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Speaker 6: Norko eighty tells the story of how five heavily armed
Speaker 6: young men led by an apocalyptic born again Christian attempted
Speaker 6: a bank robbery to turn into one of the most
Speaker 6: violent criminal events in US history, forever changing the face
Speaker 6: of American law enforcement. Part action thriller and part courtroom drama,
Speaker 6: Norko eighty transports the reader back to the southern California
Speaker 6: of the seventies, an era of predatory evangelical gurus, doomsday predictions, megachurches,
Speaker 6: and soaring crime rates, with the threat of nuclear obliteration
Speaker 6: blooming over it all. In this riveting true story, a
Speaker 6: group of landscapers transformed into a murderous gang of bank robbers,
Speaker 6: armed to the teeth with military great weapons. Their desperate
Speaker 6: getaway turned the surrounding towns into war zones. When was over,
Speaker 6: three were dead and close to twenty wounded. A police
Speaker 6: held helicopter was forced down from the sky, and thirty
Speaker 6: two police vehicles were destroyed by thousands of rounds of AMMO.
Speaker 6: The resulting trials shook the community to the core, raising
Speaker 6: many issues that continue to plague society today, from the
Speaker 6: epidemic of post traumatic stress disorder with within law enforcement,
Speaker 6: to religious extremism and the militarization of local police forces.
Speaker 6: The book that we're featuring the seating is Narcot eighty,
Speaker 6: The true story of the most spectacular bank robbery in
Speaker 6: American history, with my special guest, journalists and author Peter Hulhan.
Speaker 6: Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for
Speaker 6: agreeing to this interview.
Speaker 5: Peter Hulhan, Thanks Dan, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much.
Speaker 6: This is one incredibly exciting book. I have to say,
Speaker 6: let's start right off from the beginning, as we described
Speaker 6: in the introduction or I did. Let's talk about what
Speaker 6: somebody in California, what these two people, what many people saw.
Speaker 6: Besides joining George Wayne Smith and Christopher Harvin. But what
Speaker 6: other people saw for people born in the fifties, as
Speaker 6: you write, tell us about the violent crime rates, tell
Speaker 6: us take us back to southern California, the nineteen seventies
Speaker 6: and up to this date in nineteen eighty what do
Speaker 6: these people see.
Speaker 5: Sure, both the time and the era in which this
Speaker 5: or the time and the place in which this happened
Speaker 5: are had an influence on bringing this about this bank robbery.
Speaker 5: The bank robbers are all from Orange County, California, suburb
Speaker 5: of Los Angeles, and they came of age in the
Speaker 5: nineteen seventies. And for George Wayne Smith, there were a
Speaker 5: number of things that influenced him and kind of propelled
Speaker 5: him towards this bank robbery. One was the very aggressively
Speaker 5: evangelical born again Christian movement that began in Orange County,
Speaker 5: California in the seventies and then swept throughout the country.
Speaker 5: It was known as the Jesus Movement, and it was
Speaker 5: these were youth ministries that were revolved around the Book
Speaker 5: of Revelation and End Times theology. And at an early
Speaker 5: age George became involved in Cavalry Chapel and at that
Speaker 5: time cavalry was really based on based on the rapture
Speaker 5: and you know, the second Coming. So George at an
Speaker 5: early age believed that the apocalypse and the cataclysmic events
Speaker 5: and the collapse of society that would lead up to
Speaker 5: it was imminent. And Cavalry Chapel really pressed the uh
Speaker 5: pressed the idea that the rapture could come at any moment,
Speaker 5: and that was certainly for George to have been in
Speaker 5: Orange County as a the young man in the nineteen
Speaker 5: seventies was really really brought that about. The other was
Speaker 5: that you know, if you if you're in that front
Speaker 5: mind frame and then you're on the lookout for current
Speaker 5: events that you can match up with revelation prophecy, Southern
Speaker 5: California of the nineteen seventies and most everywhere in the
Speaker 5: nineteen seventies was a place to sure could find it.
Speaker 5: There were a lot of doomsday scenarios that were banded
Speaker 5: around in the seventies, whether it be asteroid strikes or
Speaker 5: massive earthquakes or population bombs. And also there were, as
Speaker 5: you say, you know, crime rates that would be almost
Speaker 5: unimaginable today, and a lot of the ideologies of the
Speaker 5: of the nineteen sixties really turned ugly in the seventies,
Speaker 5: recreational drug use became drug abuse. You know, free love
Speaker 5: became unwanted pregnancies. There was some really startling events like
Speaker 5: the Jonestown mass suicide, the Symbionese Liberation Army. There was
Speaker 5: a lot of revolutionary groups, especially in the early seventies
Speaker 5: that were bombing things and trying to bring down society.
Speaker 5: So when George looked out at the world, he could
Speaker 5: see a lot of events in the United States that
Speaker 5: looked like social collapse, Babylonian style social breakdown, and also
Speaker 5: internationally towards the end of the at the end of
Speaker 5: the seventies and into the yearly eighties, there was the
Speaker 5: Iran hostage situation. There was war in the Middle East,
Speaker 5: and as you say, the thing, the existential threat hanging
Speaker 5: over all of it is really nuclear war. And right
Speaker 5: out of high school, George Wayne Smith went into the
Speaker 5: army and he was trained as an artillery man and
Speaker 5: stationed in Germany, and he was trained on tactical battlefield
Speaker 5: nuclear weapons. And that was what really made the nineteen
Speaker 5: seventies dangerous, especially for the possibility of nuclear war, was
Speaker 5: this proliferation of battlefield nuclear weapons. You know, once you
Speaker 5: once you use one of those, it's not hard to
Speaker 5: imagine escalating into the intercontinental ballistics missiles that would bring
Speaker 5: along obliteration. So when George looked out at the world,
Speaker 5: a lot of things matched up, and as in terms
Speaker 5: of how it all might end, nuclear war was something
Speaker 5: that was not hard for him to imagine and frankly
Speaker 5: not hard for others to imagine. And I'll just briefly
Speaker 5: talk about George's George was the one who really planned
Speaker 5: this bank robbery and recruited the others. He had a roommate,
Speaker 5: they owned a house together, Christopher Harvin and Christopher Harbin
Speaker 5: was a bit of a survivalist, and his idea of
Speaker 5: how the how the end might come for the and
Speaker 5: the collapse of social order and lawlessness was those doomsday
Speaker 5: scenarios I had meant and earlier, but of a kind
Speaker 5: of natural disaster or man made rather than something that
Speaker 5: would come from God. And also included a nuclear war,
Speaker 5: but you know, asteroid strikes and particularly and things like that,
Speaker 5: population bombs. But really he believed in something called the
Speaker 5: Jupiter Effect, and the Jupiter Effect was a book that
Speaker 5: was about a alignment of planets that was going to
Speaker 5: come in nineteen eighty two did come than which the
Speaker 5: planets would be aligned all on the opposite side of
Speaker 5: the Sun, and it would affect gravitational pulls, it would
Speaker 5: trigger volcanoes, earthquakes and things like that. And both George
Speaker 5: and Chris their dates and George's was the apocalypse or
Speaker 5: the rapture would come before the end of nineteen eighty
Speaker 5: and for Chris, as I say, it was looming ahead,
Speaker 5: just a year and a half ahead. So sorry, it's
Speaker 5: a rather long answer, but it's certainly all those different
Speaker 5: factors fed into George Wayne Smith and Christopher Harvin kind
Speaker 5: of looking that they needed to prepare for lawlessness, social
Speaker 5: breakdown in which only the well armed and well funded
Speaker 5: and well prepared which survived.
