by Ben Machell
Both police forces were alerted and began the process of trying to work out what could possibly connect an armed and evidently proficient criminal with a pair of small cathedral cities in the West of England. “We had the DNA link from Devon, so we knew that there was a series of offenses down there that were linked to the ones in Worcester,” says DI Fox. “Which flummoxed us a bit really, because you are sitting there thinking…what’s the link? It was not your run-of-the-mill thing. Everyone was racking their brains but nobody was getting anywhere with it. It was unusual.”
Many of the officers believed the perpetrator had to be from overseas, most likely eastern Europe. They assumed that because he was an armed robber, he would have committed crimes before. Nobody began their criminal career with armed robbery. They always built up to it. If this guy was British, then there would almost certainly be DNA links to his earlier, smaller crimes in the database. It therefore followed that he would have cut his teeth abroad before coming to the UK to target banks and betting shops. Was he working alone? Did he have links to wider criminal networks and organizations domestically or abroad? How long would it be before he was responsible for someone getting badly hurt or worse? These were the kinds of questions the investigating detectives were asking.
What they were not doing was asking whether their man could be a university student, dividing his crimes between his hometown and his place of study. To do so would seem bizarre. “We just didn’t get to ‘student,’ but it was right in front of us,” says DI Fox, shaking his head. “How would you have ever predicted from his background that he would decide, in between his lectures, to go out and rob banks? We would go into every single pub in the vicinity to see if anyone matched the description. But we certainly wouldn’t be going onto a college campus. It just wouldn’t happen,” he says. “So from that point of view? He had us.”
Chapter Fourteen
After four days and nights of continual observation and constant overhead light, Stephen was allowed to leave suicide watch. Further psychiatric assessments had deemed him stable enough to join the general prison population. Exhausted, he swapped his blue paper jumpsuit for the rough-cut tan uniform of the Strafford County jail. For the first time since his capture, arrest, and incarceration in the United States, he found himself in and around a mass of other human beings. There was a time when Stephen’s Asperger’s and social anxiety would have made this overwhelming and unmanageable. But he felt almost giddy with excitement. Here, inmates were not confined to their cells. There were open, communal areas. There were books and chess sets. There were televisions. There was even an indoor basketball court.
For the first few days at Strafford County he mostly slept. Then he cautiously began to feel his way into life in a New Hampshire county jail. There were three television sets in the communal area. He immediately noticed that the inmates who gathered around each set were divided by race. The Hispanic inmates all watched TV together. So did the black inmates. So did the whites. Exposed to the media for the first time in months, Stephen began to piece together a picture of what had been happening in the world. And what he learned was that the world was teetering on the brink of economic disaster.
On September 15, 2008, while Stephen was still in the Hole, the American investment bank Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy. Over the previous decade, the Wall Street firm had become increasingly involved in mortgages as the U.S. housing market seemed to just grow and grow. They had acquired a number of companies that specialized in lending to home buyers and, as a result, had become one of the key players in subprime mortgages. By 2006, Lehman Brothers was effectively lending $50 billion a month. And in order to fund this lending they borrowed heavily, riding the housing boom to record financial returns. By 2007 the bank was, to all extents and purposes, operating as a property hedge fund.
But overleveraged in real estate and with their books full of subprime mortgages, when the U.S. housing bubble burst, America’s fourth-largest investment bank found itself trapped in a death spiral. The value of their real estate holdings fell like a stone. Nobody in their right mind would buy their toxic subprime mortgages in exchange for cash. And nobody in their right mind would lend them the cash to claw their way back from the brink. Not even the U.S. government. Confidence had vanished. Lehman Brothers went bust. Some twenty-five thousand jobs were lost almost overnight. The news showed employees filing out of their glass-and-steel Wall Street offices with cardboard boxes containing their personal effects, all looking dazed. Going down with some $700 billion in liabilities, it was the biggest bankruptcy in history.
Global financial markets plummeted in response; the Dow Jones dropped 4.5 percent overnight. A cold terror took hold. Nobody would lend to anybody. “Credit crunch” was no longer an appropriate term for what was unfolding. Instead, analysts began to talk of a “financial crisis” or “global crash.” Because it was not that banks were simply nervous about lending. It’s that they did not have the money to lend even if they wanted to.
The subprime mortgage scandal that had just helped bring down Lehman Brothers and Northern Rock was merely a symptom of a much deeper problem. For years banks and bankers had been burning through the protective layer of capital—of actual, real, liquid cash—that was supposed to be held in reserve for just such a circumstance. Why had they been doing this? Because if they plowed as much of that rainy-day money as possible into the international money market, buying up mortgage debts, CDOs, and other similar complex financial products, then they were guaranteed to make a return on that investment. The whole system had been set up to ensure this. By doing this, they were able to make their balance sheets look sensational and win themselves sensational bonuses year after year as a result. If you were a banker, you were riding an endless boom of your own clever creation.
