minutes after the Sausalito detective finished talking to Norm Gard. Palmini and Porter never met in person, but they grew close during their many phone calls, as the seasoned investigator advised the younger officer in his pursuit of the culprits behind the Trident burglary. If there was anyone in the entire case that Palmini was most grateful to, it was Homer Porter. He thanked his lucky stars for having Porter in his life.
Porter told the rookie about Dodge Ridge, a ski resort in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and a number of other safecracking jobs in California that were similar to the Trident in modus operandi (MO). He mailed Palmini a series of confidential California Department of Justice reports on organized crime and the Mafia for the rookie detective to study. Palmini was also contacted by an investigator out of Reno, Neal Carson, who had many dealings with Ettleman and his crew. Like Porter, Neal Carson forwarded his department’s intelligence reports and photos of Ettleman wearing a cowboy hat with Ralph “Indian” Morris and several other local burglars. There were also shots of weapons and burglary tools that authorities had found on them. It did not take the rookie long to become intrigued by the criminal personalities popping out of the pages, and the level of sophistication he was up against.
The intelligence reports tracked Ettleman through stolen credit cards and interviews with greedy businessmen and doctors who had made investments through Ettleman, using teamsters’ pension funds, only to get burned. The FBI suspected him of unsolved bank robberies and contract murders. Reports had Ettleman hanging out with Mafia bosses in plush venues and with the safecrackers in seedy bars. Palmini was bewildered by Ettleman and his crimes. And the more he read about him in the intelligence reports, the more Ettleman intrigued him.
How did he do all that and get away with it all these years? Palmini wondered. Who is this guy? Why isn’t he in jail?
Palmini would soon find out.
Three men maneuvered their snowmobiles between giant juniper trees under the darkness of a new moon. Strapped with semi-automatic weapons, they were clothed in identical black thermal tops, matching ski masks and white ski overalls, blending in-and-out with the night’s shadows and the ghostly snow. Fake plastic noses protruded ghoulishly from underneath their ski masks.1
The trio headed toward the popular Dodge Ridge Ski Resort in Stanislaus National Forest, which is a mountainous expanse in California’s Mother Lode Country, where hamlets like Pinecrest, Twain Harte and Strawberry lure vacationers. The winter resort was closed for the night but hours earlier it had been packed with one-day skiers from the San Francisco Bay Area, the Sacramento region and the Central Valley.
The men’s rubber-tracked vehicles left a trail over previously undisturbed snow. There was hooting and howling coming from a couple of the guys. They figured that folks tucked away for the night in nearby cabins automatically assumed “they were just a bunch of drunks fooling around.”2
Not far away, a truck was parked by the side of a lonely road in Pinecrest; its driver settled behind the wheel to wait for the men on the snowmobiles, knowing that if all went well, it would be several hours before he met up with them. To keep him company, he had a walkie-talkie in the cabin of the truck and a police scanner tuned to the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s radio frequency.3
When the masked trio reached the vicinity of the Dodge Ridge Ski Resort, one of the men fell behind to remain on a low ridge. He was the group’s point man—the sharpshooter. His job was to take care of any intruders and to warn the others through a walkie-talkie if anyone from law enforcement showed up unexpectedly. And in case they did, his next task was to “lay down a line of fire” and in doing so, create a diversion to allow the rest of his team time to escape.
In this case, the point man and the “brains” behind the outfit was William Floyd Ettleman. The job was his show. He shepherded it the way he did all the jobs his crew went on. It was a juggling act and he kept the rhythm going. This particular gig took place a little more than eighteen months before Bill Palmini even knew Ettleman existed.
Ettleman’s team was somewhat nervous when he came along on gigs with them. But they liked having Ettleman’s sidekick, thirty-one-year-old Eddie “Italian” DeVaney, on the jobs, because, as one member of Ettleman’s crew, Jackson “Nevada” Dillon, eventually explained, “Well, he was just Eddie. He was fun to have around.” But as far as the rest of them were concerned, at forty-seven, Ettleman was too old for the work for which he recruited them. They worried he might surprise them with an unexpected heart attack in the middle of a safe job. Then what would they do?
Ettleman himself was fueling the crew’s concern by making a move to drop out from the physically demanding aspects of his burglaries, while still remaining in the center of the action. He was switching to becoming strictly a “10 Percenter,” the one who did the planning and organizing in return for 10 percent of the loot. He had other deals and action going on with the mob but, in his heart, he was a thief and not ready to relinquish control of his exploits. Being a point man allowed him a larger stake in the profits and a closer connection to the core of his jobs. And faking heart attacks worked when cops were around.4 It came in handy to have the appearance of a weak heart.
Equipped with a telescopic rifle and a walkie-talkie to communicate with his cohorts and the truck parked at the side of a road nearby, Ettleman, like the truck driver, also had a police radio scanner tuned to the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Department’s frequency. On the ridge, he had a clear view of the main lodge and also the road linking Dodge Ridge with the main highway. The near-freezing temperature presented a challenge, but he knew he would be rotating every twenty minutes with another crew member. In the meantime, he had no choice but to wait it out in the cold.
Ettleman watched the other two armed snowmobilers settle into their pre-planned positions at the bottom of the hill and turn off their engines. Suddenly, a light-colored van emerged from a dark road connected to Highway 108—the area’s main road that led to major highways. Its lights dimmed when it came to a stop a short distance from the two men below.
The van had been stolen earlier in the day, about one hundred and sixty miles from Dodge Ridge in the affluent town of Los Gatos, which was part of Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco. The license plates had originally been registered to a vehicle in Los Banos, a Central Valley town where Latino immigrants made up almost 64 percent of the population. Somehow, they ended up in a Hayward junkyard, and that is where the driver of the van got them.5
The van’s driver, Eddie DeVaney, was dressed in white overalls and a dark thermal top, matching the snowmobilers’ attire. A plastic costume nose was visible from under his ski mask. He too had a semi-automatic weapon.
Ettleman leaned forward on his snowmobile and made contact with the truck driver, while his crew disembarked quickly from their vehicles and jumped into the stolen van. He watched as the van made its way through the empty parking lot. He listened intently to the communications on the police radio. Nothing was happening there.
Around midnight on Sunday, March 8, 1970, Ettleman’s team launched their assault on the Dodge Ridge Ski Resort with military precision. First, they cut the telephone cables leading to the main lodge. Next, they removed an acetylene torch, a dolly and miscellaneous tools and gear from a storage building adjacent to the main house. The equipment they seized was there for the ski resort’s own emergency repairs, but it was equally suited for cracking or moving a heavy safe.
Inside