Speaker 6: You talk about the difference in the characters between Chris
Speaker 6: Harvin and George Smith, certainly in high school and then
Speaker 6: in the military. Tell us about that before you talk
Speaker 6: about the situation that they found themselves. Both had met
Speaker 6: at the landscaping gig that they had, but now what
Speaker 6: was their current situation, So tell us about that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there were other factors that kind of triggered them
Speaker 5: to take this action. At the time, they really were
Speaker 5: two different personalities, and they had both suffered downturns in
Speaker 5: personal fortune leading up to this. They had both lost
Speaker 5: their jobs as landscapers for the City Parks Department. They
Speaker 5: had breakups in their marriage, they were running out of money.
Speaker 5: George is George had this kind of psychological makeup that
Speaker 5: may have destined him to, you know, be involved in
Speaker 5: some sort of event in which people would hurt or die.
Speaker 5: And that was he had this grandiosity about him, this
Speaker 5: idea that what he wanted and what he needed was
Speaker 5: more important than everyone else. He wasn't the guy who
Speaker 5: set out to kill people. In fact, George had kind
Speaker 5: of channeled this grandiosity and this idea that he could
Speaker 5: save everybody around him for the good. Up until then,
Speaker 5: everyone around him would say that he's a great guy.
Speaker 5: I mean, and he was, I mean up until then.
Speaker 5: He's a guy to help you out do anything, lend
Speaker 5: you money, save your soul. He was pretty aggressively evangelical himself,
Speaker 5: and so when he looked at his life and saw
Speaker 5: what you and I might think of as a a
Speaker 5: downturn in a temporary downturn in fortune, he looked at
Speaker 5: as a absolute disaster. It was a cognitive dissonance between
Speaker 5: the person he thought he was destined always to become
Speaker 5: the great person and a guy who was pretty much
Speaker 5: down on his luck, had lost his family, was about
Speaker 5: to lose his home and everything else. And these guys
Speaker 5: are in there. You know, they're twenty seven and twenty
Speaker 5: eight years old, so that's their age when they start
Speaker 5: to take this on him, when they commit this crime.
Speaker 5: Chris Harvin's just kind of a troublemaker, you know, the
Speaker 5: guy kid would do anything on a dare. He was
Speaker 5: always getting trouble at school. Nothing horrendously malicious, nothing violent.
Speaker 5: Neither of them had any criminal record, those two. And
Speaker 5: then they had this downturn in fortune and in their
Speaker 5: personal lives, combined with this idea that, you know, you
Speaker 5: could have a cataclysmic events looming in the future, and
Speaker 5: they thought they needed some money to address that and
Speaker 5: prepare themselves.
Speaker 6: Now you talk about their compounds at Mirror Loma, tell
Speaker 6: us the proximity to Los Angeles, but also tell us
Speaker 6: about the nature of this little community and the different
Speaker 6: and the distance between Norco and other communities. Tell us
Speaker 6: where it's situated, and tell us a little bit about
Speaker 6: this Mirror Loma and my idea that it's somewhat of
Speaker 6: a compound in their minds.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a modest compound. The robbery itself took place
Speaker 5: in Riverside County, California, and eventually went into the pursuit
Speaker 5: and went into San Berndino County. This is an area
Speaker 5: known as the Inland Empire. It's roughly forty miles east
Speaker 5: of Los Angeles, still part of the La Metro area.
Speaker 5: Really gritty, blue collar area, a lot of warehouses. There's
Speaker 5: a steel mill out there, the Kaiser Steel Mill. Miror Loma.
Speaker 5: Is a semi rural, a gritty neighborhood of it was
Speaker 5: unincorporated area, so that the uh, the zoning laws weren't great.
Speaker 5: Kind of a some ramshackle houses out there, but mostly
Speaker 5: a relatively quiet, uh you know, suburban neighborhood. Again you
Speaker 5: call it probably lower working class, blue collar. And they
Speaker 5: had bought a house there and uh together and uh
Speaker 5: it was a modest stucco ranch with a just as
Speaker 5: they say, a small compound, because it was really just
Speaker 5: just a little over a quarter acre. And uh, but
Speaker 5: as they as they prepare not just for the bank robbery,
Speaker 5: but again to uh to put them in a position
Speaker 5: to survive the apocalypse. They they began to put barbed
Speaker 5: wire up around the perimeter, uh walls of their backyard
Speaker 5: and uh put nailing carpet tacks so if anybody tried
Speaker 5: to come over that perimeter, they tear their hands up.
Speaker 5: And they built they dug a pit and a tuddle
Speaker 5: that went from their backyard underneath their garage so they
Speaker 5: could either escape the house or use it as a bunker.
Speaker 5: And they also they'd always they were guys who liked guns,
Speaker 5: but they really began to ramp up and kind of
Speaker 5: put together an arsenal at that point.
Speaker 6: So they were on as you write, they're in desperate
Speaker 6: need of money. But Chris and George, even though they're
Speaker 6: really good friends and they have a lot of things
Speaker 6: in common and they have this shared apocalyptic future belief,
Speaker 6: tell us about George's initial plan and introduce Russell Harvin
Speaker 6: and Manny Dogado. Who are these people and where did
Speaker 6: they come from? Who brings in who?
