Every Move You Make

by M. William Phelps

  On May 1, he sent a brief letter explaining his latest predicament. Yet, through his obvious embarrassment of doing the same things and getting the same results, he found a bit of solace in the fact that he did a “favor” for the state police. He wrote: They’re trying to get the counties to drop charges and let the feds take me on a weapons charge. That meant a lesser sentence.

  It was also clear he had put his trust now in the state police and was depending on “certain” Bureau investigators to bail him out of what amounted to the worst possible situation he could have found himself in with the law: twenty-five to life.

  At the end of the letter, he advised Robbie not to write to him: …because it hurts. I know you love me and I love you. I’m OK. Don’t worry, I’ll see you.

  A few weeks later, on May 27, he wrote again, explaining exactly what he had done and how he got caught. He maintained that “the Cohoes cops stole $3,000” of the $12,000 he had stolen from the drug dealer. The next day, when Horton stopped by the CPD to pick up an arrest report, he, too, became suspicious that a Cohoes cop had taken $3,000 from the $12,000 they had found on Evans when they arrested him. Horton, of course, knew there was $12,000 because he had counted it himself the night he interviewed Evans at the Cohoes PD.

  But when he went back to the records room to get a report, he asked the cop, who was sitting in front of a pile of reports, which one was “for the guy who ripped off the drug dealers in Troy for $12,000?”

  “It was only nine thousand,” the cop said.

  “What?”

  “Yeah,” the cop continued, “we have nine thousand all bagged up.”

  Shell-shocked and a bit confused, Horton didn’t say anything. Instead, he grabbed the report and immediately drove to Albany County Jail to talk to Evans about the money.

  “Hey,” he said after the guards brought Evans to him, “I just came from Cohoes PD. There was only nine thousand dollars there today…. There was twelve thousand last night.”

  Horton said later that Evans then “got this cat that swallowed the canary look” on his face and said, “Well…what are you going to do?”

  “Well…what?” Horton demanded.

  “It’s fucking drug money,” Evans said. “Who really gives a fuck?”

  “I care!”

  “A guy I went to high school with,” Evans said, smirking, “took it. He’s got kids. He’s a good fucking guy. It’s just fucking drug money. What do you care?”

  “Who was it?” Horton wanted to know. He was getting upset. “Tell me right now who fucking took that money!”

  Evans turned and walked away.

  “Hey, I’m asking you a question.”

  Turning around, in a whisper, Evans said, “I’m not going to tell you, Jim. Not ever.”

  Over the next ten years, Horton would routinely ask Evans who the corrupt cop was, but Evans would always go off on some tangent, explaining that loyalty was one of the only pieces of himself he had left. Horton would say, “Come on, Gar. Just tell me who it is?”

  “He’s a good cop,” Evans would say. “He has kids. It was drug money. Who fucking cares?”

  Years later, while Horton was using Evans as an informant to gather information about a serial rapist and murderer, Evans’s and Horton’s names and photos were in the newspapers whenever news broke about the case. In fact, throughout the twelve-plus years they knew each other, not six months would go by without at least a blurb being written about them in the newspapers.

  One day, Horton had to go down to the Cohoes PD to pick up some paperwork about a prisoner they had in lockup, who would ultimately turn out to be the same serial rapist and murderer he had been investigating.

  As he was gathering the reports, a Cohoes detective walked up to him and said, “Hey, how are you? I see you guys are using Gary Evans in that [serial rapist] case we’ve been investigating.”

  “Yeah,” Horton said, forcing himself to sound cordial and polite, mincing words until he located the report. “He’s been helping us out, providing some solid info.”

  “No shit,” the detective said, “you know, I went to high school with Gary Evans.”

  And there he was: the cop who had stolen the $3,000 some ten years earlier.

  “Oh, you did, huh?” Horton said.

  Because it had been so long and Horton knew Evans would never testify against the cop, he decided not to pursue it.

