I’ll smoke my profits.
As long as I get two hundred bucks when you’re done, you can do whatever the fuck you want.
The two brothers were not close. In fact, Russell often wondered if Chris’s only purpose in life was to torment him. Chris was better than Russ at everything—sports, school, women, making friends, making money—and frequently reminded Russ of that fact. Where Russ was shy and reserved, Chris was confident and controlling. When he got started, he could be relentless and mean, sometimes taking after Russ’s wife, Eileen, until he had demeaned and insulted her to tears. Even then, Russ was afraid to protest for fear his brother would go after him next.
When are we going to do it? Russ asked his brother.
I didn’t say you could do it, Chris said. You should stay out of it.
Fuck, Chris, I’m broke. I’m months behind on child support. I could get thrown back in jail for that shit.
Chris let out a long breath and stood up. Fuck, he muttered, fishing the keys to the Z/28 out of the pocket of his jeans. Come over Saturday, we’re going up to Lytle Creek to zero out the new guns. I’ll show you how.
I know how to shoot a gun, asshole, Russ sneered.
Chris paused at the door and gave his little brother a hard look. Not one like this, you don’t.
HARVEN AND SMITH HAD EACH BUILT UP A MODEST GUN COLLECTION throughout the 1970s. For Harven it was simple. He liked the outdoors, going up into the rugged San Gabriel Mountains to hike, camp, hunt, and shoot. From the Harven house on Harriet Lane in Anaheim, Chris could hop in a car, head up to Lytle Creek, and be in some serious wilderness in about an hour. In 1972, at age twenty-one, he bought his first gun, a low-quality Clerke .22 revolver. Two years later he picked up a High Standard 12-gauge pump shotgun. Along with multiple rifles were plenty of handguns, including a Dan Wesson .357, Smith & Wesson Model 59, Browning .45, Walther P48, and the Smith & Wesson .38 he gave to his wife Lani after filing down the hammer so it wouldn’t rip up her purse.
Like Harven, George Smith grew up camping on Mount Baldy and shooting in Lytle Creek. Smith also had military training with firearms. In the army, he was one of the best marksmen in his regiment. In 1974, he picked up a Ruger 10/22 rifle, a common starter gun. Less than a month later he went down to Grant Boys in Costa Mesa, not far from Calvary Chapel, and bought an M1 carbine .30-caliber rifle, the same weapon with which he had become so proficient while in the army. Even after picking up three additional guns later in the decade, none of Smith’s firearm acquisitions, individually or taken as a whole, were enough to raise any concerns. But it did bother one person, and it bothered her a lot.
In June 1974, George met Hannelore Frolich, a pretty blonde with a round face, originally from Nuremberg, Germany. At thirty-one, Hanne was nine years older than George, fun-loving with a brilliant smile but tending toward serious and reserved. She liked how easy it was to be with George right from the start, how he always seemed to be in a good mood. They went dancing a lot, played tennis, and ran away for the weekends when George didn’t have a shift at the Parks Department. On the other side of thirty, unmarried and without children, Hanne was anxious to move forward with life and would normally not have wasted a lot of time on a twenty-two-year-old man. But George had big dreams and Hanne liked people who aimed high. He talked about wanting children and didn’t seem at all opposed to settling down. So they did, marrying in the spring of 1975, just nine months after first meeting.
For the first couple of years, Hanne and George talked about their dreams and all the things they might achieve together. They continued to have an active life, but then the baby came along and everything changed.
When Monica was born in 1977, Hanne’s focus shifted almost entirely to their baby girl. George seemed to enjoy being a father. He took extra shifts at the Parks Department in Cypress, as well as a part-time gig teaching karate to kids at a local studio. They had enough money, but they stopped going out. George sulked and felt hurt and eventually found other things to do instead of hanging around the house, including running off to the mountains on the weekends with Chris Harven. Their sex life went from infrequent to nonexistent. When George’s father, Walter, came over to visit one day, he was alarmed to find George and Hanne sleeping in separate bedrooms.
For George, it was exactly what he once told high school sweetheart Rosie Miranda years before: A baby would only come between them. Had Rosie still been around, she would have told him the same thing she had back then: “George, you’re just too selfish to have a baby.”
