Becker told me that during 2001 and 2002, he and his crew pulled $650,000 from as many as one hundred safes in Florida and Texas. Sometimes, he said, they would strike three or four times in one night, the money in each safe ranging from a few hundred dollars to $50,000 or more. Other times, weeks would pass before Becker would round up his guys and do a job. During that period, police departments in Texas and Florida were beginning to sense, by the similar way the phone lines were being cut and the front doors carefully opened and the in-store surveillance videotapes taken, that one group was probably responsible for the sharp increase in safe thefts. At one point, at least thirty local agencies were on the case.
But amazingly, despite numerous hair-raising escapes, the Becker Crew was never caught. In one foiled burglary attempt in Texas, in which an alarm was accidentally tripped, Julian escaped from the cops by jumping over a fence, only to find himself in a small pasture where he was chased by an angry horse that kept nipping at his rear end. In Florida, Becker and Julian broke into Norris's Famous Place for Ribs in Port St. Lucie and came across an unmovable, five-hundred-pound safe. They started cutting it apart with a gasoline-powered saw that Bill had rented for them. But before they could get through the steel walls, they ran out of gasoline. They had Bill bring them a can of gasoline, and then they started again. By daybreak, however, they had worn out their saw blade trying to get into the safe. They drove to Lowe's hardware store, waited for the store to open so they could purchase a new blade, returned to the scene of the crime, began again, and then saw a restaurant employee arriving. As they were fleeing, Becker suddenly realized that Julian had left the rented saw, which could be traced back to them, in the restaurant. Julian ran back inside, dashed past the startled employee, grabbed the saw, and raced out. As Becker pulled away in the mini-van, a few police cars were gathering on the street in front of the restaurant, setting up a morning rush-hour speed trap. The police didn't realize until Becker was long gone that a burglary had been attempted.
When I asked Becker if he ever felt remorse about his chosen profession on Sunday mornings, as he sat in a church pew with his family, he told me that he constantly prayed for forgiveness. He said he also asked God to let him have one big score, so he could finally quit and fulfill his dream of living the noncriminal life. Although he did buy a few nice things for his family-a Rolex for Cathy and five-hundred-dollar porcelain dolls for his daughters on their birthdays-he was not that big of a spender. He was always trying to save money, he said, for that Chuck E. Cheese's franchise. When Becker took the family to Orlando for an expensive vacation at Disney World, he told me (and later told investigators) that he paid for the trip by having his Stonebridge Ranch buddy Joey fly there and meet him so that they could burglarize businesses at night after Becker had spent the day taking the children through the Magic Kingdom.
As for Cathy, there would be times during her Friday night bunco games with other mothers when the conversation would inevitably turn to the challenges the women were facing in their marriages. Cathy would look searchingly for a moment across the table, not sure what to say. The women believed she simply had no complaints about her life. What she told me, however, was that she lived in constant fear that her husband would someday go to jail. "It preyed on my mind, every day," she said. "When Todd would leave for the night, I'd lie in bed, unable to sleep, about to throw up every single second."
At one point, Cathy got her residential real estate license and went to work for Coldwell Banker, vainly hoping that she could bring in enough income so that her husband would no longer feel a need to steal. She went to a counselor at the Lutheran church, telling him she wasn't sure how to deal with a problem in her marriage. But when the counselor asked exactly what that problem was, she didn't dare tell him. To use the self-help vernacular that she would hear on such television shows as Oprah, Cathy was the classic enabler. She had to admit that she loved the kind of life that Todd had provided for her. She could never convince herself that Todd, a man who truly loved his family and did everything he could to make their lives better, was any worse than those corporate executives, plenty of whom lived right there in Stonebridge Ranch, who ignored their kids and kept mistresses on the side and did their own bit of white-collar thievery, bending accounting rules or hiding income from the IRS. She knew that Todd would never harm anyone: after all, he tried to hit only businesses that had insurance, so the owners could recover their losses.
And, she liked to point out, if Todd were really that bad of a man, would he go to such trouble to try to improve the lives of those who worked for him? When he flew his accomplices to Texas to do burglaries, for instance, he always invited them to come to his house to play with the children and eat one of Cathy's home-cooked meals. It was as if he wanted to show them that they too could climb the ladder to…yes, suburban life! (After one dinner at Becker's home, Julian went outside to smoke a cigarette. A neighbor saw the wiry young man wearing a very unsuburbanish muscle shirt and called the police, thinking the Becker house was being burglarized.) Despite their attempts to get him to change the radio to a rock station during their scouting expeditions, Becker kept playing Dr. Laura, because he believed they could use her no-nonsense advice on improving relationships and raising children. When Dwayne asked Becker to invest $25,000 of his burglary earnings into the Internet sex venture, Becker refused, telling him that he didn't like those sex sites and that he believed Dwayne needed to do something more productive with himself.
The truth was that his lessons didn't seem to be catching on. Behind his back, the crew called Becker "Ken" and Cathy "Barbie." Despite Dr. Laura's admonitions about living an immoral life, the crew still liked to get drunk at topless clubs to celebrate successful burglaries. One night, Julian and the others persuaded Becker to come with them to the Lodge, one of Dallas's more famous topless nightclubs. For a while, Becker sat uncomfortably in a booth, then he went back outside to sit in his minivan. Julian eventually showed up with a woman he had met and promptly had sex with her nearby on the hood of the woman's car. Periodically, Julian would shout at the disgusted Becker, "I'm giving her the mustard, baby! I'm giving her the mustard!"
What Becker never could have imagined was that his desire to help his brothers would eventually lead to his own arrest. It wasn't a crack police investigation that exposed Becker. What brought him down was his own perplexing moral code. In July 2002 Dwayne's girlfriend frantically called the St. Lucie county sheriff's department and claimed that Dwayne had hit her and kicked her in the face and taken a six-pack of beer from her refrigerator. After Dwayne was jailed on a charge of aggravated battery, he tried to get Becker to bail him out.
Although Becker had promised his coworkers he would always take care of them if anything happened to them during one of his burglaries, he made it clear he was not going to help them if they got into their own trouble, like a drug arrest. And he was certainly not going to help out Dwayne for battering his girlfriend. "I had had conversations with Dwayne about hitting women," Becker told me. "I had said to him, 'What kind of man could do that?' I was disgusted with Dwayne. So I said no, I'm not bailing him out."