I think there may be some confusion with regard to these robberies. There were at least two that I know of. Bobby’s account of  the first Trident robbery is accurate as far as it goes and I was there, but that’s not the robbery I had to testify in. That occurred three or four years later. Here’s what happened:
  

          Shortly after re-opening the Trident in May of 1969 when most of the kinks had been worked out, Frank and Lou realized that they were spread kind of thin…they needed some floor managers and they tried quite a few people at this position. Skip Cuddy was a friend of Billy Rice, who was at the time the number two bartender, Michael Ishmali was the bar manager – a volatile little Persian dude who had worked at the old Trident. Anyway, Frank hires Skip and Grover to be night and weekend floor managers.  Neither of them turned out to be very good at the job but for different reasons. Skip did a lot of blow and was rather spaced-out while Grover could sometimes be too abrasive with the staff. One could sometimes find them locked in the office banging waitresses, hostesses, and customers - anything that moved, really. Then they got the idea of promoting the harder-working busboys. There was Austin Broadwater from Virginia, John, who worked in the kitchen was from New York – he had about the shortest career – only about a month. Then there was Blythe Nelson, busboy and John Abrahms, also a busboy. Richard, Lisa, Dagney, Marshall, Dennis, and Bobby Weckle all came much later.
 

          John was, by far, the strangest choice. He was a fairly stout lad but had a mellow disposition and was a superb ass-kisser, which might explain how he came to be hired. John lived at Bobby’s house – a delightfully cheap little place down in Sausalito’s banana belt on Johnson St. across the street from the police station and as roommates they threw some terrific after-hours parties. Now you have to understand, Bobby and John were a couple of heavily armed dudes. Both were into collecting all sorts of knives, crossbows and other exotic weapons as well as always having the finest in consumable drugs…not to put too fine a point on it.
 

           My belief is that John became a little too dependant on coke and decided he could get away with taking money out of the cash receipts and nobody would notice. I believe he had been taking small amounts over a period of months because I’d hear Lou grumbling about missing money from time to time. Such unbelievable amounts of money were generated in that place it was a tempting target.

          Anyway, one weekend night, after everyone had mostly gone home and we (the cleanup crew and myself ) were sitting down to eat and John comes out of the office with a brown paper sack in his hand and we greeted him like always with entreaties to join the table, have a smoke – whatever, which he declined, to our surprise. He was acting strangely, agitated – nervous about something. In retrospect, he really didn’t have the guile necessary to pull this off. He was always up for little doobie and when he passed it up, it stuck in my mind and I remember remarking to Chris Leitz, one of my troops, that something was up with John.

          Anyway, next morning comes and Lou comes in to find that there is not even enough money in the safe to make up the banks. Lou gets some guy to come in and he’s going to start giving lie-detector tests to the short list of people who had keys to the office. So I hung around to see what would happen and sure enough, John was one of the first people they tested. Turns out John spent nearly all the stolen money on blow and rather than prosecute him Frank asked for the blow…don’t know how he explained it to Tong and Fong, the accountants the Trident used back then, but anyway it went down pretty much like Bobby said with Frank bad-mouthing the quality of the blow (he was a notorious drug snob) and somehow I didn’t get to try that particular batch. Ah well…

          After that, they got a new safe, installed a key-activated alarm system, put in new locks and generally set up some safeguards to protect the establishment. There were already a couple of panic-buttons installed behind the main bar and espresso bar so they just tied the new alarm system into a police notification circuit and they were all set. The new system had an infrared detector set up in the office so that any movement there would set it off…a silent alarm to the Sausalito Police Dept. 

Patrick Pendleton: Gizmo754@aol.com