The End of the Dream (25 page)

The Abe Lincoln gang had obviously planned their robberies well, and they were successful in at least thirteen bank jobs. They had made some of their escapes in a green van. “Their disguises were actually kind of comical, “ Magan recalled, “but what they were doing wasn’t.” Since Mike and Chris Gough knew the north end so well, they began to work with the FBI on the “Abe” cases. “We developed an informant, “ Magan said, “and we brought her down to the FBI. She knew who one of the Abe Lincoln suspects was.” Their informant led them to others who knew who the “Abes” really were. Armed with the names that the two bike patrol officers had provided, the FBI and Seattle Police units carried out surveillance on another suspect vehicle. They arrested a man named David Fresonke, who ultimately pleaded guilty to five bank robberies. Mike Magan and Chris Gough were also able to find the green van. They helped the FBI search the vehicle and found a fake beard and the latexlike material that had been used to make mock scars. They also found documents in the name of a female whose name had been mentioned by their informant. Later that day, they arrested the woman on two warrants. She matched the description of a bank robbery accomplice who had fled in the green van after a dye pack had exploded in it. Before midnight, they arrested still a third suspect. Sergeant Mont commended his officers.
 
“.. . The work of Magan and Gough in breaking this case for the FBI is far too extensive to adequately detail .. .

the end result is that they are ultimately responsible for identifying six bank robbery suspects and several accomplices.” Mike Magan was in the FBI offices with one of his informants in December 1994, when the Supervisory Special Agent of their bank robbery squad, Mike Byrne, asked him, “Would you be willing to come help us on the Violent Crimes Task Force when it starts up? “ 266 It was a question that almost any street cop would have shouted “YES! “ to and Mike Magan felt a surge of optimism. He could not hope for anything more. “I thought that would be great! “ he remembered. “And I said, Sure, but I wondered how I was going to pull that off.” As much as he wanted it, Magan knew that this was an assignment that would surely go to a robbery detective. And it wasn’t even up to him to accept the offer, if it should ever become an official offer, it would have to go through all the steps of departmental policy. So, at this point, it was really just an “Atta boy” that felt wonderful. Mike went home and told Lisa, and they celebrated the vote of confidence. It wasn’t Christmas yet, and the Violent Crimes Task Force wouldn’t be operational until after the first of the year.
 
Still, Mike made a few phone calls to see if officers higher up than he might call Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper and put in a good word for him.

“Everybody I called said, No. Actually, they said, Hell, no!

“ he joked. “I started to lose a little faith. And then I heard that the task force was definitely slated to start in March of 1995.” Initially, only one Seattle Police detective was selected to start on the Violent Crimes Task Force that was Sergeant Ed Striedinger, who had been a detective in both homicide and robbery. There would be other slots opening up, and Mike Magan hoped that Mike Byrne would send a letter of recommendation to Chief Stamper. Then he might at 26 least be able to get a face-to-face interview with the Chief and apply for a spot on the task force. Christmas passed, and it was 1995. By the end of March, new “pattern robberies” had begun to break. The Abe Lincoln bank robberies had stopped, but there were others to take their place.

Mike Magan had long since learned as all good investigators do that hitting the bricks, or what cops call “heel and toeing it’was often the best way to develop suspects. He had talked to business owners, motel and hotel managers, and street people constantly for years, handing out his cards. Sometimes they called in a week, or a month, or even a couple of years later. Sometimes they never called. But he had made scores of arrests because of a network of contacts he had built up over time.

Occasionally, the best tips came from former suspects who Mike had treated with respect even as he was arresting them. He was like a fisherman who dropped hundreds of lines in the water and hoped for a few nibbles. The Puget Sound Violent Crimes Task Force had started up in March 1995, and without Mike Magan. While he waited to find out if he had any chance at all to get on the task force, he kept busy. He was following up leads on bank robbers and just plain robbers who were striking in the north end of Seattle. In April, a pattern robber was committing commercial robberies there. Armed with a vicious-looking, large folding knife, he specialized in robbing small businesses where women worked. He not only took the store’s money, but he robbed the employees and customers, too. He soon had a nickname, “The Buck Knife Robber.” Women who had no choice but to go to work in convenience stores and other small operations were terrified. The Buck Knife Robber was suspected in at least forty robberies, it seemed only a matter of time until someone resisted or moved too quickly and he used his knife. The Seattle Police Robbery Unit asked Mike and Chris for help in locating the suspect, who seemed to be under the influence of drugs during most of his robberies.