Speaker 5: Certainly George Wayne Smith first had an idea that he
Speaker 5: was going to rob a Denny's restaurant and Chris said, well,
Speaker 5: if you're gonna Chris Harvin said, well, if you're going
Speaker 5: to rob anything, you might as well rob a bank.
Speaker 5: And then George began to start to plan that, and
Speaker 5: he he got more and more serious, the more and
Speaker 5: more desperate he became. And Chris really was kind of
Speaker 5: reluctant about it. But George is a very persuasive and
Speaker 5: very articulate guy, and so he began to really pressure
Speaker 5: Chris to do this, to rob a bank. And I
Speaker 5: mentioned George's grandiosity, well that extended to his plan to
Speaker 5: rob the bank. Chris also mentioned that, you know, he
Speaker 5: wasn't going to do it unless they were unless they
Speaker 5: were well armed when they went in. But George put
Speaker 5: together a rather elaborate plan in which he would address
Speaker 5: every contingency and that included being armed to the teeth
Speaker 5: with civilian versions of military grade weapons. These are you know,
Speaker 5: AR fifteen's Heckler HK ninety ones, HK ninety threes. These
Speaker 5: are two twenty three caliber weapons, and George was back
Speaker 5: in a three oh eight, which is an absolute cannon,
Speaker 5: and thousands of rounds of ammunition, high powered high capacity magazines,
Speaker 5: forty round magazines that they take together jungle style, So
Speaker 5: there was three of them take together. You could pop out,
Speaker 5: flip over put it back in. So they started to
Speaker 5: put together this grand plan. But you know, you get
Speaker 5: a grandiose plan like this, an elaborate plan, and also
Speaker 5: almost guarantees that something will go wrong, and it did.
Speaker 5: They needed decided they needed five people to pull this
Speaker 5: bank robbery off, and so Chris Harvin recruited his younger brother,
Speaker 5: Russell Harvin, and Russell was just he's going nowhere in
Speaker 5: his life. He was diabetic, but he was just kind
Speaker 5: of hanging out at home working odd jobs, smoking a
Speaker 5: lot of weed. And when his brother asked him if
Speaker 5: he wanted to do it, or told him he should
Speaker 5: do it, Russ just kind of went along with it.
Speaker 5: Russ didn't really think things through. Russell's about twenty six
Speaker 5: years old at the time, twenty seven years old at
Speaker 5: the time. Then George also recruits Many Delgado. Manny Delgatto
Speaker 5: was only twenty one years old, and they knew each
Speaker 5: other from again working as landscapers at the Parks Department.
Speaker 5: And then Manny recruited his little brother, seventeen year old
Speaker 5: Billy Delgado to be the getaway driver. And Manny and
Speaker 5: Many and Billy were from very different backgrounds. They were
Speaker 5: really from the barrio in Orange County, from really tough neighborhoods,
Speaker 5: and they all had their kind of different reasons for
Speaker 5: wanting to do it. Manny had one child and another
Speaker 5: one on the way, his wife was nine months pregnant.
Speaker 5: He felt he needed money. Billy had kind of a
Speaker 5: hopelessness about him. He had rheumatwied arthritis and believed that
Speaker 5: he wouldn't be able to walk past the age of
Speaker 5: twenty five. And Russell Harvin somehow got in his head
Speaker 5: that his diabetics, his diabetes would would doom him to
Speaker 5: death before the age of thirty five. So they all
Speaker 5: kind of felt like they had nothing to lose, kind
Speaker 5: of a bit of a desperation about them.
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Speaker 6: It's also I know we mentioned it, but it's important
Speaker 6: to know for our audience how much rejection these people
Speaker 6: had from women that had their children in their lives.
Speaker 6: Three out of the four that we just mentioned. Talk
Speaker 6: about that a little bit because I think it's really important.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they George is. All of them married very young.
Speaker 5: But George married at age eighteen, right out of high school,
Speaker 5: and that marriage quickly collapsed when he went off to Germany.
Speaker 5: He was then married again to a woman who was
Speaker 5: ten years older than him, and when they had a child,
Speaker 5: really their marriage started to fall apart. George was still
Speaker 5: concentrating on stockpiling weapons and talking about the end of
Speaker 5: the world, and his wife was trying to raise a baby,
Speaker 5: and so that marriage also fell apart. Uh, just months
Speaker 5: before the bank robbery. And again George had this view
Speaker 5: of himself as he was going to save everyone around him,
Speaker 5: that he was a really good and responsible guy, and
Speaker 5: up until then he was and and couldn't understand why
Speaker 5: this had happened. Christopher Harvin's married at age eighteen, and
Speaker 5: by age twenty seven, he was his his marriage was
Speaker 5: falling apart. He was not being able to see his
Speaker 5: kid as much as he wanted to. Russell Harvin married
Speaker 5: at age eighteen, and that wife ran off with another
Speaker 5: woman several years later. You know, she was actually married
Speaker 5: to another man and had had a had another a child,
Speaker 5: and but russ still wore their wedding ring, and so
Speaker 5: you know they were these guys were definitely kind of
Speaker 5: broken hearted and and a lot of other bad things
Speaker 5: happening in their lives.
Speaker 6: You right about the incredible scene in this little place
Speaker 6: at a place called Dave's where they get their weaponry.
Speaker 6: I know you mentioned some of the incredible weapons that
Speaker 6: they had that it's beyond hunting and beyond anything and
Speaker 6: very very military type weaponry. But you talk about Dave
Speaker 6: and this going back to Dave, so I think it's
Speaker 6: very incredible cinematic scene in here. But tell us about
Speaker 6: them going to get weapons and what is their idea
Speaker 6: about spending the last bit of their money to get
Speaker 6: these weapons.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's that's kind of one of the contradictions is
Speaker 5: that they did take the last few thousand dollars they
Speaker 5: had and started to ramp up. As I say, they'd
Speaker 5: always had, you know, handguns around and nothing crazy, you know,
Speaker 5: just kind of people who are they take them up
Speaker 5: hunting and things like that. You know, George had a
Speaker 5: carbine the same sort of he singles, you know, a
Speaker 5: single shop. The weapons that they began to buy as
Speaker 5: they moved closer to this were the again the military
Speaker 5: grade weapons, civilian version, meaning they are semi automatic rather
Speaker 5: than fully automatic. But they were just the all of
Speaker 5: these weapons were legally purchased. They were not nearly as
Speaker 5: prevalent back then as they are now. These semi automatic
Speaker 5: which commonly referred to as assault rifles, and they were around.
