Stories, Thoughts and Snippets
We were back outside in less than a minute. We didn't even hear a cop as we drove away. The take wasn't huge, eight cash drawers adding up to about 20,000 dollars, minus the $2000 we spent on our guns. As I organized the job I took $5000 as my share, the driver, who was also responsible for stealing the car used also took $5000 for the additional risk he was assuming by stealing the car. The other two split the remaining $8000 evenly. Between putting my crew together, planning the job, and executing, the entire project took about three weeks. This was not a higher return for my time than I had been seeing running Mexicans across the border, but now I had my crew, we had our weapons, which would not need to be replaced unless used, and we had a basic template for doing a job. I figured that in the future a similar job could be completed comfortably, from inception to finish, in less than a week. If we were ambitious and willing to travel extensively I thought it feasible that we could pull three or maybe even four jobs a month. At $5,500 dollars a job I figured I could average $18,000-20,000 a month, which would be $220,000-240,000 a year. Which is a fair pay rate for the actual amount of work being expended, but not good enough considering the constant risk and prolonged nature of the crime spree.
We were going to have to get into the vault, I figured one vault job would provide enough to live on comfortably for a year, after which we could reassemble and do another one in a different area, each job taking a couple of weeks, maybe a month out of our year. This was harder than I had thought it was going to be, not to execute, but to plan, and Charlie always said you shouldn't do a damn thing if you didn't know what you were doing. It's a lot easier to find someone that will hold a gun than it is to find someone that really knows dick about a bank. Eventually I got in contact with an ex-con who had worked in a bank, his banking didn't have anything to do with his crime, he had been caught in some child-prostitution sting, but he knew his banks, he told us when they would be flush with cash, he told us when safe doors should be open, and who in the bank would be able to open them if they were shut, which unfortunately, was most often no one. He recommended that if we walked in, and the vault was shut, that we take the drawers the way we always did, and leave.
The big problem was the time, we had gotten the drawers down to the point that we could be in and out in 30 seconds flat, but with a vault there were a lot more obstacles, it's not general practice to leave piles of cash sitting on a table in a vault the way the movies make it look, the money is usually inside locked drawers within the vault, these aren't complicated locks, but you can't just pull them open with your hands. Half the time you can't even pry the things open. So you have someone go in to open a safe-deposit box, and that gets them inside the vault, and then you have some idea of what you are going to have to do. Sometimes a pry bar will suffice, sometimes a small cutting torch is a good idea, and sometimes the only way you get anything is by pressing a gun against the managers temple. All the while that this goes on it's a pretty safe bet that a silent alarm has been triggered, either by one of the clerks or by a breach in protocol during entering the vault, and though response times are different in any bank you can generally expect that if it takes you longer than five minutes then you are fucked.