The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  The Barefoot Bandit

  Bob Friel

  The Barefoot Bandit tells the riveting true story of Colton Harris-Moore, America’s twenty-first-century outlaw. Born into a poor family marred by alcohol abuse, Colt had the local sheriff after him before the age of ten. Colt survived by breaking into homes to forage for food, and learned to evade the police by melting into the Pacific Northwest wilds. As a teenager, he escalated to stealing cars, boats, and identities. An extensive manhunt finally caught Colt, but he escaped juvenile prison and fled to nearby Orcas Island, where he assured his place alongside outlaw legends such as D. B. Cooper by stealing an airplane without ever having a formal flight lesson. And that was just the beginning.

  As a resident of Orcas Island, author Bob Friel witnessed firsthand as local police, FBI agents, SWAT teams, and even Homeland Security helicopters pursued Colt around the island. Colt’s crime spree infuriated and terrified many locals, while others sympathized with the barefoot young criminal—the controversy tearing at the formerly quiet community. The story gained international fame, with Time calling Colt “America’s Most Wanted Teen” when he stole and crashed his third airplane. After more than two years on the run in the Northwest, Colt fled Orcas and began a spectacular cross-country trek. Friel followed the Barefoot Bandit all the way to the Bahamas, where the chase finally ended in a hail of gunfire at 3 a.m. on a dark sea.

  Through his personal experiences and hundreds of interviews with witnesses, victims, local authorities, Colt’s family, and, indirectly, Colt himself, Friel gives readers an exclusive look at an outlaw legend. Set against the backdrop of the Pacific Northwest’s evergreen islands, where Internet millionaires coexist with survivalists and ex-hippies, this is a gripping, stranger-than-fiction tale about a neglected and troubled child who outfoxed the authorities, gained a cult following, and made the world take notice.

  “I doubt if even the best fiction writer could create a character like Colton Harris-Moore. This is an incredible but true story. Bob Friel is a gifted reporter and a very fine writer.”

  —Nelson DeMille, New York Times bestselling author of The Gold Coast and The Lion

  “Something about Colton Harris-Moore—crafty stealer of cars, boats, and airplanes—captured the fascination of our fast-moving country. But it took Bob Friel, a plucky reporter with a pitch-perfect story sense—to chase down the legend and make it real. In Friel’s fine telling, the Barefoot Bandit emerges as both villain and folk hero in a thrilling modern fugitive tale.”

  —Hampton Sides, author of Hellhound on His Trail

  “A Dillingeresque tale for our current Great Recession era. Friel not only gives a brilliantly clear-eyed look at a bandit’s adventures but also the effects they had on his peaceful community.”

  —Matthew Polly, bestselling author of American Shaolin and Tapped Out

  “Riveting, thorough, and deeply human, this terrific read doesn’t just tell the story—it brings it to life.”

  —Marcus Sakey, bestselling author of The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes and The Blade Itself

  “Friel offers a thrilling portrait of a bright and neglected teen trying to outrun authorities and his own troubled past.”

  —Booklist

  “This highly entertaining story of a modern-day Huck Finn will be enjoyed by lovers of adventure stories as well as true crime.”

  —Library Journal

  “It is Friel’s ability to spin a great yarn that draws the reader in from the start and never lets up. And he does it with deft reporting and a breezy and entertaining style that enlivens a tale as incredible as it is true.”

  —Associated Press

  “[A] true-crime classic.”

  —Aspen Daily News

  Bob Friel

  THE BAREFOOT BANDIT

  The True Tale of Colton Harris-Moore, New American Outlaw

  To great parents (especially mine), and good kids

  And to all those trying to fill in the cracks

  For Sandi

  Part 1

  REACH FOR THE SKY

  Chapter 1

  Around 8:30 a.m. everything went to hell. Swirling 60 mph winds grabbed the little plane, shook it, rolled it, threw it down toward the jagged peaks of the Cascade mountains, then slammed it back up into the darkening skies.

