THE FAR SIDE

Usually, in most “war” stories, you always hear or read the grandiose tales about the wives, the girlfriends, and the mistresses, but rarely do you hear or read a mumbling word about what lurks on the far side of the story---the law. In my many years of hustling in the streets, I had two law enforcement agents, in particular, that dogged me relentlessly. The first was a FBI agent, Joe Kenny, and the second one was a vice cop called Rambo. Both operated very differently, but both were very good at what they did which was putting the bad guys in jail.

I feared neither one of them, but I sure as hell didn’t take either for granted either. Joe was the most professional and popped up in my life when I started robbing banks in the spring of 72. When me and my boys started knocking off banks, it was pretty much a white thing, meaning that only white guys were robbing banks, so when we came along it was a new day in the game. However, the feds felt that once brothas started robbing banks that we would get violent and that some bank teller would end up getting shot, so the very first item on their agenda was to stop us before we could get started. They failed miserably because once the first robbery went off successfully, it was open season on banks in Charlotte. There was at least one a day and it got progressively worse as impoverished, young, black males started, at once, to view banks as the new "cash cow" in the hood.

Concerning Joseph A. Kenny, FBI extraordinaire. The day when Joe really came out of the woodwork was minutes after our robbery of an uptown bank. By this time I was freelancing, periodically doing some stick-up work outside of my original crew, and I had, in fact, mobbed up with a cousin of a young woman I was dating at the time and we had put together a crew for the specific purpose of robbing a bank. This was to be their introduction to bank robbery. Even though, these guys were seasoned stick-up artists, none had ever been inside a bank before with the intent to rob it, so as rookies, I had to prep each member on their individual assignments. I did not desire any rookie jitters to jinx us.

One day, shortly before the heist was to take place, the guy I was closest to took me to a residence where there was a guy who had just escaped from prison. He needed some money so he could get out of town and to lay low until the heat died down, and though I didn’t know the brotha, the bond was there. He was a fallen soldier. Additionally I, personally admired any convict who took it upon himself to wrestle with the State for his freedom. (Years later, I would make my own jailbreak from federal custody.) Anyway, as we met that morning to iron out the last minute details of the robbery, it was also decided that we would give the escapee some money to go wherever the hell he wanted to. .

For this particular outing, I had privately chosen a sweet-looking bank on Tryon Street which I had had my eyes on for quite some time, but since it looked so sweet, I never hit it. I cased it, studied it, and loved it. It was my “honey hole”, a lick so sweet that I could hit in an emergency, or any time I was pinched for cash. I decided the time was perfect to hit it now!

On the morning we were due to rob the bank, there was a minor SNAFU. A few of the guys were late. Not being punctual to commit a crime was the ultimate no-no to me so I got mad and left. We wouldn’t be working that morning, but to remedy this, we all decided to spend the night at the same place. Brilliant. This way, everyone would be ready.

On the chosen morning, we all got up early because we still had yet to make the last minute purchase of gloves, pantyhose, and other accoutrements we would require to pull off the robbery. Locating a drugstore that opened early, we made our purchases, and since the place also had a breakfast counter we broke bread together. Being wholly preoccupied with running all the current schemes and nuances of the robbery through the filter of my mind, I failed to think twice about the surgical gloves being green although I routinely used the white ones. In fact, I had never used any surgical gloves unless they were white.

We robbed the bank! And it was even sweeter than i imagined it would be which was an added bonus given the fact that I was working with a mob of rookies. From all indications, we had made a clean getaway, but when Joe arrived at the bank some few minutes later, he found a green, surgical glove outside. With no hesitation, he instantly understood that this was an odd color, and though he knew clearly that he couldn’t get any prints from the glove, he possessed an even more brilliant idea. If he could find out where we had gotten the gloves from, maybe, just maybe, he could set up a trap for us. And he did! He, along with his sidekick and partner, Marty Cohen, went all over town, took them days, searching the city for a store that sold green surgical gloves. Oddly enough, their dogged persistence paid off and probably as a consequence of their hard training and long experience were able to make some accurate assumptions, the primary one being that we would, at some point, return to buy some more gear. Thus assured, the store manager was put on NOTICE and warned to take down the license number of any car that brought gloves and panty hose. Suddenly, the noose, though loose, was around my neck.

