In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins is joined by retired FBI agent Shawn Johnson and retired bank robber Stephen Myers to examine one of the most sophisticated bank robbery investigations in modern American history. The discussion focuses on the notorious career of Scott Scurlock, known as the “Hollywood Bandit,” and the law enforcement effort that ultimately brought the robbery spree to an end. These two guests co-authored a book about these exploits titled The Treehouse: The True Story of Hollywood the Bank Robber.
Shawn Johnson begins by discussing his career with the FBI, including assignments involving violent crime and counterterrorism, instruction at the FBI Academy, and training new agents after retirement. His experience provides insight into the methods and challenges of major federal investigations.
Stephen Myers recounts his unusual path from Kansas City to a life of architecture, sculpture, furniture design, and restoration work around the world. He explains how he first met Scott Scurlock while helping build a treehouse compound in Washington State and how that relationship eventually drew him into a criminal enterprise.
The conversation explores Scurlock’s early involvement in methamphetamine production and the development of the remote treehouse property that served as a base of operations. After a violent incident ended that chapter, Scurlock turned his attention to bank robbery, approaching it with meticulous planning and extensive research. Stephen describes how Scurlock studied failed robberies, developed disguises using prosthetic masks, conducted surveillance operations, mapped escape routes, and used radios and communications equipment to reduce the chances of capture. The pair discuss the first successful robberies and the methods that allowed the crew to evade authorities.
Shawn Johnson explains how the FBI investigation evolved into a major task force operation. Investigators analyzed robbery patterns, vehicle purchases, tire records, witness statements, and other forensic evidence to identify the perpetrators and understand their operating methods. The episode examines the robbers’ transition from traditional teller robberies to more ambitious vault takeovers. Stephen discusses the use of insider information, surveillance of cash deliveries, and careful target selection designed to minimize risk and avoid unnecessary violence.
The discussion also highlights the emotional impact of bank robberies on victims. Shawn explains how repeated robberies affected tellers and customers and how investigators worked to document both the physical evidence and the human consequences of the crimes.
A key breakthrough came through the use of ProNet tracking devices secretly placed inside bank vaults. Shawn details how these tracking tags helped investigators close in on the suspects and ultimately unravel the robbery operation.
The episode concludes with the dramatic final robbery on Thanksgiving Eve, the ensuing shootout, Stephen Myers’ arrest, and the death of Scott Scurlock. Both guests reflect on the investigation, the lessons learned, and the unlikely friendship that later developed between a former FBI agent and a former member of the robbery crew.
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[0:00] Hey, all you wiretappers, welcome back to the studio, Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. I have an interesting show today. We normally do the mob, but today we’re not doing the mob. But I’ve noticed my fans like organized violence. That’s why you like organized crime. You like organized violence. I talked to a guy about podcast audiences, and women like horror crimes and disorganized violence. Men like organized violence. And so we’re going to talk about organized violence today, and that’s organized bank robberies, which I love heist movies. I always have, and I think I always will. They’re usually intricate, and I have admiration for guys that can put together a really good heist and at least get away with it at least for a while. But we like to catch them every once in a while, too. So the first guy we’re going to talk to is an FBI agent who helped catch our bank robber, Stephen Myers, and this is Sean Johnson. Welcome, Sean. Thanks, Gary. So, Sean, tell us a little bit about yourself. You’re a lawyer. You told me we talked earlier. You’re a lawyer. Most guys used to be lawyers that joined the Bureau. So tell us a little bit about that.
[1:04] After finishing undergrad in law school, I joined the FBI in 1987. Went to the academy for 16 weeks. When I graduated there, my first office was Seattle, Washington. When I got to Seattle, I was assigned to a serial murder task force, the Green River Killer case. My training agent was actually on the task force, so I spent some time there.
[1:25] After we wrapped that up, I went over to the main office and worked violent crime for about three or four years. So traditional violent crime for the FBI, bank robberies, kidnappings, fugitives, interstate theft, those types of things. And then following that, I transferred to the National Security Squad. I worked both counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations for a few years. Following that, I transferred back to the violent crime squad, and that’s where all this came to fruition, back on the violent crime squad. We’ll talk about the case here, of course, but following my time in Seattle, I transferred back to the Midwest to Milwaukee Division, the Madison Resident Agency. I spent seven years in Madison. I worked gangs, drug conspiracies, writing wire traps for a few years. And then following 9-11, we stood up our joint terrorism task force there in Madison. I supervised that until, at that point, I transferred back to the East Coast here to the FBI Academy. I was instructed for new agents at the FBI Academy for six years. I taught human intelligence work, criminal work, and counterterrorism. Following that six years, I transferred to headquarters to the Director of Intelligence, human operations, and worked at that headquarters level for five years. I’ve been retired now for 10 years back in 2016, and I’m still doing work. I have my own company here, Wolf and Owl, LLC. I contract with the FBI teaching onboard new agents and also still teaching at the Academy. How did you get hooked up with Steven? That started about three years ago when you were chasing him but after that.
[2:51] I was wondering this coming november is the 30th anniversary of the last robbery i’m coming up on that but basically what happened was the netflix show how to rob a bank that came out in june of 2024, uh of course both steve and i were on that show so through a mutual acquaintance i got even song number so i called him up after the show was on i said hey what’d you think about the show we’ll talked for a while. And I think Stephen was a bit surprised to hear from me at that point in time because quite a few years. So we just chatted for a while and that was that. And then last year, last fall, I found out that Stephen had written a book on the case called The Treehouse. So of course, I had to go get a copy of that book, read the book very intently. And then I thought, I’m going to call back and talk about the book. So I called him up, I think it was early November or so last year. And we started talking about the book and a lot of things I read in the book that I didn’t know before, which is interesting, and it’s a fascinating book. And he said, I wrote that book the first year and a half I was in prison, and I had the original manuscript that I wrote, which was, of course, much more voluminous than the book.
[3:52] And he said, do you want to read the manuscript? And I said, sure, sure. I’m in Virginia. Steve’s down in North Carolina. So last year, right before Thanksgiving, he drove up and we met up at that point, and he brought the manuscript, which I’ll show you in a minute. And we started chatting, and since then we’ve been collaborating and become good friends, which is interesting, after how this relationship started in the first place. So we’ve been collaborating on this and doing a variety of podcasts and just trying to get this story out. It’s been an interesting twist, I would say that anybody else that I encountered as a subject over almost 30 years in the Bureau, I would not be doing this with, of course, but it just worked out really well. We’ve got a lot of interesting stories since we’ve met, but I’ve really enjoyed our time together and also being able to do shows like yours to get this story off because, as I said, the Netflix show, you have a background or basic understanding of what happened, but there’s so much more behind the scenes that people don’t know, which we’re really excited to talk about. Oh, great. And guys, the book is The Treehouse, The True Story of Hollywood, The Bank Robber by Stephen Myers. So mentioning Stephen Myers, let’s hear about Stephen Myers. Where did you come from? You have a really interesting, I shouldn’t call it checkered, but a really interesting varied background before you ended up robbing banks. Tell us about yourself, Stephen.
[5:04] As we spoke a little bit earlier, I grew up in Kansas City. And after high school graduation, I left and started studying in outside in Northern Virginia, outside of DC.
[5:14] And I studied there in college for about a year, I think. And then I transferred to England and went to a college there and was studying, working in sculpture and architecture, studying architecture. And from there, I went to Germany and did an apprenticeship with an architectural firm for furniture making and design.
