The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  AND THERE WEREN’T. NO one had called them despite everyone on the dock figuring out that it was the famous Barefoot Bandit bobbing in front of them. Some of the other men tried to engage Colt in conversation, but he would talk only to Mauris and his pal.

  After Colt got mad, Mauris slid a bit farther behind the steel pole and signaled to his buddy, who pulled out a cell phone. He didn’t dial the RBPF, though, he called friends who had a boat, whispering to them to hurry up and get there, that they had the Bandit “right here at the dock.”

  Colt spotted the guy making the call. “Why is that guy on the phone?”

  Mauris told him not to worry about it. Colt gave him a big smile and said, “I’m gone!”

  He started up the outboard and began to pull away, turning back to yell to Mauris, “Read about me on the Internet!”

  MAURIS SAYS THE WHALER blasted away in the direction of Harbour Island, aiming for the lights of a resort a third of a mile north of Romora Bay. “He went toward Valentines, so I told our friends in the boat to head that way and listen for the motor because he was running really hard and was the only boat moving out there.”

  A taxi boat with a 115 Yamaha got within sight of Colt, but his little forty-horse Whaler could run over 30 mph and turn on a dime. A second boat joined the pursuit, but neither could corner the nimble Whaler out in open water as Colt ran circles around them in the darkness.

  On the other side of the bay, Kenny Strachan was manning the shadows of Romora Bay Resort, lurking for looters. About twenty boats resided in the marina that night—big live-aboard yachts along with smaller speed-boats in the twenty-five- to thirty-two-foot range that the yacht owners used for fishing and diving excursions. A few people were on board, asleep, but most guests were down in Dunmore Town celebrating the holiday at Gusty’s, Vic-Hum, and Daddy D’s, leaving Romora and its docks deserted.

  Shortly after 11:30, Kenny heard a commotion out on the black bay. “Engines were roaring and I could hear guys yelling, ‘See him? See him?’”

  At 11:43, Kenny was heading toward the marina just as Colt came flying in. “He drive that boat under the dock, right under the marina office and jumped off,” says Kenny.

  The docks at Romora stand high off the water, designed for big boats. Only one spot, a floating dinghy dock just below the office, sits low enough to disembark from a small tender. Colt drove directly there, climbed out, and tied the Whaler to a cleat, leaving the engine idling. He strapped on his backpack, grabbed his Walther PPK, and ran up the ramp to the main dock.

  At the top of the ramp, Colt bolted through the office breezeway and turned left, running full speed down one hundred yards of dock before coming to dead wet end with nothing ahead of him but bay. He realized his mistake, spun around, and raced back, finally hurrying off the dock and onto the hotel grounds, where Kenny Strachan had positioned himself at the bottom of a stairway.

  As Colt, who was obviously in some kind of distress, ran toward him, Kenny shouted, “What happened?”

  “They’re trying to kill me!” Colt yelled.

  That’s when Kenny saw a flash of silver in Colt’s hand, the pistol, and realized that God had kept His word and brought the Barefoot Bandit to him.

  “‘Oh, that’s Bandit!’ I said to myself.” Kenny had purposely left his guns at home, but the $150-a-week security guard hadn’t received a divine strategy for how to handle the situation in case the Bandit brought his. “I was excited, but I didn’t want to get shot,” he says.

  Colt kept running and Kenny kept pace alongside. “I didn’t want to show him my fear and give myself away. I wanted him to think I was on his side.” So Kenny played along, telling Colt, “I ain’t gonna let nobody kill you.”

  Colt wasn’t buying it. “He looking at me tensified and kept exactly the same distance between us, eight feet, and wouldn’t let me get closer,” says Kenny. “I kept running beside him, asking, ‘Who tryin’ kill you?’ and saying, ‘Let me help you!’ When I moved a little closer, though, he put his finger on the trigger… He didn’t want to shoot me, he wasn’t evil, but I know he was thinking it was going to get physical and I was bigger than him.”

  Kenny quickly weighed his options and his chances and made the wise decision. “Can’t run down a man with a gun, gotta let him go,” he says.

  Colt ran off the Romora grounds heading east. Kenny grabbed his phone and dialed Sergeant Hart to tell him the Bandit was loose on Briland. “Hart told me to go get my shotgun.”

