Checks

It was Danny's new girlfriend that provided the opportunity. He used to meet her as she clocked off work; he figured the sooner you got the cinema, meal or whatever over with the longer you'd have left for sex afterwards, and lovely as Cindy's personality may have been, it was her body that Danny wanted most.

Cindy was a cut above Danny's usual chick, a clerk in a finance firm in downtown Manhattan, working with serious money. Danny used to have to wear a suit just so as not to stand out when he went to pick her up; think about it, wearing a suit just to be seen with a girl. It's not like he even got to go up to her office and met her co-workers, he had to wait for her at reception.

Danny wasn't the sort of guy to enjoy sitting in a reception area doing nothing. He walked around, talked to the receptionist, stuck his nose in anything that was happening, even anything that wasn't happening. Which is how he spotted the postal bags.

There were two sacks of post pretty much every day, just lying there beside the front door waiting to be collected, nobody paying them any attention. Now, whatever you say about Danny being a high school drop out or whatever, when it came to money he has the smarts and he'd already figured out what the sacks contained. It was a bank, banks send out checks, he was looking at a sack full of checks.

Cool as New York fashion, and you don't get cooler than that, Danny strolled over to the door, picked up a sack, dragged it back to his seat and started rooting through the mail. He pulled out three letters that looked like they contained checks, muttered 'that's the one' to himself, for the receptionist's benefit, and dragged the sack back to the door. When his girlfriend finally arrived, he just walked away, checks in his pocket.

The next night Cindy had to see her mother, so Danny joined us in the bar. The Joint on East 54th Street was our regular hang out since we'd first started drinking; they had a pool table, good beer and a lax attitude to who they serve. Once upon a time there'd been a true gang of us, all looking for fun, trouble and an easy buck; in no particular order. Gradually we'd dwindled to just the three of us; myself, Danny and Wise Joe, the rest had found jobs, girlfriends, or got themselves locked up or into some sort of trouble that meant leaving town.

We'd hardly seen Danny in the month since he'd met Cindy and were winding him up about getting serious, but he cut us short; he wanted to talk business. Wise Joe sat in, but mostly it was Danny and I did the talking.

I should explain that at the time I was doing some driving work for Sally D, daughter of the main Family on Staten Island. Sally owned a number of bars across Manhattan. She was a hands-on boss, who visited all her bars every night to keep an eye on the staff, the books and on any trouble makers. My role was her driver and occasional bouncer. Though she was mostly legit, she had exemplary connections with Families across Manhattan, which was the reason Danny involved me.

"I need to get ID for these three people," said Danny, throwing the three checks on the table. "I figured you could ask Sally D."

I picked up the first check. It was for a level $1,000, made out to Jackson Mulville. "Who the fuck is Jackson Mulville?"

"Who cares, just some guy a check is made out to. All we need is ID and we can cash the check ourselves."

Danny explained how he'd come by the checks. "Not only that," he said, leaning towards us with a grin the size of the grand canyon, "I checked out all the other banks as we walked past, they all do the same thing, just leave the bags there unprotected, waiting on the post guy." I picked up the other two checks; one to Stella Watson for $202, 30 cents and one to Dean Driver for $1,700. Danny had chanced upon a gold mine.

When Joe walked off to the bar for more drinks I tried to persuade Danny that we didn't need to involve Joe in the deal. It was Danny's scheme and my contact with Sally, involving Joe would just reduce the profits.

"Yeah, but think," he said, "this opportunity isn't going to last, we need to make as much cash as we can in a few weeks, before the banks figure out where the missing checks are going. An extra body in the gang means we can steal more checks."

A nice argument, except we agreed to split the money equal shares, so Danny and I gained nothing from having the extra body on board. I think he was just trying to do Joe a favour, for the old days. We knew that Joe was having hard times, always trying to cadge a loan and seemingly always without any source of income, legit or otherwise.

I showed Sally the checks the next day and she smiled her approval. I handed over a bunch of photos of the three of us and she agreed to get the first set of IDs from, well, I never wanted to know the details.

We arranged to meet her in two days time in the Limelight, the glitzy gay bar she owned just off Broadway, that was about twenty years ahead of the gay scene in the rest of the universe. It was the last place anyone would expect to see a bunch of wise guys, but I think Sally was just testing us, making sure we knew how to behave ourselves in unfamiliar territory.

