No Future

In the right light (preferably dim), gaunt, greying Lorenzo Emil Parry, 50, wore the austere look of a doctor of divinity. His manner was grave, his clothes sober and he affected rimless octagonal glasses. One starlit night last week, Lorenzo Parry strode confidently across the gothic, ivied quadrangle of Berkeley's Pacific School of Religion, smashed a window in the administration building and went to work.

Lorenzo Parry was a toiler, all right, but not in the vineyard: he was a safecracker with 25 years of experience (counting periods of enforced inactivity).

Man at Work. He kicked in the glass in the comptroller's office door, methodically laid out his tools: an 8-lb. sledge hammer with a loin. handle, two drift-pins, two chisels, 100 fuse-type blasting caps and four electric blasting caps with wires. He tapped the battery in the breast pocket of his leather jacket and hoped he wouldn't have to use it, because a well-grounded safe man hates to blast; it is a matter of professional pride.

He had about decided he would have to blast anyway, when three students heard him and called the cops. Parry was going back to his car for a longer wire when a patrolman stuck a pistol in his face. "Who are you, pal?" asked the cop. "I'm a loser,"*said Parry wearily.

In jail atop Berkeley's two-story, grey stucco Hall of Justice the old crook, with the air of a man whose lifework was done, was garrulous about his career. Back in 1920, arrested for stealing a car, he learned safecracking from a fellow convict during a seven-year stretch in the New Mexico State Penitentiary in Santa Fe. Parry had stolen around $250,000 in his career, he bragged, and he had pulled 250 jobs. He didn't feel he had been greedy. Said he: "You've got to make a lot to get along. There are a lot of expenses." A man needed partners or a fingerman, and "good conservative clothes to be inconspicuous and live in good hotels so you won't be noticed, coming and going. Even on $1,000 a month you can't clear anything."

The Open Road. One day, consumed with the U.S. passion for setting records, he decided to hit the road and crack at least one safe in every state. Up to then he had worked in 15 states all told. "I used to be a great one for two and three and four a night," boasted Parry. "One night I made them 205 miles apart." He made as little as 55-c- and as much as $26,000 in a haul. Having widened his field, he was in New Hampshire with only Vermont to go when he decided to pass up Vermont: "I did not like the topography," he said, "It's too easy to block you in."

When he picked on the Pacific School of Religion, Parry knew he was down to the bush leagues, and not long for them. Places like Pacific are quiet, but the haul is not likely to be big (the Pacific safe had $105 in it). He picked the spot because he was getting old and tired: he even found it hard working nights. To tell the truth, he summed up, safe robbing wasn't much of a career. "It has no future for a young man," gloomily concluded Lorenzo Parry. Then, thoughtfully, he added: "And no future for an old one, either."

A man who has done time in prison. Parry had served 16 years.

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