The King Of Sting. The Amazing True Story of a Modern American Outlaw

241 Pages·2011·5.13 MB·English

by  Craig Glazer

The King Of Sting
The Amazing True Story of a Modern American Outlaw
Craig Glazer
Sal Manna
Copyright © 2008 by Craig Norton Glazer and Salvatore John Manna
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Glazer, Craig.
The king of sting : the amazing true story of a modern American outlaw / Craig Glazer
with Sal Manna.
p. cm.
9781602392496
1. Glazer, Craig. 2. Swindlers and swindling—United States—Biography. 3.
Undercover operations—United States. I. Manna, Sal. II. Title.
HV6692.G53A3 2008
364.16’3092—dc22
[B]
2008008707
Printed in the United States of America
TO MY MOTHER Rita, my grandpa Bennie, my father Stan, and Don Woodbeck: the
people who helped make me who I am, for good and bad. And also to my nephews Jake
and Alex, in the hope that reading my story they will make better choices in their lives
than I made in mine.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Authors’ Note
1 - Higher Education
2 - A Portrait of the Con Artist as a Young Man
3 - Flash for the Cash
4 - A Life of Crime
5 - Bullets and Bikers
6 - Kill or Be Killed
7 - Undercover Cop
8 - Outlaws and Outsiders
9 - Going Hollywood
10 - Blood in Redondo Beach
11 - No Trust in Tinseltown
12 - Dope and Duplicity
13 - Getting Stung
14 - On Trial
15 - Behind Bars
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Authors’ Note
SOME NAMES IN this book have been changed to protect the privacy and/or safety of
individuals. Where dialogue or an account of events was not available from public
records or press reports, it has been reconstructed from memory. The sequence of
certain events has also been altered for the sake of clarity. But, as incredible as it may
seem, this is a true story.
1
Higher Education
“Arizona was a crazy, crazy place,” remembers Otis Thrasher, one of
Arizona’s first narcotics agents. “Every kid who had a nickel could go
down to Mexico and be a drug dealer.”
—The Kansas City Times, February 12, 1983
THE CHICANO WITH the pockmarked face jabbed me hard with the butt of his gun,
and I doubled over. The follow-up, his knee to my chest, put me on the floor gasping for
air. Nearby, I could see the blood from Bob’s split nose dripping steadily on the carpet
of the Tempe apartment. This was supposed to be just a bunch of college kids throwing
their money together to buy some weed, but somehow, we wound up in a room with
three nasty-looking bad guys with a shotgun and a couple of .38s who were taking our
money and kicking our asses.
I was in Sin City, Tempe’s ghetto of student apartments—every one of them with a
beanbag chair, an Easy Rider or Clockwork Orange poster on the wall, and a package of
Zig-Zag rolling papers in a drawer. All the kids in this particular room, about ten of
them, were older than me and clean-cut—chinos, Bass loafers, button-down Pendleton
shirts—hardly the image of the doper in anti-drug commercials. I was a little rougher,
more of the leather jacket rocker type, but none of us were tie-dyed hippies.
It was 1971 and the streets were full of kids like me, long-haired eighteen-year-olds
who could vote for the first time and were protesting the war in Vietnam. We didn’t
simply question authority, we denied its existence. We wanted to be free to do what we
wanted—and what we wanted was sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. I was just an upper-
middle-class Jewish boy from Kansas, taking part in a cultural revolution.
I had no idea that getting ripped off that night would change my life forever.
Just fifteen minutes earlier, I had heard a knock on the front door and Bob, the
gangly, awkward kid who lived in the apartment, answered with an easy smile. A big
man with a red beard stood in the doorway, a Chicano on each side of him—one older
with a scarred face, the other younger and smaller but just as tough-looking.
“Do you have the cash?” asked the big man.
Bob pointed to the table in the middle of the room. Stacked neatly were separate piles
of bills, held together by rubber bands. My $300 was the smallest contribution to the
pool of $10,000. My fellow student, Steve Asher, who brought me to the apartment, had
the biggest pile. The big man, who looked like a cross between Ernest Borgnine of
McHale’s Navy and a red-bearded Viking, seemed pleased. He nodded to the scarred
Chicano, who returned to the van they drove up in. In a few seconds, he came back
lugging a burlap gunnysack that reeked of weed.
“Can we check the shit out first?” Bob asked.
The big man entered the room, followed by the Chicanos. Bob closed the door behind
them.
“You want a sample?” asked the big man. “You don’t trust me?”
“Hey man, be cool. We’ve never done this with you before. Just to show it’s good
shit.”
The big man slowly looked at everyone in the room.
“Okay,” he told his compadres. The scarred Chicano opened the burlap sack and
pulled out a shotgun, which he pointed at each of our faces. We were all too stunned to
move. Almost simultaneously, the big man and the younger Chicano had both pulled
out handguns.
I looked at my $300 on the table. My last $300. Damn.
My Sin City apartment was costing $175 a month. I was working as a salesman in a
clothing store and a floor sweeper in a pizza parlor, but at $1.85 an hour, I wasn’t
making nearly enough money. I had asked my father for a loan but he said, “That’s your
problem to solve.” He reminded me that tuition for out-of-state students was expensive
and that it was my “stupid decision” to go to Arizona State University, so I had to live
with it. “It’s time you proved yourself,” he said.
I had met Asher at a campus party. He graduated a couple years earlier from my high
school, Shawnee Mission East in Overland Park, Kansas. Asher took me under his wing
because he knew I needed money and he knew how I could make some. He called it
“investing,” which meant I was buying weed wholesale and selling it retail. My father
was a businessman, so I understood the concept.
