From Midnight to Guntown

by Hailman, John

  In 1994, his notoriety finally caught up with him. After he was featured on a segment of America’s Most Wanted, someone in the Philippines recognized Paddy Mitchell as the same person as Gary Weber. He heard that authorities were coming for him. He told Imelda the truth and kissed her and their son good-bye forever. With $11,000 in hand, he planned to fly to Vancouver and on to Juárez, Mexico, knowing as an Anglo he could easily slip into the U.S. among the hordes of returning American tourists while the border guards looked for illegal Mexicans.

  But there was one problem: He discovered his U.S. passport had expired. No problem for Paddy. He simply stopped by the U.S. consulate in Manila on his way to the airport, got his passport renewed, and flew off to Vancouver. When he got to Vancouver, there was another problem. While waiting for his flight to Mexico City, he heard an announcement directing Gary Weber to report to the Canadian immigration desk. Rather than fleeing as anyone else would have, Mitchell headed straight for the desk and calmly answered all their questions. He told them he was visiting his sister in Mexico City before going home to the United States. After twenty nervous minutes, Canadian immigration officials bought the story and Mitchell had escaped again.

  When he reached Juárez, Mitchell simply walked across the border back into the United States. But he had only $6,000 left. As he said later, “Money doesn’t last long when you’re on the run.” His shortage of cash led to a career-ending decision when he skipped his usual careful planning and “rushed into this thing looking for some fast cash.” But he did not act entirely without planning. Just inside Texas he retrieved his old .32 caliber pistol, which he’d stashed, knowing he would return to do another bank job. He paid $700 in back rent for an old Ford LTD he’d left at the El Paso airport, knowing he’d need it for his next job. From there he drove straight to Southaven, Mississippi, a booming suburb of Memphis with thirteen banks.

  Mitchell had cased a likely bank in Southaven the previous year while gambling at the dog-racing tracks across the Mississippi River in Arkansas. He knew when several large stores, including Wal-Mart and Kroger, had large cash receipts delivered to the bank by armored car. He also had a plan to fool the police, which proved to be fatally flawed. From a pay phone he called the local hospital and said, “Some people I kidnapped last night are in the trunk of a green car in your parking lot. They may be dead.” He then called City Hall and said in a crazed voice, “I just put a bomb in your building and it’s gonna blow you all to bits, you SOBs.” Then he overdid it. Using an Irish brogue, which in a later interview I heard him use several times, Mitchell called Trustmark Bank and said, “You’re about to get robbed. There’s two guys coming in two minutes. They’re going to kill everybody in the bank.”

  Little did Mitchell know what he had blundered into. The Southaven Police Department was no amateur outfit. It was located in a luxurious suite of offices with leather chairs and plush carpets that had formerly belonged to a wealthy medical practice forfeited to the city after narcotics were illegally dispensed there. Chief of police Tom Long was a longtime friend and ally of our office. His department was probably the most sophisticated and well-staffed police department in the state, and its officers were accustomed to being challenged by big-city criminals from Memphis, a large city with a crime rate equal to that of Detroit.

  There was another fact that Paddy Mitchell could never have suspected: a decade earlier, another robber had called in bomb threats to two local stores to lure police away from the bank they planned to rob. I remember that robbery well because I handled it. One of the robbers bore a striking resemblance to former Washington Redskins quarterback Sonny Jurgensen. Chief Tom Long remembered the incident too. Mitchell’s phone calls sounded like a diversion. Long immediately sent an officer to every bank in town and personally headed for the Deposit Guaranty, which had the most money and was the best target.

  It was a rainy Tuesday. Flamboyant as ever, Mitchell was outside the bank wearing a blond wig and dark sunglasses festooned with distracting green and pink ribbons. He waited for the lunchtime crowd of customers to disperse and walked into the bank alone carrying his old .32 pistol loaded with four rounds and a fake bomb concealed in a green shaving kit. He had followed a Loomis armored truck from business to business and knew that the bank was flush with cash. Still, as he later admitted to us, he almost backed away. Experience had honed his instincts. Something didn’t feel right. A voice in his head kept saying, “Something is wrong. Get the hell out of here.” He started to leave, then thought of how badly he needed the money and of how he’d never have a better opportunity for a big, quick kill. He’d be broke before he could plan another such lucrative job.

