Ledl hurried back to Rome from London to tell Cardinal Tisserant that the Vatican should be prepared to accept delivery of the sample package soon after the middle of July.
Jacobs, Rizzo and de Lorenzo headed home, and before they landed, they had come to their own decision. Because of the size of the job and the need for dispatch, the work should not be given to a single supplier but should be split in half. One part of the engraving and printing was assigned to Louis Milo, whose printing plant on Avenue A at Twelfth Street was hard by Jimmy’s Lounge and Rizzo’s L and S Coffee Shop. The other half was handed to Ely Lubin, a friend of Ricky Jacobs in Los Angeles who worked with a shop of black printers and engravers on Melrose Avenue. Working from authentic certificates, the engravers on both coasts carefully duplicated the originals, leaving blank only the serial numbers, ownership and signatures. From these plates, Milo in New York and Lubin’s printers in Los Angeles set their presses rolling and soon that authentic bond paper had been transformed into the sample package of $14.5 million in securities—American Telephone and Telegraph Company, $10,000, 7% bonds; Chrysler Corporation, $5,000, 8⅞% bonds; General Electric Company, $10,000, 7½% bonds; and Pan American World Airways, $10,000, 11⅛% bonds. The printing took a little longer than usual, but the demand had been for care, and there had been the promise that this was only a beginning, barely a start on the work that would consume the next weeks and months, until October.
In New York, Milo neatly stacked and packaged his bonds and turned them over to Rizzo. Rizzo handed them to a courier who boarded a plane for Los Angeles, where they were merged with the bonds coming off the presses of Lubin’s people. Once Rizzo had seen them off, he called his master forger, William Benjamin, in Philadelphia. The first part of the job was done, he said. Now it was up to Benjamin to finish the work, to make the certificates ready for delivery to Rome.
Benjamin had been waiting for that call, passing the days by showing a visitor, Tony Grant, the sights of Philadelphia. With Rizzo’s call, he moved. Taking Grant with him, for the ride and because Grant would soon have his own role to play, Benjamin hurried to New York, stayed only long enough to confer with Rizzo and buy an almost new IBM typewriter and sequential numbering machine from a private source. Then he and Grant were on their way to California.
Louis Gittleman was waiting for them at Los Angeles Airport. Benjamin ordered Grant dropped at a hotel and told him, “Have a good time. You won’t be seeing me for a couple of days because I have a lot of work to do.” Grant knew exactly what Benjamin meant.
Gittleman detoured to pick up Jerry Marc Jacobs, then drove to an apartment house on Melrose near Normandy Avenue. While Gittleman and Benjamin waited outside, Jacobs, following the instructions he had been given by his just-imprisoned father and by Lubin, went to an apartment on the second floor, rang the bell, identified himself to the black man who opened the door. There were several other men and two women in the apartment. They paid no attention to Jacobs as he was led to the back bedroom. On the bed was a new cardboard carton. Jacobs opened it. Neatly stacked inside were the counterfeit bonds. The black man told him to take it. Jacobs tried to lift it; it was heavier than he thought and the black man helped put it into his arms, steered him back through the apartment, held the door open for him to leave. Jacobs thanked him politely, went down the stairs, joined the waiting Benjamin and Gittleman in the car.
For the next two days and nights, in a room in Gittleman’s sister’s apartment, Benjamin labored, while Jacobs stood over him and tried to supervise, an intrusive nuisance, Benjamin thought. Wearing surgeons’ gloves so he would leave no fingerprints, Benjamin carefully numbered and dated all the certificates on the IBM typewriter and the sequential numbering machine, though after a while he turned that job over to Jerry Jacobs, ordering him to put on a pair of surgeons’ gloves before touching the certificates. Then, picking up a pen, Benjamin signed each certificate, precisely duplicating the signatures on the originals so that when he had finished it would have been hard for an experienced investigator to tell those bonds from legitimate ones. He looked at his work of two days and two sleepless nights and was satisfied. There was just one more thing for him to do. He stacked the bonds in neat packages, sealed each package with a bank label. His part of the job was over. Exhausted, Benjamin collapsed onto a bed and went to sleep.
Now it was up to Jerry Jacobs and Tony Grant to see those bonds to their destination. Grant went to a luggage shop in Beverly Hills, bought a large suitcase, which he and Jacobs filled with the bonds, so full it was hard to close and Grant wondered if he shouldn’t have bought an even larger one. That done, Jacobs reserved two first-class seats on Pan American Airways from Los Angeles to London, with a change in London to Lufthansa for Rome via Munich. They headed for the airport, checked their suitcase through with the ordinary luggage. It was mid-July and they were on their way.
What they did not know, what nobody knew, was that at almost the same moment, Vincent Rizzo was on his way from New York to Rome. According to immigration stamps on his passport, he arrived in Rome on July 17, stayed only a few days before returning to the United States. What his purpose was he revealed nearly a year later in a room at the Palace Hotel in Munich to a startled Winfried Ense, and to Joe Coffey and a group of German detectives listening a few rooms away. “I was sitting in the other half of the Excelsior,” he said. “I was watching all of you.… They told me, ‘Do you want to meet him?’ I says, ‘I don’t want to meet him. I just want my money. What do I want to meet anybody for?’” Thus, from a distance and in secret, Rizzo saw some of the events that followed and learned about the rest from those he trusted.
More than once over the years that followed, Joe Coffey wondered what would have happened had he been turned loose on Rizzo that February of 1971 when he had first had his hunch. If he had been given the license he wanted, he would have been on Rizzo while all these events were taking place, might have been able to follow on this trip to Rome or the one a few weeks before to London, might have been able to discover enough to blunt the scheme in its infancy. But he was held back, and so the plot went forward unobserved.