The Money Grabbers

Tiring of things, I began collecting people. Mirror-image scoundrels, for example – men who seemed to have had almost identical criminal careers in different centuries, like Gaston B. Means in the 20th and Sam Felker in the 19th. From them it was only a small hop to my present specialty – the successful, i.e., uncaught criminals.

The trouble with the really successful crook is that we don't hear about him. He remains uncaught, untried, his tale untold. For all his vibrant ego, no successful criminal is likely to rush into print with a candid autobiography. Even Hollywood cannot make it worth his while. "Crime," says the Motion Picture Production Code, "shall never be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime as against the law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire for imitation."

As a result, Sinatra and his Rover Boys in Ocean's 11 complete their great Las Vegas caper, get the gambling-house money safely and then have to see it burn on the garbage heap outside town. The Code, of course. And poor Alec Guinness after working out the marvelously detailed plot that brings him and the rest of the Lavender Hill Mob ten million in gold bars in London is allowed to get away with it only briefly until a square type comes to the tropical paradise to bring him back to some damp English gaol. That funny Code, again.

We enjoy such films, psychologists say, because we secretly identify with the clever criminal. Even the most righteous of us get an inner joy, an atavistic pleasure when the criminal outwits the law without employing violence. Here is our secret inner vengeance for the unmerited traffic tickets, the officiousness of court attendants, the momentary panic when Internal Revenue Service letters come out of season. In one measure or another we are all lawbreakers and there is a universal secret bond of sympathy for the criminals who dare outrageously. Let the moralists proclaim "Crime Doesn't Pay." Some of us know better. And if we didn't, the professional criminologists would tell us.

"Most of us," I was told by Donald E.J. Macnamara, Dean of the New York Institute of Criminology, "would concede that crime does pay." Virgil W. Peterson, Operating Director of our oldest anticrime group, the Chicago Crime Commission, is even blunter: "There exists a substantial army of professional criminals who ply their trade with regularity and get away with it.... It may be reassuring to repeat that crime does not pay, but there is simple evidence to show that it pays far too well for far too many people."

This isn't a new idea, only recently accepted by our more sophisticated age. Back in 1877, penologist Richard Dugdale was warning that crime "does pay the experts who commit crimes which are difficult to detect or who can buy themselves off."

For my collection, I did not want any known racketeers, any Tony Accardos, whose immunity to arrest is not the result of ingenuity but simply stems from a sordid alliance between politics and crime. Nor did I want the routine burglar whose seeming immunity is only statistical. Most police chiefs operate on the assumption that when they've nabbed a professional burglar he's previously pulled about 16 successful jobs. Thus, the more hauls, the more certain apprehension becomes. Customs investigators believe that when they pick up a professional smuggler he's previously pulled off five or six undetected jobs.

The men I searched for, through my years of free-lance writing on almost every subject for almost every top magazine, were those who operated outside the tight little society of the underworld, beyond the leveling of statistical norms; and men who worked without the aid of any weapons except their finely honed wits. In short, true originals.

The five specimens I've chosen had lower- or middle-class origins and not one had the equivalent of a formal college education. (Does college inhibit true criminal originality?) They include a master smuggler, a blackmailer, a pair of counterfeiters, and an embezzler. In the lot are an Irish-American who operated in New York and now lives in Florida; a Yugoslav who worked in Milan and now lives in Vienna; a naturalized American born in England who worked all over; an Argentine who lives in Switzerland, and a Londoner who never left England. Their net gains range from a modest total of $94,000 to $2,000,000 a year, which is the current net take of the Argentine.

• • •

The first item for my collection came from an old police friend, John A. Lyons, who had once been an inspector in New York City's police department. At the time he gave me the lead on this extraordinary criminal, Lyons was New York State's Commissioner of Correction.

"He was," Lyons said, "a consummate rogue and a real nervy son of a bitch." Lyons described him as having a small lithe figure, sharp black eyes, a well-tended mustache and the large nose of a whoremaster. "He reminded me," Lyons said, "of the busy little man with black silk socks you used to see on those French post cards."

I refrain from mentioning his true name for quixotic reasons. There are no legal restraints on libeling the dead, but after he retired as the most successful American blackmailer of the century, my man worked out a life of small good works and neighborliness in the community in which he settled in 1939. It is an upper-middle-class suburb not too far from where I live on the north shore of Long Island.