  Mitchell pulled his green turtleneck over the bottom of his face, walked into the large, beige bank, and pointed his gun at the first teller’s head. He screamed to intimidate her. “Don’t set the alarms or I’ll kill every one of you. Where’s the bags?” She motioned him to the vault. “Open the door or I’ll kill you.” A teller opened it, and he ran in and filled his blue duffel bag with as many hard-to-trace tens and twenties as it would hold. He took no conspicuous hundreds, and there was no time for tellers to slip in bait bills or a dye pack. The job was going perfectly. For a moment, Mitchell thought his premonitions were wrong and he was on his way back to New Orleans and the French Quarter.

  As he exited, he laid the green shaving kit in the middle of the lobby and announced, “This is a bomb. If you come after me, it will go off.” He cleared the bank safely—in less than ninety seconds by his stopwatch—and was backing out in his old Ford LTD when two police cars rammed him from the back and side, knocking him across the seat. When he raised his head, he was looking into the face of a burly cop and down the barrel of his gun. Chief Tom Long was on the other side, blocking his escape. Mitchell later said he was suddenly so depressed that he thought of reaching for his own gun to provoke the cops into killing him. But that was with the benefit of time and hindsight, and also made a better story. At the time he simply said, “I give up. Please don’t kill me.” Paddy Mitchell, perhaps the most famous bank robber of the twentieth century, was caught—most people thought for good. But he had not given up. He still had one more trick up his sleeve.

  The following day, Greg Weston, the Ottawa reporter who helped make Mitchell famous with his book The Stopwatch Gang, managed to get a quick telephone interview with Mitchell, and on February 25, ran a four-column story on him and his latest job. For me 1994 promised to be a busy year. We had just indicted the warden and a dozen other officers at the Parchman penitentiary for beating a handcuffed inmate almost to death. I was to try that case and was also on a DOJ team scheduled to fly to Haiti to give training to Haitian prosecutors, hoping to help quell the unrest there. Nevertheless, I could not resist the Paddy Mitchell case. As criminal chief for the office, I assigned all cases and selfishly assigned Mitchell to myself and a talented and gung-ho young assistant named Chad Lamar to try it with me. Ron Lewis, the former Wyoming cowboy with a B.A. from Dartmouth and a master’s in French from Harvard, was appointed to represent Mitchell, now a pauper entitled to free counsel at taxpayer expense.

  To the surprise of us all, Mitchell insisted on pleading guilty. He said he always pled guilty. That put us on alert, reminding us that he also had always escaped. Lafayette County sheriff Buddy East had been a friend of mine since the 1960s when I was a law student. We talked with Deputy Marshal Eddie Rambo about the likelihood that Mitchell’s “defense” to the charge would be to escape again. The FBI notified us that Mitchell was also under indictment in the Northern District of Florida for an armed bank robbery there in 1987. When Mitchell was informed, he told Ron Lewis that he wanted to plead guilty to that one, too. Under Federal Rule 20, a defendant can waive his right to be tried where the crime was committed and plead guilty in the district where he is arrested. A second guilty plea made us even more suspicious. Nevertheless, Mitchell entered guilty pleas to both bank robberies and to using guns in both robberies. His maximum punish
ment was thirty-five years on each robbery, making us even more sure he would try to escape.

  He did, of course, and he might have made it. He began his scheme in typical fashion, sending a note through the prison grapevine with an article about him as an escape artist to inmate Horace Colonel. Together they recruited a colorful team of would-be Houdinis: Colonel, who was in for drug trafficking; Thomas Dwayne Combs, a state inmate awaiting transport to Parchman to serve a forty-year sentence from Circuit Judge Henry Lackey on eight counts of sexual battery; and James Carpenter, an unemployed professional wrestler who went by the name “Handsome Jimmy” Valentine. I had just convicted him for a violent extortion in which he poured gasoline on a gambler in Greenville (a tactic Carpenter blithely called “Exxoning him”) and threatened to “light him up” with a match if the victim did not pay his gambling debts. Instead, the victim whipped the overweight wrestler and called the police, who put Carpenter in jail. All of Mitchell’s accomplices faced long sentences and had plenty of motive to escape from the ultramodern, high-tech three-hundred-bed jail in Oxford that inmates called the Buddy East Hotel.

