This is Robert Redford's last time as an actor after this movie he has gone on to state he is retiring from acting. But this does not mean in the meantime he can't produce, write or even direct a movie. This is a somewhat true story of the convict Forrest Tucker If you don't know Forrest, let's break it down here.
Forrest Silva Tucker was born June 23, 1920 in
Miami, Florida, to Leroy Morgan Tucker (1890–1938) and Carmen Tucker (
née Silva; 1898–1964).
[3] Leroy Tucker, a heavy-equipment operator, left the family when Forrest was six years old. Forrest was raised in
Stuart, Florida
by his grandmother Ellen Silva (née Morgan). His first escape from
detention happened in the spring of 1936, after he was incarcerated for
car theft.
[4]
Tucker married three times and had two children, a boy and a
girl; none of his wives knew of his criminal career until they were
informed by police. This is the very Interview Tucker had with David Grann, the writer of Forrest's true life story.
Not long
ago, I went to meet Tucker in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was being
held in a prison medical center after pleading guilty to one count of
robbery and receiving a thirteen-year sentence. The hospital, an old
yellow brick building with a red tiled roof, was on top of a hill and
set back off the main road, surrounded by armed guards and razor wire. I
was handed a notice that said no “weapons,” “ammunition,” or “metal
cutting tools” were allowed, and then escorted through a series of
chambers—each door sealing behind us before the next one opened—until I
arrived in an empty waiting room.
Before long, a man appeared in a
wheelchair pushed by a guard. He wore brown prison fatigues and a green
jacket with a turned-up collar. His figure was twisted forward, as if
he had tried to contort it one last time and it had frozen in place. As
he rose from
the wheelchair, he said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Forrest Tucker.”
His
voice was gentle, with a soft Southern lilt. After he extended his
hand, he made his way slowly over to a wooden table with the help of a
walker. “I’m sorry we have to meet here,” he said, waiting for me to sit
first.
Captain Chinn had told me that he had never met such a
gracious criminal: “If you see him, tell him Captain Chinn says hi.”
Even a juror who helped convict him once remarked, “You got to hand it
to the guy—he’s got style.”
“So what do you want to know?” Tucker
said. “I’ve been in prison all my life, except for the times I’ve broken
out. I was born in 1920, and I was in jail by the time I was fifteen.
I’m eighty-one now and I’m still in jail, but I’ve broken out eighteen
times successfully and twelve times unsuccessfully. There were plenty of
other times I planned to escape, but there’s no point in me telling you
about them.”
As we sat in a corner by a window overlooking the
prison yard, it was hard to imagine that this man’s career had featured
wanted posters and midnight escapes. His fingers were knotted like
bamboo, and he wore bifocals.
“What I mean by a successful escape
is to elude custody,” he continued, squinting out the window. “Maybe
they’d eventually get me, but I got away at least for a few minutes.”
He
pointed to the places along his arm where he had been shot while trying
to flee. “I still have part of a bullet in me,” he said. “They all
opened up on me and hit me three times—in both shoulders with M16
rifles, and with buckshot in the legs.”
His voice sounded dry, and
I offered to buy him a drink from the vending machine. He followed me
and peered through the glass, without touching it. He chose a Dr Pepper.
“That’s kind of like cherry soda, isn’t it?”
He seemed pleased.
When I gave him the drink, he glanced at the candy bars, and I asked him
if he wanted anything else. “If it’s not too much trouble,” he said,
“I’d like a Mounds.”
After he finished eating, he began to tell me
what he called “the true story of Forrest Tucker.” He spoke for hours,
and when he grew tired he offered to continue the next morning. During
our conversations, which went on for sev-eral days, we always sat in the
corner by the window, and after a while he would cough slightly and I
would offer to buy him a drink. Each time, he followed me to the
machine, as the guard watched from a distance. It was only during the
last trip to the machine, when I dropped some money, that I noticed his
eyes were moving over everything—the walls, the windows, the guard, the
fences, the razor wire. It occurred to me that Tucker, escape artist par
excellence, had been using our meetings to case the joint.
“The first time I broke out of the can I was only fifteen,” Tucker told me. “At fifteen, you’re pretty fast.”
It
was the spring of 1936, and he had been incarcerated for stealing a car
in Stuart, Florida, a small town along the St. Lucie River which had
been devastated during the Depression. He told the police that he took
it “just for a thrill,” but as he sat in jail the thrill gave way to
panic, and when a jailer removed his chains he darted out. Several days
later, a deputy discovered him in an orange grove, eating a piece of
fruit. “That was escape No. 1,” Tucker says. “Such as it was.”
The
sheriff decided to transfer him to reform school. During his brief
flight, however, Tucker had slipped a half-dozen hacksaw blades through
the cell window to a group of boys he had met inside. “They hadn’t
broken out yet and still had the blades,” he says. That night, after
sawing a bar, he slithered out, helping two other boys squeeze through
the tiny opening.
