Pay Phone Bandit

Hey true weirdos at the end of this episode stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. Law enforcement doesn't have the greatest track record for cleared cases when it comes to thieves in general and larceny in particular. Larceny just means stealing the property of a person or a business. Now larceny is different from burglary which always involves illegal entry and larceny is different from robbery which involves the use or threat of force to get that property.

Compared to burglary and robbery, larceny seems like the politest and quietest of crimes. And in the case of one genius from Ohio who went rogue, it was. So how did he mostly get away with stealing nearly a million dollars from one of the biggest and most powerful industries in America? Simple. He did it a nickel, a dime, and a quarter at a time.

True Weird Stuff. The very first was installed on a corner in Hartford, Connecticut in 1889 and the last was hauled off a corner in New York City on May 25, 1992. For more than a hundred years the payphone was a fixture on the streets of American towns and cities. A pop culture icon. The payphone has been immortalized.

We're talking novels like The Phone Box at the End of the World and the TV show The Wire. The phone booth was a staple in movies from the beginning. The 1938 film noir classic Angels with Dirty Faces had a scene where mobsters gunned down a man in a phone booth, the wrong man as it turned out, trapped in what would become his glass coffin, sprayed with bullets.

Very dramatic stuff. Loosely based on this real-life gangland killing, Vincent Mad Dog Cole was a member of the notorious Dolch-Schultz gang in the 1920s and early 1930s. Cocky and insubordinate, Cole and Schultz clashed and eventually Cole and his brother struck out on their own, becoming Schultz's rival. That ended in February 1932 when Mad Dog stepped into a phone booth inside a drugstore.

Three of Schultz's gunmen burst through the door of the drugstore, blasting the phone booth and Mad Dog to smithereens. Gangsters discovered that they just loved a good phone booth death trap. Whitey Bulger shot a bar owner named Eddie Connors to death in 1975 while Connors was in a phone booth. Frank Piccolo, a lieutenant in the Gambino crime family, met his maker in a phone booth in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1981.

Hollywood had many uses beyond murder closet for phone booths and movies. If you've seen Hitchcock's The Birds, you've seen poor Tippi Hedren trapped in a phone booth by marauding and murderous seagulls. Rosemary's Baby has a brief claustrophobic phone booth scene where a pregnant Mia Farrow, who is trying very hard to deal with her bizarre neighbors and distant husband, while also trying to not give birth to the devil, pleads with her doctor to see her.

And behind Mia, we see a large man approach and block the door with his menacing bulk. Goodfellas offered up a twist. Robert De Niro's character is in a phone booth outside a diner when he gets the news that Joe Pesci's character has been whacked, shot point blank in the head. De Niro's character loses it in the phone booth, first smashing the handset over and over and then breaking down and weeping.

It's a perfect example of the strange way that phone booths were both public and private spaces. It wasn't all bullets and bloodshed for movie phone booths. There's the scene in Dumb and Dumber where a man keeps banging on the payphone door to get his turn, only to have the bad guy inside haul off and punch his face right through the glass.

What I would have, I could do to you, because you, and I'll hold on to this one, but that's not your problem, you didn't know. Get off the phone. Get off the phone. I'm sorry, Miss Andre, you were saying? And then there was the movie phone booth. Colin Farrell played a dishonest, sleazy publicist. Kiefer Sutherland played a malevolent train sniper.

Farrell makes the mistake of answering a phone that's ringing over and over in a booth on a hectic city street. The caller, Sutherland, holds him hostage in that glass box. I'm trying to help you, Stu, but you won't help yourself. What's the matter, Stu? You shot me! It's time you learned, Stu, deception can't go unrewarded.

What the f*** is deception? Are you in need of immediate police or medical response? You bugged the f***ing booth. That's what you knew. That's what you knew about Pam and me. You picked the wrong person to lie to. Look, I didn't pick you. There are so many songs that reference the pay phone, from artists like Bob Dylan and Jim Croce and Dr. Hook to Travis Tritt and Maroon 5.

You can't talk about pay phone songs without paying tribute to this 1965 blues classic from Johnny Maestro. It's called Phone Booth on the Highway. There's a phone booth on the highway, nearly ten miles from town. And I'm standing in the phone booth watching all that rain come down. I'm standing in the phone booth. Even now, more than 30 years after New York's last pay phone bit the dust, it's still iconic.

All the proof you need of that comes from Taylor Swift. An old school glass pay phone booth plays a big part in the video for Swift's Fortnite. Glass phone booths already feel like a charming relic from a different world. Because back then, you could be in a public place. But once you stepped into the booth and pulled the accordion door closed, it transformed.

That narrow glass closet became a tiny island of privacy. And the phone itself? Used to be you could buy a whole lot more with your coins than a few minutes of talk time. You could buy something that's gotten scarce in our world. Anonymity. That wasn't the inventor's original intention. His name was William Gray, the son of Scottish immigrants.

Gray was what you might call a classic tinkerer. His job as a precision metal worker paid the bills. But Gray was forever playing with one idea or another. He was a huge baseball fan. Gray invented the sand handled baseball bat, which he patented and then sold to Spalding. Next, he came up with a padded chest protector for catchers, which was quickly adopted by professional baseball teams.

Gray pulled this off while working at Pratt & Whitney, legendary for designing and manufacturing aircraft engines. Gray had so many clever ideas that he even managed to throw his bosses a bone with the invention of something called the Gray Belt Shafter. Pratt & Whitney showed their appreciation for this innovation in, well, belting and shafting by buying it outright from William Gray.

Gray's inventions leaned more practical than fanciful. He was a problem solver. And it just so happened that there was a real problem with the telephone. The kind of problem that shows you just how quickly the phone had become a business necessity and soon a necessity at home. What was missing was a convenient, easy option to bridge those two worlds.

A public telephone. The first public telephones in existence required human attendance. A person needing to make a call would visit a telephone pay station and pay a fee to make that call. Simple enough, unless there was no pay station anywhere near you. And there likely wasn't, since there was only a handful of those pay stations in operation.

