The Hollywood Bank Robber

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FV3QPT5R

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I'm here with the stars of the Netflix documentary How to Rob a Bank. Steve Myers is the author of The Treehouse, the true story of the Hollywood Bank Robber, and it's available on Amazon. Steve's story is unique because he planned and participated in some of the bank robberies with the Hollywood Hollywood bank robber Scott Scarlock. We're also here with retired FBI agent Sean Johnson, who was tasked with investigating the robberies and pursued the gang until their capture in 1996. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Thank you. Guys, whoever wants to go first, please introduce yourselves. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

I guess I'll go first if that's okay. Yeah, Sean Johnson, retired FBI, uh 29-year career. Um started back in 1987, went through the FBI Academy, and my first office of assignment was actually Seattle, Washington, where this whole escapade went down back in 96. Uh, I spent 11 years in Seattle, worked primarily violent crime work, bank robberies, kidnappings, fugitive extortions, uh, interstate theft, and also part of that time I worked national security investigations, both counterintelligence and counterterrorism. I retired out of director of intelligence back in uh 2016 in January. I've been retired now for uh 10 years. After my retirement, I set up my own business, Wolf and Owl, LLC. I still do contracting work with the Bureau at the Academy and headquarters units. So I've been doing that now for about 10 years. And uh so that's kind of my uh quick and quick story for my bureau career.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Steve? Yeah, well, I mean, I left the United States in the uh uh early 70s uh to study in Europe. I was in England studying and then I went to Germany and did apprenticeship and studying there. And after that I migrated to Norway and did restoration on old architecture in Norway and set up my studio in Oslo and as a sculptor and furniture designer, and um from there I went to Italy and I stayed in Italy the last years, the last five or six years in Italy. So I was in Europe about 14, 15 years before I returned to the United States, and set up a studio outside of DC and started doing what I did, uh exhibitions, commissions, uh I exhibited throughout Europe sculpture and furniture and in the United States as well. And uh my career kind of morphed into remodeling, construction, and so on and so forth with design and sculpture and furniture design, furniture making, antique restoration, all kinds of things. I kind of had my hands in different areas in sculpture or furniture or whatever the situation was. And um leading up to leading up to the event of me getting involved with Scott Skurlock, prior to even bank robbery, I was working with Scott in remodeling, and we became close friends a couple years, a couple, three years prior to his bank robbery. This was when I was in Chicago, and um, you know, it was like we worked really well together. And, you know, then suddenly one day the news popped in that he was robbing banks, and then there that's where it took off. That's where but we were friends prior to it. It's not as if people like Netflix, they think suddenly I just popped in from one world to another. It wasn't that seamless, it was a very gradual kind of evolution that took place.

SPEAKER_02 3:14

Well, Steve, before Scott came up with the idea to rob banks, he was a big time meth cook, kind of like the equivalent of Heisenberg from breaking bad.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Yeah, he was the Heisenberg, real Heisenberg, not the fictional Heisenberg. I mean, the guy was phenomenal in his he studied, uh he wanted to be a doctor. So he was in Evergreen College and he was studying chemistry, biology, all of the, you know, all the equivalent courses, but he was very much into laboratory work. And um, that's where he started Crystal was uh he used to break into the university laboratories at nighttime at Evergreen College and do his experiments overnight and then leave the next day. That was like on a really small level, obviously, just for his own personal evolution. And then it grew and grew and grew, and this was long before the laws, federal laws that took place uh with pharmaceutical distributors throughout the country um that were able to uh he was able to get the precursors like ephedron, which was pure. It's not like what they do today. I mean, to be able to get that, you have to be a producer of medicine of some sort. You just can't go in and get it. I mean, it was difficult then, but he understood the laws and what he needed. He would hire people to go buy it, he would have things set up. But basically he was getting, you know, kilos of ephedron, and you know, he started producing this stuff, and obviously he became the at that time in the ear in the late 70s, early 80s, he was the kind of the founder of Crystal in the United States, as I understand it. So he was having it, was being dealt up and down the west coast from Seattle down to San Diego. And he had one partner that he worked with. He never dealt the drugs himself. He just he just uh cooked it and handed it all off when it was completed to this one partner who did all the dealing. So he wasn't in that world, that nefarious world. It was like for him, it was the creation. He loved it. And I've worked with him side by side. I was when at one point I was doing some uh work as a sort of he had bought property out in the south of Olympia and the toward the coastline in the hills and the mountains there, and it was a big, huge barn, and so I was building on the barn as a sort of cover for this laboratory he had set up in the top of the loft. And when I first saw that, when I went out there and I saw this, and I go, my God, you know, it was going into some I don't know, you know, it was a it was totally new to me. I mean, I had never experienced anything like that. And, you know, I I was watching him learning, and he was in, you know, doing something like that was a three-week process of 24-7, cooking and managing everything and making sure everything had to be dealt with, you know, distilled, cooked. I mean, it was a whole process. One person couldn't do it. Uh and so, you know, we had I learned from him and I started helping him, and because we worked really well with that, because it's a very precise uh process in doing that, and you know, my work, I'm kind of very exact and you know, obsessed by doing things properly and exact. And so we just worked well together and it transferred into building, we would do rehab together, take on little jobs, and he was a hard worker, you know. And but that's sort of where it started there, and that was long before bank robbery. And then at some point, um a few years in, uh his partner got murdered in Olympia by motorcycle gang or something wanting to get money, and that was it for him. He quit. He didn't want any more to do with it because he didn't want to get involved in that world directly, which obviously if he was to continue, he would have to take a whole new route, and you just don't go out and find people. That he didn't like the drug world in general, but believe me, his drugs, what he created was pharmaceutical level. I can as I could tell. I mean, I don't know. It was I mean, you know, you can get addicted to it, obviously, but it was, you know, it was uh every person's different. So if you're using it or whatever, you have to have some sort of control over yourself. You can't just abuse whatever you're doing. Doesn't matter if it's a drug or whatever it is. I mean, if you start abusing it, it'll take hold of you. But uh yeah, that ended it. And he told me um long before he started doing bank robbery, we would be just, you know, just talking about life, you know. He would say he'd always always imagine robbing banks. He just had this, you know, this dream in his soul from childhood. He just wanted to take down banks. That's something he had in him, and then when this all took unfolded with uh his partner, he decided to do it. And he started studying it and reading up, going into forensic libraries and reading about bank robberies. And what clicked was there used to be a program called FX on uh uh on the TV, a series, kind of TV series, and it was about he saw how they were doing this uh prosthetic mask and transformation of the face, and that's what clicked him, saying that's the that's the key to do it in the banks. You go in, you don't have mask on, you don't go in raising guns and threatening people and all that. You go in as a normal person, take control, and unfold everything as it is. And then that way you can sit in there for as long as you want, and nobody's gonna know who you are. You don't have to worry about it. If you go in with a mask on, then they obviously know you're robbing the bank, and you know, they've set the alarm off, and you know, nothing works. Put it this way Hollywood creates bank robberies. And I my own personal subjective opinion is I think the CIA promotes this in Hollywood to make bank robberies violent so that they're gonna get caught and then that ultimately everything's gonna fall apart. Whether they get out the first time, they're not gonna win, they're gonna lose. And it's a no-win situation for anyone, for the society, for the banks, for the person doing it. I mean, all of these films that are dramatic and so on and so forth, but they don't they don't reveal how you can really rob a bank without it, you know, without it going up in hell, you know, basically. And um, you know, this was this was his point, and this was my point when I got involved with him. I said, you know, I'm not into the guns and shooting, and you know, I'm out of here. I'm not doing this if it's gonna end up like this. It's not what I'm here for. The idea of taking down a bank, I mean, morally did it bother me. I mean, maybe it did, but not really, in a sense. The thing that bothered me most was the actual uh going in and, you know, confronting the people, the employees, because they're just employees. It's it's uh, you know, you're in their territory in their world, and they don't deserve that in a sense. But I guess it's like a flight attendant, you know, they're trained, as we found out later, they're trained to uh, you know, for bank robberies, what to do, how to do it. So it's part of the job. It's part of the sort of overall makeup that they have to be aware of. So from that point of view, I kind of justified doing it because as far as the banks and all of that, did it bother me? I mean, not really, but um, it was nothing I would have ever done on my own, put it that way.

SPEAKER_02 10:12

Sean, when did when did Hollywood the bank robber get on the FBI's radar?