Unlike the others, Tucker knew the area. As a
kid, he had spent a fair amount of time by the river, and it was in the
river that the police found him and another boy, about an hour later,
hiding with just their noses above water. The next day, the Stuart Daily News detailed his exploits under the headline “trio escape by sawing bars of cell last night . . . supplied with hack-saws, cold chisels and files by boy.”
“That was escape No. 2,” Tucker says. “A brief one.”
Like
the outlaws he read about in dime novels who were forced into banditry
by some perceived injustice, Tucker says that “the legend of Forrest
Tucker” began that morning when he was unfairly sent away for only a
minor theft. The story, which he repeated even as a boy, eventually
spread throughout the town, and over time the details became more
ornate, the theft more minor. Morris Walton, who used to play with
Tucker as a child, says, “My sense is he spent his life in jail for
stealing a bicycle and simply trying to escape. If he became bad, it was
only because the system made him that way.”
What Walton knew of Tucker’s upbringing reinforced
that impression. His father was a heavy-equipment operator who
disappeared when Tucker was six. While his mother struggled in menial
jobs in Miami, Tucker was sent to live with his grandmother, who was the
tender of the bridge in Stuart. There he built canoes and sailboats out
of scrap metal and wood, which he gathered along the riverbank, and
taught himself to play the saxophone and the clarinet. “It wasn’t like I
needed a father to order me around,” he says.
But as his
reputation for cleverness grew, so did his rap sheet. By his sixteenth
birthday, it included charges of “breaking and entering” and “simple
larceny.” After he escaped from reform school and fled to Georgia, he
was sentenced to “be placed and confined at labor in the chain gang.”
Like all new inmates, he was taken to the blacksmith, where a chain was
riveted around both of his ankles. The steel gradually ate into the
skin, a condition known as shackle poisoning.
“The guards would
give you the first three days to let you get your hands broken in with
calluses,” Tucker recalls. “But after that the walking boss would punish
you, hit you with his cane or fist. And if you didn’t work hard enough
the guards would take you in the bathroom and tie your hands behind your
back and put a pressure hose in your face and hold it there until you’d
sputter and you couldn’t breathe.”
Although Tucker was released
after only six months, he was soon convicted again, for stealing another
car, and sentenced to ten years. By now, “we see a man who has been
thoroughly cast out by society,” Tucker’s lawyer later wrote in a court
motion. “Marked as a criminal at seventeen years old and constantly
railroaded through judicial proceedings without the benefit of counsel,
Forrest Tucker was becoming an angry young man.” Tucker himself says,
“The die was cast.” In photographs taken after he was paroled at the age
of twenty-four, his hair is cut short and he has on a white T-shirt;
his once slender arms are coiled with muscles. His eyes are piercing.
People who knew him say that he was extraordinarily charismatic—that
girls flocked around him—but they also noted a growing reservoir of
anger. “I think he had this desperate need to show the world that he was
somebody,” one of his relatives says.
At first,
Tucker sought work playing the saxophone in big bands around Miami, and
he seemed to have harbored ambitions of becoming another Glenn Miller.
Nothing came of it, though, and, after a brief failed marriage, he put
away his sax and got himself a gun.
The
outlaw, in the American imagination, is a subject of romance—a “good”
bad man, he is typically a master of escape, a crack shot, a ladies’
man. In 1915, when the police asked the train robber Frank Ryan why he
did it, he replied, “Bad companions and dime novels. Jesse James was my
favorite hero.”
When Tucker was growing up, during the Great
Depression, the appeal of bank robbers, fuelled by widespread anger over
defaults and foreclosures, was reaching its zenith. After the F.B.I.
gunned down John Dillinger, in 1934, droves descended on the scene,
mopping up his blood with their clothes. At least ten Hollywood films
were devoted to Dillinger’s life; one of them exclaimed, “His Story Is
Written in Bullets, Blood and Blondes!”
Because the holdup demands
a public performance, it tends to draw a certain personality: bold,
vainglorious, reckless. At the same time, most bank robbers know that
the society that revels in their exploits will ultimately demand their
elimination, by incarceration or death. “They’ll get me,” Pretty Boy
Floyd once said. “Sooner or later, I’ll go down full of lead. That’s how
it will end.”
Indeed, by the time Tucker set out to become an
outlaw, in the late nineteen-forties, most of the legendary stickup men
had already been gunned down. Still, he began to imitate their style,
dressing in chalk-striped suits and two-tone shoes, and he would stand
in front of a mirror, pointing a gun at his own reflection. Finally, on
September 22, 1950, with a handkerchief tied over his face and a gun
drawn in the style of Jesse James, he strode into a bank in Miami and
made off with $1,278. A few days later, he went back to the same place,
this time for the entire safe. He was apprehended as he was trying to
crack it open with a blowtorch on the roadside.