[5:34] And after that, three years there, I went to Norway, opened up, I got a visa to restore some old Norwegian mountain architecture in the Telemark Mountains. And I was there and then I moved to Oslo, opened up a studio and started working and I can keep going. But after that, after a number of years in Oslo, working there in my own studio with sculpture and furniture. And then I went to Italy with the auspices. The first time was there was a new concert house in Oslo that was being built and it was all in marble. So I decided to do some maquettes. It was a competition for the exterior part of the concert house. And I went to Italy and I did these two models that were in marble for the concert house. And then after coming back and submitting and so on, obviously I didn’t get it, but.
[6:25] I had moved to Italy from there, and I spent my last years there, I think about six years in Italy, working there at my studio and so forth, until I returned back to the States. I returned back to Northern Virginia, D.C. area, started opening my studio, working there. And at that point, the first time I ever met Scott, I was in my studio, and my brother had come to me. This was in northern virginia in great falls and asked if i wanted to build on this barn that they purchased in the south of olympia in the country, and i said sure i didn’t understand why they but anyway he told me and we got out there and that’s.
[7:04] I don’t know if you saw the how to roll the bank you realized before the bank robbery scott was a crystal meth cook this was long before this was in the very beginning years when that stuff started happening. And he had studied at Evergreen College in Olympia, biology and chemistry and so on and so on. He wanted to be a doctor at one point. And so he was very astute with chemistry. And he started cooking this stuff and he set up laboratories. And the guy was, he was quite off the, how can you say, he was unique, a unique kind of person. And his personality was not typically how you would imagine someone like that to be. He was very mature. He was like a scientist, disciplined, ordered, but free-spirited. He wasn’t stodgy or boring. He was very, just the opposite, but he worked very disciplined. So I came out there to be a sort of front for building this barn. They had this.
[8:02] Bought this property out there with this big old barn in the mountains toward the coast. And it was a sort of a front to show why we were there building and building on this barn. And in the top loft, this huge barn, he had his laboratory set up. And needless to say, it was a three-week operation going on there for cooking that he was doing. And we came together there. And while I was working, building, doing what we’re doing, I was still helping him in the laboratory. For me, I was very naive. I didn’t, to me, this was just.
[8:35] You know, unbelievably exciting. Look, I’ve never seen anything like it. The only chemistry I ever did was in high school in the chemistry lab and doing those flasks and stuff. And here we have this serious, I don’t know how many cookers he had. I think we had 20 cookers. But needless to say, you have to keep this thing going 24 hours a day, and you’ve got to watch it and manicure it. It’s a very disciplined, ordered thing. I have to say, everybody’s thinking, this is right out of Breaking Bad. It was before Breaking Bad. I know, but they must have known about this and developed that whole story on this guy. I wish you could say it were true, but Scott was very clandestine.
[9:13] He never wanted to advertise anything. Anyway, the way we worked together, we became friends then. That’s how we got together. But he trusted me because I’m very exact in what I do, doing the kinds of work I’ve done, remodeling, sculpture, renovation, antique restoration, all kinds of stuff. So I look at things, even though I may not understand it, or I may not know it, but I can learn it. And there’s a lot of transferring techniques that take place from one trade or one ability to another. A lot of things in nature, they cross over the way things have to unfold. And it was natural for me, and I liked working around it, and it was exciting. And needless to say, I had to learn all of the forensic and legal things. He was telling me, you can’t do this. You can’t talk like this. Don’t ever say, don’t ever have conversations like this in public, even if it’s lighthearted. Don’t ever, he knew the law. He knew he had been in prison for life if he’d ever got caught because what he had produced those three weeks was about 180 pounds of crystal meth.
[10:21] And he worked with one man that he delivered the product to, and that man distributed it up and down the West Coast. And then once it was allotted and money, they met off in the forest somewhere with their old trucks and chainsaws and transferred the money and transferred the product, however it happened to be. I never met the man, and they never socialized socially in real life, except for the meetings they had in these areas in the mountains, Olympic Mountains or wherever outside of Olympia. So it was very ordered, and he didn’t want anything to break it up, but we worked well together. And then we started doing, after Virginia, I moved to Chicago, bought a warehouse there and started renovating that. And he came to help me renovate that. And we bought a couple of lofts back in the nineties, things were going up in big cities, you know, renovating warehouses and all that. So we bought a little loft and we would renovate it and sell it. And we just worked well together. He was a worker. Scott was, he loved it. This may sound strange. I always considered him to be an Egyptian. He loved to dig holes. And on his property where the tree house was, he had holes, secret holes, military grade containers that were buried and all of his stuff that he kept there. Everything was done orderly, but he was a worker. That guy could work. The treehouse is testament to that man, what he did.
[11:45] The treehouse, that was down in the woods there? Yeah, he had 19 acres in Olympia. The cottage that was a small little cottage that I ended up moving there to help renovate it, but the treehouse was in the back of the property with the forest. And he had started building that treehouse when he was in Evergreen College studying. Okay. All right. And that’s where you cooked the meth. Yeah. That was, it ended up, there was another huge operation, another huge cook job we did up in the treehouse one winter, one stormy winter. This was years after what I just exposed to you. And it was… This treehouse was the focal point of everything this man did. This was his creation. This was his soul. This was the sort of myth of what gave him the power to do what he did. And people came, people went, everybody loved it. He had politicians there, local politicians, lawyers, business people would love to just spend the weekend with their wife or girlfriend or whatever. And he was very magnanimous and let people go up there. And it was known, but it was unknown. He paid off the local building inspectors’ permit offices, so they couldn’t come out and have it shut down.
[12:59] There was nothing to code about any of that. Every year, he’d go down and pay them $5,000 or whatever just to make sure everything— because it was getting known, and that was what he was afraid of. So he had to pay these people off to keep it silent without being investigated. But that’s how we started out. And as you saw the How to Rob a Bank, he came to me in Chicago and we’d known each other, like I said, a number of years now. And we were friends. And he came after this debacle with his partner with the crystal meth, was killed, was murdered. And that’s when he quit that whole business. And he no longer wanted to be in that world because he never dealt directly with the drug world,
[13:43] but he didn’t really enjoy it. It was just his creation was the material was the product and that’s what he was he obviously enjoyed the money that was his lifestyle but in his mind as he always told as he told me a number of times his mind he always had this, goal of robbing banks it was not, It was just this inspiration he had. He said growing up as a child, he used to think about it. And he didn’t know why, but it was just something that was there. And then after this episode happened with that partner of his, he decided he wanted to do it. And.
[14:20] What he realized was the real difficult part is going in either you go in with, ski masks or whatever stupid disguises people have. He realized that’s your fail. It’s a failure. And he knew that going in violently is not the way to do it. It was just something had to click before. And he studied FBI files on failed bank robberies that hadn’t been consummated yet or found out about, just.
[14:48] Different stories to learn a little bit of the psychology and the techniques that were used by the FBI for surveillance and so on and so forth. And he’s also studied CIA journals and things like that to get an idea of that side of the world. But when it clicked for him was when he realized having prosthetic masks so that you could go in and look like a real person without them clicking the alarm. And you can go in there calmly and demand. But at the same time, it was a growing process. This didn’t happen overnight. I mean, things didn’t just evolve one day and it all happened like that. It was a growing learning process through mistakes as well. But he came to me. The first robbery he had was kind of a debunkle, as Sean can explain to you. It was a real humorous operation. He was lucky they never got caught. I wasn’t involved in that. And then after that, he came to me in Chicago, and that’s when he revealed to me that he’s doing that. And he wanted me to come out and help him with the prosthetics and with the electronics and with the rent. So he could, somebody he could trust that he knew that was going to be there for him. And that’s how I. Let’s swing back to Sean then, Sean.
