Okay, confession. I always wanted to be a jewel thief. Well, as a kid. You know most kids of my generation wanted to be astronauts or firemen or cops or president of the untied states of arugula, but I wanted to be Alexander Mundy. He was a jewel and art thief, the original "White Collar" character, long before Neil Caffrey (Matt Bomer) was ever born. Played by Robert Wagner he was suave, sophisticated, cool, and a thief. Well, truthfully, I wanted to be his father, Alistair Mundy, played by Fred Astaire. Sauver, sophisticated-er, cooler, and a thief. Bill Mason was pretty much that, except as he fully admits in this autobiography, he was also a bit of a self-indulgent jerk who didn't really care much about how what he was doing affected the people in his life as long as he got his rush from planning capers and stealing. The book is a little too much just a recitation of the facts, without a lot of emotion in it, it's interesting, towards the end, well, in the epilogue, he talks about how emotional it was to write and think back through all the experiences, but really, very little if any of that comes across in the writing. He comes across pretty emotionless other than when things don't go his way. Ah well, guess I'm glad I went for that arugula position.

A bit of disappointment. I read A Burglar's Guide to the City a couple of years ago, and that author references this book when talking about lines of sight and the easiest ways to break into spaces, and how that often has more to do with weak points in a building (and within people's imaginations) than it does any real skill, other than cold read and opportunism. Mason has an interesting skill set and one that is rarefied (perception, upper body strength, building & infrastructure maintenance) and deserves some props for what he accomplished - but ultimately, he's an asshole. He's an arrogant prick with a low opinion of the rest of the human race who visited heartache on his family and a handful of privileged strangers. The book ends up being kind of a sad collection of tales told by a raconteur, and there's not much redeeming about it.