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Well, it took a while, just because uh just an overview of what was happening in Seattle in the mid-90s. Um, besides being the case agent on this uh investigation, I was also what we call the bank robbery coordinator of the BRC, overseeing all the bank robberies in the state of Washington. Uh primary most of those happening in Seattle. So any given year, uh, we'd have uh at least 300 or more. I think our record year was 320 bank robberies. So as far as all the 52 field offices in the FBI, we were always in the top five in the country for a number of bank robberies. Uh West Coast also, because Los Angeles we used to call the uh the bank robbery capital of the world. They had you know well over a thousand a year. Um, but we kept busy with it. So again, we were running and gunning all the time. I mean, we had you know, you'd go a couple days without a robbery, then you'd have three or four in one day. So that's when you know I started the set up the uh the violent crimes task force to address you know violent crime in general, but it was also focused on on the bank robbery uh situation we had there. Uh so again, mid-90s, it was just busy. And as far as Scott's uh you know role or his when he became on a radar, it wasn't right away because his his first robbery he did with uh with Mark Biggins, and that was in uh June of 92. That was at a C First Bank in Seattle, and uh this is their first go at it, right? And as Steven said, there's no you know, bank robbery for dummies book or bank robbery 101 out there. You have you have to figure out how to do this. So uh that first robbery, uh, you know, Mark goes in with a uh uh Reagan, President Reagan mask on. Uh Scott has some kind of disguise on, not like the elaborate uh disguises that Stephen helped him develop, but they go in and you know uh they had another woman outside supposed to help them out and pick them up at a location. Anyway, they go in the bank and it it just goes sideways from the beginning. Um, you know, they weren't going after vaults at that time. This was strictly just tellerdors. So they go in and and uh Scott's trying to round up the tellers, Mark's in there, um, and he, you know, Mark comes in and either tells everybody to get on the floor, and Scott had told everybody keep standing up, you don't want to draw attention. So it's just started that way. And at some point in time during the robbery, uh Scott actually used the name Mark. Hey, Mark, blah, blah, blah, something, something. So we had Mark's first name at the first robbery. Um, but anyway, they got about uh uh maybe $20,000, which is a good haul. I mean, most bank robbers back in the day, they walk into a bank, you know, and maybe put on a baseball cap and sunglasses for a disguise, and sometimes they have a demand note, sometimes just a verbal demand. If they're lucky if they got a thousand dollars. So even with that first one, they you know, pretty decent. But and then uh really hadn't planned their getaway that well. They had seen an older gentleman drive up in the parking lot and saw him go in the bank. So that was the person they're gonna get the keys from. They get away from the bank. So Mark uh politely asked the gentleman, May I have you may I have your keys, sir? May I have your keys? So he takes his older gentleman customers uh keys to go out in the car, they're trying to get this started. It just went, and they, you know, they got away and then they had to dump the car. They ran across his golf course for a while to meet up with the woman they're supposed to meet up with anyway. So that was, you know, it was uh if I I don't I think they could have easily gotten caught that first robbery. We wouldn't be talking today if that first robbery had gone worse than it did.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

You know, so that was June of '92. And then from there they robbed uh uh three more banks in the Seattle area. They were getting a decent take, you know. I think eight thousand, nine thousand, six thousand dollars. Not not a lot, but it was the uh fifth robbery, which was a uh great Western bank, I think it was about four months after that first one. That's the first time they went into the vault, and that was Scott alone inside the bank. That was a great Western bank again. Uh he didn't get a lot of money from the vault, but again, when you transition from note jobs to verbal demands to tellers to now take over situations and now going to a vault at that point in time, that's when you know he he became a priority because that was very unusual. 90% of bank robbers don't do that, you know. So that at that point we realized this guy has some level of sophistication. He has at least a partner, you know, because Mark was in the bank the first time. So and during the course of this, we overheard radio communications between Scott and somebody outside, which later on found out was Steven. Um so at that point in time, like I said, that's when it became the writer when they started going in the vaults. Um, and that was you know, robbery five. Robbery six ramped it up again, which was about a month later. I think that was in November of uh 92. He actually got uh about a quarter million dollars out of the vault, which is unheard of. So if I had to pick a point in time during the course of these 19 robberies, it was definitely robbery six when they got a quarter million dollars out of the vault. That's when we ramped up our game, too.

SPEAKER_02 15:00

I I I'd like both of you guys' take on this. Watching the doc uh the Netflix documentary How to Right of a Bank, I was surprised at the amount of people involved in these robberies. You had an insider at the bank who was giving you guys intel, you had at least one getaway driver, you guys had spotters, Scott, and sometimes Mark Biggins both going in. You had Steve outside directing things. Sean, is that highly unusual to involve that many people in a bank robbery?

SPEAKER_00 15:26

Yeah, that's that's very unusual. Um, and you talk about motives for people robbing banks back in the day. Uh a majority were robbing banks to get drug money. You know, they ran out of money, they had to go get their next fix, right? And they didn't really care, and they knew they were gonna get caught sooner or later. I think most guys, if they're lucky, got away with maybe two or three, and that was it. So uh, you know, we uh during the course of this, we knew at least two people, and then three people were involved in this, and you know, we can get into this later, but you know, I found out, you know, at least a couple months in advance that they were planning these robberies, buying getaway vehicles, doing surveillances on the banks, etc. So uh, you know, these guys uh, you know, were a challenge for sure. And I was up for the challenge, but it was not typical by any means.

SPEAKER_02 16:12

Steve, Steve, I Steve, I gotta ask you this. Given the amount of people your gang used in these robberies, were you ever concerned that someone was gonna tell somebody or give it up? Because the more people you involve in something, the more chances things are gonna go to shit. I'm just curious, like you you had a whole network of people helping you with this. You were never afraid someone was gonna talk.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Well, it I think the Netflix, you know, exaggerated the reality of that. Yes, we had other people, but these people were specific to uh a one-time mission, and it all had to do with this the locality of the bank. Um, because you gotta understand, I'm doing all of the electronics outside in my car. And depending on the location of a bank, if there's one in-route and out route for the police, I could cover it visually. Uh on uh, you know, on top of having my scanner listening to the call if it comes out. But anytime there's a police officer that's just doing his normal route or whether a police officer's coming in with red lights, we had certain codes that I would relay to Scott. If it was a red light police, then he was to abort immediately. If it was just a normal cruise by, don't worry, don't just keep doing what you're doing. But sometimes when we had multiple routes that would come in and out of the bank area, the bank location, we would hire someone to sit up there as a spotter. I mean, we paid him $5,000 or her $5,000 a time. And I we only did that two or three times, but these people were close, close friends with Scott. You got to understand the mentality back in those days, and these were not professional criminals, they were just normal people, college, they had their businesses. But the reason why all this exists, and I don't want to, you know, deflect from what your question is, is because of the tree house. The tree house, 19-acre compound, was a sanctuary for people. It was something that you know people loved to be in, and they had a very strong connection to Scott in that whole environment. And because of that, there was a trust that was long before bank robbery that was, you know, established. And Scott, he took helped take care of people. He it was a different life, and it's not as if you're in a city and you're dealing with gangsters and this and that. It was just a different situation. The people got paid well. He never did anything contrary to any of these people. He always helped him, he was nice. You see what I mean? And plus the compound was a like I say, it was a sanctuary, it was something that was unearthing. You just it didn't exist in the world. It was something special, and people wanted to be a part of that. And as I said, we had one man that we hired a couple times as a spotter, and then we had one of Scott's earlier girlfriends who became friends, the three of us, all of us. We hired her to work in a bank. And she worked in a C First bank for about a year. And, you know, we got all of the protocols, uh, all of the security manuals, and we got everything we needed to know, certain words you could use to make sure they knew that you knew what we wanted. Like if you know, you have a vault man a vault teller, you gotta call the vault teller, you gotta know their names, you got you know, all of that helped us help the people, employees in the bank know that this person coming in knows what he's doing. He's not coming in screaming and yelling, get on the floor and all of that. It's it's more intimidating that because there's an authority in front of them. And plus they don't know who it is. They they it it's a face that is uncanny, you know. And Biggins, Mark Biggins and his girlfriend in that first robbery I wasn't involved in. I wasn't living in Chicago, and this is why he came to me, is because he knew that the prosthetics had to be, you know, had to be developed much better, and he could never work with Biggins, Mark Biggins and his girlfriend, because it was just chaos. Everything went sideways, like Sean said. You know, they're just not the type of people, they're not exact, they're not but he trusted me, and you know, he came in the in the documentary took the animated thing they had where we're sitting in a in a restaurant in Chicago and he's telling me about the first bank robbery. Well, that was taken from my book. All of these, all of the animated things there were they were all taken out of my manuscript from the director. And uh I never got credit for it. They just but the story in my book is what enabled this Netflix to become something more than just a normal documentary. If he said, Oh, I knew him, and you know, they still had all these filler people that I had no idea who the who they were or where they came from, but they used them whatever, you know. You know, they who knows? I mean, somebody from high school, I have no idea what relevance that would have. But but anyway, yeah, we had probably and then there was another woman in Seattle who was very close. I mean, she was a mother, you know, she had her business, and I'd have her buy cars for us. I would go look, search out the car, and then when I wanted the car I want, then I would have her go call up the person that the car was owned, was being sold by, and she would go buy it. So it was a woman who bought it, or it was some we get some hippie to go buy the car for me once I found the car. But there wasn't like a whole web. There was probably four people outside of the two of us who knew, besides Biggins and his girlfriend, but they didn't know the details. Once that first robbery that they did was over, they didn't know what Scott and I were doing. They they weren't involved, they weren't around. So really it was only three people who who understood, but even they, unless they were involved in the one event, they didn't know when or what we were doing. You see what I'm saying? It was not as if it was the need to know basis, but but they knew they could have made a phone call to the FBI at any time, but it wouldn't have been I mean, we were all close. I mean, it's like family. I don't know how to explain. It was the one person in the Netflix called Alban, he uh was in you know about my age, and he was in there and he discussed, he was talking about Scott's. Manufacturing, cooking, and so forth. Well, he was he lit he had owned a house in Olympia as well. And he and Scott were friends for a long, long time. Scott actually, if he actually asked him if he wanted to get involved, and he didn't want anything to do with it, but he knew that it was happening. Do you see what I'm saying? The only thing he did was a watcher because he was perfectly safe. And once once I got the call from Scott that, you know, he exited the bank, then I called Alban and I said, okay, you can go home. And that was it. You go home. So there was never any possibility of him ever getting caught or anything. So other than that, other than that, the woman Sally, who we called Mustang, she um, you know, she worked in the bank, but she was just, I mean, she and Scott used to be, you know, girlfriend and boyfriends back in the day. And then we all became friends, so it was sort of a unity. I don't know how to explain it. But so there was never that fear of that at all.