[16:05] Yes. Tell us about that first bank robbery that he did.
[16:09] So the first robbery, it was a Seafors Bank. It was June of 1992. It was Scott and Mark Beggins. Not much finding went into it, that I could tell, because Scott had some kind of a disguise, nothing elaborate. Mark was wearing a President Reagan’s mask, kind of going back to the Point Break movie, they were wearing President’s masks. Anyway, they were going to Seafors Bank, basically without a plan, getaway plan. There was another woman that was helping them out during the getaway, but she was outside.
[16:36] Anyway, they got about $20,000 from the teller doors, which wasn’t bad. An average bank driver, like $80,000, that’d be a lot. So they progressed after that, of course, but they really didn’t have a great getaway plan. They had to ask or get keys from a customer who was laying on the floor to take their car. So they had seen this older man driving in the parking lot. And after they got the money, Mark walked up to this gentleman, Someone was laying on the ground. Sir, may I have your keys, sir? So, of course, we gave him the keys. They go out to this vehicle. They were having some issues getting it started. I guess they finally got it started and drove away from the bank. They didn’t meet up with their getaway partner. They abandoned the car. They ran across a golf course to meet up with their someplace else. It was just like, it’s a three-study group. But one thing about that robbery, though, and we’ll sure get into some of the investigative process here. And Stephen can speak to this story, too, that during the robbery, Scott, I’m sure not knowingly, actually called Mark by his name Mark in the bank. That was the first robbery. So we knew through the course of the next four and a half years that one of these gentlemen was named Mark. So that was the first robbery. Again, $20,000, not a big deal. And we had, at the time in Seattle Division, we had an average of about 300 bank robberies a year. So that was just another bank robbery to us at that point. Nothing exceptional, nothing really stood out. The amount that was taken was more than usual. But other than that, it was just another bank library for us.
[18:01] So did you form that task force because there were so many bank robberies, or did you form it because you realized there was one crew doing a lot of real
[18:10] high-end bank robberies? The task force was formed about three, four years into this investigation, the Violent Crimes Task Force, which I stood up. It had federal agencies, state and local agencies on there who were focusing on violent crime in general, but in particular was what we called the Hollywood case. That was our main focus was Hollywood. so that was every day was something that our operation was geared towards is that investigation, but that was formed. About a year maybe before the last robbery. But again, it was not just bank robberies, but the primary focus was Hollywood. Okay. And a guy like that, you can’t go to your street informants and say, hey, who’s spending more money? Who just bought a new car? Who’s flashing a lot of cash? Who’s bragging about a big score he had?
[18:54] All those sources were done for you. You just had to wait until he hit again. Yeah, and once I became the case agent, lead investigator on this to the FBI, Right. And that was about a year or so into this one and a half year speed of robberies. I started looking at the robberies and we were pretty much, we, law enforcement, was in a reactive mode to this, react to this robbery, react to that robbery. And I think when we keep reacting, every single way, they’ll make a mistake, but that’s kind of on them. So I decided I’d kind of change the focus from reactive to proactive. And that’s when I started working on this case, looking at it, looking, deep diving into the robberies. We could talk about all the things I was looking at, but coming up with a strategy, because if we cut lead in Rob and Rob, sooner or later they may make a mistake. They did make mistakes through it, which I took advantage of. But at that point in time, we just had to come up with a plan. And that’s what we did. And that ended up Thanksgiving Eve of 96. But a lot happened in between there. A lot happened with these guys. A lot happened with us. Come up with a pattern. Could you come up with a pattern pretty easily? Kind of be a certain kind of bank at a certain day and put a bunch of different crews around town? Or how did you… Eventually, we set up a Hollywood operations plan. What I looked at was the time of the day. Typically, they did 19 total robberies. 14 of those were typically Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays at about 11 o’clock in the morning.
[20:14] So 14 of the 19. The other were generally around 5.30 p.m., Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays. So I don’t know if they actually knew they were predictable to Sun Green, but I looked at that. I looked at the banks they were hitting, the size of the bank, the location of the vault, the neighborhood, the streets, ingress, egress from that location. Looking at the weather conditions during the robberies, again, the time of the day of the week. Took all that in consideration when I came up with my plan eventually to install these tracking devices, which ultimately was what caught them. But Seattle is a large city, so we had to come up with a plan. I looked at likely targets. There were hundreds and hundreds of banks. At that point in time, Seattle was expanding, booming. Boeing, Microsoft. People think of Seattle as a coffee shop in every corner, which there was, or Starbucks. But there became banks in every corner, expanding hours into grocery stores. So it was a target-rich environment for these guys. and there’s plenty of opportunities. And of course, Steven was on the other side doing the same thing I was doing, planning targets to hit, routes in and out, communications, what we were doing, what Seattle police was doing. So it was a cat and mouse game and back and forth. And of course, we were trying to guess what the next step was from each side. So I always enjoyed working bank robberies. I thought it was an interesting challenge. This one, head and shoulders above everything else I worked in 30 years, but I enjoyed the challenge. But for me, over the course of the four and a half years, it became You and Ron for some cases just come in your life every day.
[21:42] That’s what you wake up thinking about. That’s what you go to bed thinking about. That’s what this case was for me.
[21:47] Now, Stephen, did you wake up and go to bed thinking about doing a bank robbery and wake up thinking about doing a bank robbery? And so tell us, Stephen, tell us that other side of what you just heard, what you’re planning and how you reacted and your source of intelligence into these banks. So tell us about that, Stephen.
[22:05] Well, in the beginning, when I first started out with him, the takes on these banks were, this was before we started entering into the vaults, and they were always in the teller robberies. And I became very frustrated in the very beginning with it, and it was through our mutual collaboration. I said, listen, I can’t go on like this with just doing these Mickey Mouse little $5,000, $10,000, $20,000. and all. It’s stupid. Steven, if I may, I just want to interject. So that first robbery, $20,000. Second, $8,000. The third robbery, $9,000. The fourth robbery, $6,000.
[22:45] So, they were getting an average, but he was going to talk about that first bank, actually, the fifth robbery, where they actually went in the vault for the first time. And that’s where our game stepped up, because tiller drawers, yeah, or whatever. Now, you’re having takeovers of banks, you’re going to vaults. That’s a totally different scenario. So, I’m sorry, Steven, go ahead. No, that’s good. No, but the reason I kept pushing and pushing, I said, listen, we have to do the vaults. Scott always wanted to do the vaults, but he didn’t feel like he had the inside information, the technology for our radio frequencies and so on. So he was always afraid that we wouldn’t be able to communicate if you were in the vault. And I said, listen, man, the doors are open. There’s not going to be any difficulty reception between me calling you out. And I said, if you’re in the vault or you’re at a teller and I have to call you out, it’s the same thing. You’re going three foot away from the door, but it’s right there in the bank. It’s not any different.
[23:38] And so what he said, let’s do something to try to make sure our receptions with our—we had Motorola’s pre-programmed to our own personal frequencies at 400-something megahertz back then. So they were high professional walkie-talkies for us. The same thing the police would use, only we had our own frequencies.
