The Burglary Page 8

  Because the burglary was scheduled for a Monday evening, they cased the neighborhood on weekday evenings, between 7 and 11 p.m., from mid-January through the week before the burglary. The most difficult aspect of casing was sitting in cars for several hours on evenings during the coldest months of the year. The burglars watched the blocks near the building from inside parked cars and Williamson’s van for three to four hours evening after evening. They prepared a to-do list of what they needed to monitor:

  • The movement of vehicles on the two streets, Front Street and Veterans Square, that intersected at the corner where County Court Apartments, the building that housed the FBI office, was located;

  • How parking patterns changed on those two streets and other nearby streets in the course of an evening;

  • The movements of residents in and out of the building on the two floors above the FBI’s second-story office;

  • The movements of the building manager who lived directly below the FBI office;

  • The movements of the people who worked in the offices in the basement and on the first and second floors of the building, including in the draft board office on the second floor;

  • The movements of people who lived in nearby houses and apartment buildings;

  • The schedules and routes of local police who patrolled the neighborhood;

  • The lighting patterns in the FBI office and other nearby offices, apartment buildings, and houses;

  • The schedules and routes of trains, buses, and taxicabs that served the area and how they affected the arrival and departure of people in the area;

  • The closing times of nearby bars and restaurants;

  • The movements of people who worked at night across the street from the FBI office at the county courthouse, especially the schedule and movements of the courthouse guards.

  This information was vitally important. Knowledge about traffic patterns, for instance, determined where Forsyth would park when he arrived first to pick the lock. It also helped determine where and when the inside crew—the people who would enter the office and remove the files—should be dropped off and the routes the getaway car drivers should take after they picked up the inside crew.

  Each burglar developed a practical approach to the project. Susan Smith had once built a cabin in the mountains by teaching herself basic carpentry skills. That same approach—anybody could learn to do this—helped her develop skills as a burglar. She was proud of her street casing skills. She often cased very late, gathering information that would be useful if the burglars needed to enter the building late, something they hoped they would not have to do. She had a casing problem no one else had—a car so beautiful it was likely to be remembered later. Because it was important not to be noticed, she had to leave her beautiful car at home. She borrowed a colleague’s sedate Volvo that blended in nicely late at night on the quiet Media streets. The streets of Media, especially near the courthouse and the building where the FBI office was located, came alive during the day, with people continuously entering and leaving those buildings. After school, neighborhood children rode bikes in the streets. At night, by contrast, the streets were nearly dead. Any unusual-looking person or vehicle, such as Smith’s flashy car, might have been conspicuous in that quiet environment.

  Williamson, like Smith, was proud of his casing skills. He also likes to think that his ability to tell very long shaggy-dog stories was helpful as tension relief during casing and while raiding draft board offices, but some of his fellow burglars disagree with him on that point. Casing was his real area of expertise, they say, rolling their eyes at the memory of his jokes. During one draft board raid, fellow burglars involuntarily risked arrest while hiding with Williamson in a closet, so loud were their groans when he finally finished one of his yarns. They affectionately advised him to stick with casing and drop the jokes. The night of this burglary he expected to be totally preoccupied.

  The burglars assumed that sitting for hours in parked cars in that quiet residential neighborhood might arouse suspicion. They decided that casing as male-female couples made them less suspicious. Couple cover stories were prepared in case someone asked them why they were lingering in a car on cold winter evenings. If a police car approached, the couple embraced and gave the impression they had been necking. In fact, those weeks before the burglary may be the only time when Media’s Veterans Square, the street in front of the building where the FBI was located, might have appeared to the casual observer to be a lovers’ lane. Another ruse called for a couple to start arguing if a police officer approached. They would tell him they were having a spat. In still another ruse, a couple would puzzle with the officer over the failure of their car to start. They would then say they were about to search for a pay phone so they could call for a tow truck.

  Williamson remembers his adrenaline pumping one evening when someone parked a car next to his van and sat beside him and his companion for a few minutes. “We became very quiet and still, and afraid.” On another occasion, “a police car drove down the street and shined a spotlight against the buildings on our side of the street.” Calmness returned as the officer drove away. The evening continued, as usual, with what burglars hope for: “nothing remarkable happening.”

  Ultimately, the burglary schedule was shaped around the predictable uneventful hours the team had mapped after two months of observation. As planned, they became very familiar with the neighborhood. They learned the habits of people and the changing patterns of building lights and traffic so well that they even knew when dog owners in the neighborhood walked their dogs, and when one resident of the FBI building often left and returned from having a drink at a bar a block away on West State Street. One of the most important things they learned from casing was the schedule of police patrols. That information was essential to the timing of each phase of the burglary. They hoped the police would be preoccupied with watching the Ali-Frazier fight that night, but they were not going to take any chances. They watched the police very carefully, and they hoped the police were not watching them.