SPEAKER_02 22:53

You know, what what I wanted to ask you was that and I'm a retired auto crime detective. You guys used uh straw men to purchase the vehicles. You guys were so sharp. Why didn't you just steal the cars? Well, who wants to steal them? Who wants extra heat on it? It takes five seconds.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

And no one sees your fate. Yeah, but I mean, I don't know. I can't believe I'm having a bank robbery tipped. I mean, first of all, in Washington State, the license goes with the car. So if we had bought a car that had uh five more months on the license valid, we didn't have to do anything. We could just run with those licenses. We didn't have to, we didn't have to go get a new title or anything. And you use the car, it's not on the radar of the police. And um, you know, then other, you know, sometimes when we didn't have any ex when we kept the car, we would have to get a new license. Well, we would go to the airport, uh covered parking lot, and we'd find the same kind of car, whatever it may be, switch the license, give them our old license plates, and we took theirs, and so we would have however many more months to drive on. And uh, you know, the likelihood of them knowing their license was taken is very unlikely. But that was kind of one of our techniques. But no, still no, I I I wouldn't want to deal with all that.

SPEAKER_02 24:01

I mean that all right. Sean, prior to the gangs captured, did any of them have previous criminal records?

SPEAKER_00 24:11

Actually, uh Scott did, um, which is interesting. Um, he he had been uh arrested three times. Uh nothing significant, but these all happened during the four and a half years of the bank robberies. Um so uh if I may go back to my note here, he got arrested for obstructing an officer. This is in Olympia, Washington, in uh June of 95. He pled guilty. He was arrested for malicious mischief, whatever that was. That was in Thurston County in Washington. That was in October '95. And his last arrest was actually down in uh Louisiana, uh, Breton, Louisiana, back in uh April of 94, I guess it was. Actually, that was the first one. Uh attempted simple robbery, disturbing the peace, simple battery, criminal damage. So he he had three encounters with law enforcement during the course of these four and a half years, of course, there was nothing, no connection with the bank robberies, and it wasn't a you know major crime, but he had been arrested three times. And I mean, as far as Stephen and Mark know, uh nobody else had a criminal criminal history.

SPEAKER_01 25:09

Says arrest in New Orleans was uh sounds pretty serious, that it was nothing. It was he was taking a taxi crab across the river, across the bridge from Algiers, and it was an Indian or Pakistani taxi driver, and he was saying, you know, he was drunk, but he was saying, drop me off here on the bridge. And the man said, No, he couldn't, he can't stop. And he started arguing. And Scott's a very stubborn guy. He said, Stop the car, I'll get out. You know, here's your money. And the guy said no. And so I don't know what he did. He said, You know, you stop the car, or I'm gonna jump out. And whatever he did, he got out. And then, you know, this Pakistani or whoever he was goes to the police and said he tried to rob him, but he didn't try to rob him. He didn't, you know, he got bailed out. He bailed himself out on with a credit card the same night. So you know, they add on all these charges that don't have they sound serious, but they're not. I mean, it's not what took place. So but you know, the other remember that that one thing in Thurston County, he was drunk one night from what I heard, and he was doing uh he took his van and started doing wheelies in some parking lot or something. I don't know, some silly thing that he could do, you know. But that was him, you know. That was his that was his nemesis getting drunk.

SPEAKER_02 26:16

But on face value, these guys didn't fit the profile of bank robbery.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

No, I mean, uh at the time, you know, we we had no idea. We just knew they were, you know, perfecting their craft over the months and years, uh, you know, the pre-planning. Like I said, you were talking about the vehicles. We've we recovered two uh actually station wagons. One was after the 14th robbery and the other was after the 16th robbery. And what I did is went out, of course, and talked to the original owners of the cars because they had sold these, you know, about a couple months in advance for cash. We got composite sketches from both of those uh previous owners, thinking that might have been, you know, one of our subjects, and of course found out later the fact they're hiring people to buy these cars. But that first vehicle, you know, got a composite sketch, that was it. And the second one after the robbery 16, uh, another station wagon, uh, both of them had bought uh in, I think one was in Kent, Washington, one was in Tacoma, and that was you know just south of Seattle. So I knew at that point in time, at least two months in advance, they were operating in the area, you know, buying vehicles, so that was helpful for us too. But that uh the second vehicle uh again brought the owner up. And I said anything unusual about this car that's different when you've when you sold it two months because, yeah, those aren't the original tires they had in the car, those are new tires. So I was able to trace those tires through the serial numbers uh to a tire shop in Tacoma, Washington. And of course, I was hoping that you know maybe somebody wrote a check or something. And back in the mid-90s, credit cards weren't as popular, but they had you know used cash. But again, that was interesting because now I knew they're buying cars in those areas, they're having serviced in those areas. There's got to be somebody, at least one of this crew, that's a permanent structure there, as Scott was. I mean, Stephen and Mark would come and go, but Scott was, you know, permanent in Olympia Washington. Just that that was very helpful. And again, a composite sketch from the second one. We published those in the papers, and you know, we didn't we didn't get anything from those per se, but uh at least you know, the few clues we had going on, those those were to me significant.

SPEAKER_02 28:05

Steve, how was the bank robbery money split?

