Armed Robbery
"The more people that I control, the better I like it. Of course, the people I was doing these robberies with began to think that I was a little bit of a bug," said David. He spent the early years of his criminal career specializing in armed robbery of fast-food chains, pharmacies, and convenience stores. David's smooth, boyish face belies his age. Although he's in his mid-thirties, he still looks like the teenager who pulled off all those jobs at age seventeen. He's a smart man. The few times he's been out of prison in the last twenty years, David's done very well for himself, performing computer research, designing security systems for the same sorts of businesses he used to rob, even establishing a charity organization. But things always get a little out of control, because of drugs, or failed marriages, or money problems. He goes back to stealing, and almost inevitably ends up returning to prison.
"If I had six people that I knew I had to control in there, and there's two of us going in, my partners would consider that risky. Me, I didn't see the risk factor. I got the gun. I don't care if there's sixty people in there. They'll do what they're told, if I've got this gun on them. Of course, then you get into the fact that one of them might be a cop, but nobody could tell me anything when I was younger. I thought anybody who did this would get the same charge out of it as I did, but that's not true. What some of them got was just scared. But because I was relatively good at planning the jobs, they either did what I wanted to do, or they went somewhere else."
For David, that sense of being in control, the psychological aspects. of being able to make other people do exactly what he wanted them to do, was perhaps more important than the money. His incredible bravado actually saved him from being locked up for life right from the start. When he was caught and put on trial for three of the numerous robberies he tells about here, he was facing a life sentence on each charge. The best plea agreement his lawyer could get was one life sentence instead of three. The witnesses were all lined up, including some of his former "friends," who knew exactly what he'd been up to.
"One time, I went into a 7-Eleven, and I bought one of those plastic toy guns, and a bottle of black Testors model paint. Painted the gun flat black. It's not even a cap gun. If you pulled back the hammer on it to try to impress somebody, there's a big spring on it, but instead of clanking, it clicks. If you look down the barrel; there's a bar across the end from where it was molded. You can see the seam. If you look down the barrel of a real loaded revolver, you can see the points of the bullets in the cylinder. In my toy gun, the cylinder is solid across the front. Just to see if on voice and eye contact alone I could get away with it, I went into one of the places I held up, and used this gun.
"Now the guy looked at the gun, and he looked back at me, and he looked at the gun again. He put the money in the bag, and I left.
"When we got to court, this assistant manager is up on the witness stand, and things are really looking bad. They've got two or three guns that they found when they arrested me.
The prosecutor asked, 'What kind of gun did he, use?'
"'To tell you the truth,' the assistant manager says. 'I thought it was a toy gun.' The prosecutor come up out of his pad of paper, and he said, 'Pardon me? You thought it was what? Why did you think it was a toy gun?'
"He describes all this stuff that I just said about how he couldn't see the bullets, and it was flat across the front, and it looked like there was a molding in the middle of the barrel. 'If you really thought it was a toy gun, why did you give him the money?'
"'We're told to by management,' he said.
"The judge stopped the trial and sent the jury out of the room. He told the prosecutor, 'You realize that we don't have an armed robbery here.' They have a charge in that state called common law robbery. It only carries fifteen years. On the other two cases, they hadn't talked to the people about what kind of gun I was using. It's not the same situation with the other people. It was a .45, and it definitely wasn't a toy. But they don't know that.
They have this big conference while my lawyer and I are still sitting there, and they say, 'Fifteen years, we're talking all three robberies, running concurrently with your other sentence.'
"'Where do I sign?' I said."
What I found strange about David's story is that he claims that he is not a violent criminal. If any of his victims had just said, "No," David says he would have had no alternative but to walk away. Many of the other people I talked to who had used deadly weapons in the commission of their crimes said that just because they held a pistol or a shotgun or a knife on their victims they had been found guilty of violent crimes, but they'd never killed anybody, never intended to. Nobody even got hurt. What's the big deal?
