Holding Their Own: A Story of Survival (7 page)

On t
he morning after Senator Bose’s press conference, the police headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio was presented with a group of 21 Hispanic men. They were herded up the station’s front steps by men with rifles who claimed their prisoners were illegals. The riflemen were unemployed union construction workers who took a school bus to a building site in Westlake, forcing the drywall crew onto the bus at gunpoint. The Cleveland police arrested the union men for kidnapping and let the Hispanics go. It wasn’t long before a large crowd gathered in Public Square.

The crowd form
ed when the families of the arrested union members tried to bail them out. The police station overflowed, and tensions began to rise. The families of the union men were forced to wait outside for hours before they could get their loved ones out of the jail. Someone made a sign, and a local news crew showed up in case the situation escalated. The presence of the news crew naturally drew rubberneckers, increasing the size of the crowd even more. A local conservative radio talk show host got word of the gathering and fanned the flames with live updates of the situation, peppered with inflammatory rhetoric. Within hours, unions sent unemployed workers, complete with bullhorns and more signs. The composition of the onlookers was unusual in that the crowd contained both union members and hard line conservatives – groups who were normally at odds. Both sides were outraged that American citizens were arrested on serious charges while the “illegals” had been let go.

By rush hour, the crowd had overflowed Public Square and filled Euclid Avenue past the theater district
to the south and down the hill on Superior Avenue to the north. It merged with the regular crowd flocking to the Warehouse District where dozens of restaurants, bars and clubs were located. By six o’clock, thousands more angry commuters were stranded on roads made impassable by the angry mob. They had few options but to join in. Alcohol from the district, combined with exasperated people, caused tensions to rise even higher.

An
impatient driver was managing a path through the crowd when he finally cursed at the wrong group of men. His car was turned on its side and caught fire. The people in the area were already compressed tightly against each other, and the burning car caused a surge in the masses. A large window of a department store gave way as dozens of people were pressed into it. The frame could not handle the pressure and collapsed inward. Someone reached through the empty window frame, grabbed an Apple computer and ran. Bedlam broke out.

Burning cars was kind of a tradition in Cleveland
. After the assignation of Dr. Martin Luther King, roving mobs torched dozens of vehicles, incinerating entire city blocks and shutting down parts of the city for days. In a desperate attempt to regain control of the area, the National Guard had had to be called in to keep order. For more than a week, Cleveland’s citizens were confined to their homes under a mandatory curfew. Like the rest of the world, they watched in horror at the almost non-stop broadcast of the burning of their beloved town. But while others could just flip the channel and forget about the devastation brewing outside, for the residents of Cleveland it was not so easy. The unmistakable odor of ash permeated their homes. Children who ventured to peek thru the window blinds could see burning vehicles in the street, just yards from their own lawns. In the minds of many citizens, the legacy image of that incident was of torched cars.

As she watched today’s news bulletin, the current mayor of Cleveland was unsettled by an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. As an eight-year-old girl, she had been terrified when the 1968 riots were in progress. She watched the events of the afternoon unfold, and one consistent thought kept running through her mind – “NEVER AGAIN.” When the pictures of a burning car reached the city hall conference room, she turned to the chief of police and said, “Stop this thing. Stop it right now!”

Cleveland was one of the few metropolitan areas that still maintained a mounted police force
. Primarily used for parades and crowd control at sporting events, there were 48 officers trained and equipped to use horses in the line of duty. At the football stadium parking lot, the entire force was marshaling in preparation to enter the fray. The plan was simple; the mounted police would form two lines and enter Public Square from different directions. Behind the 24 horse-wide-wedge would be another 75 officers on foot, many equipped with riot shields. They would push the crowd back, causing them to disperse. Behind the horseflesh battering rams would be officers equipped with tear gas and masks. They would gas the cleared area to keep the crowd from reforming behind the wedge. All over the city, officers were pulled from numerous stations to supplement the small army gathering at the stadium.

A few miles east of downtown Cleveland, Bob Spence sat in his run-down one bedroom apartment watching the news unfold. Spence, as everyone called him, had been a Cuyahoga County deputy sheriff, but had been let go almost a year ago due to budget cuts. After an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps, he had joined the ranks of local law enforcement, thinking this was a good direction for him. When informed that he and dozens of others were being “reduced,” it was a complete shock to both him and his family. He began drinking a lot and started hanging around with the wrong crowd. It had been in a neighborhood bar where he had met a small group of men who referred to themselves as “The Force.” If they had been aware of them, the FBI would have classified The Force as a neo-Nazi Class Three Organization – meaning they talked a big game and sported a lot of ink, but were essentially innocuous. The Force was neither radical enough, nor large enough, to be on the FBI’s radar and was practically unknown to law enforcement.

Spence
’s wife had divorced him some months before. His unemployment benefits had run out, and between strings of part-time jobs, he had started selling drugs in order to eat. His latest swastika tattoo had caused what family he had left to disassociate from him. He was a bitter, angry man who had little hope for the future – with the exception of a single plan. Spence had a scheme to relieve some of the local banks of their excess holdings. He and The Force had been working on it for several weeks, but they could never figure out how to implement it without considerable risk of being caught.

The Force
was the only “family” he had left. Since he had considerable inside knowledge of police procedures, he quickly rose to power as The Force executed numerous petty crimes for pocket cash. He observed the riot unfold, and he realized this was the opportunity they had been waiting for to execute their plan. He knew that the size of the crowd would dictate a concentration of officers in the area. He had participated in numerous emergency drills involving everything from terrorist attacks to the Browns winning the Super Bowl and the subsequent celebration getting out of hand. It was understood that the outlying police stations would be sending reinforcements to help downtown. This would mean a shortage of manpower in the suburbs, providing the necessary reduction of risk in their plan.

