by David Grann
A guard in one of the towers spotted them clinging to the upside-down craft, kicking to shore, and asked if they needed help. They said they were fine, and, as if to prove it, McGirk held up his wrist and yelled, “We just lost a couple of oars, but my Timex is still running!” The guard, unaware that three prisoners were missing, laughed and went back to his lookout.
California soon unleashed a statewide manhunt. Meanwhile, police in Texas and Oklahoma began to report a strange series of holdups. They all had the same M.O.: three or four men would stroll into a grocery store or a bank, flash a gun, demand the money, and speed away in a stolen car. Witnesses invariably noted that they were all, by the standards of the trade, old men. One even wore what appeared to be a hearing aid. The authorities compared them to the elderly thieves in the film “Going in Style,” and dubbed them “the Over-the-Hill Gang.”
“That was when I was really a good robber,” Tucker tells me. He is careful not to admit to any particular crime (“I don’t know if they still have jurisdiction”) or implicate any of his living partners (“Some of them are still out there”), but he says that by the age of sixty he had at last mastered the art of the holdup.
One day, while we were sitting in the prison visiting room, Tucker leaned forward in his chair and began to teach me how to rob a bank. “First of all, you want a place near the highway,” he said, putting on his bifocals, his eyes blinking as if he were imagining a particular layout. “Then you need to case it—you can’t just storm in. You need to size it up, know it like your own home.”
“In the old days, the stickup men were like cowboys,” he continued. “They would just go in shooting, yelling for everyone to lie down. But to me violence is the first sign of an amateur.” The best holdup men, in his view, were like stage actors, able to hold a room by the sheer force of their personality. Some even wore makeup and practiced getting into character. “There is an art to robbing a bank if you do it right,” Tucker said. Whereas he once cultivated a flamboyant image, he later developed, he said, a subtler, more “natural” style.
“O.K., the tools,” he pressed on. Ideally, he said, you needed nail polish or superglue to cover your fingertips (“You can wear gloves, but in warmer climates they only draw attention”), a glass cutter, a holster, a canvas bag (“big enough for the dough”), and a gun (“a .38 or semi-automatic, or whatever you can get your hands on”). He said the gun was just “a prop,” but essential to any operation.
There was one other thing, he said after a pause. It was the key to the success of the Over-the-Hill Gang and what he still called “the Forrest Tucker trademark”: the hearing aid. It was actually a police scanner, he said, which he wired through his shirt; that way, he would know if any silent alarms had been triggered.
He removed a napkin from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Once you’ve got your cool car parked nearby, you’ve got your radio, your hands are covered with gloves or superglue, you walk in. Go right up to the manager. Say, ‘Sit down.’ Never pull the gun—just flash it. Tell him calmly you’re here to rob the bank and it better go off without a hitch. Don’t run from the bank unless you’re being shot at, ’Cause it only shows something is going on. Just walk to the hot car, real calm, then drive to the cool car. Rev it up, and you’re gone.”
After he finished, he seemed satisfied. “I’ve just given you a manual on how to rob a bank,” he said. He reflected on this for a moment, then added, “No one can teach you the craft. You can only learn by doing.”
A forty-year-old sergeant on the Austin police force, John Hunt, was assigned to investigate the mysterious holdups of the Over-the-Hill Gang. “They were the most professional, successful robbers that I ever encountered in all my years on the force,” Hunt, who is now retired after a thirty-year career, told me. “They had more experience in robbery than we had catching them.”
Then a chain-smoker with a drooping mustache and a slight paunch, Hunt spent long days trying to catch the gang. With the advent of high-tech security there were fewer and fewer traditional bank robbers; most were desperate drug addicts who made off with only a few thousand dollars before they were caught. The members of the Over-the-Hill Gang seemed to defy not just their age but their era. “They’d get up every day and be on the job,” Hunt said. “Just as a welder gets good at welding, or a writer gets good over the years by writing, these guys learned from their mistakes.”