In the aftermath of the robbery, I was so ecstatic with the amount of cash taken and the relative ease with which the robbery was performed that I instantly start campaigning for a second robbery of the bank, only this time, I was pledged to work with my original crew. I didn't want any of them to miss out on the spoils of a lick that sweet, so with little or no fanfare, we settled on a date and decided to hit the same bank.

Stick-up boys, like most street hustlers, are a very superstitious bunch, who strictly adhere to any established routine they feel will give them that much needed edge in the struggle not to get busted. Most, if the truth be told, all stick to their own peculiar customs and rituals which they employ with a zeal that borders on sacred fanaticism. Trust me, crooks know they need all the help they can get, so it becomes essentially a matter of routine to constantly repeat the same procedures over and over again in the hopes that if it worked once that it will work again.

At the drugstore, we dined on day-old doughnuts and sipped lukewarm coffee, but we also bought gloves and pantyhose. On full alert, the manager, presumably elated at his chance to take down a bank robbery ring, dutifully and faithfully recorded the license number of our ride, a red Caddy. This was a personal vehicle, a decoy. Ultimately, we would switch to our work car, a stolen brown sedan with four doors later when the time approached for us to gear up and to leave for the job site.

Suddenly, in the wake of the early morning "heroic" work performed by the lowly drugstore manager, the FBI now had credible intel that a bank robbery was about to go down somewhere in the city. They just don’t know where. What was, indeed, known to them was that banks in Charlotte opened at nine.

Ten minutes after nine, we entered the NCNB, guns drawn and robbed it. Basking in the premature glow of another successful robbery, we returned to my girlfriend’s house and “busted the money up.” Then we went our separate ways to enjoy the fruits of our labor.

To relieve the pent-up pressure of work, what I, more times than not, would do, would be to hook up with a few non-bank robbing friends from the hood and go to the movies. Sitting in the dark at the cinema helped bring me down, and played a therapeutic role in relieving the mind-numbing stress of knowing I could be hunted down and killed in the streets like a rabid dog. Exiting the hood, en route to the movies, I pocketed the keys to the Caddy, leaving the red ride parked in front of my girl's crib.

A few hours later, feeling as rejuvenated as if I had been to a spa, I returned home, but as a precaution, I deliberately entered the housing projects from the back which awarded me the pleasure of being able to check out everything before I actually stepped foot onto the street when I lived and where the ride was parked.

Though my sense of danger was therapeutically muted due to the relaxation quotient of sitting in a darkened movie theater, I still executed my duty to remain safe with optimal awareness. Among other things, I primarily looked for any strange cars, and seeing none, I approached the apartment from an angle and almost pissed on myself. The red Caddy was gone! My fear was automatic, having sprung up from the depths of my knowing that bad luck had just been conjured up from something I either had done or had not done. In any eventuality, what was apparently certain was that the mere fact of the car being missing and the fact that I had the only key could only add up to the fact that the devil was now on my tail!

Despite the fact of this horrible knowing that all was not well, and despite the fact that my sense of self-preservation had kicked into HIGH gear, I was simultaneously suffocated by the very real need to know if my woman was okay or if they had locked her up to make me come forward. However, I was still super mindful of my need to stay 2 steps ahead of whatever problem had just reared its ugly head so I couldn’t afford the luxury of walking into a trap. Even after putting all my eggs into one basket and after lining all my ducks up in a row, the best plan I could muster on such short notice was pay a guy to go next door to my girl’s crib to get info. He returned, bearing bad new. The feds had confiscated the car!