  DURING AN EARLY PLANNING SESSION in the attic, one of the burglars suggested they should use a crowbar to break into the office. Others agreed, but Forsyth said no. That would be much too noisy and take much too long. Instead, he told them, he would learn to pick the lock. They thought that was funny, but he was serious.

  Earlier he had gone to a public library and discovered there were several locksmith associations. He joined one of them. That made him eligible to buy books from the Locksmith Library. As with his research on the Vietnam War two years earlier, he now thoroughly researched locksmithing. He bought several books. “They were like training books you see advertised on the back of matchbook covers—‘How to be a locksmith in 10 easy lessons.’ That kind of stuff. I got it all from the Locksmith Library.” He took a correspondence course and soon was on his way to becoming the group’s in-house locksmith.

  He remembered what the lock on the FBI office main entrance looked like when he walked by it after Davidon first told him about his interest in burglarizing it. He recalls being amazed when he saw the lock on the door. “That’s really bizarre,” he thought. He knew there were several types of high-security locks available. The one on the FBI office door was not one of those. It was a simple five-tumbler lock, easy to pick. Easy, that is, if you are a bonded locksmith and therefore eligible to buy the tools needed to pick locks. “I said, ‘Screw that.’ ” Instead, he made his own tools so he would leave no traceable evidence. There would be no receipts traceable to a store that sold lock-picking tools, and there would be no salesperson to tell an FBI agent that, yes, a tall skinny guy came in one day and bought lock-picking tools.

  With a precise image of the lock on the FBI door in mind, he went to a hardware store and bought two locks that looked just like it—one to take apart so he could figure out how to make picking tools to open it, and the other to pick again and again as he perfected his picking skills. Perhaps there were signs then of Fors
yth’s future as an engineer. He took the lock apart, studied how it was constructed, studied the diagrams and instructions in the books from the Locksmith Library, and figured out how to build the lock-picking tools he needed. Then he went to a machine supplies store and bought the materials he needed to make the tools. To his delight, they worked.

  The burglars installed new sheetrock walls in the Raineses’ attic and hung a door on one wall so Forsyth could install and practice picking a lock he was sure was exactly like the one on the FBI entrance. Night after night up there in the attic, while the other burglars discussed discoveries made during casing and added details to the map of Media and the to-do lists, Forsyth contributed to those conversations occasionally, but most of the time he focused on improving his timing. He stood in front of the door and picked the lock—again and again and again and again. Like a runner, he was improving his speed. His dedication was impressive. It was as though he were preparing for the lock-picking Olympics. “It’s just like surgery or carpentry or any other manual skill,” he said years later. “It’s practice and touch. First time you try it, it takes ten minutes, next time five, next time three. Finally, you get it down to thirty seconds.”

  Given the interruptions he had to assume might happen—such as the possibility that a resident from one of the two floors above the FBI office might walk by him in the open hallway at any time while he was picking the lock on the FBI office door—he needed to be able to pick that lock as fast as possible the night of the burglary. He kept practicing. He was proud when he got it down to thirty seconds. He thought it would be a piece of cake that night. A few days before the burglary, he walked by the FBI office a second time so he could glance quickly and carefully again at the lock on the main entrance. He remembers feeling assured as he left the building.

  The burglars decided that on the night of the burglary they would wear “proper” clothing and carry suitcases instead of the large canvas mail bags that had been used during most of the draft board raids. Unlike the draft board raiders, these burglars would not wear jeans and sweats. They would dress up for the occasion. They did that because of the odd circumstance of burglarizing an office upstairs in a residential building. They thought they needed to look like they might be residents of the building, or friends of a resident, returning from or leaving for a trip, carrying large suitcases. Their classy clothes, they hoped, would make their presence not seem too strange if, as they walked out of the FBI office with suitcases, they happened all of a sudden to come upon, say, Mrs. Smith leaving her apartment to take her garbage to the garbage can behind the building.

  After casing the immediate area, they homed in on the building where the FBI office was located. On brief casing visits inside the building during workdays, the burglars had learned there was only one way they could enter and leave the building: the front door, which was always unlocked and always well lit, inside and outside, at night. That was bad news. Late afternoon and evening observation of light patterns revealed good news: It was extremely rare for anyone to work after five o’clock in any of the commercial or government offices in the building.

  One enormous challenge remained. About two weeks before the burglary, the burglars prepared for the most important casing they would do: firsthand inspection inside the FBI office. So far they had felt encouraged, but this casing could lead to discoveries that would force them to abandon the burglary.

  Casing inside an FBI office was much more difficult than casing inside a draft board office. Draft board offices were open to the public. It was easy to walk in and look around, because people routinely went to them to ask questions about the draft and about their own records. Those offices were busy places. By contrast, not many people visited FBI offices, especially a small one like the Media office. The burglars had to assume that anyone visiting any office in the building might be noticed by the people in the other offices, especially the ones on the same floor. But they could not learn what they needed to know about the office from just dropping in briefly or by observing the office from outside the entrance, as Davidon, Smith, and Forsyth had done. Someone would have to go inside and get answers to very important questions:

  Were the cabinets and desks locked? Was there carpeting? What was immediately inside the other door that opened into the office from the outside hall but always was closed when they observed it? And the biggest question: Was there an alarm system in the office?

