The bank robbery was discovered through the Georgia State Lottery.
Atlanta Second National Bank had a training department. New employees, usually fresh from High School, started their careers in the main branch. It was the only branch of the bank that had more than one storey, the head office was on the second floor. Above the bank were luxurious directors’ offices, conference rooms, a boardroom with a 25 foot table and a training room. Second National didn’t like employing managers outside its own ranks, so the only route up the promotion ladder was to start as a trainee teller in the training room. The new employees spent about three years at the main branch before being shipped out to one of the suburban branches for a few years, to see if they had management potential.
Josh Weaver had moved from the main branch to Edgewood in the south of the city only two months ago. In his three years at the main branch, he had forged some firm friendships, become a member of the softball team and had joined the lottery syndicate. So now, each Thursday afternoon, his friend Bradley McGregor would call him up, mainly to chat or to arrange to meet for a drink, but always to ask if he wanted to play the same numbers on the lottery, or choose some new ones.
This Thursday, Josh wasn’t answering his mobile phone. An email message went undelivered. The bank’s landline was faulty. Bradley looked at his bank directory and dialled the security office number at the Edgewood branch. He had worked for a couple of years at the Georgia Tech branch when Stan Kerowski had been there. Stan would get a message to Josh. The line to security was dead. He called his supervisor.
‘Ted, I got a problem raising the Edgewood branch. I can’t get through on a landline, mobile or email.’
‘Security have a separate line, have you tried that?’
‘That line’s dead.’
There was a pause.
‘It’s almost certainly just a coincidence and there won’t be a problem at Edgewood but, just so we can’t be criticized later, call the local precinct and ask them to send a patrol car round there, will you?’
The police car pulled to the kerb and parked in exactly the same spot the Georgia Power and Light van had left 45 minutes earlier. The two officers who got out of the vehicle and pulled on their caps looked bored. This was a routine stop near the end of their day. They would go into the bank, be told everything was alright and, if they were lucky, would stay for coffee and a doughnut, so this would be the last call before they finished their shift.
Officers O’Connor and Kostos had worked together for ten years. They were both in their early 50s, over six feet tall and carrying about forty pounds of extra weight. As they walked from the car to the bank, shoving their nightsticks into their belts, they looked like a pair of bookends. Behind their backs, their fellow officers called them Tweedledee and Tweedledum. The only difference between them was that Kostos was chewing gum, O’Connor wasn’t. O’Connor looked at the clock on the front of the building: it was 5.20 pm, the bank would have been closed for nearly an hour and the bronze doors looked firmly shut. He jumped up to look through one of the high windows, but the blinds were down.
‘What’s round the back?’ he asked.
‘A parking lot, but there are no doors or windows at the back of the bank.’
O’Connor knew it was a waste of time, but he leaned into one of the doors. It started to open. He and Kostos looked at each other and pulled their guns out of their holsters. Both stood with their backs to the door for two seconds, guns raised in both hands in front of them and pointing upwards, until Kostos said, ‘Go!’
O’Connor went in first, covering the right hand of the banking hall with his gun; Kostos followed immediately, covering the left. They stopped in a combat crouch, their guns pointing in front of them, like two statues. The banking hall was empty, except for the body of Hal Clarke and the figure of Stan Kerowski. Holstering their guns, the two officers walked to the bodies lying on the carpet.
‘This one is gone,’ said O’Connor as he knelt by Hal Clarke.
‘This guy is still with us, but only just,’ said Kostos. He unclipped the radio microphone from his shirt front,
‘Get an ambulance to Atlanta Second National Bank on Ralph McGill Boulevard. We’ve got a male Caucasian, about 60 years old. Head wound, he is critical.’
‘Where the hell is everybody else?’ asked O’Connor, tipping his cap to the back of his head.
‘The security gate is open,’ said Kostos, ‘let’s try the back.’
They saw the open safety deposit box room door and the boxes and contents strewn across the floor. Kostos reached for his microphone again.
‘When you’ve contacted the hospital, get a CSI team down here, there’s been a robbery.’
They both looked at the vault door. Unless the robbers had taken the staff and customers with them, there was only one place they could be. Then they looked at the shattered punchboard.
‘Shit,’ said Kostos. ‘These …’ he searched for the word, ‘vaults,’ he said eventually, ‘aren’t they locked electronically?’ He had that look on his face he always wore when he was thinking. O’Connor left most of the thinking to Kostos.