Also, pay stations weren't open 24-7. Meaning customers had to follow the phone company's schedule instead of their own. Which was a problem for William Gray. Legend goes like this. Gray was out with his wife when she fell ill. Gray needed to call a doctor. He knocked on doors, a house, a factory, asking if he could maybe use their telephone.

And for whatever reason, all his pleas were denied. Gray's wife ultimately recovered. But the experience got the wheels in his busy brain spinning. The challenge came in making an automated public telephone. How to collect the fee and activate the call without a human attendant. Gray's first pass out, it sounds a little bit goofy.

He built a receiver with a box that covered the mouthpiece. Insert a coin, and the box slid away. Now there were at least two problems with that. One, it was just a recipe for mechanical malfunction. But the phone company wasn't too worried about that. Second, once the little box slid away, the user could make multiple calls on that one coin.

And this worried the phone company very much. So Gray started over, and eventually he landed on the solution. He crafted a little device that would ring a bell when a coin was deposited. A human operator would hear that bell. You've seen human operators in old movies. And would then connect the call. By 1891, the Gray Telephone Pay Station Company was booming.

That first pay phone he installed on that corner in Hartford was just the beginning. Gray's telephones were rapidly spreading across America. Sometimes tucked into cabinets, sometimes tacked to posts. And tinkerer that he was, Gray never stopped trying to improve on the invention. He filed patent after patent. And telephone companies enthusiastically embraced Gray's pay phone.

Because they were giddy over all the money they saved by not having human attendants at every pay station. When William Gray died in 1903, there were 81,000 pay phones in the United States. His pay phone idea was a massive success. Too bad that Gray didn't live long enough to see just how massive. Because by 1999, there were 2 million pay phones scattered across the country.

And Gray's invention turned out to be a real money maker for the telephone companies. In 1999 alone, those 2 million pay phones raked in $2.5 billion in revenue. That's billion with a B. Most people who used pay phones on the regular probably never gave much thought to just how profitable they were. And that's not because they were any more dull-witted or law-abiding than people today.

It's more like they were busy being grossed out by how filthy the handsets were. And how sooner or later, just about every phone booth reeked of urine. Of course, even if it did occur to them to steal the pay phones coins, it wasn't as simple as all that. The hopper holding the coins was behind a metal faceplate with a locking mechanism known only to the phone company.

Each phone could hold about 500 coins, a mix of quarters, nickels, and dimes. Which meant that the most you could score in a steal, if every coin was a quarter, was $125. And even if you could get to the coins, and the phone company was sure you could not, there was an awfully big risk to take for not much of a payoff.

The only way to make robbing pay phones make sense was to somehow find a way to quickly and quietly pick the coin box lock. Never gonna happen, said the phone company. And then it happened. Unless somebody gets lucky, he'll probably never get caught. He's well organized, he's smart, and he's not greedy. He only hits a few widely spaced spots each day.

He's always looking over his shoulder to see if there's a police car or a telephone company vehicle. That's Robert Cooper Rider. He worked in security for the Ohio Bell System. And he's talking about the pay phone bandit. The bandit's crime spree went down between 1981 and 1988, and covered nearly three dozen states. Which was extra annoying for the phone company, because remember, they had been convinced that the coin boxes on pay telephones were basically theft-proof.

Breaking into one would be noisy, messy, time-consuming. More trouble, they hoped, than any thief would think it might be worth. Before the bandit hit the scene, pay phone thieves typically just stole the whole phone, ripping it right off the wall. Which is tricky to pull off without attracting attention. Though, it happened a lot.

Hell, it's the rare month in America today where some yayhoo doesn't hitch a chain to an ATM and try to haul it off with a pickup truck. I guess any machine in a public space loaded with any amount of money is catnip to a crook. After all, even Bonnie and Clyde were known to rob gumball machines. But the bandit showed the phone company just how wrong they were about the security of their pay phones.

Because you know, for every successful enterprise, there's almost always a villain somewhere, figuring out how to unravel it. That's just one of our charms as a species. In this case, the villain was a middle-aged machinist from Ohio who liked western-style clothes and country music and race cars. He wore his hair in a ponytail and sported gold-rimmed glasses.

He was a married man. Nice guy. And according to the FBI, he was the only person in the entire United States capable of picking the locks on the 1.8 million pay phones in 1980s America. The bandit wasn't just smart, he was lucky too. By the time he figured out how to beat the phone company, that whole industry had been busted up and decentralized.

Meaning there was no longer just one phone company. The bandit was stealing a little bit at a time from all the phone companies, which spread their losses out. They did the math and figured it was cheaper to keep their old coin boxes in place and just hope that eventually the bandit would be caught. The FBI did the math too and decided that regardless of what the phone company thought, they were not cool with looking the other way as a multi-state crime spree unfolded.

The hunt was on. The law knew a few things about their culprit. He traveled along Interstate 40. He bought food at places like 7-Eleven, always paying in coins. He favored cheap motels, which he paid for with rolls of quarters, often checking in under the name James Bell, a little tip of the hat to the phone giant he targeted.

Ohio Bell was hit so hard that they refused to publicly admit the amount of money the bandit had taken. They were just relieved when the thief hit the road and headed south. Pay phones as far away as Arizona and California were soon under attack. Pay phone coin boxes at big sporting venues and racetracks and popular tourist attractions were easy and obvious targets.

Pay phones outside country and western bars had a way of coming up empty. Ditto for some of the pay phones strung along I-40. The frustrating part about it was this. Whoever this bandit was, he was able to take every literal dime from the phones without causing damage. In fact, the phone companies didn't even know they'd been robbed until employees tasked with collecting the coins from the phone booths discovered what was missing.

The coins, yes. But also the coin box itself. As in, their uncrackable, impenetrable coin box. Bell Laboratories had spent years developing the unbreakable lock. And now the bandit, with his five-year crime spree, was proving them wrong. Here's how the bandit did it. Beginning in the early 1980s, he began acquiring locks like those found on pay phones.