  The burglars agreed that Bonnie Raines would be the best person for this important job. She was twenty-nine, but with her long dark hair and bright smile, she easily looked the part of the college coed the other burglars suggested she pose as. Not only did the other burglars think that Bonnie looked very young, but they thought she was the member of the group most capable of looking totally innocent. When she called the office to ask for an appointment, she told Tom Lewis, the agent in charge there, that she was a student at a nearby college who was doing research for a class assignment and wanted to schedule an interview with someone at the Media FBI office about FBI hiring practices. She told him she already had talked with other employers in the Media area and she hoped an FBI agent would be able to give her about half an hour of his time. “He was extremely accommodating,” she recalls. He agreed to see her at two o’clock a few days later.

  This police artist’s sketch of Bonnie Raines is based on Media agents’ recall of “the woman” who visited the office and interviewed the agent in charge two weeks before the burglary. (From FBI’s MEDBURG investigation file)

  The Raineses with their children on their way to their annual summer vacation in Glen Lake, Michigan. The family station wagon served as a getaway car the night of the burglary.

  The group enjoyed planning her pending visit to the FBI office—what her appearance should be, what her tone should be, and what she needed to look for. The burglars thought she should seem a little naïve and not supersmart. They spent a lot of time one evening developing questions she would ask.

  It was an intimidating assignment, but Bonnie took it on with enthusiasm. She was grateful to be given this important responsibility. In the past, in nearly everything she did she felt she had been supplemental to other people. She felt she had been treated with respect but had not been given much responsibility. The heavier responsibility she carried as part of the Media group gave her confidence that she was, as she put it years later, finally “making progress” in that new life she had started to create nearly a decade earlier in New York when she and John Raines moved there in 1962 right after they were married. In addition to being an earth mother preparing those big spaghetti dinners for the group each evening before they cased Media, she remembers having a feeling of great contentment, a sense that “I was as much a part of that team as everyone else was.”

  As the burglars prepared Bonnie Raines for her walk-on, as it were, at the FBI office, they carefully considered how she should wear her long black hair. She often wore it in long pigtails that nearly reached her waist, making her look even younger than the college freshman she would pose as. It was decided that for her visit to the FBI office she would wear her hair pulled back in a barrette and tucked under an old wool stocking hat. She was sure she had never concealed her hair that way at any of the antiwar demonstrations, where, the burglars assumed, she and the rest of them had been photographed many times by FBI and other law enforcement officers. She decided to wear her horn-rimmed glasses because she didn’t think she had ever worn them to a demonstration. The glasses would provide a good disguise, but they also posed a problem. They improved her distance vision but hampered her near vision while she took notes. Adding to the awkwardness, to avoid leaving fingerprints behind she would wear gloves throughout the time she wrote the notes that she would not be able to see as she wrote them. All of the burglars thoroughly trained themselves in the habit of not leaving fingerprints behind at any point during planning, during the actual burglary, or when working with files. This was crucial to their success, including Bonnie Raines’s cas
ing visit in the office.

  Following the group’s advice, Bonnie dressed for the interview as a nerdish coed in a skirt, sweater, and long dark heavy winter coat. As planned, she arrived about fifteen minutes early. She apologized for that, telling the man seated at the reception desk right inside the open door that she had come on public transportation and that the bus had arrived earlier than she expected. Actually, John Raines had driven her to Media. She was invited to sit and wait until two o’clock, when Tom Lewis would be available to talk with her. That was just what she wanted. It meant she had time to sit quietly and survey the office slowly and carefully.

  As her eyes scanned the rooms, she tried to mentally photograph as much detail as possible. After several minutes, she asked the man she thought was a receptionist, but who was actually one of the agents based at the office, if she could see an employment application form. That request was consistent with her request to interview an agent about hiring practices. The real purpose of her question about forms, though, was to observe whether he would have to unlock the file cabinet to retrieve a form for her. She was pleased that he obliged, and even more pleased that the file cabinet was not locked.

  During the fifteen minutes she waited, seated across from an agent the entire time, she glanced around the room, trying to do so intensively while appearing to be casual and unengaged. She noted that in the office where she waited there were two desks, several file cabinets, one very tall cabinet with double doors, and a typical government-issue light khaki-green cabinet. From where she sat, she could see two other rooms in the office. She noticed that there were open venetian blinds on the windows. That meant the burglars would have to use flashlights very cautiously, if at all, during the burglary so no streams of light could be seen between the slats. By the time she left, she felt she would be able to draw a detailed sketch of the office.