Heist (2021) s01e04 Episode Script

Do you think I'm made of money? ♪
Do you think I make it grow? ♪
Think I own a cash box, mother? ♪
Tell your baby no, no no ♪
You ever been bitch-slapped
by a couple hundred grand?
Six million dollars in $100 bills.
One million dollars in $50 bills.
And $400,000 in $20 bills.
Seven point four mil.
It felt great.
We counted it and were like, "Wow."
New car smell?
Well, you got that new money smell.
Jeffrey asks me
if he can take a picture of the money.
I said, "Are you crazy?"
Jeffrey went crazy,
talking about the stuff he was gonna buy.
"Hey, whoa, whoa!"
"We ain't buying nothing, man."
"Just keep your mouth shut
and we're gonna lay low."
Do you think it grows on trees? ♪
Yeah, do you think it grows on trees? ♪
Miami's a beautiful city.
It's paradise, people love to come here.
The sun, the beaches and so forth.
But we also have our troubled side.
So, it's a paradise,
but it's also a dangerous place.
That's where we come in.
You commit a robbery here,
Miami-Dade County,
we're coming for you.
- Fifty-six stay?
- Affirmative, 56 is the
Call comes in of a robbery that had
occurred at Miami International Airport
in the warehouse area.
And at first, I thought, "Warehouse area?"
"What the hell could they"
"What's there to steal?"
I'm the first detective on the scene.
The victims start telling me,
"They took money."
I'm like, "What are you talking about?"
It was sitting right in front of me,
it's a pallet full of money.
And I go, "This is money?"
They go, "Yeah."
A wooden pallet full of money.
It's ridiculous kind of money.
Movie stuff.
When you have a case like this,
if you screw it up,
someone's gonna take
a real giant turd on you. Okay?
After the robbery
I didn't know how to tell my wife
because I knew she wasn't gonna be happy.
I remember
getting home, and I see my brother,
he's walking out with,
like, a bag. Like a gym bag.
Laughing.
I start to open the bag
'cause I don't know what's in it.
He's like, "Don't touch it."
I actually got scared
and started to panic and frantic,
and I was like, "Oh, no."
She asked what I did
and I said I stole it.
I couldn't believe
he would do something like that.
You can't just steal $7,000,000
from the government
and think they're not really
gonna try to find you.
But
I just couldn't, you know,
get him in trouble and turn him in.
A part of me wanted to,
because I didn't want
to get in trouble myself.
He was my happiness.
So I didn't need the money
to make me happy.
I already had everything that I wanted.
The only thing that was missing out
of our happiness was to have a baby.
I've seen in movies and TV shows,
money can't be buried
underground for too long
because it rots due to the humidity.
I got plastic PVC tubes.
I put the money in there,
the bags of money,
and I added baby powder,
because it absorbs the humidity.
I stashed it in the house.
And then, later on, got a safe.
All that money, you never know.
People get killed
for a lot less than that.
My closet, I had, like, a board.
You could remove it
and there was, like, a gap,
so I put all the money in there
and put the board back up.
And went back to work.
I just went to work
$5,000 in my pocket.
Why? I don't know.
I guess the feeling, man,
just having the money.
It was spoken. "Hey, nothing crazy.
We're gonna lay low, nine to five."
There are gonna be a lot
of people looking for this.
I committed the robbery on Sunday
and went to work on Monday
like any other day.
But instead of working
70 hours with overtime,
I did a bit less, 50, 60 hours
I didn't buy anything for myself,
I didn't buy jewelry,
or flash money, or buy luxury items.
Nobody had a reason to suspect me.
When I arrived, uniform
officer's already been on the scene.
I was told that one
of the subjects had dropped a bandana.
We had it sent for DNA analysis.
We were really hoping the DNA
would come back on the bandana,
that's gonna be our first lead.
In a case of this magnitude,
the amount of money that was taken,
I knew that I would
have to contact the FBI.
My initial analysis was
I had before me a major heist.
Even on other Brinks jobs, it's not
every day that we have $7.4 million
in cash taken in a few minutes.
We're used to loads of cargo
that were stolen from the port,
a million, a million and a half dollars,
or whatever was taken,
but this was considerably more.
