the more subdued of the two. And when the wetsuits made their mark on the Trident, Ondine was closed for the night. There was no one there to see or hear anything.
The Trident’s main entrance faced west. There were also a number of doors on the side of the restaurant. On that particular day, the armed burglars could have used any of these entrances, since all the doors were unlocked. After jotting down additional notes on his observations for his own police report, Palmini telephoned the department to send the evidence officer over to take photos of the crime scene. He then turned his attention back to Ribar and Pendleton, who were still hanging around. After going over their statements and asking them a few more questions, he dismissed them, but not before informing the two men that he would be contacting them again. He was particularly hopeful that Pendleton might be able to identify one of the assailants. The only problem was that Palmini did not know where to look for the man in order for Pendleton to identify him. It was the case of the proverbial needle in the haystack.
Shortly after Ribar and Pendleton left, the evidence officer arrived to shoot crime scene photos. It was time for Palmini to confront the tedious aspects of detective work—at least in this particular situation—looking for clues. He gathered pieces of loose burnt metal, scraped residue samples off walls and the area around the safes and then meticulously zipped each item into a separate plastic bag for analysis and comparison. He also included the handcuffs and kitchen towels used on Pendleton and Ribar as part of the evidence, should the case go to trial. Palmini wondered if the case ever was going to go to trial. He did not have much faith that it would.
After a while, he had enough information from the Trident and decided to head out. Getting back behind the wheel of his car, he drove down to the Sausalito Police Department, housed in a two-story red brick building with a flat roof, about a quarter of a mile from the burglarized restaurant.
Those guys pulled it off practically right under our noses, he thought, as he parked his car on the street next to the station. He was angry. Mostly he was annoyed at himself for feeling helpless and for being no match for such bravado. He recalled his comment to Rudimenkin, when he said, “What do I know about safecracking?” Indeed. It was time to call in help.
One of the first things Palmini did when he got inside the station and settled into his office was to send out a teletype to all California law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Justice and FBI district offices, asking for assistance and information. The hunt that would eventually lead the young detective to the ring of safecrackers known in the underworld as “The Best in the West” was on its way.
The media folks swarmed the Trident story like hungry wrens, pecking at Police Chief Wright and Detective Palmini with streams of questions for which neither one had all the answers. The story broke on all the media outlets. Reports implied that in carrying out the heist, the wetsuits braved the waters in the middle of the night like some modern-day buccaneers or daring frogmen—implying the crooks swam to pull the crime off. The wetsuits suddenly took on heroic proportions.
The media field day with the Trident story was a burden the rookie detective had to bear. It bugged Palmini whenever he picked up a newspaper or turned on the TV or radio to see or hear the faceless and nameless crooks he had to bring to justice romanticized as fearless swashbucklers.1
What was so daring about pointing a gun at a couple of unsuspecting, unarmed workers? Palmini wondered. He looked forward to the day the media lost interest in the case and let the whole episode just die quietly. He was plagued by the idea that the Trident was going to become another unsolved case like Ricco’s. But there was not much he could do except continue plodding. He spent the day after leaving the Trident walking door-to-door along the streets where homes faced the bay. He placed flyers at front doors, asking anyone who had any information to phone the Sausalito Police Department. He also posted flyers on telephone poles and lampposts for dogwalkers. As far as he knew, there were no reports of suspicious vehicles in the area on the night of the Trident incident. Then again, all five of the Sausalito police cars were parked at the station that night. There were no officers out riding through the quiet streets to see or report anything suspicious. Fortunately for Palmini, on the night of the assault on the Trident, a Sausalito resident named Richard Robbins had trouble sleeping.
Around four o’clock in the morning, he got up from his bed and walked over to a window, hoping that perhaps the shimmering bay and the twinkling San Francisco skyline in the distance might lull him back to sleep.
However, when he looked out, his attention was drawn to a boat, a cabin cruiser with a black hull and a white stripe running down its length. It was rare to see a black hull cabin cruiser boat in California. If one was spotted on the West Coast, chances were good that it had been transferred from the East Coast by land. But that was not why Robbins noticed it. The black hull appeared to be adrift, struggling against the force of waves pushing it toward the shore.
Robbins opened his window and listened carefully for sounds of a running engine but he did not hear any. Yet, it was obvious to him that someone aboard was keeping the boat from running with the tide. Robbins picked up a pair of binoculars to get a better look. He could not see any movement or activity on the boat or around it. Robbins wrote down the hull number of the cabin cruiser—CF9589ED—in case he had to phone the Coast Guard for help. Then he went back to steadily watching the black hull through the binoculars. He watched as the boat drifted to the North of the Trident and then returned to its original vicinity, only to drift away again.
Suddenly, a larger boat appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Robbins watched as the black hull circled the larger vessel and then returned to the vicinity of the Trident restaurant. Satisfied that the black hull he was vigilantly observing was not adrift, Robbins put down his binoculars.
The next day’s headlines drew Robbins’s interest back to the boat and he telephoned the Sausalito Police Department. Palmini was not at the station when Robbins phoned, but as soon as he received the message he made arrangements to go to Robbins’s home and interview him there. He wanted to see for himself the view Robbins had of the Trident and the bay and snap a couple of photographs, in case the need for them arose. Palmini was still operating on blind faith at that point and, to his amazement, the investigation was picking up tempo thanks to Robbins.
The following day Robbins became part of the news himself and the term “insomniac” was added to the previous “frogmen” and “buccaneer” headlines and innuendoes.
Robbins’s information attracted the attention of cops and agents outside of Sausalito. Suddenly, Palmini was getting replies to his teletype. What surprised Palmini was that the calls he was getting from other law enforcement personnel all named the same potential suspects who might have been involved in the Trident heist: William Floyd Ettleman, Edward “Italian” DeVaney, Rob Carrol, Sam Turley and Ralph “Indian” Morris—names Palmini had never heard before. He even received a telephone call from the Woodland Police, in a town about fifteen miles northwest of Sacramento, to let him know that one of their informants had overheard Ettleman and DeVaney discussing a safe job at the Trident as far back as August of 1970. Norm Gard, a special agent with the California Department of Justice in San Francisco, also phoned Palmini, advising him to contact Homer Porter, a fifteen-year veteran whose expertise was with safecracking crimes.
Homer Porter was a method-of-operation analyst on safe burglaries for the California Department of Justice, Criminal Identification and Investigation (CI&I), headquartered in Sacramento. His sole job was to study safe burglaries in California and other western states. And he was hot on Ettleman’s trail.
Porter
