by Ben Machell
“I didn’t have a lot of money on me, and this guy was saying that he wanted me to pay three times, which was crazy,” he remembers. He felt that he was being extorted and intimidated. What happens next is not entirely clear. To begin with, Stephen says that he leaped over the front desk, grabbed a fistful of money from the till, and “stormed out.” Then, he admits, he produced a knife. “I grabbed over the counter, got the money, and then he stopped in front of me, so blocking me from leaving the place. So I just opened my bag and he saw this knife, and he just backed away.”
He sprinted away from the hostel. The day was overcast and wet, and raindrops beat against him, dripping down his glasses and steaming up the lenses. He ducked into a taxi and rode away, but his identity was no secret, because the hostel had made a copy of his driver’s license when he first arrived. He sat panting in the back of a taxi, his backpack damp on the seat beside him.
Beside the lake, he told Rebecca all of this. He emphasized his deep concerns for the world. “We talked about inequality. I talked about how the financial system worked and how it created money from thin air, and where the world was headed. And she agreed with me that the destination it was going in was total destruction and suffering for people, and that unless drastic action was taken it would just keep plodding down this route,” he explains, talking clearly and with force. “Yes, there might be ways people could delay it, but those passive ways wouldn’t actually change things. They might inconvenience the powers that be a little bit, but they wouldn’t result in any significant changes. I think she understood,” he says. “In fact, I am pretty confident she understood. But she didn’t want me to do it in the robbery sense. She wanted me to make money conventionally, and then when I had made money, to spend it on building this organization that I envisioned.”
The weeks at Dechen Chöling passed, Stephen working during the day and spending the evenings with Rebecca. He continued to train in kyudo archery under the tutelage of the resident octogenarian Japanese master, and to exercise and meditate. But from time to time he sat at one of the computers in the central office, where he researched the careers and methods of real-life bank robbers. Two in particular enthralled him.
One was an American named Carl Gugasian, who stole in excess of $2 million over the course of fifty robberies spanning three decades. Gugasian, Stephen read, was widely considered to be America’s most successful bank robber. A neat, unremarkable-looking man from Pennsylvania, he served in the army before earning a PhD in statistics. In his spare time, he began to plan bank robberies, almost as a hobby. An intellectual exercise.
Eventually, Gugasian started to carry these robberies out in real life. They were meticulously planned. He would go to the library to find maps of small towns that had banks close to wooded areas with access to a nearby freeway. He’d create caches in the woods in order to stash evidence—clothes, weapons, money—in the immediate aftermath of his robberies. He’d stake out a bank for days, learning the comings and goings and habits of employees, before striking at closing time on a Friday night in the belief that this would mean fewer customers and a greater amount of cash. He would burst into the bank wearing bulky clothes to conceal his build, move quickly and in a crab-like fashion in order to make judging his height more difficult, and wear a gruesome horror mask for maximum intimidation. Brandishing a pistol, he would vault the counter, demand the terrified cashiers empty their tills, and then flee in a process designed to take less than two minutes.
Stephen clicked on dozens of articles about Gugasian, absorbing them all, entranced. He learned about how he would keep a dirt bike in the woods near the bank, then use it to flee to a van parked several miles away and make good his escape, only returning to the woodland cache of evidence and money days later, once the coast was clear. This went on for thirty years until dumb luck saw a pair of teenage boys discover a cache of weapons stored in a drainpipe in some woods near Gugasian’s home, which ultimately led to his arrest in 2002.
The other man Stephen spent hours researching online was André Stander, a South African police detective who, during the 1970s, led a double life as a bank robber. Like Gugasian, he was prolific. He’d rob a bank at lunchtime using a disguise, a pistol, and a lightning-quick entrance and exit. By the afternoon, he would be investigating the very crime he had committed. The fact that Stander later claimed his motivations stemmed in part from his disillusion with South African society under apartheid only added to the allure of his actions. Sitting alone in the admin office of a Buddhist meditation retreat, Stephen allowed himself to conclude that with the right combination of forethought and boldness, robbing banks was possible. And just as important, he allowed himself to believe that you could do this while still being a good person. A mild-mannered statistics professor. A cop jaded by a racist society. “I very strongly identified with these people. They played a massive part in the Robin Hood persona that I developed.”
In August 2007, Rebecca returned to the United States. Before she left, Stephen says, she made him an offer. To come back with her. They could live together, enjoying the mountains and forests of Colorado. Stephen could find work while she finished college. It was in so many ways the moment Stephen had yearned for. But he did not go with her. He felt he couldn’t. He knew how much he already depended on Rebecca emotionally, to help guide him through social situations, and that worried him. What’s more, if Stephen couldn’t find work there—and his experience of gaining long-term employment had not been good—then he imagined himself becoming dependent on Rebecca in every possible sense. “Because of my background, I was scared that I was being wholly reliant on her. I would feel like I was a leech latching on to her, if that makes sense, and I hated that notion. I also felt like I had an obligation to be independent, for both her sake and for mine.” It’s not that he didn’t love her and want to be with her. He just wanted to feel as though he was worthy of her.