Asher didn’t need the money. He had it all, and he knew it. He was blond, David
Cassidy handsome, and living in the Lemon Terrace Club, the most expensive
apartment complex in Sin City. The son of a wealthy electronics company owner, he
had the best-looking girlfriends, credit cards from his parents, and drove a cherry red
Trans Am. I was tooling around in the yellow Ford Galaxie Grandpa Bennie gave me as
a going-away present.
Asher liked having a sidekick. He could tell me what to do and that made him feel
better about himself. For me, at least it was better than being alone. Besides, one of his
girlfriends was a high school senior with long brown hair named Karen Curtis. She
reminded me of a Kewpie doll, a small body with big eyes. She was so perfectly pretty
that everywhere she went, heads turned. I was a rocker and she was a little more
straightlaced but I hoped that someday we might get together.
“If you need money, you can invest,” Asher had said.
“This is cool?”
“As cool as an Eskimo’s toilet.”
Now I was about to lose it all.
“Okay kids, playtime’s over,” said the big man with the red beard. “Turn around and
up against the wall.”
We did what he said. The younger Chicano searched us, taking out our wallets and
stuffing the cash in his pocket. He found a lot in Asher’s wallet, but mine was empty.
He threw it at the back of my head.
Meanwhile, the big man scooped up the pile of money from the table and shoveled
the bills into the gunnysack. After he finished, he crossed the room and grabbed Bob by
the shoulder, pushing him flat against the wall.
“You’re a real smart-ass, ain’t ya?” he asked, his face close to Bob’s. He pulled a
long bowie knife from his belt and continued berating Bob. “No sonuvabitch pussy like
you asks me to do shit.” He placed the knife tip under Bob’s nose. “Someone oughta
teach you some manners,” he said. Bob’s face was red with fear. The big man pressed
the shiny blade upward and Bob tried to stand on his tiptoes so it wouldn’t cut him.
“Don’t hurt me,” he whimpered.
The big man pushed the knife into Bob’s skin. Bob would have been lifted off the
floor except that the blade split his nose open first. He put his hands over his face,
trying to stop the flow of blood and tears streaming down his cheeks as he crumpled to
the floor.
I’m no saint, that’s for sure, but no matter what I did later, and what anyone might
think of me after reading about the life I’ve lived, I never hurt an innocent person and I
hated it when other people did. Bob was just a naïve kid. The big man and his friends
had their money. They could have just left it at that.
I turned from facing the wall and took a step towards Bob. It was just an instinct, and
I didn’t really have a plan in mind. It was that move that made the Chicano put me on
the floor. “Chingo, you stupid, eh?” he asked as he looked down on me.
Yeah, it was a pretty stupid move. I was at the mercy of these assholes. Being
helpless, unable to fight back, is the worst feeling in the world.
The three of them walked backward to the door and left. Nobody moved until we
heard their van speed away. There was a rush of air as everyone let loose a sigh of relief
at the same time. Bob ran into the bathroom. I pulled myself up, wincing with pain.
“We have to call the police,” someone said.
“What the hell are we going to tell them?” answered Asher. “‘Well, Officer, we were
making a pot deal and these bad guys came in and took our money. Do you think you
can get it back for us?’”
End of discussion. Rip-offs happened all the time. They were never reported.
As I got into Asher’s Trans Am outside the apartment, I asked if he knew the robbers.
“Forget about them.”
“They took my last $300.”
“What? You want to go after them? We’re lucky we’re alive. They’ve killed kids
before, that’s what I’ve heard—even when they get the money.”
“So you do know them.”
“Heard of them. They’re called Prairie Pirates. Welcome to the real Wild West.”
Nothing was going right. Asher could go back to his nice apartment and, after a beer,
a bong, and a babe, shrug it off. But I had none of that waiting at home for me. I was a
nobody—and now I was broke too.
I went to my shabby little apartment and sulked as I watched movies late into the
night on my tiny black-and-white TV. I could always lose myself in the movies. Ever
since I was little, I would imagine myself as the hero. Lots of kids do that. But I
believed it.
Just days after getting ripped off, a movie came on that had me glued to the screen:
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, a gangster flick by Roger Corman that came out a
few years earlier, in 1967. A true story, it was about a hit squad from Al Capone’s South
Side Chicago Italian Mob gunning down seven of George “Bugs” Moran’s North Side
Irish hoods; except this bloodbath wasn’t one of those stand-up shoot-outs or a black
sedan driving past a restaurant and spraying it with bullets.
It was February 14, 1929, and Moran’s gang was holed up in a small garage at 2122
North Clark Street. Shortly after 11 a.m., they were surprised by two men in police
uniforms, accompanied by two men who seemed to be undercover cops. Moran’s men
outnumbered them and outgunned them, but they gave up without a struggle, since
taking down cops was not a good thing, not even for gangsters. Besides, the Chicago
Police Department was there to be bought, so the hoods thought they had nothing to
fear. They figured that someone must have made a mistake somewhere, that maybe
these cops were rookies and didn’t know what was what. Moran’s men even felt lucky,
because if their captors were Capone’s men, surely they’d be dead already.
So when the seven were instructed to put their hands on the brick wall inside the
garage, they did as they were told without any resistance. When they turned their backs,
the two men in street clothes ripped open their long coats. Moran’s men never saw the
two tommy guns. It took just a couple of minutes to riddle their bodies with 140 bullets.