The End of the Dream (32 page)

Upon leaving the bank, it appears he may walk a block or more before entering his getaway vehicle. Officers should use caution as “Hollywood” may have one or more accomplices acting as lookouts.

There is little information as to what kind of threat they may pose.

.

.. “Hollywood” is believed to use older model station wagons in the commission of the robberies and switch to vehicles with possible tinted windows. Two nonrecovered vehicles of interest are, 1 ) 1980’s Blue Ford Aerostar, and 2) 1980’s Gray Chevrolet Blazer. Concept of Operation, The Seattle Police Department will assign members of the Special Patrol Unit, and when available, members of the FBI and SPD Robbery Unit to monitor area banks. These members will work within the city limits of Seattle in two to four unit teams. Upon notification of any bank robbery or robbery in progress, these units will respond and work with marked patrol units to increase the probability of suspect apprehension. All members of the Hollywood Detail will have police identification with them which will be visible during a response.

The last directive was desperately important. There would be so many lawmen responding to the next robbery that one of them could be mistaken for one of the bank robbersunless they all wore blue “Police” raid jackets. If plainclothes officers raced to a suspected Hollywood robbery, they were instructed to have blue bubble lights, to put on raid jackets and plainly display their badges. Every one expected there would be gunfire and they sure didn’t want any of the “good guys” shooting each other. Suspects may possess large caliber weapons including shotguns, hunting rifles, and military style rifles. These afford the suspect greater fields of fire, and superior penetration to a handgun. A rifle round will easily penetrate a patrol car door.

Remember to stay behind cover whenever possible when confronting a

possible suspect.. .. Beginning in August 1996, task force members began

staking out banks in the Madison Park and Northeast Seattle

neighborhoods on the last three workdays of the week, Zone 1

(considered most likely) was the Wedgwood/Roosevelt area, Zone 2

(considered less likely) was Madison Park, and Zone 3

(considered least likely) was West Seattle. On Wednesday, the stakeouts would be manned by the Puget Sound Violent Crimes Task Force members and Seattle Robbery Unit detectives. On Thursday, the Special Seattle Police Patrol (Tact Squad) would sit on the banks, and on Friday, it would be the FBI’s Special Operations Group (SOG). Someone would be watching likely target banks between 9,30 in the morning and 1:00 P. M. The memorandum warned that the men and women who were about to begin a six-month all-out campaign to trap Hollywood must never attempt an arrest without backup.

They would be out there rain or shine until February 1997 or until they caught Hollywood. For hours, officers sat in their cars observing customers go in and out of a long list of neighborhood banks. Any cop who has ever participated in a stakeout will verify that they are not pleasant. In the winter, it’s cold, in the summer, suffocatingly hot.

Joints and muscles ache, and eyes blur from looking for something and seeing nothing. Cops get thirsty and hungry and their bladders come close to bursting.

Despite the best efforts of dozens of lawenforcement personnel throughout August and September 1996, the long stakeouts ended in disappointment. Nothing happened School started, maples and alders turned from green to gold, and stores put out their Halloween merchandise. As far as those on stakeouts could tell, the Hollywood gang wasn’t even casing banks. They didn’t see the vans they’d been told to watch for. That didn’t mean much, however. Nobody could be sure what he was driving now. Mike Magan’s dad, Frank, was worried.

He was an old cop himself and he understood how consumed Mike was with catching this bank robber.

But he looked at his younger son and warned, “There’ll be shots fired when you find him, Mike.” Magan tried to reassure his father, he had no intention of going after the guy by himself, the way they had it figured, there would be cops all over the place when they finally caught up with him. “They’re the best in the West, Dad, “ Mike said.

“We’ve got the most highly trained SWAT team. They’re highly motivated and they’re always there for us.” Without telling his parents, Mike Magan began to train for a confrontation he believed was inevitable.

Some day or some nighthe knew in his bones that he was going to face Hollywood eyeball to eyeball, and he planned to be ready. He spent more time at the firing range, focusing on MP5 submachine guns and all 15 rifles. He spent hours practicing pursuit driving and felony take-downs.
 
