The Last Score

On June 9, 1999 Stephen Reid--Novelist, Folk Hero, Junkie--Walked into a candian bank with a shotgun in hopes of paying off his $90,000 drug bill. Things didn't go as planned. This is his story, in his own words

The man seemed to have it all. Money. Fame. A family. And a heroin habit that was about to destroy everything.

At one time Stephen Reid was the most notorious bank robber in North America. As "tactician and chief gunslinger'' of the three-man Stopwatch Gang in the Seventies, he led a string of bank jobs throughout the States and Canada, raking in some $15 million. Carrying heavy artillery and a stopwatch, Reid and his gang hit more than 100 banks--always in and out in less than two minutes. They made the FBI's most wanted list. The bureau called them "the best in the business.''

In 1980 Reid was busted for a San Diego heist. While serving 14 and a half years in a maximum security prison, he wrote a novel, which landed in the hands of Canadian poet Susan Musgrave. Not only did Musgrave succeed in having Jackrabbit Parole published in 1986, but she also married Reid while he was still in prison. The book flew off the racks. When Reid walked in 1987, he sold his life story to Hollywood. Brad Pitt was mentioned for the leading role. With cash in the bank, Reid and Musgrave were living happily ever after.

This was not to be. One day in early 1999 Reid "discovered coke and heroin in the same spoon,'' as he says. Three months later Reid, 49, was $90,000 in debt, with gangsters hot on his tail. He was desperate. And he saw only one way out.

June 9, 1999, Victoria, British Columbia. It's 9:15 A.M., Pacific Standard Time. Coming out of the Shell station toilet, my head rocking from a fresh jolt of heroin and cocaine, I realize this morning is about to become anything but standard. I climb into the passenger side of a hot-wired Dodge, the backseat loaded with enough artillery to light up a small country. The bank is six blocks away.

We nose into the Fairfield Road turn lane, hook a right on red and start south down Cook Street. The coke is screaming through my blood, but the heroin begins to whisper back. I wipe the sweat off my face with my forearm and scan the traffic. I can't believe I let myself get mangled on dope before the score. This job feels so far out of pocket, I should report it to Ripley's.

Behind the wheel is a 32-year-old junkie, a toothpick of a man with a lint-ball hairdo and the wild eyes of an amateur. Lint Ball is a nodding acquaintance, someone I occasionally bumped into in the hallway outside the apartment of an Asian drug dealer. I promoted him last night, partly because of his ability to hot-wire an ignition and steal a car, a talent I've never acquired. The motor coughs black blood, threatens to die. Lint Ball twitches in his seat. He and this primer-painted six-cylinder scrap of a getaway car have one thing in common: They're mutts.

We roll carefully down the sloping pavement into Cook Street Village, a gentrified hub of small shops and businesses: two cafes, b oth with patios, a peak-roofed wine outlet, a florist shop that spills onto the sidewalk, a trendy launderette and an English pub. The village is less than three blocks long, bookended by the Royal Bank of Canada and a Mac's Milk. We pass by the Mac's Milk.

Great horse chestnut and elm trees line both sides of the street. A light breeze is making the leaves tremble so their mingling shadows on the sidewalk look like little fish kissing. A couple strolls by, he with a cell phone to his ear, she with a sweater tied around her waist. People sit at sidewalk tables sipping foamy coffees, folded newspapers on their laps. The whole morning and the eople in it seem clear and bright--everything I'm not.

If ever there were a time to bail, it's now. But I'm on desperation row, all out of options. I am 90 grand deep into the pockets of a Toronto crew known as the Graduates (from the school of hard knocks). Tomorrow is payday and I've stalled long enough. I have every intention of meeting their plane. With their dinero.

I tug on my gloves and motion to Lint Ball, "Go around the block. I need more time.'' We pass the bank. He takes a right at the next street and turns to me. "You sure you're all right?'' he says. "You don't look so good.''

I want to tell him to look in the mirror. "Just drive.''

As Lint Ball circles, I haul the heavy zippered duffel bag from the backseat onto my lap. By the time he pulls into the rear parking lot of the bank, I've checked the load on an Ithaca 12-gauge pump and secured a 44 Magnum in the holster on my hip. Under a blanket in the back lies my last resort: a Chinese assault rifle with a clip of 21 steel jackets, each bullet the length of a basketball player's finger. It's a chase gun, one that will discourage even the baddest dog from biting our tires.