His career seemed
even more fleeting than that of most bank robbers, but in the county
jail Tucker decided he was more than an ordinary stickup man. “It didn’t
matter to me if they gave me five years, ten years, or life,” he says.
“I was an escape artist.”
He searched the prison for what he
called “the weak spot.” One day around Christmas, after weeks of
looking, he began to moan in pain. The authorities rushed him to the
hospital, where doctors removed his appendix. (“A small price to pay,”
Tucker says.) While convalescing, still chained to his bed, he started
to work on the shackles. He had taught himself how to pick a lock using
almost anything—a pen, a paper clip, a piece of wire, nail clippers, a
watch spring—and after a few minutes he walked out, unnoticed.
He made
his way to California, where he went on a spree of robberies, hurtling
over counters, pointing his gun, and declaring, “I mean business!” He
wore bright checkered suits and sped away in a flamboyant getaway car
with tubes along the sides. He even talked like a character in pulp
fiction. “This is a stickup, girls,” he once said, according to
witnesses. “I’ve got a gun. Be quiet and you won’t get hurt.”
Hoping
to improve his take, Tucker began to cast about for a partner. “I
didn’t want any nuts or rats,” he says, adding, “I’m from the old
school.” In the end, he found an ex-con named Richard Bellew, a tall,
handsome thief with a high I.Q. and wavy black hair. Like Tucker, Bellew
modelled himself on the stickup men of the nineteen-thirties, and he
ran with a stage dancer named Jet Blanca. But Tucker chose him for
another reason: “He always let me count the dough.”
They began to
hit one bank after another. After one heist, witnesses said the last
thing they saw was a row of suits hanging in the back seat of the
getaway car. The heists, which continued for two years, dominated the
local headlines, often preëmpting coverage of the 1952 Presidential
election and the McCarthy hearings. Tucker and Bellew were depicted as
“armed men” who “terrorized” their “victims,” but also as “dramatically
attired” “hold-up artists” who “expertly stripped” the tellers of cash,
leaving behind “only an impression of competent banditry . . . and one
getaway car.”
On March 20, 1953, more than two years after
Tucker’s escape from the hospital, F.B.I. agents surrounded him as he
was retrieving loot from a safe-deposit box in San Francisco. Then they
went to search the place Tucker had listed as his residence. There, in a
spacious apartment in San Mateo, they found a young blond woman who
said she had never heard of Forrest Tucker. She was married to a wealthy
songwriter, she said, who commuted daily to the city, and they had just
moved into a bigger apartment to make room for their five-month-old
son. Her husband’s name, she told the police, was Richard Bellew. Yet
when the officers showed Shirley Bellew a photograph of the bank robber
and longtime prison fugitive Forrest Tucker, she burst into tears. “I
can’t believe it,” she said. “He was such a good man, such a good
provider.”
She recalled how her husband would come home every
night and play with their baby, whom they had named Rick Bellew, Jr.
“What’s going to become of our little baby?” she asked. “What’s his name
going to be?”
“Let
me tell you about Alcatraz,” Tucker said one day as he sat in the
corner of the visiting room, his walker resting against his leg. He had
spread a napkin out in front of him and was eating a meatball hero I’d
brought him and sipping a Dr Pepper. “There were only fifteen hundred
and seventy-six people who ever went there. I was No. 1047.”
Alcatraz,
or “the Rock,” had been converted from a military prison in 1934 as a
way to confine the country’s most notorious criminals, including George
(Machine Gun) Kelly, Robert Stroud (the Birdman of Alcatraz), and Mickey
Cohen. At least half of the inmates had previously attempted to break
out of other prisons. Surrounded by the freezing San Francisco Bay and
its deadly currents, it was built to be escapeproof. Al Capone, who was
sent there in 1934, is said to have told the warden, “It looks like
Alcatraz has got me licked.”
Tucker arrived on September 3, 1953.
He was thirty-three. He had been sentenced to thirty years. In his
prison photo, he still has on a jacket and tie; his brown hair is
brushed back with a touch of oil; he is slightly unshaved but still
striking. Within moments, he was stripped naked, and a medical attendant
probed his ears and nose and mouth and rectum, searching for any tools
or weapons. He was given a blue chambray shirt with his number stamped
on it and a pair of trousers, as well as a cap, a peacoat, a bathrobe,
three pairs of socks, two handkerchiefs, a pair of shoes, and a
raincoat. His cell was so narrow that he could reach out and touch both
sides at the same time. “It was so cold in the cellblock you had to
sleep with your coat and hat to stay warm,” Tucker says.