He ran three nights a week, if he ever found himself in a chase with Hollywood who was obviously a trained athlete Mike didn’t want to lose him because he was out of shape. He kept telling himself, It Hollywood’s as
 
disciplined as Gebo says, then I’ll have to be twice as disciplined. He went over possible situations and what his reaction should be so many times that his response would be automatic.

“Every step Hollywood took, “ Mike recalled, “I would take two. If he went straight, I’d go diagonal. In a car chase, I’d find a way to cut him off. I knew that, one day, I was going to catch up with him.” Still a good Catholic boy, Mike prayed every day that he would catch Hollywood.

He also prayed that no one would get hurt while he accomplished that.

Mike Magan’s thirty-fourth birthday was on September 21, 1996 the first day of fall. He blew out all the candles on his cake and made a silent wish. On the way home, his wife Lisa looked at him and said, “I know what you wished for.”

“What? “

“To catch Hollywood.”

“How did you know? “ he asked, surprised.

“I know you.” She was a little frightened for him, although she never said so out loud. He had assured her dozens of times that, whatever happened, he would have plenty of backup. The Puget Sound Violent Crimes Task Force was getting more help than they ever imagined. The men and women sitting on bank stakeouts began to recognize faces those that belonged there, those that seemed strange or different even if no one had yet spotted Hollywood.

The King County Police’s air support unit, Guardian One, with Steve Kometz and Randy Shoutk aboard, worked with Mike Magan to improve communication among and between the units who would most likely respond to the scene of the next bank robbery. They would work off the Tact Squad’s channels and a few others and try to keep police communication scrambled before it reached Hollywood’s scanner. Mike contacted a ham radio genius known as “Rich the Glitch” and showed him a photo of Hollywood, pointing to the radio clipped to his belt. “You recognize that? “ he asked. “How do I intercept the communication between Hollywood and the guy he’s talking to on the outside? “ he asked.

“They’re probably on a UHF Itinerant Frequency, “ the Glitch said.

“I’ll hook up an antenna and a scanner in your caryou’ll be able to hear them if you’re in the area, too.” That, of course, would have been a dream come true. But, in reality, what Mike heard on the frequency was small talk, people on cordless phones discussing their ailments and symptoms, their boyfriends, their pets, their in-laws and recipes.
 
Before long, he wished he’d never heard of that frequency.

The Wedgwood area was totally familiar to Magan, he’d grown up there and he’d worked there. Now, he made it a high priority to get to know the bank employees in the area. Some of them had already met Hollywood, and he was afraid that more of them would meet him in the future. He told them that he was always available if they had thoughts about who the elusive robber might be, or if they saw something that didn’t seem quite right.

Something didn’t seem quite right one day in one of the Wedgwood banks on NE Eighty-fifth and Thirty-fifth NE when Magan stopped in to talk to the employees. A candidate for All-Time Loser of the Year, (bank robbery category) came in. A woman robbed the bank while Mike was standing there, and as he chased her down the street, a dye pack exploded. He got a good look at her, and even though he lost her in some thick shrubbery and a cloud of dye, she was stained bright red.

She was arrested soon afterward and charged with two bank robberies.

It wouldn’t be long before the autumn rains started hollywood’s favorite weather for bank robberies and everyone on the task force began to brace for the next robbery. Things had been too quiet for too long, and it made them all hinky. Whenever Mike Magan ran out of ideas, he went to more experienced lawmen for advice. His boss, a former task force supervisor, Ed Striedinger, was a great source of knowledge, as was Agent Don Glasser. Mike asked Glasser about his experience with other serial bank robbers, and he recalled a man the FBI had dubbed “The Shootist.” His MO was to enter a bank and fire a round into the ceiling which not only got everybody’s attention but scared them all witless.
 
