The Man Who Robbed 1.8 Million Payphones, Quarter by Quarter

James the Clark was a machinist by profession, but he had a murky history. According to the Associated Press, in 1968 he was arrested for attempting to arrange a massive counterfeit money deal with contacts in Europe that would have put $50 million phony bills into circulation.

Most of the sightings were the same. Standing in front of the motel clerk or convenience store worker was a man, roughly 5 feet, 9 inches tall, wearing a baseball cap pulled low and almost touching a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses. A ponytail stuck out from the back of the hat. A button-down shirt was left untucked. Cowboy boots protruded from under his pant cuffs. Most importantly, the man liked to pay for his food or his room in quarters—rolls and rolls of quarters.

In the 1980s, police in Ohio as well as the FBI spent years chasing the man with the ponytail. Unlike a lot of criminals, he didn’t brandish a gun, resort to violence, or put innocent people in his crosshairs. What he did instead was become the most prolific safecracker in modern times, able to breach what was once believed to be the impenetrable, unbreakable strongbox housed in the country’s 1.8 million payphones. Using means that baffled even security experts, the “payphone bandit” or “telephone bandit” eluded capture. Quarter by quarter and year after year, he collected an estimated $500,000 to $1 million from these tiny safes.

The question was how anyone was ever going to find him. “Unless somebody gets lucky, he’ll probably never get caught,” Ohio Bell Telephone security official Robert Cooperider told The Los Angeles Times in 1987. “He’s well-organized, he’s smart, and he’s not greedy. He only hits a few widely spaced spots each day. He’s always looking over his shoulder, to see if there is a police car, or a telephone company vehicle.”

Though it’s hard to imagine today, there was once a time when making a telephone call meant going home, asking to use someone’s phone, or plunking a quarter into a freestanding payphone. (Or more than one, depending on where you were calling and for how long.) The first public pay-to-use coin-operated phone debuted in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1889. It relied on the honor system, with users depositing coins owed after their call was done. Over the next century, they appeared everywhere, from convenience stores to diners to bus stations. Some were freestanding; others were located inside of a booth to give callers some privacy.

While the phones varied somewhat in design, virtually all of them took care to make the coinbox virtually impregnable. Bell, then the world’s largest phone carrier, reportedly spent years refining a lock on their box that was thought to be unpickable. If a would-be thief wanted to even have a shot at getting into the box, they’d have to try smashing it open with a sledgehammer or knock it out of the ground with a tractor. Given that the boxes only held about $150 when full, few criminals thought it was worth the effort.

James Clark wasn’t one of those people. The Akron, Ohio, native was a machinist by trade, but he had an unsavory history. According to the Associated Press, in 1968 he was arrested for attempting to arrange a massive counterfeit money deal with contacts in Europe that would have put $50 million phony bills into circulation. He was caught and sentenced to three years in prison.

Roughly a decade later, in the early 1980s, Clark devised a new scheme. According to authorities, Clark obtained locks like the ones found on payphones and created a set of specialized locksmith tools that allowed him to pick the lock. Though different operators had somewhat different lock configurations, Clark zeroed in on specific designs to breach. (His exact toolset and technique has never been publicly disclosed, likely due to security concerns.)

Clark’s strategy was simple. Upon arriving at a payphone, he used a custom tool that he could slip into the margins of the coinbox to gauge how much money was inside and whether it was worth pursuing. If it was full, he’d pick up the receiver and pretend to be deep in a conversation. While hunched over the phone, he’d grab his lockpicking tools—which he concealed with an untucked shirttail—and get to work on the lock. Picking one took about 15 minutes. When he got it, the faceplate in front of the coin receptacle came off. Clark would take the box full of change and then replace the faceplate. This last step was key: The phone would continue to operate without the box, giving no physical or mechanical clue it had been tampered with. No one would realize the box was missing until a phone company employee came to retrieve the money—in some cases a week or so later.

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