James Ellroy - The Best American Crime Writing 2005

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."

It was a tough decision. Becker knew that Dwayne was already somewhat disenchanted with him because of his lack of interest in his Internet venture. Dwayne had also been arguing with Becker about his share of the burglary proceeds, which he thought needed to be bigger. The fact that Becker would not bail him out was the last straw. An angry Dwayne impulsively contacted a police detective and said that he might know a thing or two about the mysterious safe burglaries that had been occurring around Florida. Indeed, Dwayne was so willing to talk that he forgot to arrange any kind of immunity deal for himself before making his confession.

When the cops located Julian and confronted him with the statements Dwayne had made, he did quickly cut a deal, perhaps because a few months earlier he'd been arrested for doing some burglaries on his own. Apparently, Julian had begun to believe he was as good as Becker and no longer needed him. In Orlando, in a single evening, he had attempted to steal the safes of a Dairy Queen, a check-cashing business, and a Steak and Ale-all of them located within a block of one another. An Orlando police officer saw Julian running from the last burglary, drove up beside him, and shot him with a stun gun, causing him to soil his pants. Julian realized that the only way he could avoid prison for his triple-burglary stunt was to betray the very person who had taught him how to do it.

And just like that, the Becker Crew was no more. Police officers descended on Todd and Cathy's dream home, yelling at them, "Where are the safes? Where is the money?" They found only a couple thousand dollars in the bedroom closet and around a hundred dollars in Cathy's purse, which she told them was money from her daughters' Girl Scout cookie sales. When Becker's five-year-old son watched the officers lead Becker away, he told his mother that the men were soldiers and that they wanted Becker to go away with them to fight terrorists. Cathy said, "I bet that's right," and then she burst into tears.

When police officers in Florida went looking for Bill, they found him working part-time as a Santa's helper at a mall because he was still having trouble finding a good job in the restaurant business. (He was also a very bad criminal: The cops found one of the stolen safes, which he had been too lazy to discard, in his garage.) As the police approached, he was wearing a Santa's hat and a bright green vest festooned with decorations of candy canes, telling children to smile for their photo with Santa. According to Bill, the police shouted, "Step away from the Santa booth!" During the arrest of Paulo in another part of Florida, the police found a sculpture of a purple dolphin, titled "Taking Flight," that had been taken from one of the Florida stores where a safe had been stolen. The sculpture was so beautiful, Paulo later said, that he just had to have it for his living room.

Becker was taken to Florida to be booked on state burglary charges. In the jail, he came across Dwayne. "We were sitting there by ourselves," Becker recalled, "and I said, 'What did I do to you that was so terrible that you had to do this to me?' I said, 'My kids love you-they jump on you. They call you Uncle Dwayne. They jump all over you.' " Becker paused, still stunned by the betrayal. "And there was nothing Dwayne could say. Nothing he could say."