The Trenton warehouse serves two purposes at once: it is a legitimate storage facility and a major way station in the Mafia’s cash network. Jack Twist, Mort Gersh, and Tommy Sung exploit the overlap between those functions to get inside, take four bags of money, and then face an unexpected threat as they try to leave.

A Warehouse with Two Functions

The building operates as a real, profitable warehouse, accepting shipments from legitimate businesses that need temporary storage. Behind that ordinary trade, it also collects narcotics proceeds from across New Jersey. Suitcases, flight bags, cardboard boxes, and Styrofoam coolers arrive with cash, mostly on Sundays and Mondays; the routine gives the illicit operation the logistical shape of a business.

The warehouse’s money follows a schedule. On Tuesdays, Mafia accountants calculate the week’s profits. On Wednesdays, tightly banded cash leaves in suitcases for Miami, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, and other financial centers. Investment advisers retained by the Mafia put the proceeds to work. The warehouse is therefore not simply a hiding place for cash but a junction between criminal collection and respectable financial expertise.

The Robbery

The building’s legitimate shipments also provide Jack, Mort, and Tommy with a way past its elaborate nighttime security. Jack uses his personal computer to access the warehouse’s systems and those of a reputable client, creating electronic paperwork to authorize a huge crate. The crate arrives that morning and is stored as instructed; it has five concealed exits, allowing the three men to emerge even if other crates block it on every side.

A few minutes after eleven, they slip out of the crate and surprise the toughs in the office, who had trusted the alarms and locked doors to make the warehouse invulnerable. Jack, Mort, and Tommy take four heavy bags of cash. Their joke to the tied-up men—that they should be thought of as another layer of middlemen—turns the warehouse’s financial chain into a sardonic description of the robbery itself.

The Escape Turns Dangerous

Near midnight, Jack opens a door and steps into wind and sleet. A gray Ford van has arrived at the nearest loading ramp; a passing freight train has masked its approach. Four poorly maintained security lamps cast only small patches of murky yellow light, but one illuminates the van’s passenger door and the man getting out. Jack recognizes him as a Mafia enforcer and understands that he is serious trouble. The two startle each other, and Jack hesitates rather than immediately drawing his .38.

Jack retreats into the warehouse, shuts the door, and moves aside in case someone outside starts shooting through it. Mort and Tommy are there behind him, no longer buoyed by the successful theft. Tommy proposes returning to the crate and waiting until the search dies down; Mort judges that the men outside will search the building until they find them. The warehouse’s deceptive paperwork and hidden crate exits have made the robbery possible, but once the van arrives, the same secured building becomes a place from which escape is uncertain.