SPEAKER_01 28:07

Was it equal shares or a percentage? No, we did Scott and I did 60, 40 because he paid for all the you know, he paid for the vehicles, the electronics, the transportation, the food, the period of time I'd wherever I was living, San Francisco or New Orleans, I'd fly up. He paid for everything. And you know, whether it was two weeks, three weeks, a month, month and a half, two months, you know, basically he he fan you know to everything for the two of us. So um, yeah, that's how we worked that out. And then, you know, after robberies, uh, we split up and then um I would go to Vegas or Reno and then I would launder all the money to make sure everything was clean before we used it. So back in those days I could carry a hundred thousand on my person in my trench coats and stuff, and it was not a you know, there was not a problem. Whereas today you wouldn't want to be doing that. You want to drive there. You know what I mean? Hope you don't get stopped for something there too, you know what I mean? But I mean, you know, it was a lot easier in those days, what can I say? But yeah, I mean, we invested he, you know, his property, uh, he bought his home. I mean, there was just it was life, it was traveling. I mean, I had my home in New Orleans, I was remodeling. You spend money at, you know, I mean, our robberies weren't one right after the other. They would go sometimes a year in between or three-fourths of a year in between. It was just, you know, I don't I don't know. Yeah, it was you spent life, you know, it was life. And I know a lot of Scott's money went went to Switzerland. His one of his girlfriends during that period was uh from Switzerland from Basel, and she worked in the Swiss bank there. So he had his money. His his uh backup as far as uh ever being investigated was that he would take all of the money he had, give it to her, live off credit cards to make it look like if he was ever being investigated that this guy's in debt. He's not robbing a bank and he's driving a 1989 van. Nobody does what he does with the kind of money lives like that. Do you see what I'm saying? Has a mortgage and lives off credit cards. Once he would rob a bank, he would send it, have it go to Switzerland after it was cleaned, and she would pay off all the credit cards and he'd start up again. I mean, it's you know, he'll his philosophy was well if they if they get me, if they kill me or whatever, I will have gotten them on two times on the credit cards and on the banks. I mean, it's a it's a psychology that when you're in it, in that bubble, it's a it's a new world. I don't know how to explain it. It's somehow um you're separated from life in a way. You're in it, but you're not in it. And the treehouse helped to embody all of that psychology. I can't even fathom doing something like this today. I mean, in my mind, it just doesn't calibrate, right? But then it was seamless. It was almost as if it was it was really meant to be, is somehow I I feel, you know. He and I came together in a way that was not orchestrated uh in the normal criminal way. It came together sort of, you know, I don't know how what word to use, but it was almost chemical. And we came together and were tight and it evolved we evolved the situation for the process, and then it ended. It just ended, blew up. That was it. Everything ended as the way it was supposed to end. We could have quit at any time, and believe me, I was this last robbery. I mean, the story is much more manifold than the last robbery. The last robbery was a result of situations that the uh that the FBI and the Seattle police and everything, things changed up there. The radios, the radio frequencies changed. It went from a normal uh district area of the city to trunk system, and then they had they they placed the Fronet tags in the bank, which we'd been waiting on from the very beginning. So we had to deal with that problem, and we had to deal with the new frequencies. So we in we aborted our initial idea of three banks in one afternoon right on the same day. We'd already set that up to do that, and then we went to the one bank that we had looked at years before. It was too big for Scott to do alone in the very in the uh in you know, in the beginning of when we were doing this. So we set it aside and then we realized that would be a perfect bank. We had never gone that far north in Seattle before, so you know, it felt it felt good. But there was there's a lot of technical things that took place before the robbery that we made us decide shall we do it or shall we not do it. We should have held off, but you know, hubris, we were successful. The Seattle police, the SPD, uh, you know, as Sean will attest to, they, you know, they're predictable. Not I don't mean that like a negative way, it's just that they have they can only do what they can do. And I can survey I surveyed them, you know, their routes, their timing, their shift changes, all of that. And so we would normally hit a bank after one of the rovers would come by and do that, do his route and leave, leave the area, then we would hit it about three minutes after the police officer drove away from that area. Just things like that. And when they would react, you know, I had everything in the radio. I had total communication and we had diversionary things. We had sometimes he would drive the his getaway car all the way back to the treehouse. Sometimes he would leave the car. Only twice did I ever pick him up, and that was one other time in aborted an aborted uh operation in Portland, and then the very last one was the only time that I've ever picked him up because we always had the the safety net that if anything were to happen outside of what I was listening to on the scanner, that if somehow some police officer or we couldn't hear or the FBI, because we could never get the frequencies of the FBI, so we were always, you know, blinded to that, that they might take it. He always wanted me to shadow him, maybe two blocks, three blocks away, until everything was perfect, until we knew that the heat was off of him. And um, you know, that's what I did. And you know, we just we tried to always uh create a safety net, not only for ourselves, but for everyone. We didn't want anything to go go crazy, to go haywire. And our philosophy was abort. If you're confronted, just abort, don't worry about it. Leave the bank, do whatever you gotta do, get out of there, you know? And um, but it never happened until the end. That was the only time it ever happened.

SPEAKER_02 34:21

Well, watching the documentary, I got the sense with all these robberies, it was starting to take its toll on you guys, and you had enough money. I'm just kind of curious, why didn't you just stop? I mean, that last because the the plan was to hit three banks and then you said no, no, no. And then that last bank, it just seemed like you had so much going against you. The day the the weather, the day before Thanksgiving, um, the electronic devices with the money. I I just I just don't understand why. I mean, it just seemed like it was a perfect storm why you guys didn't say, you know what, either take some time off, or you know what, this is it. Let's just pull the plug on this shit.

SPEAKER_01 34:57

I mean, it came to it went through our minds that you have to understand. This is a this became a competition. It became a statement. The money was the motivator, obviously, but it was deeper than that. And our, you know, our success over the years was a confidence builder, and it was almost as if we were this was a statement, not to humiliate or to, you know, say look at us or anything like that, but it was almost as if there was a challenge to us. We were it was an unconscious challenge. I told him this was the last bank, and he himself, the pressure was heavy. You know, it was something deeper. There was something unconscious going on. That let's put it this way, if we hadn't done that last bank robbery, we wouldn't be here right now. And do you see what I'm saying? It's almost metaphysical to me what took place because I had previous dreams up until that point, and uh it told me not to do it. Everything leading up to that last robbery said don't do it. And still we did it. I mean, I don't I don't know if you remember in the documentary, I don't remember if they even elaborated on that, but we robbed a little bank that was in the same area as the last one we did so that I could get the actual frequency, the police frequency of that area, which I thought was the right one, but I didn't know for sure because there's 25 or 30 frequencies that they just scroll through. So I wanted to log that in, and we wanted to we wanted to retrieve the Pronet tags to see how they were in the money. And so Scott, we de-disguised him, we put a ski mask on him. He was not to go to the vault, just to go to the tellers and make sure he got prone tags so that we could get them. And, you know, Scott and I were alone in that. And he was in the back of the van and my van and he went through the money. Within five minutes, he'd gotten three of them. And we were listening to the, you know, between the police and the bank and the and the uh dispatch, and they were saying, Yeah, the uh the police officer says, Well, how many, how many pronet tags were taken out of the bank? And they said, two, and Scott had found three. And I just remember, even to this day, I can remember Scott laughing in the back. He said, Oh, they're trying to trick us by telling me there's only two there. And he'd just gotten three of them. We threw them out. But it was so easy to get them. But what we didn't realize, which we should have, and we didn't, is that uh we the pronet tags are always between the twenty dollar bills, and they were on that time and they were on the last robbery as well. And we didn't cognize, yeah, of course they're gonna put them in twenties, they're not gonna put them in tens or fives, and they're not gonna put them in fifties and hundreds. I mean, they might. It logically they wouldn't because they're gonna lose two hundred dollars or a hundred dollars, and you got them all over every bank in Seattle, that's a lot of money. So twenties make sense, and plus twenties are the most available when you're robbing banks. That's the most, that's the denomination you get mostly is twenties. So, you know, we should have thought just don't take the twenties, you know, just leave the twenties behind, only take fifties and hundreds. And, you know, we didn't think of that. And, you know, we thought we could defeat them, and so we hired Biggins to come with us on that last one. We trained him to this is where they are in the money, this is what you have to do. But the volume of the money was so big, and we got one out, and that gave us a good 10 or 15 minutes more on the getaway route on the last robbery before they caught up to us, and they had overpassed one or two. Uh, Sean, I don't know what, were there three in there or two in the in the hall we took? Three. Three? Well then they they they passed over two, then you know, and and you know, that that's what did it. You know, we we knew that that's what we were facing, and why did we do it? We just we had to do it. I don't know what it is. It's something inside of you. It's not the money. Yeah, logic says you wouldn't want to, but something in us we wanted to we wanted to show ourselves. It was like a mission, an unconscious mission that kept pushing us. Does that make sense? I I I don't know. It doesn't make sense to me, but it's uh it's so profound. I don't think that way.

SPEAKER_00 38:46

Well I would have to I have to say that I was encouraging them to come back too. I mean it may sound strange, but I was hoping they'd come back for another robbery because we were ready for them. So if that stopped at 18, like you said, we might not be talking, but I wanted to come back one more time because we're ready for you now.

SPEAKER_02 39:00

So well, Sean, let me ask you, had the gang not done the last robbery, what were the chances the FBI would have caught them?

SPEAKER_00 39:07

I think slim. I mean, our solution rate, especially after we started using the uh the prone tracking devices, was about 90%. So 90% or 300. So 270 out of 300 we solved. Um so uh, you know, I if again, after it we didn't have we had some a few things going for us uh, you know, before that last robbery, but I I've to answer your question, I don't think we uh we would be here talking today if they had stopped at 18. I don't think so.

SPEAKER_02 39:33

And can you go into that how you figured out how the gang went through money and kind of pinpoint within a week or so when the next robbery would take place?

