The Burglary (16 page)

Davidon remembers feeling calmness mixed with both fear and the pumping drive of adrenaline as the burglars gathered in the motel room. Others described the atmosphere similarly—a combination of controlled excitement and fear. All agree that everyone was sober and serious. After weeks of planning together, they had confidence in one another. Each of them was aware that he or she held the future of everyone in the group in their hands. A mistake made by one could be disastrous to all. Bonds of trust seemed to be strong. Despite the pressure, no one in the group remembers hearing any expressions of concern from anyone about any other member's behavior that night, or, for that matter, at any time while they worked together.

They had no idea that night what, if anything, the person who had abandoned the group just a few days earlier, would do—or, for all they knew, already had done—with the comprehensive and potentially devastating information he possessed. The burglars moved into the first stage of the burglary as though no one except the eight of them knew anything about their plans.

Sometime between 7:30 and 8 p.m., Forsyth and John Raines got ready to leave the motel room—Forsyth to drive to Media to break into the FBI office, John to drive to a parking lot at Swarthmore College, where he would wait for Bonnie to arrive after the burglary along with suitcases to be transferred from Smith's car to the Raineses' station wagon. Words of reassurance were exchanged. There was a strong but quiet shared recognition among all of them that this moment was what they had been preparing for.

The burglary was beginning now.

IN NEW YORK,
where prefight events were warming up, the scene was wild. The city was snowbound, but that didn't prevent thousands of people
who could not get tickets to the Ali-Frazier fight from ringing the outside perimeter of Madison Square Garden. So great was the anticipation that thousands of people were arriving early—inside and outside the arena. About the time Forsyth and John Raines left the motel, a parade of celebrities was arriving at the Garden. So many were in the audience that when it was time to invite them into the boxing ring to be introduced, a common practice at boxing matches at the Garden, ring announcer
Johnny Addie said he would not introduce the celebrities tonight because
everybody
was there.

That seemed to be true. A star-studded audience the likes of which had never been seen before at the Garden was there to watch these two undefeated heavyweight champions, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, face off—Gene Kelly, Woody Allen, Ed Sullivan, Joey Bishop, Peter Falk, Robert Goulet, Carol Lawrence, Dick Cavett, Lorne Greene, Diana Ross, Michael Caine, Bill Cosby, James Taylor, David Frost, Diahann Carroll, Barbra Streisand, Buddy Rich, Andy Williams, former vice president Hubert Humphrey—who couldn't get a ringside seat and was in the balcony—Senator Edward Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, Senator John Tunney—son of heavyweight champion Gene Tunney—Joe Namath, Sargent Shriver, and New York City mayor John Lindsay. Some new heroes were there—the three Apollo 14 astronauts who had returned from the moon just a month earlier—Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa, and Edgar Mitchell. Shepard had charmed residents of planet earth less than a month earlier when he hit two golf balls on the surface of the moon. Now back on earth, these space heroes came to see the fight that preoccupied millions on planet earth the night of March 8.

The 20,455 seats in the Garden were sold out within hours when they went on sale. An overflow venue was set up for 6,000 people, including Bing Crosby, twenty blocks north of the Garden at Radio City Music Hall. The fight was broadcast live there on a large screen with commentary provided from the stage by actor Burt Lancaster, sports announcer Don Dunphy, and retired boxer Archie Moore.

At the Garden, Norman Mailer sat near the ring. He wrote
Life
magazine's main article on the fight. Ringside tickets were sold out by the time Frank Sinatra tried to buy one. Desperate, he asked the
Life
editors to give him one of the magazine's highly coveted press tickets. They struck a deal: He could have a pass if he shot photographs for them. Not many days before the fight, Sinatra had appeared in the office of the Garden's staff photographer, George Kalinsky, and said, “I hear you're the greatest photographer. I want you to teach me all you know about photography in five minutes.”
Over a three-hour lunch, Kalinksy taught him some basics and advised him to “make sure you feel the atmosphere.” Sinatra was at ringside early the night of the fight, ready with a wide-angle lens on his camera. The credits on the cover of
Life
the next week were unmatched, before or since: Norman Mailer and Frank Sinatra.

Fashions in the Garden that night matched the exciting mood. Diana Ross wore black velvet hot pants. Hugh Hefner's companion, Barbi Benton, wore black silk hot pants, a see-through chiffon blouse, and a monkey-fur coat. Someone wore a wolf coat with a matching hat that was rimmed with wolf tails. As
Michael Arkush, writer of a 2007 book about the fight, wrote, “By comparison, Colonel Harland Sanders, of Kentucky Fried Chicken, was almost drab in his traditional white suit.”

“I don't think there's ever been a night like it,”
John Condon, director of publicity at Madison Square Garden at the time, recalled years later. Everyone was standing or sitting on the edge of their seats from the time they arrived and throughout the fight. They screamed, they yelled, they gasped.

That was exactly what the Media burglars hoped for: an event so engrossing, a crowd so loud and excited that the steady static from the fight would help them go about their work inside the FBI office without being noticed. They hoped fans—especially fight fans in Media, including police and FBI agents—would be glued to their radios and televisions. They didn't know it, but that was happening all over the world. As the first stage of the burglary was taking place, in Buenos Aires the streets were deserted because so many people were watching the prefight events on television at home and in bars. In Europe and Africa, where it was several hours later, people were getting ready to waken their children so they could watch this historic fight. Fifty foreign governments, including that of Romania, purchased rights to broadcast the fight free to the general public in all of those countries. Translations were provided in twelve languages from ringside for the more than 300 million people who watched the fight around the world—still the largest number of people to watch a single sporting event as it took place.