[23:57] So what he did, we went in the evening, late in the evening to a grocery store, Safeway. I was maybe three blocks away or something, and he went in and went into the freezer. I don’t know how he did it. I don’t remember, but it’s pretty humorous. And he goes into the freezer in the back of the store, and we communicated. It was easy. It was no problem. Everything was weird. So that gave him the confidence to do what was needed. Of course, we would have, before our surveillances, we normally would have two or three banks that we would be working on for surveillance, ingress, in and out, of the bank for him and for the getaways, where his getaway car would be if we were to let the bank see the getaway car or not see it. If we left it for them to see it, then that means he was going to change over into another vehicle. We only did two times where he would get into my vehicle, twice, or three times, I’m sorry. And other than that, we always had an extra vehicle set aside for him to abort in, or if not that, I was always shadowing him within a block or two where we could rendezvous and meet up and I would take him if he had to abort from his vehicle, if it was identified. And I was always listening to the police if there was any identification of a getaway vehicle.
[25:20] Anyway, once I convinced him, I’m not trying to make myself sound like I did it, but I pushed him because I said, I can’t go on doing this for these Mickey Mouse little things. But it was an experience for us. It was an experience for us knowing developing the disguise, developing the wardrobe, developing the time of the year. We realized if you’re in the summer, you have to dress in a certain way. And so he would have his taser, he would have his gun and you have his radio and it all had to be camouflaged, but you can’t, when the winters were nice because you could get big parkas on and everybody in the Northwest has these big parkas. So you can cover up everything you need to cover up.
[26:01] But in the summer, you had to do it differently. And, you know, this is how we did it. And as far as surveillancing the banks, we would have our friend, whom she was a close friend of Scott’s years before all this happened, we would have her pay her to go and surveil a bank, tell us where the vault is in relationship to the door, in relationship to the teller counters, and so on and so forth. And just generally things like that, getting a schematic of it. And sometimes I would go in maybe a week before and deposit money or take money out or whatever it was I did. It didn’t look anything strange. It was pretty normal transaction stuff. But to get an idea of what the bank looked like and how feasible it was, because he did this alone. He was in the vault. He had to control the lobby at the same time as the vault. So as we progressed with these small little robberies, which sounded for me negative, But they were beneficial in the sense that you learned what to do and what not to do on certain levels. And so he realized it became a psychological game, that his disguise being he could walk in without them immediately pushing the alarm like somebody comes in with a ski mask or whatever.
[27:18] He had time to be able to control the people at the desks, the people behind the counters. He would speak very calmly, do them, do this, do that, don’t press any alarms, so on and so forth. And being able to get it, then he would go to the vault and be able to do what he needed to do in the vault and then return without anything happening. And if it did happen, I was there hearing the response on the scanner from the dispatch to the police, and then I would call him out. And I don’t know where people got this idea in Hollywood about you’ve got five, you’ve got 30 seconds to get out of the bank. They’ve got stopwatches and all that nonsense. I don’t know. I don’t know who created that, but it never ends. They keep doing it like there’s a certain time that the police are going to arrive. He could be around the corner and arrive in 10 seconds, or he could be three miles away with a lot of traffic and taking 30 minutes. Sometimes the police never even showed up. And for me, it was good because when I’m on the outside, I’m watching the Avenue in, the Avenue out. I would, before a robbery, I would see the patrols of the SPD.
[28:25] Seeing their patrols on that time and on that day. I would see when deliveries of armored car deliveries were and pickups. So you could see when money was being delivered, there would be more advantageous amounts of money for us there. All of this stuff was logged in. And then we would make the decision on which bank or Scott would always make the decision. We would have two or three that we would decide on. And then he would.
[28:49] As we got closer and closer to the time we wanted to do it, then he would decide, I want to do this thing. And then so we did it. And we’d already had all two or three worked out, so we knew our plan pretty well. And we would do the job. And then after you asked me, what do I wake up thinking about it? Only when we were in the operation mode, which was a month and a half, maybe the max two months time of preparing for a new takedown, bank takedown. But after that, we went back to our lives. Although I have to state that our lives, your personality changes. When you jump into this world.
[29:29] It’s not the same anymore. Relationships, family, it’s not that you disregard any of that, but you have to create a certain side of you that can’t reveal yourself to other people. And but at the same time it’s a freedom i don’t know how to express it but it’s a freedom that, you’ve annexed yourself from society in a way that you’re there you’re in it but you’re not in it and you look at this beehive around you and you wonder why do people do what they do, it’s just whether the money’s in the vault sitting in the vault or it’s in our hands who cares it’s this there the money’s like this stuff that flies around the universe and we’re our whole from birth to death we’re thinking we have to, organize our life around this system that’s been created for us and yeah we do we do we all do it but when you break out of that, i guess it’s like a counterfeiter that can get away with it for decades and decades just print whatever he wants and goes and lives a life you could say that only it wasn’t to that degree but you just.
[30:34] End up being different. So outside of our operation, I would be back. When I lived in New Orleans, I was always building and rehabbing and with my real estate, my home, rebuilding that and other real estate jobs. And I always had a front. So did Scott because he worked. He had stuff he did. So people always thought they’re contractors, they’re doing this, which is true. it was that. And as being an artist all my life with exhibitions and commissions, and I always had my own personal studio, it was just natural. That’s what it was. So nobody really suspected us as doing something. They always thought Scott, where he got his money, was from marijuana, that he grew marijuana somewhere. That’s what they thought. And that’s innocuous, especially in the Northwest at that time. Nobody cared about stuff like that. Did they know some Some people knew that he did crystal meth when he was deep into that world, but he always took care of people, not in a Hollywood sense, but because of the treehouse and the community, that existed with different kinds of people.
[31:43] There was no gangster image. Does it make sense? You would never imagine this man doing what he did, and definitely not bankrupt. robbers. Either one of us, neither one of us. It was just something that would never fit the mold because we’ve all been programmed to think bank robbers are this in this way. It’s just the way it is. It’s almost as if the film industry wants people to, if they’re going to think about robbing banks, they have to do it in this way where it’s not the way you have to do it. And it just, the lifestyle became, it became a.
[32:19] I don’t know, smooth and disconnected, but connected in a free way, if that makes sense. Oh, yeah. It sounds like it’s a little bit like being in the mob. You have this world where the regular rules don’t apply to you. I can do anything because these regular rules don’t apply to you. Me, they only apply to you little people out there. So that’d be pretty intoxicating. That would be really attractive to a lot. What’s different about us, and you take organized crime, is that they have a system. They have a foundation. They have support. They have power underneath it. And they have violence that if they have to resort to violence, they can resort to. We were just two guys that out of nowhere came and challenged the system. And that is odd. And for me, it was like a creative process. It was creative. The money was the result because if you’re going to do it for $6,000 or $6 million, it’s the same. It’s just the amount of intelligence you need to get that $6 million. That’s what it is. And our whole foundation was a nonviolent, never, if something comes that interferes in the process that we had already predetermined to happen, you just abort. You don’t confront, you abort.
[33:42] Go on your way because there’s nothing worth anything harming any person in the back because they’re not they’re they’re innocent, it’s not they who we were thinking of but you gotta in a way you’re almost wanting to protect them just to keep it as mellow as you possibly can in the police we both had strong i would say the police, the spd we, I don’t want to sound arrogant, but they’re predictable or discernible. They’re workable. You can work them. You can see they have the roots. They have the methodology. There’s nothing secret about them, whereas the FBI, which was what we were mostly always concerned with, because they’re silent, and there was no way we could scan their frequencies to hear if they’re actually anything happening. We knew things were happening with us, but we didn’t know who or what, And that was the most difficult thing for us because the respect we had for them, And the Seattle police as well. But as I say, the Seattle police are reactive and you know how their reaction is. Yeah.
