The Best American Crime Writing 2006 (11 page)

"I'm thinking about the future, the next generations," Jason says from his un-air-conditioned prison dorm."I think I have a chance to do something good before I die.Who knows, the answer to the question 'Who is John Galt?' could be 'Jason.' "

As for Natalia, she is "keeping a low profile." Last week, she went to see Jason again. Thankfully he didn't talk too much about getting married inside the prison. Mostly they talked about the strange times they'd been through and how, even if it turned out the way it did, somehow it was worth it.

"I was a young actress who came to New York like a lot of young actresses, and I wound up with the role of a lifetime. I was the Perfect 10. I totally was. It wasn't the rabbit hole I expected to tumble down, but Jason and I…we werehappy… for a time, really happy."

Since she received hardly any of her booking money and is pretty broke these days, people ask Natalia if she's planning on coming back to "work." The other night, a well-known provider, who said she used to hate Natalia when she was getting those 10/10s, offered to "pimp her out."

"That would be a feather in my cap," said the escort. "To be the one who brought back the famous Natalia."

"No, thanks," said Natalia, which is what she tells her old clients who call from time to time. "I say I'm retired, in repose.They say, 'Come on, let me buy you a drink. I'll be good.' I tell them, 'Look, we had fun and I love you. But that is over.' Mostly, they understand. Some are willing to stay friends, some can't wait to get off the phone.They've got other numbers in their book."

That doesn't mean a girl has to stay home at night. New York, after all, is a big place, full of opportunity. In a way, things have gone back to the way they were before she met Jason. "Wiser, but not necessarily sadder," Natalia says.Tonight she's going downtown. It is always good to look good, so Natalia goes through what was a familiar ritual back in the days when she was the Perfect 10-getting her nails done at the Koreans' on Twenty-ninth Street, combing out her wavy hair. For old times' sake, she's got on what she used to call her "money dress," a short satin pink number with gray jersey inserts, with the shoes to match. About ten, she's ready. She goes out into the street, lifts her arm, gets into a cab, and disappears into the night.

Mark Jacobson is the author of several books including the novels Gojiro and Everyone and No One. His nonfiction books include 12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time: A Semi-Dysfunctional Family Circumnavigates the Globe, and the recent Teenage Hipster in the Modern World. He has been a contributing editor at Esquire, Rolling Stone, Natural History, the Village Voice, and works for New York magazine. He was born and lives in New York City.

The article that wound up getting called "The $2,000-an-Hour Woman" (my original title was "Rocket Fuel for Winners," after the rubric pimpmeister Jason Itzler had engraved on his metal business cards) wasn't easy to find. But once it got going it didn't let up. Partially this was due to the ever-fecund life story of Mr. Itzler, much of which actually appears to be true. Jason is one of those perfect journalistic subjects: a guy with a lot to say who can't wait to say it. In me he had a proper foil because, to reference Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, I like listening to a man who likes to talk. As long as that talk stays interesting. Itzler did, even if he did-and continues to-call me at least five or six times a day from his current residence at Rikers Island. That's the real torture for the Sammy Glicks of the world, getting locked up with a bunch of people who simply don't care what he has to say.

The piece's other leading figure, Natalia McLennan, would also wind up in Rikers sometime after the appearance of the story. This was too bad, since as the 1996 tap-dance champion of Canada and former Shakespearean actress (several productions as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, also as Flute in A Midsummer Night's Dream) she is definitely not the Rikers type. Luckily, though, she was sprung after a month or so, although not before making the papers back in her Montreal hometown. Natalia, who does indeed have the proverbial heart of gold, did not hold me responsible for this unfortunate period of incarceration since, as she put it, "It wasn't exactly like I didn't expect something to happen after they put me on the cover of New York magazine without my clothes on." All told, I would say I met a better, more amusing, not to mention honest, class of people associated with New York Confidential than on my more usual beats, like state and national politics.