‘I guess so,’ he said.
‘And looking at that,’ Kostas nodded at the punchboard, ‘no-one’s going to open it electronically in a hurry.’
‘Nope,’ said O’Connor.
‘Shit,’ repeated Kostos and unclipped his radio microphone again.
Chief Joseph Harper had been both blessed and cursed by the bad luck of others. A great bull of a man with broad shoulders, barrel chest and a shaven head shaped like a bullet, he had joined Atlanta city police force at the age of 26, after five years in the army. He was known as brave and streetwise, but reckless and unintelligent. His physical power and violent temper made him a man people feared.
Early in his career Joe Harper had joined the union. When the local convenor was invalided out of the force, he took the job. His promotion through the police force was eased by the power of the union behind him. He would have made an excellent sergeant and a half decent lieutenant, but seven years into the job he had made captain and was already out of his depth.
When the Chief of Police retired, Harper threw a lot of union support behind Harry Lomax. When Lomax became Chief he made it his business to reward anyone who had helped him and Joe Harper was soon putting a major’s bars on his uniform.
Four years later, Harry Lomax died of cancer and the union, anxious to have one of their own in the top job, put Harper’s name forward as a candidate for Chief. There were two other names: Bill Adams, the county sheriff and Gary Johnson, a senior detective who had been on the force for over twenty years. Johnson worked out that, in a straight fight between him and Adams, he would win. But in a three-way fight, the mayor might see Adams as a compromise between him and Harper. In a late-night meeting in a back room of the Pullman Bar on Memorial Drive it was agreed that if Harper stood down, Johnson would give him the Deputy Chief’s job when he got the nod from the mayor.
Joe Harper was comfortable in the Deputy Chief’s job. It came with a title, a Hollywood sized office, a team of support staff and his own car and driver. He didn’t admit to anyone that what he liked best about the job was the four times a year he stood by Chief Johnston’s right shoulder at ceremonial parades. He was wearing his formal uniform with more gold braid on it than a South American general and he felt so proud of himself. He had a good, well-paid job which, apart from chairing the Disciplinary and Welfare Committees, was without any real responsibility. He was starting to look forward to a few more years before retiring on his two pensions, one from the force and one from the union, when the press started sniffing around a story they would later label Ashleygate.
Carl Ashley was Atlanta’s best-known gangster. He made no secret of what he did for a living and most weeks at least one newspaper or magazine would have a picture of Carl, tanned and expensively dressed, escorting a model or actress to a fundraising dinner, boxing match or the opening night of a show. What brought Carl and most of the Atlanta City Police Force hierarchy down, were two men who couldn’t face spending twenty or more years in prison.
Ricky Murphy had worked as a foot soldier for Carl since before he dropped out of High School. One evening he was driving down Trinity Avenue at about ten miles an hour over the speed limit when he was pulled over by a traffic cop. Ricky, who had spent the afternoon in a bar, started to argue and pulled out a knife. The officer called for backup, three squad cars arrived and Ricky was disarmed and arrested. One of the backup officers, left with nothing else to do, searched Ricky’s car. In a canvas bag in the boot were plastic packages containing ten kilos of pure heroin.
When the two Drug Enforcement Agency officers interviewed Ricky at the Municipal Police Station on Ponce De Leon Avenue, they showed him some photos of the Georgia State Prison at Reidsville. They told him he could keep the photos as it was going to be his home until he was a very old man. They also told him what happened to good looking boys like Ricky in Reidsville. After two hours, he was ready to sell them Carl, everyone who worked for him and if he had to, his own grandmother.
What Ricky told the DEA officers led them to Larry Schmidt. Larry was Carl’s accountant and he knew where every cent came from and where it went to. Larry was clever and meticulous. Like Ricky, Larry didn’t want to spend all his years to retirement behind bars. Carl didn’t know it, but Larry kept three sets of books. There were the ones he showed Carl, the ones he showed the IRS and the bank manager and the ones that listed the regular cash payments to a State Senator, two congressmen, Chief Johnson and most of his senior staff. Joe Harper was the odd man out; Carl saw him as too stupid and too powerless to bother bribing.
When the dust settled and all the people named in Larry’s books found themselves in prison, Joe Harper, against his wishes, was promoted to Chief of Police.