[34:53] In regards to the police, you have two separate sets of police out there. You’ve got the intelligence guys or the guys that are on the special task force that work with the FBI that are operating where you don’t know that they’re operating it, but they’re operating it all the time. The district guys in the uniform, they do their thing. They’re predictable and they’re always there. And that’s what we were, you know, that in the immediate instance of a robbery, that’s what you’re dealing with. So you have to, you don’t take them lightly. You just have to know the reactions are. And when you’re listening, when you have eyes and ears on them, it’s doable. It’s not. Yeah, because you’ll have son Brookie come out with a shotgun, but blazing, baby, blazing. So you do not want that.
[35:41] So let’s go back to the police a little bit here, Sean. I want to react to some of that, the different disguises and stuff. Did that confuse you guys? Did you try to figure out what they were doing? I assume, were they doing false mustaches and wigs and different hats and things like that? It was that. So how did you deal with those things? I guess I would start with the fact that when I became the case agent, we hadn’t gone to the media about this. Because sometimes the media can be your friend. Sometimes they’re not your friend or her. So i decided to what the heck at that point in time we didn’t have any clues at that point no evidence no nothing up until robbery number seven it was just one after another and when robbery six happened which was the second time on the vault, they got a quarter million dollars so all of a sudden now the game’s stepping up right from eight thousand to quarter million dollars, i have to ask how did they get a quarter million dollars normally a bank was this some central depository? Did they have some special insight? These guys maybe had some insight, too. They had certain branches that maybe are a feeder branch for other banks in the area. So, you know, armored car got delivered the day before, so you knew there was a lot of cash, and that all came out of the vault. But that’s pretty unusual, of course, but they did their homework. So, that was the first big take was that sixth robbery. So, right after that.
[36:59] I decided to go to the media. And we knew that there were those photographs. At that time, security devices typically were bait bills, right? Pre-recorded denomination, serial number, series year. But that would help you if you found that maybe later in a search warrant, you could tie it back to a particular bank. We had dye packs. Scott actually got a dye pack in one of the robberies and dropped the money. And I used that to my advantage later on when I was installing tracking devices in the vaults. So he got a dye pack. He made mistakes. They made mistakes, right? But it was a learning curve. So going back to the media, I was interviewed, my picture was in the paper. I had photographs, surveillance photographs in the back of me. It was like a two-page article just describing everything that happened up to that point and asking for assistance, anybody who knows this person as a lead. And I put in that article also that at least one of these individuals was named Mark. We had tried putting the surveillance photographs in the papers because we had a program at the time called, it was called Rat on a Rat. Hopefully somebody would call and I recognized that person. And I knew it was wearing disguise, but I thought, we’ll give it a shot, right? So I put Scott’s picture, Hollywood’s picture, in the paper.
[38:03] And I got some calls from folks, so I knew who that is. And I said, how do you know that? He said, I know somebody who looks just like that. And I said, if he looks like that’s not him, he’s wearing disguise. We went to the media, put the article in the paper, nothing happened. We got nothing out of that. Right after that, these guys did two robberies in Portland. So it was a total of 19 robberies. They did two in Portland right after that, which weren’t very successful. And then after their 14th robbery, Stephen was talking about these vehicles that they purposely left behind for us. So that was the first robbery after about a year, seven months into it, they left behind the station wagon. So we recovered that. I went to the previous owner and had an interview with him. They had purchased that car about two months before the robbery down in Tacoma, Washington. And so at that point in time, at least a couple months in advance, as Stephen was talking, these guys were crapping planning for this so they purchased that car for 800 cash.
[38:58] Nothing came of it. But we got a composite sketch of the person who bought the car thinking it might be one of our subjects. It turned out that Stephen and others had hired people to go buy cars for cash, so it never traced back to them. So that was the first thing we had. We did recover another vehicle about another year later, and it was another station wagon. Same thing, I brought the previous owner up. Hey, look at the car. They bought it for $1,200 cash about two months in advance, and that was in Kent, Washington. So Kent’s just south of Seattle. So I knew somebody out of this group was operating in this area, Kent, Tacoma, Washington, two months in advance. So then when I interviewed the previous owner, I said anything different about this car when he sold it? He said, yeah, those are new tires. Those are not the tires in that car when I sold.
[39:42] So I was able to trace the tires, the serial numbers of tires people don’t know, trace those purchases back to a tire shop in Tacoma, Washington around the same time the car was purchased. So, again, we had activity down in those areas south of Seattle two months in advance. So, somebody had to be in that area prepping all this work. And, of course, they had to purchase the tires for cash. Hopefully, your credit card check, of course, they wouldn’t do that. So, as it slowly went on, we were getting a little ahead of the game, right? But for the vehicles, it was a dead end to some degree. At least I knew their area of operation a couple months in advance. So, that’s something Steve and I have talked about. But I came up with another sketch from that vehicle. Again, nothing. And that’s when things started gearing up. And that’s where I came up with our operations order. We set up surveillances. That’s when I got the tracking devices, put them in the banks. But that’s where it kicked up. We had a reward at that point in time, which C-First Wells Fargo put up for $50,000. They eventually got paid out. But so anyway, we’re just trying to progress with these guys. What’s the next step? What’s the next bank? What’s the next day? What’s the next time? So just trying. And I went back over all the files, all the case files. Again, looking at particulars about the banks, neighborhoods, and streets, as I said before.
[40:54] You know, trying to come up with something predictable on their end, which it was a bit for me, because, again, trying to be proactive about this ended up being the last robbery that they took the tags. But so that was the progression of it. Again, we had some information. We had some intel on it. We had no informants. As I said before, nobody’s going to say, oh, that’s the bank robber. It’s not going to happen, especially in bank robberies. It just kept progressing. Their sophistication was going up. So our planning, our sophistication was going up, going to a technological side, getting tracers or ProNet devices in the bank. So hoping they went to know about that. All right. Now, Stephen, on your side, we’ll go back to Stephen’s side.
[41:32] How did you gather your intelligence on the money being in the bank? Was that just from an armored car delivery and then you would hit it the next day or two? Or what was the thought going into figuring out how much money was inside that bank?
[41:43] We had partly that, just from a process of elimination. that, but we also hired one, a female friend of ours. We hired her to, paid her to go get hired in the C-First Bank. So she worked in there as a teller for about a year and a half. And so she gave us all of the security protocol manuals and told us things. And she would let us know. We never took her bank that she worked in, but we got an idea. She was, I can’t remember all of the details, but she would tell us that the deliveries were such and such. And normally we We would have this amount of volume coming in. And normally, especially before holidays, like 4th of July, Thanksgiving, any major holiday, Thursdays, and if it landed on a weekend, for example, two days before the weekend, a lot of money would be sent to these banks, all these branch banks and everything, because people use the, ATMs during the weekends when the banks are closed. There’s just a lot of volume of money. And through our car deliveries, we would see deliveries going in. Okay. They do this on a Tuesday at 11 o’clock. Well.
[42:53] I would monitor that, surveil that for a couple, three weeks to make sure it happened regularly and timing. And then you could see that once, I think a few of our banks, we actually went in right after an armored car delivery happened. But we would wait probably 20 minutes or 15 minutes after they left. And also as if there was police patrol up and down that avenue, not necessarily just for a bank, but they would just have their normal patrols. And we would wait for all that to be completed before he actually went into the bank. And we just tried to prioritize everything.