And over time, he machined a set of locksmith tools that enabled him to pick at least some of those locks. He seemed to know that different phone companies each use slightly different lock configurations. How he chose which lock or locks to specialize in, and what exactly his tools looked like, is something that has never been made public.

The bandit would enter a phone booth and slip one of his specialized tools into the thin margins around the phone's coin box. He was able to gauge whether the box was full enough to make breaking in worth his time. If the box was reasonably full, the bandit got to work. He carried his custom lock-picking tools in his pants pocket, concealed by the tail of the shirts he always wore untucked.

Once he cracked the lock, he was able to remove the metal faceplate concealing the coin box. The bandit then removed the entire coin box and stashed it away before reattaching the faceplate. The entire operation took about 15 minutes. And if necessary, the bandit simply tucked the phone's receiver between his ear and shoulder and pantomimed having a conversation.

And here's the genius part. The bandit had figured out how to take the money without disabling the telephone. Everything still worked just as it was meant to. The only evidence he left behind were the faintest scratch marks along the margins, the places where he had maneuvered his tools. And since the phone still functioned, there was no reason to suspect anything.

Depending on the payphone's location, it might be a week or two or even more before a telephone company worker might come along on their usual route to empty the coin box. What the worker would find is no coin box at all. And the bandit, long, long gone. Those faint scratches in the metal were the only thing that law enforcement had to work with.

Not that it did them much good. There was no scratched metal database to plug them into. No way of knowing what tools had made them, much less who was using those tools. TV shows and movies have conditioned us to expect big aha moments in crime solving. But sometimes even the cleverest crime is solved by the most basic police work.

That's where the lead the FBI needed came from. A good old fashioned, basic, confidential police informant in Ohio. As careful and cautious as the bandit seemed, he was still just a person. People get sloppy. Had the bandit bragged to a friend about cracking the phone company's locks? Did someone notice that the man had a suitcase full of loose change in his house?

The informer told the FBI that they might want to have a look at a guy named James Clark. Clark wasn't unknown to law enforcement. He'd been in trouble before. Big trouble. Back in the late 1960s, the U.S. Secret Service seized a printing press and $4.1 million worth of phony $100 bills in Ohio. At the time, it was the biggest bust of its kind in the history of the Secret Service.

Weirdly, the state of Ohio would continue to be a hotbed of counterfeit currency crooks for years to come. So when the feds raided a vacant storage building in Wellsville, Ohio, they found boxes of paper, ink, a photocopy camera, and an entire chunk full of paper cut to the exact size of U.S. currency. A visit to the Clinton, Ohio, home of one James Clark, age 28, revealed a printing press sitting on the back porch.

The press was huge, about half the size of a small car. Clark was promptly arrested, along with an attorney from Miami Beach named Joel Lee. Lee was allegedly the traffic manager for the counterfeiters, the guy in charge of unloading the planned $50 million in fake $10, $20, and $100 bills. Clark was accused of being the printer and the technician in the operation.

Akron police said that the plates used to print the counterfeit bills were produced from photographs of real $100 bills. The result was a near-perfect reproduction of legal U.S. currency, with the quality of the paper being the only potential giveaway that the bill was fake. Secret Service agent Albert E. Whitaker described the phony cash as passable, which was a testament to how finely machined the engraving plates were.

Their suspect, James Clark, was employed at a tool and dye shop in Akron. Clark's bond was set at $75,000, a number five times higher than the bond set for Louis J. Christian, the man charged with financing the entire scheme. This was no backyard meth lab. This was a big criminal operation. After they purchased the printer from a company in Cleveland in the summer of 1968, the counterfeiters set up shop at a farm in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, which proved to be an ideal location, until a car wreck near the farm brought state troopers.

Spook, the team, moved the printing press to that abandoned storage building in Wellsville, Ohio, and that's where the Secret Service broke the case wide open. By the end of January 1968, more than 30 people had been arrested in connection to this Ohio counterfeit ring. 22 were taken into custody and charged with conspiracy and possession of passing bogus currency.

At this point, it was suspected that over $100,000 worth of phony bills were still in circulation. This sparked a little bit of a counterfeit currency paranoia in the press, with news outlets all over the country putting out stories advising consumers how to spot a fake bill. Stories about the kind of paper used to print currency, about why American money isn't colorful like the money in other countries.

Counterfeiters were getting busted, and some of those reports sounded like something out of Prohibition. Like the shootout at a motel in Dayton, Ohio, where a Secret Service agent mistook a cop in plain clothes for a counterfeiter and shot him to death. Even the newspaper comics got in on the counterfeiting craze. The Little Orphan Annie comic strip ran a storyline featuring Daddy Warbucks outsmarting a ring of counterfeiters.

Banks began advertising check guarantee cards that no counterfeiter could duplicate. That was kind of a great big nothing, just a laminated ID. But consumers were now so worried about counterfeit everything that they jumped right at it. The penalties for passing fake bills could be steep. Prison time, lengthy probation.

The Feds had zero tolerance for counterfeiters. The head of the U.S. Secret Service in Los Angeles pointed out that the conviction rate for counterfeiters brought to trial was 97.1%. James Clark confessed to being part of the Ohio ring. The Feds claimed that Clark and an accomplice planned to sell $50 million in bogus bills through a contact they'd made in the European black market.

Clark was sentenced to three years in prison. Now, if Clark's brush with the law taught him anything, it was to always be looking over his shoulder. Because by the time cops were tipped that Clark might be their mysterious payphone thief, he disappeared, leaving his wife and a grown daughter behind in Akron. Deputies began staking out Clark's home on Friday, November 5th, 1985.

A search warrant was obtained the next day, and in a police raid of Clark's house trailer, they found tools, parts they believed came from telephone coin boxes, and most damning, pieces of a bell lock. Is this what the bandit had used to develop his lockpicking tools and practice his technique? Summit County, Ohio Sheriff's Department Chief Deputy Joseph Corita.

Just by the evidence gathered at the scene of each incident, it was clear there was the same modus operandi. I can't go into detail about that, but that's what it amounts to. The manner in which it's being done led law enforcement officials to believe it's the same individual doing the same thing in 32 states. And yet, two years later, police were still on the hunt for James Clark.