It didn't make sense
until we responded
and actually started seeing it in person,
that it was true.
The doors were open to the street.
It was shocking
to see how accessible it was.
There's no security here. The only people
that were there were the Brinks guys,
and they're not allowed to have
firearms inside the warehouse.
You start looking around, you see
not one or two, but multiple cameras
and you start to get excited.
Like, "All right,
this is really gonna be good."
I asked about the cameras.
The cameras hadn't been working in months.
You have millions of dollars that
come through here every weekend
and you don't have one
freaking surveillance camera that works?
You're killing me.
In 34 years of law enforcement,
you coulda never told me
that that kind of money gets handled
in the fashion that it did.
I I was dumbfounded.
The only thing protecting
$80,000,000 from the outside world
was a yellow painted line on the ground.
It didn't make any sense.
They came in
specifically to hit this money,
so we figured from the beginning
that there had to have been an insider.
We had cell phone numbers
of all the drivers.
But it means nothing.
How do you know that one phone call
that leads you to the perpetrator?
You need more information than that.
We started talking
to all these different employees,
between Brinks
and the other two handling companies.
"Who saw the robbers?
What'd they say? What'd they look like?"
I had a gut feeling that,
"Man, somebody's involved in this."
Somebody that has inside knowledge
that told the bad guys
of the specifics
of how the money's brought in.
"It's gonna be an easy robbery."
It's an inside job.
After the robbery, little
by little, I set aside $40,000,
and started the process
of adopting a child.
We went with a company,
they would let you go in a chat room
where you can actually see
the children playing, interacting,
and seeing that they were healthy.
They all looked cute. It's like,
"Wanna take 'em all home."
We were really happy
and looking forward to doing
something positive, adopting a child.
And also healing ourselves,
so for us, it was like a therapy.
You're watching
South Florida's news station.
I remember
we'd watch the news every day.
No shoes.
And nothing.
Nothing would come on the news.
We're live on Channel 7 news,
can we see your fish?
We're like, "Damn,
we're actually doing pretty good."
Amazing.
Everybody was just talking
about not spending their money,
being smart with it, don't show out,
don't be showing off
and all that, and, um
of course,
the fucking exact opposite happens.
Jeff was a sucker for the women.
At first it was like
"How does this fat boy get
these fine-ass girls?"
But then when you start popping up
with money out of nowhere
and this type of money,
that's when it became like,
"What the fuck did you guys do?"
I told Jeff, "What's going on?
What's the problem?"
He goes, "Nothing, I just went
and, you know enjoyed myself."
"Man, you gotta lay low.
We ain't out the clear yet."
I said, "Jeffrey,
each one of those watches costs $20,000."
You're going to attract
the police's attention.
We was all supposed to get
our stuff, get our cut and disappear.
Jeff never did that.
That made everybody a target.
Karl called me and he goes,
"Man, Jeffrey's out of control, man."
"He's out doing drugs,
out every night partying,
and he's spending crazy money."
I'm like, "Okay, so try to handle that."
I made him promise to leave Miami.
He told me he would leave,
but he didn't go.
That made me very angry,
because that's not what we agreed.
So, I looked around
and found where he was
drugged up with two prostitutes
in a room.
Jeff!
I said, "Jeffrey, what are you doing, man?
I told you not to do this."
I said, "I need you to leave Miami,
because you're stirring the pot."
"I don't know how close the cops are,
but if you keep doing this,
they're going to catch us."
Get outta here.
At that point, he started shit talking,
giving me attitude.
- Hey! Hey!
- Get out!
When he gave me that crap, I thought,
"I've got to find a way
to stop him spending money.
Get the fuck out.
It was one
of two things. Give him a beating
or take his money,
the reason I could get caught.
I thought, "If I take his money,
there won't be anything to spend."
And that's when I talked with my "friend."
I told him I had a problem.
"I have a brother-in-law.
I need a favor. He's at his place."
"Take all the money he has.
Tie him up and take his money, please."
"Don't hurt him. Just scare him."
I feel bad for having done it,
because he was like my brother.
But I was thinking about my freedom.
Two weeks passed
and I didn't hear anything about him,
so I figured he left.
