At the trial, the retired teacher took the stand and clearly and distinctly identified and pointed out the robber. On cross-examination, the defense attorney tried some standard tricks. First he asked her about her age and her memory, an approach she obviously resented. Then he questioned her eyesight, again stressing her age. Finally he asked her if it wasn’t true that she was so mad at the bank robber’s rudeness that it had clouded her judgment and caused her to want to identify his client whether he was the robber or not. The teacher replied, “Would you please repeat that question?” After a rambling, repetitious question, the teacher replied in an outraged voice, “If you are trying to impugn my integrity, you can just forget about it!” The attorney quickly said, “No further questions” and withdrew from challenging her as fast as his client had.
A Preacher in a Volvo Robs an Oxford Bank5
One of my personal favorite bank robbers was Anthony Lewis, a suave and educated Seventh Day Adventist preacher from Chicago. I’ll never forget his guilty plea after robbing a bank in Oxford. When a bored Chief Judge Neal Biggers came to the standard question about how far the defendant had gone in school, Lewis replied in clear, clipped diction, “I have a master’s of divinity degree, Your Honor.” The judge peered down over the top of his glasses at Lewis, briefly speechless. Lewis was definitely not your average bank robber, who normally can barely remember what grade he was in when he dropped out.
The preacher had come to Oxford on church business and had unexpectedly fallen in love with a beautiful young woman there. Desperate not to lose her and to have enough money to woo her successfully, Lewis devised a bank robbery plan only a bookish man would believe in: Using his gray, church-owned Volvo station wagon, he decided to rob a bank in the old Kroger shopping center, thinking he could make a quick getaway up nearby Highway 7 to Memphis.
Lewis’s disguise was fairly effective—a pair of dark shades and a hat with the earflaps down like on that old Johnny Carson TV skit with a farmer from Minnesota wearing a heavy plaid jacket. Lewis, however, looked out of place in steamy Oxford in his odd costume. Lewis’s weapon was better—a fake bomb made of a small cardboard box wrapped in duct tape with red and green wires sticking out all over. The fake bomb convinced the teller it was for real and she gave him her money. Luckily for Lewis, the bank was loaded with Kroger receipts ready to be picked up by armored truck, so Lewis netted more than $30,000. But he was not destined to keep it long.
As he drove away, Lewis’s problems began. A nervous amateur in a hurry, Lewis made a mistake and picked rush hour for the job. Being from Chicago, he probably thought Oxford didn’t have rush hours. When he drove away from the bank, he tried to turn left up Highway 7 but was blocked by a long line of cars. Panicking, he turned right on University Avenue, which funneled this stranger, who knew no back streets, downtown toward the packed Oxford Square. Easily identified by his practical, professor-looking Volvo station wagon, he was quickly apprehended by police along with all his loot. The fake bomb he left behind in the bank was covered with his fingerprints.
Veteran defense attorney Ron Lewis (no relation) was appointed to represent Anthony Lewis. Ron himself is quite a story, being a graduate of both Dartmouth and Harvard, so Judge Biggers and I faced an unusually educated defense team. Ron dutifully filed motions for mental exams, which were denied by Judge Biggers, who rightly reasoned that stupid isn’t crazy. When we learned from the probation officer’s presentence report that Lewis’s motive for the robbery was to get money to please a pretty young woman, his insanity claim seemed even less believable. When he lost his motions, Lewis tried briefly to fire Ron Lewis and bring down a Chicago lawyer, but the judge denied that motion, too, taking it for just a delaying tactic. After his guilty plea and sentencing, Lewis fruitlessly pursued from prison for over a decade various arcane legal technicalities and jailhouse appeals. All failed. In the year 2000 he was finally released on parole.
Of all his many pleas, one will remain with me forever. When Judge Biggers asked him at sentencing if he had anything to say, Lewis made the usual apologies and pleas for mercy. Then this black man from the North spontaneously gave one of the greatest compliments to the people of Oxford and our local Mississippi justice system that I’ve ever heard: “Your Honor, I’ve been treated with more courtesy and respect by people here in Oxford as a bank robber than I was ever treated in Chicago as a minister of the Gospel.” Case closed.