They had a handful of old photographs and a police artist sketch, based on an eyewitness description of a man loitering in a phone booth in California in summer 1984, a phone that turned out later to be missing its coin box. Clark himself, though, was on the loose. His low-key demeanor, relatively forgettable appearance, and the quiet efficiency of his methods made him a most frustrating ghost to law enforcement.

And his robbing coins from the rich telephone company made him a kind of folk hero Robin Hood to some. Clark even appeared not once but twice on TV's America's Most Wanted. Now, law enforcement in 30-plus states was on the lookout for the country music-loving payphone bandit, and Clark's multi-year run as a fugitive ended on a warm August afternoon in Los Angeles.

On Friday, August 26, 1988, FBI agents arrested James Clark at his home in the L.A. suburb of Buena Park. Ever the chill dude, Clark made no resistance, surrendering himself on the charge of unlawful flight from prosecution. At age 49, James Clark stood accused of stealing as much as $600,000 from the phone companies.

It was suspected the real number was closer to a million. That's a whole lot of nickels, dimes, and quarters. In November 1988, Clark agreed to plead guilty to the theft of $500 in coins from five payphones in Summit County, Ohio. In exchange for that guilty plea, Judge James Murphy agreed to drop two counts of receiving stolen property and to impose less than the 10-year max sentence for the crime.

The door was left open for the possibility of additional charges in Ohio, along with any of the other 32 states James Clark had operated in. It does seem like James Clark got off easy, but how? The phone company was not happy. They didn't like the plea deal in the first place, and to see Clark charged with stealing only $500 was infuriating.

The Chief Legal Counsel for Ohio Bell, Don Morrison, demanded that the whole book be thrown at Clark. Maximum sentence for the crime. But Chief Assistant Summit County Prosecutor Fred Zook was like, settle down. Zook said the state of Ohio spent a lot of time and money just getting Clark back to the Buckeye State, and they only had evidence to charge him for five thefts in Summit County.

Zook said the state was doing the best it could with what little it had on Clark. Remember Robert Cooperider, head of security for Ohio Bell? He was livid. And when Cooperider learned that Clark had been assigned a public defender because he could not afford to hire legal counsel, the man damn near lost his mind. We don't know what he did with the money.

A spokesman for Ohio Bell chimed in that it would be Bell customers and telephone users across America who would be making up the phone company's losses by paying higher bills. Not to be cynical about big corporate capitalism or anything, but you know damn well that those price hikes stayed hiked long after Bell recouped their losses a thousandfold.

You could almost say that James Clark did them a favor by giving them a reason to raise their fees. There's probably a name for this kind of opportunistic profit increase buried somewhere in the business school textbooks. Plus, the phone company had already been super embarrassed by Clark's ability to crack their uncrackable lock and steal from them for years.

Maybe all that public huffing and puffing and threatening to blow the house down was just Bell Corp's way of saving face. Because the last thing they wanted was detailed information about just how James Clark cracked those payphone coinboxes to go public. The phone companies were making billions of dollars on payphones and they very much wanted that to continue.

Even if they knew long before you did that mobile phones were coming. Even if the phone company itself couldn't predict just how dramatically mobile phones would disrupt their business and society as we know it. In 1990, James Clark went to trial in Columbus, Ohio on two counts of tampering and one count of theft. He was sentenced to three years in that case.

It didn't seem that any other states had much interest in pursuing Clark. Looks like that came down to simple math. The amount of money stolen in any given incident was small. Too small to justify the expense of an investigation and then extradition of James Clark. The fact that all these small thefts added up to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses to the phone company ended up being, I guess, the phone company's problem.

Take even the smallest step back now and look at James Clark. He was kind of a criminal mastermind if you think about it. Yeah, he got caught. The penalty wasn't all that severe. It seems like he was one of those guys plenty smart enough to win plain by the rules. But with a defiant streak that made him want to game the system instead.

And he did. Starting in 1968, when he skated with just a three-year prison sentence for the role he played in the biggest counterfeit bust in Secret Service history at the time. And again in 1988, when all the authorities could ring out of his interstate payphone crimepalooza was a handful of small charges in Summit County, Ohio.

Just like not all heroes wear capes, not all villains try to take over the world. Some, like James Clark, just get off on being smarter than their victim. Smarter in this case than a whole laboratory filled with brilliant Bell System engineers. Clark was a guy who stayed at Motel 6. The guy who made his meals from Slim Jims, Coke, and 7-Eleven burritos.

There was nothing flashy about him. Whatever he did with all those coins, he did it quietly and discreetly. And he would have gotten away with it completely if not for that one police informer who traded Clark's secret to get himself a break. In 2012, at age 72, James Clark died suddenly and unexpectedly at his home. His obituary proudly identified him as the Coinbox Bandit and stated that he would be deeply missed by Kathy, his wife of 52 years, two daughters, five grandchildren, and 11 great-grandchildren.

In 2012, there were still 243,487 payphones in operation then, pulling in $362 million for the phone companies. The payphone had come a long way from the days where human attendants did the dialing, where human operators connected the call. And even though they say the payphone is extinct, that the very last one was removed in 2017, that's not entirely true.

Mobile phones made the payphone obsolete for many of us, but not all of us. Payphones are still critical for some people, the kind of people who live on the margins in a kind of social invisibility, people in extreme poverty, people with no housing. These are the people for whom an accessible public telephone is a lifeline.

There's a group called PhilTel in Philadelphia. It's a collective of amateurs, engineers, artists, and volunteers who are working to install payphones in the city. Payphones minus the pay part. These phones allow users to call anywhere in the United States at no charge. PhilTel was inspired by Futel out of Portland, Oregon.

Futel, founded by a former software engineer, is dedicated to preserving and providing free public telephone access. When you think about it, there are so many places in this country where a mobile phone is useless. Places where cell service is spotty or non-existent, like national parks, for example. Then there are disasters and weather events that disrupt signal.

