Читать книгу A Rookie Cop vs. The West Coast Mafia - Tanya Chalupa - Страница 12

CHAPTER 4

Dodge Ridge

Three men maneuvered their snowmobiles between giant juniper trees under the darkness of a new moon. Strapped with semi-automatic weapons, they were clothed in identical black thermal tops, matching ski masks and white ski overalls, blending in-and-out with the night’s shadows and the ghostly snow. Fake plastic noses protruded ghoulishly from underneath their ski masks.¹

The trio headed toward the popular Dodge Ridge Ski Resort in Stanislaus National Forest, which is a mountainous expanse in California’s Mother Lode Country, where hamlets like Pinecrest, Twain Harte and Strawberry lure vacationers. The winter resort was closed for the night but hours earlier it had been packed with one-day skiers from the San Francisco Bay Area, the Sacramento region and the Central Valley.

The men’s rubber-tracked vehicles left a trail over previously undisturbed snow. There was hooting and howling coming from a couple of the guys. They figured that folks tucked away for the night in nearby cabins automatically assumed “they were just a bunch of drunks fooling around.”²

Not far away, a truck was parked by the side of a lonely road in Pinecrest; its driver settled behind the wheel to wait for the men on the snowmobiles, knowing that if all went well, it would be several hours before he met up with them. To keep him company, he had a walkie-talkie in the cabin of the truck and a police scanner tuned to the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s radio frequency.³

When the masked trio reached the vicinity of the Dodge Ridge Ski Resort, one of the men fell behind to remain on a low ridge. He was the group’s point man—the sharpshooter. His job was to take care of any intruders and to warn the others through a walkie-talkie if anyone from law enforcement showed up unexpectedly. And in case they did, his next task was to “lay down a line of fire” and in doing so, create a diversion to allow the rest of his team time to escape.

In this case, the point man and the “brains” behind the outfit was William Floyd Ettleman. The job was his show. He shepherded it the way he did all the jobs his crew went on. It was a juggling act and he kept the rhythm going. This particular gig took place a little more than eighteen months before Bill Palmini even knew Ettleman existed.

Ettleman’s team was somewhat nervous when he came along on gigs with them. But they liked having Ettleman’s sidekick, thirty-one-year-old Eddie “Italian” DeVaney, on the jobs, because, as one member of Ettleman’s crew, Jackson “Nevada” Dillon, eventually explained, “Well, he was just Eddie. He was fun to have around.” But as far as the rest of them were concerned, at forty-seven, Ettleman was too old for the work for which he recruited them. They worried he might surprise them with an unexpected heart attack in the middle of a safe job. Then what would they do?

Ettleman himself was fueling the crew’s concern by making a move to drop out from the physically demanding aspects of his burglaries, while still remaining in the center of the action. He was switching to becoming strictly a “10 Percenter,” the one who did the planning and organizing in return for 10 percent of the loot. He had other deals and action going on with the mob but, in his heart, he was a thief and not ready to relinquish control of his exploits. Being a point man allowed him a larger stake in the profits and a closer connection to the core of his jobs. And faking heart attacks worked when cops were around.⁴ It came in handy to have the appearance of a weak heart.

Equipped with a telescopic rifle and a walkie-talkie to communicate with his cohorts and the truck parked at the side of a road nearby, Ettleman, like the truck driver, also had a police radio scanner tuned to the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Department’s frequency. On the ridge, he had a clear view of the main lodge and also the road linking Dodge Ridge with the main highway. The near-freezing temperature presented a challenge, but he knew he would be rotating every twenty minutes with another crew member. In the meantime, he had no choice but to wait it out in the cold.

Ettleman watched the other two armed snowmobilers settle into their pre-planned positions at the bottom of the hill and turn off their engines. Suddenly, a light-colored van emerged from a dark road connected to Highway 108—the area’s main road that led to major highways. Its lights dimmed when it came to a stop a short distance from the two men below.

The van had been stolen earlier in the day, about one hundred and sixty miles from Dodge Ridge in the affluent town of Los Gatos, which was part of Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco. The license plates had originally been registered to a vehicle in Los Banos, a Central Valley town where Latino immigrants made up almost 64 percent of the population. Somehow, they ended up in a Hayward junkyard, and that is where the driver of the van got them.⁵

The van’s driver, Eddie DeVaney, was dressed in white overalls and a dark thermal top, matching the snowmobilers’ attire. A plastic costume nose was visible from under his ski mask. He too had a semi-automatic weapon.

