“Hold your tongue, Mark,” I said, “and come with me.” How often I had been obliged to urge discretion upon him, for he was ever running risks. As we came out of the vault I closed the great steel door, and once more tried to throw home the bolt. It was useless to try. Shinburn seemed to look at me sarcastically, as though he would tell me there was no hope of locking the door if he couldn’t do it. Leaving everything as we found it, we left the bank by the rear door. Scarcely had we done so when the night clerk let himself in by the front door.
It was the first work done on the inside of a St. Catharines bank in Ontario, Canada, the vault of which, we had been informed, held a treasure worth the miles we had come to possess it.
The prize seemed to be within our reach, when the failure of the duplicate keys to work brought irritating delay. The cash in one of the safes might have been carried off that night, but it would have been flatly unwise, from our viewpoint, to leave behind thousands which might easily be gotten. To rob one safe would mean discovery of the fact the next morning, and there would end all possibility of getting the contents of the other safe. Both, with properly made keys, could be looted with one visit to the vault.
One of those apparently insignificant oversights on the part of bank officials was the foundation upon which I constructed the plan to rob this bank, and I would direct the attention of the banking world to the incident with all the force I possess. While the method of bank protection of the present period is vastly different from then, it may be that there will be a lesson, after all, found in this history.
It was Jim Griffin, a crook with a reputation, who suggested the robbery. He lived in St. Catharines. A young man who kept company with an Irish serving-girl dropped a remark in Jim’s hearing. The girl was in the employ of the cashier of the bank. Naturally she talked of his affairs, and among other things mentioned the bank keys, which “nearly every night lay on the mantel-piece in the dining room.” As I have said, Jim Griffin heard this girl’s sweetheart speak of the incident, and within two days Jim was in New York, looking for some one to loot the bank. Through a mutual friend I was introduced to him.
“That seems like a fine chance to get a few wax impressions,” was my comment.
“Yes,” rejoined Griffin, with a satisfied smile, “I thought the opportunity too inviting to give it the go-by.”
“Right; if bank cashiers will let servant-girls have opportunities to talk about bank keys lying about the house, I don’t know why we shouldn’t profit by it,” I said. “Shall I interest Mark Shinburn in this?” Griffin assented.
Two days later I was in St. Catharines, and when I had returned to New York had succeeded in making the acquaintance of the sweetheart of the cashier’s serving-girl and had with me the wax impressions of the vault door key and the keys of the two money safes inside. From these impressions I had Shinburn make duplicates.
Several days after this my associates and I were ready to begin the job, and in fact I have already told with what difficulties we had to contend. Our inability to relock the vault door, owing to the misfitting of the key, should have put an end to our hopes of robbing the vault, but, as I anticipated, the cashier, finding the vault door unlocked, believed he had been very careless, and no harm having been done, as he thought, no report of the fact was made to his superiors. Thus was our way paved with opportunity for the next attempt.