There’s people in Troy that have to pay, and people that jammed me up…and I know enough now not to do anything with anybody. I should have known before!
Whenever he was locked up for more than a night or two, Evans would begin to obsess over what he was missing on the outside, fantasizing and dreaming about the most obscure things. His latest pipe dream included building a “dream house” in the woods when he was released. He said he “deserved” it after all he had been through in life. Where he was going to get the money was never an issue. He just assumed a “big score” was going to fall in his lap one day.
He also mentioned a “para-plane” he desperately wanted to buy when he got out, and even drew a picture of it. It was a helicopter about the size of a large lawn tractor. It had a parachute attached to the back of the seat. The propeller was in the back of the vessel as opposed to on top. Most interesting to Evans as he explained it was that there was no way it could crash. It goes 35 MPH, but will climb to 6,000 feet (over road blocks!). Only needs 50 feet to take off or land. Folds up into a car trunk!!
He called himself “Evans the air pirate.” He talked about traveling around the country, apparently committing burglaries at will, but being able to avoid police as if he were some sort of superhero.
In August 1983, Evans finally went before the grand jury and implicated members of the Hells Angels in the beating of a local judge’s son. The way he saw it, because of what he had done for the DA, his record would be wiped completely clean. He was under the impression that when he was released in September 1984—one year away—he would be an absolute free man—“no parole”—for the first time in seven years.
CHAPTER 42
The next year was a cakewalk for Evans as he finished his sentence. He had been transferred to Warren County Jail, north of Albany near the Vermont border. A new program had been initiated at Warren whereby inmates who had proven they could stay out of trouble and act reasonably sane were afforded the opportunity to work outside the prison grounds on the interstate picking up garbage. Surprising to Evans, he had been chosen to participate in the program shortly after his arrival. What’s more, when he wasn’t outside soaking up the sunshine between 8:00 A.M. and 4:00 P.M., he now had access to weights and a gym. He had put on about fifteen pounds of muscle since he had been incarcerated and was bench-pressing, he claimed, about 120 pounds more than his own body weight. His ZZ Top beard had grown long and thick and now nearly reached his nipples. It was clear in his letters that he was happy for the first time in years. The only real trouble he had gotten into while at Warren was a scuffle with a “child molester,” whom he had pummeled one night after the guy began pestering him.
As he counted the days until his release, Evans trumpeted the idea to his sister that any future “jobs” would have to be done alone if he wanted to avoid prison in the future.
“No partners” became his mantra.
One of the downsides to doing a longer sentence in the county jail system was the anxiety of knowing you could be transferred at any moment. Just when an inmate might get comfortable and develop some sort of routine, a transfer would undoubtedly come through. Thus, by the end of February, Evans had been moved to Montgomery County Jail, about one hour west of Troy. But a month later, he was back at Warren. The main reason inmates were moved around like checkers while in county jail was the need for beds. As the mid-1980s progressed, cocaine distribution became the number one source of income for drug dealers, and the drug of choice for buyers. Troy was known as a refuge for hard-core drug users and drug traffickers. Logistically, it was the perfect location for major dealers in New York City, where the mother lode of cocaine generally came in, to traffic the drug throughout upstate New York, New Hampshire, Vermont and even Canada.
Dealing drugs wasn’t something Evans had ever wanted to get involved with. He had always said how much he hated drugs and drug dealers. But robbing big-time dealers of their cash became a potential new business he began to think about pursuing after his release.
A big shipment of coke came up to Troy (with a wimp!), he wrote, from Hollywood, Florida. But I found out too late to ambush it.
In that same letter, he spoke of an “Italian friend” whom he was going to hook up with when he was released. But no felonies till I’m ready. Just lil’ stuff.
That Italian friend, he promised, was going to introduce him to a new line of work, which could, he insisted, yield huge amounts of cash quickly.
Long before the Bureau’s senior investigator Jim Horton had ever considered becoming a cop, Albany native Doug Wingate was chasing down bad guys and working cases as an investigator for the Bureau in Loudonville. Wingate had joined the NYSP as a trooper in 1968. He was asked to join the New York City division of the Bureau as a narcotics officer in 1972, but he declined the position because of what he described later as a serious “cut in pay.” Wingate had a part-time job on top of working a lot of overtime as a trooper. Working in New York City would have meant being away from his family for long periods of time. He would also have to put the brakes on his part-time job, which he didn’t want to do.
“They held that against me,” Wingate said later, laughing a bit at how ridiculous it seemed that because he had turned down the NYC offer he wasn’t offered another position with the Bureau for almost ten years. “Back then,” he continued, “the test question was: ‘Would you like to go into narcotics?’ If you said no, they held it against you.”
Either way, Wingate never looked back, and had “no regrets,” he said, about a career that would ultimately span some thirty-six years.
By 1979, he was working in Loudonville, Troop G, as a Bureau investigator, for the most part looking into burglaries, robberies, rapes, sexual assaults and murders.
