A License to Steal

As early as the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Walter L. Shaw was thinking of speakerphones, conference calls and call forwarding. Of the thirty-nine patents to his credit, those three telephonic breakthroughs were his biggest inventions, yet nobody knows his name. Ahead of the world by decades, Shaw was leading us into a high-tech future as part of the intellectual elite, but he was repeatedly cheated by shrewd businessmen and big corporations. His son, Walter T. Shaw, was enraged by the ill treatment of his father and embraced a personal mission to even the score. Shaw Jr. would become one of the most prolific jewel thieves in U.S. history. Shaw Sr. spent a lifetime inventing and patenting the many means of communication we take for granted today, but it was all for nothing. Tragically, only the Mafia rewarded him. Just to make ends meet for his family, he was persuaded to put his brilliance to work for the mob. The nation's most successful gambling bookmaker financed the making of a fantastic little device dubbed the ?black box,? which Walter L. Shaw invented in 1959, and resulted in his subpoena to testify at the McClellan Subcommittee Hearings on gambling and organized crime in 1961. Shaw's young son and some of the Mafia's most notorious figures witnessed his grilling at the hearings. Seeing the boy's distress, Carlo Gambino, the boss of the Gambino crime family, whispered to Shaw Jr., ?You remember one thing about these politicians, these judges, these big corporations. They have a license to steal, but we don't need one. Your dad's not the bad guy, kid, they are.'Shaw, Walter T., Jr. is the author of 'A License to Steal', published 2008 under ISBN 9780978605902 and ISBN 097860590X.