Ettleman leaned forward on his snowmobile and made contact with the truck driver, while his crew disembarked quickly from their vehicles and jumped into the stolen van. He watched as the van made its way through the empty parking lot. He listened intently to the communications on the police radio. Nothing was happening there.

Around midnight on Sunday, March 8, 1970, Ettleman’s team launched their assault on the Dodge Ridge Ski Resort with military precision. First, they cut the telephone cables leading to the main lodge. Next, they removed an acetylene torch, a dolly and miscellaneous tools and gear from a storage building adjacent to the main house. The equipment they seized was there for the ski resort’s own emergency repairs, but it was equally suited for cracking or moving a heavy safe.

Inside the lodge, long-time employees Carl Henzie and his wife, Katie, were sound asleep in a bedroom near the main office. Sixty-six-year-old Carl Henzie was the ski lift operator at the resort and Katie Henzie, also sixty-six, was the cafeteria manager. A pounding on the door woke Katie. She picked up her glasses from the nightstand, put them on and peered groggily at the clock by her bed. It read 12:20 A.M. Getting up, she walked over to the door, thinking it was most likely Sue or Carl Stewart, a couple who were a few years younger but like the Henzies were longtime resident-employees at the resort. Carl Stewart managed the ski rental and his wife, Sue, was the ticket manager. Nevertheless, Katie’s instincts kicked in and she remained cautious.

“Who is there?” Katie leaned toward the door. She was surprised to hear a man’s voice she did not recognize.

“There’s been an accident. I need to call for help. I need to use your phone.” The stranger sounded desperate.

“There was an accident? Where?” Katie pressed her ear closer to the door.

“Up the road…I lost control and my car went over the grade. I’ve got a passenger bleeding to death.” The man’s tone was increasingly agitated, but Katie remained suspicious.

How did he get in? she wondered. The lodge door had been locked for hours. How did he get in without a key? She recalled there were public phones in the lodge that the stranger easily could have used. Why hadn’t he? she thought to herself.

Then the man asked for Mrs. Stewart.

How does he know Sue Stewart? Katie wondered. Something was wrong and did not make sense. She told the man to wait. Turning around, Katie hurried back to the bed where her husband was still fast asleep. She nudged him, saying “Carl” repeatedly until he opened his eyes.

After waking up her husband, Katie told him about the man outside their door. Next, she hurriedly picked up the telephone receiver by their bedside to call Sue Stewart, but the phone line was dead.

The crash of broken glass and the feel of cold air pouring in forced their attention to the other side of the room. A black-gloved hand emerged from between the slats of the bedroom window’s venetian blinds. The Henzies froze. They watched helplessly as the gloved hand reached toward the head rail and pulled the slats off the brackets with such force that the blinds tumbled down with a loud crash. The couple stared at the exposed, busted windowpane, beyond which stood a shadowy figure pointing a shotgun at them.

“Let him in or I’ll shoot your brains out!” the gunman hollered.

Shaken, Katie managed to obey the orders. When she opened the door, two more ski-masked men pushed their way past her, brandishing weapons.⁶

Ettleman’s gunmen tied Carl up and led his wife down the hall to wake up the other employee couple in the lodge, Carl and Sue Stewart. They ordered Katie to knock on the Stewarts’ door and to ask for Sue Stewart. With a gun pointing at her, the elderly woman reluctantly complied.

“Mrs. Stewart,” Katie called as she knocked on the door. She hoped the formality with which she addressed Sue Stewart would arouse her friend’s suspicion.

“No. Call her Sue,” one of the gunmen whispered in her ear.

Sue Stewart stumbled sleepily out of bed. She opened the door expecting to see Katie Henzie, but instead came face to face with fearsome-looking gunmen. Gripped by terror, she shrieked. Her high-pitched scream woke up her husband, who jumped out of bed to reach for a pistol he kept in the drawer of a nightstand. But before he had a chance to pull out the gun, a powerful punch knocked him to the floor. There he lay, in pain, staring into “the biggest muzzle of a steel blue pistol.”

Two of the gunmen raised Carl Stewart forcefully up on his feet and jerked his hands behind his back. They were about to tie him up when Sue pleaded, “Don’t hurt him. He just got out of the hospital with a bad arm.”

The gunmen paused and locked gazes. Then, without a word, they moved Carl Stewart’s arms to the front of his body and tied up his hands.

One of the masked gunmen spotted a set of keys and a small pile of money on top of the Stewarts’ dresser. The Stewarts looked sorrowfully at each other, expecting to see the last of their funds disappear.