Speaker 5: They were legal, but they weren't, but they were not
Speaker 5: nearly as prevalent. And Dave's gun Shop was just one
Speaker 5: of the places they purchased it, and they would go
Speaker 5: to different gun stores. But in the course of a week,
Speaker 5: George Smith walked into Dave's I think it went three times,
Speaker 5: and purchased two semi automatic weapons two twenty three and
Speaker 5: AR fifteen and a Heckler in coch HK ninety one, which,
Speaker 5: as I say, is a three eight and three eight
Speaker 5: is around that three times as big as a as
Speaker 5: a two twenty three. Not an animal in the world
Speaker 5: that can't be brought down with one single shot from
Speaker 5: a three to eight from a half mile away. And yeah,
Speaker 5: the guy at Dave's was starting to wonder kind of
Speaker 5: what was going on, and he joked to a semi
Speaker 5: joked to George Smith, Gee, what do you need all
Speaker 5: these for? Are you going to start a war? Rob
Speaker 5: a bank? And George just laughed.
Speaker 6: Right now part of the plan. Tell us about the
Speaker 6: plan itself, what George had come up with, and what
Speaker 6: did all agreed to, and then what do they do
Speaker 6: in preparation? You talk about the anarchist cookbook that they
Speaker 6: had access to.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the other part of their arsenal, in addition to
Speaker 5: each all five of them carrying one of these high
Speaker 5: powered semi automatic rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition,
Speaker 5: is they used the anarchist cookbook to make homemade fragmentation grenades.
Speaker 5: He's a made out of beer cans with an incendiary
Speaker 5: device in the mid, a detonation device in the middle
Speaker 5: and uh, and then shrapnel around them. And they tape
Speaker 5: them up in the tap them up and mask electrical tape,
Speaker 5: duct tape. And they had fashioned these with some of
Speaker 5: them on dowels so that you could launch them out
Speaker 5: of the barrel of a shotgun up to one hundred yards,
Speaker 5: So you light the fuse and you can launch it
Speaker 5: out of a shotgun, or you can just you know,
Speaker 5: toss them. They had a couple dozen of these. They
Speaker 5: had molotov cocktails, wine bottles filled with leaded gasoline. So
Speaker 5: once they had all these weapons, and again all of
Speaker 5: them were had one of these rifles on them. All
Speaker 5: of them had one or more handguns on them. And
Speaker 5: the plan was this and this is this is indeed
Speaker 5: what they executed the day of the bank robbery, which
Speaker 5: was Friday, May ninth, nineteen eighty uh and in the morning,
Speaker 5: three of them, the Delgado brothers and Russell Harvin, went
Speaker 5: to a shopping mall twenty miles away, the Braham Mall,
Speaker 5: and they stole a van at gunpoint, and they taped
Speaker 5: up the owner, Gary Hackela, and put him in the
Speaker 5: back of the van so he could not report it stolen.
Speaker 5: They then Chris, Chris and George and met up with them,
Speaker 5: and they still had Gary Hackeler taped up in the back,
Speaker 5: and they went and put a diversion bomb underneath a
Speaker 5: gas mane a mile away, and this was six beer
Speaker 5: bottles filled with gasoline with a detonation device in it.
Speaker 5: And they put that underneath a gas maine at a
Speaker 5: behind a strip mall, and it did indeed go off,
Speaker 5: but it did not ignite the gas maine. A passer
Speaker 5: by put it out with a fire extinguisher. But the
Speaker 5: plan was that, obviously that once that went off in
Speaker 5: this massive explosion, every first responder, including every cop, would
Speaker 5: be on their way to that and then they would
Speaker 5: hit the bank. And the bank that George eventually chose
Speaker 5: was the security Pacific Bank in Norco, California, which borders
Speaker 5: Miura Loma. Again, we're talking just about the center of
Speaker 5: a riverside county or near a riverside city. And he
Speaker 5: George chose his own bank, so the bank that they
Speaker 5: robbed was George's bank. And they put on a ski masks,
Speaker 5: military ponchos, and they waited for that that in Sandia,
Speaker 5: for the diversion bomb to go off, expecting to see
Speaker 5: all the first responders head down Hamner Avenue towards there.
Speaker 5: And when that didn't happen at about they waited till
Speaker 5: about three thirty in the afternoon, and then they decided
Speaker 5: to go ahead and hit the bank.
Speaker 6: Anyways, let's talk about against an incredibly movie esque scene
Speaker 6: in here where we have a depth Chuck Hill and
Speaker 6: Andy Delgado and you provide the backgrounds for this and
Speaker 6: such vivid characters emerge in this story, and a lot
Speaker 6: of vivid characters emerge law enforcement and on the other side,
Speaker 6: but much more in law enforcement rich characters. Let's talk
Speaker 6: about these two guys and why they were right there
Speaker 6: across from the bank doing what tell us about this
Speaker 6: and the reactions from these bank robbers.
Speaker 5: Sure, and The third Riverside County Sheriff's deputy patrolling Norco
Speaker 5: that day was Glenn Blaski, and he's the first way
Speaker 5: to encounter them. So it's Andy Delgado, Chuck Hill, and
Speaker 5: Glen Blaski. And yeah, I do you know, one of
Speaker 5: the things that really interest me in this story, and
Speaker 5: I do take a lot of time to paint the picture,
Speaker 5: is the backgrounds of these various law enforcement officers who
Speaker 5: became involved in this and kind of the impact it
Speaker 5: had after words. But you know, the bank robbery itself,
Speaker 5: and this is George Russ, Chris and Manny Delgado crashing
Speaker 5: into this bank and ski masks and camouflage and Billy
Speaker 5: Delgado is to get away drivers sitting outside in this van.
Speaker 5: That actually is a lot of drama that goes on
Speaker 5: in that bank, as as goes on with pretty much
Speaker 5: any takeover robbery where they put everybody down on the floor.