  Despite the heightened security, Mitchell managed to coordinate an escape plan that got way too far along. He got a friend of Combs to smuggle in hacksaw blades, which Mitchell used to saw through the heavy cell bars covering the heating duct in Cell 304, on the top tier just below the prison roof. From there, Mitchell planned for the escapees to climb down on ropes made from prison sheets, just like in the movies. To cover the sounds of the sawing, Mitchell played his TV loud, which was not uncommon. Hanging sheets over the front of his cell was more suspicious, but other inmates and trusties figured there was sexual activity going on and didn’t want to watch. To solve the biggest security problem, the absence of bars over the mouth of the duct, Mitchell showed his accomplices a trick he’d learned in the pen in Arizona. He mixed dried toothpaste with black cigarette ash and made a paste to hold the sawed-out bars back in place. For a while it worked well.

  Then Horace Colonel became impatient, fearing he’d be shipped off before the escape plan got a chance to work. Colonel suggested a far more vicious approach: Mitchell would fake another heart attack, and as accomplices helped him toward the ambulance, they would kill the marshals guarding him and all get away. Colonel knew the marshals’ procedures because they had taken him to the hospital when he got particles of steel in his eye while sawing with the hacksaw blade. Apparently no one realized at the time where the metal had come from. Mitchell nixed the shooting plan, not because he opposed violence but because the marshals were “too professional and sophisticated” to fall for it and the inmates would never pull it off. “Those marshals are hard core,” Mitchell insisted.

  Informants inside the jail eventually ratted them all out and Sheriff East and the marshals searched Mitchell’s cell and found the cut bars and hollowed-out air duct. This time, Mitchell did not plead guilty; he went to trial. Colonel’s lawyer offered us his client’s testimony in return for some leniency on his drug sentence. Much as I wanted to try this historic bank robber with Chad Lamar, I was out of the country on a DOJ mission at the time and could not be there. To take my place, I chose veteran AUSA Charlie Spillers, who had prosecuted Colonel and had a rapport with him and could handle him as a witness. As Charlie and Chad recall it, the trial was a hoot. “Handsome Jimmy” testified for us and made a good witness. Combined with Colonel, some photos, and the marshals’ testimony, it made an overwhelming case.

  Mitchell of course had total confidence he could talk his way out of it so he took the stand, allowing Charlie Spillers to cross-examine him about his previous escapes to prove his criminal intent. Mitchell had a novel story: Yes, this escape plan sounded like what he had told the testifying inmates about his prior escapes. But his version was that this time it was only to protect himself from violent inmates, especially Horace Colonel. He said it was obvious that the other inmates had simply copied his old escape plans from the newspaper articles. He testified he personally knew nothing of their plan to escape, this time.

  As Mitchell himself admitted in later interviews, Charlie Spillers destroyed him on cross-examination. Playing to Mitchell’s monstrous ego, Charlie got Mitchell to boast about his earlier escapes. Charlie was even able to show the jury the Canadian Broadcasting video about Mitchell’s robbery “career” and get him to brag about it too. The colorful Mitchell had such a unique way of thinking that the jury understood that he was behind the escape. The others were not smart enough to have conceived this plan without him. The jury convicted Mitchell in short order. Judge Biggers sentenced Mitchell to another five years in prison, the legal maximum for the escape, to be “stacked,” or served after all his other sentences in all courts. That sentence guaranteed Mitchell would die in prison. As Mitchell said later, “I’ll be 123 years old when I get out.”

