By Jane Prendergast
Enquirer staff writer

The story, as Cincinnati detectives tell it, goes like this: Jimmy, Billy, Steve, Ron, Mike and Harry Joe were safecrackers.

For more than three years, they hit businesses from Cincinnati's East Side and branched into Clermont County. They liked to work on Sunday nights, when safes often were stuffed with the weekend's profits.

They cased the places - like City Beverage in Hyde Park and the Sky Galley restaurant near Lunken Airport - days before a heist, cut phone and alarm wires and waited outside until they were sure they didn't see any cops. Once, when trying to leave Choo Choo's in Madeira in May, they saw two officers drinking coffee. They called 911, sending the officers to a fake emergency somewhere else.

James Godfrey, indicted in a safecracking ring in Cincinnati. (Photo provided)

Authorities say Jimmy Godfrey, 27, was the boss of the safecracking ring that District 2 police say is responsible for dozens of break-ins and thefts of safes, four of which weighed as much as 600 pounds and had to be dug by police divers out of the Little Miami River.

Investigators estimated that the ring, whose members were indicted this week, caused about $120,000 in damage to businesses, primarily from doors pried open to take safes and strongboxes. Authorities don't have a total tally of the amount of cash the ring got away with but estimated that it's well above $100,000.

Godfrey, as officials tell it, would order the others to wear long sleeves, gloves, long pants and masks. He wouldn't let them spit, smoke, eat, drink or go to the bathroom, even though the "jobs'' sometimes lasted hours.

He never wore the same shoes. He didn't want evidence technicians to be able to match shoeprints.

He watched CSI.

"He's not really smart-smart,'' Det. Mike Phillips said, describing Godfrey, whom he said he has arrested off and on since Godfrey was a kid growing up in Cincinnati's East End. "But he's got this down to a science.

"But he'd also pull a job, then he'd go tell everybody on Eastern Avenue about it.''

For all Godfrey's attention to detail, it was something simple that led to his indictment and those of his 10 friends and relatives who police say worked for and with him: Godfrey was taking too much of the profit.

By the time Det. Phillips and his colleagues Evan Evans and Tina Ziegler concluded more than 100 interviews, Godfrey's friends and relatives eventually had ratted everyone out, police said.

In fact, one relative was more than willing - for $35 - to lead officers to one suspect. She needed exactly that much cash to spend one more night at a hotel where she was staying.

Authorities said Friday that the others indicted this week in the 60-count indictment with Godfrey all grew up in the East End or have ties there:

• Godfrey's live-in girlfriend, Lisa Simpson, and her brother, Mike Gabbard. Simpson collected porcelain dolls and is accused of stealing three $100 Christmas tree toppers from a November 2003 heist at Hyde Park Floral. Police said the group also stole cigarettes; they said Simpson got the Marlboro Lights.

• Harry Joe Hoffman, 42, who rides a bicycle around the neighborhood and was picked up by Godfrey for their jobs.

• Godfrey's relatives Daryl Johnson, who also got cigarettes as pay; Steve Anderson, 20; and a friend Billy Mullins, 21. Godfrey wouldn't tell them where they were going until they got there.

• Two other relatives of Godfrey's, Rhonda Hart, 48, and her son, Eric McKinnis, charged with receiving stolen property. Hart "ordered'' some truck tires, which police say the gang stole at Moser Dodge in June. McKinnis is accused of getting a big-screen TV taken from Mount Lookout TV in January.While unfolding the case since spring, Det. Phillips and Evans said they're sure there's probably more cases that could be linked to the ring.

Police are still looking for Godfrey's brother, Ronald Godfrey, and his girlfriend, Donna Bruner, 39. Authorities said Godfrey didn't like to work with his brother because he thought he was sloppy.

And Ron Godfrey did, in fact, leave a big clue for police at the scene of a May break-in at the Four Seasons restaurant in Columbia Tusculum - his blood. Trying to pry open a safe with a crowbar, he banged himself in the head, police said.

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E-mail jprendergast@enquirer.com