As he lay
in bed, he says, he thought about his wife and child. He remembered the
first time he met Shirley Storz, at an event for singles in Oakland. He
remembered how they skied at Lake Tahoe and were married in a small
ceremony in September of 1951, how she sang in a choral group, and how
he’d sit and listen for hours. And he remembered his son being born. “We
loved each other,” Tucker says of his wife. “I didn’t know how to
explain to her the truth—that this was my way of life.”
Several
weeks after he arrived, a guard roused him from his cell and led him
into a tiny room that had a small window. Peering through it, he saw his
wife sitting on the other side. He picked up the phone. “It was hard to
talk,” he recalls. “We had to look at each other through a
piece of glass. She told me she had to make a life for herself. I said,
‘The best thing you can do is make a life for you and our son.’ I told
her, ‘I won’t bother you no matter what, no matter how much I want to. I
won’t ring your phone.’ ” A few months later, he received notice that
their marriage had been annulled.
By now, Tucker had developed
several maxims, including “The more security, the more bizarre the
method of escape must be.” He began to concoct elaborate schemes with a
fellow-inmate named Teddy Green, an escape artist and bank robber who
had once dressed as a priest to elude the police and had broken out of
the state penitentiary by shipping himself out in a box of rags.
Along
with another inmate, they started smuggling tools from their prison
jobs, hiding them in the laundry, and planting pieces of steel wool on
other prisoners to set off the metal detectors, so that the guards
assumed they were broken. They carved holes in their toilet bowls and
tucked the tools inside, putting putty over them. At night, they used
the tools to tunnel through the floor, planning to go out by means of
the basement.
One day, according to internal prison records, a
prisoner in solitary suggested that guards examine the cell toilets;
soon a full-scale search was launched. A warden’s report summed up the
findings:
The result of the shakedown of these toilets
was the blow torch as I have mentioned, a bar spreader, a pair of side
cutters, a brace and some bits . . . a screwdriver and one or two pieces
of wire and a piece of carborundum stone.
All three prisoners were labelled “very dangerous escape risks” and locked in the Treatment Unit, better known as “the hole.”
“I
remember walking in with no clothes or shoes on,” Tucker says. “The
steel floor was so cold it hurt to touch it. The only way to stay warm
was to keep walking.” One night, he heard a haunting sound through the
window. He couldn’t see anyone outside, but he heard voices from below.
They were the guards’ children, singing carols. “It was the first
children’s voices I had heard in years,” he says. “It was Christmas
Eve.”
As
the time passed, Tucker began to teach himself the law, and before long
he was deluging the court with appeals, which he wrote in a slanting
methodical print. Although a prosecutor later dismissed one of his writs
as pure “fantasy,” he was granted a hearing in November of 1956.
According to Tucker, as well as court records, the night before his
court appearance, while being held in the county jail, he complained of
pains in his kidneys and was rushed to the hospital. Guards were
stationed at every door. When no one was looking, Tucker broke a pencil
and stabbed his ankle. Because of the wound, the guards removed his leg
irons, strapping him to the gurney with his hands cuffed. As he was
being wheeled into the X-ray room, Tucker leaped up, overpowered two
guards, and ran out the door. For several hours, he enjoyed the fresh
air and the sight of ordinary people. He was apprehended, still in his
hospital gown and handcuffs, in the middle of a cornfield.
The
brief escape, for which he was tried and convicted, enhanced his
reputation as an escape artist. Yet it was not for another twenty-three
years, after Tucker had been released and arrested again for armed
robbery, that he made his greatest escape. In the summer of 1979, while
at San Quentin, a maximum-security facility that jutted out into the
ocean and was known among cons as “the gladiator school,” Tucker took a
job in the prison industries and, with the help of two other inmates,
John Waller and William McGirk, secretly gathered together scraps of
wood and sheets of Formica, which they cut into strange shapes and hid
under tarps. From the electrical shop, they spirited away two six-foot
poles and several buckets. Then, in the furniture workshop, they found
the final pieces: plastic dustcovers, paint, and tape, which they stored
in boxes labelled “Office Supplies.”
On August 9th, after months
of preparation, Tucker exchanged nods with both of his confederates in
the yard, signalling that everything was ready. While Waller and McGirk
stood watch outside the lumber shop, Tucker drew on his childhood
experience and began to fashion the pieces into a fourteen-foot kayak.
“A hammer was too loud, so I had to use only tape and bolts,” Tucker
says. He had just enough paint for one side of the craft, the side that
would face the guard towers, and as the others urged him to hurry he
stencilled on it “Rub-a-Dub-Dub.” Waller, who called the
fifty-nine-year-old Tucker “the old man,” later told a reporter from the
Los Angeles
Times, “The boat was beautiful; I wish my eyes were as blue as that boat.”
