This worked just fine for a couple of years. But then one Sunday night in about 1974 or 1975, at about 2:30 in the morning, I’m mopping the kitchen floor and I felt something and turned around to see the largest gun I’d ever seen pointed right at my face. The guy holding it was a little shorter than I and dressed in a wetsuit that was not wet with a neoprene hood that covered everything but his eyes and his nose.   He asked me who was here and I told him about Tom, the window washer in the dining room and we were the only two there that night and they grabbed a dish-apron off a counter and threw it over my head and then Tom and I were led to the men’s room and told to sit on the floor and stay there, a request with which we were only too happy to comply. They asked about how the alarm system worked and we told them. We could hear them hacking through the thin plywood door between the rear office and the employee locker room where the time-clock was. The IR detector only covered the front office, not the rear office where the two safes were; another design flaw corrected in subsequent incarnations.
          We could hear the guys drilling the safe and coming in periodically to check on us. After about an hour and a half, we risked talking and determined between ourselves that these guys had gone and we ought to tell somebody about it. So we got up and quietly checked the premises for stray bad-guys and hit one of the panic-buttons and I went out into the parking lot to wait for the cops to show up. We didn’t have long to wait. The cops came and I called Lou, who called Frank and it was a pretty big deal because these guys weren’t a bunch of strung-out hippies, they were professional thieves who had taken the time and trouble to plan this thing. Of course, we planned too and were careful to clean up any incriminating evidence of our nightly debauchery before the police got there. After being interviewed by the detectives assigned the case, I still had to finish cleaning the kitchen – Pierre was not one those guys I wanted to disappoint and I was just finishing up when he came in at about 6:30 am.  

 

          So I told him our sad tale of woe and he had this slightly amused look on his face as if to say, “Goofy…I’m glad you managed to not get your head blown off”. He always had this kind of stern look but he was a very sweet man. I never did find out how much was taken but on a weekend that place might have had as much as seventy-five to one hundred thousand dollars in the safe on a Sunday night. I’m sure Frank told them it was more because the insurance was picking up the tab for it. Frank was always smart when it came to money.
   

          Naturally, there came to be more and more security and the lock thing really got to be a pain-in-the ass so I asked for and got a set of master keys of my own and they made me a manager too. The whole thing got old quickly after the initial telling and retelling of the story and I felt at the time that my life really didn’t bear the kind of scrutiny it was getting, so the looking at mug shots, and talking with the DA and police detectives was somewhat unsettling to me. Since I couldn’t identify any of the guys from the book of mug shots, I thought that perhaps they wouldn’t call me to testify but they did and I was able to identify the guy I saw in court, which made the state’s case, the DA happy, and me?
 
          Well… I got a clean driving record out of the deal so all in all, not too bad. It turned out that the guys had come all the way over from San Francisco in a zodiac boat and somebody saw them on their way back and that’s how they came to be caught. Cool, huh? The Marin newspaper, Independent Journal, started calling it the Frogman Heist or something like that and we got quite a kick out of that because we knew the guys didn’t swim up to the deck – their feet were dry.

 

          So that’s the story…I don’t know about John Abrahms being a Sonoma County District Attorney. I lived in Sonoma County for eighteen years and never crossed paths with him and if I’m being honest, I have trouble believing the guy could ever pass the California Bar Exam but stranger things have happened. There is a weird kind of karmic symmetry to that idea which appeals to me somehow.... 

The Trident Robberies by Patrick Pendleton Gizmo754@aol.com