  “It wasn’t worth jeopardizing the case we were working on with the Cohoes PD at the time,” Horton recalled later with a tinge of frustration and discouragement in his voice. “We were in the process of getting a serial rapist and murderer off the streets. Evans would have denied everything. It would have been my word against the detective’s. I had no proof. I was told to drop it.”

  Whenever Evans found himself confined to four walls and a barbed wire fence, he was faced with the prospect of doing an internal inventory. Having nothing but time on his hands to think about his life, he would always look back and contemplate where he had gone wrong.

  Sis, I really don’t know what to do…, he wrote near the beginning of June, while waiting to be sentenced. I have a problem with time—I’ve had it as long as I can remember. That’s the problem, remembering things when I don’t want to.

  From there, he went on a diatribe regarding, of all things, “taking showers.” He listed all the different places he had ever taken a shower and equated each with a bad memory of childhood. He mentioned “Canada, Colorado, Florida, prison, friends’ houses, etc.” Anywhere, in other words, but home. In the same breath, however, he talked about sleeping in a field by himself. He recalled “eating cookies and milk kept cold in a stream.”

  This was euphoria for Evans: living alone in the woods. And the idea of it being a possibility, he claimed, was always something that kept him from going totally insane while locked up: All these thoughts and memories come into my head without me trying. How would you like to have thirty years of bad memories flashing through your mind all day? There’s so little good ones.

  After that, he refocused his obsession back to his high school sweetheart, Stacy, whom he hadn’t seen for ten or more years by this point: Everything reminds me of her. We spent so much time together. There’s nothing in the world that doesn’t connect with her in my mind…. After I was sick a few months ago, I was really in a bad mood, felt like going skydiving and not pulling the chute open. The only reason I didn’t was because…I haven’t found [Stacy] yet, and some people have gotten away with doing rotten shit to me and I want to pay them back. So I do illegal stuff to try to get enough money to do the things I want.

  CHAPTER 49

  By the time the June flowers were in full bloom, Evans was in county lockup stewing over the “deal” he had supposedly made with the state police—a deal that would send him back to maximum-security prison for yet another two-to four-year bid. Any pipe dreams he had of getting out sooner with the help of the state police was a figment of his imagination. Members of the state police, specifically Jim Horton and Doug Wingate (the two Bureau investigators Evans was referring to whenever he mentioned “favors” and “state police” in the same sentence), had never promised him such a thing. Trading information for time in prison wasn’t something Horton or Wingate could do. They could “put in a good word” for somebody. But that was it.

  To no one’s surprise, in early July 1985, Evans was sentenced to two to four years. In truth, it was a gift, considering his criminal history.

  His time would be spent, at least until a more permanent bed could be found, at Clinton Correctional, a prison with which he was already very familiar.

  It probably seems to you, Evans wrote on August 11, 1985, (like it does to everyone else), that the solution of staying out of jail is easy—just stop illegal activities and get a job. But whenever I do work or have to be around people (which really bothers me), I have strong feelings of wasting time not doing what I want.

  The statement made no sense. Anyone that wanted to live an hon
est life had to work for a living. But Gary Evans didn’t view life in that manner. In his mind, he deserved wealth without sacrifice. A home without a mortgage. Cars. Vacations. Diamonds and jewels for his women. All because of the “rough upbringing” he had been put through by his “horrible parents.” He was “forced” to steal in order to get the things he wanted. Time and again, faced with what he knew was the worst possible environment he could find himself in, he did nothing to modify his behavior to avoid it.

  Because Evans had planted the seed in the minds of just about everyone who had ever known Michael Falco that Falco had run off to California after burglarizing the East Greenbush flea market with him, Horton had no reason to believe otherwise. So Horton obtained a warrant for Falco’s arrest and made sure every California police department understood the Bureau was looking for him. Of course, weeks and months went by and no one heard from Falco.