In a one-year span, the Over-the-Hill Gang was suspected in at least sixty robberies in Oklahoma and Texas—twenty in the Dallas–Fort Worth area alone. The gang was also believed to be responsible for holdups in New Mexico, Arizona, and Louisiana. “SENIOR CITIZENS STRIKE AGAIN,” one headline blared. “MIDDLE-AGED BANDITS PUZZLE DETECTIVES,” another read.
In December of 1980, Hunt and forty other law-enforcement officers from at least three states held a conference in Dallas to figure out how to stop them. “You can’t say how many lives they altered by sticking a gun in someone’s face,” a former F.B.I. agent told me.
Tucker seemed unable to stop, no matter how much money he accumulated. Although there are no official estimates, Tucker—relying on an array of aliases, including Robert Tuck MacDougall, Bob Stone, Russell Johns, Ralph Pruitt, Forrest Brown, J. C. Tucker, and Ricky Tucker—is believed over his career to have stolen millions of dollars, a fleet of sports cars, a bag of yen, and one Sambo’s wooden nickel. In the spring of 1983, he embarked on his most audacious heist yet: robbing a high-security bank in Massachusetts in broad daylight by pretending that he and his men were guards making a routine pickup in an armored car. Tucker believed the plan was “a breakthrough in the art.” On March 7th, moments before the armored car was scheduled to arrive, they put on makeup and mustaches; Tucker’s wig had shrunk in a recent snowstorm, and rather than postpone the operation he decided to do without it.
The teller buzzed them in. Just as they were entering the vault, according to a police report, the manager noticed that “the dark mustache on one man and the white mustache on the other man were not real.” One of the “guards” patted his gun and said, “This is a holdup.”
Tucker locked the manager and two tellers inside the vault, and escaped with more than four hundred and thirty thousand dollars. But when the police showed the tellers a series of mug shots, they identified, for the first time, the leader of the Over-the-Hill Gang as the same man who had broken out of San Quentin in a homemade kayak three years earlier.
As the F.B.I., the local police, and the county sheriffs all tried to track him down, Tucker hid in Florida, checking in daily with Teddy Green, his old Alcatraz confidant. One June morning, Tucker pulled into Green’s garage and waited while his friend walked toward the car. “I was looking at him,” Tucker recalls, “thinking, My, what a sharp suit!”
A man jumped in front of Tucker’s car and yelled, “F.B.I., don’t move! You’re under arrest.”
Agents were everywhere, coming out of cars and bushes. Tucker glowered at Green, convinced that his friend had “ratted me out.” Although Tucker insists that he never had a pistol—and none was ever found—several agents said they saw one in his hand. “He’s got a gun!” one of them yelled, diving to the ground. The garage filled with the sound of gunfire. Bullets shattered the windshield and the radiator. Tucker, who had been hit in both arms and in the leg, ducked below the dashboard and pressed the accelerator, crashing outside the garage. He opened the car door and stumbled onto the street, his hands and face covered in blood. A woman with two children was driving toward him. “As I got closer,” the woman later testified, “he started to look bloodier and bloodier—it was all over him—and I thought, This poor man has been hit by a car.”
She offered him a ride, and he climbed into the passenger seat. Then, in her rearview mirror, she saw someone holding a rifle, and her six-year-old son cried out, “Criminal!” When she hesitated, Tucker grabbed the wheel and snapped, “I have a gun—now drive!” Her son began to sob. After a half-mile chase, they veered down a
dead-end street. At a muttered “O.K.” from Tucker, the woman scrambled out of the car and dragged her children to safety. Then Tucker himself stepped from the car and passed out.
A columnist for the Miami Herald summed up the capture of the longtime prison fugitive and leader of the Over-the-Hill Gang this way:
There is something vaguely appealing about Tucker. . . . Old guys are not regularly associated with high crimes. . . . Tucker must also be admired, in a twisted way I admit, for pulling off an incredible escape from San Quentin prison in San Francisco. . . . Tucker might have made a fortune selling the escape yarn to Hollywood and holing up somewhere. Instead he chose to resume the line of work to which he was dedicated. . . . The aging Robin Hood took from the rich, who were probably loaded with insurance.
