ONE VAULT... MILLIONS IN MOB MONEY
and a Woonsocket thief at the wheel
The number has always been a big one, but outside of a few looped-in FBI agents and some mobsters with an inside track, few people had any idea how big it really was – not until now anyway. It was long believed that the 1975 robbery of Providence’s Bonded Vault by a band of crooks who were luckier than skilled may have yielded a few million dollars. But a new book about one of the most storied episodes in Rhode Island criminal lore says the score was closer to $32 million, or more like $140 million adjusted for inflation.
And were it not for a serial thief from Woonsocket named Mitch Lanoue, it might have never gone down at all, says WPRI-TV investigative reporter Tim White, coauthor of “The Last Good Heist – The Inside Story of the Single Biggest Payday in the History of the Northeast.”
“Mitch Lanoue may be my favorite character in the book and it’s because up to his dying day, he was a true thief – and at times not a very good one, which is why he was in prison quite a bit,” said White. “At an age when most people were ready to retire from being a bad guy he kept going.”A project that was years in the making – generations might be more accurate, but more on that later – “The Last Good Heist” was written by White and two retired alumni of the Providence Journal who covered the Bonded Vault robbery back in the day – Randall Richard and Wayne Worcester.
Released a few days ago, the 252-pager is the result of painstaking and meticulous research that sheds new light on the scope of the crime. Among the most illuminating sources of new information, according to White, were thousands of pages of previously unavailable records from the FBI that the authors obtained – often in heavily redacted form – under the Freedom of Information Act.
“We do feel we’ve broken new ground,” says White. “Time has a funny way of helping the truth get out.” Tapping longtime law enforcement sources whose lips are a little looser in retirement, the authors believe they’ve nailed down a reliable figure for the worth of the booty pried loose from the safe deposit boxes of Bonded Vault over four decades ago – a trove of high-end jewelry, gems, gold and silver bars, cash and other valuables.
In colorful, minute detail, they explore how the heist was pulled off and follow the lives of the players through the years following the event, including Lanoue’s.
A SIDELINE business for the Hudson Fur Company in Providence’s gritty west side, Bonded Vault was basically a bank for the New England branch of the mafia. Racketeers and mobsters needed a safe place to store the ill-gotten gains of their criminal endeavors, but they couldn’t exactly go to Hospital Trust.
Bonded Vault didn’t have what you’d call a high profile – just the opposite. Outside of the mob and a few properly placed members of the law enforcement community, few people actually knew it existed.
The business was run by the four Levine brothers – Sam, Abraham, Hyman and Matthew – who didn’t bother with security because, well, who’d be stupid enough to rob the mob?
But the wheels of the unimaginably risky ripoff were in motion on the morning of Aug. 14, 1975 when an ordinary-looking delivery van pulled up outside Hudson Fur Storage. Armed with power tools and firearms, eight men were huddled inside, braced for the hit on the mob’s bank. But the plan was to start off by sending in only couple at first to get the situation under control before the rest joined in to crack open the safe deposit boxes.
That’s where Lanoue comes in, according to White.
While the masked point men for the heist were inside Bonded Vault sticking up the help with .38-caliber handguns and stuffing their heads in pillowcases, their accomplices back in the van were getting cold feet. It was Lanoue who cracked the whip, and he was scary enough to get them to follow through.
“He was the driver of the van,” said White. “This wasn’t an Ocean’s Eleven crew – they weren’t gifted. They were a ragtag crew and it’s shocking they pulled this one off.
“There’s a moment in the van, you already have two gunmen in the building, all of a sudden some of the guys were starting to freak,” said White. “Mitch lost his mind. He threatened to shoot them even though he didn’t have a gun. It motivated them...If it weren’t for Lanoue’s actions that morning this might have never happened.”
When it comes to Bonded Vault, the term safe deposit box was a misnomer, according to White. The heavy-duty, metal compartments inside the security company were huge – about 150 of them in all, each measuring about two feet wide, two feet high and four or five feet deep.
The crooks lugged in heavy duty power drills to disable the mini-vaults of Bonded Vault, but they were useless. In what turned out to be a major stroke of luck, they figured out that they could jimmy off the hinges to the thick steel doors of the boxes with the crowbars – all except for two. And the only reason that didn’t work was because the boxes were tucked in tight quarters where the bandits couldn’t get the proper leverage with their lowtech pry-bars.
In the end, the answer to the question of who would be stupid enough to rob from the mob turned out to be – you guessed it – the mob. Multiple fingers, including those of Robert “Deuce” Dussault, one of the gun-toting point men of the heist, pointed to legendary mob boss Raymond L.S. Patriarca as its mastermind.
Patriarca ruled the New England branch of La Cosa Nostra from his quarters on Federal Hill with an iron fist. White says investigators concluded that he set up the robbery because he thought his associates were skimming his share of the crime family’s profits while he was in prison serving time for a gangland slaying.
Officially, the FBI never tied Patriarca to the crime. After he joined the witness protection program, however, Dussault once gave a lecture on organized crime to a group of Providence police cadets as a favor to law enforcement, revealing that Patriarca not only ordered the robbery – he helped plan it.
Abit of the loot trickled down to the soldiers who pulled off the heist, but most of it has never been accounted for. White says the FBI followed leads that the stolen wealth may have made its way to Europe before the trail went cold. As for Lanoue, the years after the Bonded Vault robbery were a game of cat and mouse with law enforcement. He was indicted for his role in the robbery several years later, but the charges were dismissed on a technicality and the state appealed to the Supreme Court.
As explained in “The Last Great Heist,” Lanoue was by then already in his 60s and had earned a spot on the FBI’s “Top Thiefs Program.” While the Bonded Vault charges were on appeal, he became a suspect in several high profile robberies, including the knockoff of an armored car in East Killingly, Conn., in which some $500,000 worth of cash and gold-plating materials vanished.
Lanoue also landed in prison in the late 1980s after law enforcement found guns and other contraband in his house. Eventually the Supreme Court reinstated the Bonded Vault charges against him and he pled to 19 counts, but it didn’t amount to any additional prison time because his sentence was suspended. He was released in 1990, but his freedom didn’t last. Three years later federal agents and state police intercepted him as he was about to rob an armored car in Bellingham, Mass. At last, the chickens of Bonded Vault came home to roost for Lanoue as a judge ordered him to serve 19 years, activating the suspended sentence on the heist charges.
Lanoue was released from prison in December 2010 and, according to family members quoted anonymously in the book, he spent his remaining years reminiscing about criminal exploits instead of committing new ones. One thing he rarely discussed, however, was the Bonded Vault robbery.
“It was connected to very powerful people,” a Lanoue relative says in the book.
In January 2012, Lanoue died of natural causes at the age of 90.
White say the crime isn’t just a fascinating true-crime caper, it represents a historically important milestone in the decline of La Cosa Nostra’s power and influence – the first example of a once highly disciplined outlaw organization beginning to turn against itself.
For White, anyway, writing the book with Worcester and Richard was more than just an opportunity to explore the secrets of the Patriarca mob family – it was a way to honor his own roots. His father, the late Jack White, was a longtime investigative reporter who worked for both the Providence Journal and WPRI-TV.
As a youngster, White was regaled with stories of Bonded Vault by his father.
“I fell in love with the story,” says White, who even wrote a screenplay about it as a classroom project when he was a student at UMass Amherst.
It was his father’s death in 2005, White says, that gave him the motivation he needed to write the definitive version of the Bonded Vault story.
The book is dedicated to him.