Shownotes Transcript
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And even though there's no one she'd rather be with, she still wonders, what's the chance of this lasting? How do you get from that point to also being like, I cannot stand you, to the point that I want to cut my ties with you? This week on Explain It To Me, we find out, are we less likely to get divorced than our parents? Follow Explain It To Me wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Wednesday. Robert Dusselt was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1940.
It wasn't uncommon at that time for a family to hold a wake in their home after someone had died. People would come to pay their respects. Growing up, Robert Dusault would attend these wakes in people's houses. He was an avid thief. When he got to a wake, he would go through the receiving line downstairs and then go upstairs and look through closets and drawers, taking whatever seemed valuable. His sister Dorothy would help him sell what he stole.
You know, for DeSalt, it wasn't about the money. Reporter Tim White. I mean, the money was nice, I'm sure. But it was just about the score. It was about planning the robbery. It was about executing the crime. So he's always scheming. Always scheming. Oh, he can't help himself.
He robbed pawn shops and shops that sold rare coins. He was caught after kicking down the glass doors of a clothing store and was arrested for fighting in a donut shop. He had 13 brothers and sisters. His brothers, Paul and Christopher, would plan robberies with him. They would follow delivery trucks. And when the driver left the vehicle, they'd steal everything they could.
Robert Dussault was a sleepwalker. And when he was 15 years old, he fell 30 feet out of his third-floor bedroom window at 2 a.m. It made the front page of The Lowell Sun. His mother told police he'd been walking in his sleep since he was five years old. But at some point, Tim White says, Robert learned that the woman he'd known as his mother was actually his grandmother. He grew up in a large French-Canadian family, and who he thought was his oldest sister was
He learned was actually his mother. And he was the last one to learn that. And after that, his entire world was rocked. He started spending more and more time with his best friend, Charles Flynn, who went by Chucky. And Robert Dusseld went by Deuce. He got Deuce tattooed on his arm.
He loved Chucky. Chucky loved Deuce. They were best friends. They were brothers, and they were brothers in crime. They ran a mini criminal organization together, wreaking havoc together, committing crimes. And that was really how Deuce grew up. He grew up with Chucky Flynn doing these bad things. Robert DeSalt was in and out of prison through his late teens and 20s.
He was charged for things like larceny by check and convicted of assaulting a police officer. He hadn't learned to drive yet, and that's because he spent so much time in prison. Chucky also spent time in prison. Sometimes they overlapped. In 1967, Robert Dusalt, along with six other men, including Robert's brothers Paul and Christopher, planned to rob two banks at the same time.
They would rob one bank, and then when the Lowell police got there to investigate, they'd rob the other bank. But the night before, someone ratted them out. The police knew about their plan and were waiting for them at the first bank. Later, Robert Dusselt's brother, Paul, testified that the whole thing had been Robert's idea. Robert Dusselt was sentenced to 15 to 30 years at a maximum security prison in southern Massachusetts called Walpole.
He was always looking for things to pass the time and had decided that he wanted to get involved in a scheme that
to steal valuable stamps. And there was a stamp collector's club in the prison. And Dussault strong-armed his way into the club and made somebody he knew in the prison president of the club, basically pushed the other guys out. And the scheme was they wanted to hold an exhibition and they would solicit
And so the warden thought this might be a good way to bring some good press.
by having, you know, this community event at Walpole State Prison that Robert Dussault, a career criminal, was organizing. But some robust collectors send in their stamps to Walpole Prison, set them up on stands, and they lock the doors, you know, make sure everything is secure. And when the doors open up, their stamps are there, people are walking around, they're seeing them, and they're taking it all in. And
But then some people start realizing some of the cases are empty and some stamps are missing. And some of the collectors that are there realize that their valuable stamps have vanished into thin air. The prison manufactured license plates. And Tim White says that Robert Dusault got the stamps into a crate of license plates on its way to the Department of Transportation, where a friend was expecting them.