I shall call him Smith, because his real name was a simple Anglo-Saxon one, too. Smith attended a lesser British public school and served in World War I. He stayed on in France to commence his incredible career as a blackmailer in 1921. Until he retired in 1939 he grossed more than $2,000,000, which comes to about $71,000 a year. Operating expenses were heavy, but he managed to live in the grand style in Palm Beach, Cannes, Paris, London and Biarritz. During those 18 affluent years he was never arrested, put inside a jail or even subjected to the minor indignity of getting his name on a police blotter. The police knew who he was, what he was up to and how he worked, but they could never put a finger on him. He bribed no police, kept no shysters on retainer, was no contributor to political campaigns. He was easily one of the most frustrating experiences ever endured by law enforcement agencies.

His greatest coup took place in 1930. It never reached the papers, the courts or the district attorney. The New York police knew just enough about the details to force them to sit by helplessly while a prominent New York banker and patron of the arts was mulcted of $250,000 by Smith.

Like all of Smith's jobs, this one was painstakingly researched, prepared and rehearsed. Smith employed only a single accomplice, a new one for each venture. Invariably, she was a pretty 16-year-old orphan with a valid birth certificate. Smith made modest annual contributions to several asylums. He would then invest an even larger sum in the intensive one-year finishing-school education. At the same time she would get an extensive wardrobe and skillful make-up so that she would look older – say 21 or 22. He had seduced the girl, of course. Long before the orphan's education was completed, Smith had a complete dossier on his victim-to-be – the extent of his wealth, his previous involvements with women, a good insight into his character and a detailed knowledge of his vacation plans. Smith favored shipboard romances. They progressed faster.

In this case, the banker became friendly with the young woman aboard an ocean liner. By the time the pair returned to New York at the end of the summer, she was the older man's mistress. In September, the girl tearfully told him her fiancé had learned of the affair and threatened to break off their engagement. The sophisticated banker immediately suspected a frame. His lawyer talked to the girl and investigated her background. Smith had created her new identity with great care, and the lawyer could find nothing incriminating. The girl suggested that $50,000 would bring her fiancé around to taking a broader view. The girl got her $50,000. Then a month later came the demand for another $100,000.

The victim and his lawyer went to the police who quickly learned that Smith was involved. Smith, always a step ahead, played his best card.

One morning, the maid in the girl's apartment and the desk clerk in her hotel visited the banker at his office. They told him they had signed affidavits to the effect that the affair had begun, so far as they knew, on a certain date that year. The date, according to a copy of the girl's birth certificate which the banker had received that morning, made it clear to him that his casual liaison was now, in the eyes of the law, quite a different matter. The girl had been under 18 when the affair began which meant, according to New York law, that he had committed a felony – a second-degree rape. As he visualized the headlines if the case came to trial, he knew he was beaten. He called his lawyer, asked him to pay whatever the blackmailers wanted and asked the police to forget the case. Eventually he paid $250,000. The girl got $20,000 from Smith. "Enough for a dowry," he used to say.

When he retired in 1939, Smith bought a comfortable house in a suburb, did considerable riding, cultivated roses and was a generous contributor to community causes. He lived with a housekeeper and a "niece." I could not find out if the niece had been one of the girls he had used in any of his blackmailing schemes. He died a few years ago and the obituary in the local weekly was unintentionally funny: it described Smith as a man who had operated several private schools abroad. In a sense, he had, of course.

• • •

My next specimen is José Beraha Zdravko – you couldn't invent such a name. He is now 56. He is worth about $2,000,000, lives in a grand apartment in Vienna and is the controlling partner of the leading earth-moving-equipment importers of Austria. He is a good husband, a loving father and bitterly resents the appellation of "criminal." Indeed, he is called that only in the British Commonwealth.

Beraha's crime was an enormous one: he went into competition with the British government by putting out a finer gold sovereign.

In 1946, Beraha was a smalltime Milanese trader, exporting milling machines and aluminumware to South (continued overleaf) America. Behind him lay several escapes from the Nazis who had overrun his native Yugoslavia.

Currencies fluctuated wildly on the black markets, the only ones that mattered then. Setting out to master the intricacies of foreign exchange, Beraha came upon a curious fact: valued even more than the hard American dollar was a supposedly obsolete gold coin—the British gold sovereign. Inflation-ridden middle classes in Italy and elsewhere wanted gold coins and most of them wanted the British gold sovereign above all. This coin, a little smaller than a U.S. quarter, was last officially issued by the British in 1917 when it was worth a pound, $4.86, and contained about a fourth of an ounce of gold. So that even at the official world market price of $35 an ounce, the gold sovereign was really worth $8.75. But unofficially it was selling for anywhere between $14 and $28 in local currencies.

