Bank Robber (Pt. 3)
Catch up on Part 2
Basically, Lenny is robbing banks like the crazed junkie that he is.
After the second bank robbery, Lenny moves out of the Bombin hotel and in with a family of drug dealers –a guy named Rolando, his mother and his many brothers and sisters- in a nasty drug den. I know it was nasty because I go there later to do some reporting. It’s a broken door and behind it, a menacing darkness. I debate knocking but passersby look at me and shake their heads. I go home. So you and I will have to use our imagination.
In any case, Lenny doesn’t stay there long. Rolando the drug dealer and Lenny meet two prostitutes, Myrna and Rosa. The men introduce themselves by waving drugs at the women across the street. Myrna sashays on up to Lenny, throws her arms around his shoulder and says, “Did you have a hard day at work, baby?” Lenny gets a kick out of that one and they all move into an apartment together, with Myrna’s three children. Their new pad is furnished, courtesy of Wells Fargo, with televisions, PlayStations and children’s videos. And they play house. Play house and get high. This doesn’t sound too good of a life to me but in Lenny’s eyes, it’s Heaven.
The problem is that with all these mouths to feed, all these addicts to keep high, he is robbing banks when he should be lying low.
Meanwhile in El Paso, his fate is sealed and he doesn’t even know it. Now do you remember the part in the story when Lenny first came to El Paso in the Greyhound bus? How he scored dope with some street junkies before heading on over to Juárez? Well one of the junkies tells the FBI he shot up with the man who’s in the paper for robbing banks. And how that man said he just did 14 years for bank robbery. How he escaped from New Beginnings, the halfway house in Tucson. Now, why Lenny decided to catch up his new friends with the details of his life is beyond me. But that’s all the FBI needs. They get an ID on Lenny in hours. Their serial bank robber is Lenny DiCarlo.
In Juárez, Lenny needs money again but El Paso is too hot. The TVs have the surveillance photo with Lenny’s black-haired new look. He’ll get recognized for sure. But New Mexico might be another story, he decides. So he heads for Columbus, New Mexico, a village about an hour and a half drive from El Paso. He’s hoping for a bank and an easy gateway.
“Well, there’s nothing in Columbus,” he says.
I laugh because I’ve been to Columbus. There are 2,000 inhabitants, a historic marker for when Pancho Villa raided the town in 1916. There is dust and there are tumbleweeds. I don’t remember a bank. It’s hilarious. At the time, Lenny doesn’t find this funny at all. He finds himself stranded and aching for drugs in the Wild West. So he moves on to Deming (Population: 15,000) and finds a Wells Fargo Bank there, but an elderly woman recognized him and he flees.
“I know you, you’re the bank robber,” she said.
Desperate, he robs two convenience stores ($38 and $469) at knifepoint, hides in the crawl space under a house for 30 hours and takes off for Las Cruces (Population: 100,000). There, he robs a First Security Bank. In a motel room, he eagerly opens the money bag and counts… $152 in one dollar bills.
“I had to laugh,” he says. But really, these are desperate times. He is drug sick and away from anything familiar.
The next day he robs the Mesilla Valley Bank ($3,060), hides out at, of all places, an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting and catches a bus back to El Paso and get back to Juarez. He breathes. He’s been gone a week and things seem to have cooled off.
I have no clue what goes on with Lenny in prison. But it can’t be too good since he keeps being thrown in the hole. I gather it has to do with gangs feuding with him. There’s no way to know the truth. He won’t say, lest it sullies my opinion of him. Whatever it is, he gets transferred to another prison and it happens again. In the hole in less than a month. In the hole, there are no phone privileges. So all we can do is write. Him, in his slanted, all-caps penmanship, not saying much because there’s not much he’s proud of in this shithole, he says. A typical letter reads like this: “HELLO YOUNG LADY, JUST WANTTO SAY HELLO AND ASK HOW ARE YOU? AS FOR ME I AM HANGIN IN THERE. PLEASE TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF AND I SURE WOULD ENJOY GETTING A LETTER FROM YOU. YOUR FRIEND LENNY.” Sometimes, there are smiley faces with crazy eyes or intricate ball pen drawing of roses that look like tattoos that Lenny commissions from more artistically inclined inmates. Sometimes, there’s a trinket like a dream catcher made out of floss (I’m not joking). For Christmas, there are three-dimensional winter landscapes with toothpaste or shaving cream for snow (again, not joking).
I start moving around for jobs. I always get a P.O. box just to get Lenny’s letters and not have his prison friends spy my home address. Even when I get a scholarship at Princeton I get a Lenny P.O Box. I send him a $20 money order for Christmas and one for his birthday. One time, he uses the money to buy white and tan wool and crochets me a hat and scarf. I go skiing with those. Lenny loves it.
But before y’all start thinking this is turning into a pen pal romance, let me set you straight. It is mostly him complaining about his health and me sending him Louis L’Amour novels that he likes (the adventure!). It is very much like having a grandpa in jail.
We do one fun thing. We send each other newspaper clippings about bank robbers. Dumb ones, clever ones, unlucky ones. And our favorites, old ones because Lenny is -no offense, Lenny- kinda old. At least older than your average bank robber. So we like old bank robbers. The older, the better. This one for instance sent by Lenny: J.L. Hunter “Red” Roundtree, 91, who was detained by his intended victims, the bank customers. Or this one sent by me to Lenny: Edward Butler Blaine, 61, who locked the keys inside his getaway car.
