The Burglary (17 page)

He asked himself, “If I pop this door open, am I going to get a welcoming
party of ten FBI agents with guns pointed at me?” Perhaps, he thought, the whole thing needed to be canceled. He hated that thought.

“So, I was not too happy. I had to collect my thoughts, so I left the building and went to the car.” No solution came to mind as he sat in his car thinking about this potentially disastrous situation. So much was at stake, and it all hinged on whether he could open that door. From the beginning, he had thought he could. He thought it was a matter of how fast he could, not whether it was possible. He walked to a phone booth about a block away, called the motel, and asked for Davidon's room. When the phone rang, it resonated in everyone's gut. The people in the hotel room had been wondering why Forsyth had not returned yet. Davidon answered. The others could tell from the look on Davidon's face as he listened to Forsyth that the news was not good. Forsyth was telling Davidon what he had discovered. He suggested that maybe the burglary should be called off. He admitted he could not eliminate the possibility that maybe fear was playing tricks with his memory. He said that suddenly he couldn't be absolutely certain about what he had seen before. But he was certain of what he had just seen: two locks, not one—one he could pick, one he could not pick.

Even under these pressured circumstances, Davidon was calm. He listened to Forsyth and told him to come back to the motel. They would all consider the problem together, he said.

As Davidon recounted what Forsyth had said, the burglars were astonished. They couldn't imagine how things had gone so terribly wrong. When Forsyth arrived at the motel room, his fellow burglars looked confused and dejected. Some looked a little alarmed. That's how he felt as he told them the details of his failed attempt to break into the main door, the one they had agreed after Bonnie Raines's visit must be their way in. Anxiety took different forms among the burglars. Some of them were silent, almost frozen. Some were agitated. Whatever level of fear was in the room before was considerably higher now. Questions that could not be answered hung in the air. Did the FBI add another lock? If they did, why and when did they add it? Why would one have been added in the last two weeks? Did Bonnie Raines's visit prompt them to add a more secure second lock? What reason could there be for another lock other than the possibility that the FBI knew about plans for the burglary? If that was the case, were the burglars fools not to abort the burglary now?

There might have been a leak. What about the man who dropped out? He was the only person who might have informed on them. If he did, the burglary should be called off. But they could not know. They believed he
would not turn them in, but now, faced with these unexpected circumstances, some of them thought of him. They were sure he was the only person other than the people gathered in that room—plus John Raines, who was still waiting in the Swarthmore parking lot with no idea what was happening—who knew about their plans. If the FBI knew the burglary was supposed to take place tonight, the burglars agreed with Forsyth that there might be armed agents waiting inside the office.

All of the possibilities that came to mind were terrible.

When he felt somewhat calmer, Forsyth closely questioned Bonnie Raines again about the details of everything she remembered about the second external door—the one she had strongly recommended they not enter, but that now seemed like the only way they could. She told them what she had seen: that it was barricaded on the inside by a tall double-door metal cabinet that she assumed was filled with paper. If that door had to be pushed open, she said now, it would have to be done extremely slowly and carefully in order not to topple it to the floor and cause a loud crash. But given the new situation, she reversed herself and said she thought they should enter through that door. She realized it would be difficult but necessary to do so.

From the time Forsyth returned to the motel until a decision was made, the intense discussion of alternatives lasted not more than fifteen minutes. Bonnie Raines recalls that it “was an extremely tense moment.” After Forsyth described his failure to pick the lock and worried aloud about the long time, plus noise, it probably would take to pry the other door open, the burglars responded with a few questions and much empathy. Bonnie Raines answered his questions about the second door. When there seemed to be no more questions, Davidon summed up what they did and did not know. Then he said something like, “We've gone this far. There is no evidence we have aroused any suspicion. Everything else seems to be okay.” He didn't think the doubt about whether the lock had been added should stop them. There were no other signs, he said, that they were being watched. Very calmly, but also urgently, he said they needed to make a decision quickly.