When England went off the gold standard in 1931 it became illegal to use the sovereign in Great Britain. The coin was no longer legal tender. To Beraha's mind that meant anyone could issue it.

He organized the business quickly. Gold itself was no problem. Italy put no hindrance on the import of gold or its internal sale. Beraha had master dies of the George V sovereign made by a Milanese for $100. He leased a one-story building on the Via Andrea Doria for his mint and hired a young engineer to run it.

The British mint got 1361/2 sovereigns out of every kilo of gold (2.2 Ibs.) but Beraha decided to do worse. "No, I wanted mine to be a better product and distinctively different in one way: my coins would have more gold in them."

Even after putting a pinch more gold into each of his sovereigns, Beraha was able to make a profit of $700 on every kilo, a little more than $5 on each coin. Selling them was no problem. Inflationridden Europe, India, North Africa and Arabia were crying for gold sovereigns.

Beraha set up a system of agents to distribute the coins. To get them into lands which barred the import of gold, he worked out a friendly arrangement with several diplomatic couriers.

Early in 1951 Beraha decided to retire. He wasn't greedy: he had earned about $2,000,000 and he was attracting much competition. But worse, the premium on gold sovereigns was going down steadily. And the British were becoming too interested in his little mint.

He moved his family to Lugano in Switzerland in the spring of 1951. Five months later, the British caught up with him. It came in the form of a request for extradition by the accommodating Italians who had raided Beraha's mint.

Under the Swiss penal code, Beraha could not be bailed out while he was held for "investigation." He spent seven months inside. "The Swiss," says Beraha admiringly, "are very correct and quite unbribable. I almost didn't even think of trying."

The case came up before the Swiss Federal Tribunal in the summer of 1952. A unanimous decision was handed down by the five judges. In effect they said:

"The only question before us is whether or not the British sovereign is still legal tender.... From all the evidence we have been shown, it is obvious that the gold sovereign is not legal tender in England."

Accordingly, the court ruled that Beraha be released. "An insult to the prestige of the sovereign," stormed the Financial Times of London. "Now anyone is free to manufacture sovereigns and circulate them anywhere!"

But Beraha had long tired of the game. He made his pile and turned the mint over to his associates in Milan. The Berahas moved to Vienna in 1953 and have lived there ever since. He has invested wisely in several most respectable businesses and lives a life of ease. Only to the British is he still a dangerous counterfeiter who ruined the prestige of the gold sovereign.

• • •

The crime of John Burns, as we'll call him, was a dismally ordinary one: embezzlement. And the fact that Mr. Burns was not prosecuted even after he was found out is also a commonplace. Insurance companies estimate that about a billion dollars a year is stolen by trusted employees who have access to company money. Professor Jerome Hall of Indiana University believes that 98 percent of all detected U.S. embezzlement cases are handled without public prosecution. The victimized companies are primarily interested in getting back as much of the stolen money as possible rather than jailing the crook.

I added Burns to my collection because he was not a particularly trusted employee and officially had nothing to do with his employer's money. For most of his adult life, Burns worked for a large department store. Yet I must be coy here, because the store's conduct afterward was hard by the ominous legal shadowland known as "compounding a felony."

Burns stole $181,000. He was never tried, arrested or even mentioned in the newspapers. He did it by making himself a silent partner of the big store. There were then about 3500 employees and some 6000 stockholders, but our Burns was the only partner, an enviable relationship for an obscure maintenance man making $62 a week.

He had a small cubicle where he kept maintenance supplies for his floor in the store. One day, while repairing a hole in the ceiling of his little room, he found that the hole made it possible for him to reach a pneumatic tube. He knew this tube led from several sales departments to a central change office. Salesclerks would put the payment plus the sales slip in a pneumatic cartridge, put it into the tube and wait for the change to be returned with the slip.

