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Brinks bags.
One of the men hit the button for the twenty-second floor. They stepped out of the freight elevator into the hall, still wearing their ski masks. At this moment they were confronted with confusion. They had been told again and again to hide their faces, but also to look as calm and normal as possible. Wearing ski masks in a bank unit’s hallway seemed hardly a normal thing to do. Thus it was that all three men removed their ski masks at once. Only Richie Gillette, who had apparently picked up a modest amount of common sense over the years, kept his hood on. Richie and Mel carried one bag, Mike carried two. They strolled down the hallway with their bags weighted down by money, looking as relaxed as vacationers on the beach. Or perhaps they were maintenance guys headed over to check out the latest complaint about the screwy heating system that kept things too hot in the summer and freezing from December through May.
Stroll was what they did, over to a passenger elevator. They pressed the button and waited. Soon they were on board, headed back to the concourse. In a few minutes— by 8:45 A . M .—they passed out of a set of revolving doors at One World Trade and onto a crowded New York City street.
They had to be feeling pretty fine. This was, after all, the World Trade Center, a building transformed into a fortress as a result of the acts of crazed overseas terrorists. And they had just stolen lots and lots of money from inside that very building and walked outside an actual door onto the street.
At that moment, as Richie, Mel, and Mike headed out of the revolving door, Ralphie sat across the street in a parked car, watching. He saw them leave. He saw the bags in their hands. He saw them walk down the street. He knew that they were to take different subway routes to Brooklyn and meet up that night to split up whatever they had snatched. It must have been a difficult moment for Ralphie. There he sat, knowing that his three handpicked guys had somehow managed to come out of that building without being arrested. And yet he could not know what had transpired inside, he could not know precisely how much they’d stolen, and he could not, under any circumstances, walk over at that moment and ask. January 14, 1998
    It was hard to tell from the media deluge whether the world viewed the mastermind behind the Great World Trade Center Heist of 1998 as a criminal Einstein or a comic genius.
    It was full-court media bombardment, almost from the moment Richie, Mel, and Mike traipsed out of the Trade Center with their heavy loads. On TV, on the radio—hour
after hour it continued. The press loved it! Three guys—in some reports “bozos”—managed to walk out of New York’s most sensitive building in broad daylight (whatever that is) with more than $1 million in cash. And they did it while showing their faces to no fewer than fifty-five hidden cameras. How about that! These radio and TV people were practically laughing out loud as they read their copy to the masses.
    The mastermind himself—Ralphie Guarino—remained in a state of shock. He didn’t know what to think, except to know that whatever would come of this, it would surely be bad. During the previous twenty-four hours, after he watched his guys exit the towers, he headed to a rendezvous spot in Brooklyn. There he helped Richie and the other two guys count and split the cash. His first shock came when he got a look at the take. There was nary a dead U.S. president in the lot. Francs. Yen. Lire. Lots of lire.
    “You know I got fucking bags of this Italian yen,” Ralphie told Sal later. “I don’t know, Italian lire. You know, eighty thousand of them making fucking ten dollars.”
    There were some good old American dollar bills, but not a whole hell of a lot, and Ralphie was forced to hand over most of the U.S. cash to his three foot soldiers in stacks of $20,000 each. Counting the rest became somewhat tricky. Ralphie—a guy from Brooklyn—had little