The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  MOSS’S BOAT ARRIVED AND officers jumped into the waist-deep water to try to find the gear Colt had thrown overboard. His backpack floated, and they picked that up, but now with three boats churning the shallows there was an underwater sandstorm and they couldn’t see anything on the bottom. Both captains marked the spot on their GPS. The cops transferred Colt to the Dr. J and a tow line was rigged for the Intrepid since both of its engines had been destroyed. At 3:15 a.m., they started back toward Romora Bay.

  After the guns had gone silent, Kenny held his breath, fearing the worst. A few minutes later, his cell phone rang. “They say, ‘Kenny, we got him.’ And my God! I’m so glad they didn’t kill him.”

  Moss received a radio call that a large crowd had gathered—or at least large for three in morning on Briland. About forty people were milling around the marina. “I didn’t know if they wanted to just observe or if they wanted to harm the suspect,” he says. “So we wanted to clear the path.” Those allowed to remain were guests off the boats in the marina, Kenny, and the police and Crime Watch folks.

  When the Dr. J arrived and they lifted Colt out of the boat, the onlookers crowded around with cell phone cameras while police ordered, “Stand back! Stand back!” Moss hadn’t been able to get ahold of his police car by radio, so they’d backed a red golf cart down to the dock. As the cops steered Colt toward it, the crowd pushed in.

  “Some Americans was yelling, ‘Shame on you!’” says Kenny. “And Bahamians was sayin’, ‘Don’t come here, this no place for you to be! You come to Briland and get caught!’ Everyone was trying to get his picture, but he kept his face down and wouldn’t talk to anyone. I felt so sorry for him because he was not that kind of hard-core criminal like they thought he was.” Kenny helped them load Colt onto the cart and rode along to the edge of the property.

  They took Colt to the Briland police station and handcuffed him to a chair. Moss sent word to Nassau that they’d successfully captured the Barefoot Bandit. He pressed his superiors to come get Colt as soon as possible because he didn’t have the resources on Harbour Island to handle crowd control and any “media frenzy” that might occur. “We just wanted him off the island,” says Moss. A nurse came to check out the scratches on Colt’s legs and feet while investigators gathered around. They hoped that, like many fugitives, Colt might be so relieved it was all over and that he’d survived, that he’d have loose lips.

  Colt remained eerily calm and cool, though. He spoke politely to the officers but was careful not to implicate himself. “He was very evasive,” says Moss. The cops offered him food and drink: “No, I’m good,” he said. They brought out a photo of Spider Miller’s Cessna 400 nose down in the Great Abaco muck and asked Colt about it. “I never saw that plane before in my life,” he said. The officers laughed and began bantering, trying to get Colt to respond to some good cop–good cop.

  “How you crashed if you a good pilot?” one of them laughed.

  “You missed the runway, eh? You overshoot?”

  One of the cops was a licensed pilot who tried flattery. “He didn’t crash… He did a good job. He meant to put it there. That plane didn’t break up, it didn’t explode… I couldn’t even do better myself with plenty years of experience.”

  The other cops added the chorus, saying it’d been an excellent job. One said, “He land in the mud… That mud saved his neck.”

  Colt laughed along with the police, but got testy when he noticed an officer was filming the interview on a cell phone. “Get that camera out of my face,” he said.

  “Where you get that gun?” an officer asked him.

  “I don’t remember,” said Colt.

  IN A SEPARATE ROOM, detectives opened Colt’s backpack and laid out the contents. Along with a black nylon shaving kit, there were Ziplocs that had protected his important papers. These were the things he’d carried with him thousands of miles across the country, through all the campsites and chases and midnight boat crossings.

  Inside one plastic bag was a series of drawings. Colt had been designing his fleet of future aircraft. One depicted an ultramodern helicopter with an enclosed tail rotor. Another showed a single-propeller plane on floats—larger than a Beaver and with similar lines to a Pilatus, it looked like a melding of the two planes in Chuck Stewart’s hangar, where Colt had spent so much time. Another craft was a twin-tailed wonder, a civilian spacecraft. The drawings showed a definite design flair. And all of the aircraft were marked with the name of Colt’s dream company: Phoenix Aerospace.

