Confessions of a Second Story Man by Allen M. Hornblum

Author:Allen M. Hornblum
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781569804995
Publisher: Barricade Books

“Scolnick was good at con games,” says Kripplebauer, “but when it came to real criminal shit he was nothing. Rosenberg and Paul figured that bank deal out; they deserve as much credit as Scolnick. The whole thing came about when Sid Brooks couldn’t get his money out of the old Philadelphia Saving Fund Society. That’s what started it all. One day he goes to the bank, but doesn’t realize he’s being followed by the cops. They had been watching him for a while. That’s how they learned about the safe-deposit box. The cops thought the box contained the proceeds of various burglaries and arson jobs he had committed. They looked his name up among the owners of safe-deposit boxes, but there was nothing registered to a Sidney Brooks. He was using an alias. They then got a court order to inspect all those boxes suspected of being his. That’s how they discovered the $100,000. But the government made a big mistake: they left the money in the safe-deposit box and had the IRS put a seal on it.

“Now Sid has got a problem: he can’t get his money out of the bank. What’s he gonna do? He goes to Scolnick and explains his problem. All of us then sat down and had a discussion, what are we gonna do about this hundred grand? How are we gonna get it out of there? It wasn’t just Scolnick—there were a bunch of us trying to figure it out. It was a combination of brains. Everybody was throwing ideas out. Paul said, ‘Let’s just rob the bank. We’ll lay them all down and rob the joint.’ Others came up with other ideas. We met several times and finally came up with a plan and refined it until we all felt comfortable with it.

“It worked this way. Rosenberg went to the bank a few times and purchased a number of safe-deposit boxes, hoping that one of them would be near the box the IRS had sealed shut. The plan was to cause a diversion in the bank, get ahold of a teller’s keys while people were distracted, and then switch one of the new, empty boxes with the one that held the money and walk out.

“On the day of the robbery, everything went like clockwork. Rosenberg entered the bank and moved towards the back where the safe-deposit vault was located. Paul followed him in as backup just in case anything went wrong. I then had someone drive me up to the bank’s front door. I got out and threw a large cinderblock through the bank’s plate glass window that faced Cottman Avenue. It sounded like an explosion. I then got the hell out of there, but as we drove off I could hear Kenny Paul yelling inside the bank. He was shouting at the top of his lungs, ‘It’s a bomb! It’s a bomb! It’s a bomb! Everybody get down!’

“It looked like a prison break. While everybody is either dropping to the floor or

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