Hurricanes are a great example. When cell service fails, a simple payphone can be a lifesaver. And when you look at it that way, it's encouraging to learn that there actually are still working payphones dotted around the country. The FCC estimates there may be as many as 100,000 payphones out there. Google Maps politely disagrees, showing only 307.

Rumor has it that one of those is tucked inside the Delta Terminal at the airport in Greensboro, North Carolina. And you'll find working versions all throughout Disneyland. James Clark really did beat the system at its own game. Sure, he did a little time, but not much. Pity the poor telephone company. Clark picked their special lock and stole about a million dollars, and don't you know all they ever wanted to do was just help people?

The welding force that joins the men to a nation of neighborhoods, communicating with each other and with every country of the world. And now whole generations of kids will be born into a world where a glass phone booth in a movie looks as old-fashioned to them as talking on a wired handset on a phone attached to a kitchen wall looks to us.

They'll stumble across a YouTube clip of Billy Ray Cyrus winning the American Music Award for Achy Breaky Heart and be like, what's this weirdo even talking about? But tonight this award is from you, the fans, and as far as I'm concerned, to those people who don't like Achy Breaky Heart, here's a quarter, call someone who cares.

But no matter what happens, the payphone will always be with us in stories and movies and TV shows and songs, including this one, considered by many to be the greatest song about a payphone ever written. Operator, oh, would you help me place this call? You see the number on the matchbox holding faded. She lives in L.A. with my ex-old best friend Craig.

A guy she said she knew well, sometimes hated. But that's the way they say it goes. Well, let's forget all that and give me the number if you can find it So I can call just to tell him I'm fine and to show I've overcome the blows, I can take it well. Only wish my words could just convince myself that it just wasn't real.

But that's not the way it feels. No, no, no, no, no. That's not the way it feels. Operator, oh, would you help me place this call? Next time on True Weird Stuff. It is considered one of the most horrifying reality TV shows ever made. An experiment of such cruelty and insanity that it's hard to believe it's real. It inspired the Truman Show.

And we've got that for you on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talent, Kary "Doc" Bowser. So Sherry, I was familiar with this story. I did know who James Clark was because I watched America's Most Wanted. And it seemed like the kookiest, the kookiest thing. This guy's stealing this little amount of money from each phone booth.

And yet it's enough that it was causing. Well, you said in some estimates over a million dollars. Yeah, yeah. And he the genius of this crime was the way that he spread it out. So each theft was small because the maximum you could get in any phone was $125. And we all know that not every coin box was stuffed full of quarters, right?

So law enforcement guesstimated that maybe $100 would be the average peak score. And if you look at legal statutes, and they vary from place to place, but if you look at legal statutes, that's a misdemeanor, right? Stealing $100. And this was, remember, that's why I pointed out at the very beginning of the episode, this was larceny.

No breaking and entering. And no force of threat. No threat or threat of force or any of it, right? You're just stealing coins out of a phone box. But what the genius part came was he went interstate, which is how the FBI found him. But all those separate jurisdictions then had to decide, all those separate phone companies, Bell of Oklahoma, Bell of Arizona, Bell of Kansas, Bell of Tennessee, Ohio, all of it, each separate phone company in each separate jurisdiction had their own little pile of losses, right?

And the state prosecutors in these jurisdictions had to decide, all right, well, Arizona Bell says the guy got $800. The cost of investigating that and then getting him extradited to Arizona and the cost of having him stand trial was significantly higher than $800. And what have we seen as true crime fans? What have we seen, Max, over and over and over again in even cases of serial murder?

If you can get a guilty verdict in one, you'll take it. How many times have we seen that play out? I couldn't help but think about something, though. As you were saying, that he lost three years of his life in the counterfeiting and then three years of his life to prison in this. If he had earned just $50,000 a year, that's $300,000 he could have made doing a legitimate job.

And it's like crooks got a crook. You know what I mean? He's one of those guys. He's one of those guys, you know, that no matter what happens, they're trying to find a way to get around. And if you had taken that amount of ingenuity and effort, they probably could have made that amount of money or more in the regular world.

But I guess there's no thrill to that. And that's part of this for them, too, for him. He was, I mean, you know, he was a really smart guy. He was a really, really smart guy. And I think for people that have that wiring that we're talking about, yeah, you could use your, you could give your genius to the man. But isn't it more fun?

Isn't it more fun to beat the man? I mean, as soon as Bell Laboratories announced that the lock on the payphone coin box was unpickable, James Clark was like, all right, I'm going to need you to hold my beer because I'm going to show you that it's not. This was a guy that had already in his early 20s gotten himself involved in a giant counterfeiting operation.

Like, let me tell you, I mean, I gave so much detail about that and I could have gone on and on. But so, for example, that case got busted open when security at I think it was JFK in New York caught a guy with a briefcase with over four million dollars in counterfeit hundreds. That's how that case got busted open. And the Secret Service is who investigates counterfeiting operations.

And, you know, it turned out the single biggest bust in the history of the Secret Service up to date was the one that James Clark was involved in. And Max, you would have been a kid when this obsession with counterfeit currency hit the mainstream news cycles. Yeah, I don't remember that. It was everywhere. Like, I can remember being very young and sitting with my grandparents at their kitchen table and they would be like, you know, snapping a bill and holding it up to the light because it was all over the news that, you know, this counterfeiting thing was going down.

And that lasted from – he got busted for the counterfeit crime in 1968. The media was still chewing the juice off that. Well, a decade later into the late 1970s, it was – the country was obsessed with counterfeiting. And for some crazy reason, Ohio was like ground zero for counterfeiting. It is kind of crazy, isn't it?

It's nutty. Like, shootouts and – I mean, just one after – like, you just go ahead and do a simple search on Ohio and counterfeit currency. Like, it was nuts. It was nuts. And can I just say something a little bit about pay phones? You haven't lived until you've had to make a phone call. You had to make in an enclosed phone booth where somebody had urinated and whatever is on the receiver is unidentifiable muck.