I keep thinking about the humiliation of the store owner who urinates down his pants leg out of pure fear when that gun is stuck in his face, the teenage counter clerks in a fast-food joint who are literally shaking in their shoes, the drugstore cashier who quits her job because after a robbery she's uncontrollably afraid to go out at night. The last robbery David describes in these pages was broken up by pure chance. If the man who faced David's gun sometimes bolts awake at night dreaming about being shot dead, I wonder whether he thinks of David as a violent man.
I'd been living three or four days in this duplex with this girl I'd met. On the right side of the house, there's two couples, and this girl and me are staying on the other side. She comes out of the back bedroom, sniffing and carrying on. I asked, "What are you doing?"
"Oh, nothing."
"Bullshit. What are you doing?"
"A little heroin." So I tell her to go get the heroin. When she brings it out, it's gray. There's brown heroin, white heroin, and there's white heroin with brown specks in it, depending on how they refine it. The closer it is to being pure white, the closer it is to being pure. But gray had nothing to do with heroin. Gray's the cut. Gray is quinine, but usually they'll put enough real thing with it to make it look a little white. But this is cigarette-ash gray. I say, "What is this? You sure this is heroin?"
"If you don't want any, don't do it. The guy next door gives it to me." That's bullshit, too. People don't give heroin away. That told me what was happening with her and the guy next door. But all I'm thinking about is making some money. So I said, "How about you go get him. Let me talk to this guy a minute. Ask him if he's got a syringe."
So he comes over. He's a seventeen-year-old kid. At the time, I'm not even seventeen, but there was a difference. He'd just moved out of his house five months ago. He's been living with Mom and Dad. There is such a difference in attitude that you would have suspected a ten year difference in our ages. Because of the situation with him and the girl, he's intimidated before he even saw me, which didn't have anything to do with me. It was in his head. It helped things, though.
We get to talking about the heroin. I said, "What are you doing with this?"
"I'm selling it." He had two spoons, and I asked him how much he made out of a spoon.
"Twenty dime bags."
Okay. I make dime bags out of the two spoons that he had there, so I got forty. Then I got this little piece that she had left, and I throw it in, so it should be bigger than what he had. I throw it off in the cooker and shoot it. I'm clean as a whistle. Nothing. I said, "You're selling this? Man, you're full of shit. Somebody'll kill you."
"Naw, man."
"What are they buying?"
"They're buying ten packs." I threw three more off in the spoon. I haven't clicked to the quinine yet, but I start to itch. That doesn't come from heroin either-it comes from the quinine. I said, "Man, you can't sell this stuff. You can't."
"Yeah, I can, too."
"Show me," and I bag it up. He takes me down to a place called The Saloon. You can't buy liquor in the place, so you bring it in, and they'll sell you mixers for two dollars apiece, and you can buy beer and wine. Today, it would be called a video arcade, but then it was pinball machines. He walked in there and was swarmed. The dope was gone in a matter of a minute. He had a couple of people mad at him because he didn't save them some. I've seen some real heroin, and I know this ain't it. I'm going, "What in the hell are these people doing up here?" I'm thinking dollar signs. So I call a friend of mine that by this time is in South Florida, and find out that he's still doing his thing, and how much it will cost me. I say, "I want to buy two ounces."
"Okay, when?"
"I can be down there in three days." "Okay.'
I don't have any money. The place I'm living doesn't have a phone, so I made the phone call on the way back. When I get out of the phone booth, I get back in the car and ask the kid, "You don't by any chance have a pistol, do you?"
"I've got two or three of them." "I'd sure like to borrow one."
"Oh, man, I got a .45 I took for two bags of coke last week. You can have it." Out of all the guns that I'd had along the way, that was a favorite of mine. It was a psychological thing. Didn't matter if there was bullets in the gun. It was how much intimidation went into that chi-ching when you throw the slide on a .45. It's always impressive to whoever you're trying to impress. We go back to the house, and he brings me over the .45. I throw a clip in it. The girl's sitting there. She picks the gun up off the coffee table and says, "What are you doin?”
"I got to go make some money."
"We're not hurting. You don't need to do anything. I got a little money.”
"Yeah, I need to do something. I got some business to take care of." She doesn't know that I made the phone call. It ain't none of her business.
"I'm going to go with you," she says.
