would. But the casinos can legally bar card counters from their premises.

Blackjack, or "21", is the only casino game at which the odds may favor the gambler rather than "the house" in the long term for a certain period. It is played with six decks of cards, that get used up eventually, and then are shuffled before the next round of play. Probability-wise, the gambler will beat the house more often when there are more face cards left in the remaining stack of cards.

One team member would start gambling, perhaps losing on small bets, while keeping track in his head, of the cards that were being played. He might put on an act of naivete, so that no one would suspect that he was counting cards. When he ascertained the odds were in his favor, he would, through his body language or verbal code language, signal to another team member, the number indicating what the odds were. The second member, who might be across the room, would switch tables and take over, acting as though his teammate was a stranger, so as not to arouse suspicion. The second team member would turn into a high roller, appearing as though he wasn't even trying to win. But the team did win; sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in one night. Sometimes a team member would be sitting next to the bettor, giving him signals as to what he should do.

There were various other tricks the team used to make the maximum amount of money counting cards without getting caught. The team would switch casinos frequently, trying places in Las Vegas, Illinois and Louisiana. They gambled mostly on weekends, always flying in from Boston, where they lived. Holiday weekends were especially profitable.

Eventually, the casino security would catch on to the fact that they were counting cards, and bar them from gambling in its establishment. Casinos wised up through the 1990's, installing hundreds of security cameras and posting guards (who acted like bouncers) everywhere. The casinos hired a security service to collect personal information on all offenders. The security service shared such information among many casinos so that eventually, the team was recognized before even starting to gamble. The team tried different ways of eluding security. They gambled at a casino different from the casino-hotel at which they stayed. They were still recognized. One member would signal the others as soon as he saw security was onto him. The author describes a couple of incidents in which security broke into their hotel room with no small amount of hostility, and demanded they leave the premises immediately.

After realizing they would be caught almost anywhere they went, the team still persisted in trying to think of a way to continue counting cards without getting caught, the greedy gamblers. They were addicted; they needed the adrenaline rush. The team tried wearing disguises, thinking security wouldn't recognize them. They were wrong. Another tactic was to take on new members who wouldn't be recognized, but be very careful about whom they accepted onto the team.

One member of the team was power hungry, and convinced a few of the members to let him lead them. The other members continued as a smaller team. This smaller team included a married couple, who were burglarized of $75,000 in team money. The money was contained in the safe in the wall of their apartment, that was broken into. The apartment was trashed. The members never guessed who committed the crime. It had to be rival teams or perhaps the security personnel associated with the casinos, who knew the money was there. Another team member was audited by the IRS. He couldn't guess who had prompted that action. The author said that fortunately, the member had all of his receipts in order, and had reported all of his winnings.

These days, card counters are making much less money than they once did, if they are still operating at all. As the teams got smarter, so did the casinos. There are now automatic shuffling machines, and security personnel who are on the lookout for high-stakes gamblers who win too often.

Billy Joel

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.

Henceforth, these book reports will be a time-saving device. You need not read entire books anymore. Read these condensed versions instead. You'll have that much more time for your own blog.

Today I read "Billy Joel The Life and Times of an Angry Young Man" by Hank Bordowitz

This is a biography of a popular musician/singer/songwriter of the last three decades. He was born in 1949 and grew up in Hicksville, NY, on Long Island, with one older sister. He got his musical bent from his father, who was a pianist. However, his father abandoned the family.

Billy fell in love with rock and roll. He took up piano but was better at playing the organ. In his late teens and early twenties, he was in bands called "The Commandos", "The Hassles" and "Attila", but he wasn't making money. This put a damper on his desire to support a married woman with whom he was having an affair, so she could get a divorce, and he and she could marry. Eventually, they did.

Billy was encouraged to try his hand at songwriting. He also succeeded at that. Yet, Billy's music was a "sleeper" in terms of popularity. Record companies rejected him in the early 1970's because he was too similar to Elton John-- also a piano player/singer/songwriter who had just been discovered.

