A Rookie Cop vs. The West Coast Mafia. Tanya Chalupa
underworld as “The Best in the West” was on its way.
The media folks swarmed the Trident story like hungry wrens, pecking at Police Chief Wright and Detective Palmini with streams of questions for which neither one had all the answers. The story broke on all the media outlets. Reports implied that in carrying out the heist, the wetsuits braved the waters in the middle of the night like some modern-day buccaneers or daring frogmen—implying the crooks swam to pull the crime off. The wetsuits suddenly took on heroic proportions.
The media field day with the Trident story was a burden the rookie detective had to bear. It bugged Palmini whenever he picked up a newspaper or turned on the TV or radio to see or hear the faceless and nameless crooks he had to bring to justice romanticized as fearless swashbucklers.1
What was so daring about pointing a gun at a couple of unsuspecting, unarmed workers? Palmini wondered. He looked forward to the day the media lost interest in the case and let the whole episode just die quietly. He was plagued by the idea that the Trident was going to become another unsolved case like Ricco’s. But there was not much he could do except continue plodding. He spent the day after leaving the Trident walking door-to-door along the streets where homes faced the bay. He placed flyers at front doors, asking anyone who had any information to phone the Sausalito Police Department. He also posted flyers on telephone poles and lampposts for dogwalkers. As far as he knew, there were no reports of suspicious vehicles in the area on the night of the Trident incident. Then again, all five of the Sausalito police cars were parked at the station that night. There were no officers out riding through the quiet streets to see or report anything suspicious. Fortunately for Palmini, on the night of the assault on the Trident, a Sausalito resident named Richard Robbins had trouble sleeping.
Around four o’clock in the morning, he got up from his bed and walked over to a window, hoping that perhaps the shimmering bay and the twinkling San Francisco skyline in the distance might lull him back to sleep.
However, when he looked out, his attention was drawn to a boat, a cabin cruiser with a black hull and a white stripe running down its length. It was rare to see a black hull cabin cruiser boat in California. If one was spotted on the West Coast, chances were good that it had been transferred from the East Coast by land. But that was not why Robbins noticed it. The black hull appeared to be adrift, struggling against the force of waves pushing it toward the shore.
Robbins opened his window and listened carefully for sounds of a running engine but he did not hear any. Yet, it was obvious to him that someone aboard was keeping the boat from running with the tide. Robbins picked up a pair of binoculars to get a better look. He could not see any movement or activity on the boat or around it. Robbins wrote down the hull number of the cabin cruiser—CF9589ED—in case he had to phone the Coast Guard for help. Then he went back to steadily watching the black hull through the binoculars. He watched as the boat drifted to the North of the Trident and then returned to its original vicinity, only to drift away again.
Suddenly, a larger boat appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Robbins watched as the black hull circled the larger vessel and then returned to the vicinity of the Trident restaurant. Satisfied that the black hull he was vigilantly observing was not adrift, Robbins put down his binoculars.
The next day’s headlines drew Robbins’s interest back to the boat and he telephoned the Sausalito Police Department. Palmini was not at the station when Robbins phoned, but as soon as he received the message he made arrangements to go to Robbins’s home and interview him there. He wanted to see for himself the view Robbins had of the Trident and the bay and snap a couple of photographs, in case the need for them arose. Palmini was still operating on blind faith at that point and, to his amazement, the investigation was picking up tempo thanks to Robbins.
The following day Robbins became part of the news himself and the term “insomniac” was added to the previous “frogmen” and “buccaneer” headlines and innuendoes.
Robbins’s information attracted the attention of cops and agents outside of Sausalito. Suddenly, Palmini was getting replies to his teletype. What surprised Palmini was that the calls he was getting from other law enforcement personnel all named the same potential suspects who might have been involved in the Trident heist: William Floyd Ettleman, Edward “Italian” DeVaney, Rob Carrol, Sam Turley and Ralph “Indian” Morris—names Palmini had never heard before. He even received a telephone call from the Woodland Police, in a town about fifteen miles northwest of Sacramento, to let him know that one of their informants had overheard Ettleman and DeVaney discussing a safe job at the Trident as far back as August of 1970. Norm Gard, a special agent with the California Department of Justice in San Francisco, also phoned Palmini, advising him to contact Homer Porter, a fifteen-year veteran whose expertise was with safecracking crimes.
Homer Porter was a method-of-operation analyst on safe burglaries for the California Department of Justice, Criminal Identification and Investigation (CI&I), headquartered in Sacramento. His sole job was to study safe burglaries in California and other western states. And he was hot on Ettleman’s trail.
Porter beat Palmini to the punch and contacted him first, telephoning him within minutes after the Sausalito detective finished talking to Norm Gard. Palmini and Porter never met in person, but they grew close during their many phone calls, as the seasoned investigator advised the younger officer in his pursuit of the culprits behind the Trident burglary. If there was anyone in the entire case that Palmini was most grateful to, it was Homer Porter. He thanked his lucky stars for having Porter in his life.
Porter told the rookie about Dodge Ridge, a ski resort in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and a number of other safecracking jobs in California that were similar to the Trident in modus operandi (MO). He mailed Palmini a series of confidential California Department of Justice reports on organized crime and the Mafia for the rookie detective to study. Palmini was also contacted by an investigator out of Reno, Neal Carson, who had many dealings with Ettleman and his crew. Like Porter, Neal Carson forwarded his department’s intelligence reports and photos of Ettleman wearing a cowboy hat with Ralph “Indian” Morris and several other local burglars. There were also shots of weapons and burglary tools that authorities had found on them. It did not take the rookie long to become intrigued by the criminal personalities popping out of the pages, and the level of sophistication he was up against.
The intelligence reports tracked Ettleman through stolen credit cards and interviews with greedy businessmen and doctors who had made investments through Ettleman, using teamsters’ pension funds, only to get burned. The FBI suspected him of unsolved bank robberies and contract murders. Reports had Ettleman hanging out with Mafia bosses in plush venues and with the safecrackers in seedy bars. Palmini was bewildered by Ettleman and his crimes. And the more he read about him in the intelligence reports, the more Ettleman intrigued him.
How did he do all that and get away with it all these years? Palmini wondered. Who is this guy? Why isn’t he in jail?
Palmini would soon find out.
Three men maneuvered their snowmobiles between giant juniper trees under the darkness of a new moon. Strapped with semi-automatic weapons, they were clothed in identical black thermal tops, matching ski masks and white ski overalls, blending in-and-out with the night’s shadows and the ghostly snow. Fake plastic noses protruded ghoulishly from underneath their ski masks.1
The trio headed toward the popular Dodge Ridge Ski Resort in Stanislaus National Forest, which is a mountainous expanse in California’s Mother Lode Country, where hamlets