Speaker 5: But you know, there's a lot of drama that unfolded
Speaker 5: inside there. But for the most part, they got in
Speaker 5: that bank and they got out in two and a
Speaker 5: half minutes. However, when they were going in the bank
Speaker 5: and their camouflage and their ski masks and rifles. They
Speaker 5: were spotted by a bank teller at a bank across
Speaker 5: the street. And it is that bank teller who called
Speaker 5: the Riverside County Sheriffs to report a robbery at the
Speaker 5: bank across the street. So it took about two minutes
Speaker 5: before the dispatcher sent out the two to eleven robbery
Speaker 5: in progress tone for the Security Pacific Bank, Fourth and
Speaker 5: Hamner in Norco. And at that time, Glen Balaski, Deputy
Speaker 5: Glen Blaski just happened to be sitting at that intersection
Speaker 5: looking straight at that bank. So if you talk about
Speaker 5: some bad luck mixed in with some rather unfortunate planning,
Speaker 5: that that's where it came in, was the fact that
Speaker 5: Glen Blaski was right outside that bank. And and so
Speaker 5: Glen Balaski, you can hear him on the radio traffic.
Speaker 5: He reports himself on scene in less than two seconds
Speaker 5: after that, after that dispatch, and and these are this
Speaker 5: is right as the bank robbers are coming out of
Speaker 5: the bank. So Deputy Glen Balaski begins to take fire
Speaker 5: almost immediately as he takes the turn, just to cruise
Speaker 5: into the bank and to see what's going on. And
Speaker 5: Blaski had so little time to really think through what
Speaker 5: he was getting himself into, that he'd not processed that
Speaker 5: this was a two to eleven in progress as opposed
Speaker 5: to a two to eleven silent and most silent alarms
Speaker 5: are you know, or you know alarms are false alarms
Speaker 5: nine out of ten of them are. But this was
Speaker 5: a confirmed robbery in progress. And that's when when Glenn
Speaker 5: Belaski came head to head with these bank robbers.
Speaker 6: You talk about including this, I know this is a
Speaker 6: bit of a detour here for a second, but you
Speaker 6: talk about the prevalence of armed robbery, bank robbery in
Speaker 6: Los Angeles, how often that actually happened? And also, yeah,
Speaker 6: tell us first about that. How commonplace is this?
Speaker 5: Yeah, Los Angeles for decades had been the what the
Speaker 5: FBI called the bank robbery capital of the world, and
Speaker 5: one out of every four bank robberies in the United
Speaker 5: States takes place within the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles
Speaker 5: Field Office of the FBI. And the reason is mostly freeways.
Speaker 5: You know, you can rob a bank and you can
Speaker 5: jump on a freeway and in five minutes you could
Speaker 5: be five miles away in cruising the side streets of
Speaker 5: a whole different police jurisdiction. The golden rule of robbing
Speaker 5: banks in Los Angeles is rob a bank near a freeway.
Speaker 5: And again George decided to rob his own bank, and
Speaker 5: it was seven miles away from the from the nearest freeway.
Speaker 5: But nineteen eighty was really the sheer number of bank robberies.
Speaker 5: So Los Angeles had already established self as the bank
Speaker 5: robbery capital of the world. But the sheer number of
Speaker 5: bank robberies was beginning to skyrocket, and most of that
Speaker 5: was because of drug abuse and the cocaine era. When
Speaker 5: people got addicted, they needed money to feed that habit,
Speaker 5: and robbing a bank in Los Angeles was not all
Speaker 5: that difficult. The vast majority are one on one robberies.
Speaker 5: That's one one bank robber going to one teller telling them,
Speaker 5: you know, slipping them a note this is give me
Speaker 5: all your money, and then leaving the bank with two
Speaker 5: thousand and three thousand dollars something like that. Clearly, George
Speaker 5: and Chris, we're not driven.
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Speaker 5: He terms and conditions eighteen plus by addiction. And this
Speaker 5: was a completely different sort of robbery. This is a
Speaker 5: takeover robbery. And takeover robberies have the potential for danger
Speaker 5: and and casualties. And they are the robberies that really
Speaker 5: the FBI loose sleepover. Are these takeover robberies.
Speaker 6: I'm glad you brought up the freeway, the reason for
Speaker 6: all the bank robberies in Los Angeles and also what
Speaker 6: their idea was. But because George picked his own bank
Speaker 6: in terms of the idea that it had easy access
Speaker 6: to a getaway, you talk about that assessment of Norco itself. Also,
Speaker 6: when that silent alarm went off and the police were alerted,
Speaker 6: there was a misdirect as well that just added to
Speaker 6: this incredible inadvertent diversion. Even more so the version they
Speaker 6: had originally planned.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, there was some bad luck for the bank
Speaker 5: as well. And again just to put the industry of
Speaker 5: banking in perspective, in nineteen eighty, this is a Friday afternoon,
Speaker 5: and it's payday, and so back in those days, people
Speaker 5: did not use did not use credit cards for nearly
Speaker 5: as much, and there really were ATMs were pretty much
Speaker 5: non existent, and so people would go in and they
Speaker 5: generally cash half their paycheck and walk out with cash
Speaker 5: on it. So banks carried a lot of cash. But
Speaker 5: as the day went on, the bank was also emptying
Speaker 5: itself out of cash, and they robbed this bank at
Speaker 5: three thirty in the afternoon. The bank itself did not
Speaker 5: even have cameras in it. Most did, but this branch
Speaker 5: did not have any security cameras in it. One teller
Speaker 5: did manage to trigger the silent alarm, but the bank
Speaker 5: had been wired incorrectly, and that alarm went to the
Speaker 5: Corona Police Department, that's the neighboring town. The Corona Police
Speaker 5: Department dispatched a robbery in progress to the Corona branch
Speaker 5: of the Security Pacific Bank. So there was certainly a
Speaker 5: delay there, and if it had not been for that
Speaker 5: bank teller across the street who had seen them go
Speaker 5: in and called the uh, the riverside sheriffs and gave
Speaker 5: them the correct location. You know, none of what followed
Speaker 5: may have happened at all, and that might have been
Speaker 5: for the better for all involved as well. But uh, yeah,
Speaker 5: that that first alarm went to the wrong city.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you talk about Bloski and then uh Gary Keeter
Speaker 6: knowing that Bloski was in trouble. But part of this
Speaker 6: is also the technology at the time and turning in
Speaker 6: terms of radios, and also jurisdictions different counties tell us
Speaker 6: about that situation in terms of technologically being able to
Speaker 6: communicate with each other.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Uh, Dispatcher Gary Keeter is kind of an interesting story.