Eventually, Billy got discovered, and as you know, has had a fabulous solo career to date. He divorced his first wife, Elizabeth, who was also his first (career) manager. She grew tired of the music business, so they drifted apart. Billy allowed her brother, Frank, to take over as manager after the divorce. However, Billy had no interest in keeping track of his own personal finances. So, for more than a decade, Frank and others in Billy's entourage treated Billy's financial accounts as their personal piggy bank. Woe was Billy when he found this out in the mid- to late 1980's. There was an orgy of litigation. The cases were settled for a fraction of their full value. Fortunately, his talent was still intact, and he was able to go on tour to make more money to pay the lawyers. There were also other grave injustices done to Billy.

There was his motorcycle accident in 1979, during which he broke his wrist. Although the driver who hit him was 100% at fault, she sued HIM, essentially forcing him to give her hush money. Her lawyer would otherwise have dragged his name through the dirt, what with his shady reputation as a motorcycle-riding, drug-doing, drinking rock-and roller. In his life, there have also been two cases of plagiarism filed against him. Both cases were brought by struggling songwriters looking for money. The first time, however, Billy was not in a position to fight the guy, so he just settled out of court, and suppressed his anger. The second time, Billy had the money and legal muscle to get the case thrown out. And he did.

In 1984, he married his second wife, model Christie Brinkley. Then they had a daughter, Alexa. In 1994, Billy and Christie divorced, when Alexa was 8.

Three problem areas in Billy's life have been alcohol, long-term relationships, and accident-proneness. Perhaps the reasons are that his mother had a tendency to drink, he grew up in a single-parent female household, and he is distracted easily. He has had a few car accidents with no one else around. He went through a few girlfriends after his second divorce.

Billy was interviewed for this book. The quotes provided by him, seem to suggest a modest, honest man, for whom the enjoyment of playing music is more important than money. He said he wrote music for himself. On occasions when his record company strove to wring every penny it could from his music, such as when concert tickets were overpriced, or a charity event was over-commercialized, Billy became angry.

In 2002, he went into rehab because his daughter, whom he loves dearly, wanted him to. Finally, in 2004, Billy married a 22-year old news correspondent named Katie Lee. I like to think he's happy now.

True Story

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.

Henceforth, these book reports will be a time-saving device. You need not read entire books anymore. Read these condensed versions instead. You'll have that much more time for your own blog.

Today I read, "True Story" by Michael Finkel.

It is an incredible story. It is about a journalist who was fired, and a criminal with narcissistic personality disorder.

The author, Michael Finkel is the ex-journalist. He had done a few cover stories for the New York Times Magazine. His career future looked bright.

The author reports that officials of the Malian Association of Daloa (of the country of Mali), an aid organization, were accepting bribes from journalists in exchange for false details of the (rare to nonexistent) slavery in the cocoa plantations in West Africa (Mali and Ivory Coast).

Finkel discovered for himself from interviewing hundreds of people, that the said slavery was almost nonexistent. He was under pressure to write an honest story, but also one that would sell. He did not want to denigrate the community of media people who had been reporting the falsehood (knowingly or naively), that slavery was an everyday condition in the plantations. In other words, if he wrote about the poor living conditions and avoided the issue of slavery, he would have to explain that his fellow journalists had been lying. Besides that, the word "slavery" could provoke a boycott of West African cocoa, which would only increase the level of poverty. Half the world's cocoa comes from West Africa.

Finkel ended up sabotaging himself by concocting a story about one poverty-stricken Malian boy (from Mali), a composite of several boys he had interviewed. He used the real name of one of the boys. He sort of said that both poverty and slavery were responsible for the sorry state of affairs in West Africa, and he mentioned the agency "Save the Children" in his article. To top it off, because he didn't have the photo of the boy whose real name he used. he submitted a photo of a different boy. When his story was printed, Save the Children complained that the story was inaccurate, and his cover was blown. He was fired in December 2001.

