Inside the Vault

By Amil Dinsio

Millions of dollars sat in a small, non-descript bank perched on a hill in the quiet town of Laguna Niguel in Orange County. But deep within its vaults was a secret: millions of dollars in illegally obtained funds belonging to none other than President Richard Nixon. Those stolen funds would not remain Nixon's for long. Over the weekend of March 24

• Language: English
• Publisher: I Love You, Brother, LLC
• Release date: Feb 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781939758057

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Forty years later, I’m giving you the real story. I’m giving you the story of the greatest bank burglary in American history. I’m giving you this story because it is MY story to give.

Books have been written and television documentaries have been made about the burglary of President Richard Nixon’s money that netted over twelve million dollars, but none of those accounts are accurate.

They are inaccurate because no one knows the real story, the whole story; no one, that is, except for me.

And now you will know what people have speculated about—and never figured out—for forty years. You will know how I planned the burglary of the United California Bank in Laguna Niguel, California. You will know exactly how my crew and I blasted through the roof of the vault and how we looted the contents of hundreds of safe deposit boxes over the weekend of March 24, 1972.

The FBI refers to me as a master bank burglar—the best in the world, even. I don’t see myself that way, though. I see myself as just an average guy. I see myself as a husband, father, grandfather, son, brother, and friend.

But, in all fairness to the FBI, I have pulled off over a hundred successful bank burglaries, so I guess I am a master at my chosen craft.

I am a criminal. I’m not necessarily proud of that fact, but I am what I am and there’s no denying it.

However, my crew and I weren’t the only crooks involved in this burglary and its aftermath. You see, the government wasn’t smart enough to catch me honestly. They had to lie, steal, and plant evidence to convict me.

The federal agents, prosecutors, and judges are criminals far bigger than I, because they were sworn to uphold the law and defend the Constitution of the United States. I admit what I am, but they have never admitted to being criminals.

I have changed some names in this book to protect the innocent. However, I have identified all federal agents, prosecutors, and judges accurately.

After all, the criminals should have to face the music—all of us, including the criminals who carry badges and wear black robes.

CHAPTER ONE

How It All Began

"Nobody move and nobody gets hurt!"

I can still remember yelling those words as my brother James and I ran, guns drawn, through the back door of that very first bank so many years ago in Wheeling, West Virginia. My brother gathered together seven of the eight people in the bank, and I told the eighth one, a teller, to give me all the money in the drawers. She easily complied, and less than two minutes later, we ran back out the same back door more than twenty-two thousand dollars richer.

I was only sixteen years old.

I was born in Goshen, Ohio, in 1936, and I was the seventh of my parents’ eight children. My father immigrated to America from Italy when he was just seventeen years old, coming through Ellis Island in New York with only twelve dollars in his pocket. When my father came to America, he was accompanied by a Sicilian friend named Jimmy Prato. Jimmy later became a mob boss, and went by the name of Two Gun Jimmy. I knew him very well, and was close to his nephew, Lenny Strollo. Lenny was just an underboss, doing whatever Two Gun Jimmy told him to do. My father always told my brother and me to stay away from Two Gun Jimmy, and never to do anything illegal for him or the mob. My father told us that the mob just uses people to do their dirty work.

Growing up, we were poor—as poor as poor can get. We lived on a small 90-acre farm in Goshen Township, Ohio. Our home was tiny. The kitchen was only about twenty-five by twenty-five feet, with a big table in the middle. The house had two bedrooms. One was about the size of the kitchen, and at one time or another, all eight of us kids slept in that one bedroom. My mother and father slept in the other small bedroom. The house had no running water or electricity. Our water came from a hand pump that pumped water up from a well to the sink in the kitchen. My mother cooked on a coal stove, and that same coal stove heated our home in the wintertime. Our house was lit using kerosene lamps. In one small room, we had a big radio hooked up to a car battery.

Although we were very poor, one thing we always had was food. We had a good-sized barn on the farm with milking cows, pigs, goats, chickens, ducks, etc. My father did the butchering, and the meat was stored in a freezer house rental room in Salem, Ohio. He would smoke the pork, bacon and hams in a smoke house down by the barn. We had a big garden, and my mother canned bottle after bottle of garden crops, with help from us kids. We had a large peach orchard as well, and my mother canned peaches too. In the basement under the house, we stored bins of apples, along with cider barrels and my father’s elderberry wine.

The farm could not support the family, so both my parents had to work. While we lived on the farm, my father worked as a machinist at Morgan’s Engineering in Alliance, Ohio, about fifteen miles from the farm. During World War II, my mother worked at the Mullin’s Manufacturing in Salem, Ohio, making bathtubs and sinks.

I did well enough in school to get the grades necessary to play football and basketball. I was pretty good, too. To this day, my daughters kid me about the cheerleaders yelling hubba-hubba, bing, bing, baby, you got everything, as I ran up and down the basketball court. Even now, I can still put a ball through a hoop better than most of my peers.

Up until the sixth grade, I went to a one-room school called Meadowbrook.

Then, in 1946, my dad sold the farm, and we moved to North Lima, Ohio—about six miles from Youngstown. There, my father built a small restaurant. My mother was the cook, and she was great at making tasty food.