George’s evangelical zeal and deep belief in End Times theology had not diminished since his days at Calvary Chapel. He had a talent for navigating almost any conversation to the subject of faith, the Bible, and the need to be prepared, both spiritually and materially, for the approaching Apocalypse. He worked the friends and family circuit particularly hard, converting many around him into born-again zealots. Even Hanne had come to know the Lord through George. Yet no matter how complete their conversion, all politely declined George’s invitation to help him trick out some deserted mine shaft with food, gear, and weapons. With Chuck Smith’s official Rapture deadline closing in, George was spurred to action. If no one would help him, then he’d do it himself, eventually settling on the goal of buying a remote cabin in the hills of Utah. There he would gather his loved ones, fight the Great Demon, and ride out the horrors God had in store for the creatures he had made in His own image. All George needed was the money to buy it.
The plan was classic George Smith, replete with grandiosity, self-righteousness, and confidence that he knew more than everyone around him. But it could not have come at a worse time for his marriage. Hanne was already stressed, second-guessing all of George’s decisions and questioning every cent he spent on anything other than Monica. When George went out over the next few months and added the Colt .45 semiautomatic pistol, Remington hunting rifle, and Sauer .44 single-action revolver along with the ammo, cases, holsters, scopes, and all the other stuff that went with them, Hanne was less than pleased. She was in no mood for blowing the family budget on excessive weaponry while there were buggies, diapers, and baby food to be bought. In April 1979, George and Chris picked up a couple of .38 Specials of the concealable variety usually reserved for liquor store holdups and bar fights. Suddenly George’s big plans seemed to Hanne like nothing more than distractions pulling him away from providing for Monica.
Whatever the reason—obsessive mothering, selfishness, Chuck Smith, or guns—by the spring of 1979, George was living in the house in Mira Loma with Chris Harven and without Hanne and Monica. Hanne was introspective enough to recognize her role in the disintegration of the marriage, but she had also seen something in George she knew would only become a bigger problem as time went on. “I think his dreams are just too big for what he can really do.”
By Christmas 1979, George Smith was without a job, without a car, and without a family. It was a demoralizing condition for a young man who had always thought of himself as destined for great things. George struggled with a painful cognitive dissonance between who he thought he was and what he had really become. He had a solid support system of family and friends, but to fall back on it was utterly unimaginable to him. George was the one who always saved other people, whether it be with a few extra bucks, a solution to a problem, or the salvation of their very souls. What other people might have seen as merely a rough patch, George Smith saw as a desperate situation and one that he needed to escape at any cost.
George told Chris that he and a twenty-one-year-old co-worker from the Cypress Parks Department named Manny Delgado were going to rob the Denny’s restaurant in Corona. Chris told him it was a ridiculous idea. “If you’re gonna rob anything, why don’t you just rob a fuckin’ bank?”
With his situation growing ever more dire, and the Revelation time clock running out as fast as his bank account, George’s behavior became increasingly erratic. He stopped cutting his hair so he would be able to weave it into seven braids
like Samson. He convinced Chris that it was time to start turning the Mira Loma house into a fortress, complete with escape tunnel, fallout bunker, and fortified perimeter. After all, if they were not going to have enough money to buy the cabin in Utah, they better make damn sure they were prepared to ride out the Apocalypse right where they were.
But the Mira Loma house was only a contingency plan. George had not entirely given up on Utah. We got to get the fuck out of California, dude, or we’re gonna die here. He’d been thinking about what Chris said about robbing a bank. As usual, George was thinking big. None of this passing a note and cleaning out the teller line for ten thousand bucks. Why not take over the whole bank and go for the vault? On a Friday payday, who knows, there could be $50,000; $100,000; $300,000 in cash in there. All we need are enough guys to pull the whole thing off, fast.
Chris remained noncommittal even as George got more and more detailed in his planning. Whenever Chris questioned the plan or pointed out a flaw, George would get defensive and question Chris’s manhood, calling him a “yellow-belly” and a “coward.” Chris would just brush him off. Throughout the New Year, Smith continued to poke and prod to get Chris on board, alternatingly bullying and begging his roommate. They’d lose the house soon. He didn’t have enough money to pay child support to Hanne. You gotta fuckin’ help me out, Chris.