When he stopped speaking, the burglars searched one another's faces. There was total silence. Bonnie Raines remembers realizing that a consensus had been reached. “Suddenly,” she said, heads began nodding affirmatively. “Everyone agreed to go ahead. I don't know what would have happened if one or two people had just said, ‘Forget it, I'm outta here.' ” But that didn't happen. Instead, everyone agreed to begin again. Whatever their risk originally, they realized the decision they had just made might have exponentially increased it.

Davidon's effective leadership was keenly evident during the anxious minutes in the motel room after the burglars absorbed the bad news from Forsyth. Recalling years later how Davidon imparted calmness and courage in those crucial minutes, Bonnie Raines is moved, as she was then, by the quality of his leadership. “We needed his great spirit. Without his spirit, we wouldn't have done it.” The others agree. Every burglar who has been interviewed expressed that same view:
Davidon's courage and his confidence in the plan they developed and in their being able to carry it out, despite what had just happened, made it possible for them to agree again to move forward. His calm words and clear thinking during those crucial minutes, they say, made it possible for them to find confidence despite their increased fear.

Forsyth drove to the FBI office. Again.

As his accomplices waited at the motel, they were, to put it mildly, very worried about what they had just agreed he should do. Small talk did not come easily among them after he left. There was a lot of pacing. The Ali-Frazier fight in New York may have been distracting the world at that hour, but it was not distracting them. They were preoccupied by fear that their elaborate plans might be spinning out of control—the opposite of the smooth operation they hoped all their weeks of planning would make possible.

The burglars didn't know it, but thanks to Forsyth's delay in breaking in, the timing of the burglary now aligned almost precisely with that of the Ali-Frazier fight. The burglars had assumed the fight would start about 8 p.m. and therefore so should the burglary. Actually, the Ali-Frazier fight did not start until 10:40. Consequently, in New York the noisiest part of the pre-event ceremony was just getting under way about the time Forsyth returned to the FBI office to start his second round, as it were. Whatever helpful sound the fight could provide this evening, the loudest noise would happen at just the right time.

AT
10:30 in New York, the ring announcer calmed the crowd enough to introduce great boxers from the past, all of whom came into the ring: James J. Braddock, Rocky Graziano, Willie Pep, Jack Dempsey, Archie Moore, Jack Sharkey, Sugar Ray Raineson, Billy Conn, and Joe Louis. There was a huge ovation as Louis climbed into the ring.

By that time, the excitement in New York was extreme. As it built, the sportswriter
Dave Kindred wrote nearly thirty years later, “Such a night had never been seen in the history of sports. For here came two of the greatest fighters ever, both young and strong and nearly as good as they'd ever be,
both to be paid $2.5 million … both certain they would leave the ring as he entered it, champion now and forever.…

“I don't remember breathing all night long,” Kindred recalled.

What international tennis champion
Arthur Ashe later described as “the biggest event in the history of boxing” was about to begin. “No fight ever transcended boxing,” he later wrote, as that one did “throughout the world.”

The excitement had been building to a high crescendo since eight o'clock. After the past greats were introduced and left the ring, the excitement was palpable. It was time. “The eyes of the world were focused on a small square of illuminated canvas, which had become one of the great stages of modern times,”
Thomas Hauser wrote of the extraordinary atmosphere as the fight was about to begin. The stars of the evening—in whom millions all over the world saw the reflection of their own values, hopes, and dreams—were at last coming down the aisle. Ali came first, followed by Frazier. Ali wore a white satin robe, red trunks, and white shoes laced with red tassels a fan had sent from Germany. On the back of Frazier's robe, the names of his five children were embroidered in gold between his first and last names. He was wearing green satin trunks.

In the seconds before the fight started at 10:40, the roar from the crowd was unlike anything Larry Merchant, longtime boxing reporter and analyst, says he ever heard before or since that night:

“There was this guttural roar. It came straight up from the stomach, from a place that went beyond the heart, that the heart could not control, much less the mind. People could hardly believe the fight was going to happen.”

