Every Move You Make (34 page)

“They had this [water] well in the front yard that had dried up. Damien would steal the bicycles and put them in the well so no one could find them.”

Evans just showed up at Damien’s apartment one afternoon and knocked on the door. Lisa Morris was home at the time. Damien was gone. She had never seen Evans before, nor had Damien ever mentioned him.

“Me and my girlfriend,” Lisa said later, “were sitting behind Damien’s parents’ house one day [not too long after that] sunning ourselves when Gary came up. He was looking for Damien and then he said something. After they met, he was always pulling Damien out of the house. They would be gone for a long time. I didn’t like him. He took Damien away from us, his family.”

The hatred Lisa had for Evans began after Lisa and Evans “had words” one afternoon and Evans threatened to “throw her off the balcony if she gave him any more trouble.” Lisa was working two jobs at the time, trying to make the best of what she saw as a pretty good life with Damien and Christina. She knew Damien was a thief and took off to commit burglaries, but she was determined, she recalled, to have a family with him and Christina.

Throughout the next year, Damien and Evans became inseparable. They hung out together. Traveled together. Committed burglaries together. And enjoyed what had become a rather reclusive life as two of Albany’s most notorious, and successful, burglars. Other thieves in town envied their successes.

While Evans worked on his relationship with Damien Cuomo, he still kept his eye on Horton. At one point, he went to Horton and explained how he could set up a sting to buy two stolen weapons from a local Troy burglar.

“What do you want, Gar?”

“Nothing! I just want to fuck this guy hard.”

So Horton gave Evans the money and told him to set up the deal.

A day later, Horton had two stolen weapons off the street and a local burglar in jail, and Evans was back on his way.

“He would come to me and talk about what was going on in Troy,” Horton recalled. “He needed to stay in touch with me. Keep me thinking he was doing good things for me—which, in many ways, he was. But it was all a ruse.”

On June 28, 1989, Cuomo and Evans were driving north on Interstate 87 from New York City in Damien’s Chrysler Fifth Avenue. They had just finished meeting with someone who was going to start fencing stolen merchandise for them when a state trooper pulled them over for speeding.

“Fuck,” Evans said. “We’ve got the trunk full of shit.”

“Relax,” Cuomo said, slowing the car down. “Let’s play it cool.”

While the trooper was asking Damien for his license and registration, Evans began to shuffle in his seat. Trained to snoop out any suspicious behavior, the trooper had enough sense to ask Damien Cuomo and Gary Evans to get out of the car. Then, “Pop the trunk,” he said as another trooper pulled up. “We’re going to have to take a look.”

There on the floor of the trunk were several items one might use during a burglary, kidnapping or both: three black ski masks, two stun guns, a police scanner, two walkie-talkies, a slim jim, crowbar, screwdrivers, duct tape, rope, two sets of handcuffs, two sets of thumbcuffs, a plastic Uzi machine gun, gloves, hats, several maps of the Northeast and a book of police radio frequencies.

Looking at everything, the trooper assumed Evans and Damien weren’t heading to a masquerade ball, but were perhaps either coming from a burglary or en route to committing one.

The stun guns was Damien’s, Evans said later. Cuomo had a habit of breaking into homes when people were asleep, and would often use the gun to put people down who woke up. Evans hated him for it. If there was one thing Evans never did, he claimed, it was break into homes while people were inside. He found it too risky. Not to mention there were plenty of homes where people weren’t home.

“‘I’m the good burglar,’” Horton recalled later in a sarcastic tone. “That’s what Evans always wanted me to believe. He’d tell me that he was a better person than Cuomo or Falco because he never did what they did. The truth of the matter is, Gary would break into homes if people were home
if
he thought he could get away with it.”

In a scene straight out of the children’s classic
How the Grinch Stole Christmas,
Cuomo once broke into a home while a family was sleeping, a former girlfriend of Damien’s claimed, and woke up a small child, who ended up walking down the hallway and staring at him as he rummaged through the home looking for items to steal. Upon seeing her, Damien told her to scoot back to her room without saying a word.

The child said she was thirsty.

