The Dinner Set Gang

I hear they just brought back Alan Golder – the guy they were calling the Dinnertime Bandit. Guess where they got that name from. Let me tell you how he found out about me & Don when he was a kid, and was sent out to copy us. Don told some of this to the newspapers last year when Golder was caught.

When we were the biggest in the early 70′s, everybody wanted a piece, and Figgy, one of the mob guys we knew through the family, was always puttin’ pressure. So every once in a while instead of our regular fences, we’d give his guys – Alex, a Russian who survived the concentration camps, and his son – a little something. The last package we gave Alex was in ’75, from an actress who was giving a party in Greenwich. Just before me and Don split up for a while.

So Figgy and Alex need somebody else, so they tell this kid Golder in ’76 – I hear he was like 21 – that he had to copy us, that’s how we made the money. I hear this later from the FBI, who wanted to prove a RICO case against Figgy and Alex. They did it to – Figgy and Alex both took a plea later and got 10 years each.

Golder made the mistake of bringin’ guys with guns to that house on Long Island in ’78, and the owner gets killed. They told me Golder took a 6-carat ring right off the wife’s finger – that’s when the husband went and got a shotgun and they shot him instead. Golder brought other guys in the house with him, which you can’t ever do – you have to make sure you always know where everybody is. Yeah, you can’t ever allow weapons, never confront people. Rather walk away with nothin’ than hurt anybody.

Even in our last thing in ’92, the minute we knew the woman heard something, we left. She never saw us, I didn’t take a thing. That’s the way it had to be.

“I’m not a burglar,” I’d tell the cops who’d come to me, and they’d look at me like I’m crazy. “I’m one of the only international cat burglars alive today.” Then there’s these copycat burglars. Even while I’m locked up, I hear there’s articles in the paper in Palm Beach about thieves taking jewelry who remind the cops of The Dinner Set Gang – me and Don. But they’re nothin’ like us. All these copycats never were – they weren’t patient, go to empty houses, or jerks brought guns if people were there. They didn’t know how to do it – have the skill or guts to do it right. There’s one big reason for that – I never taught nobody, other than Don. Don and I kept it in the family – safer that way.

For years after we were done, local cops would come to us whenever there was a burglary and say “we think it was you guys.” I would ask ‘em, “was it a giant mansion that was hit?” They say no. I ask, “was over a million dollars taken?” They say no. So I tell ‘em, “When it is, then you come talk to me. ‘Cause it wasn’t us.” I’d tell ‘em they were dealing with amateurs, bumbling idiots.

The FBI’s been tracking us for more than 26 years. One of our main FBI guys, from the time we disappeared for a while, would tell the local cops, “We took them out of circulation. If I let them loose, there wouldn’t be a diamond left in Palm Beach.”

We did come back when we had to. And there were guys from in the family and outside who heard stories, thought they could copy us. Forget it. Copycats, amateurs. Interesting the cops still compare people to us, but if we ever came back, they’d know it… maybe they wouldn’t.