It’s pretty clear from all these stories, Lenny’s included, that bank robbery is not the meticulously planned “job” of Hollywood movies where Jason Statham or whoever rents the apartment next door and drills a hole through the vault. It’s not generally a team sport. It’s a desperate act but not a violent one. I interviewed a woman in a bank after Lenny robbed it. She said she cashed a check, buttoned her coat and left the bank, then paused. Maybe she should get some money out of her savings account. She turned around, went back up the elevators and the bank lobby was unusually, eerily calm. She asked what was wrong and was told, we’ve just been robbed. Lenny likely worked while she was cashing her check.
That’s how the banks want it. They want the robber out of there as fast as possible. They don’t want the whole thing to drag on and have a hostage situation on their hands. None of this is very exciting, if you think about it. You wait on line, produce a note, leave. Except, you do need nerves of steel and some acting talents. Robbing a bank is a performance. You have to really sell it. As Lenny says, “You have to act as if you have a gun and you’re half nuts.” This incredible bank robber, Carl Gugasian, who robbed more than 50 banks over 30 years, chickened out eight times before his first robbery, so sick was he with stage fright. I’m just saying, not everybody can do it.
After his little New Mexico escapade, Lenny is back in Juárez’s Boys’ Town, as he says. His flatmates, the drug dealer and the whores, are ecstatic. Their free ride is back in one piece and flush to boot. Lenny settles back in, gets high and thinks about the future. He isn’t going back to El Paso. He’s got to be smart about this. He’ll rob banks in Nogales, or in Douglas, in Arizona. Keep on the move. One step ahead of the law.
“Well, we get to partying. We do more drugs than we should, spend more money than we should. I can still make the trip, but I won’t be able to pay for a hotel room or drugs. I’m thinking, ‘This ain’t going to work,’” he tells me.
That’s how Lenny sets out to rob one last bank.
At 2:45 pm on December 14, he walks into the bank on the second floor of the Chase building at Main Street and Mesa Drive –my bank, incidentally. It’s a pretty quiet lobby, like a library. Lenny speaks to the teller softly and insistently, “Give me some money, give me some money. That’s good. That’s good.” He gets away with $4,720. His biggest payoff in El Paso. Much later, one of the bankers tells me that Lenny left his fingerprints all over the removable glass pane on the counter in front of the teller. The place where you sign your checks. The police took the glass for evidence (that’s why it’s removable) but rested it on top of one of the posts for the rope line and it fell and broke.
On his way back to the bridge, Lenny goes shopping for coats for his friends and stuffs them in bulky Santa Claus shopping bags. By 3:30 p.m., he is back in Juárez.
But by now, television sets on La Mariscal are periodically broadcasting a $5,000 reward for his capture. That changes everything. $5K is nothing in America, maybe a used car, but it’s two years salary for some people in Juárez. Friendship evaporates when that kind of money is to be had. Lenny is no dummy. He knows he has to leave. He’ll leave the next day, he decides. First, he’ll get high.
He rises again at noon and goes looking for Rolando, his partner in drugs, to say goodbye. He runs into an elderly neighbor.
“Why are you still here? Leave now. There’s nobody here that wouldn’t take the money,” the man says.
Rolando is at his mother’s in the drug den. He loads Lenny full of cocaine for old times’ sake.
By the time Lenny comes out of it, it’s 4:45 p.m.
At 5 p.m., December 15, Lenny pushes open the broken door of the drug den and is met by half a dozen Mexican state policemen.
It’s been more than 10 years since Lenny and I met in that fishbowl of a visiting house. I got married and I had a child and a career. And Lenny did what it is they do in prison. He got older and crankier. Juárez too has changed, and not for the better. You probably heard of it. These days, I doubt Lenny would recognize it. His bank robbing hijinks seem quaint by comparison.
The book that he wanted me to write about him never happened. Neither did the Pulitzer Prize. As much as I was convinced that Lenny was special, my friends and my editors all thought he was a common low-life. What’s so special about this guy? They asked. You have to know him, I’d say. Some stories are just too small for journalism, I get that. But no story is too small for friendship. Lenny is not too small for my friendship.
In 2014, I sent Lenny his $20 money order for his birthday. It came back to me in the mail. A lot of mail had been coming back. It was weird. Just in case, I went online to the Inmate Locator and entered ‘Lenny DiCarlo’. And it said, “Deceased, 1/1/2014.”
Like a good journalist, I FOIAed Lenny’s death certificate. I learned that he suffered a heart attack in prison. He was transported and died at the hospital. It was a quiet end to a life not well lived.
Just in case you wonder, I cried my eyes out.
But there’s one last chapter I need to tell you about Lenny’s saga. So, someone gave him up. And I know you think it was Rolando, his drug dealing friend. And Lenny sure thought it was Rolando. But the FBI told me it was Rolando’s uncle. I never told Lenny that. I don’t think it matters. Really, it could have been anyone.
The fact is, at 5 pm on December 15, 2000, Lenny is met at his door by Mexican police. A few hours later, two Mexican cops walk him across the bridge, back to the United States. The American law is awaiting him. But before that, just as they reach the top of the bridge, where there is a line on the pavement between two flying flags, they stop. They let him smoke his last cigarette as a free man. Lenny draws deep on his cigarette. He hasn’t giving up yet. He thinks. He still has a couple of thousand dollars left, some of it in his shoes. That’s his only chance. He offers the cops $1,000 each to let him go.
They are smoking too. They draw a puff and consider the offer. They shake their heads.
“It’s gone too far for that,” they say.