“Don’t worry, we don’t take hard-earned money from working folks like you,” the gunman said as he snatched just the ring of keys. The group headed down the hall and stopped in front of the door by the main office. The gunman handed Sue the set of keys he’d seized earlier from atop the dresser and told her to unlock it. With trembling hands, she managed to find the key and opened the door, thereby saving the thieves time searching for the correct key. The gunman then walked her and the other two hostages to the Henzies’ bedroom to join the tied up Carl Henzie.

Inside the Henzies’ bedroom, one of the gunmen held the four at gunpoint, while another talked on the walkie-talkie. It seemed to the Henzies and the Stewarts that the person he was talking to was outside near the parking lot, serving as a lookout.

Then Ettleman’s other gunman entered the bedroom. He helped take one of the twin bed mattresses in the room and throw it on the floor, while another man pointed his rifle at the ski resort employees. Next, Sue and her husband were tied up and ordered to lie down on the mattress on the floor.

In the midst of this, Katie asked for a glass of water. One of the gunmen quickly disappeared, soon returning and handing her a glass of water to drink. When she finished, she was bound up and, along with her husband, instructed to lie down on top of the twin bed with the mattress still on it. Both she and her husband were covered up to be protected from the raging cold air streaming in through the shattered window. The masked intruders also turned up the thermostat in the room and threw a cover over the Stewarts before moving on to their main objective.

The Dodge Ridge Ski Resort had three safes in the main lodge. The gunmen jimmied open a small safe and used an acetylene torch to cut through a second one. They still had one safe to go, but time was running out. The third safe, which weighed several hundred pounds, was embedded in the floor of an unfinished bathroom. They hauled it out and moved it into the stolen van.

A few times during the night, one of the gunmen came in to check on the couples. On one occasion, because the Henzies and the Stewarts were speaking so loudly amongst themselves, he ordered them to “shut up” and “lay still.”⁷

Finally, when the masked men’s mission was completed, they prepared to make their escape. The employees were told that one of the gunmen was remaining behind to watch over them while the others took off.

“But we can’t promise that he’ll be as nice to you,” one of the safecrackers warned them.

The Henzies and Stewarts were uncertain about the exact number of gunmen. They were also under the impression that whoever it was who remained behind to watch them left about thirty minutes after the main group took off. It was then that the four victims struggled to free themselves.

The women were first to release themselves, because they were not secured as tightly. They then helped undo their husbands’ hands. Next, they woke up an employee sleeping in a nearby cabin on the property and sent him to get help. He walked six miles to Pinecrest to get to a phone and notify the authorities.⁸

Dodge Ridge, one of the most successful and popular ski resorts in the state of California, lost $109,000 in the burglary by Ettleman and his crew. In those days, that amount was enough to buy a couple of custom-designed homes for cash in Sacramento. The media, however, reported that $40,000 to $60,000 was stolen. They also omitted the fact that the theft included over $150,000 in jewelry and $350,000 in negotiable bonds. Each safecracker received $70,000 as his share from the heist.⁹

A website, measuringworth.com, which calculates the purchasing power of currencies, estimates that by today’s standards, the relative value of the thieves’ $70,000 share was well over $400,000 and the total amount in cash, jewelry and bonds stolen from Dodge Ridge Ski Resort equaled over $3,500,000.

Ettleman and his gang did not steal from a faceless corporation. Dodge Ridge Ski Resort was a family-owned business. It was developed by Earl Purdy, who in 1947, while drinking a cup of coffee in a grocery store in Long Barn, California, learned from neighbors that the US Forest Service was soliciting bids to develop a ski area in nearby Dodge Ridge. At the time, Purdy was running a successful general store and gas station between the towns of Ripon and Manteca, called Simm’s Station. But the long commute was getting to him and he was looking for a business venture that would be closer to his home and family. He did not know much about skiing, which he took up in his forties when his own children started taking lessons. But he was a vastly experienced individual with many facets and was not afraid to take on new challenges and risks. He’d previously been a teacher, a truck driver, a highway patrolman and a professional violinist. He also had a degree in architecture from the College of Pacifica. The son of a forest ranger, he was familiar with the region, having hiked the Dodge Ridge area as a youth.¹⁰

Purdy decided to enter the ski area competition, which entailed a one-hundred-dollar fee. Three months later he was shocked to learn that the Forest Service chose him over the other bidders because of his business history. Before utilizing the special use permit from the Forest Service, Purdy toured western ski resorts for three months to help him determine if Dodge Ridge could be economically viable. He traveled as far as Sun Valley in Idaho, and he also visited Mammoth and Squaw Valley, places that were closer to his home. Finally, he picked the spot where he thought the ski area should be built and pulled out a matchbook on which he sketched the layout of the resort. It turned out to accurately reflect what the completed project would look like.

