FOR 48 YEARS JACK QUINN LED A LIFE distinguished by nothing except its dull predictability. The most dramatic thing he had ever done was get a tattoo when he was in the Marines.
He was like thousands of other men shuffling through a middle-management life. He had a wife and a son, he went to work every day to pay his rent, and he came home at night to sit on the couch and watch TV.
On April 9, 1988, for once in his life, Jack Quinn became someone special. That Saturday morning he went to work at Federal Protection Services, an armored-car and security company in Riviera Beach, but he never came home.
It took two days to discover that when Quinn walked away from his unremarkable life, $1.3 million disappeared with him. He left behind $107,000 in cash in the trunk of the family car, a note for his 13-year-old son and a trail of unanswered questions.
Jack Quinn remains at large to this day, the only suspect in one of the largest thefts ever in Palm Beach County. For four years he has been a fugitive, getting away with what is almost a fantasy crime.
It was the ultimate heist: clean, quick, quiet, and without a drop of blood. There is almost a perverse thrill in it. Jack Quinn, a dough-faced man as plain as toast, has apparently gone down the road with a million-dollar suitcase, outsmarting the assembled badges of the local police and the FBI.
If and when he is caught, he will be charged with grand theft and interstate transportation of stolen property. But in a way, this caper has added a new dimension — a twisted kind of respect — to a man no one gave much thought to before. Two years after Quinn walked away from his middle-class life, his son smiled at the audacity of a father who had been the soul of boredom.
“He’s done something no one else could get away with,” 15-year-old Michael Quinn said in an interview with Sunshine.
Did he admire what his father had done?
“Yeah,” he admitted with a grin. “I do.”
VERY LITTLE IN HIS LIFE BEFORE APRIL 9, 1988, would make anyone think Jack Quinn could become a robber on the run. But unlikely criminals are often the most successful ones.
“He was the last guy in the world you’d have thought would have pulled something like this,” says his former boss, Carl Fulgenzi.
Quinn was quiet, steady and, as far as anyone knew, trustworthy. He came to Florida with his wife and son in 1982 and took a job with a company later bought by Federal Protection Services. He rose to the rank of vice president in charge of the armored-car division and made $37,000 a year. He designed the dual-combination security system for the company vault.
Six months before he disappeared, Quinn and his family moved from Wellington to a farm in rural Loxahatchee, where his wife, Pauline, boarded horses. To help pay the $1,200 monthly rent, Jack had a second job hauling medical waste from hospitals. Some of their neighbors thought the Quinns were sweet, gentle people, but others recall loud, violent arguments between husband and wife.
Jack Quinn’s entire life has been a puzzle, marked by contradiction and mystery. What is not in dispute is that he was born in Hammond, Ind., on Jan. 7, 1940, and christened John Anthony Quinn III. He grew up near Pittsburgh, attended Catholic schools and was a Boy Scout. His father now lives in Delray Beach, but if John Anthony Quinn II knows anything about his son’s new life, he isn’t saying.
“No sir, I will not talk about it,” he snorts, “and please don’t bother me again.”
After graduating from high school in 1957, Quinn joined the Marines and got married. Some sources say he and his first wife had only one child, but Quinn’s own resume states that he is the father of six.
After three years in the Marine Corps and a year as a salesman in Jacksonville, Quinn moved to Montgomery County, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., in 1962. His resume says he spent six years on the local police force, but records show that he only went to the police academy and never spent time on the street.
It was in Maryland that Quinn met his future wife, Pauline. She was walking her dogs through a park where, she claims, Jack Quinn was a policeman on patrol. It was about 1974, she thinks, but if Quinn was a patrolman then, Pauline may be the only witness.
“It was love at first sight,” she recalled two years ago. “It was beautiful from that moment on.”
Both were married to other people, but they quickly got divorces and were married in 1974. Their son, Michael, was born the following year.
One of Quinn’s few interests was guns. He had a collection of at least 10 pistols and rifles, all but one of which were found after he disappeared. Today the FBI considers him armed and dangerous.