  The morning had started out smoothly, according to plan. After a night of lashing rains driven down the runway by gusts blowing from across the Canadian border, the predawn skies cleared and fleecy air gently blanketed Orcas Island. The barometer rose and the temperature climbed to 57 degrees, about 15 warmer than expected for a mid-November morning in the far corner of the Pacific Northwest. It looked like fine flying weather—unless you’d checked the reports and saw the obvious shitstorm coming.

  Pilots of small aircraft obsess about the weather. Ill winds, icing, poor visibility—all can bring your flight to a terminal, smoldering conclusion. Before the FAA considers a pilot minimally safe to solo, he must study and train intensively, racking up forty or more hours of air time sitting alongside a calm, cool flight instructor ready to instantly take over and recover from blunders that could otherwise kill them both. During ground school, student pilots learn the one surefire way to avoid trouble with dangerous weather: don’t fly in it. However, when you’re a seventeen-year-old with zero hours of official flight training strapped into a stolen airplane trying to make a quick getaway from a whole lotta law enforcement on your tail… Well, you have other things on your mind besides the weather forecast.

  As the sky began to glow, teasing misty details from the island’s steep, evergreen hillsides, the teen had busied himself with final preflight preparations inside one of Orcas airport’s private hangars. More than seventy small aircraft bed down on the island, and its single runway averages nearly 150 takeoffs and landings per day. You can watch the airplane action from the parking lot, the adjacent dog park, a spot just north called Smuggler’s, or from the woods behind the airport’s flimsy deer fence. You can also spy on the comings and goings from Orcas Island’s small sheriff station—known to locals as the cop shop—that lies within badge-tossing range of the runway’s south end.

  A few days earlier, one of the landings was made by a 1999 Cessna 182 Skylane, tail number N24658. The would-be thief recognized that model on sight, just as he knew every Cessna, Piper, Beech, Cirrus, and other small plane. Regardless of its challenges with impulse control and social norms, the kid’s brain functioned as an aircraft encyclopedia crammed with engine ratings, performance stats, and avionics capabilities. Flying had been his one constant dream, one soaring aspiration in an otherwise bottom-of-the-barrel life, and he’d been teaching himself about flight since childhood, obsessively paging through airplane books until their bindings disintegrated. Now, at an age when most kids spent all their feverish energy trying to wangle a sweaty hour or two with another teen in a backseat or on a basement couch, Colton Harris-Moore’s one overwhelming desire was to spend illicit time in the privacy of a hangar with a plane he planned to make his own.

  This particular Cessna, he knew, offered fuel-injected reliability and a rugged, easy-to-fly airframe. It was an airborne SUV, the Ford Bronco of the skies, and he could close his eyes, project an image of the cockpit, and reach out to virtually touch every control, switch, and gauge.

  The Cessna had landed, rolled out, and taxied to its home in the airport’s hangar farm. Other planes slept under the stars, tied down out on the tarmac, but Colton wanted one stored out of sight. After sundown—after the daily FedEx flight and the last of the commuter runs had taken off for Seattle and Bellingham, and the airport’s provincial terminal went dark for the night—he simply walked through the open fence.

  A typical small-plane hangar features
a large door for the aircraft along with one or more regular-size entrances called man doors. Plane theft is practically unheard of and few private hangars have alarm systems despite housing planes worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. It took just a few seconds to jimmy open the man door. Inside, Colton switched on his headlamp and illuminated his dream.

  FLIERS LOVE THEIR AIRPLANES. Passionately. During preflight inspection, a pilot caresses the frame. He runs his hands along the ship’s smooth skin, probing her flaps, stroking every inch of her propeller blades, even gently lifting her tail. It seems to go well beyond a simple safety check.

  An intimate relationship with an airplane offers its pilot superhuman ability, harnessing simple physics to magical effect. Pull back on the yoke and zoom to ten thousand feet, laughing in the oppressive face of gravity that back on earth remains ready to ruin you just for tripping on the stairs or leaning too far back on a bar stool. For aficionados, planes elicit fanatical devotion.