Burns got the same idea some of you just did as I tell this. Locking the door of the supply room, he built a little stovepipe extension onto the pneumatic tube so that the cartridges would pop out with a whoosh right on the little table in the supply room. Then he made some rubber stamps to match those used in the central change office. For an hour every day he would lock himself in the room and intercept the cartridges. If the sales slip indicated that an $18 dress had been purchased and a $20 bill was enclosed, he would simply take $2 out of his change tray, stamp the sales slip and put it back in the pneumatic tube for return to the salesclerk.

The shortstopping went on undetected for seven fat years, during which Burns bought himself a $65,000 home, a goodsized power cruiser, a fine car and invested successfully in the long bull market. The big store's auditors knew there was a great cash leak somewhere in the system, but their tightest investigation couldn't disclose the thief. (Dozens of other thieving employees were uncovered, but not the one they wanted. In the retail field alone, internal thefts are equal to half the total profits.)

Then Burns decided to take his family on a long-planned visit to the Ould Sod. While he was away, a janitor from another floor wandered into the Burns supply room looking for a bottle of window cleaner. He saw the added tube and the change desk and called the store's security department.

When the silent partner returned from Ireland he was confronted. He admitted nothing. His home, cruiser, investments? Just lucky track winnings plus an Irish Sweepstakes windfall – on which, he pointed out, he had carefully paid his income tax. The store's surety company persuaded him to make a deal. They knew it would be a particularly tough case to prosecute, since he was never caught in the act of shortstopping. He paid back some $71,000 and was allowed to keep his house and the $32,000 which he was able to prove he made in the stock market. Part of the agreement was that there was to be no publicity. There wasn't.

(There are some righteous prosecutors who think that such deals are dangerously close to compounding a felony. They are convinced that this nonprosecution encourages embezzlers.)

(continued on page 171) Money Grabbers (continued from page 104)

Burns opened a store in mid-town Manhattan and prospered moderately. Then, a few years ago, he decided to retire and bought a home in southern Florida where he lives now in sunny ease with a comparatively untroubled conscience, solaced by the absolution granted him by the surety company and his former employer. The pneumatic tube system for changemaking at his former employer's has long since disappeared. It was much too simple to emulate the silent-partner gambit.

• • •

The strangest specimen in my collection is nameless, faceless – and much sought after. I have several rival English collectors who are also after him. They have certain advantages: this specimen was English and operated in London.

He took the British government for about $150,000 in the years 1871 – 1872 when the money was the equivalent of one million untaxed dollars today. When Scotland Yard finally caught on to his crime and his methods the statute of limitations on prosecution had long run out. Not only couldn't they touch him, but they even had to continue his pension as a retired civil servant. It must have been terribly frustrating.

Jones is as good a name for him as any. In 1870 he was 38 years old and an employee of the General Post Office working in the stock-exchange branch on Threadneedle Street, a shilling's throw from the Bank of England. Jones was almost certainly a supervising clerk and his specialty was telegrams. Four thousand telegrams a day were sent from this G.P.O. branch, mainly by stockbrokers – to clients, banks and other brokers.

The procedure was this: After each telegraphic message was written on a blank form, it was handed to a clerk at the counter in the post office – Jones, for example. He would count the words and tell the sender the cost. Most wires were at the minimum rate of a shilling for 20 words. Jones would ask for the shilling and give the sender his telegram and a new shilling postage stamp. The sender would lick the back of the stamp, paste it on his telegraph form and hand it back to Jones. He would then cancel it with a rubber hand stamp and give the message to a telegrapher seated at a key in the center of the room.

If you have just a little clever larceny in your heart you know how Jones handled this; but if all you can think of is the thieving tollbooth agent's cadence "one for the house and one for me," you do Jones a great injustice. He made his own shilling stamps.

The shilling stamps bore a left-profile portrait of a youthful Queen Victoria. Jones' counterfeit wasn't bad. He didn't bother trying to duplicate the water-mark on the back, but what ordinary stamp user would try to find out if there was one on the stamp before paying over his shilling?

Hard-working, eager, efficient Jones probably could have handled a thousand telegrams a day. A thousand shillings a day is about $250 a day; six days a week brings it to $1500 a week or $78,000 a year! He was at it about two years, or $156,000 worth. Let us generously allow $6000 for paper, artwork and the hiring of certain technical assistance, which leaves Jones with a thumping $150,000 for his excellent idea and devotion to duty in the stock-exchange post office.

He wasn't greedy. Late in 1872 Jones, now 40, decided to retire – on "grounds of ill health," and he began drawing a small but steady pension. Not for him a suspiciously hasty farewell to his fellow clerks and a trumped-up story about inheriting a fortune from an uncle in Australia.