Even inside the four corners of a really tough state prison, he was able to pull off a pretty remarkable heist. Robert Dusselt was eventually transferred from Walpole to a lower security prison in Greenfield. Inmates were often granted unofficial furloughs to see their wives for a day or drive to medical appointments. And in the summer of 1975, Robert Dusselt convinced a prison guard to drive him to Boston.
On the trip, they stopped at a strip club. He set up the prison guard at a strip joint in Boston, plied him with booze, and then he just took off and hid out in a hotel in the Alston-Brighton area of Boston while he waited for help from Chucky. Chucky had escaped from Walpole and was in Providence, Rhode Island. Providence in the 70s was kind of down and dirty.
This is Wayne Wooster. He was a reporter for the Providence Journal at the time. At the time, the Providence Journal had extraordinary market penetration. The only thing better in terms of market penetration was organized crime. The mob pretty much infiltrated, if you would, most of government. It was part of the fabric of daily life. We often referred to it as a playground for reporters.
simply because from one shift to the next, you never really knew what to expect. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the most powerful organized crime family in New England was based in Providence, and it was all ruled by a man named Raymond Patriarca. He was a pervasive presence, both real and imagined. You know, it was, all you had to say was...
Well, he's one of Raymond's people. She didn't even need his last name. He didn't even need to say Patriarcha. It was known, it was understood that there's danger here, you know? Raymond Patriarcha rose to power in the 1950s and was respected by each of the so-called Five Families of Organized Crime.
He had a pinball and vending machine business, but he made millions of dollars through loan sharking, illegal gambling, and labor racketeering, among other things. Raymond Patriarca was allegedly a silent partner in a horse track in Massachusetts with Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. According to the New York Times, people said Sinatra proposed to Mia Farrow with the diamond ring given to him by Raymond Patriarca.
He was always at his office at the National Cigarette Service Company and Coin-O-Matic distributors in Providence. Chucky Flynn went to Providence to work with some acquaintances of Raymond Patriarca that he had met through someone in prison, two brothers, John and Walter Womet. But John and Walter's parents weren't Italian, and Tim White says that you had to have at least one Italian parent to be in Raymond Patriarca's inner circle. The Womets were trying anyway.
and told Chucky that they were working on something big. They invited him to participate, and Chucky invited Robert Dussault. He was cryptic with Dussault about this amazing job, you know, this last good heist that they're going to pull off together, and it's going to be so lucrative, they can ride off into the sunset. But at first, Dussault didn't have a lot of...
of details about what was going on, all he knew was Chucky wanted him to lead the robbery. Because Chucky trusted Deuce more than anyone on the planet and knew that Deuce could walk into any place, with or without a gun, by the way, and just handle the situation. Very confident guy. The plan was to rob the Hudson First Storage Facility in Providence.
Dessault was like, this is bullshit. I have no interest in stealing furs. I don't care how high-end these furs are. But inside the Hudson fur storage facility, there was a secret vault. Inside, there were 148 safety deposit boxes with millions of dollars worth of coins, jewelry, and cash.
It really did not have a sophisticated alarm or security system because it didn't need one. It was secure in its own right. It was called the Bonded Vault Company, and it was owned by Raymond Patriarca. No one would ever pull off this heist because it would be suicide. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. We'll be right back.
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Support for this show comes from Amazon Business. We could all use more time. Amazon Business offers smart business buying solutions, so you can spend more time growing your business and less time doing the admin. I can see why they call it smart. Learn more about smart business buying at amazonbusiness.com. Robert Dusault and Chucky Flynn prepared to rob the vault inside of the Hudson Fir Storage Facility in Providence in the summer of 1975.
These were boxes stuffed with the ill-gotten gains of the New England crime family, of maid members, of associates, people who ran bookmaking operations, bingo, illegal bingo operations, believe it or not. Just an absolute treasure that was hidden in there. Who would be dumb enough to rob from the mob? It would be a death sentence.