They knew the neighborhoods he was hitting so well that they were able to set up stakeout sites. Mike sat on many of the stakeouts himself, watching and waiting. On May 18, he waited near a store that fit the profile of Buck Knife’s prime targets. While he waited, he thought about the task-force job. Rumor had it that the next appointment would be announced on June I. He still wanted it. Mike looked up and spotted a car that looked like one they were looking for. He called for backup.
 
The driver was a dead-ringer for Buck Knife. They moved in and arrested him, along with his girlfriend. It was the Buck Knife Robber. When detectives, including Mike Magan, searched his apartment they found a large folding knife, along with other items of evidence that connected him absolutely to more than three dozen robberies.

It seemed that Mike was wearing a detective’s hat as often now as he was a bike cop’s uniform. He had slipped into it so easily, but he still felt as though he’d be spending his life waiting to become a detective.
 
Detectives in the Robbery Unit invited him to their offices on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building, showed him around, and wrote him still another commendation letter. All it did was whet his appetite more. Mike Magan kept thinking “June I. June I. June I.” Magan’s Lieutenant, Linda Pierce, and his Captain, Dan Bryant, urged him to approach Chief Stamper. He was reluctant. Chances were that Stamper would look at him like he was a kid, untriednot ready. He went ahead anyway and made an appointment. In truth, Norm Stamper is the most approachable of police chiefs, an amiable man who has none of the stiff-necked pride that old-time chiefs had, even though he sports a “cookie duster” mustache that gives him the look of a lawman from another era. Stamper is fiercely devoted to his officers. He tries to know all of them personally. He is so good at his job that most of them are in awe of him. What Mike Magan didn’t know was that his wife, Lisa, had already talked to Stamper when she sold the chief a bottle of perfume for his wife. Lisa hadn’t been at all shy about praising her husband. Mike was embarrassed when she told him, but she reminded him that, at least, Stamper would know who he was no wand he wouldn’t be just another faceless street cop. Magan had other boosters too. It.

Pierce totaled up his arrests and was amazed to find he and Chris had cleared eighty robberies in six months. “I don’t think any deed should go unnoticed, “ she told Mike. “Captain Bryant and I think I should go with you when you meet the chief and, by the way, I got you an earlier appointment.” The meeting with Norm Stamper was pleasant and friendly, but it ended without any promises. Stamper mentioned that he had had a nice talk with Lisa Magan, and said he would look into the situation with the task force. He didn’t mention that he had already pored over Mike’s personnel file and read his commendations and his entire history with the Seattle Police Department. Wheels that Magan knew nothing about were already turning. Mike was off duty on June 1, 1995, when his phone rang a little before eleven. It was Linda Pierce.

“See you later, “ she said cryptically. “What do you mean? “

“I’m just calling to tell you that you got the spot.”

“You’re kidding me.

“

“No, it’s yours.” Mike couldn’t stay home. He called Lisa and told her that he had been assigned to the Puget Sound Violent Crimes Task Force.
 
She suggested he might as well go to work in his new office.

And so he did. For the first time, Mike Magan walked into the Violent Crimes Task Force offices. He picked out a desk and that made it seem real. It was June 1, 1995. Sixty miles away, there was a man breaking the law and getting away with it. One day soon, he would find out who Mike Magan was. Catching the Hollywood Bank Robber wouldn’t be just Magan’s goal, of course. The elusive, masked man would become the number one quarry of every investigator on the new task force.

When the task force started up in the spring of 1995, they saw that Hollywood hadn’t been seen in Seattle during the last half of 1994not after the Queen Anne bank robbery in July. His pursuers wondered if he had retired. But they knew that was wishful thinking. He had gone underground before, and no one on the new Violent Crimes Task Force believed that he was gone for good.