At five feet nine inches, 195 pounds, Wingate was cookie-cutter perfect when matched up against the rest of his Bureau counterparts. He was garrulous and conniving when he needed to be, friendly when the job called for it, and even crass, authoritative and brassy when he felt a suspect had information he needed.
The perfect cop, in other words.
Wingate had met Evans a few years before Horton walked into Troop G as a green investigator. It was spring 1981. At the time, Wingate was stationed in Brunswick, a little town in the mountains just north of Troy. Each Bureau barracks had what investigators called a “Back Room”—an in-house nickname for a group of investigators that, basically, investigated anything that fell under the heading of “crime.”
In those days, Brunswick was a bit of a reprieve from the hustle and bustle of Troy. There were large, stately homes with well-manicured lawns and expensive cars parked in three-and four-car garages. Ten-story pine trees—faultless triangles of nature—dotted the countryside. A hilly town, with streets snaking and twisting around valleys, mountains and streams, Brunswick was scenic and hunter-friendly. People moved to Brunswick to get away from the confines of city life. It was quiet. Private. People kept to themselves.
For Evans and his cohorts in Troy, however, Brunswick became a treasure trove of potential merchandise to steal. Most people didn’t equip their homes with alarm systems back then, or didn’t feel the need to, so breaking and entering into homes for Evans and his cronies became as easy as walking through the door.
One characteristic that had set Evans apart from those with whom he burgled was his cleverness. He was always looking for the perfect way to steal.
“Gary was very intelligent,” Doug Wingate said later. “I’m not talking just as a thief—but an intellectual. He would read books, cover to cover. Study those areas he wanted to excel in.”
When Evans realized what Brunswick could offer him as a thief, he didn’t think twice about focusing on the town as a place to turn out quick, small-time jobs that would ultimately finance the bigger jobs in other parts of New England he had always dreamed about. Further, Wingate explained, Evans had an astute quality to the way he spoke and could carry on an educated conversation about anything. This impressed Win
gate. He had become used to dealing with criminals who were, for lack of a more appropriate term, “stupid,” he said. Many had chosen a criminal life because they couldn’t make it in the real world. But not Evans. He could have done anything he wanted, Wingate was quick to point out, and been successful at it. When he applied that knowledge and general intelligence to turning jobs in Brunswick, he realized quickly the windfall the town offered.
Evans had always viewed burglary as a full-time job. When he applied his smarts to it, he came up with several unique ways to steal that simply amazed cops when they found out later. One of his favorite things to do, for example, involved scouring parking lots of five-star restaurants, jewelry stores and antique outlets for luxurious vehicles: Mercedes, BMWs, Jaguars, Cadillacs. Once he found a vehicle that interested him, he would look inside the car to see if the owner had left his or her garage door opener clipped to the sun visor or somewhere out in the open. Then he would break in, steal the opener and rummage through the glove compartment, hoping to locate the car registration to find out where the person lived. Once he had the address, he would write it down and literally walk into the home after opening the garage door.
“I knew the person wasn’t home,” he said, “because they were at the restaurant eating dinner. It was the perfect score.”
In 1982, Wingate was investigating a string of burglaries throughout the upper north country, which included Warren County, Essex County and Hamilton County. During that investigation, he had developed a contact in Troy by the name of Tyler Jacobs, a two-bit thief who had a reputation for beating up people. Jacobs was a “strongman,” known more for his ability to break legs than anything else.
One day, Wingate got a call from the state police in Bennington, Vermont. A trooper explained that Jacobs and another notable Troy thief, Raymond Bosse, a guy Evans knew pretty well, had committed a burglary. Jacobs had been caught in the act and was locked up in Bennington. Bosse had escaped when the cops showed up, took off for Troy, but was caught by two Back Room troopers in Brunswick.
“Bosse was a pretty tough kid,” Wingate recalled. “There was a whole crew of these guys who were burglars. Really tough kids. They did not do drugs. They did not drink. When they went out to do a burglary, they were stone-cold sober. Professionals all the way.”
Bosse was, indeed, no slouch. He had arms on him almost as big as Evans’s, but he was taller and heavier. When Wingate went in to talk to him, he wouldn’t say a word. Because he wouldn’t talk, and he had committed a crime in Vermont, Wingate had him shipped back to Bennington to face charges there.
Throughout the years, Jacobs had become one of Wingate’s informants, and always had information about what was happening on the street. As a criminal, though, one of his downfalls was that whenever he had his back against the wall, he talked.
“Before I left to go to Bennington,” Wingate said, “I got clearance from the DA to give Jacobs carte blanche on any burglaries or larcenies.”
After getting hold of Jacobs’s attorney, Wingate set up a meeting.
Over the next two days, Wingate and Jacobs built a rapport and talked about several different unsolved burglaries in and around the Capital Region.
“Tell me about some of the other burglaries,” Wingate said, just to see what Jacobs was willing to talk about.
“Am I home free on those, too?” Jacobs asked.
“I’m sure I can take care of that.”
“There’s a meat market in Guilderland. I did that job with Raymond Bosse.”
“You’re a codefendant; how can I get Bosse?”
