CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Genie continued to teach martial arts. She would accompany me on a job every once in a while. Easy jobs, nothing too complicated. Everything became routine, and I was very okay with it.
By this time, I’d gotten two dogs, a German Shepherd and a Pit Bull as I had before. I named the Shepherd Goldie, and the Pit was Kong. Genie loved them as much as I did. I had told her about losing Tiny as a child and she understood my need to love my dogs. We both walked them a lot.
I started getting close to my neighbors, Bob and Jill Luftkin. I ended up giving them a spare key to my place and the code to the alarm system. I asked them to walk and feed Goldie and Kong when I was out of town. I felt I could trust them that much.
Besides, I had cameras placed to keep track of them if I wanted to.
A year passed, and then another. Genie had moved into my trailer and we were making plans to get married. We were thinking about buying a house in the Keys, or maybe in the Caribbean.
Around that time, Miguel told me about a big job that he thought was perfect for me. He said it was the kind of job that a man could retire on.
I already had around eight million dollars in the bank, and he said this job would triple it.
He gave me the details. It was similar to the job I’d done for Vienguilay Otemrouth years before. A heist for an insurance payout.
I couldn’t sleep. The job was the only thing on my mind. This was it! The big score! The one I’d been waiting on most of my adult life! And wow, it was so simple….yeah, there were some risks, but there were always risks. Nothing I couldn’t deal with.
DeBeers, the world’s largest buyer and distributor of diamonds, would be hosting a show in Miami. Diamond aficionados from all over the world; France, Sweden, The United Arab Emirates, China and so forth, would be there showcasing their jewelry and stones.
The plan was simple. Tommy Zuuca and several of his associates from New York, Las Vegas, and L.A. would attend the show. They would purchase large sums of diamonds at wholesale prices for their jewelry stores, while also bringing some of their own merchandise to display for sale.
They would all stay in the same luxury hotel and of course keep all of their merchandise in the hotels’ safe for security insurance purposes.
That is where I came in. My job would be to steal the diamonds and afterwards, everyone would collect from their insurer. That is, after they added some fat to their inventories.
The stolen diamonds would get returned to their original owners and be redistributed around the world by various questionable means I didn’t ask about and I didn’t need to know.
So, I started preparing for the job. The International Diamond show was only four months away. A hotel was selected, The Fountainbleu, one of the oldest, extravagant hotels in the area. Miguel provided me with blueprints of the hotel and diagrams of the safe.
Now I was getting nervous. Why? Everything was simple and straightforward. I knew how to access the safe. Its’ weakest point was the back. I would cut through an eight inch outer wall, then a six-inch concrete block, and finally the one inch thick steel lining. It would be a breeze.
Accessing the area behind the safe would also be very easy. There was a corridor between the walls that allowed access to plumbing and wiring. Service technicians could go back there and make repairs with little or no disturbance to the guests.
Of course, there were cameras in those corridors, but that would be a small obstacle for me to overcome. I could do the job very easily.
But still, something was gnawing at me. Someone with a lot less skill could do the job too. Maybe not as clean as I could, but the job was definitely a no-brainer.
I had to assume that there were factors, variables that made this job land in my lap. Something that someone with less proficiency would overlook.
I called Brody and told him to tell Miguel that the hotel they had picked was fine. I had already checked the place out to make sure that everything matched up with the blueprints and diagrams, taking pictures with a digital camera to compare everything. So that was good.
I had not decided whether I would let Genie help me to do this job or not. I knew I could use another set of eyes on the lobby to watch the entrance to the safe from that side and warn me of any approaching problems. She would be in absolutely no danger, but I still hesitated, so why not?
I don’t know what it was, but my gut was trying to warn me that something was not right. I ignored it, chalk it up to being my last job before hanging up my hat.
So, I got the tools together that I would be using, then decided to tell Genie about the job. She definitely wanted in. Her eyes lit every time we talked about it and she was so full of energy, I thought she was going to jump out of her skin.
I didn’t tell her how big the payoff would be. I was afraid that she would get nervous and maybe mess up something, or sense something was wrong too. She just assumed that it was another half-million dollar payoff like the one I’d done before, and I let her believe that.
I also explained to her that I couldn’t discuss the details of the job with her because the less she knew, the better I could protect her. She told me that was ok, that she had faith in me and that was enough for her.
The four months flew by. As the day the show approached, I still felt nervous, and I understand why. Maybe it was the excitement of the huge score; more money than I could ever have dreamed of. I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t anything. I mean, why couldn’t the job be easy? I was very good at what I did, possibly even the best. I’d practiced this job over and over for the past four months, setting up mock walls and corridors that corresponded to the diagrams and then using the tools to cut through everything.
I was using a RAPTOR, a device the size of a large fire-extinguisher that was helium driven and fired steel nails at five thousand feet per second. It was very quiet and would easily crack concrete up to ten inches thick, after which I would use a small hand-held jackhammer, or mini hammer, to clear out the rest of the concrete. For the steel line, I would use a hand-held plasma cutter that could make a good-sized hole through the metal in just a few minutes and I had a water-filtration system that eliminated the smoke. I practiced with everything until I got my time down to around twenty minutes, including the packing of all the jewelry.
Genie’s part would be to sit in the lobby, in disguise, to advise me if anything happened up front. She would be posing as a Middle-Eastern woman, with her face and body completely covered. I got her an earpiece that allowed her to amplify sounds in the lobby so that she could easily hear any conversation clearly just by turning that way. She would communicate with me by text, using single word messages: stop, go, good, bad, etc….
We went in at 11:00PM, when most of the lobby traffic had died down for the day. Genie gave me the go-ahead and I started working.
I was dressed as a maintenance worker and had wheeled my cart full of tools in the back and had accessed the corridors. I had taken care of the cameras thirty minutes earlier, splicing into the feeds and playing a digital ‘loop’ that showed an empty corridor.
Everything went smoothly, and I got through the walls and steel lining in eighteen minutes. Genie said she couldn’t hear anything at all. It took me another five minutes to gather all of the diamonds. There were so many of them! I was out of the hotel by 11:45PM.
A few hours later, I met up with Brody and confirmed a wire transfer of the twenty-four million dollars before giving him the merchandise. Everything was pre-arranged by DeFriese and went without a hitch. I then met up with Genie at a parking garage a few blocks from where I’d had my meeting with Brody and we drove back to our place in Central Florida.