CHAPTER NINE
I gave up my old job selling phones. It had only been a cover for me anyway, to explain my income and to justify my spending.
So now, I could watch and learn. I could pick the service techs brains and learn all that I needed to know about stealing cars and getting around any security systems that they might have.
As I expected, Tony started me out at the minimum wage. I wasn’t sure if he was testing me to see if I meant what I had told him or if he was just a cheap bastard.
As I later found out, it was the latter. Tony was a cheap bastard, but I understand why. You don’t get rich, and stay rich, by giving it all away. The good thing for me was that I didn’t care about the pay. The knowledge was what I was after, and that would pay me much more dividends down the road.
So, “Tony’s Auto Electronics,” got a new ‘do-boy,’ and school was in session for me.
I was real eager, and everyone could see it. Most of the guys liked me, but some didn’t, but that was ok. I’d learned a valuable lesson as a salesman, that you can’t please everyone a hundred percent of the time. You can’t know everyone’s thoughts, nor can you know everyone’s motives or agendas, so you do the best that you can and chalk up the ones you don’t sell as experience. You try to learn something if you can, and then move on.
So, the two ijitts that didn’t like me probably saw me as soft; a yes man. And for all intents and purposes, I was.
I was there to do whatever anyone needed, anytime. Of course, technically I was Tony’s gopher, or do-boy, but I was always on loan and available to whoever needed me. I was pretty busy.
My work wasn’t limited to the shop. I picked up parts and supplies from all over town. Sometimes, I would go to pick up lunch for Tony or Judy if that’s what they wanted.
I kept the place clean and helped any technician that would let me get my hands dirty.
It was Julio that seemed to like me the most. He was probably the best technician Tony had. He was a second generation American, like me. His family was from Columbia, South America. He claimed his family was part of the Columbian drug cartel, but I kind of doubt it. A person usually doesn’t brag about something like that, because if they are really involved, they pretty much know to keep their mouths shut.
But it didn’t matter. He was my open door. When there was nothing to do, or I was in between jobs, Julio would explain things to me. Some really cool stuff and some really stupid. I had to sit and listen through so many useless stories just to build a rapport, and to fully earn his trust.
He had taken a tool home with him and acted like he had stolen it. He told me about it to test my loyalty and to see if I was a snitch, if I would tell Tony.
What I didn’t know though, was that he had already asked Tony if he could borrow the tool. Poor Julio. If he only knew how little stealing a tool from Tony meant to me.
Anyway, I passed his little test, and a few more after that. Soon after the last test, he started inviting me to his house to help him with a few of his side jobs. These jobs would come from people, some who had already gone to Tony’s and found it too expensive, or those that heard by word of mouth that Julio could do the work for a better price.
In addition to those people, Julio would steal customers from Tony. He would wait until Tony or Judy went to lunch or took a break and he would watch the counter for them when the customer would come for an estimate. Julio would them the price that Tony would charge, then he would tell them how much he, Julio, would charge for the same procedure, undercutting Tony’s estimate by 20-30 percent.
He never went after the basic installs though. There was no real profit in them. No, it was always the more extensive and involved jobs that he took. The ones where he could save the customers a lot of money and make himself a nice check too.
So, now that I knew more about his shady dealings, it made more sense to him to train me and get me more involved. I had a little bit of dirt on him, and he knew from his tests that I was trustworthy. He thought I was his boy and that he was my mentor. He had it half right.
I picked his brain, prying for every little detail I could get. I have to tell you, when it came to cars, that guy was the real deal. He knew his stuff cold. With everything he knew, I was surprised he wasn’t stealing cars himself.
So, I learned, and in time, Tony raised my pay to a more respectable level and let me perform some of the basic alarm and stereo installations.
The money that the technicians were getting compared to the money Tony was making for their work was sickening. It was clear to me why Julio, and I’m sure some of the other techs, was doing side work.
Well, to make a long story short, it only took me about four months to acquire all the information and confidence I needed in order to steal my first car.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t steal a car all the time. No, the whole point of my learning all of this knowledge was to help me to do it without getting caught.
