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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

The Crown Jewels. A short story by John William Tuohy

                                                                   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.