The Crown Jewels
About ten minutes ago, two cons
threw me off the 12th tier of the prisons main building. That’s how I died. I’m looking down at my
crushed and broken body still lying there. I’ll be there for a while. The
alarms been sounded but no guards will be here for another, say, ten maybe
twenty minutes. That’s to make sure I bleed out by the time they get here. Like
those gang bangers who tossed me off the tier, they’re getting paid, and paid
well, to make sure I’m dead. If I’m dead when the Captain of the guard shows
up, they don’t get paid. It’s a basic fundamental of prison economics.
I was in this dump doing 3 to
five years on an interstate robbery charge. Well, wait, let me go back. I’m a
mobster….I was a mobster…. a member of the mob. Organized crime. Not the prick-your-finger-with-a- needle-burn-
a- picture- of -a- Saint kind of mobster. I could never be one of those guys. I
was only half Italian. Not even that really. My mother came from Irish blood. My
Dad was like, half Greek or something. So I was, as the feds say, “associated” with those guys.
So, this all started over a
movie. You ever see the film called “Pretty Woman”? Well that was playing in the TV room one
night and there’s this scene where the rich guy gets a Beverly Hills jewelry
store to lends him a diamond necklace worth a quarter of a million dollars for
the girl in the movie to wear out to the theater that night. The guy even tells
her, he goes “Don’t get excited, its only on loan.”
And I’m sitting there, and I’m
thinking, if I was that guy, I’d keep the necklace because its insured for
twice its actual value. You think mob guys are crooked? We don’t have nothin on
the jewelry merchants, believe me on that. I mean, who do you think buys all
the stuff we steal on the occasional burglary?
Jewelers.
So I plotted it out. First, get a jeweler to
go along with lending me some necklace or something, I could figure out a
reason why later on, and then, instead of returning the jewelry, I keep it. The
jeweler reports it stolen, he gets the insurance money and I get a kick back on
that after I return the jewelry to him.
So my boss, in the Mob you got a
boss, everybody’s got a boss in the mob, to run the scam by him. You have to do
that. You have to run all your end scams by the boss and then he takes that to
his boss and gets permission and then he comes back and gives me the okay. My
boss is Jimmy the Hammer Sabatino. He’s in here on a
murder rap. He’ll never see the outside again.
Well it turns out that my bosses
boss is Paulie the Barber Castellana and he’s here
the joint with me and Jimmy the Hammer doing a few months on a
conspiracy-interstate rap and better yet, he owns a jewelry store, Crown Jewels
Jewelry, run by his Brother-in-Law. Half the crap they sell in the place is
stolen which is why Paulie the Barber was involved with it in the first place.
Paulie
the Barber tells my boss, Jimmy the Hammer, that I got the go
ahead and sends down the details on how he wants the deal to go down. I go to
the prison library and I email Paulie the Barbers Brother-in-Law at Crown
Jewels Jewelry and tell him that I’m a producer for Sony Pictures International
and asked to borrow jewelry for a video I’m shooting with Jennifer Lopez. Crown
Jewels agreed to lend me five pieces of jewelry worth
$2.09 million, after it receives a
certificate of insurance which we had made in the prison print shop.
Now all we got to do is pick up
the five pieces of jewelry and since it will all be recorded by cameras in the
shop and will require an in-person signature, we need to send in somebody who’s
not with us, you know, mobbed up.
So I got a woman on the outside named Candy
Supreme, she got a real name, I forget what it is, but she’s a dancer at a club
one of our guys run. We hooked up when we were both in a court ordered
substance recovery program. I called Candy and asked her to come up state and
visit me and my boss Jimmy the Hammer. I told her it
would be worth the ride. She does and we
run the deal past her, and she agrees to pick up the five pieces and sit on
them for ten G’s, ten grand. Good money for a day’s work.
I should have known right then
and there that you can’t trust a stripper with a coke problem. You know what
she did? She took the merchandize straight down to Miami and met with the
Cubans. She shows them the five pieces of jewelry, tells them their worth $2 mill,
and explains the whole scam to them and says she’ll trade the jewelry for one
key of cocaine. So the Cubans shot her to death, dumped her in a gator swamp
and sold the jewelry to some European guy for a cool half million bucks.
So I’m thinking, not to worry.
There’s always the insurance money. Crown Jewels made the claim for the loss
under an insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London. So what Paulie
the Barber Castellana’s Brother -in-Law didn’t know was that when he took over the Crown Jewels from some
degenerate gambler was that the store had signed an insurance policy that contained
a dishonest entrustment exclusion. In plain English, the insurance company excluded
coverage for any merchandize “caused by or resulting from sabotage, theft,
conversion or other act or omission of a dishonest character.”
Remember I was telling you about
those Cubans down in Miami? Well, the European guy they sold the five pieces of
jewelry to was actually an FBI undercover guy. The fed’s traced the jewelry
back to Crown Jewels, busted the Cubans and got one of them to spill the beans
about Candy Supreme and found what was left her in the gator swamp, which,
unfortunately included one of her hands and then used her finger prints to get
a positive ID of her and then they got hold of the prison film with her meeting
with me and Jimmy the Hammer.
I was small potatoes to the feds.
They needed to connect the caper back to Paulie the Barber Castellana and I
couldn’t do that. But Jimmy the Hammer could, He could connect everybody to
everybody else. And he did and walked on all charges, past and present.
When Paulie the Barber Castellana
figured out what was going on, he pushed a button on his Brother-in-Law who is
now part of a land fill in North Jersey. Then Crown Jewelers blew up as a
result of Sicilian lightening. He couldn’t touch Jimmy the Hammer who was in the
Witness Protection Program, running a car shop in Kentucky.
I was next. And that’s how I
ended up a pizza on the prison floor.