Master Thieves Read Online Free Page A

was a threatening side to Royce. He was certainly willing to introduce violence to gain the upper hand. But even better, he liked people to know that his brother Billy was a criminal with a wild, violent streak. And while Louis Royce had committed dozens of robberies, two of his three longest sentences were for violent crimes. In fact, when he was planning the Gardner Museum heist, Royce was an escapee from federal detention for an elaborate kidnapping and extortion plan he’d been nabbed for ten years earlier.
    Louis F. Royce, circa 1981, considered by the FBI to be one of Boston’s most artful thieves, cased the museum for a heist, having known about its poor security since sleeping in its galleries as a runaway youth.
    In the early 1970s, Royce and several accomplices had forced their way into the home of a banker and his family in Lincoln, Rhode Island. While the family was held hostage, Royce drove the husband to his bank and, before it opened for business, stole more than $100,000 in cash from its safe. The crime came undone when Royce was arrested after he checked himself into a Boston hotel using his mother’s maiden name—Morrill—to sign the register. He was unaware that Boston police had just commenced one of their biggest manhunts ever in search of a criminal named William Morrill Gilday,who was on the run after killing a police officer during a local bank holdup.
    But easily his biggest heist, and a measure of how daring Royce could be, came in December 1981, when he arranged the robbery of a South Shore bank with a close friend, Richard Devlin, who had been released from prison on a furlough just an hour before the heist.
    Even though he was ten years older than Devlin, Royce was drawn to the younger man when they served time together in the 1960s at a Massachusetts state prison. The two shared an insatiable interest in criminal mayhem, and balanced each other well. Royce liked to plan his heists meticulously; Devlin delighted in carrying them out.
    â€œI liked him,” Royce told me, remembering those early days fondly. “He was a dynamic guy and if you stayed on his good side, which I made sure I did, he was always talking one score or another.”
    Although he would be released from prison the following month, Devlin went ahead and participated in the Rockland bank robbery while he was on a daylong furlough from a minimum-security facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts. During his first term as governor of Massachusetts, Michael S. Dukakis had broadened the state’s prison furlough program in an effort to ease the re-entry of prisoners into society.
    Despite the program’s good intentions, there was little oversight, which led to numerous examples of prisoners committing petty crimes while on work release. Most famously, Willie Horton, a convicted murderer, never returned from a weekend furlough and two years later was arrested for raping a woman and assaulting her fiancé in Maryland. The case came to light during Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign and proved his political undoing.
    Devlin, too, exploited the furlough program to continue his life in crime. On Saturday, December 19, 1981, Devlin signedhimself out of his minimum-security facility at 6:45 a.m. , ostensibly to drive to his job nearby. But instead Devlin drove north to a rest area off Route 3 in Marshfield, half an hour away, where Royce was waiting for him along with another member of the Rossetti gang in a van the two had stolen earlier that morning.
    With Royce driving Devlin’s car and Devlin in the stolen van, the trio drove north another fifteen miles to the South Shore Mall in Hanover, and the Rockland Trust Company.
    â€œI’d scoped out the bank weeks in advance,” Royce says now with the pride only a master thief could muster. “I knew every in and out of the place. When we got there we could see the folks inside counting out the cash. They were preparing for the arrival of the