And now you have to put this close to your precious face and talk into it because there was a smell that went with it too. And if you had to make a long-distance call, you had to have a handful of change and you had to call the operator and the operator could tell what kind of coin it was by a code they would get, like whatever the noise would make, so that they would know, OK, you've put in $2.50.

That will buy you three minutes of a long-distance phone call, for instance. I mean, wow. And you think about how much you were spending on it too. I mean, long-distance phone calls were expensive. It was crazy how much money the phone companies were making on pay phones. When I came across, because I went into FCC, I mean, I looked everywhere.

So is this number real? Because $2.50 billion seemed crazy to me. But you know what? There were no cell phones back then. And you needed to make a call and you weren't at home or at work. You were on a pay phone. And one of the greatest tributes to the pay phone ever was the TV show The Wire. All the drug dealers, all the criminals in that TV show used pay phones.

And actually, the law enforcement went to the creator of The Wire, David Simon, and expressed some concern about how much he seemed to know about that very shadowy world. And so The Wire held stuff back that they knew. They didn't write certain – isn't this fascinating to you? It is. That they were careful about certain things because the law was like, you got to – like, what? What are you all doing over here?

So The Wire is an amazing – if you watch it, if you binge it now and you've never seen it, it's time travel because the pay phone is critical. Eventually, pagers came in. Right. But pagers sent you to – A pay phone. A pay phone. I had a phone number. So I had moved into this apartment. And at one time, pay phones, the last four digits always began with a nine, right?

And so my new phone number began with a nine. So I would get phone calls all hours of the day and night. Because people were looking to make drug deals. And they'd be like – I bet. Hello? Is Pookie there? Is this Pookie? Right? Like, it's crazy. And it's such a cultural icon. And I'm super fascinated with the way that the phone booth was this private space in the middle of the public.

And because the walls were glass, you were fully on display. But once you were inside there, do you remember? You'd close the door and it would block out a ton of street noise. Right. Or mall noise or whatever. And it felt like this tiny, magical, private space. And you were on full display to the world. It's just – it's a fascinating little artifact.

And each of them had – they had phone books in it. They had a white pages and a yellow pages. Yeah. Like in these little plastic containers that you had to flip up to open. And they were all gross as hell. Everything about it was gross. I can tell you. I don't miss that at all. I remember being a little girl. And, you know, I'd go with my grandmom to the grocery store pre-cell phone.

And she might, for whatever reason, need to make a phone call. You know, maybe call home to see if somebody needed something or whatever it was. And we would go into the phone booth and my grandmother would say, Never let this – she'd point to the mouth part. Never let it touch your face or you'll get boils. Wait, what?

Well, there might have been some truth to that. She wasn't wrong. Here's what I kept on thinking, though. So he gets all these coins. How do you launder those coins? Because the only place then – the CoinStar didn't exist. Not then. You'd have to do it to a bank. You'd have to go to a bank and do it. Here's what's really interesting.

So while I was writing this episode, I was working on it. We had a family thing. And one of the twins who just turned – one of Kevin's children from his first marriage with my sister wife, Russell and Zane are twins. They had just had a big birthday, turned 27. And I'm talking to Russell's girlfriend, who's maybe 25. And she's like, but how come he didn't get caught buying everything with quarters by the security cameras?

Oh, child of the future. Because there weren't security cameras everywhere back then. Back then – and you should have seen her eyes. I was like, back then, you could leave your house and just go buck wild. And unless there was an eyewitness, you probably got away with it. Because now, every single one of those phone booths would have a camera in it.

He would not have been able to get away with it. Of course, he probably would have found some dodge to get around the camera then. Because he was a rogue genius. So to answer your question, how did he launder the money? Well, clearly, he did not launder – we'll say the low estimate, $600,000 buying Slim Jims at 7-Eleven.

But again, back then in the 1980s, it would not raise eyebrows for a guy to pay for $40 worth of groceries with wrapped rolls of quarters. Would it, Max? No, it wouldn't. And the grocery store would be glad to get the coins because that way they don't have to get it from the bank. It really wouldn't. I can remember as a kid, my pop-up had – he would save his change and then roll it in those little paper sleeves.

And it was a big deal for my pop-up to give each of us a roll of dimes that we could spend at the park that day or whatever. There was no Coinstar to your point. And so if you had a bunch of coins, you rolled them up and you spent them. It was a different world. It was a very different world. And James Clark moved through that world nearly invisible.

He was just one of those people that you did not look at twice. He paid for motels and gas and food in coins. When he was home in Ohio, he'd go to the corner market and he'd buy a couple of bags of groceries and he'd pay with rolled sleeves of coins. And nobody thought anything of it because he wasn't going over to the local Chevy dealership and buying a truck with quarters, was he?

No. No. Because he was a smart guy and he knew how to fly under the radar. And we don't know what his spending habits were like. But don't you believe that despite the fact that he went to prison and said he didn't have any money for a regular lawyer, they needed a public defender. Don't you think he had that money squirreled away somewhere?

I will take that belief to the grave. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure he did. And he lived – we have this idea. Again, TV and movies have really shaped the way we imagine the world. We have this idea that everybody that gets their hands on a little bit of money does what the Loomis Fargo thieves did. They buy a mansion and a jet ski and sports cars.

But there are a lot of people like James Clark who steal from the company they work for. Max and I worked with a woman who quietly embezzled for 20-some years from the company we all worked for. And they didn't prosecute. No. She was allowed to retire. The money was gone because she had been quietly spending the money all those years.

Family would go. She embezzled. How much was it, Max? It was tens of thousands of dollars. It was. It was a lot of money. It was well over $100,000. Yeah. The family would go to the beach for a week at the summer. They would pay for their rental with a check or a credit card. But all the treats and spending money and groceries, you paid for that in cash.

So we see people embezzling from workplaces and churches and a handful get caught because, again, the crime clearance rate for larceny is in the basement. It's like less than 20% of larceny crimes are cleared, meaning they're solved and there's a conviction, right? And that's Department of Justice statistics. That's not me staying up late watching Ancient Aliens.