Lint Ball jumps on the brakes. I adjust the eyeholes on a flesh-toned face mask and exit the still-rocking car. Loping alongside the bank, hugging the red-brick wall, I hurry toward the front entrance holding the duffel loosely, my head to the ground. No telling what sort of spectacle my homemade cop uniform is making. SWAT ball cap. A jacket with police stenciled on the back. I need enough of a pay-no-mind to get myself inside the bank, but the cheap Halloween mask attracts some double takes: It's supposed to be realistic--a guy's face, just not mine. But the lips are painted target red. I look more like Bank Robber Barbie than a facsimile of a cop.

My last thought before I step inside that bank: How the hull did I end up here? I place a gloved hand on the crossbar to the glass doors and push through.

•

Three months earlier. Three o'clock in the afternoon, March 13--my 49th birthday. I was nursing a sense of detachment while staring out the window of the Herald Street Caffe into one of those brilliant champagne days that come to Victoria in the early spring. The waiter delivered a chocolate torte with a lit sparkler, and our whole table, a birthday gathering of six other Pisces poets and writers, erupted into applause. Years ago, when we discovered that a bunch of us had birthdays clustered together, we began this annual lunch, calling ourselves the Fish Poets Lunch Bandits.

Somewhere between the unfinished torte and my third refusal of Armagnac, I began to distance myself from the comfortable banter around the table. My friends were happy about their gardens, happy with their ex partners, happy but self-deprecating about their publishing successes and literary prize nominations. They were smart, sensitive and sensible people: the architects of their own lives. I saw in them an essential wholeness--something I lacked. I made my excuses and left the luncheon early.

Since leaving prison 12 years ago I had wanted desperately to build something of my life, too. I'd made the journey from junkie and FBI most wanted bank robber to best-selling novelist. I'd married one of the most interesting and beautiful women on the planet. We were raising two pieces of magic together, our daughters, Sophie and Charlotte. The garden was planted, the woodshed was full, the mortgage was paid. Yet that essential wholeness eluded me, as if the life I wanted were taking place in a different world than the one I belonged in.

These days my life was defined by exes--ex-smoker, ex-con, ex-bank robber, ex-addict. I tried hard to inhabit my mended ways, but with every obligation upheld and responsibility met, there came not only a sense of well-being but also an unsettling sense that this life had been too precariously constructed.

Driving aimlessly, I made an impromptu stop in the familiar three-block enclave of Cook Street Village. I sat down at a small table on the raised patio of Cafe Mocha and ordered a latte. An old man shuffled by, his body bent like the drooping ash of a cigarette. He scowled and struck out with his cane as if full of loathing for the ground he walked upon. Was this how it all turned out? You build your life and wind up near the end getting mad at a sidewalk?

I abandoned my latte, started down the steps to street level and found myself facing an old red-brick building--the Royal Bank of Canada. I laughed upon seeing the royal lions in navy blue and gold mounted on either side of the glass doors to the lobby. I had cut my teeth on the Royal Bank, and in my ensuing criminal career had walked past those roaring lions carrying guns and wearing masks more times than I cared to count. Once, years before, I came out of a branch of the Royal, one just like this, only to find our getaway driver had abandoned us. There we were on the sidewalk with guns, money bags and our girlfriends' smelly nylons over our heads. My partner walked calmly back into the bank and reappeared within seconds, dangling a set of keys and pointing to a green Pontiac that belonged to the manager.

Ensconced in that memory, I stood there feeling damn near nostalgic until a voice snapped me out of it. "Stevie!'' Now, I have two kinds of friends--ones who call me Stephen and ones who call me Stevie. I stared up. It was a leath-er-and-jeans guy sporting a ponytail and waving wildly from the fire escape landing of a nearby apartment building. He was motioning me over and bounding down the steps at the same time. As he came nearer I couldn't quite fish his name out of the memory pool, but for sure we'd walked the big yard together. Close up, his eyes were glassy and pinned. He greeted me with that hand-slapping faux exuberance of a heroin high: "Great to see you, Stevie. Me and the old lady watched you on television.''

(continued on page 144)Last Score(continued from page 84)

He'd probably seen The Poet and the Bandit, a documentary made about my wife and me, half a year earlier. "Hey, come on up, I want her to meet you.''

