Heat 2 by Michael Mann

Heat 2 - Heat 2 By Michael Mann-pdfread.net.
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Dedicationfor my dadJack Aaron Mannwho inspired everything—Michael MannFor Paul
—Meg Gardiner
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ContentsCoverTitle PageDedicationProloguePart One1Part Two8Part Three35Part
Four47Part Five63Part Six65AcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorsCopyrightAbout the
Publisher
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PrologueAt 11:32 a.m. on Thursday, September 7, 1995, the Far East National Bankat 444
South Flower Street in Los Angeles was held up by three men: NeilMcCauley, Michael
Cerrito, and Chris Shiherlis. A fourth, Donald Breedan,was driving the getaway vehicle.
Far East National was a cash distributionhub with large amounts of currency on hand.
Bank employees triggered twotelco and one cellular alarm, but the signals went nowhere.
The night before,Cerrito had cut through the ceiling of the bank’s underground garage
toaccess the alarm system’s CPU on the floor above and changed out three ofits circuit
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boards. Twenty minutes before the robbery, the alarm systemturned itself and its video
recorders off. At 11:50 a.m., McCauley, Cerrito,and Shiherlis were walking out—one at a
time—carrying duffel bagscontaining $12.8 million in cash.Five minutes earlier, at 11:45
a.m., Vincent Hanna of LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division had received a tip about the
armed robbery in progress.Hanna, his detectives, and units of uniformed police raced to
the bank asMcCauley, Cerrito, and Shiherlis were crossing the sidewalk on their wayout.
In the next moments, downtown LA erupted into urban warfare.Hanna had been
pursuing this crew since he arrived at the scene of a violentarmored van robbery. Pulling
in, he found the typical crime scene paradigm:the ordered regularity of street furniture—
curbs, lampposts, utility boxes—and then the anomalies appeared: brains, bone shards,
irregular pools ofblood, the underside of an armored van on its side like a petrified
mammoth.
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The armed robbers’ identities were a mystery. But what Hanna knew atfirst glance was
they were a heavy-duty crew of highline pros.There were signs, like discarded shards,
leavings, that contained messagesabout what happened. Reversing how they got there
told Hanna the sequenceof events and about this crew’s methods. The spot they picked
had goodescape routes—on-ramps to two freeways. They ignored loose cash, and thetwo-
minute elapsed time of the robbery meant they knew how long it tookLAPD to respond to
a 211. The skillful use of shaped charges to cut theprecise, rectangular opening in the
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armor plate told Hanna this crew could goin on the prowl. They could do sophisticated
highline burglaries as well. Thatmeant they were capable of taking down a variety of
scores any way thosescores needed to be taken down. And, if they went in strong, they’d
rock androll at the drop of a hat. They killed two armored guards when one reachedfor an
ankle-holstered handgun. They executed the third off a coldcalculation: Since it had
become a murder one beef anyway, why leave aliving witness? If you happened into this
crew’s way, that was going to beyour problem.Hanna finished taking it all in before
speaking to the detectives,technicians, and uniformed officers from other
divisions.Robbery-Homicide Division was LAPD’s elite major crime unit. Itspurview was
citywide. Hanna had the authority to appropriate any case in anydivision. He wanted this
one. RHD took over.Working his network of informants, Hanna identified one crew
member,Michael Cerrito. Surveillance on him led Hanna to the others, except theelusive
McCauley. Hanna knew, as a foregone conclusion, given this crew’sproficiency, they were
unlikely to leave behind enough physical evidence at acrime scene to tie them to it. So
Hanna’s strategy became to surveil them,discover what they were taking next, and be
there when they walked in thedoor.Neil McCauley became aware that somebody was on
him. When ithappened, his reaction was calm and smooth because smooth was fast.
Fastwasn’t fast. Shiherlis was inside a precious metal depository, cutting a hole ina metal
vault door with a hollow-core drill at three in the morning. Cerritowas up a telephone pole
monitoring his alarm system bypasses. Trejo, onlookout, was circling the block.Outside
on the sidewalk the night air was cool on Neil’s face as hewatched the dark, vacant streets.
He heard a sound. It was sheet metal hit by a
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solid object. It was a sound that should not be there. It came from a row ofdelivery vans
parked across the street in a lot for an industrial bakery. Thesound was out of place. They
were supposed to be empty. They weren’t.Coolly, Neil reentered the building. Shiherlis,
guiding the hollow bit, wasmoments away from accessing the lock box. After that it would
be opensesame. Neil gave the order: walk away. They left behind tools, work clothes,six
weeks of preparation. That was their discipline.Hanna watched it all play out on FLIR
images from hidden cameras insidea bakery delivery van. His SWAT teams were staked
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out and well hidden.He let them go. He wasn’t settling for breaking and entering. He
wantedthem for real.Afterward, Neil gathered Shiherlis, Cerrito, and Trejo outside a
DWPelectrical substation, where the exposed high-voltage conductors created somuch RF
interference that any transmission from bugs they hadn’t found ontheir cars would be
scrambled.They had to decide there and then—split and go their separate ways rightnow,
or figure out who the hell had cut into them, dump their surveillance,and stay and take
the bank anyway.For Chris Shiherlis it was an automatic. His marriage was on full
tilt.Hewas solid, with a lethal sobriety and pinpoint focus, when he was in thegroove on
the job. They had been scoring, month in, month out. It was innormal life that Chris was a
fuckup. A reformed gambling junkie, he fell offthe wagon on a Saturday morning two
months earlier at Santa Anita. He losta load on the third race and started betting wildly on
“meta-coincidences”based off numbers and names, including a horse named Dominick,
the samename as his son. It lost, too. He blew half of what he and Charlene hadstashed
after a year and a half of solid scoring.Charlene had had it after that. She wanted a version
of adult life for themand their son. She had pulled herself up out of a downslope life. To
her, Chriswas staying “a child, growing older.” For Chris, dumping the cops who hadcut
into them and taking the bank’s $11–$12 million was worth the risk.Sitting in night
shadows beneath the soaring ramps of the 105–110interchange in a Cadillac, Neil was
handed a package of counterintel,including Vincent Hanna’s personnel file, by his fixer
and middleman, Nate.Nate was an old-school SoCal bank robber. He and McCauley had
donetime in McNeil Federal Penitentiary in Puget Sound. Now he was a broker of
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