From the S&S archives:
Brink's bandit says crime doesn't pay

Walking across a floor littered with counterfeit currency, a wiry elder named Sandy Richardson strode to a speaker's stand and resolutely declared himself — crime does not pay.

Once, Richardson reflected, there had been real money on the floor of a garage in north Boston. Sandy and 10 other men had wallowed in it, throwing wads of cash aloft in glorious handfuls — the loot taken from Brink's Inc., professional money movers whose integrity and prestige would somehow survive what was then, early 1950, the greatest cash robbery in the history of American crime.

In a clockwork holdup that lasted only 20 minutes, they took $2.7 million, a million of that in cold, negotiable coin of the realm. The bandits became folk heroes, legends who moved in the tracks of Paul Revere and other fabled Bostonians — Richardson, Tony Pino, Specs O'Keefe, Jazz Maffie, Jimmy Costa, Jimma Faherty, Joe McGinnis, Mike Geagen, Henry Baker, Barnet'. Banfield and Stanley Gusciora.

Their sudden wealth bought them nothing but grief.

At a Tokyo press conference called to publicize a Dino De Laurentis film on the robbery, an older newspaperman warmly thanked Richardson — recalled the days he and other GIs in a frontline artillery battery in Korea faithfully read entertaining accounts of the Brink's robbery in Pacific Stars and Stripes.

"Well," Richardson said, a little tiredly, "I'm glad somebody got something out of it. It sure didn't do anything for me." He paused. "No, I wouldn't do it again, not even if I could read it in the Stars and Stripes."

Seventy-two years old now, Sandy Richardson is back where he started — working a crane on the tough Boston docks, the only employment he could find after parole from a life sentence. As for the $100,000 he claimed as his share of the take, Richardson said his chronic incompetence with racing forms lost it all. He was destitute when he went to prison.

"Did I lose anything? Yes, I lost fourteen. years of my life," relates Richardson. "Fourteen years and three months."

Ah, but once — once, they were the royalty of the underworld, national heroes in an America that felt the first faint stirrings of rebellion against the Establishment.

Jan. 17, 1950.

The five flabbergasted guards could not believe it. They were being held up by Captain Marvel, Frankenstein and other characters out of the comic page and the movies — intruders who wore Halloween masks that pulled over the face and head, along with chauffeur caps and bulky black Navy peacoats that would destroy descriptions of weight and build. One uttered the words immortalized in a million Saturday matinees: "Put them up and do what you're told and nobody will get hurt."

The guards were even more incredulous. This couldn't be happening to them — not to Brink's, the prime movers of massive amounts of currency since the last century. They had just been extolled in a Life magazine story for tight and flawless security. But as they laid on the floor to be tied up and have tape slapped across their mouths, they knew it was indeed happening.

There were seven bandits, with the others waiting outside as lookout or driver in two getaway vehicles. They went right to the vault — open, as they knew it would be. For months into years, the bandits had studied the North Terminal Garage Building on Hull Street from rooftops and neighboring buildings — and had been into the garage itself no less than 75 times, easily making their way through antique locks and faulty alarms during dark hours in which there were, incredibly, no watchmen. Pino had even greased sliding doors to make sure they wouldn't squeak as the bandits approached for an armed robbery — a reluctantly chosen alternative to cracking the thick vault.

"We had parties in there," Richardson would relate. "And one guy (O'Keefe) even brought his girlfriend in."

Nothing had escaped the careful notice of the bandits — even the habits of one guard who used a bathroom as a library.

Now Sandy Richardson, his wiry slightness smothered by the bizarre disguise, saw that another guard was "kind of doddering.

"So I took his glasses off and put them on a shelf before I laid him down and tied him up.

"No one got hurt. We never in our lives hurt anybody. It's altogether different from a real violent crime. We used a little psychology and got these masks and that was enough to frighten them."

Now the robbers efficiently lifted heavy sacks and took them down the stairs and out the door. That was it — 20 minutes.