The post office got a clue to Jones' homemade shilling stamps in 1898 when a young stamp dealer, Charles Nissen, discovered a lack of watermark and several crudities in a batch of shilling stamps on old telegraph forms. But nothing came of that investigation. Then, in 1910, a larger batch of canceled Jones stamps turned up. These, too, had been canceled at the stock-exchange post office. In 1912, R. G. Waldegrave, then Accountant General of the post office, visited Jones, who was 80 and still drawing his pension. What happened at the interview? In January 1938, Waldegrave provided a tempered, discreet account. He used no names, of course. He called Jones "the official who, to put it no higher, would have had the most obvious opportunity of disposing of the forged stamps to the public. He retired in 1872 at the age of 40 on grounds of ill health. He was interviewed – one would like to know his emotional reactions to the news that the interview was to take place – but if he had any secret which he might have revealed, he did not reveal it, either then or during the further years of his life."

Jones, Nissen and Waldegrave are dead now, but the mystery persists. Waldegrave's kin have been questioned many times. Once or twice a year, rather-too-casual inquirers would like to know if they could check on the post-office employees who retired in 1872 on grounds of ill health. The records, alas, are buried in a cellar in Yorkshire and cannot be consulted. The results of the post office's 1898 and 1912 investigations are still secret.

London philatelists I've talked to at The Royal Philatelic Club have nothing but admiration for Jones. To all of them, his work is still the most audacious fraud of its kind ever perpetrated. They don't know where Jones is buried, but they've given him an impressive monument. You will find it in the authoritative Encyclopedia of Philately by Robson Lowe:

1871. The one-shilling plates, 5 and 6, have been forged and are known as the Stock Exchange forgeries; they are worth many times the price of the genuine stamp.

In a very short time, Jones made a great deal of money and retired while he was young enough to enjoy it. But in death he enjoyed an even greater triumph. His homemade stamps, bereft of watermark and filled with many crudities, are great treasures for the collector. His stamps fetch as much as $40 each. The government's own pucka Victoria shilling stamp of 1871 is worth about 50 cents.

In the strange world of philately the successful counterfeits – those actually used for postage – are always worth more than plain, honest originals. Millions of young collectors, whose moral fiber isn't completely warped by this revelation, will be better prepared for an adult world in which, alas, Crime Often Pays Well.

• • •

I dined out one winter in New York largely on the tale of Bernardo's great success. Here was a criminal with an almost foolproof scheme who was now netting $2,000,000 a year and couldn't be arrested. Inevitably, came the stock question: If it was so easy, why weren't others doing it?

Others were doing it, I explained. But Bernardo was the most successful, the shrewdest and the most careful. He had experience and some of the most valuable gold contacts in the world. You don't come by those in any cram course. I preface the tale with these cautionary remarks, because in some ways Bernardo's operation sounds almost too easy.

Bernardo is 56 and is an Argentine citizen who now lives in Switzerland. He maintains comfortable apartments in Geneva and Zurich. He is bald, benignly plump and has never handled a gun in his life. He's never been arrested, indicted or even held on suspicion, and so it is necessary to provide him with a false last name or else flirt with libel. Let's say Reis. (Interpol does have an ever-growing dossier on him.)

Bernardo is a "Financial Advisor" on his calling cards, and several Swiss banks, citadels of infinite discretion, are pleased to have him as a client. There is nothing criminal about what Bernardo does in Switzerland. Only India considers Bernardo Reis a dangerous criminal.

Reis is the world's most successful master smuggler of gold. In an average year, his agents carry about four tons of gold – around 120,000 ounces – to India, the gold sink of the world. Reis nets nearly $20 an ounce. Two or three times a year his carriers are seized by Indian customs officials and the 50 or 60 pounds of gold each carries – worth $40,000–$50,000 – is confiscated.

Gold is India's national curse. Money that should be used to build factories or purchase needed machinery abroad is, instead, invested in hoarded gold. At harvest, millions of farmers buy gold which is converted into bracelets and rings worn by the farmers' wives – until they need money the following spring for planting. Or the gold is simply buried. The rupees used to pay for the gold are sent abroad, converted into foreign currencies and thus become a debit item in India's balance of trade. Indian authorities believe that in the past decade some 15,000,000 ounces – about 83 tons – of gold have been smuggled into India. Bernardo is probably responsible for nearly half, or 40 tons.