Speaker 5: He was actually a patrolman who'd injured his knee and
Speaker 5: was so a signed behind the dispatch mic and he
Speaker 5: is he did an absolutely incredible job during this running
Speaker 5: gun battle that went on for uh for an hour
Speaker 5: and uh just had so many moving parts and he
Speaker 5: you hear his voice on the radio traffic. He is
Speaker 5: calm and cool and filtering through so much information. But
Speaker 5: here's uh, here's one of the problems that really plagued
Speaker 5: law enforcement at the time and still does to a
Speaker 5: certain extent. But and that's that. Uh, this this pursuit,
Speaker 5: it started with a pitched firefight in front of the
Speaker 5: bank between three sheriff's deputies and uh five bank robbers
Speaker 5: in which you know, people were wounded and one bank
Speaker 5: robber killed, and then became a running gun battle through
Speaker 5: the suburban streets of Riverside County onto a major highway
Speaker 5: that went into a San Bernardino County and then up
Speaker 5: into the mountains. So the the law enforcement agencies involved
Speaker 5: heavily were the Riverside County Sheriffs, Sam Bernardino County Sheriffs,
Speaker 5: and the California Highway Patrol. Not to mention some other
Speaker 5: city agencies that were that were came in were involved,
Speaker 5: and none of these guys could talk to each other
Speaker 5: the different agencies there was. There's an interagency system called
Speaker 5: clay Mars which was just beginning to be implemented, and
Speaker 5: there was only one in which you could go to
Speaker 5: a different frequency and all talk to each other, but
Speaker 5: that was did not really come into play until later on.
Speaker 5: And even in a very limited sense. Some patrol units
Speaker 5: had scanners so they could pick up different frequencies, but
Speaker 5: they could not talk to those other those other agencies.
Speaker 5: So when this became a pursuit with up to thirty
Speaker 5: sometimes forty law enforcement vehicles involved, you know, these guys
Speaker 5: could not talk to each other, nor could some of
Speaker 5: them talk to the helicopter above which was pursuing the
Speaker 5: that was pursuing the bank robbers, and that would prove
Speaker 5: to be fatal later on in the at the end
Speaker 5: of the pursuit, inability for the lead patrol unit to
Speaker 5: be able to talk directly to the helicopter and receive
Speaker 5: reports from that helicopter as to where the truck was
Speaker 5: that was with the bank robbers in front of it.
Speaker 6: Before we talk about this incredible pursuit, and before that,
Speaker 6: the complete change of direction for these bank robbers. They
Speaker 6: had with a diversion, the idea that they would have
Speaker 6: cold cars, they switch license plates so that they'd be
Speaker 6: able to go into another vehicle after they stole this
Speaker 6: first vehicle. But that doesn't happen and they can't go
Speaker 6: back to Mira Loma. So this pursuit changes, and no
Speaker 6: one knows and the police certainly can't predict much of
Speaker 6: a direction, but they have their ideas. And it's interesting
Speaker 6: all these sheriffs again and deputies pardon me, that are
Speaker 6: involved in this pursuit. Let's first talk about how outgunned
Speaker 6: the police were at that time, because that's a big
Speaker 6: contributing factor to not only Jim Evans' death, but this
Speaker 6: entire thing that could have turned much, much worse.
Speaker 5: Yeah, certainly, at that time, the sheriff's deputies were still
Speaker 5: guarding the wild West with the same weapons they had
Speaker 5: for one hundred years, and that's a six shooter and
Speaker 5: a Winchester shotgun. And as you can see, that was
Speaker 5: no match for the weaponry that they were about to encounter.
Speaker 5: And this this confrontation between law enforcement and bank robbers,
Speaker 5: as I noticed, started immediately in front of the bank
Speaker 5: when Glenn Bulaski came head to head with them, and
Speaker 5: then soon Chuck Hill and Andy Delgado, the other two
Speaker 5: deputies who were patrolling Norcobe, came un scene and there
Speaker 5: was a pitched firefight in a crowded southern California intersection
Speaker 5: at three point thirty in the afternoon on a Friday,
Speaker 5: and there were over five hundred rounds fired. Blaski's vehicle
Speaker 5: was hit forty six times. Blasky was wounded in by
Speaker 5: bullet fragments or flying glass in five different places, including
Speaker 5: a shot to the elbow that severed an artery. But
Speaker 5: Blaski did manage to get off four shotgun rounds and
Speaker 5: Andy Delgado managed to discharge his shotgun with ten rounds
Speaker 5: and they did inflict some damage. The getaway driver, Billy Delgado,
Speaker 5: was shot in the back of the head with a
Speaker 5: shotgun pellet that paralyzed him and the van veered off
Speaker 5: course and crashed into a fence. So the police were effective,
Speaker 5: was what they had. But once the pursuit got going
Speaker 5: after that, they really didn't stand a chance because when
Speaker 5: Billy Delgado was killed, the van kind of rolled off
Speaker 5: to the side and they couldn't get Billy out of
Speaker 5: the seat. So they abandoned the van and spread out
Speaker 5: into the intersection. They brought there they left their twenty
Speaker 5: thousand dollars that they'd gotten from the bank robbery, which
Speaker 5: was a terrible take, and they they offloaded their double
Speaker 5: bags full of bombs and UH and UH ammunition and
Speaker 5: brought their rifles with them and began to fan out
Speaker 5: into this intersection while laying down heavy fire. The entire
Speaker 5: time on on the three deputies there and as they say,
Speaker 5: wounding a significantly wounding Blaski. But in general, yeah, there
Speaker 5: was a uh there. The police were completely outgunned, especially
Speaker 5: because the bank robbers then commandeered a Ford F two
Speaker 5: fifty pickup truck that was used that had been modified
Speaker 5: for as a service vehicle, a heavy heavy uh heavy
Speaker 5: equipment uh maintenance trucks. So had they fabricated a cabinets
Speaker 5: on the sides of it, and they were filled with
Speaker 5: equipment in tools and UH. And then they they'd mounted
Speaker 5: a settling and oxygen tanks on the back, back on
Speaker 5: against the cab, those big tall tanks, and there's nothing
Speaker 5: nothing the police were shooting it would ever penetrate those.
Speaker 5: So this was you had. You then had h You
Speaker 5: had Russ Harvin and George Smith in the back. Both
Speaker 5: have been wounded. George has been wounded pretty significantly. You
Speaker 5: had Manny Delgado sitting out the passenger window, he literally
Speaker 5: had his torso completely out the passenger window, and Chris
Speaker 5: Harvin driving, and all of the three guys had again
Speaker 5: these semi automatic high powered rifles. So for all intents
Speaker 5: and purposes, this was like a military military vehicle in
Speaker 5: terms of its its armor and sell it's it's firepower.