But Jeffrey started
doing the same old things.
He's spending money, going to strip clubs.
He started giving out watches to everyone.
They take almost all his money
and he still keeps doing stupid stuff.
If you're making it rain
with $20 and $100 bills,
and you had always been poor,
never had money before
people are going to do something,
especially if you've been
kidnapped already.
I realized he hadn't learned his lesson.
I didn't say anything.
But I knew I needed to change
my method of getting through to him.
He needed a beating.
I'm not violent
until I have to be.
So I decided to call my "friends" again.
But this time I wanted them
to be a bit more aggressive.
I wanted to strip him of every dollar.
So they called me in front of Jeffrey,
but they pretended like
they didn't know me,
and they asked me for $1 million.
I said, "I don't know
what you're talking about."
"He'll tell you where it is."
"It's at my mom's place,
under some plants,
inside some pipes."
I said, "Look, he only has $475,000."
"I'll give you $275,000
and I keep $200,000."
That half was for Jeffrey,
so when he needed cash,
I could give him his own money.
I committed a robbery.
And now I was having Jeffrey kidnapped.
All I wanted was a baby.
My niece called me.
That Jeff has been kidnapped.
"Oh, man. This is not good."
"This is not good."
Now, it's personal.
They wrecked him up.
He was at Baptist Hospital
with brain injuries.
They took pliers to his fingernails,
they burned him with cigars.
They did hit him with,
like, a metal on his head
and, um, they shifted his brain.
My brother could've gotten killed.
Call him up. "What happened?"
"I had just come back
from the strip club and they got me."
I started thinking,
"Who?" Who would do it?
Somebody he was with
put somebody else onto this?
That's usually where it comes from.
Those closest to you.
It was a bit violent, yes.
Was it the best way to do that? No.
But something had to happen to him,
because if you do something wrong,
you have to pay the price.
We had an agreement
and he didn't follow the terms.
We put every resource
and tried every technique that we could
for weeks and weeks and weeks.
Nobody had any positive information
about this robbery.
One of the subjects
had dropped a bandana
and we had it sent for DNA analysis.
When you have a piece
of evidence like that
in a case of this magnitude,
you're thinking, "If I can get some
DNA evidence and the guy is in the system,
we can crack the case."
We get the results back,
there's no DNA on the bandana.
We're like, "Damn!"
Nothing's panning out.
You do the best you can
to try to solve it.
But we needed something else.
There was a reticence
from the supervisor to put out a reward.
Because you get everybody
at every street corner
that saw somebody that looks like the guy.
I didn't want to get bogged down
with putting people on wild goose chases.
But it gets brought up several times,
"Are we ready?"
We finally got to the point
where we said, "Okay."
Miami International Airport
was the scene last month
of one of the largest heists
in US history.
A plane with $80 million on it
It's official. It's out there.
Now we got trouble.
millions of dollars in broad daylight.
There was so many stories
in the street.
You go to a corner store,
you go to a cafeteria,
and you just hear people talking.
almost uncanny resemblance
to the plot of Goodfellas.
Nobody knows for sure
just how much was taken
in a daring pre-dawn raid at the Lufthansa
cargo terminal at Kennedy Airport.
I had never seen it.
$150,000 reward
is being offered
for anyone willing to come forward
If you look historically
at investigations of this type,
the majority of times it gets solved
because somebody comes forward,
somebody with insider information.
Money talks.
Miami Police Department.
And the first night, we had a caller.
He was nervous.
He didn't know if he should tell us,
that he was scared.
So, at this point, I'm starting to think,
"Okay, I got myself a wacko here."
As often happens
when you put out a reward,
you get good stuff,
but you could also get the crazies.
So, that's when I stopped everything
and I said, "Okay, look here."
"Are you sure that you know who did this?"
And he kind of looked at me,
he looked around,
and he said,
"Out of 100%, I'm 150% sure."
And I said, "Why?"
He said, "Because I was invited
to go and I didn't go."
My understanding was
he was approached
about being part of the robbery
and then he was aggravated
that he had been cut out.
He starts telling us
who all the players are by name.
And the mastermind of the robbery,
a guy named Karls Monzon.