In the rice fields of South Vietnam, American troops gathered around radios, getting ready to listen to this fight between Ali, who refused to serve in Vietnam, and Frazier, who supported the war but who also had not served in the military. The promoters of the fight, who controlled all broadcast access to it, tried at first to extract a heavy price from the Pentagon for the right to broadcast it to troops. After a furious reaction from the Pentagon, the promoters relented and provided free radio access to the approximately
326,200 Americans then stationed in South Vietnam and on some U.S. Navy ships at sea. As the
New York Times
noted at the time, the Pentagon was particularly eager to broadcast the fight because it was having “global difficulties with respect to racial tensions” in the military.

Remarkably, the televised fight was blacked out where the largest number of people wanted to see it—in the United States. The promoters,
Jack Kent Cooke and
Jerry Perenchio, had sold governments in those fifty countries the rights to broadcast the fight live, but to maximize their profits, the promoters prevented television networks in the United States from broadcasting either the fight or descriptions of it live as it happened on either television or radio. It was viewed live in the United States only by people who purchased tickets to watch the closed-circuit broadcasts shown by the promoters at three hundred theaters in various parts of the country. Those venues accommodated only a tiny fraction of the millions of Americans who wanted to see the fight.

The promoters even went to court the day before the fight in an attempt to end the agreement that gave Mutual Broadcasting System access to broadcast summaries after each round. The promoters failed in that effort. Because the fight was blacked out in the United States, many millions of Americans prepared early that evening to huddle around their radios and televisions to listen and watch announcers give brief summaries of the fight between rounds. They listened to commentary and color stories about the scene inside and outside Madison Square Garden. It was a less than satisfying way to watch the fight, especially in light of the live access in much of the rest of the world. But Americans were so passionate about the Ali-Frazier fight that they were eager to tune in to it whatever way it was available. Even with windows closed against the cold in much of the country, streets were filled that night with the sounds of sports announcers breathlessly talking about the fight.

IN MEDIA, 114
miles south of New York City, the contrast with the wild scene in New York—what the burglars hoped would be their decoy—could not have been greater. The initial steps of the burglary were sounds of silence. John Raines arrived at the dark parking lot at Swarthmore College. He continued to feel terrible. Afraid they would all be arrested that night, he tried to convince himself that because the burglary was very well organized, it should unfold smoothly and swiftly. It should, he told himself, all be over
soon. It should take only a few seconds for Forsyth to break in. The burglary itself probably would take less than an hour. In less than two hours, Bonnie should show up, along with a portion of the files removed from the FBI office. He repeatedly convinced himself to be patient.

Forsyth arrived in Media in just a few minutes and parked a short distance from the building where the FBI office was located. This was a big moment for him. He had been preparing for it with a great deal of dedication and intense work from the time the burglars first met in December. He still felt sure he would pick that lock and be inside the office in thirty seconds flat, his best speed during lock-picking practice.

As he left the car, he carried a briefcase. In it were his homemade lock-picking tools. The smaller tools were in a pencil case tucked in a small inside pocket of his coat. His larger tools were covered by a few layers of paper so the paper, not the tools, would be seen first if the briefcase was opened in front of anyone. He had been meticulous in his preparations. Each of the metal lock-picking tools he had made was wrapped in foam rubber so they wouldn't clank against each other as he walked. The briefcase looked appropriate for someone wearing a Brooks Brothers suit. “That was so important,” he says. “You can do anything you want in the United States if you wear a suit and tie … especially if you are white. That also helps.” And the briefcase added, of course, to his all-American busy-businessman-coming-home-late-from-the-office look.
He wore leather gloves appropriate for a businessman. Underneath them, he wore tight-fitting rubber gloves. The leather gloves would hamper his dexterity, so essential to his task tonight, so he planned to remove them and put them in his coat pockets and wear only the rubber gloves so he could pick the lock with the dexterity of a surgeon.

The Media FBI office was located on the second floor, near corner, of the County Court Apartments Building, across the street from the Delaware County Courthouse.
(Photo by Betty Medsger)

Acting as though he lived in the building, Forsyth opened the always unlocked front door, walked upstairs to the second floor, and went directly to the FBI office door. He felt slightly nervous but very confident.

His confidence quickly evaporated.

He could not pick the lock in thirty seconds. He could not pick the lock at all.

As he faced the object of his many rounds of picking practice, Forsyth was startled. There were two locks, not one, on the main entrance of the FBI office. One was the simple five-pin tumbler lock that he remembered seeing and was prepared to pick, the same one Bonnie Raines remembered. But now there was a second lock, a much more complex one—a high-security lock that was extremely difficult to pick. Forsyth's homemade tools were useless on this lock.

“I freaked out. First of all, I can't get in. Second of all, what does this mean? What's the probability of this lock appearing by purely random chance just at the moment when I'm about to break through the door? It's astronomically small. I was worried about the noise, because the caretaker of the building lived right underneath the FBI office.

“So I'm standing over the guy's ceiling. I'm thinking, ‘Wait a minute. They put this other lock on there. What does that mean? They know? How the hell do they know? We've been pretty goddamn careful. We haven't said anything over the phone. We don't even talk in the same room where there's a phone because there are ways to listen to people's conversations even when the phone is hung up. We've been really careful. I felt really sure about all of these individuals. There are no informers in the group. What the hell is going on?' ” He doesn't remember wondering then if the man who abandoned the group the previous week, might have alerted the FBI to the burglary. Forsyth thought there was a possibility that he had been so nervous both times he walked by the FBI office door, including just the previous week, that he didn't see the second lock. Could that be? He could not answer the question. He could not believe that he and Bonnie Raines both would have imagined there was only one lock. Finally, as he stood outside the door, he did not trust his memory.