Only, they had undone themselves. They had left the entire Western banking system cataclysmically undercapitalized. Where was the real money? Nobody could say for sure. Everything had been bound together by promises and projections and sleight-of-hand tricks that turned slivers of debt into bundles of profit come the next financial year. But at this rate it seemed there might not be another financial year. A domino effect looked set to commence. First banks would fail. Then businesses would fail. Then households would fail. Then nations, eventually, would fail.
Governments began to panic. The dreams of national leaders were haunted by visions of the ATMs in their country no longer issuing cash. Of trust in banks evaporating as citizens began to understand that the notes in their wallets were simply broken promises. And even if people allowed themselves to believe that this money still had some value, they would hoard it jealously. Entire economies would turn to dust. Social stability would teeter. Within a few weeks of Lehman Brothers going down, U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson told Congress they might be facing the collapse of the world economy “within twenty-four hours.”
The only hope of averting a situation in which Western society was slowly bled of money was massive public bailouts and stimulus packages. In a desperate transfusion, governments and central banks pumped billions into keeping alive many of the institutions whose actions helped cause the crisis. Popular anger began to manifest toward the banking executives whose attempts at financial alchemy had threatened to throw millions of lives into chaos and uncertainty. In the first week of November, while Stephen played chess against Nigerian fraudsters and Scrabble with small-time drug dealers in Strafford County, it was announced that five hundred thousand jobs had been lost in the United States over the previous two months. Car sales in the UK and the United States fell precipitously, threatening the automotive industries in both countries. The Chinese government announced a $586 billion domestic stimulus package to help defend against the deep global recession that was now inevitable.
Stephen viewed these unfolding events with little emotion. He did not feel vindicated, because he had always known that this was a system capable of
destroying itself. What was happening now was logical. Inevitable. If anything, he was surprised that people were surprised. The most vulnerable would suffer the most, and those responsible would not. A loud buzzer sounded at Strafford County, which meant it was time for the inmates to return to their cells. Stephen thanked the Nigerian man for the game of chess and drifted back behind bars.
* * *
—
At Strafford County, Stephen experienced something new. He looked at the men he was incarcerated with and felt a sense of comradeship. For the first time in his life, he had something in common with the people around him. They were all prisoners, all in matching tan uniforms, and they were all sharing the same fate. He was not on the outside looking in. He was now on the inside. Literally. All of them were. That was the point. It’s not that he enjoyed being in jail, but he felt it was a shared experience that bound them all together.
He made connections in a way he’d never been able to at Sidmouth or at university. He played board games with a large, gentle African American who was known as Muffin Man, on account of his overhanging belly. He did push-ups with an inmate everyone called Red Giant, due to his size and habit of blushing. Stephen was invited to play in basketball games. Everyone, as always, wanted to know what the hell he was doing there. And when he quietly explained, they puffed their cheeks out in disbelief and then called over to their friends, jabbing their fingers at Stephen and saying that the English kid was a fucking bank robber.
He shared a cell with a skinny, sour-faced man in his midforties who was covered in rough tattoos of lightning bolts and blotchy crests. As the weeks passed, Stephen noticed that his cellmate would make angry, muttered observations about Muffin Man and other black prisoners. One evening, in their cell, the skinny man finally exploded, pacing the floor and cursing at Stephen for fraternizing with “niggers” and insisting that from now on he must play basketball, watch TV, and even eat only alongside fellow “Aryan” inmates. The inmate leaned close into Stephen, who had been reading a book on his bunk, and spat out a long racial-epithet-filled diatribe, the overall gist of which was that whites were superior to all other races. But particularly to the blacks.
Stephen blinked. He put down his book. He was shocked that the man he’d been sharing his cell with held these views. He was also irritated that he was espousing something so obviously wrong. Not just morally wrong, but objectively wrong. The idea that there was some kind of hierarchy of different human races just didn’t make any sense to Stephen. It didn’t remotely stand up to scrutiny. He began to explain this to the man in front of him, to point out that racism is born of ignorance and leads only to destruction and division. We are all humans, he continued, speaking calmly and evenly, and the ecological and economic catastrophes that were about to be visited upon the planet would eventually affect all of us, regardless of the color of our skin.
For some reason, this only seemed to make his cellmate more irate. He yelled that he was proud to be a white man and a member of the white race. The man tugged down hard on his prison vest and pointed to a faded tattoo on his chest that he said showed he was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist organization. Stephen nodded patiently and said that, well, be that as it may, he surely had to accept that racism was born of prejudice, and that prejudice was, in turn, born of feelings and emotions rather than any observable, demonstrable facts. The man frowned. No, he said. He did not accept that. He believed there was a clear, ordained hierarchy of races, crowned by the pure-blooded white man. That was, he said, the whole point of being in the Aryan Brotherhood.