  Kenny also had the presence of mind to do something that severely limited Colt’s chances of escape. He ran back down to the dinghy dock, turned off the Whaler’s engine, and pocketed the key.

  LANDLINES WERE STILL DOWN throughout the island, and cell service was spotty, so Sergeant Hart sent a runner to wake Chief Inspector Moss. Hart then grabbed his weapon and rushed down to Romora. Kenny met him at the edge of the resort and was just pointing out which way Colt had fled when they heard a scream. The men ran east and found a woman standing in the street crying. She’d come outside because of the shouting, and suddenly Colt appeared, gun in hand. He looked at her, she screamed, and Colt dashed off into the bushes next to her property. As Hart and Strachan ran up, the woman was trembling. She pointed to the trees. “I just saw him! Right through there!”

  Kenny says they clearly saw the path where Colt parted the scrub. “If the police had a good canine or good experience, they would have got him right there in the bush… But they didn’t go in.”

  Instead of rushing into the black woods, Hart began to gather as much manpower as possible. “He called up some other neighborhood crime fighters,” says Kenny. “They all have licensed guns, and he directed us to spread out and try to keep Bandit trapped in the woods.”

  Hiding in the bushes, Colt was in his element, but also in his nightmare. He’d told his mom that a doctor said he had PTSD. “And Colt thinks it’s from the cops chasing him in the dark,” says Pam. “He said, ‘Every time I see a little light in the dark, I go insane.’”

  Now Colt was crouched amid strange scrubby trees on an unfamiliar island three thousand miles from home with a rapidly growing group of armed men probing the woods with flashlights. He was also already bleeding. Instead of the soft moss and cedar branchlets of the Northwest, the ground here was sharp limestone rock, and the forest was filled with tearing thorns and scaly, tripping roots.

  Colt had gotten his chase. Now he could see the lights and hear the voices and crackle of walkie-talkies as the men tried to pen him in. But he wasn’t ready to give up by a long shot.

  The two-hundred-square-yard section of Briland backabush where Colt hid was connected to other patches of woods he could sneak through to reach any of nearly one hundred nearby homes. He could also stay under cover all the way across the island, which is only five hundred yards from bay to beach in this area. Or he could pull a Colt and try something no one would ever expect.

  CHIEF INSPECTOR MOSS WOKE to the banging on his door and got the news about Colt. He knew he’d need more manpower to have any chance of corralling the outlaw who’d escaped so many police operations over the last two years. Neither his landline nor cell phone was working, so Moss pulled on a pair of jean shorts, threw his bulletproof vest over a muscle tee, grabbed his 9mm, and ran out of the house in his slippers.

  Like everyone else on Briland, the police generally drive around in golf carts. Moss, though, had brought in an actual patrol car after taking over. He raced to Pink Sands, the island’s most famous resort, which had an Internet connection that didn’t rely on the phone lines. Moss booted up Vonage and called Nassau headquarters and Governor’s Harbour. The same VoIP technology Colt had been using to communicate during his time on the lam was now used to call in reinforcements to catch him.

  Calls were relayed via radio to officers spread across Eleuthera, still out policing the late-night festivities. Eight of them hightailed it to Three Island Dock and commandeered a boat to carry them over to Briland.

  By 1 a.
m., Moss had sixteen men. He broke them into two teams. With no night-vision equipment and no dogs, his strategy was simply to contain Colt until sunrise, when he’d be easy to spot in the low scrub. Moss led Team One, which included unarmed members of the local Crime Watch. Their job was to seal off the island so Colt couldn’t escape. Team Two—all cops packing Uzi submachine guns, shotguns, and their 9mm sidearms—was ordered to continue patrolling the edges of the woods near Romora to keep Colt bottled up.

  Dawn would break in five hours.

  Moss and his team drove to the island’s other marinas, telling them “to remain on red alert” so Colt couldn’t grab another boat. They handed out more wanted flyers and gathered drinking water and bug juice for everyone involved in the operation.

  “It seemed like half the island was up and around by now,” says Moss. Many came up to the chief inspector asking to be deputized. He told them to just keep their eyes open but not to put themselves in danger since this was an armed fugitive.

  Word had gotten downtown, and all the guests had returned to Romora Bay. One of the boats in the marina, a ninety-two-footer named Picasso, lay berthed adjacent to the dock office. The captain of the $4 million aluminum yacht checked the footage from its surveillance cameras and found images of Colt running back and forth.