The wildest part of it all was Chucky and Dussault were assured that they had the approval of the mob boss himself to pull off this heist. Because if you didn't, you might as well sign your own death warrant. Why would the boss have given the okay? He felt like his soldiers, the maid guys, the associates had not been...
generous enough with their operations, had not been paying up that pyramid scheme. And he wanted to send them a message. Many of the people who worked for him kept their money and valuables, often stolen, in the safety deposit boxes in Raymond Patriarca's vault. And look, he was greedy. He knew there was a lot of money in there. And so he wanted to send a message and collect the loot for himself.
Once you had the OK from Raymond L.S. Patriarca, Dessault started feeling a little bit better about this job and what it could mean. He felt a lot worse when he started meeting the people that he the team he was going to lead, meeting the other thieves in this job.
This was not Ocean's Eleven here. These were not sophisticated thieves that could crack a safe, you know, and use expert tools to pull off a big heist. The heist was originally planned for August 13th, 1975. But the day before, while some of the men were cleaning out a van they had stolen to use as the getaway car, a policeman drove by.
They got nervous and decided they needed to steal a new van. They postponed the heist by one day. On August 14th, eight men got into the van. Temperatures in Providence that week were in the mid-90s. And the men were all stuffed into a van. There was no air conditioning in the van. They were in full jumpsuits. And it was very hot. And a lot of the guys started jumping.
Worrying, you know, cops are already on them. Somebody's going to rat them out. This doesn't feel right. Let's not do this. And Dusselt just told the guys, I'm walking in that building and you're going to come in five minutes later and we're starting this job. Around 8 a.m., Robert Dusselt entered the Hudson First Storage Facility.
He walked up to the desk and handed a slip of paper to the man behind it, Sam Levine, owner of Hudson Furs. On the slip of paper were four names. And he said, I'm looking for the safe deposit boxes of these four names. And the next thing Dusault did is he pulled out a handgun and he
pushed it into the face of the owner and the guy responded, "You don't know what trouble you bring me. You have no idea what trouble you bring me." Robert Dusault tied up Sam Levine and the four other workers in the building, made them put pillowcases over their heads, and told them to stay quiet. Chucky and some of the men came in and headed for the vault. But there was a problem.
They had planned to use high-powered drills with specialized drill bits to open the safe deposit boxes. But the drill bits were burning out and they couldn't get through the locks. But then someone figured out a solution with a crowbar. He puts it between the hinge of one of the doors and the door next to it and just gives it a pop. And it turns out the hinges on the doors were pretty brittle. And with some brute strength, you could just pop the doors off.
And that's exactly what they did. They popped off 146 out of 148 doors in that room that day. And one of the hostages, Barbara Oliva, who I interviewed, told me it sounded like manhole covers were hitting the floor. And they'd hear hoots and hollers from the room back there every time another door revealed the treasures behind it.
They would go crazy, right, because they realized they've hit the jackpot. Tell me, what were some of the things they were taking out? So they, of course, went for the cash first, and they couldn't be bothered with the small bills. They left behind the ones and the fives and the tens. They took the $500 bills. They took the $100 bills, so on and so forth. That was first and foremost.
They identified silver bars that someone had a stack of in their safe deposit box. They took raw gems, diamonds and gems and uncut stones. They took a lot of gold coins as well. Once they were able to open the doors and see just how much they were able to get, I think it was stunning to them. They had...
There's no way they could have conceived the amount of wealth that was hidden in that room. All the loot was just spilling on the floor and the men were stuffing it into, you know, giant duffel bags like hockey players use. And they had to make a choice because they didn't bring enough bags. Eventually, they had to stop. They had run out of places to put things.
The trunk of the sedan almost touched the asphalt because it was so heavy in the back of the vehicle that it pushed the nose up into the air and the trunk was weighed down in the back. What did the vault look like after they left? Barbara Oliver told me that it was ankle to knee deep with the stuff that they left behind. So imagine what they took.
So early on, the estimate was $1 million in cash and jewels and other stuff was stolen. That was the early estimate. Then it was up shortly thereafter to $4 million. But everybody knew that was just the tip of the iceberg. That's just what the government could prove, right? Yeah.