And there was the Organisation. “There was this sense of an obligation as well, about making a difference in the world, that was still digging at me. I thought if I went down the path of being with Rebecca, then I would be turning my back on the obligation I had seen myself as making. After everything I saw on my travels, that seemed really callous and selfish even. That sounds weird, I guess,” he says, softly. “The idea that it’s selfish not to rob a bank.”
The pain of letting Rebecca go was “unbearable.” But they agreed that one way or another, they would reunite within a year. With Rebecca now gone and little else to occupy his mind, Stephen was almost locked into his course of action. He had been turning the idea over and over since New Zealand. Researching and understanding the methods used by successful bank robbers had become an obsession for him. He gave it the same unblinking focus that he gave to global inequality or, previously, the cosmos, geology, or any number of his past special interests, which, as someone with Asperger’s, he’d always pursued with single-minded intensity. Because of what he had done in Amsterdam, he told himself that he had already crossed a line. That he was already a criminal. But there was still a part of him that wanted to know—or to believe—that his plan to rob from the rich to give to the poor was morally watertight.
Which is why, one day, he approached an old Buddhist monk who was passing through Dechen Chöling. Quietly and respectfully, he asked the monk if it would ever be permissible to steal. The old man smiled and shook his head. The teachings of Buddha say that it would not. Stephen absorbed this and then rephrased the question, asking if it would be okay to steal so long as you then did great good with the proceeds. Again, the monk shook his head. Stephen smiled and said, yes, but what if people really, really needed the proceeds of this hypothetical theft? The monk, increasingly perplexed, said that stealing is stealing. They went back and forth like this for some time before Stephen eventually asked if it would be okay to steal if the money he was stealing had been stolen from the people, who would then, effectively, be having the money
returned to them and which would, in turn, allow them all to improve their lives immeasurably. The exasperated monk eventually said that, well, yes, it could be that under those precise circumstances, perhaps it would be permissible to steal. It was all Stephen needed to hear. He thanked the old man, bowed respectfully, then walked away, feeling lighter than air.
* * *
—
At almost exactly this time, 250 miles north of Dechen Chöling, a decision was made that would accelerate and intensify Stephen’s actions. On August 9, 2007, French bank BNP Paribas, one of the largest in the world, announced they were freezing all withdrawals from three of their investment funds. The U.S. housing market was tanking, people were defaulting on their subprime mortgages at a terrifying rate, and with BNP Paribas’s books full of increasingly rotten CDOs, they solemnly explained that they could no longer calculate how much their holdings were actually worth. As such, the amount of money they were willing to lend and invest would be reduced significantly.
For many economists, this represents the moment that the global financial crisis began: an admission, by a huge international bank, that because of their own activities, they simply did not know how much money they had. BNP Paribas would receive immediate aid from the European Central Bank, but by then it was far too late. Larry Elliott, The Guardian’s economics editor, later described August 9, 2007, as having “all the resonance of August 4th, 1914. It marks the cut-off point between ‘an Edwardian summer’ of prosperity and tranquility and the trench warfare of the credit crunch—the failed banks, the petrified markets, the property markets blown to pieces by a shortage of credit.”
Stephen left Dechen Chöling at the end of August. He returned to Sidmouth, but only briefly. Before making the trip home, he had applied through clearing for a place at the University of Worcester in order to study geography and sociology. If Carl Gugasian could earn a PhD, then there’s no reason why Stephen couldn’t get some qualifications along the way. Plus, he wanted to go to university and to experience what it had to offer. A criminal career and a life as a student need not be mutually exclusive.
Chapter Eleven
As Operation Gandalf rolled into life in late 2007 and the Lloyds TSB and Ladbrokes robberies were investigated, one of the first things Detective Constable Bingham and his team did was check to see if there were any similar unsolved crimes in the Exeter area. It did not take them long to discover that on January 31 that same year, the very same branch of Ladbrokes had been robbed by a man wearing a black leather jacket, a black ski mask, and black gloves, and who threatened staff with a knife and a handgun before making off with what news reports later referred to as a “substantial” amount of cash. To Bingham, it seemed reasonable to hypothesize that this crime had been carried out by the same man he was now looking for. When Stephen eventually stood trial in the UK for his crimes, he would be charged with this robbery. “In the indictment, I was accused of doing an offense when I came back to England,” he says, meaning that the alleged robbery took place after his return from his round-the-world trip but before he left for Europe and Dechen Chöling. He says that he pleaded not guilty to the offense and that he was never convicted of it.
Bingham does not believe him. “Effectively, he got away with one,” he says. Either way, the timeline shows that Stephen left for Europe not long after the robbery took place. If Bingham is right, it means that Stephen didn’t spend his time at Dechen Chöling wrestling with the question of whether or not he should turn to crime. Instead, he had spent his time at Dechen Chöling wrestling with the question of whether to continue down a path he was already taking.