“He has said he won’t be taken alive,” notes agent Jim Cavanaugh.
So, with the odd scenario of a middle American loading up for a death-or- glory shootout, the FBI resorted to its own secret weapon — TV. In December of 1988, Quinn was featured in an episode of NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries. More than 200 tips were phoned in, all of which were checked out by the FBI. It is not known whether a television buff named Jack Quinn saw the show.
ON APRIL 9, 1988, QUINN WENT TO his office in Riviera Beach between 8:30 and 9 a.m. It wasn’t unusual for him to work on Saturdays, and only one other person was working that day. Quinn left for an hour or so during the morning and later washed his car in front of the building — also not unusual. No one saw him open the safe. In the afternoon he drove his car home, catching a ride back to Riviera Beach with a company guard. He left the office at about 5 p.m. in a company car.
When he wasn’t home by 7, Pauline Quinn phoned several of Jack’s co-workers. She called the police to see if her husband had been in an accident.
The next day, Sunday, Pauline opened the trunk of the car and found two bags stuffed with $107,000 in cash. In a handwritten note to his son, Quinn said he had done something terribly wrong but could no longer stand the heat from the IRS. He asked Michael, then 13, to be the man of the family.
“I hope you will understand someday,” he wrote. “I love you.”
At the office, Quinn had set a timer that kept the safe locked until Monday morning. When company officials and the police finally opened the door of the safe, $1.3 million was missing. The bills were worn and unmarked, impossible to trace.
Quinn’s company car turned up at Palm Beach International Airport, with a ticket stub showing he entered the parking lot Saturday at 5:36 p.m. The police checked every airline and every rental company, but no one saw Jack Quinn leave town.
“He either walked away, which is hard to do with a million dollars in cash,” says Cavanaugh of the FBI, “or someone drove him.”
The only certainty is that without warning and without witnesses, Jack Quinn vanished like the fog.
After four years the authorities still don’t know why it happened. Maybe it was the temptation of handling other people’s money. Every day the armored cars brought in huge stacks of cash from banks, restaurants and businesses — often more than the $1.3 million Quinn is thought to have taken.
Maybe, as Pauline Quinn believes, the government drove him to desperation. In the mid-1980s the Internal Revenue Service ordered Quinn to pay more than $15,000 in back taxes. But investigators discount this theory, since the IRS garnisheed Quinn’s paycheck for at least six months before he left, collecting several thousand dollars.
“Why do people do things like this?” muses Quinn’s old boss Carl Fulgenzi, a retired chief of police from Westchester County, N.Y. “Maybe he gave up hope and went off the deep end.”
“Why?” asks FBI agent Jim Cavanaugh. “Ask his psychiatrist.”
THE FBI’S PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE OF Quinn is disappointingly dull.
“He’s a total loner type, a couch potato,” says Cavanaugh, who handled the case until he recently moved to Texas. “He avoids socializing like the plague.”
In a peculiar twist of legal fate, Cavanaugh actually met Quinn in his capacity as armored-car supervisor for Federal Protection Services.
“He was Joe Quiet,” recalls Cavanaugh, a 21-year veteran of the Bureau. “He was low-key, didn’t say much.”
Jack Quinn is a chunky 5 feet 8 inches tall, weighing about 225 pounds. He has blue eyes and gray hair and likes to smoke Dutch Masters cigars. He had worn a mustache for some time, but he had shaved it off and lost weight just before he dropped from sight in 1988. He has a U.S. Marine Corps tattoo on his right forearm and a scar on the back of his neck. Some people claim he spoke Spanish fluently, others say he didn’t know the language at all.
He did know how to sell himself and make a good impression. He had a way of making you believe him.
“Jack Quinn was a very, very bright person,” says Fulgenzi, the former boss. “He was quick with responses. He was — what do you call it? — glib. He was very sharp in that respect.”
Though clever on his feet, Quinn was a man of formidable reserve. In November of 1987, five months before he vanished, his mother died.
“Not once,” Pauline Quinn later recalled, “did I see a tear. I knew the man so well, but what got me the most was that his innermost feelings were hidden from me.”