So Damien got her a glass of water and sent her off to bed before cleaning out the house.

After spending nearly the past year turning dozens of jobs together—homes, businesses, antique shops, jewelry stores—Evans and Cuomo had become good friends. When they committed burglaries, one of their favorite ways to throw off authorities was to wear sneakers three or four sizes too big. This way, any footprints left behind wouldn’t match. By all accounts, they were good at what they did. Professionals. Where one man lacked a certain flair for climbing walls or cutting a hole in a window without being heard, the other made up for it.

It was common knowledge inside the confines of the state police that Horton and Evans had a relationship that perhaps stretched a bit over the cop-informant line. So with Damien and Evans in lockup at the Albany Thruway State Police barracks, just outside downtown, it was no shock to Horton when he got a call at home alerting him that Evans and his “partner” had been pulled over for speeding, but were suspected of possessing burglar tools.

“Jesus,” Horton said mockingly, “what a shock that is!”

When Horton arrived at the barracks, Evans looked embarrassed, as if he had been scolded by a teacher and sent to the principal’s office. He was both humiliated and disappointed that he had let himself get caught for something so seemingly inconsequential. The last thing he wanted was to look bad in front of Horton.

Cuomo, never one to talk to cops, said nothing when Horton introduced himself. Turning to Evans after not getting a response from Damien, Horton said, “I can’t help you much. This is your mess. Stay out of trouble and this won’t happen.” He could tell Evans didn’t want to talk.

“I’ll try,” Evans said.

“Yeah, right…just keep me out of it from now on,” Horton said, and left.

Years later, Horton would find out that Evans and Cuomo had the entire inside of Damien’s car lined with stolen merchandise, but the cops never found it. It was in the side panels and underneath a rug in the trunk.

“That day was a turning point for Gary Evans,” Horton recalled later. “He had been arrested for something trivial…in a sense, making a stupid mistake. He realized he was getting sloppy in his work. It upset him. But little did I know then, of course, what was going to happen next.”

CHAPTER 57

Located in the upper northern part of the state, hugging the northeastern tip of Lake Ontario at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, Watertown, New York, is just over two hundred miles—a 3½-hour drive—from Albany. A melting pot of mostly Irish, German, Italian and French immigrants, crime in Watertown is something residents worry little about. One murder in town per year is, generally, a shock to the nearly twenty thousand residents who call Watertown home.

As the fall of 1989 brought thousands of tourists from all over the Northeast to take in Watertown’s wonderful views of the foliage, Evans and Cuomo targeted the town as a candidate to do some business. An added bonus, it was almost as far away from Albany as one could get in the state, offering isolation, yet easy accessibility to the interstate.

One of Damien’s best friends had joined the military after high school and had been stationed at Fort Drum, an army base directly north of Watertown. The guy knew the area well. He called Damien one day and told him that there was a small coin and jewelry shop in downtown Watertown run by one man. It would possibly be an easy target to hit. The way Evans explained it later, Damien’s friend called and said, “I know of a perfect place for you to rob. There’s an old man there. No alarm system. He sleeps in the back on a cot with a gun.”

Indeed, sixty-three-year-old Douglas Berry, owner-operator of the Square Lion Coin and Jewelry, located in the center of downtown Watertown, directly across the street from Public Square, was an unassuming businessman who had opened the shop back in the mid-1970s with hopes of leading a quiet New England life. Berry couldn’t afford an alarm system, so he occasionally slept in what Evans called a “loft,” which was in the back of the shop, and, for protection, kept a handgun underneath his pillow. Berry had been married for what seemed like forever and lived in a small single-family home in town with his wife. Some who knew Berry spoke highly of him for the fact that he didn’t much bother anyone. He kept to himself and was, more than anything, determined to succeed in business. He worked long hours and often ran the shop by himself. At six feet two inches, about 225 pounds, Berry sported a thick shock of brown hair he kept greased back in a ’50s fashion.

Attached to a beam near the loft where Berry slept was a mirror. If he happened to hear something while in bed, he could look up at the mirror and see what was going on in his store without getting out of the loft.