  In the other Ziploc was Colt’s fifth-grade class picture from Elger Bay Elementary School along with his fifth-grade headshot. The only other paper he carried all this way was the certificate from the Boy Scouts of America awarding him the rank of Wolf Scout.

  The Bahamian police claim that when they captured him, Colt had less than $40 in cash and no credit cards on him. By my accounting, though, Colt could have been carrying well over $20,000, most likely in a Ziploc. The money has never been reported found.

  SHORTLY AFTER DAYBREAK, cHIEF inspector Moss grabbed his snorkel gear and went back out to the sandbar. Now high tide, he estimated it was about ten feet deep at the spot where Colt had gotten stuck—way more depth than the Intrepid needed to cross safely. Moss quickly found a black zippered case that held an Apple laptop. Then he spotted a handheld GPS, and Colt’s iPod with earbuds still attached. It took him fifteen minutes to locate the pistol, a black-and-chrome .38 caliber Walther PPK with the serial number filed off.

  The Walther looks cool and, of course, has the “Bond, James Bond” cachet, but it definitely would not be the first choice for an experienced gunslinger headed to the Bahamas. Colt had spent the last week in the sand and muck and moist salty air. A Walther PPK, if not kept fastidiously clean in that kind of harsh environment, is prone to extractor failures.

  Colt fired one round as the police approached. In a semiauto like the Walther, the force from one shot ejects the spent shell casing while a spring in the clip automatically loads the next round. Simply pull the trigger again and another round will fire.

  When Colt fired his first shot, though, the shell casing never ejected, and the next round didn’t chamber. He could have pulled the trigger again, whether aiming into the sky, at the police, or at his own head, but until he manually cleared that spent shell, the gun wouldn’t have fired.

  There were two live rounds left in the clip, both hollow points.

  KENNY WENT OVER TO the Briland police station later that morning to give his statement. He sat down in a chair next to Colt, who, he said, looked a little worse for wear from his Bahamian visit. “Oh, he had skin look like checkers from mosquitoes! He had a lot of bits in him!” As Kenny sat there, a nurse came to check on Colt again. “The nurse was asking him if he was all right, if he feel any pain, and he said, ‘No pain, I’m okay.’ He was extremely mannerly, respectful, humble. He didn’t give no aggressive answers like I seen some criminals when I was livin’ in New York.” Kenny laughs. “But he wasn’t giving too much information!”

  Colt did eventually loosen up enough to tell the Bahamian police what his future plans were—no crime in just thinking about it. Like he’d told Mauris, Colt said his next stop was Cuba, where the American authorities wouldn’t be able to follow him. Once he lost them, he said he planned to move on to the Turks and Caicos Islands because his research showed they had very few cops.

  It wasn’t a bad plan, but it had some problems. A number of U.S. citizens have gone to Cuba to stay out of the reach of American courts. However, they tend to bring very large amounts of cash with them to smooth their way, like Robert Vesco, or else they’re high-profile asylum seekers, like Black Panthers Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver.

  Colt may have been packing some new Spanish vocabulary words, but he didn’t mention any plans to officially seek asylum. His $20,000-plus—if he had it—would have gone a long way in a country where doctors earn less than $50 a month. Even if he made it to the island without getting shot down or blo
wn out of the water, though, the odds of a six-foot-five gringo fading anonymously into the Cuban countryside were slim. The Cuban people are very open and friendly, though, so if he arrived with enough greenbacks that he didn’t have to steal to feed himself, and kept a big smile on his face, Colt might have been okay.

  It would have been bad timing, though, to make the Turks and Caicos a long-term stop on his Caribbean tour. The British had recently kicked out a crooked premier there who’d been putting the banana back in the concept of a banana republic. The Brits reinstituted direct rule from Westminster and had launched a law-and-order campaign to keep the islands safe for tax evaders and tourists, the two legs of the Turks and Caicos economy.