Raymond Bosse was someone the DA’s office, Wingate and other members of the Bureau were looking at for some time. He was a “tough guy,” Wingate recalled, “a wise guy, in the sense that we wanted to get him on more than what we had.”
“Well,” Jacobs said, “I know he’s just a codefendant, but if you really want Bosse…talk to this guy named Gary Evans.”
Wingate had never heard the name before.
Puzzled, Wingate asked, “Who is Gary Evans? Why would he want to talk to me?”
CHAPTER 43
Over the next few days, Tyler Jacobs, looking to trade information for jail time, continued to talk to Doug Wingate about Gary Evans and, moreover, the burglaries Jacobs knew Evans had been involved in.
This, of course, piqued Wingate’s interest. Perhaps Evans could shed some light on some of the Bureau’s unsolved burglaries. In particular, there was a jewelry store heist in Oneonta, New York, Jacobs said Evans had masterminded. The Bureau had been trying to solve the case for nearly a year.
“Gary went down there one day with a kid named Mike Falco,” Jacobs said, “and they cased the place out. They went back there that night and, for whatever reason, Mike chickened out.”
“What happened then?”
“Well, they took off. But Gary went back the next day with Raymond Bosse.”
“You didn’t go with them?”
“No. Evans decided they should take a Greyhound bus to do the job,” Jacobs continued. “They wouldn’t be noticed that way.”
“What?”
“Yeah, a fucking Greyhound. Gary is smart.”
“What’s he look like?”
“He wears a bandanna all the time. You can’t miss him. Once you see him, you won’t forget him.”
Wingate began by running Evans’s name through the system. After a quick search, Evans turned up at Saratoga County Jail. He was halfway through his most recent bid, with a release date set for September 1984.
When Wingate showed up at Saratoga, he and Evans had, what he called later, a “standoff.” Evans just stood there, sizing Wingate up. Then, after a few moments, asked, “Why the fuck would I ever talk to you?”
Wingate said, “I don’t know much about you. But my goal right now is to do Raymond Bosse. I need help on a couple of cases he was involved in. One is a meat market job in Guilderland…you know all about that, don’t you?”
Evans became enraged. “I didn’t do that!”
“Well, I know you didn’t.”
“I don’t do anything in Albany County.”
“You do know about it, though—”
Evans wouldn’t let Wingate finish a sentence without interrupting.
“Still, why the hell am I going to talk to you?”
“Look, if you’re just going to stonewall me,” Wingate said, “fuck it. I’ll just go to Ray and we’ll talk about going to Oneonta on the bus and…”
That seemed to lighten Evans up some. Wingate hadn’t given up Tyler Jacobs as his informant, and wasn’t about to. But he wanted Evans to know—without coming out and saying it—that he wasn’t just dangling a carrot. He was working with solid background information.
As Wingate continued, Evans stared at him in disbelief: How do you know so much about this job?
“I know you went down there with Mike Falco. I know he chickened out. And I fucking know you went back with Bosse.”
“Wait a minute,” Evans said.
“You know, Gary, when you take a bus to a little town like Oneonta, you really shouldn’t wear that bandanna. You went in and cased the place…. Who is going to forget you? Just look at yourself!”
“Okay…okay,” Evans said. “What do we need to do?”
“You need to start by telling me all about the meat market job.”
In the end, Wingate and the Albany County DA’s Office used Evans and Jacobs to nail Raymond Bosse on the meat market heist, and within a few months, Bosse was indicted.
That one chance encounter Wingate initiated with Evans, however, would turn out to be much more. It was, for Evans, the first time in his career as a thief he had truly trusted law enforcement and wasn’t burned.
What was odd about Doug Wingate and Evans’s first encounter, and the fact that information Evans provided ended up putting Raymond Bosse behind bars, was that Evans, in his letters during that same period, blamed Bosse for his latest stint in prison.
I tal
ked to the state police investigator, Evans wrote on September 29, 1983, that (so far) hasn’t lied to me (that I know of, anyway). He says I have no problems anywhere…. Later, in the same letter, he added, I positively learned one thing: Don’t ever let anyone know what I’m doing. [Raymond] got talkative to the wrong people and here I sit.
CHAPTER 44
The closer Evans got to his release date, the more he began to focus on revenge. It was clear that prison life, once again, was getting to him. He complained about “authority having a hold on” him. About being confined “like an animal” when there were serious criminals walking the streets, committing evil acts and getting off. Yet, regardless of what he talked about, Evans always brought the subject back to what he was going to do to those people who had, in his mind, been responsible for every day he spent behind bars.
You know I have a lot of hate, he wrote, for a lot of people—and eventually that will be straightened out.
A few months before he was released, he came up with a rather unique plan to avoid capture when he got out and inevitably he promised, started a new reign of burglaries—a plan, indeed, straight out of a spy novel.
After talking about the serious money he was going to be making with the Italians he met recently, he wanted to have the Italians point him to a “crooked doctor” so he could “get skin grafts” on his fingers. His reasoning behind the painful surgery? In what sounded like a child’s voice, he wrote, So I can’t never be proved to be me.
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