SPEAKER_01 39:42

That's a beautiful part.

SPEAKER_00 39:43

That's really beautiful what he's uh well let me just say this. Uh, you know, we talked about recovering the cars, we had surveillance photographs from the banks. That was actually we we had a program at the time. We published the uh bank robbery surveillance photographs in the Thursday afternoon paper in Seattle. It was called a program called Roar, called Rat on a Rat. So somebody would call and say, I know this guy, give a thousand dollars for an indictment. But uh, you know, Scott was wearing this theatrical makeup, so you know that wasn't going to come to fruition. But uh in looking back at the robberies, and I did this a couple times as case agent, just I would revisit the case files, I would go back out to the neighborhoods where the banks were robbed, uh, the location of the bank, the size of the bank, the location of the vault, the ingress, egress routes from there, the time of the day, the day of the week. Uh actually uh they became predictable to a degree with that because again, 19 total robberies, 14 of those robberies happened on typically Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays at 11 o'clock, give or take 11 o'clock in the morning. So 14 out of the 19, 11 o'clock in the morning those three days. The other there were otherwise, it was usually around five o'clock or so in the evenings, four robberies at five o'clock. So those are the time frames I had. And again, going back to the banks themselves, uh, again, just dive, you know, deep dive back in. And what are we missing here? What are we missing? What could we, you know, use to our benefit here? That you know, mistakes they made. I mean, Scott got a die pack one robbery, he had to drop the money, so and uh one of the robberies in Portland, he couldn't get in the vault. So even with the the progression of these robberies, there were still mistakes being made, right? Um, but as far as that prediction, uh, using those criteria, also, you know, what when are they coming back? Motivation for robbing banks typically is the money. So how much money are they going through? You know, whether it's two, two, at least two or maybe three people now that have to split this money up. And so what I came up with was they're going through about $21,000 a month. And after that, they'd be coming back. So there was a robbery, uh, which was uh make sure I get the dates right here. Uh I think it was uh January of uh 90 94, 95, sorry. And so I predicted three days in advance, a year later, three days in January, a year later, one of these three days, they're coming back hitting a bank because we had set up surveillances on the banks, but I thought were likely targets. Um that first day, nothing happened. Uh the second day, fewer people went out because they're thinking, uh, you just you're what basis do you have to make this decision? So I said, well, we'll see. Second day, a few more people came out with me, but not a lot, nothing happened. The third day, the third day they hit a bank about just blocks up from where I was sitting. I was out there by myself pretty much at that point in time, so I had predicted that robbery a year in advance, you know. So just doing my homework, you know, doing the homework, you know, likely targets, time of the day, day of the week, the money they're going through, that $21,000. I hit it on the the nail on the head right there. They came back that day, a year later. So for me it was it was uh frustrating because I thought we were ready for it, and we were, but uh, you know, to to to sell that to other law enforcement that this is gonna happen uh third day year later. Well, you know, some people kind of look at me shaking their head, well, this isn't gonna happen. Well, guess what? It did. It did happen.

SPEAKER_01 42:54

Not only that, but you told me in the debriefing, you said when I was uh telling you the getaway, we were they just passed you a block away from where you were sitting, is what you told me. Is that correct? Yeah, about a block, yeah. Yeah, because he had you had you'd asked me in detail how what was our getaway route, you know, for the his getaway route, and I told you what it was. And it's amazing how much I remember. You you uh you know, you asked the question, why would we not stop? But when you get into the book, when you start reading it, you're gonna see the psychology of ourselves, our personal lives, what we thought, how it was. It wasn't as, you know, cut and dry. It was kind of evolution. And the point when I first started, when I first came out there from Chicago, and I came out there, he wanted me to help him, you know, start robbing banks. I was there to remodeling his front house. So and I was living there, and that was the sort of front that I would be there, which was all true. It wasn't a front, I was remodeling, and he was paying me to do that. And and uh, but at the same time, all I was doing was helping with the developing the prosthetics for his masks and then running the electronics, and I was. Never going to be directly. If anything ever happened to him, he got caught. I would just drive back home, get in my vehicle, and leave and go to wherever. You know what I mean? I wouldn't be indicted in any way. And it was like a safe situation. But because, as Sean had said, the first four, five, or six, whatever it was, were all these little silly 5,000, 8,000, whatever. I go, Scott, this has got to end. I can't do this. I'm not going to continue on it. And he, you know, he was always positive. He said, Man, we got to learn. We're learning. Each time we do, we're learning something new. And I go, Yeah, I guess, yeah, we are learning. There's no school of bank robbery. I get that. But, you know, at the same time, I said, the only one way to do this is to take the vaults. He says, I know I want to do the vaults, but I don't have the electronic. I don't know for sure whether our, you know, our radios are going to go through and all that. And I said, Well, get rid of these radios here. Let's buy the top end, get Motorola. We got the top end. What the police use, the Motorola's. Got our own frequency on there, which the police would know if they know that there's a scan. You know, if there's somebody out there communicating on radios, they can pick, they can scan us like we can scan them. So we were always careful. We tried to minimize our conversations on the on the radios. But I said, we got to do them. We got to do the vaults, or otherwise I'm out. I can I can't do this. I'm not going to get caught for some Mickey Mouse 10,000, 5,000. It's just embarrassing. The whole thing's, it's embarrassing to ourselves if we failed. You know, we failed at it. That's what's embarrassing to me and to him as well. And, you know, finally we he can I convinced that I said, let's do this. We got the new radios, top-end radios. And I said, go in at nighttime, go into a we'll go in a grocery store. We knew one actually nearby, right across the street from Hawthorne, uh, the Hawthorne bank there. Um, Sean, do you remember the big one we did three times? Yeah. Yeah, the Seafirst, yeah. Yeah, Seafirst. I mean, yeah, Hawthorne, Seafirst, and across the street was a uh grocery store. So he goes in there and he goes in into the very back and he goes into the freezer, shuts the door, and then we radio and it was clear. I mean, that was as close as we could get to a vault. But the vault door is open, it's not gonna be closed, you know. So that convinced him. I mean, it was like can to me it was never an issue. I never really thought, you know, I mean, if somebody were to close, if one of the employees were to close the vault door on him, it doesn't matter if we have a radio or not, you know, he's it's a done deal. You see what I'm saying? And I would try to tell him that logic. I say, if they're gonna close the door on you, you're not aware of it, then whether I got a radio or not is automatic. Uh so anyway, that it all worked, it was seamless, it's good, and then that's when it started doing the vaults. And I said, listen, let's just stay away from these tellers altogether. I mean, maybe after you get the vault, and if the call hasn't come out and you want to clean the tellers out, go ahead and do it. But you know they've got die packs, and if it'd be horrible to get a die pack, some Mickey Mouse $20, you know, $400 or whatever they came in, you know what I mean? Just leave the tellers alone. Who cares? You don't need to do that. And but you know, he had a way about him. I don't know, he had a stubbornness, and sometimes he would do things and he'd go off the reservation a little bit, and you know, like the one, the one where he got the die pack, he goes in there and the woman, the teller, the teller, I don't know why he went to the tellers first, but he did, and instead of going to the vault, and the he said, Well, what's that those 20s? That's a pack of 20s there. And the teller goes, You want that, sir? And he goes, Well, of course I do. And she said, Okay, and she gave it to him, and that was the die pack. You know what I mean? I mean, you know, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to make myself like I know it all, but it just there's after you do it a bit, you know the logic behind it. And there's no valid reason to take tellers, not when you're doing the vault. And because if there's no money in the vault, there's not going to be that much in the tellers either, basically. That the bank is gonna limit itself to what the tellers have, and they're you know, and if they need a big amount of money, then they go to the manager, and the manager goes and they have special they have special teller vaults and different things where they can get the money, whatever large amount it might have been. But you know, most people don't go in and want to get $200,000 out of the bank. So and you know, we did things on I mean, you know, you ask you said the question why we did it on that night. Well, weather was always to our advantage. We always wanted rough weather, snow, rain, storms, because the police would be tied up, traffic accidents. Nobody patrons don't go to banks when it's raining now, they don't go when there's snowstorms. You got less possibility of anything going wrong if there's patrons, a lot of patrons in the bank. Plus, it gives us cover. I mean, you know, because police are tied up and there's traffic, nothing works properly like it normally would on a good day. And um, you know, that's that was one of our one of our things we tried to do. It didn't always happen that way, but that's what we always tried to do. So, you know, we used as much as we could technically technically, you know. I mean, what's the bank in the bank in Portland that we went down that was an abort, it had to abort because it started out. We planned it, it started out, it was going to be a it was a huge rainstorm that morning. It's a two-hour, three, three-hour drive, two and a half, three-hour drive to Portland from Olympia. You know, by the time we got down there, there was this black line that was black on our side going south, and then right there above the city was just white sunshine. We get there, and he's dressed up in a trench coat, and you know, he just doesn't, you know, it's not the right get up because we I've I I've dressed him up and did everything for the appropriate weather. And so when he got down there, it's sunny and hot and sweat, and he's got this prosthetics on and it's dripping on him. It's irritating him. And he goes in. This bank, he had the the there was a rear door uh going into the bank from the parking lot. So, and right there as the walkway going into the rear door of the bank, there's the drive-thru. And there was a patron in the patron in the waiting to get money from the ATM or from the, you know, the drive-thru teller station, and they saw him go in, he just looked weird because he would dressed in the way he was, like raincoats and everything, and he had his, you know, his face was not properly real. And at that point, the so they called in, they called uh they called the police the 911 because on the scanner they said, yeah, we just got a patron calling in from the bank at such and such address. And then I called him out of the bank and we had to rendezvous and he had to leave the vehicle, and you know, he didn't he didn't get anything, and we just the close call. That was the closest call we had to anything that took place. That's an example of using the weather and then suddenly it goes against you. Um you see what I'm saying? You think of those things and you think of uh uh, you know, how to I have to buy the right kind of dress for him. Uh, you know, in the summertime in Seattle, that's why I dressed him up in always a sport coat so he could camouflage his gun and his scan and his radio and uh, you know, so it wouldn't be seen because you just can't go in there with shorts and stuff on. In the winter, which was good in Seattle, you could get these big heavy parkas and different things like that that could cover everything that he was carrying on. So, you know, that that's part of our philosophy.