  As the summer of 1985 drew to a close, Horton tracked down Falco’s common-law wife, Tori Ellis, the mother of Falco’s kids. She, too, was under the impression Falco had split to California after hearing it from several people who had, in turn, heard it from Evans. When Horton confronted Ellis and asked her about Falco, she ended up turning over several pieces of jewelry from the East Greenbush flea market job that Falco had given her.

  “Where is he?” Horton asked. “Have you heard from him at all?”

  “No,” Ellis explained. “He took off on me and the kids…. I heard he was in California.”

  Sing Sing Correctional Facility, located in Westchester County, New York, in Ossining, was built more than 160 years ago, and is probably the most famous New York prison. Movies have been shot at Sing Sing, books have been written about the place and several notable prisoners have spent the bulk of their time there. On top of its dark and violent history of riots and prisoner takeovers, about six hundred convicts have been executed at Sing Sing throughout the years. The criminal makeup of it is, without a doubt, among the toughest in the United States. New York courts send hard-core rapists, murderers, thieves, gang members and child predators to Sing Sing, either to teach them a lesson they will likely never learn, or to send them a message.

  By late August, Evans was on his way south to do his two-to four-year bid at Sing Sing. For Evans, remarkably, he viewed going to Sing Sing as some sort of step up from where he had spent most of his time in other upstate prisons. To him, Sing Sing wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Most important was the fact that he could add another famous feather to his criminal cap. Once people heard he had done time at Sing Sing, Evans knew, they’d view him differently. An immediate respect, at least in the criminal world, would be there waiting for him when he got out.

  There was never “one specific reason” Evans ever gave for latching onto Horton during the fall of 1985. Horton later admitted that a statement Evans made to him shortly after they met offered some insight as to why Evans perhaps trusted him so earnestly.

  “You treated me better than any other cop,” Evans said one day when Horton asked him why he was always calling and asking for him.

  “I like to treat people as people,” Horton told Evans that day. “Without you, I wouldn’t have a job.”

  For Horton, getting Evans to confess to the East Greenbush flea market burglary was a watershed moment in his career. He had been a new investigator and here he had solved a major burglary case. Evans had been, at the time, a Bureau target for years. The old-timers, Horton recalled, would always taunt him about getting Evans: “You’ll never catch him! He’s too good a thief.”

  With Evans away in prison, Horton assumed he wouldn’t hear from him. By this point, Horton had been transferred from the Bureau’s East Greenbush barracks to the Loudonville Bureau, Troop G, which was closer to his home and more action-packed. The only reason he would have for contacting Evans would be if he had a case and wanted to use Evans as an informant. Other than that, he had little use for him.

  On September 25, 1985, as Horton was working a murder case unrelated to Evans, he received a letter from him.

  How many other S.P. do you know who get mail from Sing Sing? Evans opened the letter with. Referring to Horton as “Guy,” a name he would commonly use as the years progressed, he began talking about the “fake” drug deal he had been involved in that had gotten him locked up this time around. He wrote: Word is…[the drug dealer I ripped off] will get me killed when I get out (he’ll have to stand in line). I have thought a lot about how easily his brother…could do it. (And if he does, please try to get him for it, okay?)

  There was a sense of camaraderie in the letter that struck Horton. He didn’t expect, for one, to ever hear from Evans again, nor did he imagine Evans to sound so calm and fixated on himself as a criminal who was, in his twisted mind, “working” with the state police.

  “I think that first letter served two purposes for Gary,” Horton commented later. “One, I think he found a cop who he knew would treat him decently…. Remember, we had no idea he was a murderer. We believed he was a prolific burglar who could help solve an endless array of local burglaries. Two, he thought he had a cop he could bring in to his twisted fold and make him an ally.”