Two nights later, Danny, Joe and I walked into a back room of the Limelight and we served huge pink drinks by a pretty, buxom young waitress wearing very little, who the other guys naively took to be a woman. I'd been in the bar before though. Sally cut the ice by throwing three passports onto the table, Dean Driver's had my face on it, Jackson Mulville had Danny's and Stella Watson had Sally's. They looked the real thing, quality product, if I didn't know better I'd swear I really was Dean Driver.

"Let's just agree the rules and get on with it," she said. "We split everything four ways, once the cost of the ID has been taken out. I arrange the ID; nobody needs to know who I'm using or anything else about that side of the deal. Don't worry, my guy's a professional, no questions, no risk, I've known him all my life. He took my baby snaps."

We laughed at this, but guessed it was probably true, Sally's family were well connected that way. We planned the first day to the very second, as if it were a bank job. Shit, it was a bank job, no guns, no bluster, the least exciting bank job you could think of outside of working in one, but a sure rewarding one.

Sally would drive us to the financial district, drop us off and drive round the block ready to pick us up. We'd each go into one bank, sling a sack over our shoulder and walk out, drive to one of Sally's bars and go through the mail in a back room.

It took the four of us nearly three hours to go through the three bags, but we found nearly fifty checks. Half a dozen of them were just for small change, not worth getting ID for, but that still left enough to keep us busy.

The next day she drove us back and we just dumped the sacks by the doors we'd taken them from, just muttering 'picked up the wrong bag' to the receptionist. That way none of the other mail would go missing, which would mean it would take forever to trace the missing checks to the same mail bag. It worked smoothly again, nobody queried us bringing the bags back, just as nobody had queried us taking them in the first place.

Two days later Sally had a pile of thirty-seven fresh IDs and we were kept busy taking them round New York cashing them, always making sure we never used the same place twice. This took another couple of days working nine to five, but it worked, nobody queried any of the IDs, not even those with Chinese names. I guess Danny does look a bit slitty-eyed. After expenses we'd made nearly $10,000 dollars each, half a year's wages for a nine to five guy.

We stuck to stealing the bags on Thursdays, there was more mail in them, as the banks trying to get all the checks sent out before the weekend, and people would be less likely to notice the rest of the mail being a day late because of the weekend post. We tried three different banks the second time, but the scheme worked just the same, we just picked up the bags from the doorway and carried them to Sally's car, bringing the bags back the next day with the checks taken out.

We figured we could last maybe three months without getting caught. This worked out at about three raids on each of the main banks, any more than that the cops might start to figure out what was going on, though it wouldn't be easy for them, the checks were being sent all over the States, a few to Europe, and would be reported missing to their local police, not the NYPD. The ID was so good it never got questioned. We didn't even have to worry about getting caught spending the money, once we'd cashed the checks the money was clean, couldn't be traced. We were just wise guys who'd got lucky, very lucky.

Danny spent a lot of his money on Cindy; necklaces, rings, clothes, treating the girl like his princess. Myself, I was putting most of it away, as Sally had said, this job was going to dry up in three months and I wanted to be able to live off it for a long time. Chances like this don't come along too often.

The only weak spot was Wise Joe. He wasn't used to having money, certainly never for long, and with a seemingly limitless amount of dollars in his pocket he hit the town big time. To be fair he kept sober while we were working, did his fair share of 'the paperwork', but as soon as he finished work he'd hit the bar and drink like their was no tomorrow, like a fish who'd re-discovered water after a five year drought. Sometimes, on a Wednesday night and we had a job the next day, or when we had checks to cash, I'd try to drag him home to sober up, but he'd always push me away and go join his friends. Funny, now he had money to throw around he'd made a new group of buddies, just like that.

So a typical story of old friends, as soon as you make good you start to drift apart; Joe with his drinking and Danny spending more and more time with Cindy. They were starting to talk about serious stuff; kids, buying a place, even getting hitched. Only Sally D and myself carried on much as we'd done before, with a bit more green when we needed, a buck-cushioned future ahead of us, but mostly much as we'd always been.

The time flew. My bank account grew so heavy with cash the bank manager started to come out an greet me personally when I came in, never once thinking to ask where I was getting the cash from. Danny bought Cindy a diamond engagement ring and even Sally D splashed out, investing in a new bar just a few blocks from the banks we'd been robbing.

Two weeks before our scheduled three months quit date, we hit our biggest check, over half a million dollars, $612,000, made out to a Mrs Nancy Henderson. That night Sally came to join us in The Joint for the first time and made sure we were drinking champagne all evening.