SPEAKER_02 50:53

Steve, I read this somewhere. Did you guys have a mobile base station set up to white out police frequencies?

SPEAKER_01 50:59

That was our that was what we were doing for the last when we were gonna do the three robberies, but we had to abort all that because the police frequencies changed to the trunk system, and we had that set up. I had bought a transceiver about two years before that. I flew out to uh Vienna, out to Washington, D.C. and there's a CIA electronics place out there in Vienna, Virginia, something as I recall, and I went in there and used fake because you got to show ID and all kinds of stuff to be able to but purchase this. And plus, when we bought the bought the transceiver, it was um had to be programmed on a disc and you had to give the frequency. So I made a big story up that I was coming from Greece, you know, and I was a had my captain over there has a fishing crew and he needs to have this frequency program. You know, I figured, well, they wouldn't know what a frequency in Greece would be. They would obviously know a police frequency, okay, whether it was in Seattle or wherever, because they're on a very marginal, I mean, I don't know, uh, you know, it's not a big difference. 480 or 460 megahertz point, whatever. But so I think anybody doing that would know it's a police frequency or a fire department frequency or whatever. So I, you know, made a story up that I was coming from Greece, Athens, and he wants this special transceiver that was really good or something. You know, I made a story up. I mean, I read up on it a little bit, but you know, back then stories were went a long way.

SPEAKER_02 52:27

I just can't believe the amount of work you guys put into this.

SPEAKER_01 52:31

I mean, this was cre it was like a creative experience. I don't know how to explain. It's like this it just built and built and built and built, and it was a challenge, it was creative, inspiring in many ways, and um I I don't know. It just grew. It just grew and grew and grew, and you know. And then, you know, which we probably will get to when I discovered that uh, you know, we never knew the FBI. We, you know, we knew the police as much as you can know them, and but the FBI we didn't know, but we knew they were there. We just didn't have, we couldn't get their frequencies, you know, because they're not public like the police frequencies were. And um but then when the Sean put this big article out in the Seattle paper, and I, you know, picked up the paper and saw it was a two-page article, and there was a picture of Sean there in the bill, you know, the billboard behind not billboard, but the pegboard behind him with all of Hollywood's bank shots and different things like that. And then I go, okay, there's that's the man. There's the guy. You know what I mean? So finally we had a Here I am, here I am. It was like our partner. It was like finally we found our partner. He's he's our friend in crime, you know what I mean? Well, and it wasn't it wasn't a malicious.

SPEAKER_00 53:43

Stevenson was part of the crew at that point in time, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 53:46

So we hired, we hired God hired one of his friends who was kind of at that time very nerd, you know, electronic savvy and all that. He went and uh and uh uh surveyed Sean for about two weeks, the followed him and tried to figure out if we could get any smut on him in case we ever needed it for something. But nothing ever came of it. He got it, but nothing ever came of it. Because I mean, you know, he followed following home, following to work, and that was it, and whatever he did, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 54:13

But nothing ever came up. I learned about I learned about that in the book when I read it last year.

SPEAKER_01 54:20

Sean There's a lot of substories in the book that obviously uh a documentary can't bring out, but it's a very there's a lot of humor, a lot of tragedy, strange things, you know. Uh it's it it's a voyage. It's not like a true crime novel written in that context. It's written in my voice, and the dialogue that goes on between me and other persons, it's remembered and uh it's all truthful. And so you take it as you will, but if you want to learn, if you want to understand how we did what we did and the methodologies that we, you know, executed, you can read the book and you can see everything that took place because I didn't hold back, you know. I mean, including myself, embarrassment, embarrassing moments and everything. I tried to make it as you know as truthful as possible what took place.

SPEAKER_02 55:10

So and after the last bank robbery and they got captured, what what did the FBI find at Scott Scarlock's house?

SPEAKER_00 55:16

Well, we did the uh search warrant at his house uh Thanksgiving Day that morning. Um and of course at that time, you know, the night before was a shootout, and uh Scott had bailed out of the van. So that next morning, after I worked the evening getting search warrants, arrest warrants for Scott, I we hit the hit his house in Olympia with the teams. And uh this was like six in the morning. Um and uh we did a search of the house. Uh there was a house, there was the barn, and then further back in the woods, which Steven described to me the evening before was this huge tree house, which I wasn't sure if that existed because he described it to me. And of course, when I got there, I realized there was this huge tree house. But as far as evidence concerned, uh we got some weapons out of the house and the property, we got some uh ammunition, we got uh some money, about thirty thousand dollars, which I think I found out after the fact when Stephen mentioned they had robbed a bank about five days before to get the Pronat devices with the ski mast. That $30,000 was I think uh Steven's take from that robbery, so I took his money and the new search warrant. Um, and then uh the makeup studio, we found the makeup studio in the barn. Uh so that you know that was pretty much it. And also when we were there, uh his girlfriend uh had shown up the night before from Phoenix to spend Thanksgiving with Scott. She's in the treehouse. We called her out, did an interview with her at the scene, but uh again that whole morning at the tree house was about six o'clock and in the morning till midday. And then at that point in time we were leaving. I had all the evidence in my vehicle to bring back up to the Seattle office to enter into evidence. Of course, that never happened because on the way back up was when I got the other call about the sh uh shots fired in the area about you know blocks away from the previous night's event. So that's when I decided not to go to the office. I raced up to north north Seattle where uh the standoff started with at the in the camper in the back of this uh lady's yard there. Again, just blocks away from the events from the night before.

SPEAKER_02 57:11

Steve, when the robbery went south and you were captured, what were you thinking?