  On June 30, 1995, when all possibility of appeals had run out and Mitchell was about to be shipped to a maximum security prison to serve his time, he and his attorney agreed to an interview. Present were several marshals, the prosecuting and defense attorneys, and reporter Jonny Miles from the Oxford Eagle, who later did a fine feature story on Mitchell for GQ magazine. We all satisfied our curiosity, asking Mitchell all the questions we’d wanted to ask but could not ask in court. He was quite a storyteller. We asked him for insider tips on bank robbery. I naively asked if he ever got ideas from other bank robbers he met in prison. Adopting his Irish brogue, he said, “Those aren’t bank robbers, God bless ’em. Anyone who hands a teller a note is not a bank robber; he’s an amateur. The only real American bank robbers are in Atlanta, and I haven’t been there yet.” He said he was afraid of guns and never had one except to use as bluff in a bank robbery. He told of one job where an accomplice accidentally fired his gun while drawing it and shot himself through the arm and Mitchell in the buttocks with a single bullet.

  Mitchell reflected with considerable insight but no remorse on his life of crime: “I’m not smart. I can’t spell, I can’t do math. I have no skills. In a way I had no choice. And I’d rather be in prison than work in a car wash.” He talked of the other inmates in the Oxford jail. “Carpenter trusted me. He told me he was a snitch and trusted me not to tell. I didn’t tell on him, and he didn’t tell on me. He only testified because he had to.” He ruminated on the others also: “Colonel, now he was scary. He told me about all the people he’d killed. I didn’t like to look him in the eye. He had a very cold look straight on.” U.S. Marshal David Crews gave a fair assessment of Mitchell that agreed with mine: “He has no moral underpinnings. He is sinister, but he does have a certain style.” Chad Lamar put it subtly: “There are so many conflicts in Paddy’s character and philosophy. He’s a walking conflict. Paddy is really a party boy who just happens to be damn good at robbing banks.”

  Once in federal prison, Mitchell continued to try to manipulate the system. For years he petitioned to be sent back to Canada to serve his time and even conned the U.S. State Department into supporting him under a U.S.-Canadian treaty. But our office opposed it vehemently to the end. His claim of wanting to be closer to his first family rang hollow to us. After all, he said the same thing about his first wife and young son he did about his second wife and young son: “I missed them all right—for a while.” We figured that what he really missed was his freedom and that he planned to get it back by escaping from whatever Canadian prison he went to.

  Over the years, Mitchell found a new avocation in prison as a blogger. With his usual pizzazz, he pontificated online on everything from prison conditions and chemotherapy to war in the Middle East and “The Bank Robber’s Life.” But he never robbed another bank. Patrick Michael Mitchell died in the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners at Butner, North Carolina, at 8:43 A.M. on Sunday, January 14, 2007, of lung cancer metastasized to the brain, which caused heart failure. As the official notice from the Bureau of Prisons stated in standard bureaucrat speak, “His projected release date was December 21, 2033.” It was a commo
nplace end for an uncommon man.

  Try It Again, Frank8

  Justice was almost defeated in one bank robbery case because of my overconfidence. Although frequently warned of racial solidarity among jurors, I had had so much success convicting black defendants with mostly black juries that I grew complacent. One of the most vigorous defense attorneys in those days was Charles Victor McTeer, a soft-voiced three-hundred-pound ex-football player from Maryland who moved to Greenville to be a civil rights lawyer. The big difference between Victor and other civil rights attorneys was that he also intended to make lots of money and as the saying went “do well while doing good.” He succeeded richly, driving a new Mercedes and flying his own plane. His daughter, Heather, also a lawyer, was for several years mayor of Greenville.

  One day, a young man named Nathaniel Johnson robbed a bank on South Main Street in Greenville just a block from where I once lived on the south end of Arnold Avenue. The robbery was a violent one and the black victim teller suffered a miscarriage and lost her late-term baby as a result, so we took the case especially seriously. One of our best FBI agents, John Canale of the prominent Memphis family, was assigned to the case. John did a brilliant job lining up evidence, including a unique candlestick from the defendant’s house whose bottom unscrewed. Inside, the defendant had rolled up and hidden several hundred dollars in bait bills. The case looked like a lock, but Victor refused a plea agreement and confidently announced ready for trial. With equal confidence, I also announced ready, and using hardly any challenges picked a jury that was mostly black. The marshals, always our best allies, warned me right away from what they heard in the hallways that I was in trouble with my jury. They were mesmerized by Victor McTeer and his civil rights reputation.