The first thing we needed to do was
to confirm some of the things he told us.
When we start comparing phone records,
Karls Monzon is in contact
with one of the other Brinks drivers.
Onelio Diaz.
Onelio Diaz contacted him
ten times or more the day of the robbery.
We also learned that Onelio
was a friend of Karl from Cuba.
So, now we're like,
"Hey, here we go. Here we go."
The next step is to get
conversation on recording
from Karl Monzon
that would be incriminating.
So I called the informant
and said, "Look, I don't know
what you're planning to do today,
but I do know that you're going to go
to Karl's house and talk to him."
I went down there.
We videotaped from the outside
and the informant went in.
He began talking
about the robbery at the airport,
saying he wished
he could have done it himself.
And I said, "Ricky,
I don't want to talk about it."
We started talking about something else
and then he starts talking
about the heist again.
So I told him,
"I'm going to the bathroom."
I grabbed a gun.
and threatened him, saying,
"If I see you around here,
talking to my family,
I'm going to snap your neck."
Then I kicked him out of the house.
At that point, we could arrest Karls,
but there were
other perpetrators we needed,
so we weren't gonna jump the gun yet.
When we have wiretaps, we do something
that's called "tickle the wire,"
which means that you do
some action through an informant
that causes a reaction
in the people you wiretap,
and then they speak about it on the phone.
So, I asked Brinks to get
all the guards together
and I said to them,
"Look, guys, we are at a dead end."
"We have no idea who did this robbery."
"We're lost."
So, we left.
Onelio called Karl.
He was ecstatic.
"They got nothing! They have nothing!"
"And I told you.
People didn't think I could do this,
but I did it, I pulled it off!"
We said, "Well, that's not necessarily
accurate, Mr. Monzon."
I thought
we'd taken all of Jeffrey's money,
so I stopped worrying about him.
But he must have had more hidden,
because he was still in the strip clubs.
After the second kidnapping,
Jeffrey changed.
He didn't trust anyone.
He was afraid.
He started being distrustful of me.
By then, he already suspected
that I was involved with the kidnappers.
The third one
I had nothing to do with that.
My "friends" called me and said,
"We kidnapped your brother."
"We need you to give us
half a million dollars."
I mean, to be
investigating a significant armed robbery,
and in the middle of that, you know,
discovering an ongoing kidnapping
- It's almost surreal.
- It was. Yeah.
No, this was like nothing I'd ever seen.
Karls, please help me.
What do you want me to do?
Karls,
I don't have any money left.
I'm sorry,
but you're fuck out of luck, bro.
You're telling me
you're not going to give them money?
I don't give a fuck about you.
You didn't learn your lesson, man?
You didn't learn?
I was tired of his mistakes.
Because if he'd listened to me,
none of this would have happened.
I said, "No, kill him,
you'd be doing me a favor."
And I turned my phone off.
He said, "Kill him, I don't give a shit."
Then we're like, "All right."
The case had just taken
a giant left turn right there.
At that point,
I put an airplane in the air
so that we could follow Mr. Monzon.
And I also called a SWAT team
in the event that we located Jeffrey
and we could effect a rescue.
- Hello?
- Sis. It's Jeffrey.
I'm in trouble.
They put him
on the phone and he was crying,
he was like, "Sis, please, they're gonna
kill me." Like, "Please." You know?
They said,
"If you don't give us the money,
you're gonna find his fingers
in your grandmother's mailbox.
About an hour later, my wife calls crying.
Then my mother-in-law called,
and my grandmother-in-law called.
Everyone wanted me to help,
saying we were brothers.
At that moment, I felt betrayed.
They had already kidnapped him twice
and taken almost all of his money,
and now they wanted to take mine.
But it was his problem, not mine.
I had to finish it one way or another.
He tells them,
"Let's meet. I'll meet you."
And he just has that tone
that he's pissed.
Everything was getting out of control.
I never thought I could kill someone,
but they pushed me
somewhere I'd never been.
I had to make it stop.
We had
a surveillance team following him
going back into Dade County,
and he stops at a gun store.
I was scared.
They knew I had money.
I wasn't gonna give them anything.
We cannot afford
to have him shooting it out
with kidnappers using assault rifles,
so we made a decision
that we gotta pick up Karl.
