I was sitting in the Richmond County Courtroom in Augusta, Georgia, with one of our lawyers, when John Reno Casper testified that Charlie Fleming and I had cracked the safe in the jukebox business.  During his testimony, he said that Charlie and I were the head of the Dixie Mafia, and the Dixie Mafia made the Italian Mafia look like school children.  I punched the lawyer beside me and asked him, “What did he say?”  The lawyer repeated the testimony.  I then asked him, “What’s the Dixie Mafia?”  The lawyer replied, “Damn if I know.”—Foster Sellers

      Set a thief to catch a thief.---English Proverb circa 1670

      Foster and his confederates continued honing their burglary skills during the early 1960s.  One cohort, Howard Carter of Baxley, could neither read nor write, and he had a habit of dropping in on Foster when he was broke and couldn’t buy a drink.  Foster remembered him as being “cunning as hell, and he could keep people around him laughing, sometimes with his wit and sometimes with his ignorance.”   Howard decided he wanted to steal some slot machines from a Jesup VFW club, and he asked Foster to help.  They drove to the club one Sunday night, and Foster told him to take the car around the back, so they could see what the building looked like.  To their surprise, they found a house trailer almost as long as the clubhouse with a couple of cars parked out front-—a situation obviously too risky. 

      “That was a typical case job by Howard,” Foster wryly observed. 

      On another occasion, Howard asked Foster what B-A-N-K spelled. 

     “It’s ‘bank’,” Foster replied. 

     “That’s what I thought,” Howard said.  “I know where one is that we can burglarize.” 

     He directed Foster to Screven, Georgia, located On U.S. 82 a few miles southwest of Jesup and around seventy miles from Savannah.  At this time, Foster had never burglarized a bank, but he decided it was as good a time as any to give it a try.

     Although Foster’s accomplice might not have been the sharpest knife in the kitchen drawer, he had the nose for a good target.  Screven was a very small town, and its bank was located near the railroad tracks in the downtown area, several blocks away from the main highway and its heavy traffic.  That night, the two men broke into an auto body shop and stole a cutting torch, went back to the bank and made an entrance through the back door.  Although the cutting torch had a small tip and could not produce the heat needed for heavy steel, it served Foster’s purposes sufficiently.  He cut a hole in the vault door and chewed through the bar that prevented the door handle from operating the locking bars. 

The door swung open, and Foster found himself facing an “iron horse.” This is a solid steel safe shaped like a giant egg with one end cut off and a round door attached.  It sat on top of a steel box, and the box had a small rectangular door with a combination lock.

     Foster immediately realized that the stolen torch was not powerful enough to cut through the iron horse, but he could puncture the small box underneath.  He burned away the metal, until he found the pin holding the handle.  He cut it in two, twisted the handle and found several thousand dollars inside. The two men split the take, fifty-fifty. 

      “It wasn’t a big score, but I learned a lot,” Foster said.  “Before the bank burglaries stopped, and I started robbing banks instead, I counted thirty-three banks once that my group had burglarized.”  This is a subtle but significant delineation.  The bank burglar enters the building when it is empty and rifles the safe for its contents.  The bank robber uses force, usually a weapon of some kind, coercing bank employees into handing over money and other valuables.  The latter felony is far riskier and involves the danger of injury or death to those robbed as well as to the robber.

     On another occasion, Foster and Howard used a Sunday, when most retail stores are closed, to burglarize a Savannah shopping center.  They decided to approach the target store from the roof by cutting a hole and dropping down into the unoccupied building. 

     The problem with this technique is that from the roof it is very difficult to calculate exactly what store is underneath your feet.  In this instance, Foster and Howard cut away and dropped into what they thought was a loan office.  Surprise, surprise!  They had landed in a lady’s clothing emporium.

     Deciding to make lemonade from this lemon, they stole as many outfits as they could, many of them formal evening wear.  Foster took his half to Indian Lil, who sold every one of the dresses within a week.

      Charlie Fleming continued teaching his safecracking skills to Foster and Bernie Lewis.  Experience was the best teacher, however, and they learned from their mistakes. One Sunday, they broke into a Wolco store near palm tree-lined Victory Drive in Savannah.  They knew it had a large screw safe, and this time they planned to use an electrical cutting rig instead of a torch to cut it open.  A portable acetylene-cutting torch would not do the trick.  The doors were too thick, and the metal used for the safe tended to puddle and stick together after it melted.  This would affect the cutting torch, denying it of enough oxygen after the hole was a couple of inches deep. 

     Also, at that depth, the heat would blow back toward the torch operator and would melt the tip of the torch until it fell off.  The electric welding machine used electrode-cutting rods, eliminating the cutting tip problem, but it was slow work using one, and it took many cutting rods to eat through the safe. 

     Finally, Foster cut a small hole in the safe, and Bernie, who had small hands, was able to reach through and clean the safe out.  Still, Foster was not satisfied with the electric welding machine, and they abandoned it in the Wolco store for the manager and the police to puzzle over.

     Shortly afterward, Bernie ended up in a Jacksonville, Florida, jail.  Bernie’s father called Foster in Savannah and asked him to check a small house Bernie had rented there for some of Bernie’s clothes.  Accompanied by his crony, Howard Carter, Foster went to the house, and they entered via an unlocked small side window.  Foster searched the interior but did not see any clothes, nor did he notice any items missing.  When he opened the front door to leave, Foster found himself staring down the barrel of a long-barrel gun.  Both men put up their hands as two police officers approached.

     One officer said he had a search warrant for the house and wanted to know if they wanted to see it.  Howard took the document, studied it seriously and said,      “Let Foster see it.”  Foster could care less about the search warrant and told the policemen that Howard didn’t either, since Howard couldn’t read. 

     “Why the hell did you want to see the warrant for, if you can’t read?” the cop bellowed at Howard. 

     “You said I could see it,” Howard solemnly replied.  “I can do that without reading it.”