One day, George came home and announced he had just finished casing the perfect bank for the job: the Security Pacific Bank in Norco. Chris was amazed. You’re going to rob your own fucking bank?
When Chris’s life began to fall apart too, he started to cave, retaining his doubts about the wisdom of the enterprise while committing himself to its execution. Okay, he’d do it under one condition. I’m not going into any bank unless we’re armed up. You know the cops will be shooting at us, so we might as well be prepared to fight back if we have to.
WITH THE DECISION MADE, THE TWO EMPTIED MOST OF THEIR REMAINING savings accounts on more guns. Why not? George said. They’d either end up with a shitload of money from the job or die trying. In January 1980, Chris Harven visited two gun stores and bought a High Standard 12-gauge shotgun and a Browning semiautomatic pistol. On February 3, Harven and Smith went to Dave’s Guns in Costa Mesa and picked up a second Browning .45 along with a far more serious weapon, a Heckler & Koch HK93. The HK93 was a top-of-the line German-made .223-caliber assault rifle, the civilian semiautomatic version of the M16 used by American forces in Vietnam. But it still wasn’t enough. On February 13, Harven came back to Dave’s and bought a sawed-off, antipersonnel version of the Remington 870 Wingmaster shotgun known as a riot gun. A week later, Smith stopped in and picked up hundreds of rounds of .223 ammunition, a high-powered rifle scope, and forty rounds of German Rottweil Brenneke shotgun slugs powerful enough to crack the engine block of an automobile.
In March, Chris brought Russ with him to Dave’s Guns to look around and left after buying a .45 Long Colt single-action revolver with a six-inch-long barrel. Russ did not know at the time that his older brother was arming up for a bank robbery. On April 28, Chris went to the Gun Ranch in Garden Grove and purchased his second .223-caliber assault rifle, this time a Colt “Shorty” AR-15. The “Shorty” was as powerful as the M16 Colt manufactured for the military but with a collapsible stock and shorter barrel for use in confined spaces. Along with it he bought a handful of forty-round, high-capacity magazines. By the end of April, Christopher Harven had completed his arsenal.
George Smith, on the other hand, had not. Concluding that everyone involved in the robbery should be armed to the teeth, he made his biggest purchase yet—and the one that finally raised eyebrows at Dave’s Guns. Smith picked up a standard Colt AR-15 and a Heckler & Koch HK91 semiautomatic assault rifle. The HK91 was essentially the same gun as the AR-15 but chambered for a .308-caliber round three times the size of the .223. A .223 might kill you, but a .308 would literally blow your head off. There was not an animal in the world that could not be brought down with a single round from a .308.
Guns like these might have been legal, but they were not big sellers in 1980. “What are you doing,” clerk Dave McNulty joked, “getting ready to start World War III or rob a bank?”
Smith just laughed.
The date was May 2, 1980.
2
ZEROED OUT
May 3, 1980. Lytle Creek Canyon, California.
CHRISTOPHER HARVEN TOOK A LENGTH OF ONE-AND-ONE-QUARTER-INCH schedule 40 PVC plumber’s pipe and screwed it snugly into the vise. With the hacksaw, he cut it down to three inches and used an electric drill to bore a small hole through one side in the middle of the white plastic tube. After sealing off one end with a PVC endcap, he tore a strip of newspaper off the front page of the Riverside Press-Enterprise, wadded it up, and pushed it down the pipe into the endcap. Picking up a six-inch length of green waterproof safety fuse, he threaded one end through the hole he had made in the side of the pipe. He stood the piece of pipe up on its capped end and gently tightened it down in the vise and left it there to dry.
When’s Russ getting here? George asked, standing at the workbench emptying buckshot out of a shotgun cartridge into a metal Band-Aid box.
Harven took a rag off the table and dried the sweat off his forehead and neck. You know Russ, he could show up whenever.
Okay. Just as long as he’s not thinking about backing out on us.
Chris tossed the rag onto the workbench. I’m sure every one of those guys are thinking about it.
George tilted the shotgun cartridge, rolling it between his thumb and fingers until the gunpowder charge began to pour out into a can of Copenhagen dip already half filled with the stuff. I can talk to him.
