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Mason suggested a replay of the flip-the-girlfriend trick. The police caught up with Lisa, the blond woman in the photograph that Mason had shown Lua
"Once we have that exact location, we'll go in there, show Blane's picture," Mason told me in mid-January. "We'll say, 'We know he's fencing here, and when we arrest him he's facing a life term and he'll turn on you.' Within a week, we'll find Blane in a drum in the East River, because that's how these guys play." Mason said he would be comfortable with that outcome. "I'm cold and calloused," he said. "The bottom line is, Blane's gotten away too many times. Maybe this would be the fitting end to a life in crime."
Mason's reply stu
If Mason was right about the Russian mobsters, then it was the police who saved Blane Nordahl's life. Lisa told them that Nordahl had occasionally stayed in Philadelphia with her sister and her brother-in-law. The police had Lisa and her sister set Nordahl up- call him, tell him everything was okay there, and invite him to come by.
Nordahl drove up that night in a black Ford Explorer and circled the block. He parked, approached the house, and once inside was set upon by three cops. A dozen more waited outside. He fought hard, and wound up in a Philadelphia jail cell with a face like a smashed tomato and the sour knowledge that the police had been helped by his close friends.
In the coming weeks, various police jurisdictions began to fight over the right to prosecute Nordahl. He entered his jailhouse-lawyer mode, hoping once again to roll up the assorted charges into a single light plea. But on March 23, he was finally extradited to Poughkeepsie. At his arraignment, the Dutchess County prosecutor said he pla
For months, I had put off calling Nordahl's mother, Sharon Fitzsimmons, who now works as an accountant in a state prison in Indiana. The police warned me that if Nordahl found out that I had called her he would stop talking to me-and that Fitzsimmons would never talk anyway. But now I tried her.
"He's not a completely bad person," she told me. "He's a very likable person. I think his big problem was intelligence and no common sense. I just wish this would all come to an end. The last time I talked to him about what he was doing-this was a few years back-his response was that it's an excitement thing. He said he got bored. So I said, 'Well, why don't you take up skydiving?' I said, 'We're not wealthy people, but we'll back you up. We'll support you morally, we'll be there for you.' "
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She told me what a good and smart and interesting kid Blane had been, but mostly she talked about how disappointed she was. "What I've had to do is basically realize these are his decisions," she said. "I've told him I can't help him anymore. He's over forty now, and his decisions are his own."
Although Blane had always written to her regularly, Fitzsimmons said, he rarely discussed his troubles. But his recent letters "have a different edge to them," she told me. "He's concerned that it's going to be a life thing. I think basically he's scared. He's saying he wants to get on the right path now, for good."
Then she opened a recent letter and read me a bit: "I don't want to die in jail, and I don't want you or dad to pass away without seeing my life change." She paused, then said, "I've never heard that from him before." The letter was only a slightly different version of the story that Nordahl had pitched to me recently-and to Cornell Abruzzini, and to his lawyer, and probably to half a dozen others. But I didn't need to tell that to his mother. She sounded as if she didn't believe him, either.
Stephen J. Dubner is the author of the New York Times best-selling Freakonomics (2005, with Steven D. Levitt), Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son's Return to His Jewish Family (1998), and Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper (2003). He is now working on a book about the psychology of money, and another book about Jewish ethics. Most of his journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine but also in The New Yorker, Time, New York, and elsewhere.
It only took two years to write this article. I made my first phone calls in March of 2002. I was finishing up a book that concerned Pittsburgh, so I was in the habit of reading the Pittsburgh papers every morning. In the Post-Gazette one day was an article about some silver burglaries that, if pattern held, were likely committed by a certain Blane Nordahl, who had just been arrested outside of Philadelphia. A quick search of the Philly papers yielded a few more articles. So my first conscious act in writing this story about burglary was to burgle the work of those journalists in Pittsburgh and Philly. To them: apologies, and thanks.
I got to work, trying to reconstruct the past few years of Nordahl's life. I was happy to save string, see how things turned out. What I really wanted was an interview with Nordahl himself, which took forever to arrange. Finally he agreed. Then he changed his mind. Then he changed his mind again, but with conditions. By the time I finally sat down with him at a federal prison in Ohio, I knew more about Nordahl than I know about some of my own siblings. (This isn't as strange as you might think; there are eight of us, and some of the facts are pretty murky.) Nordahl was, without question, one of the dullest interviews I've ever conducted. His story was terrific, but he wasn't the guy to tell it. He was too arrogant, too paranoid, too controlling. The story came from Lo
Early one morning, soon after Nordahl jumped bail, went on a burglary tear, and got busted again, Lo
A few months after this article was published, Law & Order: Criminal Intent ran an episode based on Nordahl. Lo