Time has a funny way of letting the truth come out. And we put the conservative estimate at around $30 to $32 million in loot that was taken that day. It was one of the biggest robberies in the United States. $30 million in 1975 is about $170 million today. Where did Deuce and Chucky go after the heist? Well, where does anyone go after a heist? You go to Vegas.
Tim White says that each of the men who robbed the vault got $64,000 and that Robert Chucky and Chucky's girlfriend, Ellen, got on a plane. One thing you have to know about Chucky Flynn is he had a searing gambling addiction. So Vegas was probably not the best choice for a guy with $64,000 in a paper bag. They got a suite at the MGM Grand. Chucky was spending a lot of time at the craps table.
He proposed to his girlfriend with a ring attached to a bottle of champagne. Robert Dusault was spending his money on sex workers and soon was only hiring one. And then they started dating. Her name was Karen Sponheim. And they were a couple. And Chucky Flynn's gambling got so bad that his fiancée begged him to go back to Rhode Island. And she came to Dusault saying...
Chucky won't stop. He's gambling around the clock. He's losing money. He already went through all the $500 bills. And that really hit Dussault because...
He didn't get any $500 bills, neither did, to his knowledge, any of the other men that took part in that robbery. So it signaled to Dussault that Chucky had pocketed some of the money on his own and had walked away with more than $64,000 that day. But you know what? No honor among thieves. He didn't hold it against Chucky. He told Chucky to take a break from gambling.
You got to get out of here. Take what you have left. Head back. I'm going to stick around with Karen Sponheim. We're going to tour the West Coast for a little while. And I'll, you know, I'll check back in with you. And ultimately, that's what Chucky did. Chucky went back to Rhode Island. Robert Dusault and Karen Sponheim drove around California. Karen drove because Robert didn't know how. They stayed in luxury hotels until they ran out of money. He starts calling Chucky and wondering...
Hey, you know, what about all the other stuff? What about the silver bars and the gold coins, all the gems? Has that been liquidated yet? Like, what's going on? I'm running out of money. I've run out of money. Chucky went to the other guys from the robbery, and Tim White says they pooled some money and gave Robert Dussault about $8,500, but he kept asking for more. Chucky keeps coming to Dussault's aid because he loves him. I mean, they're all each other has at the end of the day.
On September 3rd, 1975, authorities announced that they had indicted one suspect in connection with the robbery at Hudson First Storage. And they're able to put the pieces together as to who some of the players were. And ultimately, they are able to get the name Robert Dussault. Robert Dussault's picture was on the front page of the Providence Journal. Police called it a tremendous break in the case.
and the result of a lot of heel and toe work by the state and city authorities. Police also said they couldn't elaborate on how they got in his name. Robert Dussault was the lead gunman that went into the bonded vault that day and kicked the entire thing off. And just don't think for a second that wasn't purposeful. Guys like Robert Dussault were terrible.
They were tissue paper to the New England crime family. They're going to shut him up, make sure he never talks, and they're going to kill Robert Dussault. They sent Chucky Flynn to do it. Flynn was told by the mob, you got to clip Dussault. We'll be right back. Reservation for two booked on Resi, right this way. With Amex Gold. Your cacio e pepe. So good.
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With Mercury, you can pay bills in seconds, close the books faster, and even send invoices. Not only does Mercury do away with a patchwork of tools, it eliminates guesswork, giving you complete and accurate visibility into your business finances. All from one account. Apply in minutes at Mercury.com. Robert Dusselt and Karen Sponheim were in Texas when he got a phone call from Chucky Flynn saying they needed to talk in person. Chucky sounded different?
And Dussault's no idiot. Tim White said Robert Dussault and Karen Sponheim left Dallas, afraid that Chucky was coming there to kill him. They drove back to Karen's apartment in Las Vegas, but Chucky was waiting for them there. He traveled to Las Vegas with two of the other men from the robbery, but Robert ended up talking with Chucky alone. And Dussault did what he always does. He talked himself out of it. He was able to convince Chucky that,
I told you not to trust those guys, the wise guys down in Rhode Island. They sent you out here to kill me. I'm your brother. I love you. This is them. You can trust me. I'm not going to, I am not going to talk. I'm not a rat. I'm a lot of things, but I'm not a rat. And there was a lot of tears in the car. Ultimately, Chucky believed him and said, you know what? I trust you. Chucky let Robert go.
