War Story: “Unsolved Mysteries” and John Quinn – Part One

Written by Jim Cavanaugh – South Florida had always had a problem with bank robberies and armored car robberies. The numbers increased after the Cuban boat lift. Not meaning to be anti-Cuban, but apparently that was a popular crime back home and the criminal types continued to ply their trade once President Carter welcomed them to the US. As a result agents had close contact with the banks and the armored car companies.

One such company was run by a man named John Anthony Quinn. We called him Jack Quinn. He was a frequent visitor at law enforcement functions and supported causes that cops loved. I had lunch with him on occasion, as did other agents.

One weekend I got a call from the Sheriff’s office about a problem at Quinn’s company. It seems John came in on Saturday just to check on the daily collections that the armored cars make from area businesses. The money is logged into their vault and on Monday it is dispersed to the banks or back to the businesses. John had stayed at the office until early afternoon and then left. As he closed the door the safe was secured on its time-lock and couldn’t be opened until Monday morning at 7 a.m.

After leaving, John apparently didn’t go home. After several hours his wife started getting concerned and made calls to co-workers in an effort to locate him. Everyone said the same thing, and no one had any idea where he could be. They tried to calm her and assure her that he must have stopped off to see someone. By 9 p.m. the wife was frantic. She had called the hospitals and the police. No one had any information. She decided to take her car and re-trace his normal route to the office to see if he had been in some accident and was sitting by the side of the road.

When she walked outside of their rural ranch home, she noticed a note under the windshield wiper. It was from John and called her a rotten [expletive deleted] and a whole bunch of other names. It told her to look in the car, which she did. There was a bag of money. The note told her that he wasn’t coming home and she was on her own.

The wife called co-workers and the police to let them know what she had found and all the bells and whistles went off. We all knew that the $150,000 in the bag for the wife must be the tip of the iceberg, and that Quinn left with a lot more than that, but there was no way to check until Monday.

We started looking for Quinn in the area, but we knew he was gone. The Airport Police started checking the long term and short term parking lots. About an hour later they found it. The car had been there since Saturday afternoon and Quinn was probably long gone from south Florida.

On Monday morning the vault door was opened to an audience of cops, FBI agents and company executives. After the count it appeared there was about $3,000,000 missing and not one clue as to where Quinn might have gone. We checked all the airline flights departing from the airport after the time stamp on the parking lot sub at the lot. We also checked cabs and rental cars to see if it was possible that Quinn dropped the car at the airport as a decoy. Nothing came up, so we had to believe he already had a new name and identity before the theft.

The end result was Quinn and the money were both gone. I spent years tracking him based upon sightings around the world, but he seemed to have vanished from the earth. We even developed a theory that Quinn was dead and that his wife had orchestrated the entire deal. She had him take the money, bring it home, and then she killed him and disposed of the body before calling everyone concerned about his being missing. It didn’t really make sense, but when you have nothing to go one, you grasp at any workable theory.

… To Be Continued …