  Colt would have most likely had a similar experience in the Turks as he’d had in the Bahamas. If he’d been able to stay at large for a couple more months, he’d be heading into the Caribbean’s September swelter season when the air becomes a sopping, oppressive stew. A week in that late-summer tropical humidity—caked with salt sweat and covered in no-see-um bites, with fine sand invading every orifice—is enough to force a nun into taking a bird bath in a baptismal font. If Colt couldn’t find an air-conditioned hideaway, he’d be begging to get back to the cool Northwest.

  A TEAM OF OFFICERS arrived from Nassau and took charge of Colt. They wrapped a heavy chain around his ankles and closed it tight with padlocks. And Colt finally got the bulletproof vest Pam wanted him to wear. Then they hustled him—still barefoot—onto a ferry boat and to the North Eleuthera Airport where an RBPF plane waited.

  OVER AT PETAGAY’S, THE instant the service came back on, our phones lit up with the news Colt had been caught. On the Romora dock, I met Kenny, Mauris, and police officers who were on the boat that caught him. Going through the events of the entire night moment by moment with them, there was only one spot of disagreement: how Colt got out to the Intrepid. Both Kenny and an American boater who claims he saw Colt as he motored away say that he waded in from the shore and swam beneath the dock out to the boat. Chief Inspector Moss, though, noted that Colt’s T-shirt and shorts were “perfectly dry” when they captured him, meaning he must have simply—and once again, audaciously—ninja’d his way past all the cops and down 275 yards of dock to where the Intrepid was tied up.

  At the Intrepid that morning, one of the policemen was watching the owner tie the boat alongside its mothership, Lady BJ. The owner told the cop he wished they’d shot “the little shit” instead of his outboards.

  I asked the officer if Colt had ever threatened to shoot back at them.

  “At one point, yeah,” he said. “I guess when we opened fire he sorta changed his mind.”

  When I looked closely at the Intrepid, I spotted drops of blood on the rod holder and the driver’s seat. Kenny, standing next to me, said that Colt had not been hit by any bullets or pellets. “He was all torn apart with trees and briars from coming through the bush and running on the rocks with his bare feet.”

  It was, once again, almost inconceivable that Colt wasn’t seriously injured or dead. Black night, jerking spotlights, the chase boat rocking as police jostled into firing position, Colt’s boat lurching along the sandbar, Colt actually firing a shot, then refusing to drop his gun… then somehow not getting hit by a stray, a ricochet, or one of the shots that went straight toward the spot where he’d been standing.

  “You can see on the boat that they did fire a shot to hit him!” Kenny said. “But God put it so it was not for him.”

  The RBPF say they didn’t shoot at Colt. When I press Chief Inspector Moss, he admits that Colt gave his men more than enough excuse to fire at him instead of the boat engines. Moss credits the “experience, professionalism, maturity, and discipline” of the officers on the boat as to why Colt came out of it alive… along with “divine intervention.”

  Kenny agrees with the last part. “The Lord put it so Bandit come runnin’ to me,” he says. “He needed to get a blessing to make sure he don’t die that night.”

  Chapter 29

  Escorted by Bahamian police with assault rifles, Colt deplaned in Nassau. They marched him barefoot across the tarmac for the first of many perp walks. The asphalt was hot enough to feel through my shoes, but it didn’t seem to bother Colt. He maintained his head-down posture, though it wasn’t in disgrace, just disdain for “the paparazzi.”

  Catching a fugitive that the FBI, Homeland Security, Canadian Mounties, and a host of local departments hadn’t been able to get their cuffs on was a heroic moment for the oft-maligned RBPF, and they wanted to make the most of it. The fourth time they paraded the shackled Barefoot Bandit for the cameras within twelve hours, Colt appealed to his guards, “Come on, let’s make this one fast.”

  I expected Colt to be shipped back to the United States as fast as possible after the Bahamian police got to show him off. There was an impressive list of crimes the Bahamians could nail him with: at least five burglaries, three boat thefts, a car theft, and, most serious, possession of a loaded gun during a crime. But no way they would. The Bahamian authorities were in a tough spot, politically. There’s only one prison in the country, the notorious Fox Hill, which doesn’t make it into tourist brochures and is rarely mentioned by locals without a shudder. Past inmates talk of its maximum-security block as an overcrowded, HIV- and TB-infested, shit-and-sweat-stinking hellhole lorded over by abusive guards. Along with U.S. State Department and Amnesty International condemnations, almost all Bahamian citizens themselves feel the conditions at the jail are deplorable.