When Cuomo heard about Berry’s shop, he immediately called Evans and, excited, told him about it. Evans liked the idea of the location and the accessibility. Berry not having an alarm system was, of course, also a plus.

Evans, however, was never one to take things at face value; he knew any job that sounded too good to be true probably was. “Let’s go up there,” he suggested to Cuomo, “and take a look before we do anything.”

Damien was, Evans admitted later, always ready to jump in the water without first getting his toes wet, whereas Evans liked to scope things out and take his time, making sure there were no obstacles in his way he couldn’t overcome. Contingencies meant getting caught. In this case particularly, Evans wanted to be certain the information they were getting was solid. More important, he wanted to be sure they weren’t being set up.

Throughout the summer, Evans and Damien drove to Watertown several times to check out the Square Lion. They had even walked into the shop and sold Berry a few pieces of gold they had stolen.

On the morning of September 7, 1989, they once again headed north to Watertown in Damien’s car to check out the Square Lion and bounce around town to see how things looked. For the hell of it, they brought along ski masks, a crowbar and two handguns, a .38-caliber pistol Cuomo always carried with him, and a .22 automatic Evans had at times packed.

Evans said later he made a point to bring along his .22 “because of the information we had gotten earlier [from Damien’s friend] about Berry possibly being armed.”

The Gary Evans motto: “Kill or be killed.”

Along the way, just outside of Watertown, Damien was stopped by a trooper for speeding. After getting a ticket, which “pissed him off,” Evans said, they pulled into the center of town and parked near the Square Lion.

Evans explained to Damien on the way up north that they would drift into town, park near the shop, and hang out across the street for a few hours so they could watch the place. Damien was a bit antsy to get the job done, but agreed.

While they were in town, Evans explained, Cuomo became “too anxious…pacing up and down the sidewalk, chain-smoking cigarettes.” Evans, who was methodical when it came to planning burglaries, tried calming him, he said, but it didn’t do much good.

“Let’s just sit and watch, Damien,” Evans said at one point. “Let’s see what kind of traffic goes in and out, and what kind of business this guy does.”

“I want to get this over with,” Cuomo said.

“Just fucking relax.”

Throughout the afternoon, they walked the streets of Watertown and got something to eat. It was a quiet town, for the most part. Evans liked that. It told him they could move around town stealthily without standing out. If they looked out of place for any reason, someone would remember them when it came time for the cops to interview people.

Evans later said that he and Damien, months before they went to Watertown to burglarize the Square Lion, came up with what would turn out to be a brilliant idea—that is, if one is a thief.

“Come on, Damien, we’re taking a drive up north.”

“Where we goin’?”

“Just get in the fucking truck and shut up.”

The Canadian border was about 240 miles northwest of Albany. In what turned out to be a three-hour trip, by the end of that morning they were inside the borders of Canada shopping at a local convenience store.

Damien bought Canadian cigarettes; Evans purchased snacks and several other items branded with Canadian price tags and bar codes.

“We’re going to need this stuff when we do that Watertown job,” Evans told Cuomo as they left the store. “Hang onto it. Don’t fucking lose it.”

Behind the Square Lion was a large parking lot, partially secluded. The entrance to the store was in front, on the first floor of the building, street level, leading out to the sidewalk. In back, there was a second-story picture window with two side windows that cranked open from inside. Berry’s loft was just inside the window to the right.

As night fell on Watertown on September 7, Evans took a look at the window and figured they could pry it open easily and probably get in without being seen or heard.

After casing the back of the shop, they took turns going into the store to check it out. Evans had even made it into the back room, where Berry had his loft, and saw the cot Berry slept on, he later admitted.

Undeniably, Damien’s informant had been spot on with his information, which pleased Evans considerably. He now believed for certain it wasn’t a setup.

Damien was an expert at scaling walls and getting into buildings through windows and small crevices. Evans assumed Damien could walk up the fire escape in the back of the shop, then crawl along the building, balancing himself on an electrical wire hugging the wall, until he reached the window. Once he shimmied the window open and got inside, Evans could climb up the same way and follow him in.