[43:31] Certain banks over others. Seattle was very unique in this way that you would have these small commercial areas with grocery stores, service stations, coffee shops, businesses, not huge like Macy’s and big corporations, but small businesses that have to deposit the money and normally there’s one or two banks right there that’s going to be convenient for them. So there’s going to be volumes of cash. And back in the nineties, people still carried cash bags So the bank has to be available to these outlets when they need cash. And so we would focus on those kinds of things because surrounding these commercial areas were large areas of residential streets going up and around. And Seattle is hilly and it’s so much vegetation, large trees, camouflage.
[44:27] We used the weather as part of our thing. we wanted as much as possible bad weather, stormy weather, for many reasons up there, especially in the winter months. The summer months is difficult because the weather’s beautiful up there. But in the winters, late falls, you have gray storms, rain, and just psychologically, everybody, police, everybody is tired. You’re groggy and there’s accidents on the road and police are held up here. So we try to use as much as.
[44:59] As many aspects of natural, feasible things that could help us in the actual event. We would try to find times. I know Sean said we would hit banks at a certain time, but usually one of the Portland banks was where we had to abort was because it was right at lunchtime, I think right before 12 o’clock, where people go to the bank and get money to go to lunch, and it was just very occupied. It was really a bad time to do it because we always tried to get times where there’s fewer patrons in the bank. So there’s less possibility of any accident, anything happening. Talking about that, you were doing takeovers of the bank in the end, weren’t you? Because you had to go in the vault. So you were holding everybody at gunpoint or at least threat of violence to lay down. That was pretty dicey, did you? you realize there could have been an off-duty policeman in there who had more courage than he had since that might engage with you? Or did you even think about that? That’s always a possibility. That’s why we try to go into places where there’s times when there was fewer patrons. But the one thing, he never made it look, go in there, wave guns around in people’s faces and tell them to get on the ground. He wanted it to look natural for the fact that if.
[46:14] People on the outside are coming by and they don’t want to see some activity going. They want to make it look as normal as possible. But that’s the whole thing, the psychological part of this. What Scott acquired over time is that the threat was the confidence in the nonviolent way he approached everything. And plus, after getting certain words to use and vocabulary to talk, to tell them to do this and do that, only somebody inside the bank would know about that. You wouldn’t go in there saying the things he said to be able to manage and control the people. He was nice. And then his whole philosophy was if something happens and if I go in crazy and screaming and yelling and something is to take place that’s confronting you, then what do you do? If you go in there calmly and somebody is disobeying what you were trying to do and standing in line, you just say, ma’am, no, don’t go outside the door. You stay right in line. This will be over with. Do you see what I’m saying? He always tried to make it as minimal as possible, and because of that, psychologically, I think the people realize this person, knows something that I don’t know, or he understands what this bank’s about, and this is what he was imparting to me because it just—.
[47:33] His whole philosophy was if there was happens to be a cop in there and or just some guy that has a carrying gun nowadays and wants to not have this happen to him that day, which is very normal and possible. He didn’t want to have to have a confrontation like that. He would prefer aborting. The whole thing was just to leave. You get out, confront that kind of person. And because there’s no upside to any of that. It’s stupid. You’re not trying to prove anything. You’re not trying to prove that. Do you see what I’m saying? The whole goal is the one goal, and that’s to take the bank and get out of there and continue on down the road and go to the next object that you have to do. But over time.
[48:26] Everything was the vaults now. Everything was the vaults. And so our goal was, in Scott’s creative mind, was three banks in a row. This was our goal, was three banks in a row to do this one afternoon, late afternoon in the winter. And we’d already had the banks we wanted from upper north Seattle working our way down south, one bank after the other. We had the vehicles and everything prepared for this. And then that’s when we found out that the ProNet tags were put in the banks. And we had to abort that operation. And that’s what drew us into the final one that took place. Because we couldn’t do three with ProNet tags. And we didn’t have a facility. At that time, when you don’t have internet, you don’t have all of the things that you have today to find out information. You have to go directly to the source. And if you go directly to the source to ask what’s the frequency of these ProNet tags, You’re going to ask, why would you want that? If you’re trying to jam, which our intention would be to jam them or to block them, you know, something.
[49:35] Let’s go back to Sean now and we start to wind this down. So, Sean, tell me about these ProNet tags. And Sean, tell me about some of the victims that you interviewed here. Were they, how were they? I think there’s some victims that are really overly traumatized by just the fact they’re being robbed. I had an in-law that was, I started kidding with her about it, and she just, she went, she started crying just because she had been robbed. And it was a reasonably normal, put a gun in your face, give me the money kind of robbery. So talk about those ProNet tags and then about the victims you talked to. As far as the ProNet tags, so it was about three months, it was August of 96, when I organized that effort with the local police department, with the company out of Texas called ProNet, with the banks themselves to install these tags. And since they were doing vault takeovers, I decided to put the tags, at least two tags in the vault of the bank. Now we had hundreds and hundreds of banks, so I had to be selective on what targets I thought were likely. So I think at the end, it was probably a total of 60 banks I put these tags into. And we caught quite a few people on those. And generally, we had the tracking devices or the tracking mechanisms in our vehicles, as PD did. We had the towers around the city. So hot and cold, you could follow it up to the point where you pull up behind the car and that was them. They had no idea how they got caught because they had no idea they’d taken a tag. And it looks, it’s just like this. It’s just a bill. It wouldn’t go there between 20s. This is one and the device is inside this. So it’s not like a dye pack where it’s that thick.
[51:04] And again, that last robbery, they had a million dollars trying to find these in a million dollars of cash.
[51:09] Seriously. So anyway, we set up those devices. We started our surveillances about three months in advance. And what happened was we were trying to they keep that technique undercover, you know, behind the curtain. But at one point in time, there was a bank that had been robbed in the CLA, I think it was Bellevue, I think. But it got out in the press. These two guys, two kids, basically had been caught on these tags. So now the cat’s out of the bag, right? So I assumed they knew about it. And it was in the paper. So what these guys did was, less than a week before this last robbery, they had a Wells Fargo bank. And Scott wore a ski mask and a big, dark overcoat. And they were completely different. Took the tags from the tiller drawers. It wasn’t much money. But the purpose was not to get the money, but to find these and figure out how to defeat them. how to find them, how to defeat them. So it was, and at that point, we had no idea that was Hollywood because it wasn’t typical, it wasn’t his MO. But these guys, again, talking about planning, they didn’t care about the money. They just wanted to see these and figure out how to defeat them. Oh, and as far as the witnesses are concerned, I interviewed hundreds and hundreds of tellers, employees, customers. When you talk about bank robbery is a violent crime, of course, force, violence, fear, intimidation. I think Scott used the intimidation factor the most because he walked in and the thing was with the tellers he hit two different Seafirst banks three times each that’s unheard of hit the same bank two different banks three times each so by the third time he got in those banks he walks in the tellers know him.
[52:36] Oh, he’s back again. I’m not making fun of her, making light of it.