“No, you’re not.”
"Listen," she says. "My last old man is up in the joint in Raleigh right now. He left to go do a job, and I didn't even hear from him for two years. I didn't know if he was alive or dead. I'm not going out like that. I love you. So if you're going, I'm going with you." Then she jacked a round in the pistol and said, "Or I'll kill you right now, and we won't have to worry about it anymore."
I really didn't think that she would kill me, but the reality of the situation was that if she had that much heart, then this took care of the partner problem. I was going to use the kid next door.
We went back to the old reliable. Went and hit a McDonald's that night. I got eight thousand dollars, but five grand of that is going into the job, and I have to have a vehicle of my own. So I decided that I had to do another one the next night.
Bought a motorcycle. Rode to Florida. Bought two ounces of heroin. Ride it back. Cut the heroin. Go make a transaction with the guy who was selling the dope to the kid. He don't do dope. He has a girlfriend who's strung out, so he has her try it. I made her cut back on what she was going to shoot. She tries the heroin, falls out. I'm making the deal with the guy, and by that time she comes back around, she's telling him, "Don't do it! Don't do it! It's not heroin!" He thinks I'm selling him Dilaudid or something.
"What do you mean?" I said. She didn't itch. She was so naive about heroin that she thought that was part of the problem. I didn't have any quinine. You don't just walk up and buy that in a supermarket. I had cut this with lactose, milk sugar, but at least it's white. He arranged to get quinine for any future purchases.
But something had happened to me. I got strung back out on the robbery by going and doing the two McDonald's. I could have made a fortune just bussing in the heroin.
I got a pocket full of money, got my own vehicle, and I'm feeling pretty good about things. But it wasn't two days later me and this girl go and case out a big national chain drugstore. This was a little girl, too. She couldn't handle a shotgun or any weapon that big. I got her an "over and under" .410 and sawed it off. A .410 with bird shot doesn't have hardly any kick to it at all, but it was still an impressive gun to look down the barrel at.
It's winter time. I was wearing an army field jacket. She had this leather coat that she wore. We go into the front of the store with ski masks rolled up like regular toboggan hats. Once everybody was between us and the back of the store, and nobody can get out the door, we'd pull the ski masks down. Throw down on the people, take the cashiers and everybody to the back. I've got control of them.
The girls who worked there wore these little blue smocks. Once everybody was down behind the counter where they couldn't see her, she would take one of these girls' smocks and put it on. Take off the ski mask, shake her hair out, and go to the cash register up front. She'd empty the cash register. The gun is under the counter. If anybody came in, she's between them and the door. She can throw down on them and bring them back to me. I've got everybody lying on the floor back in the pharmacy department, and the pharmacist is cleaning out his cash register for me and handing over all the narcotics. Then we just walk out of the place, get in the car and drive away.
That was no problem for eight or nine serious robberies. We had one of them old-timey steamer trunks that have the tray in the top of it. Pharmaceutical bottles have numbers on them that are registered. From that number you can tell where that bottle came from.
We'd throw all the bottles away, count the pills out in plastic baggies of a hundred, seal them, and throw them into the bottom of the steamer trunk. It looked like a rainbow when you opened it-Tuinals, reds, yellows, Seconals, the whole shebang from Dilaudids down to Valium, and everything in between. We're also averaging about thirtyfive hundred dollars in cash each job. I'm doing the jobs because they're fun. I don't need the drugs. Got drugs coming out my ears. After about the fourth job, we're paying the rent on both sides of the duplex. We're supporting everybody's drug habit there, and everybody is strung out. The ones, fives, and tens in cash had gotten to where they were in the way. We had them in paper bags in the kitchen cabinets on one side of the duplex. Anybody that wanted any was welcome to it. There was five vehicles other than my bike, and the keys were on a key ring inside the door-help yourself. Want to go shopping? Let's go to the mall. Drop two thousand dollars on clothes. It was nothing to walk in a record shop and drop two hundred dollars.
For me, the robberies had become as much of an addiction at that point as the drugs had become, maybe even more so. The drugs are what kept me sane until the next time I had something planned to go to work.