Speaker 6: Chris Harvin has taken over from Billy Degatto, the driver
Speaker 6: that was shot in the back of the head. So
Speaker 6: what did they decide to do knowing this area? But
Speaker 6: what still, what's this decision that they do that police
Speaker 6: couldn't possibly predict where to go with this pursuit? And
Speaker 6: how is that an advantage to them?
Speaker 5: Certainly? So to set the scene back at the intersection,
Speaker 5: the van is abandoned, Billy Delgado is dying in the
Speaker 5: front seat in the process of dying in the front seat,
Speaker 5: and over five hundred rounds have been fired. People are
Speaker 5: running for their lives when they commandeer this at gunpoint,
Speaker 5: this truck I just mentioned, and they first begin heading
Speaker 5: back to their home that they've you know, their compound
Speaker 5: as you put, at their fortified home in miro Loma,
Speaker 5: which is about nine or ten miles away, And they
Speaker 5: head up Hamner Avenue, which is the busiest boulevard in
Speaker 5: that area in Norco, and heads up towards miro Loma.
Speaker 5: And as they head north, it starts to become more
Speaker 5: and more kind of rural. There's kind of there's vineyards
Speaker 5: out there, there's bean fields, there's sheep grazing meadows and
Speaker 5: things like that. But it's still a very populated area.
Speaker 5: And as they begin to head towards their house, they're
Speaker 5: really weaving through side streets and they turn almost every block,
Speaker 5: and so it's almost impossible for these pursuing units to
Speaker 5: predict where they're going to come out the radio traffic,
Speaker 5: they're saying, Okay, they're they're you know, they're headed this
Speaker 5: way on this street. Then now they're headed this way
Speaker 5: on this street. Now they're headed this way on another street,
Speaker 5: and you know, trying to intercept them or set up
Speaker 5: a roadblock became almost impossible. There is not a helicopter
Speaker 5: on them at that point. Riverside County Sheriff did not
Speaker 5: have a helicopter. They had requested one from a from
Speaker 5: a nearby city, Riverside City PD, and that had not
Speaker 5: that was not yet on the that had not yet
Speaker 5: engaged the pursuit. So what was happening is these police
Speaker 5: officers were flooding into the area and the California Highway
Speaker 5: Patrol had begun to self dispatch off the freeways and
Speaker 5: we're involved now, and but they would suddenly come upon
Speaker 5: this truck with almost no warning, and these you know,
Speaker 5: again you have three guys firing high powered rifle and
Speaker 5: they were immediately being hit with gunfire. There were numerous
Speaker 5: vehicles struck by gunfire, including civilian vehicles. They also rammed
Speaker 5: a few civilian vehicles. They pushed one out into an intersection,
Speaker 5: so they took that truck and just rammed them out
Speaker 5: of the intersection so they could get through the light.
Speaker 5: The next intersection they rammed it, hit another car sideways,
Speaker 5: they t boned it, sent it spinning, and then they
Speaker 5: started weaving through these streets. And in the matter of
Speaker 5: you know, about ten minutes, there was an additional five
Speaker 5: five people hit by gunfire, four deputies and a civilian
Speaker 5: by the time they got up to Mira Loma, and
Speaker 5: then by the time and then the helicopter engaged them
Speaker 5: in Mira Loma. So when they did finally get to
Speaker 5: their house, they really had no ability to stop there.
Speaker 5: I mean, they had a helicopter on them, and they
Speaker 5: still had one California Highway Patrol unit and three deputies
Speaker 5: right following through these through these streets with.
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Speaker 6: So what was the route they took? What was the idea?
Speaker 6: Where were they They originally had an idea to escape
Speaker 6: if the bank robbery were successful. Now what was their
Speaker 6: idea and what was their route? And again it banished route.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the initial idea was to as you mentioned, they
Speaker 5: had parked a couple of cold cars, which were their
Speaker 5: personal vehicles with stolen plates on them, and they were
Speaker 5: going to dump the van and the hostage who's still
Speaker 5: in the back, would you know? And they would dump
Speaker 5: that the van, hop into those cars, head out to
Speaker 5: Las Vegas and and launder the money through the casinos there.
Speaker 5: When uh when, by the time they now now in
Speaker 5: the truck By the time they got up to the
Speaker 5: cold cars, they had to they had police officers, they
Speaker 5: were already encountering them. They've been spotted. So Chris Harvin
Speaker 5: decided not to stop at the cold cars, and that's
Speaker 5: when they were headed towards their house. And the advantage,
Speaker 5: of course, was weaving through those streets was that nobody
Speaker 5: could get a beat on them or set up a
Speaker 5: roadblock or otherwise prepared to encounter them. And uh, you
Speaker 5: know they are and that at that point headed in
Speaker 5: the direction inadvertently headed in the direction of a of
Speaker 5: a freeway. But yeah, the second destination was the house itself.
Speaker 6: So tell us about what happens with the again, it's
Speaker 6: it's interesting. You have all these deputies disabled, their cars
Speaker 6: disabled by gunfire, people piggybacking into other vehicles, people going
Speaker 6: first in the line then dropping back. There is warning
Speaker 6: too to drop back from these guys because of their
Speaker 6: weaponry is hitting targets of half a mile to a mile,
Speaker 6: which is astonishing. Again, there isn't communication with everyone. Tell
Speaker 6: us what happens with Deputy Jim.
Speaker 5: Evans after weaving through the streets of a suburban Riverside
Speaker 5: County and deciding to abandon stopping at their house. They
Speaker 5: weaved around and they passed the house twice and then
Speaker 5: abandoned that idea and then tried tried to actually commandeer
Speaker 5: another vehicle, which which failed. But at that point they
Speaker 5: had reached had reached the freeway, the Pomona Freeway, and
Speaker 5: the strategy at that point was to head up into
Speaker 5: the mountains above Los Angeles and to then try to
Speaker 5: use the fact that they had this truck to lose
Speaker 5: the patrol vehicles which are really you know, sit ans
Speaker 5: and on the rough dirt roads and eventually disappear into
Speaker 5: the canyons. So the first thing they did is they
Speaker 5: got on the Pomona Freeway and then onto Interstate fifteen
Speaker 5: and headed east into the mountains above Los Angeles and
Speaker 5: Los Angeles and Riverside San Bernardino, and they crossed into
Speaker 5: the San Bernardino County line, so they've passed into the
Speaker 5: jurisdiction of the Riverside County Sheriffs and onto the freeway,
Speaker 5: which is the turf of the California Highway Patrol. So
Speaker 5: now you had Riverside still pursuing California Highway Patrol descending
Speaker 5: from all different directions and then the San Bernardino County
Speaker 5: Sheriffs starting to flood onto the freeway at that point,
Speaker 5: and that's where they are hitting patrol vehicles from about
Speaker 5: a half a mile away. And soon the patrol units,
Speaker 5: the deputies, and the CHP units start to turn off
Speaker 5: their lights, their light bars because they were they realized
Speaker 5: they were being targeted. They could see the light bars.