At that moment,
I was on a different planet.
I was fed up.
My plan was
to load the guns with bullets
and when they walk up the to car
I'd fill it with bullets.
Shoot everyone inside.
And then I see a van
I go like this and I'm looking.
They were running towards me
and I thought it must be the kidnappers.
I realized it was a SWAT team.
Game over. They got us.
He was thrown into my car and
I looked in my rear view mirror and said,
"Mr. Monzon, welcome to the FBI."
Now we gotta get Jeffrey Boatwright
back from the kidnappers.
We explained to Karls,
"Listen, we got you by the balls."
"But right now, let's concentrate
on getting your brother-in-law back."
We need to make sure Karls can
make phone calls back to the abductors.
We can't have anybody
know that he is in custody.
He wanted to see his wife
and he was threatening,
he wasn't gonna cooperate,
he wasn't gonna do anything.
So, we brought her over.
So, I said "okay" and told Karl,
"I need you to help my brother out.
They're gonna kill him."
That's when I started
to cooperate with them
to save my brother-in-law.
We didn't know where
they were, so we used some technology
that hits cell towers and will give you
a general vicinity of where that phone is.
But that person can't turn the phone off,
'cause then you're not getting a signal.
He was brazen enough
to pull off a 7.4 million dollar robbery.
- Surely he can BS kidnappers, we figured.
- You'd think so.
I told them they were
faggots, they were cowards,
that I'd beat their asses
when I saw them,
that I'd shoot them if I see them.
That I'd fuck their mothers.
That I was going to fight with anyone
who'd try me.
These guys were
all night long shutting down the phones.
At some point, the phones
went back up near the airport.
You need to trawl, because you need to get
within a certain range of the phones
in order to say, "Okay,
it's in that house, next to that window."
That kind of detail.
We're in the area,
we're getting information.
It's not an exact science, and a freeway
goes through there, so it's kinda screwy,
a lot of dead ends and weird roads
that don't go through.
And they said, "Wait a minute."
"What about this hotel that's just
right around the corner there?"
The Miami Princess Hotel is a hotel
that has these special rooms
where individuals
having illicit affairs go
because they can drive
their cars into a little garage.
Open the garage door, you pull your car
into the garage, close the garage door,
then there's an internal staircase that
goes up to the actual hotel room upstairs.
- Escorts, stuff like that can visit.
- Cheaters.
- A heart-shaped hot tub. Sex-oriented.
- Mirrors on the ceiling.
A garage motel, if you know
what those are. We learned the hard way.
When we first moved here, we didn't know
what a garage motel was for. Now we know.
They drive
into the parking lot, bing,
they get the signal
of the kidnapper's phone.
All units to the Princess Motel.
Room 17. Suspects are confirmed inside.
PD's out front.
We're coming up the back stairs.
This is police.
You're surrounded. We know you're inside.
It's time to go.
Go, go, go!
Down! Go, go!
Go! Go! Go!
Move! Move! Move!
- They're running!
- Suspects are running.
- Officers are searching for Boatwright.
- Hey! Stop!
- Go!
- Mr. Boatwright?
- Take him!
- Put your hands in the air!
Bedroom clear!
Suspects apprehended.
Suspect located.
Boatwright has been secured.
You have Jeffrey Boatwright.
He can't run. Can't go anywhere.
He told them, "You saved my life.
They were gonna kill me."
He was excited he'd been saved
by the good guys.
Team America saved him.
They cleaned him up,
and took him into custody
for the original robbery.
Not too many cases
are resolved when, you know,
you save a kidnapping victim
and then arrest him,
and that's exactly what happened.
He got saved as a victim
and arrested within moments.
We were feeling relief.
The fact that the case was over.
More importantly,
that we were able
to recover this numbskull,
who kept getting kidnapped,
without getting killed.
Everybody's responsible
for their own actions.
My brother wasn't a bad guy, he just
was a little careless, you could say.
We didn't grow up with our father,
and so he would run to the streets
and do things, you know?
He never had his life put together.
So, I think
a big part of him really wanted
to try to change his life around.
But he kept going back to,
you know, women and drugs
and doing things
he wasn't supposed to be doing.