That's DOJ data. So if you're clearing less than 20% of cases, that means for every five people that are committing larceny, only one is getting caught. And I think that because a lot of these people that take it 100 bucks here, 100 bucks there, which is what James Clark did, that money gets funneled right into their expenses, right?

The cost of just getting a meal and a place to sleep and they don't go hog wild with it. James Clark would never have been caught. This would be the DB Cooper of the telephone industry if not for that police informer. He would never have gotten caught. Yeah, probably not. And you wonder who's the guy or gal, who is the person who ratted him out?

Because he probably would have gotten away with it. I tried to find that, but it's confidential. And that informer never came forward and said I was the one, right, that I know of. I couldn't find it. Because you've got to figure at some point along the line, you know, he's going to continue on and keep doing it. Why shouldn't he?

He's been successful at it. It's interesting to know that Bell Labs developed those boxes. People might not know this, but Bell Labs back in the day when AT&T was all one big company, they were one of the foremost innovators of technology in this country for a host of things. Lasers, all kinds of things came out of Bell Labs.

And so when they said Bell Labs developed it, you went, oh, well, say no more. If they say you can't get in, then you can't get in. I mean these were brilliant engineers. These were brilliant thinkers that worked. I mean the best of the best went to work for Bell Labs and then AT&T, like Max's dad. Like the best of the best were recruited for those jobs.

I think James Clark would have gotten away with it without the confidential informer for two reasons. One is he just was so low key and it was petty larceny times a gazillion, right? But here's the other thing. James Clark's two crimes were the kind of crimes that are really, really embarrassing. So the counterfeit case.

Do you know how hard it was to find once the bust was made and they had some people under arrest? They had James and they had the Miami-based attorney and they had Louis G. Christian, who is the guy that put up the front money to buy the printing press and all the ink and paper. Once they had those people arrested and then they got like 30 people that had been tasked with getting this fake money into the system, passing bills at gas stations and stores, the case fell off the face of the earth because the Secret Service was really embarrassed because they had just been bested by what they considered some real rednecks in the Buckeye State.

Like they could not believe when they found that printing press on the back porch of Clark's house, they could not believe that these people that they thought were just ignorant could beat them at their own game. They were so embarrassed because the United States currency system, of all things, needs to be infallible.

We can't be having this nonsense. It undermines faith in the entire system. The Secret Service was mortified. It took so much digging to find all the details on how those cases were prosecuted out and I think it was intentional, like a little bit of a news blackout once the arrests were made because the government was embarrassed.

It's bad PR. It's bad PR. So that was James' first brush with the law and he got in trouble and three years in prison is no joke, right? But three years in prison for that, well, not that much and then it disappeared like it never happened. Then he does this to the phone companies after they had been busted up and transformed from a monopoly into the chaos that followed.

But he's so embarrassed the phone companies who believed that they had an uncrackable system and they couldn't stop him and they couldn't catch him and then they couldn't prosecute him that that too very quickly and quietly went away and he lived out the rest of his life. The picture in his newspaper obituaries in Ohio is hysterical.

He looks like what would happen if Guy Fieri and Colonel Sanders had a baby and gave the baby meth. That is what he looks like in his obituary picture. Here is what I think about him because crooks got a crook. He came out of prison. He started another scam. I don't know what it was, but he found another scam and he did it and never got caught until his death.

I completely believe because I cannot believe he went. Well, I've learned my lesson now. I can't believe I completely believe that. And I think that somewhere I don't know where somewhere was a barrel of change. And it's really easy to reach into a barrel of coins and fill your pockets and spend it without drawing attention.

As long as you don't go try to buy a car with nickels. Who who max in any retail environment other than rolling their eyes because you're a pain in the ass. Who is going to question you if you if you buy $17 worth of something with coins? Sherry, I think there are some car dealers, maybe used car dealers that have the corner lot.

You know, I think they would accept nickels for payment of an automobile. I'm just saying maybe back in the day. Yeah. Back in the day when things were a little looser, couldn't track this stuff. There are a lot of like jokes and memes that go around on the Internet about like, you know, we feel sorry for Gen Z and Gen Alpha because they'll never know the thrill of walking out of the house.

All right, mom, I'll be home in time for dinner. And then your parents had no idea what you were up to. You could literally be riding an escaped tiger in the woods near the dump. It's true. Your parents wouldn't know. No. Right. You had you had we were like as a Gen X kid. We were feral. We had. Oh, my God. So I had distracted, neglectful parents.

I had so much freedom. Nobody knew where I was. Nobody asked or I think really even cared what we were up to. But kids now Gen Z, Gen Alpha millennials, they live in a surveillance state. They live in a world where when they were kids and got their first cell phones, their parents put stuff like Life 360 on it and track their every move as though they were, you know, terrorists and the mom and dad were Interpol.

We it happened so swiftly, but so gradually at the same time that we don't even realize the degree to which we're like radio tagged livestock. We all know where we all are and what we're doing at all times. And there's cameras everywhere. But for James Clark, he enjoyed the last days of the frontier. And he got away with it.

I don't care that he went to prison. They never recovered the money. They never got it back. And the reason that you didn't hear about that, that that wasn't a bigger deal is because the phone company didn't want you to think that it was that easy to steal them, steal them blind. So just like the counterfeiting story quietly went away.

The same thing happened with the payphone bandit. It quietly went away. And it wasn't too long after he got caught. That mobile phones, which have been in development since World War Two. Right. Or maybe even a little sooner. Right, Max? Yeah. Began hitting the scene. First, it was a bag phone. And then, you know, it was these big, heavy cell phones.

Pretty soon it was smartphones and then burnt and burner phones have been around. And once you have burner phones, you know, you didn't need pagers and payphones. But the case. So before we wrap this up, I want to touch on what's happening in Philly and Oregon and in some other places until you've needed a phone and you don't have signal.

You don't know how much you would appreciate a payphone. There's a place where I go hiking and there is no cell phone service there. So when you get to the parking lot of that park, there is a payphone. I've taken a picture of it and posted it before because it's so wild to see it. But that's the reason that it's there.