And there it was. My conundrum, my Rubik's Cube without colors, the puzzle that doesn't respond to logic. My feet followed him up the fire escape and into the building. It wasn't his old lady I hungered to meet, but a much paler lady from my past.

Why would I succumb to the urge after all the clean years? The answer is that I don't know the answer.

The ponytail dude rapped on a door, and we walked into a small airless junkie apartment that smelled of toadstools and cat urine. A woman with the slow eyes of a lizard bid me to be seated on a worn-out couch. It seemed the perfect place to unmake my life, just for today.

I smoked the dope that afternoon. There was no euphoric buzz, just a nice bump into that warm and safe place, which is all I ever expected or wanted from heroin. Using, for me, has never been about the pursuit of bliss--it was merely a way to break even.

I nodded out on the couch, then woke up startled by the lateness of the evening. I stopped twice on the rush home--once to throw up and once to buy a pack of cigarettes. I arrived past my daughters' bedtime. My wife smelled the tobacco on my breath and saw the long-distance holes in my eyes. She retreated to our bedroom, closed the door and wept. On the table I found a birthday cake, surrounded by some presents and a handmade card with "Happy Birthday Daddy'' scrawled across the top. Even having spent so many years in the can, that was the loneliest moment of my life.

I slept on the couch that night and in the morning I said my junkie prayers--never ever again, Lord--and made all the junkie promises my wife could listen to. Within three days I was back in the toadstool apartment for another afternoon with Dude and the Lizard Lady. Within three weeks I was injecting five speedballs a day.

Before my wife was able to confiscate my plastic, I flew to Toronto and cuffed a shitload of coke from a crew of old friends, major earners known as the Graduates. I used my reputation as collateral. By the third month my home life was in shreds. I had either shot or fronted out the coke to some gypsy junkies from whom I had no hope of ever collecting. I was 90 grand in debt, payday was looming and my life was in the toilet.

Time to go to the bank.

•

I'm standing in the middle of the Royal Bank of Canada holding a weapon the length of a Volkswagen Jetta and wearing a Halloween mask, yet people just stare at me, wondering what it is I want. No one is moving. I've been a holdup guy so long I know the words for "This is a robbery!'' in five languages, and two dialects (Mandarin and Cantonese) for the casinos. Today I give the 15 or so bank customers the lowdown in English. People begin to fold, to lower themselves cautiously to the polished floor. A tall guy, six and change, gives me a look. I raise the shotgun and move toward him. He folds reluctantly. With that attitude I figure he's a cop--and could be ankle-strapped. I turn a full 360 and step between the sprawled bodies. The scene looks like a crowded swimming pool that has been drained too quickly.

There's a certain rush you get once you're inside, holding the gun. It's like shooting a movie in real time. You own all those characters' lives, whether you want to or not. Around me all is quiet except the whir of the security cameras clicking away at five frames per second. My gun barrel comes to rest on the mustachioed man behind the desk in the glassed-in manager's office. He emerges, sleeves rolled up, tie loose. His hands pose surrender but his face wears a confidence not warranted, as if he knows something I don't. But I already know. A hidden alarm button somewhere in the bank has been pushed, probably the one under his desk. That this score was going to be on the police radio frequency within 15 seconds of my entrance is simply a bank-robbing fact of life.

The manager starts for the floor but I stop him. Just then, another man wearing the same shirt-and-tie ensemble scoots out of a back office already down on his butt. I now have the mustachioed manager standing there still showing me his elbows and palms and what I assumed to be the assistant manager on his butt on the floor.

For a few long seconds everyone stays frozen, then I realize they are waiting for me. I had never done a bank alone. Usually I just wore the stopwatch and all I had to do was command the floors and doors while my guys cleaned the place out. Finally I click into gear. "You!'' I jerk the barrel at the assistant manager, "Get off your butt and get the back door unlocked! And you,'' I swing around to the manager, "get the night deposit bags brought out and the safes opened up!''

The two managers stare at each other helplessly then cry in unison, "Helen!''

A 50ish woman--Helen, I presume--rises timidly from the floor and speaks hesitantly. "The safes can't be opened for another hour, the night deposit bags are already gone and the key to the back door is in the middle office, first drawer on the right. All we have on hand is the cash in this drawer.''