In any case, in early September 2007, Bingham and the small team working Operation Gandalf were trying to find out who their man was. Their approach was methodical. In the past, says Bingham, police detectives would have been encouraged to try to build up a psychological and personal profile of the man committing the crimes. In many ways this mirrors human instinct, to ask and then address the obvious question: Who is this person? What can we deduce about them? What might they be like? But Bingham believed this was the last thing they should be doing. Why risk overlooking the real perpetrator by allowing yourself to rush to the conclusion that the robber was a drug addict, or had previous convictions for armed robbery, or was working as part of a wider criminal network?
“Old-fashioned coppers would have had a hypothesis immediately about who they think it would be or the type of person,” says Bingham. “Actually that could take you down some very narrow avenues in trying to find who it is. You shouldn’t try and categorize who it is or what they might be like.”
Bingham instead focused on the “golden hour” principle, the idea that following a crime, investigators have a limited amount of time to find and preserve material that could otherwise be lost. “It’s not actually an hour, but it’s about securing evidence. As a detective, you just naturally do that,” he says. “So absolutely flood the scene with forensics and go through all the CCTV, because what you do know is that he isn’t going to be walking down the street wearing a balaclava.”
Stills from closed-circuit television of both incidents were printed in the local papers, though it was impossible to identify the man in the grainy photographs. But as soon as it was clear that they had managed to obtain a sample of the suspect’s DNA from the replica pistol, Bingham allowed himself to feel confident. “We always knew after the Lloyds bank one that we had forensics on him, so we knew we would get him. It was just a matter of time. In this day and age, if you have DNA or fingerprints, you are confident you are going to get him pretty quickly.”
Or at least this would have been the case if Stephen had already been a criminal whose DNA or fingerprints from past crimes—solved or not—were already logged in a database and ready for a match. Only, he wasn’t. Even Bingham, normally so unwilling to jump to conclusions about his quarry, found the idea that somebody might begin their criminal career with an attempted bank robbery a little hard to believe.
“It is unlikely,” he admits. “It’s not a common factor that somebody jumps straight to armed robbery. They normally build up through some form of criminality. They try it out first. Very rarely do you get somebody doing it as their first crime.” He explains that to plan and execute a robbery, never mind knowing what to do with the money you steal, is generally something that requires you to be at least in some way connected to an experienced network of criminals. “If you go into a bank and get fifty grand in cash, you can’t just go and spend it. It’s a naïve person who thinks that if you rob a bank, it’s going to be an easy option.”
As Devon and Cornwall Police searched through CCTV footage, conducted interviews, and analyzed Stephen’s replica gun and fake bomb for forensics, they missed one small thing. When Stephen burst into the South Street Ladbrokes, he’d announced his arrival by hurling a pound coin across the room. He had planned this the previous day, and he would do this as the prelude to many of his subsequent robberies. In his mind it was a sort of symbolic act. The banks and institutions he robbed from had the ability to create money from nothing—from abstract ideas like “debt” and “interest.” When he stole from these institutions, he was simply taking money they had spun from thin air. By leaving them a simple, solid pound coin, he was “repaying” them with the means to eventually summon all the money back again. “That’s what I told myself anyway.” The pound coins he used for this purpose all had a single line scratched through them, though rarely if ever on the side featuring the queen’s portrait. “I probably would have seen that as being disrespectful.”
* * *
—
On September 15, 2007, there was a run on Northern Rock. One of the largest lenders in Britain, the bank had borrowed large sums of money in order to expand and fund customer mortgages. In order to repay the money they’d borrowed, Northern Rock’s business model required them to simply bundle their customers’ mortgages and sell them as
CDOs on the international money market. Only, nobody in the international money market wanted CDOs anymore. Nor did they want to lend to mortgage banks in general. This left Northern Rock in a liquidity crisis. They needed more cash.
On September 12, they approached the Bank of England to act as lender of last resort, and received some £3 billion of initial aid. The story was made public on September 14, through a report on the ten o’clock news. This immediately prompted fears that bankruptcy was imminent. The following morning, thousands of Northern Rock customers up and down the country were filmed queuing up outside their local branches in order to withdraw their savings. These queues, often made up of the elderly and retired, remained in place for three days. It was the first run on a British bank in 150 years. When Northern Rock was finally nationalized, thousands of ordinary people who had put their savings into shares in the bank were left with nothing.
Stephen watched this all unfold on the TV in the ramshackle living room at Manstone Avenue. While studio pundits and the customers interviewed on the street were confused and shocked, Stephen was not. As he sat there watching, his mother on the couch beside him murmuring her dismay, it all merely confirmed what he’d already known: that banks had created a system in which they could magic money from almost nothing. But when a reckoning came, it would not be the bankers who faced the consequences, but the ordinary workaday people at the bottom of the pile.