Tucker’s story had, at last, acquired the burnish of outlaw mythology. The battered Rub-a-Dub-Dub had been donated to the Marin Yacht Club and was later placed in a prison museum, and the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Oakland requested that Tucker be allowed to serve as grand marshal for its upcoming Bathtub Regatta. Amid the clamor, the F.B.I. showed up at a fancy retirement community in Lauderhill, Florida, where Tucker was believed to have been living. An elegant woman in her fifties answered the door. When they asked her about Forrest Tucker, she said she had never heard of the man. She was married to Bob Callahan, a successful stockbroker whom she had met shortly after her first husband died. When the agents explained that Bob Callahan was really Forrest Tucker, a man who had broken out of jail four years earlier, she looked at them in tears. “I told ’em, ‘I don’t believe a word you’re saying,’” she recalled, nearly two decades later. “But they had him. They shot him three times.”
An heiress to a modest moving-company fortune who looked, in her youth, a bit like Marilyn Monroe, she remembers meeting Tucker at the Whale and Porpoise, a private club on Oakland Park Boulevard. She had never encountered anyone so kind and gallant. “He came over and asked me to dance, and that was that,” she told me.
She recalled how she went to see him in prison (“still in a daze”), not sure what to say or do. When she saw him lying there, pale and bloodied, she was overcome with love for this man who, she learned, had been in a chain gang at sixteen. As he begged her forgiveness, she told me, “All I wanted to do was hold him.”
At first, awaiting trial in Miami, Tucker tried to break out of jail, removing a bar in his cell with a hacksaw and climbing onto the roof with a homemade grappling hook. But after his wife promised—to the consternation of her family and friends—to stay with him if he reformed, Tucker vowed to rehabilitate himself. “I told her that from then on I’d only look at ways to escape,” he says, adding, “She is one in a million.”
He returned to San Quentin, where he was nicknamed “the captain,” and where, for the first time, his seemingly impervious constitution began to show its age. In 1986, he underwent a quadruple bypass. Although guards stood by the door in case he tried to escape, he now considered himself strictly a legal contortionist. Years earlier, at Alcatraz, he had written an appeal that went all the way to the Supreme Court in which he successfully argued that a judge could not, at sentencing, take into account prior convictions received when the defendant lacked counsel. (“It is time we become just a little realistic in the face of a record such as this one,” Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote in an angry dissent.) Now, with his failing health, Tucker unleashed another flurry of appeals, getting his sentence reduced by more than half. “This is to thank you,” he wrote one judge. “It’s the first break I ever got in my life. I won’t ever need another.”
He began to pour all his energy into what he saw as the culmination of his life as an outlaw: a Hollywood movie. Tucker had seen all sorts of films that echoed his life, among them “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,” “Escape from Alcatraz,” and “Bonnie and Clyde,” and he wanted, at last, to see his story enshrined in the American imagination. He began to put his exploits down on paper, five pages at a time. “No one could have written this inside story of the Rock and what really happened there unless they had personally lived it,” he wrote. He devoted two hundred and sixty-one pages to “Alcatraz: The True Story,” while working on a second, more ambitious account, which he titled “The Can Opener.” In it, he described himself as a throwback “to the highly intelligent, nonviolent type of criminal in the Willie Sutton mold,” and, more grandly, as a kind of heroic underdog, pitted against a vast and oppressive system. “Tucker’s obsession with freedom and escape has transformed itself into gamesmanship,” he wrote. “This is his way of keeping his sanity in a lifetime of being the hunted. Each new ‘joint’ is a game, a game to outwit the authorities.”