  As Colton scanned the inside of the hangar, he saw the Cessna owner’s face watching his every move. The plane belonged to Bob Rivers, a popular radio personality who lived down in Seattle and lived for flying his plane up to the San Juan Islands on the weekends. Promotion posters featuring Rivers’s smiling, silver-maned mug decorated the hangar walls.

  The idea that Rivers owned and flew a small plane had been the subject of much banter on his morning radio show. He’d first had to overcome a deathly “medicate me and wake me when it’s over” fear of flying. Pilot friends and the interminable lines for the ferries heading out to the San Juans during the summer tourist season finally convinced him to reconsider the power of flight. Now he loved it, and especially loved his immaculately kept $175,000 Cessna Skylane.

  Colton foraged around the hangar until he found the plane’s key inside a tackle box sitting amid a pile of stored boating gear. He climbed inside the cockpit, powered up the gauges, and saw that the tanks held enough fuel. As he expected, the Skylane’s POH sat inside the plane. The Pilot’s Operating Handbook is a detailed manual specific to every aircraft, and includes step-by-step checklists for prepping, starting, taking off, flying, and landing. It’s the plane’s Rosetta Stone.

  Colton had all night to pore over the POH as well as manuals for the avionics, radio, autopilot, and GPS navigation equipment. Out of the small flock of Cessnas roosting at Orcas airport, Rivers’s was the only one outfitted with a Garmin MX200, an $8,000 add-on GPS “situational awareness” system that makes navigating similar to a video game. One of these modern GPS chartplotters linked to a plane’s mechanical and autopilot systems simplifies much of the flier’s in-flight calculations and workload. Click a cursor anywhere on the chart and the computer instantly tells a pilot how to get to his destination. It won’t get a plane up in the air, though.

  Airplanes want to fly. Pick the right one, like the Skylane—not too complicated, not too powerful, stable high-wing design, built to operate at relatively slow speeds—then meticulously follow the POH checklists, and there’s a very good chance that even without taking a single flight class, you could get it up in the air. Then, however, you’re royally screwed.

  Flying is full of old adages, most of them with at least a touch of dark humor. One of the most famous is: “Takeoffs are optional, but landings are mandatory.”

  Inside the hangar, Colton also had all night to think about what he was about to attempt—something any rational observer would consider almost certain suicide.

  AT FIRST LIGHT, DURING the blue hour before actual sunrise, Colton pressed the button to raise the hangar’s wide metal door. He unplugged the Tow Buddy from its charger and attached its beetlelike mandibles to the Cessna’s nose wheel. Using the little low-geared electric tug, he slowly rolled the one-ton plane out of its hangar. Once clear of the building, he not only walked the tug back inside the hangar, but put it in the exact spot he’d found it. Colton didn’t plug its charger back in, but that wouldn’t inconvenience Bob Rivers much considering he’d soon have no plane to use it on.

  After closing the hangar door behind him, Colton climbed up into the Cessna’s left-hand seat. Like every aviation procedure, whether it’s a pilot’s first Cessna solo or thousandth sortie in a 747, starting a plane is done by checklist. The challenge, at first, is just learning where all the switches and gauges are located. For Colton, though, that wasn’t a problem. He’d spent many hours looking at this dashboard exactingly reproduced on computer simulations. Even the walls of his bedroom, instead of being hung with scantily clad pop stars, displayed posters of airplane cockpits.

  He checked that the fuel tank selector, throttle, prop, and mixture were all set to their correct positions. Normally, a pilot then yells “Clear!” out the side window to warn anyone near the prop to move or risk being sliced and diced. As this was grand theft, it made sense to skip that step. Master switch on, auxiliary fuel pump on just until fuel flows, throttle back to idle. Hit the starter and feel the tingle in your privates as the 235-horsepower Lycoming whines up and the propeller begins to turn, then suddenly the pistons catch with a distinctive throaty flutter. Go rich on the mixture, throttle to 1,000 rpms. Oil pressure? Check. Lean the mixture, avionics on, navigation lights on. Ready to roll.