Full-Service Bankers6
One day the high sheriff of Tippah County came to visit Buck Tatum Jr., president of the Bank of Falkner. The sheriff told Tatum that trusties in his jail were saying that an inmate had been bragging about how easy it would be to rob the bank at Falkner. The bank was a competitor of the bank founded by William Faulkner’s grandfather. Tatum Jr. did not take kindly to people robbing his bank. Accompanied by the sheriff, he went straight to the jail and confronted the inmate, Dewayne Porterfield: “I hear you’ve been running your mouth about robbing my bank. If you do, I’ll track you down and catch you myself and have you put away in Parchman Prison forever.” Experienced criminals like Porterfield dreaded Parchman, a hellish place on a fifty-thousand-acre plantation deep in the Delta where inmates worked every day, often in one-hundred-degree heat in the summer, and spent every night in open, un-air-conditioned, unheated barracks with dozens of violent and dangerous inmates. Tatum figured his threat would protect the bank’s customers and employees from harm.
A couple of weeks later, Tatum received a phone call from the manager of a branch of his bank located several miles away in the tiny town of Walnut. The bank had been robbed. Tatum immediately said, “It’s that damn, stupid Dee-Wayne (as everyone pronounced it). I guess I should have told him to stay away from Walnut, too.” Tatum called the sheriff, who verified that Dewayne Porterfield had slipped out of the jail that morning with another inmate named Ross. The two men had been seen walking toward Walnut. The sheriff said his deputies were looking for the two and would probably catch them that same day. But Buck Tatum was not waiting. He called his brother-in-law, Woody Childers, board chairman of the Bank of Falkner, and said, “Woody, that damn Dee-Wayne has robbed our bank after I specifically told him not to. We need to get him.” Childers was equally outraged: “Wait there, Buck Junior, I’ll be right over.” Childers picked up Buck Jr. in his yellow Cadillac, and they drove madly around Tippah County, looking for the robbers without success. After an hour or so, Childers’s Cadillac overheated and started to smoke, so they switched to Buck Jr.’s pickup, which gave them a moment to stop and think. Tatum asked Childers, “If you were that damn, stupid Dee-Wayne and had robbed a bank, what would you do?” Childers, who knew Dee-Wayne, thought for a moment and said, “Head for the nearest beer joint?” Tatum thought some more: “And if those fellows were right who said they were on foot, which way would you go?” Childers wondered, “Try to hitch a ride to Memphis?” Buck Jr. agreed.
The brothers-in-law remembered a little beer joint on the shortest route from Walnut to Memphis and took off for it at high speed like something out of the Dukes of Hazzard. As their pickup topped a rise, they saw two men walking slowly along. One was tall and skinny like Dee-Wayne, the other shorter and stockier. “Surely it’s not them,” Buck Jr. said. But it was. Buck Jr. and Woody pulled up alongside the walkers. Tatum pointed his pistol at them and told them to stop. The shorter man, who was carrying a shotgun, laid it carefully on the ground. Buck Jr. said, “Put your hands up.” They did. While Childers kept his own pistol pointed at them, Tatum patted both men down for other weapons, finding none, but discovered the loot from his bank on Porterfield.
The bankers did not quite know what to do next. It was before the days of cell phones and Buck Jr. cursed himself for not having a CB radio in his pickup. He also wished he had some handcuffs. Finally, he said, “You drive, Woody. I’ll keep them in the back.” Tatum lowered the tailgate and ordered the tired, dusty robbers into the back of his pickup. Then he stopped. Later Tatum told me what he was thinking at t
he time: “I don’t want to screw this up. These citizen arrest deals can be tricky.” So he proceeded to advise Porterfield and Ross of their rights, reciting them as best he could from TV crime shows he’d watched over the years. Both robbers pled guilty and to their relief were sent not to Parchman but to federal prison. Although the federal joints were air-conditioned and had better guards, the companionship was probably not much better. As noted in Careers in Crime, “prison wife” is the worst of all criminal careers, ranking #50.
