I mentioned this thread to my wife and she reminded me of something Steve used to do I had forgotten about. Steve would go to one of those companies that shipped your car by having someone drive it, drive away companies. Steve would get a car and never deliver it. He would drive it around for months. Mercedes Cadillac's and so on. The owners often would put stuff in the cars like golf clubs, clothes what ever they also wanted to ship. Steve would come to the pool room and sell everything that was in the car. Then just drive the car like it was his before leaving it on the side of the road to picked up or stolen for a second time. I don't know how many time he did this, I remember at least at least 5 or 6 times. You could never get away with stuff like that today because of computers but back then it was easy.
You have enough details to make me believe you are talking about the same guy. I was in the Congress by the way the night it was robbed. When we left we went right past the guys as they were coming in to rob the place. A few nights later we ran into them a few towns over and they had a pocket full of money and where playing one pocket going off for the whole amount. This same group robbed another pool room taking everybody's money about a week later. Back in those days there were not ATM cards. On a Friday night people had all their money in their pockets. And forget about robbing a room full of gamblers, the thieves would get more then if they robbed a bank. The Congress robbery they figured the robbers made off like $30,000 just out of the players pockets..
The year Keith won it paid $25,000 for first and $10,000 for second, a pretty big drop off. He was playing Lebron in the finals and Mike wanted to make a "deal", 20K and 15K. Keith said nothing doing and beat him 9-3 in the finals. Keith got 12.5K and so did I. Keith ran down to Philly to try to give Jimmy Fusco the eight ball at Boulevard Billiards. He came home broke.
