Chameleon

By Murray Schuster

Murray Schuster—alias M. Robert Shuster, Bob Shuster, Bob Richman, and Bob Meyers—was a juvenile delinquent and was incarcerated in several prisons before he was thirty years old. He was apprehended in the armed robbery of a large department store in the Bronx, New York, and belonged to a crew that had the keys to the parking meters in New York City. After changing his life entirely, he became head of security for a major hotel and country club in Upstate New York and was assigned to a detail to protect Robert F. Kennedy. He became president of the Chamber of Commerce in a city in Upstate New York, a member of the Rotary Club, and the president of the Lions Club and dabbled in some politics. He founded a large art and antique auction company, sold an option to Mattel toy company for an invention, and spent a year and a half gold mining on the Klamath River in Northern California. In this novel, you will find his story, as well as an exposé of a credit scam and what goes on in the antique, art, and auction businesses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647017804

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Chameleon

Murray Schuster

Copyright © 2020 Murray Schuster

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-64701-777-4 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-64701-780-4 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Incarceration

Heist

Collecting for the Mob

Schuster Chemical Corporation

Hey Paisano

The Parking Meter Rip-Off

The Credit Card Scam

Early Days

Tiffany & Co.

Kutsher’s Country Club

M. Robert Schuster, Auctioneer and Appraiser

The Antique and Auction Business

The Picasso

Ideal ImportsLongman China

Hookers

Fraudulent Antique Retailers

In memoriam

Gerrold Schuster

July 7, 1943–September 25, 2018

Chameleons can change colors depending on a change of mood or environment, changing their opinions or behaviors according to the situation.

What’s done cannot be undone.

—Macbeth (1606)

Shakespeare

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my daughter, Rhonda, for her encouragement and persistence to make me complete this book.

I would like to thank my good friends Carolyn Concolino and Maria Pappas Lambert for contributing their time when they were available.

SPECIAL THANKS to Jo Anne Grant, John Paul, Andrew Concolino, Deeahna Arrieta, Mark Arrieta, Katy Arrieta, Monica Neary, Buddy Winston.

Chapter 1

Incarceration

It was spring of 1957. I was standing on line in the yard at Sing Sing State Prison in Ossining, New York. As I turned to the right, looking through the fence down the Hudson river, they were constructing the Tappan Zee Bridge. When I looked ahead, I saw a redbrick building, and that was the death house that held the electric chair. And the drainpipe was there, water used to leak out when they filled the building up with ice. As soon as we saw water coming out of that drainpipe, we knew the ice was melting. We knew that someone was going to be electrocuted. After the count, they took us up to our cells. Being in prison for the first time was a horrendous experience for me. It was as if time stopped. For a guy who rebelled against authority, it was a disaster. But having a little common sense, I realized I didn’t have many options, so I adapted.

When I was transferred to Wallkill State Prison, I completed the course and obtained my high school equivalency diploma. I also took a correspondence course in salesmanship. After completion, I proceeded to teach classes to the inmates. After twenty months, I was allowed to apply for parole. I went before the board and was turned down. It was hard to explain the feeling one had when having been incarcerated for some time and expectations of release was on the horizon, and then you would get slammed down for another ten months of prison time. I felt at that time that if you had to do one day in prison, nothing you would do on the outside was worth taking the risk of losing your freedom. But after you’re out, it reminds me of a joke someone told me about a sailor whose ship sunk and he was drowning. He said, God, if you save me, I will go to church every single day. I promise. And as the current took him closer to the shore, he said, God, I promise I will attend church at least twice a week. And when he was right near the shore, he said, Thank you, God. I will keep my promise, and I will go to church at least once a year!

The course in sales really helped me later in life. I loved it because it was challenging. I learned that people buy for five reasons other than necessity. You can remember them by PACES—pride, affection, comfort, economy, and security. You can’t really sell if you don’t understand what motivates a person to buy and have a sale finally take place. A sale takes place only when the item you’re selling has more value at a precise moment than the buyer has to part with.

When I was still a teenager, the guys used to go up to Lake Hopatcong in New Jersey. There was a large hotel up there, and it was well-known to have a lot of action, a large band, and a lot of girls. We used to drive up every two weekends. One time, I picked up a Wall Street Journal. I would be sitting in the lobby, reading. I had one of my friends pick up the phone and page Dr. Robert Richmond. That was one of the names I used at the time. I would slowly get up and walk across the lobby and slowly fold my paper and answer the page. After that, I had it made for the rest of the weekend. All the girls thought what a young-looking doctor I was. When they asked me what I specialized in, I was very tempted to say gynecology, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Then one of my friends picked up the phone and asked to page Mike Hunt. When it came over the loudspeaker, it sounded like Mike Unt, and all the guys cracked up. We were nuts in those days.

There were loads of women in my life—too many to talk about here. I am not exaggerating. It would take a lot more pages. As to my four marriages, they were all lovely women. I guess, deep down, I always wanted a homelife like everyone else. Having a job, I couldn’t make it, plus the fact that some guys were addicted to drugs and some to alcohol. Me? I loved women. I thought they were wonderful. It was like being locked up in a candy store with all kinds of goodies, and you just couldn’t resist. That was why I always got caught fooling around, and that ended in divorce, except with Lynn. Lynn was special. We were together for about thirty years. It was not that we never had any arguments, but we always worked them out. Maybe we were together for so long because we never got married, and one of us could walk out the door at any time.

Let me go back to the beginning. I lived in the South Bronx on Fulton Avenue right near Crotona Park. Crotona Park was on the east side of my building. The building was 1485 as I remember it, Fulton Avenue. On the right was the park, and to the left was the YMHA. It was a large building. It was the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. It was similar to the YMCA. It was a recreational building that had pool tables. They used to run dances, and there was a large gymnasium on the top floor. That was where I met Stan Mendelson. Stan’s father was a middleweight boxer years ago, and his uncle also was a known professional boxer. His father, Jack, was training him to enter the Golden Gloves competition that year. Jack sort of took me under his wing. I started training with Stan up at the gym. He was teaching me how to box. After a while, we had eight or nine different youngsters there who were interested in boxing. Jack had a friend who owned the Sealy mattress company, a big company in New York. Jack talked him into backing us, and we formed a club, which we called the Sealy AC—the Sealy Athletic Club. We were running a lot of charity boxing matches with other local community centers. One charity was the Damon Runyon Cancer Foundation. Jake LaMotta and Rocky Graziano used to referee some of the boxing matches.

At that time, I was a young kid hanging out with a rough crowd. I was half a juvenile delinquent. At least, the boxing kept me off the streets for a while. I was attending Taft High School, and we used to hang out at a place called the Taft Sugar Bowl, which was on the corner across from the high school. I remember that the old man who owned the place used to say, Shuster, you are going to die in jail. I guess I was a pretty crazy kid, and for a while, I thought that myself. Anyway, at that time, there were a lot of gangs. There were the Guinea Dukes on 154th Street and Morris Avenue; there were the Fordham Baldies, the Irish Dukes, and the Little Italy Mob down in Manhattan. There were clubs down in Brooklyn, and we used to go to dances—open-air dances in Poe Park on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and also Prospect Park in Brooklyn. We used to go to a lot of high school dances. Of course, everyone was dressed up, and we were looking to find girls. Fights started at some of the dances because everybody wanted to be a tough guy…the early days.

Unfortunately, by the time I was thirty years old, I was in quite a few jails. I was getting into