They
wore sailor hats and sweatshirts that Tucker had painted bright orange,
with the logo of the Marin Yacht Club, which he had seen on the boats
that sailed by. When the guard wasn’t looking, they hurriedly put the
kayak into the water. As they set out, the winds were blowing more than
twenty miles an hour, and massive swells began to
swamp the kayak. “The boat didn’t leak a drop,” Waller said. “We could
have paddled to Australia. It was those damn waves over the side. When
we finally reached the edge of the property at Q”—San Quentin—“the son
of a bitch sank.”
A guard in one of the towers spotted them
clinging to the upside-down craft, kicking to shore, and asked if they
needed help. They said they were fine, and, as if to prove it, McGirk
held up his wrist and yelled, “We just lost a couple of oars, but my
Timex is still running!” The guard, unaware that three prisoners were
missing, laughed and went back to his lookout.
California soon
unleashed a statewide manhunt. Meanwhile, police in Texas and Oklahoma
began to report a strange series of holdups. They all had the same M.O.:
three or four men would stroll into a grocery store or a bank, flash a
gun, demand the money, and speed away in a stolen car. Witnesses
invariably noted that they were all, by the standards of the trade, old
men. One even wore what appeared to be a hearing aid. The authorities
compared them to the elderly thieves in the film “Going in Style,” and
dubbed them “the Over-the-Hill Gang.”
“That was when I was really a
good robber,” Tucker tells me. He is careful not to admit to any
particular crime (“I don’t know if they still have jurisdiction”) or
implicate any of his living partners (“Some of them are still out
there”), but he says that by the age of sixty he had at last mastered
the art of the holdup.
One
day, while we were sitting in the prison visiting room, Tucker leaned
forward in his chair and began to teach me how to rob a bank. “First of
all, you want a place near the highway,” he said, putting on his
bifocals, his eyes blinking as if he were imagining a particular layout.
“Then you need to case it—you can’t just storm in. You need to size it
up, know it like your own home.”
“In the old days, the stickup men
were like cowboys,” he continued. “They would just go in shooting,
yelling for everyone to lie down. But to me violence is the first sign
of an amateur.” The best holdup men, in his view, were like stage
actors, able to hold a room by the sheer force of their personality.
Some even wore makeup and practiced getting into character. “There is an
art to robbing a bank if you do it right,” Tucker said. Whereas he once
cultivated a flamboyant image, he later developed, he said, a subtler,
more “natural” style.
“O.K., the tools,” he pressed on. Ideally,
he said, you needed nail polish or superglue to cover your fingertips
(“You can wear gloves, but in warmer climates they only draw
attention”), a glass cutter, a holster, a canvas bag (“big enough for
the dough”), and a gun (“a .38 or semi-automatic, or whatever you can
get your hands on”). He said the gun was just “a prop,” but essential to
any operation.
There was one other thing, he said after a pause.
It was the key to the success of the Over-the-Hill Gang and what he
still called “the Forrest Tucker trademark”: the hearing aid. It was
actually a police scanner, he said, which he wired through his shirt;
that way, he would know if any silent alarms had been triggered.
He
removed a napkin from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
“Once you’ve got your cool car parked nearby, you’ve got your radio,
your hands are covered with gloves or superglue, you walk in. Go right
up to the manager. Say, ‘Sit down.’ Never pull the gun—just flash it.
Tell him calmly you’re here to rob the bank and it better go off without
a hitch. Don’t run from the bank unless you’re being shot at, ’cause it
only shows something is going on. Just walk to the hot car, real calm,
then drive to the cool car. Rev it up, and you’re gone.”
After he
finished, he seemed satisfied. “I’ve just given you a manual on how to
rob a bank,” he said. He reflected on this for a moment, then added, “No
one can teach you the craft. You can only learn by doing.”
A
forty-year-old sergeant on the Austin police force, John Hunt, was
assigned to investigate the mysterious holdups of the Over-the-Hill
Gang. “They were the most professional, successful robbers that I ever
encountered in all my years on the force,” Hunt, who is now retired
after a thirty-year career, told me. “They had more experience in
robbery than we had catching them.”
Then a chain-smoker with a
drooping mustache and a slight paunch, Hunt spent long days trying to
catch the gang. With the advent of high-tech security, there were fewer
and fewer traditional bank robbers; most were desperate drug addicts who
made off with only a few thousand dollars before they were caught. The
Over-the-Hill Gang seemed to defy not just their age but their
era. “They’d get up every day and be on the job,” Hunt said. “Just as a
welder gets good at welding, or a writer gets good over the years by
writing, these guys learned from their mistakes.”
In a one-year span, the Over-the-Hill Gang was suspected in
at least sixty robberies in Oklahoma and Texas—twenty in the
Dallas-Fort Worth area alone. The gang was also believed to be
responsible for holdups in New Mexico, Arizona, and Louisiana. “
senior citizens strike again,” one headline blared. “
middle-aged bandits puzzle detectives,” another read.
