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The first time this occurred to me was about 9:30 on a weekday morning when I was summoned to the office of the Roosevelt principal. I had never visited the principal’s office before. Katz was there already, in the outer waiting room. He was often there.

“What’s up?” I said.

But before he could speak I was called into the inner sanctum. The principal was sitting with a plainclothes detective who introduced himself as Sergeant Rotisserie or something like that. He had the last flattop in America.

“We’ve uncovered a ring of counterfeit driver’s licenses,” the sergeant told me gravely and held up one of my creations.

“A ring?” I said and tried not to beam. My very first foray into crime and already I was, single-handedly, a “ring.” I couldn’t have been more proud. On the other hand, I didn’t particularly want to be sent to the state reform school at Clarinda and spend the next three years having involuntary soapy sex in the showers with guys named Billy Bob and Cletus Leroy.

He passed the license to me to examine. It was one I had done for Katz (or “Mr. B. Bopp,” as he had rather rakishly restyled himself). He had been picked up while having a beer-induced nap on the grassy median of Polk Boulevard the night before and a search of his personal effects at the station house had turned up the artificial license, which I examined with polite interest now. On the back it said “Bankers Trust” and beneath that was my father’s name and address—something of a giveaway to be sure.

“That’s your father, isn’t it?” said the detective.

“Why, yes it is,” I answered and gave what I hoped was a very nice frown of mystification.

“Like to tell me how that happened?”

“I can’t imagine,” I said, looking earnest, and then added: “Oh, wait. I bet I know. I had some friends over last week to listen to records, you know, and some fellows we’d never seen before crashed in on us, even though it wasn’t even a party.” I lowered my voice slightly. “They’d been drinking.”

The detective nodded grimly, knowledgeably. He’d been to this slippery slope before.

“We asked them to leave, of course, and eventually they did when they realized we didn’t have any beer or other intoxicants, but I just bet you while we weren’t looking one of them went through my dad’s desk and stole some checks.”

“Any idea who they were?”

“I’m pretty sure they were from North High. One of them looked like Richard Speck.”

The detective nodded. “It starts to make sense, doesn’t it? Do you have any witnesses?”

“Oom,” I said, a touch noncommittally, but nodded as if it might be many.

“Was Stephen Katz present?”

“I think so. Yes, I believe he was.”

“Would you go out and wait in the outer room and tell Mr. Katz to come in?”

I went out and Katz was sitting there. I leaned over to him and said quickly: “North High. Crashed party. Stole checks. Richard Speck.”

He nodded, instantly understanding. This is one of the reasons why I say Stephen Katz is the finest human being in the world. Ten minutes later I was called back in.

“Mr. Katz here has corroborated your story. It appears these boys from North High stole the checks and ran them through a printing press. Mr. Katz here was one of their customers.”

He looked at Katz without much sympathy.

“Great! Case solved!” I said brightly. “So, can we go?”

“You can go,” said the sergeant. “I’m afraid Mr. Katz will be coming downtown with me.”

So Katz took the rap, allowing me to keep a clean sheet, God bless him and keep him. He spent a month in juvenile detention.

THE THING ABOUT KATZ was that he didn’t do bad things with alcohol because he wanted to, he did them because he needed to. Casting around for a new source of supply, he set his sights higher. Des Moines had four beer distribution companies, all in brick depots in a quiet quarter at the edge of downtown where the railroad tracks ran through. Katz watched these depots closely for a couple of weeks and realized that they had practically no security and never worked on Saturdays or Sundays. He also noticed that railroad boxcars often