After he married Pauline, Quinn had almost nothing to do with his first wife and family. He still owes more than $8,500 in alimony. He also had an affair of four years that he kept secret from Pauline. When he skipped town, Quinn never told his mistress goodbye.
“He wasn’t close to anyone,” concludes Jim Cavanaugh.
TWO YEARS AFTER THE FACT, Pauline regretted that she turned in the $107,000 she found in the trunk of the car.
“People say, you must have gotten a reward,” she complained. “I got nothing, absolutely nothing.”
After living in Maryland with her daughter from an earlier marriage, Pauline returned to Florida with her son in May of 1990. She asked friends for money and a place to stay. Some helped her a little, others sent her on her way.
“Every waking moment all I think about is, Where are you, Jack?” she lamented at the time. “You wait for the mailman, and nothing comes. You stay up till 3 in the morning. Please get in touch with us, Jack. We need you, Jack. Do you know where we are? Why did you do it, Jack?”
Quinn did in fact see his wife and son not long after he disappeared. Pauline and Mike moved into a trailer in Ocean City, Md., where Jack was apparently living. One day Pauline found a handwritten letter from her husband inside her trailer, plus $3,600 in cash in her microwave oven. Pauline foolishly told a neighbor about the money.
“The next day it was stolen,” she recalled.
Pauline admitted that she and her son met Jack at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., after his disappearance but never heard from him after July of 1989.
“He was traveling with beards and wigs,” Pauline said two years ago. He wore contact lenses to make his blue eyes look brown, and he had gained a lot of weight. He used the aliases of Dale Clukey and James Sullivan, Pauline said, and drove a maroon Chrysler Imperial.
In May of 1989 Quinn was issued a driver’s license in Houston, Texas, under the name of Dale Calvin Clukey. The license photograph shows him with an uncharacteristic smile and a full, salt-and-pepper beard. His birthdate is listed as June 26, 1952. Quinn was actually born 12 years earlier, and looks it.
The FBI thinks Pauline Quinn knows more than she is telling. Agents suspect that she and her husband actually lived together in 1989, a year after he walked away.
“We believe she is in touch with him and continues to see him,” agent Cavanaugh conjectures.
If so, Pauline Quinn could be arrested for aiding and abetting the commission of a felony and harboring a fugitive.
The FBI would like to know more, but Pauline and her son have dropped from sight themselves. Michael Quinn, now 17, lived with a family in Boynton Beach for a while, and there were rumors that Pauline had checked into a rehabilitation clinic to deal with a drinking problem. But for more than a year there has been no word about either mother or son.
WHEN JACK QUINN LEFT PALM Beach County, he destroyed his own family and very nearly wrecked an entire company.
“We went to the bottom,” says Carl Fulgenzi of Federal Protection Services. “We were forced into Chapter 11 by what he did.”
To collect after the theft, the company had to sue its insurer, Lloyd’s of London. Federal Protection did not emerge from bankruptcy until April of 1991. By then it had been bought by a holding company, and the armored-car division headed by Jack Quinn was sold. The firm now concentrates on personal and corporate security.
“The company is doing beautifully,” says Fulgenzi, “and we’ve paid back all our debts, dollar for dollar.”
Reports have placed Jack Quinn in Australia, Mexico and the western United States, but the sightings were apparently cases of mistaken identity.
“Those leads resulted in the arrest of drug smugglers,” notes Cavanaugh, “but not of Quinn.”
No one knows what kind of life Quinn leads today. Is he living on some tropical island, enjoying the breezes and the taste of rum? Is he in Las Vegas, trying to cash in on a dirty fortune? Or is he shuffling from one tiny town to another, eating bad food and staying in trailer parks and cheap motels?
What will he do if he runs into someone he knows? What will go through his mind the next time he sees his face in a newspaper or on a TV crime show?
Does he keep a loaded gun with him at all times, having vowed never to be taken alive? Or perhaps he has grown weary of this dangerous game and is simply waiting for the day the agents with drawn guns knock on his door.