In
December of 1980, Hunt and forty other law-enforcement officers from at
least three states held a conference in Dallas to figure out how to
stop them. “You can’t say how many lives they altered by sticking a gun
in someone’s face,” a former F.B.I. agent told me.
Tucker seemed
unable to stop, no matter how much money he accumulated. Although there
are no official estimates, Tucker—relying on an array of aliases,
including Robert Tuck MacDougall, Bob Stone, Russell Johns, Ralph
Pruitt, Forrest Brown, J. C. Tucker, and Ricky Tucker—is believed over
his career to have stolen millions of dollars, a fleet of sports cars, a
bag of yen, and one Sambo’s wooden nickel. In the spring of 1983, he
embarked on his most audacious heist yet: robbing a high-security bank
in Massachusetts in broad daylight by pretending that he and his men
were guards making a routine pickup in an armored car. Tucker believed
the plan was “a breakthrough in the art.” On March 7th, moments before
the armored car was scheduled to arrive, they put on makeup and
mustaches; Tucker’s wig had shrunk in a recent snowstorm, and rather
than postpone the operation he decided to do without it.
The
teller buzzed them in. Just as they were entering the vault, according
to a police report, the manager noticed that “the dark mustache on one
man and the white mustache on the other man were not real.” One of the
“guards” patted his gun and said, “This is a holdup.”
Tucker
locked the manager and two tellers inside the vault, and escaped with
more than four hundred and thirty thousand dollars. But when the police
showed the tellers a series of mug shots, they identified, for the first
time, the leader of the Over-the-Hill Gang as the same man who had
broken out of San Quentin in a homemade kayak three years earlier.
As
the F.B.I., the local police, and the county sheriffs all tried to
track him down, Tucker hid in Florida, checking in daily with Teddy
Green, his old Alcatraz confidant. One June morning, Tucker pulled into
Green’s garage and waited while his friend walked toward the car. “I was
looking at him,” Tucker recalls, “thinking, My, what a sharp suit!”
A man jumped in front of Tucker’s car and yelled, “F.B.I., don’t move! You’re under arrest.”
Agents
were everywhere, coming out of cars and bushes. Tucker glowered at
Green, convinced that his friend had “ratted me out.” Although Tucker
insists that he never had a pistol—and none was ever found—several
agents said they saw one in his hand. “He’s got a gun!” one of them
yelled, diving to the ground. The garage filled with the sound of
gunfire. Bullets shattered the windshield and the radiator. Tucker, who
had been hit in both arms and in the leg, ducked below the dashboard and
pressed the accelerator, crashing outside the garage. He opened the car
door and stumbled onto the street, his hands and face covered in blood.
A woman with two children was driving toward him. “As I got closer,”
the woman later testified, “he started to look bloodier and bloodier—it
was all over him—and I thought, This poor man has been hit by a car.”
She
offered him a ride, and he climbed into the passenger seat. Then, in
her rearview mirror, she saw someone holding a rifle, and her
six-year-old son cried out, “Criminal!” When she hesitated, Tucker
grabbed the wheel and snapped, “I have a gun—now drive!” Her son began
to sob. After a half-mile chase, they veered down a dead-end street. At a
muttered “O.K.” from Tucker, the woman scrambled out of the car and
dragged her children to safety. Then Tucker himself stepped from the car
and passed out.
A columnist for the Miami
Herald summed up the capture of the longtime prison fugitive and leader of the Over-the-Hill Gang this way:
There
is something vaguely appealing about Tucker. . . . Old guys are not
regularly associated with high crimes. . . . Tucker must also be
admired, in a twisted way I admit, for pulling off an incredible escape
from San Quentin prison in San Francisco. . . . Tucker might have made a
fortune selling the escape yarn to Hollywood and holing up somewhere.
Instead he chose to resume the line of work to which he was
dedicated. . . . The aging Robin Hood took from the rich, who were
probably loaded with insurance.
Tucker’s story had,
at last, acquired the burnish of outlaw mythology. The battered
Rub-a-Dub-Dub had been donated to the Marin Yacht Club and was later
placed in a prison museum, and the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in
Oakland requested that Tucker be allowed to serve as grand marshal for
its upcoming Bathtub Regatta. Amid the clamor, the F.B.I. showed up at a
fancy retirement community in Lauderhill, Florida, where Tucker was
believed to have been living. An elegant woman in her fifties answered
the door. When they asked her about Forrest Tucker, she said she had
never heard of the man. She was married to
Bob Callahan, a successful stockbroker whom she had met shortly after
her first husband died. When the agents explained that Bob Callahan was
really Forrest Tucker, a man who had broken out of jail four years
earlier, she looked at them in tears. “I told ’em, ‘I don’t believe a
word you’re saying,’ ” she recalled, nearly two decades later. “But they
had him. They shot him three times.”