With that she steps over to a desk behind the counter and begins emptying the drawer. My heart crashes at the sight--a pitiful pile of fives and 10s. There sits the hard evidence, the difference between a drug-fueled fantasy and the reality of a well-planned score.

The clock's ticking. I get the assistant manager to open the back door, then swing around to hold sway on the bank. That's when I spot it, the punch line to the old joke When is a door not a door? When it's ajar. This jar leads to the room behind the automatic teller machines. A new plan ka-chings into place like three cherries and an anchor on a slot machine. I throw the duffel bag at the manager and tell him what I want--the cash in the ATMs. He rolls his eyes and calls, "Helen! I need you to open the machines.'' He rounds the end of the counter, joins up with Helen the Teller and together they head into the loading room. I check the floor again. The assistant manager has the back door opened and I catch a new jolt of fear. The car is nowhere in sight.

Stacks of $10s and $20s are flying into the duffel bag in three-foot lengths, but it's taking too long to withdraw and unload each cassette. "Hurry!'' I yell. "Just throw the whole tray in.'' They do, and out comes the manager carrying the bulging duffel bag. I point toward the back door. A woman customer enters, sees me, sees the gun and then crouches down against the wall by the door. As the manager passes her he says, "Welcome to Victoria.''

The car and Lint Ball are there, much to his credit and my relief. The manager drops the bag into the open trunk and I thank him. He slams the lid shut and storms back into the bank without saying "You're welcome.''

Time to scram. Suddenly a red Volvo comes out of nowhere and stops bumper to bumper in front of us. Blocked in! The driver, an ancient woman, squints through her windshield, her bony fingers clutching the steering wheel. Beyond the Volvo, across the street, stands a cop in her summer uniform--short-sleeve tunic and navy shorts. Her bare legs are planted two feet apart. She and her gun are in a three-point stance aimed right at us.

"Stop! Right where you are!''

We gas-pedal our way out of there and fishtail onto a narrow street, nearly side-swiping a line of parked cars. The thunk of the bullet never comes. I'm still expecting the shot as we hit the T-section at the end of the block and turn left, out of the line of fire. Lint Ball accelerates. His jaw is tight and he's strangling the steering wheel as we tear up two blocks then lean into a hard left.

I'm twisted around, looking out the rear window. There's a three-way intersection coming up, a right will put us on a shortcut through Beacon Hill Park. Make that without the cops spotting us and we got a win. I can hear sirens, but there is nothing with us yet. We make the turn, but before I can twist back around, Lint Ball hits the brakes so hard I pitch forward into the dash. We are forced to a moving crawl, trapped behind a horse-drawn tourist carriage. Before I can stop him, Lint Ball cranks the wheel and speeds off down a paved bicycle path. The entrance is marked by a yellow no vehicles sign, but that seems like the least of our worries.

I'm kneeling in the front seat facing back. A cruiser stops broadside at the yellow sign, spots us and turns in. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!'' I snatch the shotgun, wrangle my body halfway out the window and take aim across the roof. It's only birdshot, but the boom of the gun and the yellow flame spitting from the barrel should be enough to knock a couple of rookies off our tail. Sure enough, the cruiser brakes, but before I can say yahoo, a motorcycle cop steers around the cruiser and comes roaring at us down again. He swerves, reguns the throttle and keeps coming.

We fly over a small stone bridge, pass a duck pond and a petting zoo. Park strollers are frozen in midstep, openmouthed and gawking. Lint Ball is again braking hard. My focus shifts. Behind us the motorcycle, lights flashing, crosses the bridge. Ahead are steel posts sunk into the pavement, the space between them too narrow for the car to pass through.

Lint Ball halts the car about two feet in front of the posts, apparently ready to toss in the towel. I throw my leg over the paneling, put my foot over his and push the gas pedal all the way to the floor. The engine screams. All he can do is steer. The metal posts rip both sides of the car, hurling sparks everywhere, and we pop free into a four-wheel slide across a busy intersection, barely missing a kid holding a skateboard under his arm. The other cars stop on a dime, a couple wrenching sideways. We somehow get righted, find an opening and barrel straight down into the heart of the James Bay neighborhood.

