"Come, Mr. Sheedy—hand over the original paintings I left with you, or I'll blow your head off!"
He was considerably amazed at this warlike nerve on my part, but still had nerve enough left to argue that those were the pictures I had given him. But I was not to be tricked like that. Finally he went into an adjoining room—I after him with the gun in my hand—pulled open a drawer and took out the canvasses which had my initials on the back. I carried them back to London, where Raymond sold them for $75,000, of which he gave me $10,000. I sold many stolen paintings to Sheedy after that, but he never tried to take advantage of me again.
Raymond often used to tell me that all his bad luck dated from the night he stole the famous Gainsborough. If the portrait really was a "hoodoo" its evil influence was a long time in taking effect. The two or three years after his robbery of the Agnew gallery saw the most daring crimes of his life and the money they yielded made him a multi-millionaire. Even his heavy losses at Monte Carlo could not seriously affect a fortune which was being steadily increased by all sorts of illegal undertakings.
He lived like a prince in London and Paris, owned several race horses and maintained, besides a sailing yacht, a palatial steam yacht with a crew of twenty men. He liked to vary the monotony of his cruises by deeds of piracy as sensational as any Captain Kidd ever attempted. On one such occasion he robbed a post-office on the island of Malta; on another he attempted to loot a warehouse on the docks at Kingston, Jamaica. This last exploit would have ended in his capture by a British gunboat which pursued him for twenty miles had his yacht not been a remarkably speedy craft.
RAYMOND'S EXPERT ON SAFE CRACKING
Raymond was a natural leader of men, and he had a sharp eye for able assistants. In his gangs were the greatest experts he could collect around him. Raymond was not a technically educated machinist, and he felt the need of an expert mechanic. For a number of years he watched the work of various other bank burglars and gave especial attention to any work that showed peculiar mechanical skill in getting into locks and steel safes.
Finally Raymond got his eye on a very promising young burglar named Mark Shinburn, who turned out to be a perfect wonder as a safe opener. Shinburn had served an apprenticeship in a machine shop and soon got a job in the factory of the Lilly Safe Company. Locks and safes had a peculiar fascination for Shinburn and he rapidly mastered the whole scheme, theory, and practice of lock-making, and knew the weak points not only of the locks his own company made but also of all the other big safe makers whose locks and safes were on the market.
Shinburn was just the man to fit into Raymond's band of experts. He had the peculiar and valuable technical knowledge that Raymond lacked. Raymond would select a bank, study the habits of the bank clerks, survey the situation, and lay out the plans for the job. Raymond would execute all these preliminaries and would lead his men into the bank and face to face with the safe; but at this point Shinburn would bring his genius into action and Raymond would stand by holding his dark lantern and watching Shinburn with silent admiration.
Raymond and Shinburn were the moving spirits of the bold gang which robbed the Ocean Bank in New York of a million dollars. With them were associated Jimmy Hope, who later led the attack on the Manhattan Bank; my husband, Ned Lyons, George Bliss, and several others.
On his return from a series of bank robberies on the Continent, Raymond took apartments in the house of a widow who lived with her two daughters in Bayswater, a suburb of London. He became in time much attached to this woman and her children, and lavished every luxury on them, including the education of the girls in the best French schools. For years this family never suspected their benefactor was a criminal, but supposed him to be a prosperous diamond importer.