  Recent reports say that all convicted prisoners are initially sent to the (mad) Max unit as a means of “breaking them in” to prison life. With all the press attention focused on Colt, sticking him in Fox Hill would turn the Bahamians’ moment of glory into an embarrassing exposé. While many arrestees go to Fox Hill just to await trial, Colt was instead held at the RBPF’s Central Detectives Unit, a menacing enough government-issue stained-concrete building.

  Colt tried to phone his mom, but couldn’t get through. So he made a tearful call to his aunt Sandy.

  BAHAMIAN LAW ENFORCEMENT BRASS HELD a press conference about Colt that Sunday… then realized that not all the international media had arrived in Nassau yet, so they scheduled a repeat for Monday.

  At the E Street Barracks, Commissioner of Police Ellison Greenslade announced that the investigation was progressing, that the firearm charges against Colt were “very serious,” and that they looked forward to proffering charges very soon. I kept waiting for the punch line: “… but, we’re going to turn him over to our good friends in the U.S.A. tomorrow.” But it never came.

  “He has committed criminal offenses in the Bahamas,” said Greenslade. “Our laws are very clear… A number of people have made legitimate claims to the police department and we will bring charges where they are necessary to the satisfaction of those victims.”

  The commissioner himself said he’d already interviewed his famous prisoner. He was clearly smitten. He smiled when asked about the Bandit. “Colton is obviously a very intelligent young man… level of diction, semantics… He gives a good account of himself. He’s quite a stand-up guy, quite a mature young man.”

  Greenslade said that Colt understood his rights and was being afforded due process. Also that he was very calm, he “understood the realities of the situation he was in,” and had given them no problems since the capture.

  On Monday, the U.S. federal authorities started making noises that inferred it could be a long time—months—before the fugitive was repatriated.

  Colt dominated the local Bahamian news just as he’d become a front-page and top-of-the-newscast story across the United States. Everyone was fascinated with the kid determined to fly no matter what. A seventy-two-year-old Bahamian who pumped me for every detail taught me a local expression I’d never heard before: after each plane crash or SWAT chase I recounted, he exclaimed, “Mutha Blue!”

  ON TUESDAY, A SUNNY, hot, and humid afternoon, the entire press corps gathered outside the Baha
mas’ courts complex. A line of metal barricades held back a large, mostly local crowd of the curious that included a few very vocal Bahamian Colt supporters. In front of the barriers posed the RBPF’s top officers, all spit-shined and smiling. RBDF soldiers and police tactical units patrolled the area along with a couple of oversize guys packing serious weaponry and scary eyes, which were all you could see because their heads were covered with black balaclavas—Colt would finally get to meet some real ninjas.

  The police orchestrated everything so that the media could capture another all-important perp walk. I got a quizzical look from the RBPF press officer when I repeatedly told her I didn’t care about seeing the show, but that I’d really like to get inside the courtroom. She finally waved me across the barricade.

  There are a couple old-school English-style courts in Nassau, impressive buildings, and I’d expected Colt to appear in one of them. Instead, we were led upstairs into a tiny, dimly lit workaday courtroom used for minor cases. It was hard to tell what this meant until a woman, one of about eight Bahamians in the small gallery, leaned over and whispered to me that she recognized the man sitting at the prosecution table as an immigration officer. Aha. Colt definitely wasn’t going to Fox Hill.

  Suddenly we heard a muffled commotion outside. The crowd began yelling and cheering as Colt—in chains and surrounded by a cordon of cops—was baby-stepped down the street. He bent low at the waist to avoid the eyes of all the cameras, but some bystanders mistook it for shame and a few began shouting encouragement: “Hold ya’ head up, boy!” “You a hero, dog!” “Tell it to the world!”