A Rookie Cop vs. The West Coast Mafia. Tanya Chalupa
it had been packed with one-day skiers from the San Francisco Bay Area, the Sacramento region and the Central Valley.
The men’s rubber-tracked vehicles left a trail over previously undisturbed snow. There was hooting and howling coming from a couple of the guys. They figured that folks tucked away for the night in nearby cabins automatically assumed “they were just a bunch of drunks fooling around.”2
Not far away, a truck was parked by the side of a lonely road in Pinecrest; its driver settled behind the wheel to wait for the men on the snowmobiles, knowing that if all went well, it would be several hours before he met up with them. To keep him company, he had a walkie-talkie in the cabin of the truck and a police scanner tuned to the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s radio frequency.3
When the masked trio reached the vicinity of the Dodge Ridge Ski Resort, one of the men fell behind to remain on a low ridge. He was the group’s point man—the sharpshooter. His job was to take care of any intruders and to warn the others through a walkie-talkie if anyone from law enforcement showed up unexpectedly. And in case they did, his next task was to “lay down a line of fire” and in doing so, create a diversion to allow the rest of his team time to escape.
In this case, the point man and the “brains” behind the outfit was William Floyd Ettleman. The job was his show. He shepherded it the way he did all the jobs his crew went on. It was a juggling act and he kept the rhythm going. This particular gig took place a little more than eighteen months before Bill Palmini even knew Ettleman existed.
Ettleman’s team was somewhat nervous when he came along on gigs with them. But they liked having Ettleman’s sidekick, thirty-one-year-old Eddie “Italian” DeVaney, on the jobs, because, as one member of Ettleman’s crew, Jackson “Nevada” Dillon, eventually explained, “Well, he was just Eddie. He was fun to have around.” But as far as the rest of them were concerned, at forty-seven, Ettleman was too old for the work for which he recruited them. They worried he might surprise them with an unexpected heart attack in the middle of a safe job. Then what would they do?
Ettleman himself was fueling the crew’s concern by making a move to drop out from the physically demanding aspects of his burglaries, while still remaining in the center of the action. He was switching to becoming strictly a “10 Percenter,” the one who did the planning and organizing in return for 10 percent of the loot. He had other deals and action going on with the mob but, in his heart, he was a thief and not ready to relinquish control of his exploits. Being a point man allowed him a larger stake in the profits and a closer connection to the core of his jobs. And faking heart attacks worked when cops were around.4 It came in handy to have the appearance of a weak heart.
Equipped with a telescopic rifle and a walkie-talkie to communicate with his cohorts and the truck parked at the side of a road nearby, Ettleman, like the truck driver, also had a police radio scanner tuned to the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Department’s frequency. On the ridge, he had a clear view of the main lodge and also the road linking Dodge Ridge with the main highway. The near-freezing temperature presented a challenge, but he knew he would be rotating every twenty minutes with another crew member. In the meantime, he had no choice but to wait it out in the cold.
Ettleman watched the other two armed snowmobilers settle into their pre-planned positions at the bottom of the hill and turn off their engines. Suddenly, a light-colored van emerged from a dark road connected to Highway 108—the area’s main road that led to major highways. Its lights dimmed when it came to a stop a short distance from the two men below.
The van had been stolen earlier in the day, about one hundred and sixty miles from Dodge Ridge in the affluent town of Los Gatos, which was part of Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco. The license plates had originally been registered to a vehicle in Los Banos, a Central Valley town where Latino immigrants made up almost 64 percent of the population. Somehow, they ended up in a Hayward junkyard, and that is where the driver of the van got them.5
The van’s driver, Eddie DeVaney, was dressed in white overalls and a dark thermal top, matching the snowmobilers’ attire. A plastic costume nose was visible from under his ski mask. He too had a semi-automatic weapon.
Ettleman leaned forward on his snowmobile and made contact with the truck driver, while his crew disembarked quickly from their vehicles and jumped into the stolen van. He watched as the van made its way through the empty parking lot. He listened intently to the communications on the police radio. Nothing was happening there.
Around midnight on Sunday, March 8, 1970, Ettleman’s team launched their assault on the Dodge Ridge Ski Resort with military precision. First, they cut the telephone cables leading to the main lodge. Next, they removed an acetylene torch, a dolly and miscellaneous tools and gear from a storage building adjacent to the main house. The equipment they seized was there for the ski resort’s own emergency repairs, but it was equally suited for cracking or moving a heavy safe.
Inside the lodge, long-time employees Carl Henzie and his wife, Katie, were sound asleep in a bedroom near the main office. Sixty-six-year-old Carl Henzie was the ski lift operator at the resort and Katie Henzie, also sixty-six, was the cafeteria manager. A pounding on the door woke Katie. She picked up her glasses from the nightstand, put them on and peered groggily at the clock by her bed. It read 12:20 A.M. Getting up, she walked over to the door, thinking it was most likely Sue or Carl Stewart, a couple who were a few years younger but like the Henzies were longtime resident-employees at the resort. Carl Stewart managed the ski rental and his wife, Sue, was the ticket manager. Nevertheless, Katie’s instincts kicked in and she remained cautious.
“Who is there?” Katie leaned toward the door. She was surprised to hear a man’s voice she did not recognize.
“There’s been an accident. I need to call for help. I need to use your phone.” The stranger sounded desperate.
“There was an accident? Where?” Katie pressed her ear closer to the door.
“Up the road…I lost control and my car went over the grade. I’ve got a passenger bleeding to death.” The man’s tone was increasingly agitated, but Katie remained suspicious.
How did he get in? she wondered. The lodge door had been locked for hours. How did he get in without a key? She recalled there were public phones in the lodge that the stranger easily could have used. Why hadn’t he? she thought to herself.
Then the man asked for Mrs. Stewart.
How does he know Sue Stewart? Katie wondered. Something was wrong and did not make sense. She told the man to wait. Turning around, Katie hurried back to the bed where her husband was still fast asleep. She nudged him, saying “Carl” repeatedly until he opened his eyes.
After waking up her husband, Katie told him about the man outside their door. Next, she hurriedly picked up the telephone receiver by their bedside to call Sue Stewart, but the phone line was dead.
The crash of broken glass and the feel of cold air pouring in forced their attention to the other side of the room. A black-gloved hand emerged from between the slats of the bedroom window’s venetian blinds. The Henzies froze. They watched helplessly as the gloved hand reached toward the head rail and pulled the slats off the brackets with such force that the blinds tumbled down with a loud crash. The couple stared at the exposed, busted windowpane, beyond which stood a shadowy figure pointing a shotgun at them.
“Let him in or I’ll shoot your brains out!” the gunman hollered.
Shaken, Katie managed to obey the orders. When she opened the door, two more ski-masked men pushed their way past her, brandishing weapons.6
Ettleman’s gunmen tied Carl up and led his wife down the hall to wake up the other employee couple in the lodge, Carl and Sue Stewart. They ordered Katie to knock on the Stewarts’ door and to ask for Sue Stewart. With a gun pointing at her, the elderly woman reluctantly complied.
“Mrs. Stewart,” Katie called as she knocked on the door. She hoped the formality with which she addressed Sue Stewart would arouse her friend’s suspicion.
“No. Call her Sue,”