The Great Hotel Robbery

de John Minahan

At 4:04 A.M., Friday, May 29, 1981, three tuxedo-clad men and a uniformed chauffeur emerge from a limousine at the side entrance of New York's famed Hotel Champs-Elysees, carry expensive luggage into the lobby, and calmly pull off the biggest hotel robbery in American history. Over the next two hours and thirty-three minutes, they handcuff, gag, and blindfold twenty-three employees, suppliers,and guests; break open sixty-seven safe-deposit boxes in the vault; and collect an estimated $3.4 million in jewelry, cash, and negotiable bonds. Enter veteran NYPD detective John Rawlings, a combination of Columbo and George Burns, and his partner Big John Daniels. Together with a team of forty top detectives led by a paranoid, press-hungry chief, they track down and collar the crooks in eight days of nonstop excitement and front-page, prime-time coverage. Then the surprises start. Rawlings and Daniels find themselves in a Pac-Man labyrinth of deception and intrigue provided by a richly variegated cast of characters on both sides of the law and culminating in multiple murder. Suspense builds rapidly and the result is pure entertainment, an insightful, hilarious take-off on the Mickey Mouse/Machiavellian machinations of police-press relations, from carefully orchestrated mass-media events ("to give the illusion we're still in control") to a masterful surprise ending covered by Mike Wallace of "60 Minutes."