  Kenny Strachan went back to his post, patrolling the resort, now with his shotgun strapped across his back. Time dragged on, with no sightings and no action for more than two and a half hours. It was the dead of a dark, moonless night. Everyone was tired and bleary-eyed. Talk among the cops dropped to occasional whispers, then to nothing. Kenny walked out onto the dock and sat down.

  At 2:45 a.m., Chief Inspector Moss got a report of a possible escape boat on Pink Sand Beach. He and his team drove across the island to check it out. As soon as they left, Colt made his move.

  Kenny and another guy were on the dock near the marina office, discussing whether Colt might be able to sneak back and take one of Romora’s boats…

  “Just then a white guy come up and say he heard a boat startin’,” says Kenny. “We listen and suddenly hear boat engines bog down and go WHOOOOO like when you go full throttle. We start yellin’, ‘Dat’s him! Dat’s him!’”

  COLT HAD MANAGED TO creep from the woods east of Romora Bay and through the cordon of Team Two cops. He crossed the resort grounds and then made it out onto the dock. At the farthest corner of the marina lay the Lady BJ. The owners of this seventy-six-foot yacht—a Miami real estate investor and his family—were fast asleep belowdecks with the generator thrumming and air conditioners blowing. They never heard Colt climb down off the dock onto the thirty-two-foot Intrepid they’d towed over from Key Largo as their sport boat. The keys were on board, and Colt fired up the pair of 275-horsepower Mercury outboards.

  Colt pulled out of the slip and pushed the throttles forward. With a full tank of gas aboard what the Bahamians would definitely call a “go-fast boat,” Colt had the range to get to Nassau or Cat Island or Rum Cay or Long Island, or to lose himself amid the hundreds of Exuma Cays—all before daylight. If he could just get out of the bay.

  Colt opened her up and headed south toward the deep cut between Harbour Island and Whale Point that led to open water.

  SERGEANT HART AND THE cops of Team Two ran down to the dock with guns at the ready, but Colt’s boat had already disappeared into the darkness. The only chance to catch him was to find a boat of their own. Hart asked the Picasso’s owners if the RBPF could borrow their sport boat and their captain, New Orleans native Ron Billiot. The owners said yes. The Picasso’s go-fast was the owners’ son Jordan’s Dr. J, a twenty-seven-foot Boston Whaler Outrage powered by twin 250s. With one or two people aboard, this boat could top 50 mph, just like Colt’s Intrepid. However, Sergeant Hart, three RBPF officers heavy with body armor and weapons, Jordan, and another visiting boater also got aboard. Billiot fired up the engines, tossed off the lines, and headed out into the dark bay. They were already about four minutes behind Colt, and all the extra weight meant there’d be no way the Whaler would ever catch the Intrepid in a chase. All they could hope for was a lucky break.

  A FEW MINUTES AFTER the Dr. J took off, Moss arrived at the dock and commandeered another civilian boat. This one, though, wouldn’t crank, so they tried another. That started, and with Moss, five cops, and the captain aboard, it too roared off into the pitch-black night.

  It was the first time the chief inspector had been out on a boat after dark in this area. Fortunately, he wasn’t driving, because the deceptively calm bay hides a nasty surprise for anyone who is unfamiliar with the local waters or is in too much of a rush to check the charts.

  COLT, NEVER ONE TO be afraid of going full speed at night when the adrenaline surfing comes in even bigger waves, blasted south along Harbour Island. The few lights burning on shore and the slightly blacker black of the land were all he could see. However, all he had to do was make it to the end of the island, just 1.1 miles from Romora, and he’d be able to pick out the smudge on the horizon that marked the inlet leading to open water and continued freedom.

  Colt had not only gotten his chase, he’d toyed with the locals, dodged the cops, and then ninja’d himself right under their noses for yet another spectacular escape. He had an excellent boat and plenty of good-life islands within reach. Colt had broken through to unlock whole new levels of the game.

  Then, suddenly, everything went to shit. Three-quarters of a mile south of the marina, the Intrepid abruptly slowed as if the seawater had turned to Jell-O. The engines growled and the propellers churned. Colt pulled back the throttles. He’d hit a sandbar.