In a back room of the restaurant, Two Gun Jimmy put in one-armed bandits—a.k.a. slot machines. Along with the one-armed bandits, my father set up poker tables in that back room. You see, back in the late 1940s and early ’50s, the mob had the county sheriff, Sheriff Elser, on their side. My father was really good friends with Sheriff Elser, and the sheriff let the gambling go on. Almost every night, in that back room, big poker games were played. It was right up my alley. The guys called me Shorty and always had me running and getting them food and sodas while they played. They’d give me nickels and dimes in return, which I would then take right over to the one-armed bandits, pulling down the handle and losing my money. I was just a foolish kid. I loved it.

The restaurant had good business from the truckers who hauled cement and coal out of Bessemer, Pennsylvania. The road took them right past the restaurant, and they’d stop and eat my mother’s delicious cooking. Then, the Ohio Water Service built a lake, and it shut off the road coming from Pennsylvania. That killed our business, and my family had to close the restaurant.

Whether at the restaurant, on the farm, or in school, my brothers and I were always the cool guys. If there was any ass-kicking to be done, the older Dinsio brothers could handle it, and as I got older, I could too. There was always an older Dinsio brother to take care of the younger, and the guys knew that.

My family was close, and we were always proud of each other’s accomplishments. During the Second World War, two of my brothers, Vince and William, joined the Navy. I remember my mother hanging two small American flags in the window of the house to show that our home had men serving their country.

I love all my siblings, and the FBI has said that the Dinsios are a fiercely loyal clan, but I was always closest to my brother James, who was seven years older than I. James was a good man, and always took care of my sisters and me. James and I weren’t just brothers; our relationship was more unique than that. James was the closest person to me throughout my life. We thought alike; we worked well with each other; and we always defended and protected each other. Everyone knew that if they incurred the wrath of one of us, they incurred the wrath of both of us. It also was widely known that a situation like that never ended well for our enemy. Most importantly, James and I knew without a doubt, without a second’s hesitation, each of us would take—or shoot—a bullet to protect the other one.

In 1951, James bought a 1950 Packard that he liked to drive to Steubenville, Ohio, and he often took me with him. When we would go to Steubenville, we would also stop to see the mob boss’s son, Rab, whom my brother knew. Rab ran the Venetian Gardens, which was where the real mob guys hung out. On a couple of occasions, I even saw Dean Martin there—after all, he was good friends with Rab, and Steubenville was Dean’s hometown.

Sometimes, we would go with Rab and a couple of his friends over the bridge into Wheeling, West Virginia. From there, we would head out into the country, to an old barn where they held rooster fights. Sometimes my brother would bet on a rooster to win. When the rooster lost, it was taken to a block of wood, where it would get its head cut off, blood flying everywhere. I really didn’t like to see that happen, and neither did my brother; but he still liked to bet on the roosters.

After we left the rooster fights, we would stop in Wheeling, at a small hole-in-the-wall that sold real good hot sausage sandwiches and pizza. We would park the car right on the street, or alongside a small bank building. After a few nights looking at that bank, we started wondering whether we might be able to rob it. We figured, with all the steel workers in Wheeling cashing checks, we’d get a lot of money.

We walked around to the back of the bank to check it out. Behind the bank was a lot where the bank employees parked their cars. James checked the back door, and no lie—you could take a pen knife and slide the locking bolt back into the door frame and open the door. So one night, we went into the bank. We looked around, and then came back out. After that, we spent several nights lying out behind the back of the bank. As far as I can remember, not once did we see a cop pass behind the bank. So in the fall of that year, when it got dark early, I think either a Thursday or a Friday night, we came back.

We drove a stolen car. Stealing cars was actually pretty easy in those days. In the 1950s, if you owned a G.M. automobile and you lost your car keys, you’d call a G.M. dealer, who would come with a ring of about sixty car keys. Each key on the ring had a number stamped on it. The G.M. dealer would sit in your car, trying key after key in the ignition until he found the right key. Then, he would set the key cutting machine to the number from that key. Once we learned about this, we knew all we had to do was steal one of those rings. We could just take ten keys off of that ring and find a car to steal real fast. Sometimes you had to wiggle the key a little, but one of those keys would always work.

We parked the stolen car right in back of the bank. Just after the bank locked its front door, my brother and I came in the back. We were both a little scared, but we both had big balls. After the robbery, we left through the back door and got into our hot car. We drove across the Ohio River Bridge, back into Steubenville, and back to our car, which we had parked at the railroad station across from the Venetian Gardens. We were elated with our success. We went into Venetian’s and dined on spaghetti and meatballs. We couldn’t believe how easy it was to rob a bank. And no one but my brother and I knew that we had done it.

If we knew then what we found out through experience later, we would have robbed that bank in the morning hours after the armored truck dropped off the money for the steel workers’ paychecks. Live and learn—and learn we did.

Robbing banks was our preferred method of generating income for a couple years. That changed one day when I was dropping off my sister for her shift at Isaly’s, a local dairy and restaurant. As I sat in the parking lot of the shopping plaza in Boardman, Ohio, I watched one of the employees inside the bank next to Isaly’s. I was captivated as I watched him pull bag after bag of money out of the bank’s night deposit safe. I knew right then that my brother and I needed to get into bank safes at night to score the really big money.

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