SPEAKER_01 57:14

Well, I don't know if thoughts came into it. You don't uh prepare for moments like that. I mean, there was a frustrating moment when I was uh I was driving on the getaway route, which was very circuitous, and after our robbery, I rendezvoused with him. We were north of the bank, about five blocks north of the bank where they left their vehicle and got into mine. And um, once we started driving down, and then we went back into the bank, back toward the bank, into the everything that, you know, the in the at that point, you know, the scanner was going crazy. There was one call after the other, one one uh officer responding, I'm on my way, another officer responding, and they're on their way. You know, it was and by the time we got back to the bank, I mean, there was it was chaotic. I mean, there were police coming everywhere, but we still, you know, I mean, I held f you you I mean, I went through the we went through the route, I mean, many, many times. And when Mark showed up, we had to do it with him to show him, even though he wasn't gonna be responsible for driving or anything, or that he even knew the area of town, but we just wanted him to, you know, feel what was gonna go happen. And I just, you know, was on autopilot, and you know, they were on autopilot. I said, just get those, get those tags, get those tags, whatever you do, get them out of here. We gotta get them out because the police are everywhere, they're gonna be on us. And, you know, I took a left away from the bank up into the residential areas, and then a cop came up the hill, I remember, and I he turned the wrong direction from where I was going, and I said, There's one. And then we had the other, we had two getaway cars uh stationed south of the bank in case we had to abort. And then plus we had Mustang, who was on the very top of the hill from this bank near the highway where the police would be coming down, so she could radio us telling us if police are coming, and she was there as a third redundant kind of pickup in case something happened. And she happened to be there in front of me at that point, and then the police were coming from behind me, and they turned and went to her, and I went forward, going straight, I recall, and then they stopped at I could look in my rear room, you know, in my side mirror, and I saw that they'd stopped, and then she had stopped her car, and then they started backing up because obviously they were tracking me. And at that point, Scott got one of the prone tanks, had handed it to me, and I threw it out the window. And at that point, the police lost it. So they had to they had to retrieve that tag that I threw out and deactivate it, and then they could go on, you know, triangulate as they were as they were doing. Well, I gave us 10-15 minutes and we kept going south. And then at one point, it we just passed our one of our drop cars that we had in case we had to, you know, get out and abort. And we just passed it. We were about a block away from it. And then he said, Stop, I want to drive now. And I go, he said, I've gone through all the money, and I said, Well, man, you got there's got to be more than one. We got three the other day. There's got to be more. You got to go keep looking, man. We can't stop. I don't want to stop. We can't stop. Because as soon as you stop, you know, they're there. It doesn't take them long to get there because you're you're con you know, you're steady. Their reception's steady, their beep is steady. And so he kept arguing and arguing. And so I finally said, Okay, okay, I can't hear anymore. And I jumped in the back, I pulled over to the side, jumped to the bank. Scott gets up in the car, and then he starts taking his prosthetics off and changing into a different what are you doing, man? It's storming. Go, go, go. What are you doing? Don't sit here and stop. And I looked back and they had a pile. It was just like loose money. And I go, How on earth am I supposed to go through this? You know, and Biggins is back there. I don't even know what he's doing. I think he just went unconscious or something. I don't know. But it was a mess. They didn't have it ordered or anything. You know, I don't know why they did what they did. We'd spoken about it before, separate boxes or something, but it wasn't that. And I just started going in it, and then he finally, after about a minute, which is a long time in this kind of scenario, which you would know. And he pulls up, and it's just a small knoll in a residential, and he turns left and then he goes, Oh my God, they're everywhere. And then I kind of looked out the leaned up because I was on my knees and my arms trying to go through this money, and I looked back and I could see all these police lights, and then that's when they started shooting. They started, they ambushed and they shot biggins first, and he fell flat onto the mutt pile of money. And he was to the left of me. I was on the sliding door side, and he was behind the driver's side, and he fell, and they stopped, and Scott jumps out with his semi-automatic rifle, and his whole I mean, I'm skipping through history here, but his whole premise was, and he always had it in a he always had in a guitar case with his semi-automatic rifle with armor-piercing bullets. There was a cop, ex-cop in Chicago, that robbed a bank, turned bank robber, and he was being pursued after a bank robbery by another cop, and he got out and shot the engine out, and he got away. And so that stuck in Scott's mind, and he always wanted that rifle in case there was a cop pursuing him. He could shoot the engine out. Well, he got out and the rifle jammed. So all that philosophy and everything jumped rifle jammed, he jumps back in through the sliding door, and then they started shooting again, and then they shot my left arm off, and it just started flying in front of my face. And um uh, you know, then he stopped again, and about a half a block up, he stopped again, and he got out, and I screamed out, you know, they shot my arm, they shot my fucking arm off, you know what I mean, or something like that. He gets out and he has this uh this uh Beretta shotgun, and it had single slugs for the same purpose of shooting an engine out, car stopped the car from pursuing. And I think he shot one or twice. I I he was on the side of me, but I was my arm was shot off, and you know, I'm you know, nothing, nothing's real at that point. And evidently Big and had shot his when he lay flat, lay prone on the ground, and he put his gun behind his head and shot out the window. I never heard it. I mean, it would have been it'd have been four or five inches from my head, but I never heard it, you know, because I was already in shock, you know, and adrenaline and everything. And um, so he got Scott got back in, left the sliding door open, and then they started shooting again. As soon as he got in, they started shooting again, and they shot my other arm off. And um and then maybe a little bit further down, he runs into the lawn of the house, goes up against a bush or a tree, and he aborts, and then that's where it all ended. And then it was like a whole new life opened up. You know what I mean? It was a yeah, it was how do you how do you appro you know the the the point about it is if you're when you know that you're uh in opposition to something that shouldn't be that should not be happening, you don't have the same ferocity, you can't justify shooting somebody. Do you see what I'm saying? Whereas if you're in a war and you're going and you're fighting a battle, you know, you don't it's just instinct, you just shoot, you go for it. But that was not our mindset, it was not that. Our mindset was always to over-exaggerate ourselves to make sure nothing happened like that. Well, it happened. And, you know, in the documentary, I mean it's always from the very beginning, even in the court when we were, you know, at the federal courthouse and our pleas, signing our plea agreement and everything, you know, and they had written out everything that took place saying we ambushed them, but it was never true. They never we never ambushed them. I had no skin. I mean, maybe then you could say I had skin in the game to lie about it, but I didn't, and I'm not now because it doesn't matter to me one way or the other. And um, you know, it is what it is. I don't have a I don't have a hard feeling about it, but I don't like it when they lie about it. And instead of the opposite, I mean, like Sean, who would never he never was like that. And I always respected Sean from the very beginning. I mean, our interaction was always very, very good. He was a professional Mac, respecting him a lot.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:52

Sean, I have to ask, did you try to get Steve and Mark Biggins to cooperate? Trying to figure out what our next step was, and that's during the course of that, is when I came up with uh, you know, Scott Skerlock's name and where he lived in Olympia, Washington, and such. So everything that, you know, he had been involved with, uh, the things he knew, but that was part of the plea agreement, and he was required to sit down and talk with me. And so that was four days worth of uh interaction, which you know, talking about, you know, my philosophy at the time was I I think I told him right away, I said, hey, well, both Mark and Stephen, this is nothing personal, this is strictly professional. I need to know what happened and why it happened, and that's the judge's uh decision, not mine. So we had it we had a good interaction both with you know I had with both Stephen and Mark. So um they were cooperative to a degree, uh to a degree, and not not totally. Um, but we uh you know the the charge is only relative to the last robbery. They were charged four counts. The bank robbery, the use of weapon, the bank robbery, uh assault on a federal officer, AFO, and you know it does, but like you said, um

SPEAKER_02 1:06:00

Limited cooperation, which means he didn't name accomplices, um, you know, like Mustang and a couple other people. I I find that interesting, Steve, that you were fine, you were facing decades behind prison and and you didn't reveal any names.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:14

