a mischevious grin spread across his face. “Bill, there’s more, but I’ll let that be a surprise. You’ll know soon enough.”
Palmini did not understand what Rudimenkin was talking about, but at least he was beginning to see signs of the “old” Rudimenkin he knew. The two walked to the west end of the building, then entered the restaurant through one of its side doors leading to the kitchen. Inside, they met with the officer dispatched to respond to the call. The officer briefed Palmini and introduced him to the two employees, who provided him with more details of their nerve-wracking experience. When Palmini finished interviewing Patrick Pendleton and Thomas Ribar, he had gotten a clear depiction of the harrowing experience the two Trident workers went through that night. He also discovered what George Rudimenkin had been hiding. The Trident heist came with its own dress code.
The gunmen had assaulted the restaurant dressed as frogmen. They were all wearing black wetsuits with blue stripes on the sleeves. And they all had on black rubber hoods, the same kind deep ocean divers wore, except for one of them. He had the attached hood hanging off of his collar in the back, but his head was covered by a brown knit cap.2
According to the police reports, the wetsuited gang made their initial assault in the kitchen where Patrick Pendleton was cleaning up. One of them sneaked in from behind, grabbed Pendleton by the left arm and pointed a 45-caliber handgun at his head.
“Just stay calm and you won’t get hurt.” The man twisted Pendleton’s arm, forcing him to his knees. “Get down,” he barked.
Pendleton felt the assailant’s knee press against his spine as he fell to the floor. Leaning over him, the wetsuit jerked both of Pendleton’s arms behind his back and snapped handcuffs on his wrists. Rising swiftly back up on his feet, the wetsuit snatched a kitchen towel lying on a counter and spread it over Pendleton’s head. Pendleton later told the officers he felt himself breaking into a sweat, waiting for the last sound he would ever hear: the blast that a bullet makes when it is fired from a gun.
There was music piping through the restaurant’s speaker system. Thomas Ribar was washing the deck windows in the Southeast corner of the dining room, unaware of the intruders. A noise behind him startled him. He stopped working and turned around. At first Ribar thought it was a joke when he saw a guy standing there in a wetsuit but then he realized the man was pointing a blue steel gun at his face. Suddenly, it stopped being funny.
Ribar described the man to Palmini as being in his late twenties or early thirties, dressed in a black wetsuit with a brown knit cap on his head. He ordered Ribar to go into the kitchen.
“I was scared shitless,” Ribar stated when he recounted how it felt to walk into the restaurant’s kitchen with the gunman following closely behind him, shoving him every couple of steps, ordering him to move faster. Inside the kitchen, Ribar’s eyes fell on Pendleton lying on the floor with his head covered with a towel. Suddenly, Ribar felt his arms forced back. The wetsuit in the brown knit cap handcuffed Ribar and ordered him to lie down next to Pendleton.
Going down on his knees, Ribar got a glimpse of two other men in the room. They were both dressed in the same black wetsuits and hoods. He noticed a walkie-talkie with a chrome antenna on a nearby countertop. Then, the oldest-looking one in the group threw a towel over Ribar’s head.
“Shit,” Ribar murmured, “they’re going to execute us.”
In describing his assailant, Pendleton recalled he was clean-shaven, between forty and fifty years old, of medium build and approximately six feet tall. Pendleton also noticed the man had on black tennis shoes and no socks, and that his calves and shoes were wet. He also recalled that the man spoke with a slight Southern twang. Meanwhile, Ribar described his assailant and the others he got a brief look at as all clean-shaven. He had noticed that they all wore black tennis shoes without socks. Ribar also described his gunman’s ankles and calves as being red, as if the man had been standing in hot or ice-cold water.
Instead of shooting the Trident workers, as Pendleton and Ribar had feared, the wetsuits ordered the two men back up on their feet. They led the pair, with their heads covered with kitchen towels, to the men’s room. There the gunmen ordered the two to lie down on the floor with the towels still draped over their heads.
Ribar and Pendleton whispered back and forth to each other, wisely deciding not to do anything to risk their lives. It was Frank Werber’s money anyway. They both agreed it was not worth dying for.3
As the two employees lay handcuffed in the bathroom, they heard rapid movements in the nearby hallway. They heard equipment being moved, followed by the high-pitched shrieks of drills and the chopping, sawing and ripping of walls. All the while, music flowed from the restaurant’s sound system, interrupted only by the clamor created by the wetsuits. The doors leading to the safes were in the same hallway as the men’s room, which enabled them to clearly hear the wetsuits’ conversations and their movements, the employees reported to the police.4
They overheard a male voice talking to the wetsuits through a walkie-talkie. Pendleton recalled bursts of static from the receiver. Ribar remembered that the radio emitted an even and constant background tone when the wetsuits transmitted messages back and forth with the man.
Pendleton and Ribar both said that once they were forced to lie down on the floor in the men’s restroom, the wetsuits’ behavior appeared more relaxed toward them. They were polite and professional in their interactions with each other and with the two hostages. Occasionally, one of the wetsuits came into the lavatory to check on Ribar and Pendleton and sometimes to change their positions on the floor to make them more comfortable. During one of these visits, the first assailant, the one who had forced Pendleton to the ground at gunpoint, asked Pendleton if the office was bugged by an alarm.
“Yes, it is,” Pendleton told him, perhaps hoping this bit of information might get them to scatter sooner.
Both employees mentioned to the Sausalito police that the burglars referred to the bathroom as the “shitter,” a term common among convicts and military personnel.
“Can you identify your assailants?” Palmini looked up at Pendleton and Ribar from his notepad.
“Yeah,” Pendleton nodded. It was the first good news Palmini had that morning.
“It looks like one of these guys had time on his hands,” Rudimenkin pointed to a cigarette machine standing near the entrance. It had been broken into and stripped of change and all its contents.
Pendleton stated in his deposition that when the wetsuits were leaving at around 4:30 A.M., he heard one of them say, “Joe, hang around for about five minutes and watch these guys.”
After they were sure all the wetsuits were truly gone, Pendleton and Ribar got up. The two employees struggled with their handcuffs. Finally, Pendleton was able to free one hand. He then called the police. Sausalito Police records show that the alarm went off at 6:05 A.M. and the responding officer, Douglas Morgan, arrived on the premises at 6:08 A.M.5
When Pendleton and Ribar finished their account of the events, Palmini told Rudimenkin and the reporting officer that he wanted to retrace the wetsuits’ steps inside the restaurant. Rudimenkin and the other officer followed him close enough to observe as Palmini followed the crime scene trail.
First, Palmini noted the door’s proximity to