Wherever he is, what must it be like to guard a suitcase full of stale green cash? Twenty-four hours a day, he is chained to that dwindling supply of paper freedom as surely as if he were in the shackles of the FBI.
“I wouldn’t want to live like that,” says his old boss, Carl Fulgenzi. “He must be looking over his shoulder all the time.”
No one knows where Quinn was yesterday, where he might be going today. But tomorrow everything could change. All it takes is the right call from a landlord, a clerk in a store or a neighbor who isn’t quite sure about this guarded man without a past.
“The case will be open,” says Jim Cavanaugh of the FBI, “until we have either Quinn or his body.”
No matter what troubles he had before, how can this man now be free? If he makes just one slight slip, Jack Quinn could be caught — and he knows it.
—- MATT SCHUDEL is a Sunshine staff writer.
THE PERILS OF PAULINE
WHEN PAULINE QUINN returned with her son to South Florida in May of 1990, she had no money, no home, nowhere to turn. She was at the lowest point of a pitiful life.
We had talked a year earlier, when she was living on welfare in Gaithersburg, Md., but she didn’t want a story written about her then. When she called a year later, on May 9, 1990, she sounded desperate.
“It’s terrible when you’re completely destitute,” she said. “I have nothing in my wallet, nothing.”
She wanted to know if Sunshine magazine could pay her for telling her story. It couldn’t. The most I could offer was to buy lunch for her and her 15-year- old son, Michael. They were staying at a motel in Palm Beach.
Pauline, about 50 years old with bleached hair, could be charming and articulate. But she was also an alcoholic who had fallen off the wagon. She had a couple of drinks at lunch, and when we went back to her motel room she chain-smoked Vantages through the afternoon and steadily poured herself drinks from a bottle of Wild Irish Rose. As the day wore on, she grew more and more maudlin.
“I’m being shunned,” she said. “I have nobody to call a friend. Why is every day so painful?”
She alternated between anger at her husband and a kind of wistful, idealized memory of him.
“He was the most honest man anyone would want to meet,” she said, above her son’s snickering. “Honesty was his first, middle and last name.”
Later she said, “He has jeopardized us. I have no more feeling.”
Mike Quinn was a well-spoken kid who wore his hair short on the sides, with a long ponytail in back. He admired the audacity of his father’s apparent crime but now felt deserted and deprived.
“He’s not my father anymore,” he concluded. “He left us.”
Pauline talked of a life of unendurable sadness and loss. In less than a year, her husband had disappeared, her mother and mother-in-law had died, and one of her daughters had been strangled to death by a boyfriend. A decade earlier, that daughter’s twin sister had been killed in a car wreck at 18.
“And people wonder, why am I drinking?” Pauline said.
She’d had a severe heart attack the previous summer, she said, and could not work. Days before returning to Florida, she was in a motorcycle crash and needed 100 stitches in her leg. She pulled up her jeans to show me a leg that was red, swollen and bandaged.
“It’s been one fiasco after another,” she said. “Life has been hell, to say the least.”
All Pauline wanted was to have Jack come home. She wanted a house and horses, she wanted her old life back. She didn’t seem to realize that Jack couldn’t support her very well from inside a prison cell.
I felt sorry for her. This sad woman had found pain at every step of her life. She seemed to have nowhere to turn but to the solace of a bottle.
Against all principles and ethics, except the instincts of the human heart, I reached into my pocket and handed her three $20 bills. I didn’t want her son to notice.
I told her I wanted to see her and Michael again to talk about their life with Jack. She gave me the phone number of a friend. When I called two days later, Pauline Quinn was gone, and I haven’t heard a word from her since. I later learned that she had been arrested and jailed for theft, and that she may have been driving a stolen car.
The afternoon we met I treated Pauline and her son to lunch at a Chinese restaurant. It was the first food they had eaten in two days, Pauline told me. When the lunch was over, she broke open her cookie and read this fortune: “Nobody shall mar your happy future.”
—- MATT SCHUDEL
