STEAM-DRILL BURGLARY
While "Mother" Mandelbaum engineered house and dry goods store robberies, Grady set his mind and energies on the great banks. As bold as the Manhattan affair was his assault on a West Side bank. The vaults of this bank were surrounded by a three-foot wall of solid concrete.
Grady opened a first-class saloon next door, and as soon as he got his bearings installed a steam engine in the cellar. This engine was supposed to run the electric light dynamo and an air pump. In reality it was there to drill a hole into the bank next door.
Selecting a Saturday which happened to be a holiday, he commenced operations Friday night, and there was every prospect of being inside the vault long before Monday morning. But, unfortunately, a wide-awake policeman of inquiring mind heard the unfamiliar buzzing out in the street. He prowled around and finally discovered that something unusual was going on in the cellar under the saloon. No answer coming to his knocks, he burst in the door and descended to the cellar. The thieves ran out, but two were caught in the street. Though Grady financed and planned this scheme, he escaped untouched, for there was no evidence against him.
Criminals, successful and unsuccessful, rarely lack women to love them. Strangely enough, this grim, daring, successful general of crime was perpetually spurned and flouted by my sex. Finally there came to him like an angel from heaven a very beautiful, well-bred daughter of the rich. Of course, John fell in love with her—any man would have—and things looked favorable for him.
This woman was the young and almost penniless widow of a member of the "four hundred." She had involved herself in a financial situation from which there was no honest escape. Just as servants of the rich ran to "Mother" Mandelbaum with their secrets, so this woman went to Grady with her inside knowledge.
A sort of partnership sprang up between them which was profitable to both, but particularly to the woman, who used her sex unhesitatingly to get the better of her bargains with the cunning old master of the underworld. Grady's passion grew stronger and stronger, and the young widow, who really despised him, found it harder and harder to keep him at a distance.
Finally things came to a head. Grady knew that the secret of the Manhattan Bank was soon to come out and that his position in New York would be no longer safe. He was ready to flee, but his passion for the woman had become so completely his master that he would not move without her. It was a peculiar duel of wits that followed. The woman was financially dependent on Grady and dared not hide from him nor pretend that she did not return his passion.
The night came when she must either elope with him or lose his aid. The thought of either was unbearable, yet she met him in his empty house at midnight prepared. She knew that Grady would have his entire fortune with him in the form of the diamonds and her plan was nothing less than to murder him and take his jewels. She had brought a little vial of poison with her and held it in trembling fingers within her muff. She knew Grady had a bottle of yellow wine, and she knew it would not be hard to have him drink a toast to their elopement.
Grady produced the bottle but also only one dirty tumbler. They were both to drink from that, it seemed. The woman, at her wits' ends, glanced about the room and spied a battered tin cup.
"There," she cried, pointing, "the very thing."