"We should quit after this," I said, "it's not worth the risk of another two weeks, this is enough to retire on. Besides, if the cops are ever going to take an interest it's going to be in this check, I reckon Mrs Henderson will be kicking up a holy skunk of a stink."

Sally D was very much of the same opinion, after all she had more to lose than any of us, whilst this wasn't exactly spare change to her, she had other sources of income and the deal had appealed because of the low risk nature of it. Playing it safe suited her perfectly.

Wise Joe wanted to keep going, to maximise the cash. God knows what he was finding to spend it all on.

In the end it was Danny's call. Sure we were a democracy and all that, but ultimately this was Danny's trick, even though Sally was the senior member of the crew in every other respect. And Danny needed every buck he could squeeze out of the venture, what with the wedding, the deposit on his new apartment and the need to keep Cindy looking good.

"Heck, why quit now when the checks are getting bigger and our luck's getting better. We could get more like this, Cindy says there's the quarter year coming up and all they're doing is sending out checks from morning to night."

That final Thursday we were all nervous; this was the last time it could go wrong. Wise Joe persuaded us to go out with a bang, three banks each, nine sacks in total. The risks were high, but Cindy had been right, the week before we'd made the most checks ever, nearly a hundred altogether, so with nine sacks we'd have three hundred checks. As Danny said, "If we're gonna do this last week we might as well make it worthwhile."

We left half an hour earlier than usual to fit in the extra collections, but this didn't cause any problems. The sacks were sitting by the front door, waiting for us, and we just walked away with them, same as ever. Sally had to drive round the block a dozen times altogether, but eventually all nine sacks were collected and we were ready to make our escape.

We took the bags to the back room of the Limelight. The mood was just short of jubilant, I'd not seen Sally relax and laugh out loud the whole time we'd been working this job. It was going to be a long, but happy night searching the bags for checks. It would take a week or two to get all the IDs made up and another week to cash them all, but after that I could retire, buy a bar of my own maybe, or move out to the coast, heck, maybe I'd find my equivalent of Cindy and settle down and marry and stuff.

These were the dreams floating about my head half an hour later, when what seemed like a hundred cops streamed into the room. We had no chance to react even, let alone escape, in no time we were cuffed and had our rights read.

Sally D phoned her lawyer, a good one, who did work for the mob, and tried to grease a few palms, but the cops had too much evidence to let this one go.

"How the fuck?" was all Danny said, and I was thinking exactly the same. I guessed they must have been waiting for us at one of the banks and tailed us back to the bar. At least that's what I thought then.

Sally's lawyer made sure that we got charged for the lowest possible offence, theft of the mail, as because they'd raided when they did we didn't have any IDs made up or evidence of cash from the previous jobs. We could've gone down for ten years if they'd put in the effort of catching us using fake ID to cash stolen checks. As it was Sally D got six months, on account of her previous good character, and Danny and I got a year apiece.

It wasn't 'til Wise Joe walked free that we realised we'd been stitched up. Sally D put the word round after the trial to find out what had happened. Turns out that Joe had been busted trying to buy drugs from a cop. Quite what he was trying to buy drugs for was a mystery, as he was found to be in possession of a serious supply of hashish and pills, which meant he was facing a long term in prison.

Panicking, he'd cut a deal with the cops, sold us out in return for their letting him go. The cops loved it, it was great for their crime stats, they could record every stolen check as a separate theft, which meant they'd solved nearly three hundred crimes in a single night, barely had to lift a finger.

I didn't do so bad, in spite of the year in jail. All we'd been caught with was that week's checks, they couldn't prove anything that anything had happened before, and Joe was at least sensible enough not to sell us out on that. I still had a healthy bank account, and walked out of prison a rich man. Sally D had gotten a criminal record, which meant she could no longer appear as licensee, but apart from changing the paperwork she continued to run her bars, even offered me my old job back. Danny was less lucky, Cindy walked out on him, taking most of the jewellery with her.

Sally tried to track Joe down, but he left town as if the mob were after him, which of course it probably was. He disappeared successfully, it was a full five years before he was heard of again.

It was a guy at The Joint who showed me the article, a small piece at the back of the paper, a gunman shot in a bank raid in Philadelphia. He was using an assumed name, but I recognised the picture. I wanted to feel I'd been revenged, somehow, but I guess I knew that even if we'd gotten away with it, even if we'd all just walked away with all the money, this was how Joe'd have ended up anyway.