CV Rick

The Bankrobber I Knew - Part Eight

For the entire story, click the Bankrobber topic at the end of this post, in the sidebar to your right, or just click here.

“I thought you were dead.” 

That's an awkward way to start a conversation but that's what I said. 

“Oh yeah, I should have called,” Westley said.  “I didn't think about that after the explosion.”

“What happened?”  I asked.

He jumped into the truck and helped unload it while he talked.

“I was running a bit late and had just turned the corner when the explosion threw the Pinto clear across the intersection and into a lamppost.  I don't think it'll ever be drivable again.”

“As if you weren't in the Pinto at the time?” I asked.  Besides the Harley, Westley had a little Pinto hatchback with wood paneling.  He kept fixing it just enough to keep it running.

The Bankrobber I Knew - Part Seven

For the entire story, click the Bankrobber topic at the end of this post, in the sidebar to your right, or just click here.

We were told to stop using all radios, cell phones, and electronic devices using radio or infra frequencies, including garage door openers.  A bomb had exploded in the center of the city and the Murrah Building was destroyed and authorities had no idea what the trigger had been.  They weren't taking any chances. Our plant closed down and everyone went home.

On the way home I listened to the news on the radio and word was that some kind of Middle Eastern terrorist group had blown up the building in an act of defiance against America.  That was the story that was repeated for at least a day on national news, and for many more days locally.  The seething hatred of those Khomeni thugs by phone-in callers was broadcast over Oklahoma airwaves complete with death threats and plans to nuke Tehran.

When I got back to the apartment Westley wasn't there.  His car wasn't there.  Not that I was surprised, but it's the first thing I checked.  Maybe he hadn't gone in, maybe he'd been sick, maybe, maybe, maybe. 

There were no calls on the answering machine and the phone system was overwhelmed.  The only sound in my receiver was static that whole first day.  I knew my family would be worried, but I had no way to contact them.  The only thing I could do was watch the news, which I did with the volume off so I could also listen to the radio.  If you pay attention to everything you might find out the truth.  I believed that then.  I'm more cynical today.

By midnight, I figured Westley was dead.  There just wasn't any other option so far as I could see.  His parole appointment was at 9:00 and the bomb went off at either 9:02 or 9:03 according to reports.  Even taking into account him being a few minutes late, he'd have been in the parking lot, in front of the building, or at the entrance.  The bomb had taken all of that out.

The Bankrobber I Knew - Part Six

For the entire story, click the Bankrobber topic at the end of this post, in the sidebar to your right, or just click here.

Westley took pieces of a dozen printers and combined the travel rods.  What that meant is that he created an assembly and sits above a table and runs back and forth along the width and length of a sheet of paper with a print head.  He ran cables to them and together we wrote the programs to control the belts so that the printer could go back and forth over the paper, then we programmed in every millimeter of a twenty dollar bill. It was this practice that really taught me how to control machines with sensors and a bit of good code.  It was also this project that taught me how to wire motors directly to a printer port and make things happen.  Computers are pretty cool, I thought.  I learned how to engineer by counterfeiting money.

It was a pretty fun exercise.  After than, Westley experimented with different inks and  papers until he got a pretty good counterfeit. 

“What are you going to do with them?” I asked. 

“Spend them,” he said. 

I didn't argue with him about the legality.  In fact, I wished I had the courage to try and spend those bills also, but I didn't.  I was scared of being caught.  By this time however, there was no way I was going to tell Treasury, the FBI, or anyone else about Westley's activities.  Good thing they never came back to chat about it.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The Bankrobber I Knew - Part Five

For the entire story, click the Bankrobber topic at the end of this post, in the sidebar to your right, or just click here.

One morning I opened my bedroom door while rubbing my tired eyes and standing in front of me was my roommate's parole officer, nearly naked except for a towel around her waist.  Rhonda was exiting the bathroom just as I needed to shower.

“Um hi Officer Williams,” I said while staring at her ample breasts.

“Hi, Rick,” she said as she disappeared back into Westley's room. 

I wondered how awkward that was at the Federal Building.  Westley had his parole check-ins at 9 AM every Wednesday morning.  I had to wait until that night to ask him since I'd changed jobs in order to take more college classes so we no longer saw each other at work.

“Isn't that against the rules?” I asked him when I got home.

“I've always been all about mixing business and pleasure,” he said, grinning.  “Let me tell you about the cute bank teller I once knew.”

The Bankrobber I Knew - Part Four

For the entire story, click the Bankrobber topic at the end of this post, in the sidebar to your right, or just click here.

“If I were to attempt to be a successful bank robber,” Westley began over a couple of beers at the Wildside.  “I'd have to know the consequences.”

“The consequences?  You go to jail, right?”  I asked.

“Well, if you get caught, you go to jail.  But there's a lot of different kinds of jail and a lot of different kinds of sentences.  A smart bank robber would think that all the way through.  A smart bank robber would try to get the least sentence in the best prisons for the most robberies.”

“Wouldn't a smart bank robber just not get caught?” I asked.

“The law of averages, Rick.  Eventually even the best bank robber gets caught if he keeps doing it.”