I begin to think we've lost the motorcycle cop, but then I see him--the white bug shield, emergency lights still pulsing. We start a long dance, us and that lone cop. We're racing down the street and he's staying just out of shotgun range while maintaining a visual. We're flat out, doing 80, maybe 90, an hour, almost flying velocity on a residential street. I'm wedged out the window, wind whipping my hair, and for one glorious moment, when that shotgun bucks against my shoulder and all four tires lift free of the ground, I'm no longer bound to this earth. But we bounce right back down and the motorcycle is still coming on like a bad consequence.

I think of the Chinese assault rifle lying under the blanket. But today isn't a day for killing. I come up with another plan as we near a sharp, almost 90-degree curve on Dallas Road. "Round this corner and stop!'' I scream. Lint Ball slams on the brakes.

I jump out of the car and straddle the middle of the empty road, shotgun poised, staring straight into dead man's curve. I can hear the roaring growl of the approaching motorcycle. The cop accelerates into the curve and when he spots me, he spills. The bike slides out, the front wheel bounces off a concrete barrier and the cop tumbles ass over teakettle down a grass embankment.

I get back in the car. Lint Ball is jumping out of his skin. "You did it, man, you did it!''

Now we're clear, mere blocks from where we had earlier planted a fresh car. For reasons only he will ever know, Lint Ball turns back into the chase, straight toward a posse of cop cars that had been trying to catch up to the action. Before I can get him turned around, an unmarked but unmistakable cop car comes off a side street onto our tail. A hundred yards ahead a black and white pulls sideways, blocking the road. A cop jumps out and points his pistol straight between my eyes. Lint Ball brakes, wheels into a driveway. I bail. For a split second I look over my shoulder and see Lint Ball, standing in that driveway, his hands raised in the air.

I struggle over a high wooden fence and sprint across a lawn, but my body betrays me. I lean against the rough bark of a tree and throw up. Then I stagger toward an apartment building, the cries of "There he is, there he is'' audible in the near distance. I'm expecting to catch one between the shoulder blades any second now, but I'm so worn out I feel more resignation than terror.

I make the lobby of the apartment building, push through and start knocking on doors, trying to find an entry into one of the apartments facing the rear. If I can go straight through and out the back door I might be gone, leaving the cops to believe I'm still inside. Here's a laundry room, no exit. I open the stairwell door and through a plate-glass window I see a cop, revolver drawn, in a crouched run along the side of the building. I'm trapped. So I head up the stairs and start knocking on doors on the second floor.

Number 206 opens. A woman is standing there and I push my way inside. It takes all of two seconds for the futility of my predicament to flood through my body. I slide the shotgun under the couch and walk into the bathroom to wash my face. When I come out, I spot the woman who answered the door. She is sitting in a chair in the bedroom, holding the hand of an elderly man who is under the covers. I imagine they are praying.

I return to the living room and sit on a couch, slumped with the knowledge that my life is over. The couple come out of the bedroom and introduce themselves as John and Kathy, as if I were some kind of distant relative stopping in by surprise.

"You're sweating so much,'' Kathy says. She fetches me a glass of water. The old man comes out, sits down next to me and starts rolling a cigarette. He speaks with an accent. "I don't know what you are doing in my house. You must be in trouble with police.'' He hands me the cigarette. "I was in trouble with police, back in Serbia.''

"God moves in mysterious ways,'' says Kathy.

There is a pounding on the door. "Police--everybody out!'' John opens the door and he and Kathy are whisked away. The police don't enter. They leave the door open and light up the hallway with blazing klieg lights. An hour goes by, minute by agonizing minute. I can hear them emptying all the apartments in the building.

And then the strangest thing happens. I fall asleep, a deep timeless sleep. I'm floating, and my wife and kids are with me--everybody smiling, the sun blazing. There's no sound, only the vision. And then the dream is shattered in an instant as an army in black padded uniforms and Plexiglas shields storms the apartment like a casting call for a Star Wars flick. They're all over me before I can wipe the snot out of my eyes.

My fall from grace complete, I find myself stripped bare and all out of illusions in a prison cell like every other prison cell I have lived in far too long.

The metal food slot on the cell door drops open and the hollow flushing of stainless steel toilets echoes through the hallway--the gut-wrenching sounds of city cells in the morning. I lay my arm across my eyes and try to shut it all out. I am coming down like a Boeing 747 on fire, all broken bones and busted spirits.