Don’t talk to him, Chris said, pulling on a pair of powder-blue rubber gloves. We should have left him alone to begin with. He reached out and slid three canisters of black powder in front of him. He had worked with gunpowder before, making his own fireworks and M-80s strong enough to blow a home mailbox to shreds and then setting them off down at Huntington Beach on the Fourth of July. But the shit still made him nervous, especially with all the oily rags, solvents, and cans of gasoline sitting on shelving they had haphazardly thrown up with cinder blocks and boards. The whole place already smelled like a fucking bomb.
Harven took the canister of FFFG-grade smokeless powder from the shotgun shells and poured it into one containing black flake powder. To that he added DuPont-type powder, tiny black cylinders that looked like bits of pencil lead. Screwing the lid onto the metal canister, he gently shook it to combine the three into a Red Dot–type gunpowder mix. Using a small funnel, he poured an ounce and a half of the mixture into the PVC pipe, enough high-grade, smokeless gunpowder to fill thirty shotgun shells. He capped the other end and laid the four-and-a-half-inch detonating device in a row along with the others, over a dozen in all.
You need to catch up, he said to George, peeling off the kitchen gloves and tossing them onto the floor.
George set the last emptied shotgun cartridge to the side and stepped over to the odd collection of materials laid out in various containers: unfired lead bullets extracted from .358 rounds, concrete and duplex nails, barbed wire staples, shards of broken glass, and the lead pellets of #4 buckshot he had emptied out of shotgun cartridges. He took a final look at his copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, an instruction manual for an array of illegal activities such as making drugs, setting booby traps, tapping phone lines, and, of particular use to Harven and Smith, a section on “How to make an antipersonnel grenade.”
Taking a twelve-ounce Budweiser can into the lid of which he had cut a star shape and peeled back the metal, Smith poured in a combination of the materials, inserted one of Harven’s detonation devices in the center, and filled in the area around and on top of it with more of the lethal shrapnel mix, two and a half pounds in all. He bent the cut metal strips of the lid back down, took a second lid cut from another beer can, pulled the fuse from the detonator up through the opening, and pop-riveted the second lid to the
top of the main can. When he was done with that, George wrapped the whole business in masking tape and set it beside the others.
It’s not like these guys have anything to lose, George said, walking over to the card table with the launching devices he and Chris had made earlier (page 98: “Converting a shotgun into a grenade launcher”).
Everybody’s got something to lose, Chris said.
George slid one of the beer can grenades into a launcher and gave it a small shake until it held snugly in place. The launching device was simple: a twelve-ounce Coke can with the lid cut off and the bottom screwed down onto a half-inch circular plywood plate, which in turn was attached to a five-eighths-inch dowel, nineteen inches long. By setting the explosive device into the Coke can “grenade holder,” sliding the dowel down the barrel of a shotgun, lighting the fuse on the bomb, and firing the shotgun loaded with a shell emptied of its buckshot, Harven and Smith had a devastating antipersonnel grenade with a launch range of one hundred yards. The shotgun could also be used to launch the incendiary bombs that Smith would add to the collection later: sixteen-ounce Blue Nun wine bottles filled with leaded gasoline, one of Harven’s PVC detonators placed inside the neck.
When they were done, George and Chris surveyed the arsenal. Chris shook his head. I don’t know, George, he said. This is some pretty heavy shit.
Well, we don’t have much choice, George said, wiping the gunpowder and cellulose off his hands with a beach towel. We already spent all our money on guns. He picked up The Anarchist Cookbook and flipped through the pages. Think you could make one of these? he said, holding it out for Chris to see.
Harven studied the page. What’s this for?
Diversion bomb. We’ll set it off on the other side of town just before we go into the bank.
Harven let out a long breath. Sure, I can make that.
GEORGE TOOK THE NYLON RIFLE BAG OUT OF THE TRUNK OF THE CAMARO, UNZIPPED it, and removed the Colt AR-15 he had bought the day before from Dave’s Guns. He lifted the rifle and sighted down the barrel into the wash at Lytle Creek Canyon. Between two cottonwoods was the rusted hulk of an abandoned Ford Pinto. A Maytag washing machine pockmarked with gunfire sat at the base of the hill along with an assortment of tires, furniture, and hundreds of beer cans and soda bottles. Half a dozen watermelons lay torn apart among it all, their red guts splattered over anything within twenty feet.
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