Around the same time, the criminal was fooling around in Cancun, posing as journalist Michael Finkel. The criminal, Christian Longo didn't know that Finkel had been fired, and stole his name because he liked his stories. He had committed the most heinous crime of all just days before.
Michael Finkel (then an ex-journalist) first heard of the impersonation when an Oregon newspaper called him. He thought it was calling about his firing. Longo's cover was eventually blown, too. As writers are naturally curious, Finkel contacted Longo in jail to find out what compelled him to act as an impostor. My feeling is that Finkel was intrigued by the coincidence that both he and Longo had committed deception around the same time. Finkel and Longo developed a friendship; they became pen- and telephone pals until Longo's trial in 2003. Finkel learned Longo's long story through the hundreds of pages of letters they exchanged. Finkel did not write newspaper articles on Longo, but waited until the entire story was over, and then wrote this book.

Longo did not have the happiest childhood. When he was 19, he married a woman 7 years older than himself. They eventually had three children. They were active in their Jehovah's Witnesses community. Over the course of nine years, Longo dug himself into a hole. He had the best of intentions-- he was willing to work hard to make enough money to support his family. Unfortunately, he had only a high school education and was too proud to apply for public assistance. Therefore, going back to school was not an option. He could get only either jobs that paid well but required long hours, or poverty-line jobs, 8-9 hours a day. Their religion dictated that his wife take care of the children; i.e., not work. He went through a series of jobs, long hours, then short hours, then started his own business. But when that starting failing through some fault of his own, he resorted to criminal behavior.

By the spring of 2001, his family was basically homeless. He stole vehicles, cashed forged checks, bought equipment for the business at a deep discount from a seller he suspected had stolen it, all behind his wife's back. He was expelled by his church and shunned by friends. Whenever Longo could no longer afford to pay rent, which was frequently, the family moved. On one occasion, he was sentenced to probation and community service for one of his crimes. He violated the former by leaving the state, and never served the latter. He rented a truck which he never fully paid for, and later abandoned. One of the family's residences was a warehouse that was zoned for business purposes.

Longo reminds me of the character played by John Travolta in the movie, "White Man's Burden". The protagonist has serious character flaws. He has a short-sighted mentality. He does not fully consider his options, and therefore makes poor choices in a series of events that eventually ends in tragedy. It is sad, because the character keeps rationalizing that he is forced to act the way he does because he needs to protect/support his family. He says he is doing it for them.

Finally, Longo is at the end of his rope. He is the only one who knows, though, that the family is about to be evicted, and they are tens of thousands of dollars in debt. He has a job, but it pays barely above minimum wage, at a coffee shop. Inevitably, there will be countless warrants out for his arrest.

He will never escape this nightmare he has made of his life, unless... so he does.

He strangles his wife and three small children and deposits their bodies in a bay in Oregon. In the face of overwhelming circumstantial evidence, Longo's two defense lawyers have a tough time at the trial. In the middle of the trial, Longo changes his plea from essentially "not guilty" to "guilty" with respect to killing his wife and youngest child, but not the other two children. The lawyers allow Longo make this totally perverse move, because they cannot help him. They know he is almost guaranteed the death penalty, regardless of what they do. They can't even think of any arguments that would reduce his sentence to life imprisonment. They let Longo take the stand and testify, because he was the only witness to the deaths.

Upon hearing Longo's testimony, Finkel's positive feelings toward Longo dissolve. He then hates Longo, whom he had known, all along, is a pathological liar. Somehow, something in Finkel snaps when Longo takes the stand.

Longo says, the reason for his partial guilty plea, is that his wife killed the other two children. Then he killed his wife and youngest child. Finkel thinks perhaps his story might have been a ploy by Longo to have himself declared legally insane. But sanely enough, in just four hours of deliberation, the jury pronounced him guilty of all four murders. He got the death penalty on all four, too, even though he can die only once. As of this writing, he is still on death row.

Isn't that a fun story? :)