After the sentencing of Porterfield and Ross, I figured I’d seen the last of Buck Tatum, but several years later I found myself confronting him in my office during a plea-bargaining session with his lawyers. We had some good laughs about Dee-Wayne and how the bankers had given the robbers a citizen’s advice of rights. Then we got down to business. Through a series of bad business deals, Buck Jr. had gotten himself in a deep financial hole. His only way out was to embezzle from his own bank, which he did. His family members caught him with the help of the FDIC. The stress of the investigation caused him to have a major heart attack, and it was a much thinner and older Buck Jr. I faced in my office. We reached a plea agreement under which he would testify in other unrelated cases of which he had knowledge. One interested me especially because a bank bag with $50,000 had been found just sitting on the floor of the vault of the Bank of Falkner. The money was not in a safety deposit box and was not listed on the bank’s books. Pinned to it with a simple safety pin was a piece of cardboard that said, “Property of Thurston Little.” “Buck,” I asked him, “What was that $50,000 for?” He replied, “Well, I don’t know for sure. I just let Thurston keep it there in the vault as a favor. I didn’t charge him for keeping it and didn’t pay him any interest on it either. He would just go in now and then and put some in or take some out. I never asked him about it and didn’t really want to know. But you know Thurston, he just had to tell me about it. I don’t know if it’s true, but he said it was to buy votes and pay off public officials, but that’s just what he said. You know Thurston.” Another prosecutor handled Buck’s embezzlement case after that, and I haven’t seen him since.
At Last a Professional: Presidential Mask Bank Robber Caught in Our District7
In 1992, the Canadian Broadcasting Company did a prime-time special on a fugitive said to be the most “professional” bank robber of the twentieth century, a Canadian named Patrick Michael Mitchell. A book about his robberies, The Stopwatch Gang, was already a best-seller, and the gang’s MO of wearing presidential masks was featured in the movie Point Break with Patrick Swayze.
Born in a poor Irish neighborhood in Ottawa, Paddy Mitchell was an unusual fellow: a bank robber competent in his chosen profession. Although he remained all his life basically a thief, he managed to give bank robbers a brief aura of glamour, at least until he was caught in 1994 by Southaven chief of police Tom Long and his officers and sent to prison for the rest of his life by federal prosecutors Charlie Spillers and Chad Lamar of our office.
Mitchell began quietly enough. He went straight to work from high school, married, had a son and drove a soft-drink truck. But he also kept bad company, hanging out in Ottawa bars. Using his natural ability for scheming, Mitchell began his “career” planning heists for other people in exchange for a cut of the loot. Soon he wanted more of the profits for himself. Finally, when he netted more from hijacking one liquor truck than he would have made in a year delivering soft drinks, he turned to robbery full time. In 1973, he formed a three-man gang with Stephen Reid, a hippie, and Lionel Wright, a reclusive newspaper clerk. The strange fact that his partners were named Reid and Wright should have been an omen this was not an average group. Reid later became a published writer of novels about bank robbers. What are the odds of that?
The trio began robbing banks in unusual ways. They always called attention to themselves, which is usually unwise, however gratifying it is to the ego. Mitchell carried a large stopwatch around his neck during robberies. He insisted his jobs be so well planned that his gang could be in and out of the bank in one hundred seconds—less than two minutes. For a few years, Mitchell robbed for a living while telling his wife he was going to his humdrum job every day. Eventually, however, there were too many absences and too much to explain, so he simply abandoned her and his young son and went on the road for good.
With Reid and Wright, he went on a robbery spree across Canada that reached its height in 1974 with the Great Gold Heist, in which the trio stole $1.8 million in gold bars from an armored truck at the Ottawa airport. Errors in this flamboyant caper finally resulted in their arrests and convictions, with Reid sentenced to ten years in prison, Wright seventeen, and the mastermind, Mitchell, twenty. Within two years, however, all three had escaped from prison. Wright went first, simply walking away through a hole in a prison-yard fence. Reid’s prison break required more planning, but he finally got away while on a field trip for rehab training in woodworking.
Shortly thereafter, Mitchell made a much more challenging escape that is still a legend among prison inmates across the U.S. and Canada. Learning that it was possible to fake a heart attack by swallowing liquid nicotine leached from cigarette butts soaked overnight in water, Mitchell overdid it. Instead of one cigarette, Mitchell soaked a whole pack of cigarettes in a big glass of water, then ran three miles around the prison exercise yard before drinking the nicotine solution. It nearly killed him. His heart attack symptoms were so real that guards rushed him to a nearby hospital, where his old partners Reid and Wright were waiting for him disguised as emergency-room workers. All three got away and hid out for days in a nearby basement while Mitchell recovered from his near-death experience. His heart had nearly exploded.