An heiress to a modest
moving-company fortune who looked, in her youth, a bit like Marilyn
Monroe, she remembers meeting Tucker at the Whale and Porpoise, a
private club on Oakland Park Boulevard. She had never encountered anyone
so kind and gallant. “He came over and asked me to dance, and that was
that,” she told me.
She recalled how she went to see him in prison
(“still in a daze”), not sure what to say or do. When she saw him lying
there, pale and bloodied, she was overcome with love for this man who,
she learned, had been in a chain gang at sixteen. As he begged her
forgiveness, she told me, “All I wanted to do was hold him.”
At
first, awaiting trial in Miami, Tucker tried to break out of jail,
removing a bar in his cell with a hacksaw and climbing onto the roof
with a homemade grappling hook. But after his wife promised—to the
consternation of her family and friends—to stay with him if he reformed,
Tucker vowed to rehabilitate himself. “I told her that from then on I’d
only look at ways to escape,” he says, adding, “She is one in a
million.”
He returned to San Quentin, where he was nicknamed “the
captain,” and where, for the first time, his seemingly impervious
constitution began to show its age. In 1986, he underwent a quadruple
bypass. Although guards stood by the door in case he tried to escape, he
now considered himself strictly a legal contortionist. Years earlier,
at Alcatraz, he had written an appeal that went all the way to the
Supreme Court in which he successfully argued that a judge could not, at
sentencing, take into account prior convictions received when the
defendant lacked counsel. (“It is time we become just a little realistic
in the face of a record such as this one,” Justice Harry A. Blackmun
wrote in an angry dissent.) Now, with his failing health, Tucker
unleashed another flurry of appeals, getting his sentence reduced by
more than half. “This is to thank you,” he wrote one judge. “It’s the
first break I ever got in my life. I won’t ever need another.”
He
began to pour all his energy into what he saw as the culmination of his
life as an outlaw: a Hollywood movie. Tucker had seen all sorts of films
that echoed his life, among them “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,”
“Escape from Alcatraz,” and “Bonnie and Clyde,” and he wanted, at last,
to see his story enshrined in the American imagination. He began to put
his exploits down on paper, five pages at a time. “No one could have
written this inside story of the Rock and what really happened there
unless they had personally lived it,” he wrote. He devoted two hundred
and sixty-one pages to “Alcatraz: The True Story,” while working on a
second, more ambitious account, which he titled “The Can Opener.” In it,
he described himself as a throwback “to the highly intelligent,
nonviolent type of criminal in the Willie Sutton mold,” and, more
grandly, as a kind of heroic underdog, pitted against a vast and
oppressive system. “Tucker’s obsession with freedom and escape has
transformed itself into gamesmanship,” he wrote. “This is his way of
keeping his sanity in a lifetime of being the hunted. Each new ‘joint’
is a game, a game to outwit the authorities.”
In 1993, he was
released, at the age of seventy-three, and settled into the
peach-colored house in Pompano Beach, which his wife had bought for
them. He polished his manuscript and set up a music room in the den,
where he gave saxophone and clarinet lessons for twenty-five dollars an
hour. “We had a wonderful life,” his wife said. Tucker recalls, “We used
to go out dancing. She’d dress up real pretty, and I’d show her off.”
He composed music for her. “He has all these talents that had been
wasted all these years,” she told me. From time to time, he played in
local jazz clubs. “I got used to being free,” he says. But his
manuscript failed to captivate people as he had hoped it would—“I called
Clint Eastwood’s secretary, but she said, ‘Unless you have an agent, he
won’t read it’ ”—and the author of “The Can Opener” increasingly seemed
trapped, an ordinary old man.
Then came the day in 1999 when, at
the age of seventy-eight, he painted his fingertips with nail polish,
pulled his white ascot up over his face, and burst into the Republic
Security Bank with his gun. “He didn’t do it for the money,” his wife
said. “We had a new car, nice home paid for, beautiful clothes. He had
everything.”
“I think he wanted to become a legend, like Bonnie
and Clyde,” said Captain Chinn, who apprehended him after what was
believed to be his fourth recent robbery in the Florida area. A court
psychologist who examined Tucker noted, “I have
seen many individuals who are self-aggrandizing, and that would like to
make their mark in history . . . but none, I must admit, that I heard
that would want to, other than in the movies, go out in a blaze in a
bank robbery. It is beyond the realm of psychological prediction.”
After
Tucker’s arrest, the police put him in semi-isolation, fearing that
even at seventy-eight he might somehow elude them. Despite his lawyer’s
pleas that his client could die under such conditions, he was denied
bail. “Ordinarily, I would not consider a 78-year-old man a flight risk
or a danger to the community,” the magistrate said, “but Mr. Tucker has
proved himself to be remarkably agile.” On October 20, 2000, just before
his case was scheduled to go to trial, and with his wife looking on,
Tucker pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to thirteen years.