There are lots of amateurs in the business, including amateurs in the business, including airline personnel and foreign diplomats who are caught eventually. Bernardo Reis never gets caught.

His system starts with the personnel department, run by his son who has agents all over Europe looking for likely carriers. They must be ordinary Joes, steady job holders who've never been in trouble. About one of three is tempted by the offer of a fast $1500 plus a free trip to India. Usually they make the trip during their vacation.

Once he's been checked out carefully, the carrier is fitted with a special skin-hugging vest which will hold from 50 to 60 pounds of pure gold. He also gets a custom-made suit, skillfully tailored to conceal the bulges, a cover story of why he is stopping in India although his destination appears to be Australia, Malaya or Japan. He's warned of what will happen to him and his family if he should try a double cross.

Just before he leaves, the carrier has his special vest fitted with the small gold bricks of .996 fineness purchased in a perfectly legal transaction from the Union des Banques Suisses. The carrier gets a round-trip ticket to Tokyo or Singapore and is accompanied by a Reis agent to Milan or Paris for the real beginning of the journey. (Travelers to India coming directly from Switzerland are always under suspicion.) En route the carrier is under surveillance by other Reis agents who make sure he doesn't get any ideas. Meanwhile, Reis has sent a coded message to his Bombay agents describing the carrier, the exact amount of gold he has, and his flight number.

Indian officials want to encourage tourists and they do not harass visitors unduly. So they do not use the X-ray inspectoscope indiscriminately. The odds definitely favor the first-time carrier.

Once past Bombay customs, the carrier goes to a designated hotel where the Reis agent relieves him of the gold and weighs it carefully. The carrier is paid his fee – based on the weight of the gold – and is then free to return to Europe. If he's caught, a prominent Indian solicitor will appear with bail to get him out of jail. A few days later the smuggler will leave India, forfeiting his bail. Of course, he can never be a carrier again.

As long as Switzerland keeps a free market in gold and as long as Bernardo Reis keeps out of India, there isn't a chance in the world he will ever be arrested and tried for being the most successful smuggler in the world today.

Are there any smudges on Reis' horizon? Well, he thinks that, once or twice, Indian agents have tried to kill him by running him down.

He isn't accepted socially in Geneva, but then, few foreigners are. On the whole, as he once put it with cloying modesty, "It isn't a bad life, you know."

• • •

The seeking of social acceptance is one of the curious strivings these five successful criminals had in common. Probably Jones, the shilling-stamp counterfeiter, got it because his crime wasn't suspected until he was 80. José Beraha has the problem to a certain extent in Vienna. When I first met him, an old friend of his, an engineer, acted as our interpreter. Toward the end he said, "For God's sake, keep me out of the story. It wouldn't help my career to be known as a friend of a counterfeiter." He spoke in English, but somehow Beraha sensed what he had said and smiled sadly. There have been more pointed snubs since then, but Beraha has grown philosophical about them. His wife is somewhat more sensitive about this, though.

In Florida, the silent partner of the big store in New York is visited occasionally by old cronies who mix doses of envy and scorn, as only old friends can. Smith, the blackmailer, left a residue of small doubts in the suburban community he settled in. When I visited it after his death, a neighbor said he never liked Smith. "Just one of those things. He reminded me of a retired pimp. And he laid on that 'niece' routine a little too thickly. He wasn't kidding us."

The need to fit firmly into a comfortable middle-class environment is the great weakness, then, of our successful criminals. Lacking underworld ties which any ordinary self-respecting crook would have, these exemplars invariably seek a gilded respectability after they've made it.

Once, in Munich, I met Eliaza Bazna, better known as "Cicero," the extraordinary valet-spy of World War II who filched secrets from his master, the British Ambassador to Turkey. Idly, I asked Bazna if he had thought of fleeing to Rio de Janeiro after he quit, just as his film portrayer, James Mason, did in Five Fingers. Bazna looked puzzled. "Brazil? But I don't know anyone there."

I just wanted you to know that even after you've pulled the perfect crime and gotten away with the loot, there are still peculiar little problems society will pose for you.

"The greatest crimes," Aristotle wrote 2300 years ago, "are not committed in order to acquire the necessary, but the superfluous." Middle-class respectability, for example. Maybe the slogan should be changed to "Crime Does Pay – But Who Can Afford It?"