  Taxiing presents a challenge for first-time Skylane fliers since instinctually everyone used to driving a car tries to steer with the wheel instead of the foot pedals. But Colton knew that. (And hell, he didn’t have a driver’s license either.) In fact, with all his previous study and experience, the most complex part of the entire episode to this point was adjusting the pilot’s seat to his gangly six-foot-five frame.

  With so many private planes based on Orcas, none of the neighbors took special notice of the Cessna’s early-morning growls. Colton released the parking brake, taxied out of the hangar farm, and turned south toward the still-sleeping town of Eastsound. He then spun the thirty-foot-long plane until its nose aimed straight down runway 34. Blue lights focused his view down the black strip, which ended abruptly in the cold, dark waters of the Salish Sea.

  Colton Harris-Moore knew more than enough to fly a small plane—in theory. Reality reared up when he pushed the throttle to the firewall. The engine roared, his heart raced, and the Cessna began to roll forward down the narrow airstrip. Lightly loaded, the plane picked up speed quickly, the blue lights flashing by faster and faster. Colton’s eyes darted back and forth between the airspeed indicator—watching it climb toward the magic number—and the end of the runway, which came closer and closer.

  This was a kid, an outcast, who’d been bullied and beaten, forgotten and failed, expelled, medicated, incarcerated, and seemingly doomed to society’s lowest rung. He’d already blown a number of chances in his young life, but he wasn’t going to blow this one.

  Colton kept his cool, hit his airspeed number, and pulled back on the yoke. After a breathless moment, the plane’s rumbling wheels suddenly went silent. The runway disappeared beneath him, replaced with an epic rush of euphoria.

  The white plane rose to the sunrise like a phoenix, an image and reference not lost on its pilot despite his failure at formal education. Colton’s flight from the ashes of a wretched childhood, though, had taken a crooked path. He was a wanted outlaw, a wily one-kid crime wave that had swept across two tranquil islands, damaging their small communities’ sense of security. His illegal deeds had been escalating for years as he studied crime with the same intensity he brought to teaching himself how to fly. Colton had graduated from stealing food to identities, from skipping school to escaping a prison home, from assaulting a soda machine to macing a cop. He often carried a gun, and he was determined not to go back to jail.

  Colton Harris-Moore had also just pulled off one of the most audacious thefts in American history—and he was only getting started.

  Chapter 2

  With the sky brightening behind snow-capped Mount Baker on the Washington State mainland, the stolen Cessna turned south, its pilot gaining confidence as the plane gaine
d altitude. After just a few minutes, Colton crossed the border from San Juan County to Island County, and his home, Camano Island, came into view. A small airport lies at the north end of Camano, but that wasn’t an option. He already had a price on his head there and his face adorned wanted posters all over the island. Colton continued on, flying unchallenged past Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Boeing Field, and the region’s largest commercial airport, Seattle-Tacoma.

  He flew along the flat lip of the continent, where, after dropping precipitously from the Cascades, bottomland spills into Puget Sound. It’s a spectacular sightseeing route with a series of volcanoes as waypoints—whenever the weather allows you to see them. The safest course to where Colton was headed called for banking east once he was south of Seattle, putting the icy, awe-inspiring bulk of Mount Rainier in his right window and following I-90 as it cut through Snoqualmie Pass past many of the locations used in David Lynch’s eerie Northwest mystery Twin Peaks.

  Of course “safest” is a relative term.

  Soon after takeoff, the rain had started back in. The skies closed and winds reared, gusting to 30 mph at sea level, even higher at altitude. According to the Air Safety Institute at the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), 80 percent of all accidents in a Cessna Skylane—considered a very safe plane—result from pilot error. Of those, the greatest number of serious accidents occur because the pilot flies into bad weather. The statistics also reveal who is most likely to fly himself to death: a new pilot.