One
day, I found a report that the Department of Corrections had compiled,
detailing Tucker’s life. After pages listing his dramatic holdups and
daredevil escapes, it concluded with a different kind of summary:
The
defendant does not know the whereabouts of [his] daughter. He stated he
did not have an active part in this child’s upbringing. . . . The
defendant has no knowledge of his son’s whereabouts. The defendant did
not partake in the rearing of this child.
“I thought
he died in an automobile accident,” his son, Rick Bellew, told me over
the phone after I tracked him down in Nevada, where he was living and
working as a printer. “That’s what my mom told me to protect me.” He
didn’t know the truth, he said, until he was in his early twenties, when
Tucker was about to be paroled. “My mom was afraid he’d come up to me
on the street and freak me out.”
He said that after his father was
taken away the authorities confiscated all their furniture and
possessions, which had been paid for with stolen cash. They had to move
in with his grandparents, while his mother worked in a factory to
support them. “He left us with nothing,” he said. “He turned our world
inside out.”
After Bellew read about Tucker’s last arrest, he
wrote him a letter for the first time. “I needed to know why he did it,”
he said. “Why he sacrificed everything.”
Although Tucker could
never give him a satisfactory answer, they struck up a correspondence,
and in one of his letters Tucker told him something he had never
expected: Bellew had an older half sister named Gaile Tucker, a nurse
who lived in Florida. “I called her up and said, ‘Are you sitting down?’
I said, ‘This is your long-lost brother.’ She said, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”
Later, the two met, studying each other’s features for similarities,
trying to piece together a portrait of a man they barely knew.
“I don’t have any ill feelings,” his daughter told me. “I just don’t have any feelings.”
At
one point, Bellew read me part of a letter that Tucker had recently
sent him: “I’m sorry things turned out the way they did. . . . I never
got to take you fishing, or to baseball games or to see you grow
up. . . . I don’t ask you to forgive me as there is too much lost but
just so you know I wish you the best. Always. Your dad, Forrest.”
Bellew
said he didn’t know if he would continue the correspondence, not
because of what Tucker had done to him but because of what he had done
to his mother. “He blew my mother’s world apart,” Bellew told me. “She
never remarried. There was a song she used to sing to me called ‘Me and
My Shadow,’ all about being alone and blue. And when she had cancer, and
wasn’t going to live much longer, I broke down and she sang that song,
and I realized how bittersweet it was. It was her life.”
When I
visited Tucker’s third wife this spring in Pompano Beach, she seemed to
be still trying to cope. A small, delicate woman, now in her seventies,
she had had several operations and lived alone in their house. “With
Forrest gone, there’s no one to fix things up,” she said. She paused,
scanning the den where he used to keep his musical instruments. “The
silence is unbearable.” She showed me a picture of the two of them,
taken shortly after they met. They are standing side by side, their arms
touching. He has on a red shirt and tie, and his wavy hair is neatly
combed to one side. “God, he used to be so handsome,” she said. “When I
met him, he was a doll.”
She turned the picture of him over
several times in her hand. “I waited all those years,” she said as she
walked me outside, wiping her eyes. “I thought we had the rest of our
lives together. What am I supposed to do now?”
One
of the last times I met Tucker in prison, he looked alarmingly frail.
His facial muscles seemed slack, and his hands trembled. Since his
incarceration, he had had several strokes, and a cardiologist concluded
that blood clots were gradually cutting off oxygen to his brain. His
daughter told me bluntly, “He’ll die in prison.”
“Everyone says I’m smart,” Tucker said
to me. “But I’m not smart in the ways of life or I wouldn’t have done
the things I did.” After a brief flurry of attention following his
arrest, he had been all but forgotten. “When I die, no one will remember
me,” he said. His voice was almost a whisper. “I wish I had a real
profession, something like the music business. I regret not being able
to work steady and support my family. I have other regrets, too, but
that’s as much as one man can stand. Late at night, you lie in your bunk
in prison and you think about what you lost, what you were, what you
could’ve been, and you regret.”
He said that his wife was thinking
of selling their house and moving into a community where she could see
more people. Although he and his wife still spoke regularly, Tucker
said, she was too frail to visit.
“What hurts most . . . is that I know how much I disappointed my wife,” he went on. “That hurts more than anything.”
As he rose to go, he took a piece of paper from his back pocket. “I made this up for you last night,” he said.
On
it was a list of all his escapes, neatly printed. At the bottom, there
was a No. 19—one more than he had actually made—left blank. As the guard
fetched his wheelchair, he waved him away. “I don’t need my chariot,”
he said. Then slowly, with his back hunched, he steadied himself against
the wall and, with the guard standing behind him, inched down the
corridor.As the way I see it I'm giving this an 8 out of 10