And, of course, he was not. Scott Scurlock had spent the summer and most of the fall of 1999traveling. His last two bank jobs had netted him well over a hundred thousand dollars apiece, and his expenses had been minimalcash for two cars in California, a car rented for Steve Meyers for the Queen Anne bank robbery, some makeup, and the almost miserly $5,000 he had given Steve after each robbery. Whatever they then made gambling was just the frosting on the cake. There were good reasons for Scott to lay low beyond the fact that his yen to travel was calling to him. He was infamous now, and he’d seen his picture (in full makeup) in the newspapers several times. He acknowledged that he had lost the advantage he once had as a fledgling bank robber. He was Hollywood now.
 
Part of him must have enjoyed his notoriety, even as he realized that he would have to plan even more carefully than he had before. But being anonymous wasn’t nearly as important as being an expert was. And he was an expert now. Scott had continued to study banks and bank security, and there wasn’t much he didn’t know about where the big money and the danger were. From the very beginning, he had been careful never to purchase the theatrical makeup himself. He had bought it through the mail, using the address of a friend in Olympia who knew nothing about the bank robberies. His friend wasn’t sure what it was that Scott picked up at his house, and he asked no questions. He did tell Scott that he was never, ever, to have guns or ammunition sent to his house, and the packages from Los Angeles were too light to be guns. Scott had even created a hidden makeup room in the big barn where he applied his disguises. Unless someone knew it was there, he was sure they would never find it. So many of Scott Scurlock’s friends suspected that he was up to no good, but few guessed what he was actually involved in.
 
Probably no one beyond Steve, Mark Biggins, Bobby Gray and Kevinknew about the bank jobs. Unless you had been befriended and groomed by Scott, it was almost impossible to understand what loyalty he evoked. He made each person in his circle feel so special, as if he had never had a friend he admired more. No one was caught up in Scott’s friendly web more than Steve Meyers. His life continued to be one of upheaval and change. His live-in girlfriend, Sari, was hired by United Airlines and that meant she had to go to Chicago for training only three months after she and Steve moved to Sonoma.

Before she left, the couple drove a truck up to Scott’s place and dropped off most of Steve’s possessions. He was still living a peripatetic life where he had no real home, other than Scott’s house and treehouse in Olympia. In truth, Steve had never had a permanent home not even when he was a little boy back in Kansas and Texas. There was little time now for him to sculpt or paint, since planning bank robberies and laundering money wasn’t conducive to artistic excellence.

Sometimes, Steve let himself think about the way things really were.

All Scott had to do was crook his little finger and he expected Steve to come running. He no longer deluded himself into believing that Scott needed him as a friend.

Scott didn’t need him until he was out of money and it was time .

.. again. It still galled Scott to think of the fat zero they’d scored in the aborted bank robbery in Portland, Oregon, in June of 1994. They’d run home to Olympia with their tails between their legs, and he wanted badly to erase that humiliating memory.

Five months later shortly after Thanksgiving scott had told Steve that they were going to hit Portland again. Scott figured the Ford Aerostar would be good for one more robbery but not in Seattle. It was described on wanted bulletins there. Scott would drive it to Portland, and Steve would drive his car. Scott thought that the Ford minivan would probably have to be left behind, like an old horse, it had served its purpose.
 
They hit the U. S. Bank, the Woodstock branch, in Portland on December 20, 1994.

Although this trip to Oregon was more successful than the one in June, it was not a complete triumph. They didn’t get much money not by Scott’s standards. Scott didn’t get into the vault, and when he left the bank, somebody followed him out and got the license plate number.

It wasn’t registered to Scott, but it would soon be broadcast over police channels. Scott had to jettison the Aerostar sooner than he’d planned, and he left it behind an apartment complex in Portland. They drove home in Steve’s car.

Scott was in a lousy mood, frustrated and angry. A 200 mile round trip was a long way to go to get only $22,000, hardly enough for Christmas shopping not to mention the stake he needed to carry him over the next six months or so. He gave Steve ten percent of the take. Steve found himself trying to cheer Scott up and he stayed on with Scott in Olympia.
 
On weekends, he flew to Reno to launder the Portland money.