from Texas Monthly

Peggy Jo Tallas was, by all accounts, the classic good-hearted Texas woman. For much of her adult life, she lived with her ailing mother in a small apartment in the Dallas suburbs. Every morning, after waking up and making her bed, always taking the time to smooth out all the wrinkles in the sheets with her hands, she'd walk into her mother's bedroom. She'd wrap a robe around her mother's shoulders, lead her to the kitchen, fix her cereal, and lay out her pills. For a few minutes, the two of them would sit at the table, making small talk. Peggy Jo, who didn't like to eat until later in the day, would often smoke a cigarette and drink Pepsi out of a coffee cup.Then, after her mother was finished eating, Peggy Jo would gently guide her back to her bedroom, prop a pillow behind her head, set a glass of tap water and her romance novel on the side table, and walk back into her own room to get dressed.

Usually, she liked wearing khaki pants, a simple blouse, and loafers. But on a lovely morning in May 1991, Peggy Jo, who was then forty-six years old, decided to wear something different. She walked over to her dresser, the top of which held a few small glass sculptures of dolphins with iridescent eyes that she had been collecting off and on for more than a decade. She opened one of the lower drawers and pulled out a pair of men's pants and a dark men's shirt. From her closet, she grabbed a men's brown leather jacket that she kept on a hanger. She then reached for a Styrofoam mannequin's head that was on a shelf in the closet. A fake beard was pinned to it and on top was a white cowboy hat.

She took off her nightshirt and put on the clothes along with some boots that were too big for her feet. She stuffed a towel under her shirt to make herself look heavier. She stepped into the bathroom, rubbed some adhesive across her face, pasted on the fake beard, and colored her hair with gray paint she had bought at a costume shop. She placed the cowboy hat on her head, put on a large pair of silver-rimmed sunglasses, and pulled on a pair of gloves. She then took a few minutes to write a note on a sheet of lined paper and put it in her pocket.

"Be back in a minute," Peggy Jo told her mother, tiptoeing past her room. She walked outside, got behind the wheel of her 1975 two-door Pontiac Grand Prix, drove to the American Federal Bank just off West Airport Freeway in Irving, pulled into the parking lot, stepped into the bank's lobby, and headed toward the counter, where a young female teller was smiling cheerfully.

"Hello, sir," the teller said. "How may I help you?"

Peggy Jo pulled out the note she had written. "This is a bank robbery," it read. "Give me your money. No marked bills or dye packs."

The stunned teller handed over a stack of cash from her drawer. Peggy Jo nodded, stuck the money into a satchel, and walked out of the bank. She then drove straight back to her apartment, where her mother was still in bed, getting hungry, hoping Peggy Jo would return soon to fix her lunch.

In the criminology textbooks, they are invariably described as products of a deprived socioeconomic background. Most of them are young male drug addicts who don't have the slightest idea what they are doing. When they burst into banks, their fingers twitch and their heads swivel back and forth as they look for security guards. They shout out threats and wave guns in the air. When they get their money, they run madly for the exits, bowling over anyone in their path, and they squeal away in their cars, leaving tire tracks on the road.

And then there was Peggy Jo Tallas. "I promise you, my Aunt Peggy was the last person on earth you would ever imagine robbing a bank," said her niece, Michelle. "Whenever I was in a car with her, she never drove above the speed limit. If anything, she drove below it. And she always came to a complete stop at stop signs."

But Peggy Jo didn't just rob a bank. Beginning with that May 1991 trip to American Federal, she robbed lots of banks.According to the FBI, she was one of the most unusual bank robbers of her generation, a modern-day Bonnie without a Clyde who always worked alone, never using a partner to operate as her lookout or drive her getaway car. She was also a master of disguise, her cross-dressing outfits so carefully designed that law enforcement officials, studying bank surveillance tapes, had no idea they were chasing a woman.What's more, she was so determined not to hurt anyone that she never carried a weapon into any bank she robbed. "I have to admit, I admired her style," said Steve Powell, a former FBI agent who spent most of his thirty-year career chasing bank robbers and who supervised bank robbery investigations for the Dallas office of the FBI in the early nineties."She knew how to get in and out of a bank in sixty seconds. She was very skilled and very efficient, as good as any man I've ever come across."

