The Saturday morning of the very first San Diego Comic-Con in 1970, my friend Steve Sherman picked me up and we, along with Steve's brother Gary and our pal Bruce Simon, drove down to that historic gathering. I was in such a hurry when Steve pulled up outside at a very early hour that I didn't notice that my father's car was not in the driveway. It should have been…since he was still inside, fast asleep. When I returned home late that evening, I learned that some time the previous night, that car — an Oldsmobile with a whole lotta miles on it, I believe — had been stolen.
The police had come by and reports had been filled out. My father was annoyed, of course, more at the inconvenience than at the cost, most of which would be covered by insurance. But it was a pain to get to work the following week. His friend and co-worker Howard had to come by and give him a lift. And it was a pain to go out and shop for another car. His brother, my Uncle Nathan drove him to a couple of lots before he found the right one. And the big pain was that he'd lost his briefcase and a filebox of papers he had in the trunk — papers relating to cases he was then handling in his job for the Internal Revenue Service. All of that had to be reconstructed and replaced.
Around a month later, my father announced that he'd finally, after much struggle, re-created all the paperwork he'd lost. The next day, the police called to say they'd found the car…and all that paperwork.
The vehicle had turned up in Orange County in the yard of a company that bought old, undriveable cars for scrap. You towed one in with a pink slip. They gave you cash for it, no questions asked.
The Oldsmobile had been stripped and its seller did not have a set of keys for it. For some reason, that did not make the fellow at the automotive junk yard suspicious. What did was that the trunk had not been opened. The thieves either hadn't been able to get into it or hadn't bothered.
Someone at the yard pried it open, found all those I.R.S. papers inside and then either called the police who called the I.R.S. or called the I.R.S. who called the police. Detectives did their usual detecting and determined, of course, that the pink slip that had transferred ownership was a total forgery. What's more, they knew who had done it.
There was a crime boss in Orange County…and if I ever knew his name, I've forgotten it. Let's call him Hal Capone. He had a very lucrative, very crooked operation. Kids would steal cars. They'd take them to one of Mr. Capone's many lieutenants who would fork over quick cash for them. Then the car would disappear into some network that would strip it and sell the strippings here, and the carcass of the automobile there. The cops had had a fair amount of success in busting those lieutenants but they hadn't been able to connect it all to Hal Capone. They knew he ran everything but couldn't prove it in a court of law.
Several detectives came to our house and told my father: "We were able to track the phony pink slip to the guy who bought the car from the kids who stole it out of your driveway. He's new at this and we're not all that interested in him. We want to bust Capone." The lieutenant who'd bought and sold the Olds was willing to plea-bargain. In exchange for probation and no jail time, he was willing to turn State's Evidence against Hal Capone. That would surely make it possible to get a conviction against Capone but not much of one. Capone had no criminal record but did have the funds necessary to hire the best attorneys in the state.
A detective who I recall looking exactly like Norman Fell said, "He'll get six months in jail, tops. He might just get probation. This is a guy who has probably been responsible for the theft of thousands of cars in Southern California in the last ten or fifteen years and that's all he'll get." Then he leaned in closer to my father and said with a serious, dramatic tone, "With your cooperation, we think we can put Capone away for a long time. But it does mean you'll have to testify."
My father was not the bravest man in the world but he instantly said, "Yes, absolutely. Whatever I can do to help."
Hal Capone was arrested and charged with one count of receiving stolen property…or something like that. He scrambled expensive attorneys, they dickered with the prosecutors and a deal was struck. Capone would plead guilty and would serve two or three months in the most comfortable prison in Southern California. In exchange, the state would agree they would not prosecute him any further on this or any related matter.
The day his plea was entered before a judge and he was sentenced, my father went to the courtroom. This, he had to see. I wanted to go with him but I had a final exam at U.C.L.A. that afternoon.
In court, Capone stood and affirmed his guilty plea to the judge. He was sentenced to the two or three months and told that he could go but would have to report within sixty days to begin serving his sentence. As he walked out of the courtroom, Hal probably thought to himself what a crafty, shrewd operator he was. He'd made millions with a huge car theft ring and this was all the law could do to him: Toss him in a luxury hotel with bars on some windows for two or three months. "He had to be feeling pretty cocky," my father told me as he described what he saw that day.
Then a man in a dark suit walked up to Mr. Hal Capone, identified himself as a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and placed him under arrest for stealing government documents.
What government documents? Why, the ones in the trunk of my father's car, of course.
Capone had never seen those documents. I don't think he'd even seen the car…but the documents had been stolen along with the rest of the Oldsmobile. And he couldn't very well deny he was a part of its theft and sale, having just pled guilty to that. The state had agreed there'd be no further prosecution of him on this matter but the Feds hadn't agreed to anything of the sort.
I'm a bit fuzzy on some of the details because very little of this ever made the news and all I know from here on is what my father told me and he was fuzzy on some of the details. But the way he described it, they charged the Godfather of Car Theft with crimes that could result in a long, long stay in a small, small room. High-priced lawyers were again scrambled, pleas were bargained and the end result was the dissolution of the entire operation, charges against many involved in it…and Hal Capone did a lot more than two or three months in prison. We later heard it was more like ten years, though he managed parole a few years shy of that. My father did not have to testify but the fact that he was willing and ready was apparently vital to any of this happening.
I told this tale to some lawyers a few years ago and they said, "There must be more to the story than that" because a few parts of it didn't make sense to them. That may well be and you needn't write to tell me that. I'm sure there was more to it than what I've reported here. The important part to me though was that my father was very, very proud of the role he'd played in bringing a very, very bad man to justice. And he really enjoyed describing the look on Hal Capone's face when he was arrested in the courthouse lobby and he suddenly realized that it wasn't over; that of all the stolen cars he'd trafficked in, it was the car of Bernie Evanier that had truly made a Federal Case out of things.