But law enforcement all over the country were still looking for him. In December of 1975, Karen Sponheim left Robert. He'd been abusive for months. She decided to go to her mother's house in California, but Robert was looking for her and broke into her Las Vegas apartment, thinking she would return there. Karen told the manager of the apartment complex to call the police. On New Year's Day, police went to Karen's apartment, and Robert Dusault opened the door wearing a bathrobe.
They let him get dressed and took him to the police station. His biggest mistake was he had two different IDs on him. They were both fake, but that is an immediate red flag to law enforcement. He also had a newspaper clipping about his own indictment in his wallet.
They brought him back to the station and ultimately they were able to narrow in that he was possibly Robert Dussault, but he was not giving that up. Providence Police, State Police hop a flight to Las Vegas. They question him. For hours they questioned him. And he's still denying that he's Robert Dussault. And then one of the officers asked if he knew someone named Chucky Flynn.
detective leans in and he says, Chucky's dead. He came here to kill you. We know it. We have sources telling us he refused to do it, so they killed him. And that was the breaking point for Robert Dussault. And it was in that moment that he identified himself as Robert Dussault and admitted to the crime and committed to work with law enforcement and with the government in prosecuting the people that
that took part in it. And his goal, too, was to also make sure that the mob boss got jammed up for the crime. By then, the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 had changed the way the mafia interacted with the police. The act had established the Witness Protection Program, and it went into effect in 1971, about five years before Robert Dussault was taken into custody. They were on a flight back to...
From Las Vegas, they already had, they had Dussault's confession. They had him on videotape. They had agreed to protect him in the witness protection program. That was all laid out now. The ink was dry. And the detective says to Dussault, what I told you about Chucky, it's not true. He's alive. Robert Dussault had already told the authorities what happened. Chucky was arrested and indicted along with four others.
Robert Dusault and Chucky were charged with kidnapping, dangerous weapon assault, illegal possession of firearms and burglar tools, conspiracy, and multiple counts of robbery. Robert Dusault was charged as the lead gunman and a fugitive for his escape from prison, but he wouldn't be going to prison because he was cooperating. The Womet brothers were charged as accessories to the crime.
The state trial was the longest and costliest in Rhode Island history. Armed guards were posted in the courtroom. Witness testimony ended on the 79th day of the trial. Ultimately, Deuce's testimony got Chucky convicted, and Chucky was sentenced to life in prison for this. There was one name that was never mentioned at trial. This heist was...
Authorized by the boss himself. Everybody knew it on the street level. They knew it. Raymond L.S. Patriarca is never charged. The government is unable to connect the dots all the way to to the boss. And that speaks in large part to who he is. This planted the seeds of distrust within the crime family itself because the mob boss approved of the robbery of his own men.
of his own soldiers, his own associates from a secret bank that they were told to use because they could keep it out of the reach of the federal government, of the IRS. That started to eat away at the crime family from the inside. Raymond Patriarca died in 1984, and his son Raymond Jr. took over his post.
Years later, when local journalists gained access to Raymond Sr.'s FBI file, they found that the FBI had an informant who said that Patriarca was the owner of the vault and that he had given his permission to rob it. Chucky Flynn went on to appeal his conviction. A federal appeals court reversed the conviction, ruling that the presence of armed guards in the courtroom at the trial undermined his right to be presumed innocent.
The case was heard by the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the state. Chucky Flynn got out on parole in 1989, but was indicted again two years later for drug trafficking, extortion, conspiracy, and illegal gambling. He died in prison in 2001. As for Robert Dussault, he no longer existed.
In 2006, Tim White and two former Providence Journal reporters, Wayne Worcester and Randall Richard, started writing a book about the robbery. So my father was an investigative reporter, and he actually reported on this. Tim White's father, Jack, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his reporting, exposing then-President Richard Nixon's tax fraud.