On an out-of-the-blue whim, I nervously contacted my Moms, only to discover, to my dismay, that Joe had indeed been there. She told me that Joe had given her a business card for her to give me, but my Moms made me proud. She had torn the card up in his face because she knew I would have nothing to say to him.

That incident, among others, made me know how relentless Joe was, but we got help from a source that he never counted on. Life is full of twists and turns. Thank God. As fortune would have it, the girl at the drugstore counter who had rang up our purchases for the gloves and pantyhose had been a childhood girlfriend of mine. We didn’t recognize each other since it had been over ten years since we had seen one another. We weren’t really boyfriend/girlfriend since we had only been about eight or nine, but just the same, she and I had resided in the same neighborhood, a block away from each other, and she had been the one that I gave my Valentine’s Day candy to on February 14th. Anyway, when we get busted, she saw my name and once she recognized who I was. she refused to testify. In open court, they declared her a hostile witness and without her testimony, they couldn’t link us to the gloves or pantyhose, and therefore a critical element of their case collapsed. We beat the charge! You know something, I have told myself to do it a thousand times, but I am going to find that sista and thank her. I have always envisioned myself showing up on her doorsteps with a bouquet of roses and some money. I don’t have any money, but I can afford the flowers. Yes, I really need to locate sista JB. I just made a new addition to my bucket list. Find JB.

As a matter of fact, the acquittal of that bank robbery charge etched me and my boys into judicial history since we were the first ones to ever win a bank robbery case in Charlotte.

Now, allow me to tell you about this bank in Cherry, a quaint ghetto on the other sides of the tracks. On one side of Queens Road, the rich white people lived in their well-to-d0 estates, but directly across the street on the other side of Queens Road was where the black folks, who were the paid servants of the white folks, lived. Cherry was a black neighborhood, the oldest in the city, and it was built by the rich whites folks so that their maids, butlers, gardeners, and other servants could live close by and would have no difficulty getting to work to clean up their messes. How charming.

Reckoning the bank was nearly as ripe a prize as the last bank we had hit, we found someone who let us move into her Cherry apartment so we could case the bank. We also needed to lay low for a minute since Joe had started that bullshit and was turning the heat up. Plus, I had some minor domestic woes as my baby Mama was distraught because Joe had visited my daughter at school and had questioned her. I took that personal. Leave my ten year old daughter out of this.

I made plans to leave town right after the NCNB job although it wasn't specifically clear to me who I wanted to get away from the most---the FBI or my baby Mama. No matter, but there was a hurried rush to the planning of the heist since I wanted to do it and get it over with as soon as possible. I was more than eager to leave town.

While laying low in our safe house, there was this guy, may he rest in peace, that knew who we were and what we did, so he was our go-to guy when we needed an errand run. We all lived contentedly in this big, quadruplex house on the top floor, to the left.

Without rhyme or reason, when we got down to it and started planning our next job, for some reason, we didn’t plan to do the bank in Cherry. We decided to hit one across town even though this was a total reversal of why we were even in Cherry to start with which was solely and wholly to knock off the bank on Kings Drive.

Nevertheless, during our planning, our girlfriends would sometimes be present while the small details of the heist were hashed out. Of course, our ‘go-to” man was there as well. No one thought anything of it. He, though, an outsider, was accepted due to the sheer necessity of out circumstances.

Not absolutely content with our financial scheme, on the morning of the robbery, we made a couple of on-the-spot changes. The bank we had chosen to take down was a two-door facility which one of my partners simply loved. For some odd reason, he enjoyed the flexibility of being able to come in one bank door and to go out of the motherfucking other. Anyway, after a bit too much debate, we decided to come in from the back rather than the front as had been our original plan. We also decided to hit it earlier than we had it scheduled for. These minor changes allowed us to get to the bank earlier and by coming in from the back, we had a great view. And what we saw spooked the shit out of all of us. We saw police surrounding the bank. They never saw us, so we drove off. At first, despite being a wee bit shaken up, we chalked it up as mere coincidence. But it happened a second time.