There is no cell phone service in this spot. A lot of the national parks, which, as you know, tinfoil hat time. I think there's all kinds of shenanigans in America's national parks. You know, you're not allowed to fly drones. Yeah, OK. For the wildlife. But there's other reasons. And there's no cell phone coverage. And we spend a lot of time.

My husband and I spend a lot of time in national parks because we're big N.P. fans. And there I mean, you before we go in, we text the kids. We're heading in. Let's go to the dark side of the dark side of the moon. So when my youngest daughter was little, little, she had a friend for a sleepover and they wanted to go for a walk.

So I was like, all right, well, let's go. We'll go get frozen yogurt. Let's walk to the frozen yogurt place. And we're walking and walking. And suddenly the girl that Kermia's friend let out a scream and I whipped around and she was like, is that is that is that a payphone? And it was like a restaurant, like a crappy old restaurant that was closed with a busted, janky old payphone right in the parking lot.

And I was like, well, I don't think it works. But, yeah, it's a payphone. She goes, will you take my picture next to it? I've never seen one for real. And I took her picture. I took this kid's picture standing next to this busted out payphone. And and and then Kermia was like, mom, did you ever talk on a payphone? Oh, I did, honey.

I did. I tell I found out electricity had been invented. I took a payphone call. They were fascinated. And they were like, could you put paper money in? No, you had to have you had to have coins. And then they wanted to know how long you could talk for like a quarter. And I have no idea how long you stay able to talk for a quarter.

They just thought they were so sad that they couldn't have the experience of talking on a payphone. When I was in England, what you would do is you would buy like a little a plastic card and the card will be worth, let's say, 20 pounds. OK, and then you would take that card. Not a plastic, it was a cardboard and you would stick it in and the payphone would know how much money was on it and just take a little bit off of it.

And then they would print on there how much was left on it, which I thought was the coolest thing. So cool. Well, in England, there's a project. Their phone boxes are red. They don't have the glass booths that we do. They have those iconic red ones. And as they go defunct, people are turning them, people are buying them from, I guess, the government and turning them into like art projects, which is a really cool idea.

It is. And I do love because I think people who are unhoused, people living on the margins, they need access to communication. And burner phones aren't free and cell phone accounts require all sorts of things, including a fixed address. Right. I mean, all kinds of complications. And we just passed a law in this country that criminalizes homelessness, which in a nutshell means we're just complete jerk offs, because the answer to homelessness is not more jail for the cost of incarcerating a homeless person.

We could have housed them and and help them get back on their feet and back into the workforce and into the act of living that human beings are on this planet for. But a person who is enough about that, a person who is unhoused needs access to a phone. This is what makes me crazy. All right. Rant incoming. Grant incoming.

Here's what makes me crazy. I'll listen to people go, well, why don't they just get a job? OK, well, heads up. When you apply for a job, they ask you for some things like an address and a phone number. Yeah. And if you don't have those things, your chances of getting hired just drop dramatically. Right. So we need to be thinking more humanely.

And instead of allowing the wheels of capitalism to grind us all into dust and then suck the marrow out of our bones, we might be going, hmm, with big Wall Street investment companies buying up all the housing in America and making it completely unaffordable, even for people who have two jobs. Maybe we don't need to send homeless people to jail.

Maybe we need to rethink the whole frickin problem and the number of people who are unhoused, unhoused, who are trying to go to work still every day. And maybe they're sleeping rough on the street or in their car and they're still showing up for a job every day. That could be you, because now I've got my social tinfoil hat off, social worker hat on.

Most of us, most of us are three tragic bad breaks away from complete ruin. Well, and not to get into a whole thing about homelessness, but there's no simple answer for that. There's no simple answer as to why people are homeless. It's not as simple as get a job. When I hear people say that, it makes me really crazy. This brings out my social worker fury, and when my social worker fury collides with my filly girl temper and my tinfoil hat conspiracy mind, it's dangerous.

But there is no simple solution for homelessness, and there are a lot of people out there that are such assholes who seem to think that they're three good breaks away from being a billionaire. No, son, that is not going to happen for you. There is not one person listening to me today that will die a billionaire. The odds of that are so catastrophically astronomically stacked against you, but the chances of you ending up ruined, that's a little more, a lot more realistic.

All it takes is one car accident, a catastrophic medical diagnosis, the loss of a job, and then things start snowballing and snowballing and snowballing, and now there you are with no house to go to and no phone and some dick yelling at you to go get a job. It's just not that simple, and so I love what I'm seeing with PhilTel and Futel where they're saying, all right, it's a complex problem, and it's going to take a lot of different solutions coming together, but we can start with giving these human beings who are no different from you and me.

These human beings, these souls walking around in these meat suits, we can give them the dignity of access to communication. We can give them free public wired telephones, and that's good stuff. That's an example of people who say it's the parable of the starfish. These people are on the beach, and there's a gazillion starfish, and the feeling of, oh, my God, where to even begin makes you hopeless, and then you start picking them up one at a time and throwing them in the ocean.

Yeah, you didn't save all of them, but for the ones you saved, it mattered, and so for these people in Philly and Oregon and other places around the country, yeah, you're not solving the problem, but man, what you're doing matters, and for the family and the surviving relatives and now grown great-grandchildren of the payphone bandit, we know Pawpaw had a barrel full of coins, and we ain't telling anybody.

We're not going to rat you out, okay? We're not going to rat you out. Nope. Lip sealed, throw away the key. Thank you for joining us for this episode of True Weird Stuff. You know, Max, I love when a criminal is not sloppy and a criminal stays tight. You know I respect that game so much. Next week on the show, we will be talking about one of the craziest things that has ever happened in the history of television, and it was a Japanese reality game show, and you just won't believe what they did to their contestant.

You won't believe that it was legal or humane or sane what they did to this man, and I can't wait for you to hear this story. That's on the next True Weird Stuff. Thanks, y'all, for listening. You're the reason we make it. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner, and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff.

Hit our website, trueweirdstuff.com, for show notes and photos and videos when we have it, and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweety.

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