We had a job that went bad. Matter of fact, it went real bad. This girl and I had hit everyone of these drugstores in the three-county area except this one.
This one was set up a little differently. Instead of having a double set of doors in the front, it was on the corner of a shopping center, and it had doors in the front and doors on the side. You couldn't see the one set of doors from the other, because of the counter running through the store. We hit this store about four-thirty in the afternoon, same as we'd been doing the rest of them. She was up front.
An off-duty cop came in the side doors, and she couldn't see him. He came to pick up a prescription that had been called in. The first thing we knew about him being there was he had thrown down on me, talking about "drop it." I had six or seven people on the floor. I am about to be caught in this robbery. They're going to pin the rest of them on me. Still, there's no way I can bring my gun to bear on the cop. I don't know what's happened up front, but I know he's there behind me.
You know those big round mirrors they have in the ceiling? She had seen him move in. Without putting her mask back. on, she walked up behind him, and just let go--shot him. Didn't say anything to me. Didn't say anything to him. Just shot him in the small of, the back. If there had been anything besides bird shot in that gun, robberies wouldn't have been fun no more. It was real serious.
Literally scared the piss out of me. He fell into me, and we both went down. The pharmacist was standing there looking straight at her. We get away.
From right then, we left the drugstores alone. Three or four weeks things calm down. The cop didn't die, but the drug chain had a reward out. Lots of things were okay, but things were bad enough. So I got a little more into dealing with the heroin thing that I had been coming to Florida fm. I made a trip down to see the guy in South Florida. I'm supposed to be gone two days. I get there, and the guy is gone to Texas. He's stuck waiting on somebody there, so I'm stuck waiting in Florida.
The people in the duplex are without dope. While I'm gone, they try to collect this fifteen-hundred-dollar reward that the drugstore's got out-information leading to, etc. These are the same people I spent the last seven months with. The old lady is up there, but she don't know nothing about what's going on.
When I get back, the cops were waiting on me. The police throw down and get me with the heroin, although they didn't arrest me for that, and about two weeks later it showed up in a sergeant's locker in the police station.
They arrest me and my old lady, but they only have evidence on a couple little jobs I did on my own. My bond is fifteen thousand dollars. Don't have any cash--the cash was in the heroin. But I've got plenty of drugs at this house. I'm calling bondsmen, "I need you to work with me, here." I finally get this one guy to talk to me. I said, "Listen" I've got a steamer trunk full of drugs. It's not money right now, but it can be money real fast."
"Your old lady's in here too, huh?" "Yeah."
"You need to go over there?" "Yeah."
"You mess with me now, I'm going to shoot you."
After he made my bond, he gets me in his car. He's got a V-bolt through the floorboard. He ran a chain through a pair of handcuffs and locked me to the V-bolt.
We get out to the house, and there is nothing there. The place is totally empty. The furniture is gone, the stereo is gone, the vehicles are gone, and, of course, the drugs are gone. The ones who ratted us out couldn't get the reward money without coming to court and testifying or us making a plea agreement. Since neither of those things happened, they just wiped us out.
The bondsman is looking at me, and he said, "I don't know what I'm going to do with you. What do you think I ought to do with you? You had those drugs here though, didn't you? If you had that much drugs, you're the one doing all those drugstore robberies.
“How’d you guess?” He took the handcuffs off me. "You got any guns?" "No, they got the guns when they busted me."
"Okay." He reaches into his glove box and pulled out a .38 and a box of shells. He said,
"Go get my money."
"What about my old lady?"
"After I get my money, then you can have your old lady. I don't figure you're going anywhere while she's locked up."
"Man, this isn't a realistic situation. I need a partner. I need a vehicle."
"If I leave you here, can you get to a phone in about an hour?
Then let me check with somebody."