Now, for good reason, there was a lot of tension within the crew because we believed that one of our girls had started talking. As a remedy, the next time that we made our plans, it was a closed door session, so only we would know what was what. This time, we were hitting the NCNB in Cherry.

And now this. If there had ever been a good time in my bank-robbing career to abort mission, this was by far the time for it. As a rule among us, we always robbed in the morning. Never in the evening. And this caper started off wrong, so much so that it was late afternoon before we were actually ready to go to work. Quietly permitting my need for cash to supersede my need to make sense of what I was doing, I sanctioned the late afternoon heist.

It was damned near 4:00 when we charged into the crowded bank, and when we loudly announced our intentions, and hollered that they were, at that very moment, involved in a robbery, no one paid us any attention. To get their attention, one of the crew fired shots into the ceiling. All hell broke loose. People started running all over the bank, screaming in terror. As luck would have it, I was the shotgun man that day which meant I had to make everybody lay down on the floor and to maintain order. I had my fucking work cut out for me, so I started snatching people down by their hair. I didn’t intend to hurt anyone, but I had to get them on the floor. One young girl whom I had yanked down by her long. blonde hair started to cry and I reached down and comforted her. I immediately stopped what I was doing, nevermind that I was smack-dab in the middle of a crime, and patted her on the shoulder, telling her that everything was going to be a’ight. The next morning, the newspaper had a picture of me, brandishing my sawed-off shot gun, patrolling the bank floor. They called me “The Gentleman Bandit”!

Already reeling from a severe case of shit-going-wrong, matters grew even worse as a man came inside the bank and when he saw what was going on , he tried to run. Thankfully, I got to him in time to stop him from exiting the bank. Guess what, the man was Kays Gary, a top newspaper editor in my hometown. Guess what else? We got to be real cool after that, and he wrote me while I was in prison, urging me me to get into journalism, and a decade later when I got busted for a robbery I didn’t commit, he stepped up to help me.

Know what else? Matters turned even more worse as there was an armed man in the parking lot. His wife had been inside the bank and when he heard shots inside the bank, he decided to play hero. When we came out of the bank, he opened fire on us, and after a brief shoot-out in the parking lot, we drove off.

To make a long story short, our go-to guy had been the one talking to the feds which had only meant that the feds knew that a bank was going to get robbed that morning. and though our boy couldn’t tell them which bank it was, he did tell them where we were going to split the money up. Yes, the big-assed house in Cherry! No sooner did we get to the house than we take all the money wrappers off the money, and change clothes. We put the money wrappers, our clothes and the guns in a bag and sent them across the hall. Then guess what happened next? The police blockade the house! I looked out the window and almost had a heart-attack. DAAAAMN!

We can’t shoot if out since we don’t have any weapons, and before any of us inside the apartment could count to 3, there was a knock at the door. It was you-know-who. I didn't know what to think as Joe Kenny and Marty Cohen walked in like they were the landlords.

I mean they were as cool as cucumbers. No introductions were needed since Joe knew everyone and we all definitely knew him. After a second, Joe sat down and started casually talking about how nice the weather was. He acted like he was a long-lost partner, and after about five minutes of idle chit-chat, he stood up. He smiled politely. And I would never have believed what happened if it hadn’t happened to me personally, but Joe told us that he didn’t like it that someone had snitched on us. He said that he didn’t need anyone to help him do his job. He lectured us, spilling the beans about what he knew about the robbery, informing us in plain English that he knew we had robbed the bank and for us to keep the money and to enjoy it. Speaking with a cockiness that bordered on arrogance, Joe said that he would get us his way. No one dared ask what way that was, but when the cops were gone, we all got missing. We left the money in the house in case this was a trap to catch us outside with the money. No one bothered us. We got the money when it got dark and everyone left town.

And then there was Rambo.