Although female bank robbers are not unheard of-it is estimated that women commit less than 5 percent of the some 7,600 bank robberies that take place each year in the United States- almost all of them are young women who, like most of the men, rob banks for drug money. And only a few of those women rob more than a bank or two before they quit or get caught. Accordingly, when Powell and his team of FBI agents happened to corner Peggy Jo near her apartment in 1992, they assumed they would never be dealing with her again. She was one of those women, they believed, who had succumbed to a strange bout of middle-aged craziness. She wasn't poor. She wasn't an addict or an alcoholic. And from what people who knew her said, she was utterly harmless-"A sweet lady who once chatted with me about the best way to grow plants on the front porch," one neighbor noted. Seemingly repentant, Peggy Jo pleaded guilty to bank robbery and quietly went off to prison for almost three years.And that seemed to be that.

But then, this past May, the story broke that a small bank in the East Texas city of Tyler had been robbed by a sixty-year-old woman. The woman was dressed in black, wearing a black wide-brimmed hat and dark sunglasses that covered much of her face. She was polite and did not use a gun when she confronted the teller. She placed the money she received in a black satchel, nodded "thank you," walked out the door, and climbed into a twenty-foot Frontier RV with pretty purple shades around the windows. She turned on the ignition, pushed on the gas pedal, and headed south on Texas Highway 69, straight out of town.

After all those years, Peggy Jo Tallas had returned.

If you want to understand her, her friends say, you've got to go back to Dallas in the late fifties, when she was an irre-pressibly free-spirited teenager, her hair brownish-blond and curly and her green eyes as shiny as marbles. "She had a beautiful, wide smile that made you want to smile back at her," said Karen Jones, her closest childhood friend."And what was most special about her was that she loved doing things other kids didn't do. She once drove me around looking for stray dogs to adopt. And then she took me over to the Yellow Belly drag strip just to watch the cars race."

She was the youngest of three children.When she was four years old, her father died of cancer, and her mother, Helen, found a job as a nurse's aide to support the family. They lived in a tiny rent house in the suburb of Grand Prairie. Peggy Jo's sister, Nancy, was a high school majorette, and her older brother, Pete, played on the district's championship basketball team. Peggy Jo, however, dropped out of high school after the tenth grade. "She told me there was just too much else to do in life than spend so many days at school," Karen said. One day, in fact, Peggy Jo jumped in her car and drove to San Francisco because she wanted to see what life was like there. When she returned, she gave Karen a book of poems written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the co-founder of San Francisco 's famous City Lights bookstore and an influential Beat poet whose work often decried the emptiness of modern life. (In one of his most famous poems, from A Coney Island of the Mind, he described America as a country of "… freeways fifty lanes wide/on a concrete continent/spaced with bland billboards/illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness.") "I laughed and thought, 'Of all people, Peggy Jo's been off reading poetry in San Francisco,' " Karen said. "But that was just who she was, always ready for an adventure."

When she was in her twenties, Peggy Jo got her own apartment in North Dallas and started working as a receptionist at a Marriott hotel near downtown. She and another receptionist, a cute blonde named Cherry Young, went out almost every night. Peggy Jo always drove in her little burgundy Fiat, gunning the engine, racing other cars from stoplight to stoplight. They hit all the great Dallas nightclubs: Soul City, the Fog, and the Filling Station, on Greenville Avenue, ordering Coors, playing pool, and flirting with men. They went to see the Doors and the Doobie Brothers and even the Rolling Stones, screaming at the top of their lungs as a young, wrinkle-free Mick Jagger gyrated madly across the stage. Peggy Jo took Cherry to a coffeehouse where amateur poets read out of their notebooks, and they also went to see movies. Peggy Jo's favorite, which she saw over and over, was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, the movie tells the story of the famous bank- and train-robbing duo who lived in the last days of the Old West: two good-natured, Robin Hood-like outlaws who never believed that what they were doing was wrong because they never hurt innocent bystanders and they always robbed from institutions that took advantage of downtrodden citizens. Although Butch and Sundance knew they had little chance of survival, they refused to walk away from the life they loved, and they ended up in South America, still robbing banks, finally dying in a hail of gunfire.