The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [52]
On the designated Saturday, Dave and Art bought some gloves and a pry bar, then cased the house, a one-story home on the outskirts of Denton. Once it was dark, Art dropped Pettis off on the closest corner, then joined him after he’d pried his way in through the back door. Just as Dave had said, the house was dark and deserted, and he led Art straight to the jeweler’s workshop. It was then that Art started to have misgivings. Even for a home business, the shop seemed little more than a tinkerer’s den—a few power tools, a work lamp, some plastic bins of beads, and a file cabinet. When they pawed through the cabinet’s drawers they found about thirty gold and silver chains and semiprecious stones, but nothing close to as valuable as what Dave had described. “It was like we were robbing somebody’s artsy-and-craftsy grandma,” Art says. “There was maybe five thousand dollars’ worth of shit.”
Dave seemed confused and dejected. He wanted to search the house more but Art insisted that they leave immediately. Whoever the jeweler was, he had either lied about his inventory or Dave had misled him. After Art threatened to leave him there alone, Dave reluctantly followed him back to the car. On the way back to Valley View, Dave drove fast and nervously, weaving in and out of traffic as Art chastised Pettis for lying to him about the merch. And it was smack in the middle of that harangue that the red and blue strobe lights of a cruiser from the Denton County Sheriff’s Office graced the rearview mirror.
Art suspected that the deputies were pulling them over for a simple traffic violation, and he urged Dave to pull over and play it cool. But Pettis’s nerves were overloading, and when one of the deputies approached the driver’s side and asked him for his license and registration, he fumbled and failed to find them, then stammered as the deputy quizzed him as to where he was headed. Suspicious, the deputy requested to search the car—and Dave refused so adamantly that the cops went ahead and searched it anyway on the grounds that they had reason to believe there were drugs in the car.
They had placed the jeweler’s goods into an old bowling-ball bag they’d found in the house, and when the police opened it and saw the chains and stones their suspicions were immediately aroused. The bag was monogrammed with the jeweler’s name, which they used to look up his address. While Dave and Art waited, a unit was dispatched to the house, where officers quickly discovered signs of a break-in. The pair were arrested and taken to the Denton County Jail. A day later, they were both charged with burglary of a habitation—a first-degree felony that, under Texas’s infamously harsh penal code, can carry a maximum sentence of twenty years.
Dave had lied about the whole enterprise—a nervous novice, he’d invented the story about the insurance scam as a way to enlist someone with more experience to commit a genuine robbery (though Art’s familiarity with crime hadn’t helped much when it came to assaying the trustworthiness of a fellow criminal). The only truth was that the jeweler had indeed been the father of Dave’s girlfriend, but it turned out the two men hated each other, meaning the jeweler had every intention of pressing charges.
Having been caught with the stolen goods, Art knew that he had little chance of beating the rap. He could have attempted to cut a deal by testifying that Pettis had been the mastermind behind the burglary, but in his mind he was still in Bridgeport, where the only certain honor is resisting the opportunity to become a rat. Unhampered by any such code, Pettis told prosecutors that the burglary had been Art’s idea and agreed to testify against him, winning himself probation. On the advice of his court-appointed lawyer, Art pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary of a habitation.
On January 12, 1996, a Denton County judge sentenced Art to six years