It had taken Gene Tunney ten minutes more to earn a million dollars in his 1927 fight with Jack Dempsey.

If Hollywood spent that much money on a movie back then, it was hailed as an epic.

Nobody from Joe Louis to Franklin Delano Roosevelt had made so much money with so little effort in so little time.

This was a crime that excited the imagination of the downtrodden and henpecked.

An outraged Brink's, in a reward notice that might have been posted on the American frontier, offered $100,000 for dead or alive delivery of the bandits — preferably the former. They were blasted in angry letters from all over the United States and the world, the tone of which was, "Leave our heroes alone."

Milton Berle, Fred Allen and Ed Sullivan all made witty cracks about the Brink's robbery — but the robbers themselves were finding it less and less funny.

Richardson saw his share dwindle and vanish in a year and a half. Jazz Maffie needed only six months to blow all of his. The tight-fisted McGinnis was suspected of holding out on his cohorts by falsely telling them that much of the take was "hot" money that couldn't be safely spent.

All but $1.2 million was in bonds and checks that were valueless. And there were other woeful complications.

Confirmed and chronic loser that he was, the erratic and volatile O'Keefe could simply not stay out of trouble.

Against the frantic advice of the rest of the gang, he and Gusciora drove to Chicago, where Gusciora wanted to visit his brother's grave. On the way back, they stopped at a Pennsylvania store to "boost" suits of clothing and a few guns. They were caught — O'Keefe with price tags still dangling from the stolen goods. Gusciora got 20 years and O'Keefe also went down with heavy time.

His relatives all but bankrupted themselves on his legal fees. He smuggled to his accomplices notes that pleaded, then threatened — come up with more cash or else.

Meanwhile, the FBI had joined the most intensive manhunt in years, having injected itself into the case because a small amount of the stolen cash was Federal Reserve. J. Edgar Hoover thought there might be a link between the underworld and the Communist Party — that the Brink's loot might finance revolutionary terrorism.

"That Hoover," Richardson chuckles. "I think he saw Reds under his bed."

Hoover and other investigators punched around wildly and landed on nothing but thin air. Not a lead — nothing but loose notions that O'Keefe and Gusciora were in on the Brink's job.

But the gang members failed to see the significance of O'Keefe's cryptic threats. On Jan. 9, 1956, there were only 11 days to go on the statute of limitations — If the robbers weren't in custody or Identified as suspects by then, they couldn't be touched. O'Keefe called an FBI agent to the prison.

"All right," he asked brokenly, "what do you want to know?" Then he told it all. Most of the Brink's gang was swept up in a few days. Richardson and Faherty felt hands on their shoulders weeks later.

They got life sentences — all but the cooperative O'Keefe, who served not a day for the Brink's job and only four more of the 12 years he owed Pennsylvania.

Having committed a grave breach of criminal ethics, O'Keefe found it best to change both his name and his surroundings — particularly after an incredibly inefficient assassin fired at him with a submachine gun and succeeded only in nicking his wrist. He moved around clandestinely, taking a variety of nickle and dime dishwasher jobs before lucking out as chauffeur for actor Cary Grant — who was innocently unaware that he was traveling in company with a moving target.

"He could have moved all day as far as we were concerned," Richardson said ruefully. "We were pretty well stuck in prison. But I would rather he'd lived and died the way he did, because he had to live with it. I didn't. I could walk the streets when I got out. He couldn't. Nobody liked him. He lost every friend he ever had."

O'Keefe seemed a poor candidate for natural death but passed on from a heart attack, age 68, in early 1976.

Only four of the 11 robbers are alive now. Most died in prison or shortly after being paroled in the early 1970s.

When "The Brink's Job" premiered in Boston last December, Richardson and Maffie marched in a parade as honored guests and Richardson himself was invited to a banker's meeting — presided over by the president of Brink's Inc.

"He offered me a job in security," Richardson smiles.