Mitchell and his Stopwatch Gang decided to move operations to the United States, believing that they were too hot in Canada. South of the border they began a spectacular spree of bank robberies, glorying in their m.o. as the “stopwatch gang.” They enjoyed women, drugs, and life on the beach, not to mention fine cigars and the best champagne. But most of all they loved the adrenaline rush of the robberies themselves, which Mitchell compared to a long cocaine high. Over the next twenty years they robbed, by Mitchell’s count, more than 140 banks, netting over $8 million, all of it soon spent on riotous living.
Their favorite region was the American Southwest. In 1980, they successfully robbed a series of banks in San Diego, the high point being a Bank of America branch where they got $280,000 but were caught on a surveillance video wearing their presidents’ masks and using their stopwatch. The FBI put the pieces together and found them at their favorite hideaway, the beautiful little city of Sedona, Arizona, a sort of New Age party town where Mitchell was known as a generous millionaire businessman. On Halloween 1980, Reid and Wright were arrested for the San Diego robbery, but Mitchell slipped away and kept on robbing, both solo and with new partners. In 1983, robbing solo, he was caught robbing a business in Arizona. The Stopwatch Gang was no more.
Wright served his time and went to work as a reclusive accountant for the Canadian prison system, which took him back. Reid did his time, married and moved to Vancouver, where he began writing novels, including Jackrabbit Parole, a gritty, lightly fictionalized version of the gang and its escapes. Looking much older and with neatly trimmed facial hair, he built a career doing TV interviews about his life of crime. Later he was caught again, this time in a drug deal, and went back to prison for good. Mitchell soldiered on. Sentenced to seventeen years for the Arizona robbery, he promptly conned another team of prison guards. Mitchell got a job cleaning inmate visiting rooms and gained the trust of the guards. In later TV interviews they still seemed captivated by his Irish charm which caused them to forget about his previous prison escapes and his years as a successful fugitive. By 1986, Mitchell had determined the prison’s weak point, a duct system that opened out near the back fence. He talked his way into a job cleaning the area beside the warden’s office, where a large duct was exposed. He was able to cut into it with homemade tools
fashioned from his cleaning equipment. One night he crawled out the duct, climbed the fence, and walked away.
It was 1986 and time to consider a new career path, without of course giving up bank robbery. He moved to the French Quarter in New Orleans, adding the French-sounding alias Richard Landry to his existing list. By 1988, after a long string of successful bank robberies, some alone, some with a partner, Mitchell had saved enough money to retire. Because his face was featured on wanted posters around the country, he had plastic surgery done “so my own mother would not have known me.”
He boarded a plane in Seattle and flew to the Philippines, where he met a beautiful but poor woman named Imelda in a Manila shoe store where she was working. She believed his story that he was Gary Weber, a rich American insurance executive. He moved her to a mansion on a hill overlooking the beautiful, secluded Trinidad Valley 150 miles north of Manila. They married and Mitchell fathered a son by her in November 1989. Imelda trusted him completely. Mitchell put Imelda’s brothers through college and set her father up in business. He became a local philanthropist, helping earthquake victims. Mitchell exercised and even became a vegetarian. But he could not stop robbing banks. On his yearly “business trips” to America, he kept on robbing.
Mitchell at first seemed unable or unwilling to tell me in an interview why he could not retire as he’d planned. He also had difficulty explaining why he kept leaving his Filipina wife, their son, and what he called his “Garden of Eden on the island,” but he did. Finally, he admitted it was probably a mixture of his spendthrift way of always blowing his loot on flamboyant gestures and his love of the score, the addictive adrenalin excitement of the robberies themselves. Whatever the reason, he headed back yearly to the U.S. in the Philippine rainy season to rob a bank or two for thrills and cash. By 1990, he was No. 3 on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. His face was on posters all over the U.S.
From Midnight to Guntown Page 7