I told them, "Give me an address.
I'll turn myself in.
"If not, come get me. This is my address.
I'm not running from you guys."
I missed so much out of my kids' lives.
No amount of money is worth
me missing out on my kids.
Trust me, I'm kicking myself
in the ass to this day for it.
One day, I get home,
there's a card on the door.
Just says "FBI."
I just knew.
When you get that paper
in your hands that says,
"So-and-so versus the United States
of America," you don't stand a chance.
So, is it something to brag about?
Nah. I don't wanna brag about it.
That's why I'm wearing this.
You think you're bad,
think you're gangster?
You ain't nothing.
I don't ever talk about it
with anybody. No one knows.
It's something I did, but it's
not something I'm proud of, 'cause
I'm a decent human being, you know?
I just cut and ran.
I was bouncing between Carolina,
Georgia, and Tennessee.
I wasn't in one place.
But they're gonna be looking.
Where are they gonna look? Your family.
That's one thing
that really broke me down,
watching my kids' face,
and breaking that news,
"Maybe I'll see you next week
and maybe I won't."
And they give you that look.
It just gets to a breaking point.
When you start easing up
is when they start gassing up.
And that's what happened.
Yep. About four years on the run.
In a way, I wanted to get it over with.
In a way, I wanted to get it over with.
I mean
It is what it is.
I lost all my family
at the same time.
You know, holidays are not the same.
Gatherings are not the same.
Um, you know, what's supposed
to be a positive memory,
turns into something negative.
It's very hard to digest
that you love somebody so much
and that they can betray you like that.
Could he have killed somebody?
I don't know.
I'm thankful that he never did.
But you really never know the person
who you're sleeping next to.
How could you love me so much
and say you wanna build a life with me,
and have a family with me,
and then throw it all
in the garbage over money?
If I told you I'll give you $7.4 million,
but I will destroy your whole family,
what would you tell me?
Would you take the $7.4 million?
A marriage needs two things,
trust and respect.
If you lose respect for your partner,
or stop trusting them,
that's not a marriage anymore.
When I went to prison, I said,
"Move on with your life,
because I'll be in here for 17 years."
"I don't want you
to wait 17 years for me."
"Do what you have to do.
Try to have a family."
With him, I felt like
I had it all. He was my first true love.
And, um unfortunately, you know,
everything we went through in life and
You know, have it all to lose it all.
It hurt,
but time heals everything.
I'm happy she has the life
she always wanted. Two children.
I did choose money over family.
This robbery cost me
my American dream.
I had the house, I had a wife,
I just needed a child.
I'm still the same person,
but more educated.
I have a different perspective in life.
And
I think things over
a lot more than before.
We recovered somewhere
between 1.2 and 1.4 million dollars.
So, that leaves approximately
$6,000,000 that was unaccounted for.
That's the FBI question,
"Where is the money?"
We talk about it,
and we try to speculate as to,
"Maybe is there still
some out there somewhere?"
You know, it's possible.
Supposedly there's only,
what, 1.5 recovered?
You're gonna tell me
you don't think anybody else
wants to know where that money's at?
Shit.
My honest opinion?
I think some of those guys
still have that money stashed somewhere.
I wish I would have stashed the money.
I was so stupid that I blew it.
I don't know where the rest
of that money went, man.
I know where my part went.
And it got stolen.
Ah, bills. Bills.
It gets expensive to be on the run.
Check 'em out in a few more years.
They'll probably move to another county.
Or move to Costa Rica!
They say I have money, but I don't.
I lost it. I don't know where it is.
I don't know if I spent it,
it's gone, it was stolen I don't know.
I don't have it.
My parents
used to tell me stories
before they put me to bed at night.
I've grown past that age.
I was the kind of guy
that you knew that could get stuff.
I was kinda like a mini-Amazon.
- Rare Pappy
- Pappy
Pappy Van Winkle bourbon.
It's liquid gold.
A barrel of Pappy bourbon
is worth an incredible $100,000.
It'd be like working
in a bank or Fort Knox
with the vault wide open with no guards.
Are you gonna do it
if you don't get caught?
It's whiskey, for God's sake.