The Shootist was colorful, but he made mistakes. He always drove an easily recognizable perfectly restored vintage red Alfa Romeo. At some point, he realized that he and his Alfa Romeo weren’t suited for surveillance, but he apparently couldn’t bring himself to give the car up so, Glasser recalled, he switched to observing banks at night. Still, he never came close to stealing as much money as Hollywood had. The Shootist was not a detail man, and that made him a third-rate bank robber. Glasser’s comments about The Shootist’s nighttime robberies gave Mike Magan an idea. Maybe Hollywood wasn’t doing daytime surveillance at all, maybe he prowled after dark. “Every Friday night, “ Mike remembered, “my partner, Sheila Bond, and I checked out the banks on the list. We looked in the windows after they were closed to see what someone could find out from outside. We discovered that often we could see the camera locations, the alarms, where people sat, and where they went in and out. If we could see it so could Hollywood. That meant he didn’t have to risk being seen during the day.” Mike went several steps further, he climbed up on bank roofs in the wee hours of the morning to see what he could tell from up there, fully expecting he might set off a bank alarm. He was always careful to wear his jacket with “POLICE” on the back. “I made noise no response. I shouted no response. When I got back to my car, I revved the engine no response, “ he said. “That told me that anyone wanting to hang around a bank at night would have free rein. Nobody in the neighborhoods called 911 or came out to see what was happening.

“One night at 2 A. M. , I dragged a couple of guys with me and probably annoyed the neighbors, “ Mike recalled. “We aimed our headlights in different directions, looking at the reflections of lights in the bank windows. Looking for angles, clear shots of what
 
you could see behind the teller counters, the alarm positions. What was he seeing?

Maybe I even had a glimmer of hope that we’d see a suspicious car his car parked close.” They never did. One night, Mike drove to all the banks that had been robbedall fourteen. “Why was he hitting them? I began to look at manpower allocation, possible escape routes. And, again and again, I kept asking myself, What are we missing? “ Sheila Bond was a former New York Police Department officer but she had switched to the DEA, and she represented that agency when she joined the violent crimes task force in the spring of 1996. She came on initially as a tough-talking, no-nonsense officer with an East Coast accent. She was all of those things, but she was also one of the best partners Mike Magan would ever have. Like everyone else on the task force, she had an opinion of who Hollywood was.

Mike thought he was a cop, Sheila thought he was probably ex-military.

“No, Sheila, “ Mike argued with her. “If he was exmilitary, he’d have a 9-mm Beretta. And you can see in the bank photos that he’s carrying a Glock. We all carry Glocks.” Like Shawn Johnson and the rest of the task force, Mike and Sheila were well aware that they were looking for a very special criminal.

“Ninety-five percent of the people we arrest are dopers, “ Magan said.

“The other five percent are thrill seekers, gamblers, professionals, or people who act out of sheer desperation.

Hollywood was in that minute one percent of professionals. He kept reinvesting in himself, buying cars, making sure those cars were up to snuff with new tires and batteries, full gas tanks, oil changes. They were clean as a hound’s tooth when we found them.

He bought the clothing he liked those trademark Converse shoes. He had good weaponry and expensive Motorola radios.” Sheila Bond and Mike Magan were only required to work stakeouts one day a week, but they decided that they would sit on all the banks they could, whether they were scheduled to or not. They even discovered a few banks hidden away in quiet spots that weren’t on the lists of “most likely to appeal to Hollywood and Company.” Mike noticed that certain banks tended to close their blinds during the day when the sun hit the windows. That would effectively render whatever might be happening inside invisible from the street, a bank robber could be confident that he wouldn’t be observed.
 
Magan had established such a close liaison with his banks that all he had to do was call them and say, “Open your blinds! “ Eventually, the bank employees in his stakeout sector were so convinced of the importance of open blinds that Mike told detectives to call him if they ever saw a bank with its blinds closed. That would mean trouble inside.
 
Although no one had so much as glimpsed Hollywood since May, there were other criminals out there, plenty of them.

And they got caught, too. The surveillance teams caught a number of bank robbers, including two men who had accosted a bank manager at home and forced him to drive to his bank. Kevin Aratani and Mike Magan tracked them down and arrested them in Bellevue, a suburb on the other side of Seattle’s floating bridges. But these bank robbers had nothing whatsoever to do with Hollywood. Just in case Hollywood was a rogue cop, the specifics of the massive dragnet and surveillance schedule were still a secret to most Seattle police officers. Magan didn’t even tell his longtime bike patrol partner, Chris Gough, what was going on. Chris called him one day and said, “There’s an FBI stakeout in the neighborhood.