A Rookie Cop vs. The West Coast Mafia. Tanya Chalupa
The California Department of Justice’s CI&I, the FBI and the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Office were not sure where or how the armed burglars got the key to get into the lodge and the shed housing the tools and equipment they used or how the gunmen made their getaway, but they had a very good idea who the professional thieves were.12
The police had no doubt that William Floyd Ettleman was behind the operation. It was his MO. There were not many proficient, prolific safecrackers like Ettleman and his crew. The fact that the stolen van’s plates came from a Hayward junkyard turned out to be a major clue that the crooks were from the San Francisco Bay Area. And indeed, Ettleman and the driver of the van, Eddie DeVaney, both resided in the Bay Area at the time. It was also obvious the crooks were familiar with the Dodge Ridge lodge, its routine and layout. Using snowmobiles in the Dodge Ridge heist was also not a first for Ettleman. He had utilized them when they hit other ski resort safes in Montana, Nevada, Utah and Colorado.13
“It looked like a national thieves’ convention around Twain Hart the week before,” a member of the law enforcement team said, referring to a nearby town where Ettleman’s family happened to own a cabin. Fred Mitchel, the undersheriff of Tuolumne County, was quoted in the press as stating that “the gang in the last two years operated in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Colorado, Nevada and seven counties of California.”14 However, on the night of the Dodge Ridge caper, there was no one from the California Highway Patrol (CHP) on duty. Then again, with a forecast of fresh snow, why would the CHP imagine anyone would be speeding? There was no need to risk a CHP officer’s life driving back and forth on slippery roads. How were they to know that a dramatic armed robbery would take place that night? Law enforcement intelligence did not have detailed information on Ettleman yet. But it was not going to be too long before the FBI applied pressure to get it.
In the meantime, an investigator for the Tuolumne Sheriff’s Department got a lead. Two brothers who lived in the area and were known burglars had become informants, even though they themselves were not involved in the crime. Thieves like to brag to those they trust. More often than not, the ones they trust are as unscrupulous as they are. And when one makes a score like Dodge Ridge, there is bound to be bragging.
The informants led the investigator to the Carquinez Bridge, which consists of two parallel spans forming part of Interstate 80 between the towns of Crockett and Vallejo, stretching over the Carquinez Strait, a channel of water where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers empty into San Francisco Bay. They showed the investigator where the safe from Dodge Ridge was thrown down into the tidal strait below and pointed out the scrape marks on the rails where the safe was hoisted up and then pushed over. The informants claimed that after all the valuables were removed, the safecrackers had thrown their clothes and masks into the safe.
The investigation stopped there. The county did not want to spend a penny more on the case, which would have required the county corps of engineers to drive over three hours and cover more than one hundred and sixty miles to reach the Carquinez Bridge with a team of divers. And for what? To retrieve a useless safe full of discarded clothes?
Then, two weeks later, Ettleman left his mark again. This time, he hit neighboring Stanislaus County.
On the night of March 26, the eighty-year-old widow Helen Shoemake, owner of Shoemake’s Fine Jewelers in Modesto, California, lay semi-conscious in her bedroom on the second story of her home while a robbery took place around and below her. The robbery was being carried out commando-style by two gun-wielding men wearing ski masks, dark clothing and tennis shoes.1
To get into the house and take control, the masked intruders first hid behind Mrs. Shoemake’s sixty-seven-year-old housekeeper’s car, parked in the carport. They waited for Shoemake’s forty-five-year-old live-in physician, Dr. R. Bruce Dainard, to arrive from a nearby hospital where he also worked. He showed up at about 10:30 P.M. and parked his car in the lower level garage. Suddenly, the two gunmen jumped him. Dainard shrieked. The ambushers subdued him with threats. They led him inside the house with one pressing a gun against his back and the other holding a gun against his temple. Mrs. Shoemaker’s unsuspecting housekeeper had not heard anything that went on in the garage. She was on the lower level when the armed intruders entered with the captive physician.
The gunmen appeared to be acquainted with the alarm system and asked the housekeeper if she had turned it on yet. She shook her head and replied, “No.” Next, she and Dainard were led upstairs to Helen Shoemake’s bedroom. The gunmen ordered the housekeeper to lie down on the floor next to Shoemake’s bed but she pleaded that she had a bad back and it would be difficult and painful for her to do so. The intruders instead allowed her to sit on Shoemake’s bed. The physician was ordered to lie down and remain on the floor near the bed. His arms and feet were bound with wire. Afterward, the robbers cut all the phone lines.
Shoemake woke up briefly during the robbery and complained about being too hot. One of the robbers gently removed a blanket from her and then continued ransacking her home, ignoring expensive antiques and silver in the dining room. Finally, after a little over an hour, he and his partner found three boxes full of Shoemake’s finest jewelry pieces in a hall closet. Many of the pieces were one-of-a-kind, designed by Helen Shoemake’s late husband, Walter. Among the pieces the thieves absconded with were a double strand of pearls, a heart-shaped ring with forty-five diamonds, a diamond watch and band, a two-carat diamond on a chain and a couple of diamond bracelets. They took a diamond solitaire ring in which the diamond was described to be as “big as a thumb.”2 They also stole jewelry and silver pieces they found in Dainard’s bedroom. In the end, the thieves got away with jewelry which would be worth well over one million dollars on today’s market.
In spite of the huge value of the loot they took from Helen Shoemake’s home, the thieves did something odd. They took twenty dollars from the housekeeper’s wallet and thirty-five dollars from Dainard’s wallet. Perhaps this was in an effort to prove that they were not the same men who were also involved in the Dodge Ridge heist, where one of the thieves was quoted in the press as telling Sue Stewart and her husband, “We don’t take hard-earned money from working folks like you.”3
The next morning, police found footsteps leading from Shoemake’s house to Dry Creek. It appeared to them that the robbers waded across Dry Creek to reach a getaway car parked on the other side of the creek on Morton Boulevard.
None of the pieces stolen from Helen Shoemake were ever recovered. She passed away a couple of months later, unaware she had been robbed.
Law enforcement intelligence theorized that the Dodge Ridge and Shoemake crimes were Ettleman’s handiwork, just as they knew he supplied talent, muscle and planning for the mob. It was catching him in the act that proved to be a challenge. In a San Mateo Police Department report he was listed as the leader of an organized burglary ring.
His ring operated nationally, with a focus on western states: California, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon and Colorado.4 But Ettleman did not set limits on his crew and on occasion they also worked in eastern states. He was aquainted with Francesco Joseph Scibelli, listed in an FBI report as a member of the Patriarca La Cosa Nostra (LCN) family, a New England mob outfit with strong ties to New York crime families. Ettleman was introduced to Scibelli by Colorado mob boss Scotty Spinuzzi when they both traveled east “on business.”5
An ex-wife once referred to Ettleman as “the top thief in the nation” when he was at the peak of his criminal career. A law enforcement intelligence officer who had interactions with Ettleman in a case in San Jose recalls him as being “a mean son of a bitch” and his group as “true organized crime.”6 His other services included being a contract hit man, a muscle man, a con man, a drug dealer and running stolen credit card rings. He was, indeed, the master of a criminal juggling act, blending in like a chameleon as he shifted between the high and the low in the criminal world. With his safecrackers he dressed loudly, wearing cowboy hats