If I was going to steal a car, I was going to do it with the lowest risk and highest rewards. Of course, I wasn’t averse to taking a bigger risk, but at this point I wanted to learn first.
So, my first action was to get license plates. If I was driving a stolen car, I definitely did not want to have the original plates, or a blank spot back there for the police to see as plain as a birthmark on a baby’s butt.
Now, I came up with a really great idea to get some license plates. Really, I came up with two ideas.
The first was to find what is called dealer’s tags. These tags were used on demonstration cars at new car dealerships. Those cars were used to give customers test drives, because of course they were not going to drive a brand new car off the lot unless the customer was ready to buy that specific car. The dealer’s tag on the car also covered insurance in case of an accident. It was also used on the demo cars when the salesman decided to drive it home or use it as their own transportation. The good thing about the tag was that if the car was pulled over, they did not have show a registration at all. All they had to do was show a business card that said they worked at the dealership and their license. The police knew that the dealerships had insurance so there would be no problem there either.
Now, you might be thinking that I would have to steal one or more of those tags and someone might report them stolen, which would put me in jeopardy.
Wrong. See, this is where my idea really came in. I would clone the plates, then put the original plates back on the original cars. See, a few years back I had gone to a surplus auction, just for the heck of it, and seen a license plate stamp machine. Well, I ended up buying it for a couple hundred dollars and put it in a storage room I was paying for. It came with a few hundred blank aluminum plates, and if I ended up using all of them, I could always buy more somewhere.
Anyway, that would take care of the problem of driving the stolen car anywhere.
My other idea was that I could put a temporary plate on the car, a cardboard plate with a temporary number on it that was used for new cars purchased from dealers. It was good for up to thirty days and could easily be made with a home computer with an inkjet printer. The only paperwork a driver with that kind of tag had to have if pulled over was the dealer’s copy of the bill of sale. I could make of those easily on my computer.
So, now I was set to take another step up the career ladder as a thief, and also with that step, I would get greater rewards. With the rewards though, there were greater consequences.
I was ready….at least I thought I was.
I started venturing out, looking for my first car. I figured that I would stay away from my own neighborhood, so I started checking out the surrounding cities.
My first step to do that was to pick up Cindy, a friend of mine who had worked with me at the mall. She was a saleswoman at the store across the aisle from my store.
Cindy was only a few years older than me and already had a few kids. Cute kids—Zach and Gina, three and two years old. She was cute too, but we were just friends. She was looking for a daddy for her kids, and I made sure that she understood that I had absolutely no interest in being strapped down like that.
Now Cindy and I kept in touch after I quit my phone sales job. I would call her or she would call me, and we would go out to see a movie or grab a bite to eat. It wasn’t something we did all the time, but at least once or twice a week.
So how things worked was when I wanted to venture out and scope out a neighborhood, I would call her and make plans to take her and the kids out for a nice drive, usually on the weekend. We’d drive around, looking at nice homes in nice neighborhoods. I would pretend to be envying the rich people’s lives, while making small talk with Cindy.
Of course, I would feed her some baloney story of me dreaming of one day living like those people, and she would say the same stuff back to me while we were talking, I would be taking note of the number of homes with alarms, those with pets, those with garage doors partially open. I would look for yards with kids toys spread on them too. Houses with kids usually mean that the parents were in their late twenties to early forties and liked having expensive toys—boats, jet skies, 4-wheeler, expensive cars, etc….
The neighborhoods that I targeted had wooded areas close by that I could use for reconnaissance purposes. I would approach the homes from the back side completely unobserved.
I also looked for adjoining sub-divisions so that I could park whatever car I was using far enough away from the homes I was burglarizing and stealing cars from as to be unnoticed.
Another security measure I took was to do all of my work at night or during rainstorms. Rainstorms were nice because for the most part, people did not go out in the weather, nor did they go looking around outside their homes. Alarms were constantly being set off by electrical surges, and because of that, those alarms were less likely to be responded to by the police. So, I did all of my home- work and now I was ready to start stealing cars.