Dodge Ridge opened in the fall of 1950 with Purdy’s initial investment of $250,000, a great sum in those days. His dream to build a family-oriented winter sports mecca with a state-of-the-art chairlift finally came true. Most importantly, it enabled him to be closer to his own family.

Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Department deputies launched an intensive manhunt as soon as they were summoned at 4:17 that morning. Neighboring police departments set up roadblocks. Agents from the FBI and the California Department of Justice’s Criminal Investigation and Identification (CI&I) responded rapidly when they received the news of the safe burglary, flying in by helicopter. In no time, the roads around Dodge Ridge and the neighboring hamlets were inundated with police cars. Helicopters could be heard circling the area on and off throughout most of the day.

The deputies also conducted a house-to-house search of five hundred cabins, looking for the armed bandits. They figured that the thieves might still be in the area, since the roads east of the resort were blocked by snow.¹¹ But if anyone was blocked, it was law enforcement. Five inches of fresh snow fell in the early hours of the morning, covering the masked gunmen’s trail and hampering police efforts.

A ski mask, gloves and a pair of white overalls discarded by one of the bandits from a vehicle moving westbound were found along Highway 108. The stolen van used to haul the safe was also found, abandoned and empty, at a gas station in Strawberry, less than six miles from the resort. An eyewitness saw four men dash out of the van in the very early hours of the morning. The witness said the men split up into pairs and each pair drove away in a different car.

With all the scattered clues, law enforcement still had no evidence to tie any suspects to the crime. This was an era before the discovery of DNA and other forensic advancements, which make it easier to prove innocence or guilt today.

The California Department of Justice’s CI&I, the FBI and the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Office were not sure where or how the armed burglars got the key to get into the lodge and the shed housing the tools and equipment they used or how the gunmen made their getaway, but they had a very good idea who the professional thieves were.¹²

The police had no doubt that William Floyd Ettleman was behind the operation. It was his MO. There were not many proficient, prolific safecrackers like Ettleman and his crew. The fact that the stolen van’s plates came from a Hayward junkyard turned out to be a major clue that the crooks were from the San Francisco Bay Area. And indeed, Ettleman and the driver of the van, Eddie DeVaney, both resided in the Bay Area at the time. It was also obvious the crooks were familiar with the Dodge Ridge lodge, its routine and layout. Using snowmobiles in the Dodge Ridge heist was also not a first for Ettleman. He had utilized them when they hit other ski resort safes in Montana, Nevada, Utah and Colorado.¹³

“It looked like a national thieves’ convention around Twain Hart the week before,” a member of the law enforcement team said, referring to a nearby town where Ettleman’s family happened to own a cabin. Fred Mitchel, the undersheriff of Tuolumne County, was quoted in the press as stating that “the gang in the last two years operated in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Colorado, Nevada and seven counties of California.”¹⁴ However, on the night of the Dodge Ridge caper, there was no one from the California Highway Patrol (CHP) on duty. Then again, with a forecast of fresh snow, why would the CHP imagine anyone would be speeding? There was no need to risk a CHP officer’s life driving back and forth on slippery roads. How were they to know that a dramatic armed robbery would take place that night? Law enforcement intelligence did not have detailed information on Ettleman yet. But it was not going to be too long before the FBI applied pressure to get it.

In the meantime, an investigator for the Tuolumne Sheriff’s Department got a lead. Two brothers who lived in the area and were known burglars had become informants, even though they themselves were not involved in the crime. Thieves like to brag to those they trust. More often than not, the ones they trust are as unscrupulous as they are. And when one makes a score like Dodge Ridge, there is bound to be bragging.

The informants led the investigator to the Carquinez Bridge, which consists of two parallel spans forming part of Interstate 80 between the towns of Crockett and Vallejo, stretching over the Carquinez Strait, a channel of water where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers empty into San Francisco Bay. They showed the investigator where the safe from Dodge Ridge was thrown down into the tidal strait below and pointed out the scrape marks on the rails where the safe was hoisted up and then pushed over. The informants claimed that after all the valuables were removed, the safecrackers had thrown their clothes and masks into the safe.

The investigation stopped there. The county did not want to spend a penny more on the case, which would have required the county corps of engineers to drive over three hours and cover more than one hundred and sixty miles to reach the Carquinez Bridge with a team of divers. And for what? To retrieve a useless safe full of discarded clothes?

Then, two weeks later, Ettleman left his mark again. This time, he hit neighboring Stanislaus County.