At 10:40 the bell rang. The fight started.

FORSYTH ARRIVED
at the FBI office about that time. The thirty-second break-in plan now long gone, breaking in now seemed like it would be more like a small demolition job than a swift lock-picking exercise. Of course, he had no idea that the fight schedule and his revised break-in schedule might mesh, let alone whether it would matter. The fight was not on his mind.

Again he entered the building, briefcase in hand, trying again to look as though he either lived there or was on his way to see a client, though it was a little late for that. Given the crude and slow way the break-in would now have to be done, the odds of residents walking by or hearing the sound of wood breaking had increased.

This time, in addition to the set of homemade tools in his briefcase, Forsyth
carried a crowbar. It fit fairly well in the deep inside pocket of his used Brooks Brothers overcoat. A long time later, he marveled in amusement at how well the overcoat's pockets, with their unusual depth, could be adapted to the special storage needs of a burglar. He easily picked the lock on the second door, the one that was not used as an entrance, in thirty seconds. But that was just the beginning. There was a deadbolt near the top of the door. He pulled out his crowbar and, with a quick maneuver, popped it. “I had to do it fast. Otherwise, there would have been a long creaking sound. I figured if you cause a quick bang, if someone hears it, they will think a cat knocked over the trash can in the alley, and it's all done with.” He wasn't sure that rationale made sense, but he found it comforting at the time.

Then he pushed on the door. It wouldn't move. Yes, Bonnie Raines was right. He didn't remember exactly what she had said blocked the door; he just realized now that something “very big and very heavy” was on the other side. To move it even a tiny fraction of an inch, he had to lean on it with all his might. An agent who worked at the Media office said years later that, given the weight of the large cabinet leaning against that door, all of the burglars must have pushed the door open together. In fact, Forsyth alone did it, but with a great deal of worry. “It was obvious,” he recalled, “that if that sucker hit the floor it was going to wake up the whole neighborhood, not just the caretaker who lived directly below the office.

“The only thing to do then … I got down on the floor, put the crowbar up against the door and tried to push against it.…I couldn't apply nearly enough force. Whatever was behind it, it was heavy as hell. I'm trying to slide it across a carpeted floor without tipping it and without being able to use the things you normally use when you move furniture. I thought that if I had a lot longer lever, a wrecking bar, it would be better. But it wasn't exactly the time to get that. There were no construction supply houses open where I could get a six-foot or a ten-foot bar. So I went out to the car and got one of those old trapezoidal bars you use on jack stands. I held it in place inside my overcoat. The bottom of it was about half an inch above the bottom of the coat, and the other part stuck up above one shoulder.” He likes to think that he looked like a guy in an overcoat walking down the street with an unfortunate growth on one shoulder.

There in the well-lit second-floor hall, where residents might pass by at any time, Forsyth stretched his more than six-foot frame out on the floor and proceeded to use his leg muscles to push and pull the bar. As he rocked the bar, he feared a resident from an upstairs apartment might at any moment decide to go for a walk or a drink and come down the stairs, nearly stepping
on his face as he lay stretched out on the floor near the stairs, huffing and puffing as he pushed on the FBI door. There he was—a man on the floor in a topcoat making a fulcrum of himself. “Hello … Good evening,” he imagined himself wryly and politely saying as he looked up from the floor into the face of a very puzzled resident and did his best to act as though their bizarre encounter was natural and should not be reported to the police.

While Forsyth was working hard on the floor, he “heard this clank noise from inside the office. My heart dropped to my heels. Have you ever had that sinking feeling—like you're just about to get struck from behind by a speeding semitrailer or something like that? I thought, ‘Here I go down the tubes and there's nothing I can do about it.' I'm thinking to myself, ‘Was that a clumsy FBI agent, or was that the heating system?' And I'm thinking, ‘What did it really sound like? It sounded metallic. Sounded like the sound of two pieces of metal hitting each other.' ”