It was in response to Jack White's reporting that Nixon said, quote, I'm not a crook. Jack White died in 2005 at the age of 63. Tim White had always loved the story of the bonded Voltheist and wanted his father to write a book about it. When his father passed away, Tim decided to do it himself. But there was one problem. We could tell you, all the players, some who are alive, some who aren't, we couldn't tell you what happened to the lead gunman.
Warts and all, he was the lead figure of our story. And we had no idea what happened to him. The last thing his father told him he knew was that Robert Dusselt had been given a new name and a job working for Coors Brewing Company. I don't care how nice you are to the Department of Justice and the federal government. They will not tell you what happened to someone inside the Witness Protection Program. And so we were stuck for a long time.
And then, one day, Tim's mother brought him a box of his father's old reporting documents. And in it was an envelope. The envelope was empty, but it was addressed to my dad. The return address was a name I didn't recognize, Robert Dempsey, and it had a number on it. And it was in Colorado. And I'm looking at this envelope, and I'm going, wait a minute. Dad told me the federal government got him a job at Coors Brewing.
Coors Brewing is in Colorado. There is no way my dad was pen pals with this guy in the witness protection program. That can't be real. Now, it would ring true of my father not to tell his own son because he protected his sources all the way to the end. On the envelope, there was an inmate number. Tim used that to confirm that there had been a Robert Dempsey in the Colorado prison system and that he had died in 1992.
Because he was deceased, Tim was able to FOIA the government for Robert Dempsey's FBI file. It took over a year, but in the mail, I got this box of more than 400 pages. And the top sheet, I am not, I kid you not, the top sheet said, Robert Dussault, a.k.a. Robert Dempsey. And if my mother had not shown up that day with that box and that envelope...
I do not think I'd be talking to you right now. You know, we were able to find out what happened to Robert Dussault, and he didn't change a bit. Under the thumb of the federal government, Robert Dussault did what he knew best. In 1982, Robert Dussault, under the name Robert Dempsey, was involved in the armed robbery of a coin emporium in Colorado. At that point, he was still testifying in trials related to the Bonded Vault case.
Federal marshals picked him up at the airport on his way to Rhode Island to testify. According to Tim White, the FBI file said he had escaped prison again in 1985 and was caught 21 days later after robbing another bank. His death certificate states that he died of heart disease on October 3, 1992, in federal custody in North Dakota. He was 51.
When Tim White spoke with Robert Dussault's family members for the book, he was the one to break the news to them that Robert had died. And they couldn't believe that he was dead. And then the sister, one of his sisters said, well, wait a minute. When did you say he was, he died? Tim told her it was in October of 1992. And she said, well, that's impossible. He came to America.
According to prison records, Robert Dusselt's body was sent to a funeral home and buried at Rose Hill Memorial Park in North Dakota.
The only people present at the burial were the funeral director, a man handling the casket, and someone videotaping it. We were able to track down the funeral director that handled Robert Dussault's funeral. And this is weird, but he recorded the funeral with a home video camera, like a VHS camera at the time, early 1990s.
Which is weird, right? I mean, most people don't do that with a funeral. In the midst of life, we are in death. And when can we seek help? Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. On the tape, you hear the funeral director reading a few passages from the Bible in front of the open casket of Robert Dussault's body. But when you watch the tape, it's a little odd. Almighty God, into your hands we commend your child, Robert Dempsey,
Once the funeral director finishes reading, he closes the casket and goes to lower it into the ground. And just as they're about to do that, the tape stops and then restarts again. We're not conspiracy theorists. I promise you we're not conspiracy theorists. But if there was anyone that would pull off something like this, it was Robert DeSalt.
Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, Megan Kinane, and Lucy Sullivan. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. This episode was mixed by Emma Munger. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.
Tim White, Wayne Worcester, and Randall Richards' book is called The Last Good Heist, the inside story of the biggest single payday in the criminal history of the Northeast. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.
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Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Support for this show is brought to you by Nissan Kicks. It's never too late to try new things, and it's never too late to reinvent yourself. The all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. ♪
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