A Cup of Coffee

By the time armored Bank Truck No. 512 stopped at the First National Bank in Danvers, Mass. (pop. 15,000) one warm spring morning last week, its three-man crew was ready to knock off for a cup of coffee. Collecting bags of money is essentially as dull as collecting bags of laundry --the crew, in fact, referred to the Danvers trip as the "laundry run," since they were picking up $320,000 in worn and dirty bills which were to be cleaned or destroyed by the Government. Then, too, they had been on the road more than three hours, had made collections at nine banks, and were ready to turn back to Boston.

Driver Dennis Walsh made a U-turn, parked the armored truck by a fire hydrant in front of Rope's drugstore, locked the doors on a treasure of three-quarters of a million dollars, and joined the two guards at the soda counter inside. Leaving a truck unguarded is strictly against company rules, but the trio had safely sneaked coffee in Danvers many times before.

In the sunny street outside, Policeman Edmund Noonan was directing traffic, half a block from the bank truck. He noticed a black Buick sedan beside it and strolled down the street to call a warning against double parking. As he approached, the car started up, ripped past him, screeched around the corner and was gone. The cop took one look at the open doors of the bank truck, scribbled down the first three digits of the Buick's license--all he had been able to spot--and ran into the drugstore. The guards tumbled out: $681,000 --biggest cash haul since the million-dollar Brink's robbery--was missing.

How had the truck been opened? At first, the cops speculated seriously that a midget had been hidden inside it. But a simpler explanation--which seemed to link the crime with the 1950 Brink's robbery--was soon forthcoming. Bank Truck 512, like other U.S. Trucking Corp, armored vehicles, was kept at night in Brink's Boston garage. Their keys, each with the truck's number, were kept in an unlocked drawer close to the street entrance. Almost anyone, it seemed, could have stolen a key or taken one long enough to get it duplicated. An ex-convict, now employed by a Boston garage, told the police about calling recently at Brink's to pick up a bank truck which needed greasing: he had opened the drawer, gotten the right keys, and driven the machine away without being questioned by anyone.

By week's end, after five days of frantic police investigation, only one thing about the robbery was really clear: Rope's drugstore had served the most expensive coffee in history.

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