Curious, I asked him, “Doesn't a good bank robber get enough money from a single robbery to get out of the country and live a nice life?”

“No. It's only in the movies that you get into the vault, hold hostages, get a big score and skip the border.  In the real world the key is just to get what's in a couple of cashier tills and get out before the cops show up.  The objective is to never be in a stand-off and never be in a chase.  How it's done is like this:

The Bankrobber I Knew - Part Three

For the entire story, click the Bankrobber topic at the end of this post, in the sidebar to your right, or just click here.

Westley worked very hard.  When on the job he'd put in twelve hour days without complaint and he'd rush out to repair a substation or pump station when he was on call and he never sighed or rolled his eyes at the inconvenience.  He'd just put on a jacket, grab a toolbox and drive right out.  Even though he was, by far, the most talented electronics tech in the company, he didn't ask for raises and didn't inflate his own worth. 

He also played hard.  When he was off work he enjoyed Bourbon and games. He was in a couple of bar pool leagues as well as one dart league. I wasn't much for pool, but I'd played darts off and on since I'd acquired a dart board and hung it on the basement wall when I was ten.  I told Westley that story and he jumped right on it, bringing me a set of plastic tipped darts with Dallas Cowboy flights as a present.  A present with strings attached, of course. 

He dragged me to the bar with him and before I knew it I was throwing at an electronic board for twenty dollars a game.  Surprisingly, I was competent and it didn't cost Westley any money, so I was on the team.

We played every Friday and since I didn't have any Friday night classes at the University of Oklahoma, I was able to make every match.  The bar we were sponsored by, Wildside, was a raunchy strip club in South Oklahoma City, where the rough-looking strippers were either past their prime or not pretty enough to make money at a place with more neon.  They'd hang around drinking until someone with actual money to spend came in the joint, then they'd plod around in front of him until he picked a favorite.  It was the type of place one would expect to find known felons, but since I didn't ask questions, Westley was the only confirmed sighting.

The Bankrobber I Knew - Part Two

For the entire story, click the Bankrobber topic at the end of this post, in the sidebar to your right, or just click here.

When things had finally deteriorated to the point that I had to leave home for a while, my wife decided I needed to take a box of china dishes with me.  She drove right up to the front door of Southern Transformer and threw the box out the window of her car, they crashed with movie-quality sound and then she squealed the tires as she pulled away.  She'd timed it to occur during my morning break, so there was an audience of a dozen guys sitting on the loading dock to watch the event.  Being Oklahoma Rednecks none of them moved or talked until she drove away, then Terry, the largest by eight belt notches slowly said, “I think Westley is looking for someone to room with.”

And that's how Westley and I ended up in a two bedroom apartment overlooking the courtyard. 

Becoming Westley's roommate wasn't as easy as all that, of course.  First I moved in with Terry for a week while we found a place and I scheduled interviews.  When you move in with an ex-con on parole there are several important things that have to be taken care of.  I don't know if this is true of all ex-cons, but it's certainly true of bankrobbers on parole.

The Bankrobber I Knew - Part One

For the entire story, click the Bankrobber topic at the end of this post, in the sidebar to your right, or just click here.

This is the story of me and my bank robber roommate.  Not many people actually rob banks because it's a losing proposition.  Fewer people who aren't incarcerated ever meet any bank robbers because they tend to get caught and separated from society for very long periods of time.  So, I count myself among the very few people in this country to have ever been friends with, and roommates with a bank robber. 

I met Westley Walls at Southern Transformer in Oklahoma City.  I worked there as both the supervisor of their quality assurance program and as a transformer designer, which really just meant I crunched numbers.  A transformer in simplistic terms is just two coils of copper wire over iron cores enclosed in a neutral oil, but the mathematics of transformers is actually a fun exercise – calculating the number of turns of copper in each coil, the amount of paper insulation, the space between the copper and the space between the coils, and the type and depth of the oil insulator.  The best part of the job was hitting these tremendous transformers, some of them the size of an average house, with strikes of lightning-strength electricity.  We had banks of capacitors that would charge over the course of several hours, then when enough electricity had been stored, it would all be released in a beautiful blue crash of lightning right at the transformer and an array of sensors would measure every part of the device to see what damage it'd taken.  A transformer has to be able to withstand lightning, so it was the ultimate test.  Westley hooked up and maintained all the electronic test equipment for the testing booth.  He was an electronics genius, but we'll get into that later.

It was a hard time for me.  My wife and I were in the process of splitting up and I had many sleepless nights and a lot of distractions with the full compliment of emergencies and drama.  I needed someone to talk to and Westley was always willing to listen, so we talked while hooking up all that equipment and charging the capacitors. 

“You're a really patient listener,” I once said.

“I had a lot of time in the joint to learn to listen to people,” he said.  This was my first introduction to him as an ex-con.  He was open about it to me, but usually something so pronounced would be news long before even meeting someone in the workplace.  'pssst, he's a jailbird'  'see that guy over there, he's a con' 'you'll see a guy named Westley, he got sent away for robbing banks'  Things like that would be expected.  But no one seemed interested in talking about Westley's incarceration.