I mean, there was nothing that they would have benefited me, even if it would have, I wouldn't have done it because they were just innocent parties. Do you see what I mean? And I don't even know if forensically they could ever indict them, you know, just because I said something. I mean, they could say that guy's just saying it just to get time off or something. But Scott and I had uh we'd made a pact, you know. He said at this point, you know, halfway through the our this voyage, we both came to the no matter what happens, he said he would say, when we would be mountain climbing or something, you know, he would say, When don't ever let don't ever let anyone else decide how your life ends. You'd make your own decision. And, you know, as as a two partners, inseparable as we were, you know, it got to the point that if one of us were apprehended or caught for whatever reason, the other person's gonna get it. Because it's just there was just too much connective fiber between us. I mean, I was ignorant to the law. I didn't know laws back then, so I probably to me it was like all or nothing in those days. You know, if you got picked up, you were done, no matter what. Obviously, the law has so many different subtle variations, and but he said, you know, whatever happens, we gotta do you do what you gotta do on your own. Everything is you and everything is me. If it comes down to whatever bad situation comes about, you're on your own, I'm on my own. There's no helping, there's none of this sort of stuff, you know. It's not like the movies or anything like that. And for me, the difficult, the most difficult part of that, when I was in the hospital waiting on surgery, you know, and I mean, I'm in, you know, sh both arms shot up in pain, and uh my mind's trying to decipher, okay, okay, I'm here now. Now what do I got to do? And the biggest problem for me was the fact that Scott was determined before this robbery to have his girlfriend from Phoenix come down and be at the treehouse. This was done, she arrived the day we were doing, or the yeah, the day we were doing this, she arrived the night we were in Seattle. And I go, Scott, you can't do this, man. You know what we're facing. I mean, he knew what we were facing. We, you know, there's a task force, there's the prone tags, there's, you know, we knew what we were facing. And I said, you can't do that, you know. If if it fall, if it all falls apart, they're gonna go down there. The who knows, they could kill her, they could do whatever. We don't know what the police. I mean, according to what they did to me, all I could assume was if they found that treehouse, because they're gonna find the place, they're gonna find Scott because they had the guns, they traced the guns, they're gonna get his address, they're gonna get it. And here it is, this girl, she's innocent. She didn't know anything about bank robberies. I mean, she loves Scott, the whole, you know, the whole romantic thing, naive as it was, but there she is in this tree house, and then I can only imagine if the police found this tree house back there. I mean, what they did to us and what they did to the front cottage house that I told them about, you know, that's where I was living, you know, busting everything down. They probably I mean, the girl would have been minimally arrested and put in jail until, you know, the dust, you know, the dust settled or whatever. But the point is, is that she would have been traumatized if not killed, shot, you know, because what law enforcement's gonna see this tree house? They don't know if it's booby trap, they don't know anything. You see what I mean? And I told Sean, I said, no, there's no booby traps. Don't, it's not there. I was thinking of this girl, she didn't deserve it, and it pissed me off that Scott did this, allowed her to come up. That really pissed me off. And so basically, in my traumatic state, lay laying there on the gurney and all these guys asking me these questions, and all uh, you know, and it was just like, oh my god, you know what I mean? And so I'm trying to I'm trying to protect myself as much as I can. And, you know, I mean, I don't even think I was mirandized, you know. It didn't even matter to me. I don't have a no, you know, all that silly shit in court going to did I did it. I'm I did what I did. I'm not gonna deny it. I mean, who who does that kind of stuff? Cowards do that. I did what I did, but I didn't do what I didn't do, you know what I mean? And that's how I want to see it. And, you know, Sean was a professional, and you know, we were working the same thing, the same case, the same story, and you know, there was no reason to be confronted to him. I'm not gonna sit and you know be a tough guy. There's no reason to be a tough guy because there was too many people that didn't deserve any of this in their lives. Do you see what I'm saying? You know, so I tried to at the same time protecting myself because I didn't want to, you know, I'm I'm I'm concerned about myself now. I don't know what I'm facing. I had no idea, you know what I mean, at that point in time. So but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:44

Steve, I Steve, I was watching footage of when you and I think it was your co-defendant Biggins being led into an FBI vehicle. Look like after you were out of the hospital, you guys were in prison jumpsuits. The two of you kind of like was smiling and look amused. Were you not concerned about the consequences that were coming?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:02

Well, you want to know the real story? This is what's beautiful. Read my book. Here's what happened. Hey, Biggins is six foot six or something, you know, 280 pounds, okay? A big guy. He's shot in his gut and his leg, and he, you know, you're trying to move in these slip-on uh uh pants they give you, you know what I mean? And we're in slippers. And I'm in the car, and the cameras are right on me. You know, they're looking at us, and then Biggins is getting in, and he's having to get in backwards into the thing. And as he's getting in, and they got cameras in my window, they're watching Biggins get in, and his whole ass is shown. His ass is bare, and I started laughing. I go, This is perfect for the fucking press. Look at he's they're shooting his ass, you know. And of course they're gonna say, they're gonna say, yeah, he doesn't give a shit about no, it wasn't that. That makes sense. It was because he could scooted in and his pants unfolded on him and he had his bare ass in there. He even said, God, he goes, God damn this shit, you know, or something like that. And actually, right before that, when we were in the garage there in the federal courthouse, we were talking to there was a couple of SPD officers in there. There was FBI, there were some marshals, and we were like talking like one of them was from Minnesota where Biggins was from, and we're talking fishing, having a good time. I mean, it's cool. The FPD officers were cool. They go, Man, I don't know how you guys did what you did, but you know, you know, I'm sorry to see you guys have to go down like this. I mean, things like that. That that was the normal upside to all of this experience, you know. The FBI agents, the marshals, and the FPD officers that were really cool. And, you know, they were all gentlemen, and you know, when you don't act like a cocky kid, they're not nobody's gonna nobody's gonna, you know, it life is what it is, and it turned out this way, unfortunately. But, you know, on the good side, on the upside, it uh made a it ended, and it ended advantageously for the system, for the for the police and everybody else, you know, which I'm I'm fine with all of that. It's uh, you know, it's the way it should be. Uh otherwise, none of this would have happened. The book would have never been written, none of this would have happened. And this is a story. I don't know. It's a unique story that took place in American history. And that to me has value. I don't know why. It's not as if I promote people going out to Rob Banks, but it's more than that. It can be an inspiration that, you know, something as big as this is, to do it in the way we did it, two guys that are not trained in any of this capacity, and we could do it, think of what people can do in life, you know, all the great things that can take place. That's what uh that's what I see in the story and the uniqueness of what Scott did to this treehouse. I mean, a guy to do what he did, and it's just phenomenal. And the creation that was created is not of this world in the way we know it. And you know, that's that's unique and to me important in American history. That's you know, I mean, the only people that got injured were us, and that's it. And so we made our beds, we created what we created, and it ended as it ended. And I don't regret it. I don't regret getting shot, I don't regret any any of it. Um, I don't regret prison. Um, not that I want it again, but I learned, you know, I had a lot of great friends, met some very super people in there. Um, you know, I did a lot. Uh I was in the best health of my life. You know, it was it was great. I mean, great in the sense that, you know, if you can see through the insanity, you can make something happen in those places. You know, and that's that's that's kind of cool in a way. I mean, I believe me, I don't want to even think about it again. I couldn't, you know, but when it's new, when you don't know anything and you're going into an environment like that, you're just learning day to day and things come about, and you know, you have to change, you have to morph, you know, it's a it's it it's been an interesting ride, an interesting part of my life, I have to admit. I mean, but would I ever do it again? I can't even imagine and it's not something like you'd be coming, you know, career criminals and recidivists and all that. It's not even in my mind. Because what took place took place because Scott and I came together out of a situation that took and unfolded. I could never have done it alone. If I hadn't have been there, he wouldn't have done what he did. It wouldn't have happened. He would have been caught and he would have had people that he couldn't have trusted, that he couldn't have evolved with, and um, it just wouldn't have happened. So, you know, blame it on me, blame it on him. I just I don't blame it on anybody. It just was. And, you know, we tried to, you know, we evolved it to get out of it, but this this ended it, you know, this ended it. Because it was going to end anyway. Either we succeeded or they succeeded. Because it was in for me, it was in uh my plans were to sell my house in New Orleans, and I was going to return back to Europe, go to Europe, live there, buy a place and go, you know, live over there and do what I was doing before I left. So but it didn't end that way. So here we are.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:45

Well, I I want to thank the both of you for coming on the show and reaching out to me. Thank you so much, Sean. I really appreciate it. And and Steve, tell us the name of your book and and where our listeners can pick up a copy.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:56

Yeah, it's The Tree House, the true story of Hollywood the Bank Robber. When you say the tree house, you better add on the true story of Hollywood the bank robber because a lot of treehouse stuff comes up. Or you give them my name, you know, Steven Myers, the Treehouse, Steven Myers, it'll come up. It's on Amazon and Barnes and Noble Book. Um, yeah, and it's available in eight languages, I believe. So, um, and it's got uh, you know, it's Kindle and it's also audiobook, you can get it, and the Spine's Publishing. So yeah, but it's on Amazon. I think it's worthwhile, you know. It's a story, it's an untruncated story. Uh, you're gonna get it from me, everything that I, you know, my involvement, Scott and I's relationship. It's it's there's poetical points in it, there's trips, there's philosophy, it's it's a it's just a it's an it's an unfolding experience of four and a half years, and um it is what it is, what can I say? But it's interesting. And the tree house, um, justified as it is, it fell. It all collapsed, evidently. I was out there some years back and it's no longer there. And in a way, I'm glad because it was his creation and no one else deserved to have it. Does that make sense to you? It was something that, yeah, it was something that uh took place. You know, he put everything he had into that. That was his vision.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:15

Well, again, Steve Myers and Sean Johnson, thank you so much for spending your time with us today.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:20

Thank you, Vic.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:20

Thank you, Vic. It's been a pleasure. As always, I'd like to thank everyone for tuning in, especially my listeners in Tempe, Arizona, Seattle, Washington, Nwaso, Oklahoma, and Mountainside, New Jersey. If you work in law enforcement, had an interesting criminal background, please drop me a note on Twitter, Instagram at VicFerrari50. If you're watching on YouTube, please hit the like and subscribe buttons. And if you're really feeling strong, please hit the hype button. If you enjoy the content, check out my Amazon author page. Just type in my name, VicFerrari Like the Car, where you can preview all my NYPD books for free. Thanks again, everyone, and I'll see you next week.