Final Confession by Bill Crowley Dennis Lehane Gilbert Geis Brian P. Wallace

checks,” Detective Halliday responded. The room erupted in laughter.
    Phil Cresta, back at the Fenway Motor Inn, saw nothing even remotely funny about this news.
    Once they had transferred the sixty-four bags that they’d believed contained money, the team left the stolen blue car and jumped into the car that Angelo had driven to a predetermined transfer location. They were giddy with excitement as they drove down Columbia Road and then headed for the Fenway Motor Inn. Phil had never seen so many moneybags in one truck, and he was trying to gauge how much money they had stolen. “Cushman was right on the money, it looks like,” Tony said. “Angelo was very quiet on the ride back to the Fenway,” Phil recalled. “I knew something was bothering him, but I was too caught up in the moment to focus on his problems.”
    They rolled into the parking lot at the motor inn a little after eight o’clock. “We backed the car up to my room and took onebag out of the trunk. They emptied the contents of the bag onto the lone bed in the room and their hearts dropped. “Get another one,” Phil barked to Tony. Same thing: canceled checks, no money. By the time they had emptied a dozen moneybags on the bed, it was clear that there would be no big payday, at least not that day. Phil was livid. Tony was babbling. Angelo said, “I knew it. There’s no way they were gonna let one man guard fifty mil, no way. We should kill that fucking mick Cushman.”
    At noon they turned on the television to catch the news. The cops and the reporters were laughing at them. Phil could hardly bear it. “Nobody knows about this ever, do you hear me?” he screamed. Phil looked at Tony and said, “If Tilley finds out about this, we might as well get out of town. Do you understand, Tony?” Tony shrugged and never looked up.
    â€œWhat about Cushman? What do we do about him?” Angelo asked. “Not a thing,” Phil said. “You don’t think Cushman will want to take any credit for the stupidest robbery in history, do you? In this business if you got no muscle, you better have good sources. Cushman will be through in this town if word gets out he put this fiasco together,” Phil said.
    It got even more embarrassing. The
Boston Evening Globe
’s front-page story on August 21 read, “Downtown Boston this morning had history’s greatest armored car theft … of canceled checks.” The story went on to say, “The robbery, which took one hour in broad daylight, netted the bandits between $25–$50 million in canceled checks.” The
Boston Herald Traveler
was much nastier. Its front-page story read, “A pair of bandits, who must have spent their early years transmuting gold into lead, bungled yesterday as they tried to pull off what could have been history’s largest armored car theft. … The only trouble was that the checks were cancelled and scarcely worth the price of an admission to
The Lavender Hill Mob
. … The bandits may be feeling frustrated right now, but so do the bookkeepers, who will probably have to put in a good deal of overtime in the next few days straightening out the records. One last note … The
Herald
can’t confirm it, but there are those who claim that the bandits’convertible was an Edsel, a discontinued model, easily traceable. With their luck, it figures.”
    â€œIf I’d had Cushman in front of me then, I probably would’ve whacked him,” Phil recalled. “I knew Angelo was out looking for him, even though I asked him to let it go.” Tony and Angelo took all the bank bags to the incinerator near City Hospital and burned them. “We went from the penthouse to the outhouse in a matter of minutes,” Phil said. “It sure was humiliating. I’m just glad nobody knew who pulled the job.”
    Cushman disappeared for a couple of months until things died down. Phil told