[52:42] And I think one of the banks, the teller, Scott was filling up his bags and he was running out of room in his bags. One of the tellers offered him another bag. He filled up more money. One of the tellers when he was leaving. So you’re not coming back here, are you? So I don’t think so. So I’m not saying it wasn’t traumatizing for folks, but the whole situation just got very unusual. But, yeah, when you’re involved in a banker, I don’t care if they’re carrying a weapon or not, especially with the victim teller. That’s a traumatic experience, right? And we had a lot of tellers who said, I’m not doing this anymore because, again, with Seattle, 300-plus robberies a year. These guys, it wasn’t just a one-time occurrence for these employees. It was happening again and again. So a lot of them found different careers to get out of that scene and possibility of the next one coming back in their bank again. So that’s where we’re at that point. So now we get to the last robbery, right? And Stephen was mentioning about crowd control of the banks. Most bank writers came in a bank. If they’re in 30 seconds to a minute, That was a long time, in and out quickly. And I’d say majority of bank robbers, they weren’t there for getting the vault. They were there for getting money for drugs.
[53:44] They got a thousand bucks. They spent the money. When that ran out, they went back. And maybe two or three robberies, that was it. And they anticipated or expected to get caught. That was part of the game. Not these guys, though. So that last robbery, Thanksgiving Eve, it was about quarter to six when they actually went in the bank, both Scott and Mark. It was very busy, even it was Thanksgiving Eve. So lots of people around, very crowded bank. And the tone, the alarms went off about five minutes later. These guys were in the bank for almost five minutes.
[54:12] That is a long time.
[54:14] It’s a long time to expose yourself to what could happen. And of course, Stephen was out in radio communications with Scott. They finally got called out again after five minutes, and they walk out of the bank with over a million dollars. Previous to that, they had a million dollars. One robbery alone, a million dollars. And as an investigator, I was hoping they would come back. I was hoping for another bank robbery because if they had stopped at the last robbery, before the last robbery, we probably won’t be talking today. I think these guys would have been free and clear. Honestly, they would have been free and clear. But I was hoping on, and I’ve never met Scott Scurlock. I didn’t know him personally. I knew Hollywood. I don’t know Scott Scurlock. But at the time, I was hoping the greed factor maybe. And I was thinking greed. I was thinking adrenaline rush. I was thinking the challenge, coming back, not just the money. So I was hoping that they’d come back, which they did that evening. And that’s when everything started going crazy.
[55:08] Stephen, why don’t you wind this down and tell them about that last day.
[55:12] That last day that was the buildup the if i can speak about the process of the transformation process of scott into hollywood now it was sean who about two and a half years in, when he mentioned about the big article coming out in the seattle papers and i’d seen this article and this was the first time we finally came across sean came across the fbi we had a face, We had somebody we knew now, whereas before we didn’t. It was all opaque. We knew they were there, but we didn’t have anything. But now we had it, and there he was. And it was a symbiotic. I felt a kind of connection to the man, even in the article. I don’t know how to explain it. And obviously, at the end, the last day, the last robbery, when I finally met Sean, when I lay on the street, I hadn’t been shot up. I saw him and he came up and he was just very, to me, very recognizable. And myself, I don’t mean it over emotionally, but to myself, it was as if, okay, the guy, here we are, our partners arrived. Does that make sense to you?
[56:26] He became part of our whole system. and in a good way, not in a bad way. There was no animosity or anything, but this was good, which was the opposite of the SPD. But anyway, that day when you’re building up, everything had been planned and we had Mark come in because the lobby was much larger bank. This was one we’d found years before and it was too big for Scott to do alone. But now because of the three bank project we had, we couldn’t do that. So we went to this one because we knew the volume of money right before Thanksgiving. Was we were told something up between $5 and $10 million in the bank. So you had to have two people for that kind of volume of money. I don’t know if that exact amount is true or not, but I know that when Scott finally, when he rendezvoused with me after they left the bank, he got in and he said, man, I had to leave 90% of the money there. And we got a million, so whatever that meant. But that day leading up to it, before we left Olympia, every time the preparation for Scott turning himself into Hollywood. And unbeknownst to us.
[57:35] When we started this disguise work, it was just for the technical purpose of defeating being identified as who you are, being able to go in. But once Sean in this newspaper termed him Hollywood, then it became almost a show, not for Scott in the sense of braggadocia or anything like that. It was almost as if now he had a moniker on him. He had a tag on him, like a dog tag, and something became more, this Hollywood became more than what it was before, if that makes sense to you. So the process of leaving Scott and turning into Hollywood was a very kind of, I don’t want it spiritual or not really that, but it was a warrior type moment of about 45 minutes or an hour of preparation. Everything. him. I was in charge of everything was wiped down. The cars were wiped down. Everything, if we were leaving evidence left, all the handguns that were carried were wiped down. Bullets were wiped down. Everything, the cars were completely clean. And it was a very solemn moment. And in this time, usually Scott’s alone doing that, whereas now we had big. And so I had done the prosthetics for him the month before and gotten all that prepared. And I was doing his makeup up after putting his prosthetics on when Scott was doing his own way, his own makeup, which is what he liked to do.
[59:03] It’s very solemn, very quiet, and we’re just intense. It’s like you’re going into battle, not in a shootout battle, but a survival battle. You don’t know what’s going to happen. As much as you try to plan everything, you never know. We knew this time that there was a task force. There were these Pronet tags. Like Sean had said, we took this smaller bank in the same region of this bank, and de-disguised Scott just so we could get the Pronet tags. Scott, it.
[59:31] After he left his car, we rendezvoused and he got into my van and he went through the money. I don’t remember what it was, $28,000 or something, but it was all just from the tellers. So it wasn’t, it was different kinds of bills and nonsense. And he got three of them out. Within five minutes, he got three out and it was very easy for him to do it. And he did it alone. them. So we said, if it was that easy, then we can get Mark up here, explain to him where they’re at in the bundles. Once you crack open the bundle where they’re at and get them out. On the last robbery, once when I called them out of the bank and they rendezvoused with me and got into my van and started going through the money, Scott had gotten one of them, within two minutes, three minutes and he handed it to me and I threw it out of the window. And that’s what gave us the good amount of time. Probably had 15 minutes before the vehicle police actually caught up to us because they had to find that tag that I threw out and deactivate it and then get back in and start triangulating us again. And by that time we were some miles down, you know, on our getaway route.
[1:00:42] And here we go. And we’d gone through this getaway many, several times because it was a very circuitous route in and out, back and forth, because you don’t want to go in one straight line when they’re triangulated. You want to make it very difficult. And we came, we had two other getaway cars stationed there. As we were going out of the city, if we had to abort, we could jump into those. And we were close to one, maybe a block away from one. And Scott suddenly says they’d gone through the money.
[1:01:15] And he said, I need to drive. I got to drive now. I go, man, we can’t stop. We’re not driving. And he said, no, I got to drive. I know the town better than you, which he did. But it didn’t matter because I knew where I’ve been there. I knew what we were doing. We were arguing for a minute. And finally, he’s a very stubborn guy. And so he, I, I jumped back and I look at this chaos. They didn’t have any order putting the money aside. It was looked at and it was just chaos. And I go, God almighty, where do you start? And there he is in the driver’s seat. And this took this transaction between that was maybe a minute. And then he gets in the driver’s seats and he starts taking off the jacket that he had to put something else on. And you’ve got to understand this was a howling rain, fun, one of the worst storms I’ve ever seen in seattle winds every so nobody’s going to see anybody inside the van with you and i said scott get out of here get out of here you got to go man what are you doing standing here waiting, and finally when he goes up on the knoll he turns left and he says and i’m down on the ground down.