Later that morning a phalanx of officers escorts me into a courtroom. I'm barefoot, wearing only white paper coveralls and 40 pounds of chains. They are laughing at me and congratulating one another over the morning's headlines. Turns out I spent four and a half minutes inside that bank--long enough to apply for a loan.

Weeks pass, more court appearances. My wife hires a good lawyer, but we both know I can't beat this beef with a bazooka. My daughters bring me get out of Jail free cards from their Monopoly set. After seven months of remands, I plead out. Although the judge listens to my junkie alibi, he knows what everyone, including me, knows: We deal in choices, and now I'll have to live with this one. He levels me with 18 charlies and sends me off to the pen.

The media vilified me as the man who had won redemption and then tossed it aside. The mayor of the city passed out hardware at the Cop Oscars. Meanwhile I lay on my bunk staring at the ceiling.

I studied that ceiling for almost a year. I had another birthday. On that day, at 50 pieces, I swung my feet down to the floor and began to pace, seven steps in one direction and seven steps back. I have fallen through the crust of the earth so many times that only on this small and familiar pad of concrete have I learned to touch down with any certainty.

I started to work out in the weight pit, to build strength. I began to find dignity in my punishment rather than participate in the degradation of it, and reentered my life in small, ordinary ways.

I'm now living in a prison by the sea. I wake up at first bell and go outside to watch the sun rise over the Olympic Mountains. I use no heroin and have no expectations. I enjoy one cup of coffee at a time. I no longer devise ways to end my own life, nor have urges to light it on fire.

There is always this: As long as I'm alive, something extremely interesting might come up.

The coke is screaming through my blood, but the heroin begins to whisper back and i settle in a bit, wipe the sweat and scan the traffic.

Stacks of $10S and $20S are flying into the duffel bag in three-foot lengths, but it's taking too long to withdraw and unload each cassette.

For one glorious moment, when that shotgun bucks against my shoulder and all four tires leave the ground, I'M No longer bound to this earth.

Botched Bank Heists

When and where: February 28, 1997, Bank of America, North Hollywood, California

The plan: Right out of Heat. Emil Matasareanu and Larry Phillips Jr. don black clothes, masks and body armor. Armed with assault rifles, they storm the bank just after it opens. A fortified Chevy sedan waits in the parking lot.

What went wrong: Angry at their $304,000 take, the bandits beat a bank officer. Police arrive, closing off streets. A Shootout begins as the duo exit--two robbers with automatic weapons versus 350 cops with pistols and shotguns. Police run into a nearby gun shop for more weapons and ammo.

Just deserts: Phillips tries to escape on foot while shooting at news helicopters; a sharpshooter kills him. Matasareanu takes off in the car and is surrounded by SWAT gunmen; he surrenders after being hit 29 times, and bleeds to death in the street.

When and where: March 17, 1997, Lindell Bank and Trust, St. Louis

The plan: Billie Allen and Norris Holder storm the bank armed with AK-47s. Two stolen vans are to be the escape vehicles--the duo plans to drive one to nearby Forest Park and set it on fire to destroy evidence, then drive away in the second.

What went wrong: Allen shoots and kills a bank security guard. As they speed off in one van, they douse the interior with gas. But when one of them tests his lighter, he accidentally sets his shirt on fire. The flames quickly spread. Ammo in the van starts going off as the fire intensifies. Some of the $50,000 in loot burns.

Just Deserts: Allen and Holder abandon the van, which is spotted by police. Holder is arrested at the scene. His duct-taped artificial leg falls off as he tries to escape. Allen is arrested the next day.

When and where: December 29, 1993, Central Florida Educators' Federal Credit Union, Edgewood, Florida

The Plan: A quartet of thieves has a simple plan: Three of them will enter the bank at 10 A.M. and demand money. The fourth will wait outside to drive the getaway car.

What went wrong: While the group is speeding away from the crime, a dye pack explodes in a stack of bills that's deep inside one robber's pants. Fumes from the pack are so intense that the thieves start throwing money out the window of the car, drawing the attention of a passing deputy sheriff.

Just deserts: In the resulting chase, the driver loses control of the getaway car, which skids into a house. One of the four is caught immediately. Using dogs and a helicopter, the three others are found in nearby woods. One has shredded pants.