But Stephen did not relent. He never would. Over the coming days and weeks, he would do his best to bring his cellmate to reason. This debate would run for whole evenings, the pair of them lying on their bunks at the end of the day, repeating the same circular arguments for and against the existence of a white master race. Time passed, and the anger seemed to seep from Stephen’s cellmate, annoyance turning to resignation, turning, eventually, to curiosity about this strange, skinny, obsessive English kid who was like a dog with a bone. Stephen meditated and did yoga routines he had learned at Dechen Chöling on the floor, and rather than deride him, his cellmate asked cautious questions. As the two of them talked late into the night, snippets of information about their respective lives emerged. And Stephen started to see something he had already noticed when speaking to other inmates. Which was that despite having grown up thousands of miles apart, he and the other men shared much in common, especially in their youth. A lack of money. A lack of opportunity. Mental health issues within families.
“Some of the stuff about his background I related to,” says Stephen of his cellmate. “Not the racist stuff. But I felt sorry for him in some ways. In fact, most of the people I got to know in any shape or form, I related to their experience and understood where they came from.”
Running parallel to Stephen’s newfound feeling of belonging and sense of bonhomie was the absolute conviction that he must nevertheless escape. The belief that it remained possible to break free of his confines had existed as a low whisper in the back of his mind ever since his arrest in the United States five months earlier. Upon delivering him to Northwest State Correctional Facility, the U.S. Marshals who had escorted him there had made it absolutely clear to prison staff that Stephen was likely to attempt this. When he was in solitary confinement, even Stephen accepted that escape would be virtually impossible. But now that he was at Strafford County, he began to formulate possible plans of action. “Escape was like a constant,” he says. “I was constantly thinking about how I could do it.”
From his narrow cell window, Stephen could see that the jail was surrounded by a chain-link perimeter fence topped with a single coil of barbed wire. And beyond that? As far as he could see, it was about 125 meters of green field and then thick tree line. Taking into account the wire, Stephen estimated there was probably about ten feet’s worth of fence to clear. But Stephen thought he had spotted something that meant that, if he were somehow able to get through an exit and outside, he wouldn’t even need to climb over it. “It sounds crazy, but I could see a little gap underneath the fence,” he says, chuckling softly. “I thought that if I could just get outside, then I could get underneath that and then I’d be away.”
With hindsight, he says that he had not even considered what his plan would be, should he somehow pull this off. He was just obsessed with the idea of getting out. Everything else would have to fall into place. “I just had this mentality of, where there’s a will, there’s a way.” As with his robberies, Stephen maintained a belief that anything was possible. “I felt that the world would take care of me, as it were. The reason being that I was acting in the name of justice.”
Stephen never told any of the other inmates that he planned to escape. After his experience of being ratted out at NWSCF, he knew that directly disclosing his thoughts to others would be naïve. But what he did do was muse openly about the possibility of it. About the potential practical requirements that would, theoretically, need to be met if a jailbreak were to happen. He was, he believed, being subtle. He wanted to know what other prisoners, particularly those serving longer sentences, felt about the subject of escape. Was it something they had thought about? he wondered aloud over games of Scrabble. Was it something that they’d known people to do successfully in the past? he asked as they watched other inmates playing basketball. Nobody seemed to want to talk about it. Stephen shrugged inwardly and resolved to keep scanning the doors, windows, and air vents of Strafford County, constantly triangulating the different possibilities of escape. In the evening he returned to his cell and drifted to sleep, imagining himself running free, gleeful and laughing, through the thick, moonlit forests of New Hampshire.
One night Stephen was woken by two guards who entered his cell and ordered him to stand up. As he did so, strong hands reached out to twist his arms behind his back, and he felt the squeeze and click of h
andcuffs as they were locked around his wrists. He was taken from his cell and marched through the long, sterile corridors of the jail. He asked where he was being taken but the two men ignored him. Deep down, Stephen already knew the answer. Deep down, he already knew why. They turned a corner, and the sign on the wall simply read segregation. He was being placed back in solitary confinement. Another inmate had told the prison authorities about his obsessive talk of escape, and now he was in a familiar six-by-nine-foot cell. The guards ordered him to strip down to his underpants, then left him alone. He began to shiver.
There was a time when Stephen would have despaired. He would have curled up on his cold slab of a bunk and wept. But the past five months had made him stronger, more resilient. Instead, he stood in the middle of his cell and took three deep breaths. Then, still in his underpants, he calmly began a yoga routine. A guard pressed his face to the small window in the cell door. He saw Stephen with his eyes clenched shut and arms outstretched, as pale and still as a statue under the dim cell light.
Chapter Fifteen
It was early December 2007, twelve months before Stephen would find himself doing yoga in solitary confinement at Strafford County. He was in his room at Wyvern Hall, smoking a joint and reviewing the crimes he had thus far carried out. Since his attempt to enter the Lloyds TSB in Exeter—the attempt that finished with the bomb scare and evacuation—he had succeeded only in holding up two betting shops, making away with less than a thousand pounds in cash. He covered his face with his hands and rubbed his eyes. His plan had never been to reach the sum of £100,000 in tiny increments. Instead, he’d hoped to steal it all in one fell swoop. One big job, a getaway, and then he could begin the process of working out how to use this cash as seed money for the Organisation.