[1:02:18] Bed of the thing trying to go through money not it was just chaos and he says they’re everywhere they’re everywhere and so he pulled in front pulled in and they were about, i looked up out the back window of the van that we were in and there was the cop cars coming, and he didn’t speed away or anything like that, but it should have been the point. This is what’s really interesting about all of it is that this would have never happened before. It was almost as if it had to happen. I keep looking at it through my mind because this is not how he would have operated before. And there was many other things before this leading up to it at the property, at the things that should have never happened with his girlfriend and different stuff that we would have never done this. And yet.
[1:03:04] Here it is. He pulls in front, and then the SVD starts shooting in the back of the van. And Mark was the first one to get hit. He got hit and fell down onto the ground. They said, they shot me. He was very calm. Passed me, pour another cup of coffee for me. That’s how it was. He just fell. And then Scott stops, and he gets out. His whole philosophy was there was a bank robbery in Chicago years ago. Ex-cop was a bank robber. He had an armor-piercing rifle that shot out the engine of a pursuing cop car. And it worked and so he always had that in his head that’s why he had that that assault right semi-assault rifle with armor piercing bullets off the engine to stop them and i argued with them i said man if it gets to that point, hey so you shoot the one out there’s they’re everywhere they’re going to be everywhere it’s not we got us we got to figure to me it was always like if you have that there, the, possibility of you using it out of chaos in your mind.
[1:04:03] Is more probable than if you don’t have it, then your mind is going to leave, run, go, get out, do what you have to do to get out of there. But anyway, that was his thing. That was his security base to have that. He gets out of the van and jumps out on the side sliding door where I was at, right by the sliding door and takes and click on the jam, his rifle jammed down. This is just Mickey Mouse, as you can believe. And then he jumps back in, throws the rifle down and the door is still open and the sliding door. And so then he, as he starts up, he’s not speeding. He’s just going like normal. I don’t know why I didn’t jump out at that time and just start running. I don’t know why. And then they start shooting it. Then the cops start shooting again. Now this was not the FBI, this was the FBD This was Mike McGann Who was the main shooter And then they shot my left arm And my left arm’s just I don’t know if it was because of a splayed.
[1:05:02] Bullet going in, but it was a bigger, I had a bigger hole. It shot my whole, blew my whole bone apart. My whole arm started swinging in front of my head. And I just started, I screamed out just hellacious, whore, screamed, those motherfuckers, they shot my fucking arm off. And so I stopped again. I guess I must have scared the hell out of him. He gets out with that shotgun that also had slugs that were armor piercing, which was the, you don’t get a shotgun with a slug to try to shoot somebody it’s for one reason and i think he shot he was on the side i mean i could hear one shot i don’t know if there was two i don’t know they said there was two so it must have been, and evidently mark when he lay on when he was laying flat he took his nine millimeter and shot out the back window just over his head i never heard that i was right beside him but you know how those things go anyway they all it all happened we were shot up then scott goes after they shot my arm up and he, lodges the van up against a tree or a bush in a yard and aborts. And then you just hear shooting going on everywhere. There he goes. There goes that motherfucker killing, killing. And the SVD are just shooting wildly in this residential neighborhood. And then Mike McGann, the shooter who ambushes, comes in and comes around and starts screaming and cussing.
[1:06:22] By the way, this is all in the book. When you read my book, you’re in the voyage. You’re in the bank robberage. You’re listening to what Scott’s saying in the bank. You’re hearing the police dispatch. You’re hearing the dispatchers. You’re in the, the whole thing is just like this void. You’re going through a voyage of four and a half years of robbing banks and our lot of people.
[1:06:42] And so he yells at us and he’s got his dog, Beethoven, outside the van, get out of the fucking van, get out of the motherfucking van. And I get out and he says, get on the ground. And I didn’t have, both my arms were shot at this point. Both of my arms were shot. So my right hand was clawed. I didn’t have this one. So just hanging and flopping around. And I get down and I fall on my knees. He says, get on the ground and put your hands behind your butt screaming at me. Mother F this, motherfucker this, fuck that. Scream and yell like a madman. And then he had Beethoven, the German shepherd dog. He was Muslim.
[1:07:13] He was in my face. And I said, man, I got no arms. And so I had to flop down on the wet. It was pouring down rain and everything. And I flopped on the ground. Get your arms behind. I said, man, I started cussing. I said, shut the fuck up. I don’t have any arms. You shot them off. And he was like this crazed. He was like on a crack or something with his shotgun around me and just cracked out. He was like, I’d never seen a cop like this because most of the cops really, that I came across while in the hospital and just transporting. They were all nice guys, sober-minded. This guy was crazy. And so that all happened, and that’s what happened. Scott got away, and they were shooting through the neighborhood, and the whole story. You saw the Netflix, so you know what happened. Yeah.
[1:07:57] And he hid out. I think he got shot forensically. His father, when he went to his autopsy, I was told that there was a gunshot in his leg that was crusted over that was older than obviously the head shot that he did himself. But then once he shot himself, that’s when the Seattle police shot into the camper he was holding up at. So he had a lot of other bullet holes in him, even though he was dead. There was a one wound, and that makes sense because he would have never hit up in some camper. Physically, we were both physically, especially he was, he could have gone, outrun any cop out there. and, he was ahead of him. He had to go on him, so he could have gotten away. But if you stop, you can’t go into a bar or a restaurant or something and act normal. He could have done that if he hadn’t been injured. So he was injured before, in my speculation. And there’s no tantrum. But that was the end of that, and then life goes on, and then one world can change into another. Yeah, yeah. Stephen Myers, thank you so much. The educated, sophisticated bank robber.
[1:09:08] If you’re interested in this story, if you’re interested in really a lowdown on how to rob a bank and how it was done technically, psychologically, dramatically, and a lifestyle that was lived by all of us, buy the book, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble online. And there’s you have audiobook you have ebook and then you can buy the hard copies too all right yeah and i’ll have guys i’ll have links to that in the show notes down below and guys i’ll put an image of that book and the, so people in youtube can kind of see that books out there sean one last one last word from the fbi and then we’ll get out of here.
[1:09:47] I would say, again, very challenging investigation, a lot of twists and turns, a lot of unknowns that became knowns. But in the end, it finally ended that evening. And since that time, again, this coming November, Thanksgiving game is 30 years from that final shootout. And I just find it interesting that we’re still talking about this case 30 years later. And again, there’s so much more of the story we didn’t get a chance to talk about. But that’s why I encourage people to read Stephen’s book. And when I read it, I found a lot of things I didn’t know either. It was brand new for me. But I really enjoyed working with you. And I really enjoyed that after all these years, as Stephen and I get together and have this good friendship, which is special to me, too, even after what happened 30 years ago. Things happen for a reason, I believe. And this happened for a reason. Yeah, I agree.
[1:10:35] This has morphed into something very, very productive, very good. I respect Sean and his family. And as I say, when I lay in the street and he came up to me on that night, I felt I wasn’t gushing, but there was somebody there that was different. And it was this good guy. And then the debriefing that we went through, I always had respect for him. And I always told Stephen during that, this is nothing personal. I’m not judging for what you did. This is strictly professional. When I sat down four days for the plea agreement, and we talked about a variety of things, not just bank robbers, just the same with Mark Beggins. And I think you get a lot more out of folks thinking about law enforcement back then and now. You get a lot more by tuning through the respect that you would respect yourself. So I think it’s much more accessible than the other option.
[1:11:20] Really? Especially professional criminals like this. They all understand the rules and know the game. It’s just always a big game where we played cops and robbers with real bullets. So thanks a lot, guys. I really appreciate you all coming on the show. Thank you, Steve. We look forward to it. All right. All right.