In 1993, he was released, at the age of seventy-three, and settled into the peach-colored house in Pompano Beach, which his wife had bought for them. He polished his manuscript and set up a music room in the den, where he gave saxophone and clarinet lessons for twenty-five dollars an hour. “We had a wonderful life,” his wife said. Tucker recalls, “We used to go out dancing. She’d dress up real pretty, and I’d show her off.” He composed music for her. “He has all these talents that had been wasted all these years,” she told me. From time to time, he played in local jazz clubs. “I got used to being free,” he says. But his manuscript failed to captivate people as he had hoped it would—“I called Clint Eastwood’s secretary, but she said, ‘Unless you have an agent, he won’t read it’”—and the author of “The Can Opener” increasingly seemed trapped, an ordinary old man.
Then came the day in 1999 when, at the age of seventy-eight, he painted his fingertips with nail polish, pulled his white ascot up over his face, and burst into the Republic Security Bank with his gun. “He didn’t do it for the money,” his wife said. “We had a new car, nice home paid for, beautiful clothes. He had everything.”
“I think he wanted to become a legend, like Bonnie and Clyde,” said Captain Chinn, who apprehended him after what was believed to be his fourth recent robbery in the Florida area. A court psychologist who examined Tucker noted, “I have seen many individuals who are self-aggrandizing, and that would like to make their mark in history . . . but none, I must admit, that I heard that would want to, other than in the movies, go out in a blaze in a bank robbery. It is beyond the realm of psychological prediction.”
After Tucker’s arrest, the police put him in semi-isolation, fearing that even at seventy-eight he might somehow elude them. Despite his lawyer’s pleas that his client could die under such conditions, he was denied bail. “Ordinarily, I would not consider a seventy-eight-year-old man a flight risk or a danger to the community,” the magistrate said, “but Mr. Tucker has proved himself to be remarkably agile.” On October 20, 2000, just before his case was scheduled to go to trial, and with his wife looking on, Tucker pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to thirteen years.
At one point, I found a report that the Department of Corrections had compiled, detailing Tucker’s life. After pages listing his dramatic holdups and daredevil escapes, it concluded with a different kind of summary:
The defendant does not know the whereabouts of [his] daughter. He stated he did not have an active part in this child’s upbringing. . . . The defendant has no knowledge of his son’s whereabouts. The defendant did not partake in the rearing of this child.
“I thought he died in an automobile accident,” his son, Rick Bellew, told me over the phone after I tracked him down in Nevada, where he was living and working as a printer. “That’s what my mom told me to protect me.” He didn’t know the truth, he said, until he was in his early twenties, when Tucker was about to be paroled. “My mom was afraid he’d come up to me on the street and freak me out.”
He said that after his father was taken away the authorities confiscated all their furniture and possessions, which had been paid for with stolen cash. They had to move in with his grandparents, while his mother worked in a factory to support them. “He left us with nothing,” he said. “He turned our world inside ou
t.”
After Bellew read about Tucker’s last arrest, he wrote him a letter for the first time. “I needed to know why he did it,” he said. “Why he sacrificed everything.”
Although Tucker could never give him a satisfactory answer, they struck up a correspondence, and in one of his letters Tucker told him something he had never expected: Bellew had an older half sister named Gaile Tucker, a nurse who lived in Florida. “I called her up and said, ‘Are you sitting down?’ I said, ‘This is your long-lost brother.’ She said, ‘Oh, my God.’” Later, the two met, studying each other’s features for similarities, trying to piece together a portrait of a man they barely knew.
“I don’t have any ill feelings,” his daughter told me. “I just don’t have any feelings.”
At one point, Bellew read me part of a letter that Tucker had recently sent him: “I’m sorry things turned out the way they did. . . . I never got to take you fishing, or to baseball games or to see you grow up. . . . I don’t ask you to forgive me as there is too much lost but just so you know I wish you the best. Always. Your dad, Forrest.”
Bellew said he didn’t know if he would continue the correspondence, not because of what Tucker had done to him but because of what he had done to his mother. “He blew my mother’s world apart,” Bellew told me. “She never remarried. There was a song she used to sing to me called ‘Me and My Shadow,’ all about being alone and blue. And when she had cancer, and wasn’t going to live much longer, I broke down and she sang that song, and I realized how bittersweet it was. It was her life.”