I call him an hour later, and he's got somebody else who also needs to make some money, and this guy can get a car for us. Do a job the next morning with this total stranger. The guy teed me off. He slapped a guy in the mouth with his pistol. "Come on, come on, man, let's get out of here." It was uncalled for, plus it's another charge. We got away from that, and I slapped him with my gun. Up till this time, I've done a lot of robberies, and I've hurt no one. At no point have I intended to hurt anyone. It was real simple. The stuff is in a safe. You've got to give it to me. If you don't give it to me, if you say no and you're adamant about it, I'm going to leave. These were open stores in the daytime. If I pull the trigger on this gun, I've got to go. It doesn't accomplish what I came here for. So the deal is just my head against your head, only thing is, I got this little equalizer here, this machine for convincing people.
I have to do two jobs to clear fifteen thousand dollars, because he wants my full bond, not the percentage. I took him the money the next day, an9. I said, "How about my oId lady?"
"It's time for you to go," he said. "The pharmacist from when the cop was shot identified your girlfriend. They want her to testify against you. She's a young girl. I figure she'll do it. There's no bond for her now, so you can't get her out."
Me and this guy I'd hooked up with did a few more little things, one of which was a Pizza Hut-a waste of time, nine hundred dollars on a Friday night. I hired a lawyer for my girlfriend, put some money in an account for her through the bondsman. I split.
From the robberies we just did, I got plenty of drugs and plenty of money. I've got this guy's girlfriend's car, her, and him. I figure I'll take my money down to Florida and see about getting out of the country. And I also decide now that nothing is happening, this is the time for me to do some serious drugs. I stay almost unconscious during the whole drive down.
At a mall, somewhere in North Florida, I had bought a new pair of jeans that didn't have any back pockets, so my wallet is on the dashboard of the car. I got a roll of bills in my front pocket. By this time, I'm not going anywhere without a gun, so I had a small pistol in my pocket as well. Back when I had been stuck in Florida for a couple of days when I got snitched on, I had wrecked the motorcycle, and got road burn on the top of my foot where the concrete had ground through my boot. Every time I put my shoes off and on, it's tearing the scab off. Even shot full of dope, it hurt when I put my boots on.
I went into a pharmacy in a little town on the Interstate, and picked up a small bottle of
Vaseline, and a roll of gauze, and some of those little white pads for a bandage. When I went up front to pay for it, the pharmacist called me to the back, "Sir, would you mind coming back here? She's doing inventory up there."
I'd been shooting Dilaudids, so I'm having trouble keeping out of the nod. I'm moving my head up and down to keep my eyes open. So I climb the three little steps up to the pharmacist's counter and push the half door open. I'm leaning against the post. The guy says, "That'll be $2.98." I went into my pocket, and the pistol was on top of the money. The jeans were just tight enough, and the truth of the matter is I didn't think about not pulling the gun out of my pocket. I took the gun out and put it in my left hand, and put my right hand back in my pocket to get the money. What brought me out of the nod was this big intake of breath from the pharmacist. I look up, and he's got his hands in the air. I forgot what I was doing and told him, "Give me the Class As and Twos and Threes." I threw down on him.
About halfway through while he's getting this stuff, this little girl, I guess it was his daughter, acts like I'm not even there, and she's just going to shoulder me out of the way and go about her business. I pushed her back with the gun, and he just freaked out, "Oh, God! Oh, my God!"
I didn't have control of the situation. That's what triggered me. All of a sudden in my head I said, "What am I doing here? If I want to do this, my ski mask is in the car. I have a green jumpsuit in the car. The guy I've been robbing with is in the car. I could do this right."
I never had people freak out on me before. I always had control with that pistol, with the voice, and eye contact. That was it. They lost it, and then I lost it. I didn't take anything.
"Excuse me, I think I'm in the wrong place." And I left. The police chased us two blocks. When we made the first turn, I got the guns out of the vehicle, which was the difference between life and a maximum of fifteen years. We'd left the girl in a hotel room. She takes the drugs and what money she has, and she's out of there. This guy knows too much about too many other robberies that he can tell on, and he doesn't know anything about this dumb move I just made. I'm dead and busted on this anyway. So I figure, let me cut him loose. I wrote a statement taking the whole rap, and got him out of there.
I tried twice to escape from the county jail while I was there.
Sprained an ankle running from the courtroom and going down four flights of stairs. The second time, we were cutting the bars, and the people in the cell next door told on us before we got the bars all the way out."