  TWO THINGS CONSPIRED TO finally end the Barefoot Bandit’s long run. First was the sandy shoal that stretches more than halfway across the bay between Briland and North Eleuthera. To get to the Whale Point cut, boaters have to first steer toward the Eleutheran shoreline to skirt the bar. It’s marked on charts and obvious on satellite photos. It’s also easy to spot during the day when the shallows glow a brilliant aquamarine compared to the deeper blue surrounding waters. At night, though, it’s invisible.

  The other thing that got him was also invisible that night. One of Colt’s first fascinations and one of his very first words—the moon—betrayed him. Hitting its darkest phase that morning, the new moon brought dramatic tides. It’d sucked water off the sandbar until it sat dead low tide at 2:22 a.m., less than an hour before Colt showed up. A few hours and another eighteen inches of incoming tide later, and he would have skimmed right across.

  Same thing if he’d been aboard the little Whaler he left tied at the dock.

  ABOARD THE DR. J, Ron Billiot knew all about the sandbar. He slowed as he neared the shallows, and they flicked on the spotlights. A light-colored hull popped out of the darkness. Dr. J idled closer and the men aboard her could see Colt at the controls of the Intrepid’s center console, one hand on the throttles, one on the wheel. The police began shouting at him: “Stop!” “It’s over!” “You’re caught!” “Put your hands up!”

  Colt’s hand came up; it was holding a pistol, though, and he fired.

  The officers, each with an Uzi or shotgun aimed at Colt, saw the muzzle flash but didn’t return fire. They yelled at him to drop his weapon.

  Colt hollered back, telling them to get the lights off him. Then he screamed, “Don’t come any closer! I’m not going back to jail! Don’t come any closer or I’ll kill myself!”

  The two boats were only about fifty feet apart when the cops saw Colt lift the pistol to his head, shouting, “Go away! I’ll kill myself!”

  The cops weren’t going away, though, and unlike at Granite Falls, they weren’t backing off. After a few tense moments, Colt pulled the gun away from his head. But he wasn’t giving up. Colt turned back to the boat’s controls and pushed the throttles forward. The Intrepid dug down in the stern, the props chewing into the bottom, but slowly it began to make headway. Colt had bogged down at the shallowest part of the bar, and now his boat’s powerful engines we
re plowing through the sand, taking him toward deeper water.

  Aboard the Dr. J, Billiot told Sergeant Hart that if the Intrepid got just a little farther it’d be off the sandbar and they’d never be able to catch it. The Barefoot Bandit would get away again.

  BACK AT ROMORA BAY, Kenny Strachan stood on the dock staring out at the black water when he heard what sounded to him like a war. “Bloom-bloom-bloom-bloom-bloom! On and on and on. I thought, Oh my God, they killed him!”

  THE FIRST SHOTGUN BLAST hit the portside outboard engine. Other officers fired their Uzis, the 9mm bullets spraying the starboard engine. At least two rounds went toward the center console where Colt was standing. One passed through the stainless-steel piping in the middle of his seat, then tore through the cushion, and cracked the windshield. A second bullet punched into the steel pipe behind the seat and ricocheted inside until it was spent. Another round went well high and ripped into an aluminum outrigger ten feet above the waterline.

  Bullets and shotgun pellets filled the air. Rounds careened off the outboards’ engine blocks and exploded back out, showering the boat with shrapnel. The police officers finally ceased fire after pumping at least twenty rounds into the Intrepid.

  Acrid smoke filled the still night air. The only sound was the soft rumble of the Dr. J’s engines.

  “Stop shooting! I can’t hear! I can’t hear!” Colt rose from the deck of the Intrepid screaming and waving his arms.

  The police shouted for him to put up his hands, but Colt was still thinking. He opened his backpack and reached inside. Hart told Billiot to move in closer and the cops lined up with guns ready, yelling, “Drop your weapon! Show us your hands!” Instead, Colt pulled out his laptop and threw it over the side, followed by his GPS and iPod. Finally, he tossed his pistol and backpack into the sea.

  When the Dr. J came alongside, the cops ordered Colt down on the deck. Once they saw that he didn’t have any more weapons, they jumped across and handcuffed him. At that point, officers say, a calmness came over Colt. All he said was “You should have killed me.”