Teen Sons Learn the Family Business--Armed Robbery

Like a lot of couples, Matthew and Pamela Schultz taught their teen-age sons the family business. It wasn’t your typical mom-and-pop operation--the Schultzes were into robbery.

For William, 16, and Matt, 15, the tools of the trade were AK-47s, police scanners, surveillance and survival gear, maps, wigs, even hypnosis, police say. They were trained in hand-to-hand combat, went through daily routines of jogging, sit-ups and push-ups, and memorized streets, zones and police codes.

There were dry runs and days of scrupulously logging police movement.

Files police found in a rented home near Sarasota included blueprint-like drawings and maps showing distances to police and fire stations, hospitals, malls, railroad terminals and streets leading to interstate highways.

After a job, the two teens would be hypnotized and debriefed.

Eliminate Mistakes

“Some sessions were more detailed than others,” said Detective Bob Drone in Kenneth City, 50 miles north of Sarasota. “The reason was if any mistakes were made during a robbery they could be corrected before the next one.”

One mistake the Schultzes made cost them; they pleaded guilty in Tennessee to a botched robbery and drew a 10-year prison sentence.

Documents police found in the house left no doubt that the Schultzes thought of it as a business. There were ledger entries for expenditures. A contract dealt with firearm purchases, handling of loot and standards of behavior.

“No greed will be tolerated for personal use and pleasure,” it warned, according to investigators.

Police don’t know much about the family. Schultz, 29, was at one time a trucker. His 35-year-old wife was a one-time exotic dancer and was married to a Rochester, N.Y., man named Hinton, who fathered the boys and since has died.

The Schultzes told their landlady, Stella Penney, they were Matt and Pat Avery last September when they rented the three-bedroom country home she owned on 10 acres near Sarasota. They said they would be there two years.

Schultz told Penney he was a Marine on special assignment at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, 70 miles away. “I wasn’t suspicious. I didn’t know they were criminals,” she said, adding that the boys were polite, but didn’t seem to go to school and dressed mostly in military clothes.

Grew Wary

Over the months, Penney grew wary of Pamela Schultz, who demanded several days’ notice before the landlady could visit, then was rude to her. “I was getting kind of scared of her. The others would come around and apologize, make excuses for her that she was having a bad day or the like.”

The first police knew of the Schultzes was a six-month spree of robberies and burglaries that began in the Sarasota area in May, 1988. On Nov. 26, the Schultzes sat outside a Kenneth City restaurant while the two teens and a runaway they had picked up took $3,000-$4,000 at gunpoint, Drone said.

On Dec. 1, Penney got the November rent. “Matt opened his wallet and I saw a stack of big bills, 2 inches thick. It was loaded; there were hundreds. I said: ‘What did you do, rob a bank?’ ”

Schultz said no, then told her he was going to Tampa on business and would be back in a few weeks. But the family fled.

“It looked like they got out in a hurry,” Penney said. They left behind two big dogs, their clothes and a $300 electric bill.

Gone were the stove, dining room table and fans, and the carpet was ruined. One bedroom was painted in military camouflage colors. A barrel on the wooded lot had been used for target practice and looked like swiss cheese. Shots had been fired into the barn. Empty ammunition shells were scattered around and there were three homemade obstacle courses in the front yard.

Headed Home

Scared by a local crime-reenactment TV show, the Schultzes headed home to Churchville, N.Y., starting back south in January or February, police say.

They made it as far as Red Bank, Tenn., outside Chattanooga, where police nabbed the two Schultz boys and a runaway from New York after the botched armed robbery of a businessman as he made a night deposit, said Sgt. Dan Dyer.

Police recovered all but $110 of the $1,180 cash and $300 in checks. Some was stashed in a motel light fixture and $300 was in a refrigerator drip tray, he said. “The light globe had been lined with tissue paper so the money was not visible even when you shined a flashlight on it. Some of the stuff was ingenious.”

Police confiscated an AK-47 and 750 rounds of ammunition, a .45-caliber pistol with 130 rounds, an automatic rifle with 300 rounds, magazine clips and a number of military-type knives, Dyer said. “They had enough weapons and ammo to keep us held off the better part of a week.”

The Schultzes pleaded guilty last month to the robbery. A judge sentenced the adults to 10 years to run concurrently with any sentence in Florida. The boys’ unspecified sentence is to be parallel and concurrent to Florida’s.

The family was extradited last month and pleaded innocent July 7 to charges stemming from three shoe-store robberies, one each at a computer software store and a yogurt shop and burglaries of a restaurant and three schools.

Matthew and Pamela Schultz and William Hinton, now 17, face 24 counts each of conspiracy, robbery with a firearm, burglary and grand theft. Each is being held on nearly $500,000 bond. Matt Hinton was indicted by a grand jury on 19 counts as an adult and is being held on $200,000 bond.

They are to be tried Oct. 23.

Traced to Home

Police traced the family to the rented home and found shotguns, ammunition and 60 pounds of spent shells. They also seized a 3-inch-thick file giving more than a glimpse into the carefully orchestrated, resourceful operation that included runaways the adults brought into the fold.

The contract they found reads in part:

“Any and all firearms will be bought by the business and held by the overseer for proper use.” Stolen money would be “cleaned and unmarked by overseer Matt.” Big expenditures “would not be allowed in one lump sum as it might be traced back.” Anyone who took drugs or alcohol within seven days of a job would be excluded. Traceable items had to be destroyed.

There also were individual’s notes: “three days ago, stopped smoking . . . you can beat anybody but Matthew . . . you are smart, smarter than the cops . . . you feel no pain . . . won’t remember being hypnotized.”

Jobs were carefully planned. For a grocery store stickup, they figured 20 seconds to open the safe, 15 seconds to grab the money, 10 to get out followed by a 100-yard dash. Police were two-fifths of a mile away. They had 36 seconds to run half the driveway with maybe 12 stacks of money totaling 20 to 30 pounds.