This was just the situation
The Force needed to make their plan work. After a few quick phone calls, The Force was assembled in Spence’s apartment. A quick discussion, and all agreed – it was now or never.

Each man went over his specific role in the plan
. Spence’s military training had taught him that simple was always best in any operation. Stress, unforeseen events, and the fog of war would derail a complex plan. Everyone should know his job forwards and backwards. After an hour of reviewing times, locations and responsibilities, the group allocated the necessary equipment to execute the plan, and headed to their jump-off points.

The first step was to acquire a bulldozer
. One member knew where several were parked on semi-trailers at a construction company. Construction was slow because of the depression, so the lot always had several units idle. Having been laid off from the construction business, he knew how to operate both the truck and the dozer. It was also known that the keys to the truck and the bulldozer were carelessly kept above the visor. Within 20 minutes, Spence’s cell phone rang, and the voice on the other end said, “I have a D8 CAT on the way.”

The Shaker Heights suburb of Cleveland remained an upscale address, and many of the streets were still lined with the residences of Cleveland’s old money. These families had worked together over the years to everyone’s mutual benefit and profit. After his “reduction” Spence had been able to land a job here as a part time security guard. He had discovered that a local synagogue had an investment club. These Jewish businessmen determined some time ago that gold was the place to be and had converted a significant sum of money into bullion. Spence’s Security Company had been hired to escort a rather large shipment of lockboxes to a neighborhood bank. He estimated that there were almost 400 pounds of .999 pure gold sitting in those boxes, all stored in the vault of the Shaker Square Branch, 2
nd
National Bank.
Typical Jews
, he thought
, too damn cheap and too damn paranoid to keep their money in a more secure downtown bank.

Even with a reduction in the number of local police,
Spence knew that their chances of being caught robbing a bank were high. The local station would still have at least 10 radio cars in the area. State police and county reserves would be on the way to fill the void left by diverting resources downtown. To increase The Force’s chance of success, he had purchased an eight-pound container of Winchester 748 smokeless gunpowder at a local sporting goods store. Typically used to reload rifle and pistol ammunition, the substance was legal, readily available, and would not draw attention. He then purchased a length of steel pipe at Home Depot and proceeded to construct four rather large pipe bombs. He added in a little gasoline, Vaseline and cannon fuse to create a highly effective bomb. Over a period of a few weeks before the riot, his crew had stolen four common trashcans, the same type as typically used outside of any bank branch.

Each fuse had been carefully measured and timed
. The trashcans were numbered and painted with the name of the bank to which they were to be stationed. One member of The Force owned an old panel van that the group had used for a few previous crimes. It came equipped with a large magnetic sign that referred to the fictitious “North Cleveland Facility and Landscape Maintenance Company.” Members of the team had a uniform shirt, complete with a patch showing the word “Service” printed under their fabricated logo. Fake name badges and pairs of worn work gloves rounded out the disguises. The four bombs, complete with trashcan facades, were loaded into the van.

Two blocks away from the 2
nd
National Bank branch, code named “Fort Knox,” the truck carrying the bulldozer parked in an empty lot. Wearing hard hats, reflective vests and carrying “Caution” flags, the bulldozer crew started the enormous machine and backed it down from its trailer. Spence’s cell phone rang again, and the voice delivered its coded signal, “Ready 5 at Fort Knox.”

The van made its way to one bank branch after another
, spread over almost a square mile of suburban Cleveland. As the crew parked in the lot of each closed branch, they would light the long cannon fuse and place the new can near the front door of the bank. Each man wore a baseball hat low over his eyes and was careful not to look up at surveillance cameras. Spence knew the cameras at the bank branches were not monitored, but were simply recording video tape. He knew the picture quality was low and that if his men were careful, they would not be identifiable, even under close scrutiny. They had also picked four bank branches that all used the same alarm monitoring company as Fort Knox. Their logic was that while one alarm would cause stress in the control room, five alarms would cause complete anarchy.

As each can was
delivered, his cell phone rang, and a report would be made indicating, “Easter egg in place.” The cannon fuse was a very reliable, slow burning method of setting off a bomb. Each trash can bomb was timed to explode in sequence a few minutes after its predecessor. Easter Egg One would explode in one hour, with the rest following in ten-minute intervals. When the last bomb had been planted, Spence looked at his watch and smiled.
Right on time
, he thought. He dialed the bulldozer crew and simply instructed, “Go,” and hung up.

As the dozer left the nearby parking lot, the first bomb exploded
. The trashcan had been placed to the side of the main entrance of the bank, and the blast shattered both sets of doors at the entrance. A fireball ensued that could be seen rising over 100 feet into the air. The alarm was immediately engaged.

At the ABT Security Center five miles away, a yawning operator was half watching one of several computer screens in front of him. He was monitoring the commercial alarm cluster, which was typically boring as compared to the residential center down the hall.
At least down there
, he thought,
a cat sets off a house alarm now and then.
His computer began making an annoying beeping racket, and he clicked the mouse to see which alarm had been tripped. He saw that it was a bank branch and looked at the time on the display. It was clearly after closing time, so he clicked on “Notify Police of Alarm.” The computer connected to the closest known police station in proximity to the alarm and the downtown police headquarters. An automated message was sent to both stations. As per procedure, he picked up the phone to call the station just in case the computer system failed. After talking to the special police operator, he called his supervisor.