  On the second page of the five-page letter, Evans began once again to dangle Michael Falco from a stick, rubbing Horton’s face in the deceitful fact that Falco was still alive and on the run. He talked about a guy he met in prison who knew Michael Falco: I came upstate in August, but spent July in Rensselaer County Jail. While there, [a] weird guy that Mike Falco sold jewelry to came in for traffic or drunk or some bullshit. While there, he told me he talked to Mike at a concert. Said he kissed off [Tori Ellis] + kid. Which is typical Falco family sentiment, and went west again.

  He next wrote he had spoken to Tori, too: “Fuck Mike,” [he said she told him,] since he threw her away….

  Throughout the letter, he gravitated toward giving Horton names of potential informants who could help him solve cases. Then he talked about the two drug dealers he had robbed, and ended up giving Horton several names connected to the main source of drugs in Troy. At the end of a long paragraph, after laying out the entire drug operation the two guys ran in Troy, he wrote: You’re welcome!

  It was as if Horton had thrown Evans a bone by treating him like a human being and now he was bringing it back.

  Then it came time, in his characteristic way of just coming right out with it, to talk about payback.

  Anyway…how can you guys sleep at night knowing I’m rotting in Sing Sing?! Clean up Troy, I won’t be back there but I’d like to see [the] hometown stand straight.

  The very last line of the letter was, perhaps, Evans at his best, taunting Horton, as he would for the next thirteen years: Write this infamous person at infamous Sing Sing. What the hell. It’ll look good if you ever write a book.

  CHAPTER 50

  During the early days after they first met, Evans saw Horton as an inexperienced investigator, still wet behind the ears. Horton was “the new guy” at the Bureau. Because of that, and the fact that he wholeheartedly believed he was smarter than Horton, Evans tried to shape and mold him into the type of cop he needed on his side. Horton, admittedly, was eager to prove himself as a young Bureau investigator. In a sense, he later said, he fell for Evans’s charm, at least in the beginning.

  After talking to Evans several times throughout September after receiving that first letter, Horton went to his Bureau captain and told him what was going on. “Captain, I got this Evans guy talking about all kinds of burglaries and drug deals and—”

  “Kid,” the captain said, interrupting, “leave it alone. Let Troy take care of those drug dealers. Worry about your job. Murders. The bigger fish.”

  Horton felt discouraged. He thought he had accomplished what other Bureau investigators had tried for years to do but couldn’t: penetrate the armor of the abominable Gary Evans and get him to open up.

  Horton would understand later that his captain knew a lot more about law enforcement than he let on.

&nbs
p; “Gary Evans was playing me,” Horton said. “He was throwing me things: drug dealers, robbery suspects, et cetera. But he was also giving me bullshit names and crimes that never happened. My captain knew I was being played.”

  Evans believed he was controlling Horton. He thought he could pull a string and Horton would rush right over to console him and grant his every wish.

  But Horton was also using Evans. He knew Evans could further his Bureau career. He knew Evans would eventually cough up important names. And he knew he ran a risk by befriending Evans—that it could all backfire on his career if he wasn’t careful.

  Throughout the remaining few months of 1985, and well into the beginning of 1986, as Evans continued to do his time at Sing Sing, he became one of Horton’s top CIs. Every cop has a few on a string—some with good information, some not. Most of the information Evans provided, Horton said later, was either impossible to back up, or totally spot on. Evans knew exactly what he was doing. In the years to come, Horton would realize that the main thrust fueling Evans’s desire to give up only certain bits of information was to throw Horton off the scent of Michael Falco. Evans would later admit he believed that if he kept Horton busy with other crimes and criminals, he would never suspect—and he didn’t until years later—that Evans was involved in Michael Falco’s disappearance.

  Indeed, both men were using each other—and both thought he was smarter than the other.

  In October, Evans sat down and sent his sister a letter and, with one stroke of his pen, explained how he’d figured out his life. He finally realized why he had spent the better part of the past ten years behind bars: I can’t believe I’m here again. But I know what did it: that guy not wanting the painting and I was trying to get [my last girlfriend] as a replacement for [Stacy], which is impossible.