Speaker 5: Chris Harvin also begins to slow down to at points
Speaker 5: to try to ambush these these pursuing vehicles, draw them
Speaker 5: in close, hit the brakes and have those guys fire
Speaker 5: on them from close range. They throw out three fragmentation
Speaker 5: grenades on Interstate fifteen that pepper the pursuing police officers
Speaker 5: with shrapnel. This whole time, they're hitting civilian cars as
Speaker 5: well semi trucks, shooting them at close range, some of
Speaker 5: the inadvertently some inexplicably turning their guns on civilians. So
Speaker 5: people are bailing off the freeway into the breakdown lane.
Speaker 5: Trucks are swerving to get out of the way. It
Speaker 5: is absolute chaos on this freeway and it's at this
Speaker 5: point that they turn their guns on a San Bernardino
Speaker 5: County Sheriff's helicopter that's about eight hundred feet above them
Speaker 5: and George Smith. It's a round from a three to
Speaker 5: eight right through the belly of this helicopter and it
Speaker 5: immediately the electrical system in the radios catches fire. And
Speaker 5: luckily it's a Vietnam chopper pilot with tons of combat
Speaker 5: experience behind the stick in that helicopter, and he manages
Speaker 5: to get it down to the ground before it before
Speaker 5: it crashes, and they are and then a second helicopter
Speaker 5: quickly comes in and resumes the pursuit. But the way
Speaker 5: they're headed is to the mountains of above Los Angeles,
Speaker 5: and they get off after about eight miles. They get
Speaker 5: off at Sierra Road and start to head up Lytle Creek.
Speaker 5: And Lytle Creek is a place where they were familiar.
Speaker 5: It is a it's a place where you can fire
Speaker 5: guns anywhere you want at that time, and that's where
Speaker 5: they had gone to practice with their new weapons. Even
Speaker 5: threw a hand grenade down in the cannon to make
Speaker 5: canyon to make sure they work. That was a week before,
Speaker 5: so they're very familiar with this area. And you know,
Speaker 5: if you know the little if you know the San
Speaker 5: Gabriel National Forest and Mount Baldy in that area. These
Speaker 5: are very rugged mountains. You know, they can jut up
Speaker 5: to over ten thousand feet very rapidly. So these are
Speaker 5: very rough canyons. And when that pursuit and it's you know,
Speaker 5: this is a two lane road that starts his asphalt
Speaker 5: and then turns into turns into a dirt road and
Speaker 5: again a rough dirt road. So a lot of these
Speaker 5: cars are breaking down as you say, ones that were
Speaker 5: hit with gunfire are bailing out and the police officers
Speaker 5: and summer jumping out of one vehicle and getting into
Speaker 5: another one. So now there's you know, some of them
Speaker 5: have two and even three officers in there. And you
Speaker 5: mentioned Jim Evans, and this is where on the on
Speaker 5: the I fifteen's where Jim Evans, Deputy Riverside Deputy. Jim
Speaker 5: Evans joins the pursuit. And I'll give you a little
Speaker 5: bit of background on Jim Evans. He's older, he's about
Speaker 5: thirty eight years old. He's a career military. He is
Speaker 5: Green Beret, highly decorated in Vietnam UH combat mission. So
Speaker 5: he's a he's a senior guy. He joined the joined
Speaker 5: the river. He's only joined the Sheriff's department and about
Speaker 5: five years before. But he was certainly destined to move
Speaker 5: up the ranks. Just a wonderful human being. Quiet, He's
Speaker 5: a Texan, so he's got that Texas drawl, really looked
Speaker 5: up to by the bias fellow deputies. And and so
Speaker 5: Jim Evans is in uh in one of the front
Speaker 5: cars in the pursuit as it heads up into this
Speaker 5: very ominous landscape of the mountains.
Speaker 6: And uh. You talk about Mary too, You describe and
Speaker 6: and feature her in the story as well. She's a
Speaker 6: bus driver. It's later in the evening. I don't think
Speaker 6: she's served. She hadn't heard any news at all.
Speaker 5: Tell us about that, Yeah, Mary Evans, you know the
Speaker 5: uh uh Jim and Mary Evans is really a unique
Speaker 5: kind of love story. As I say, Jim Evans was
Speaker 5: a was a Texan and UH and military and he
Speaker 5: moved to a Riverside County because he was familiar with
Speaker 5: it from being there in the military. Mary was a
Speaker 5: a Italian Roman Catholic from Boston who ended up in
Speaker 5: Riverside because she loved horses and and had come out
Speaker 5: at one point they she had had had a pretty
Speaker 5: rough life and she was a very tough woman. And
Speaker 5: when these two found each other, they had they had
Speaker 5: really found the love of their lives. They were a
Speaker 5: perfect couple couple together. They both loved to ride horses,
Speaker 5: owned horses, and uh, it's kind of one of these
Speaker 5: things where long last both of them had found the
Speaker 5: perfect person. And they'd been married about two years and
Speaker 5: had a uh, had a son that was about six,
Speaker 5: about eight weeks old at the time. And Mary was
Speaker 5: a municipal bus driver. And again you know the times
Speaker 5: in which these things take place. Excuse if you didn't
Speaker 5: have the radio on, and even then, you might not
Speaker 5: have even known this was going on unless you encountered
Speaker 5: this crazy pursuit that was unfolding. And she was on
Speaker 5: a bus route at the time, so she did not
Speaker 5: know her husband, Jim Evans, was involved in anything because
Speaker 5: she didn't know this was going on.
Speaker 6: Yeah, now back to this pursuit here we talk about
Speaker 6: it continues the next day because that's how dangerous this is.
Speaker 6: And they realized that with this ambush ability and darkness
Speaker 6: as a cover, that they should regroup and bring in
Speaker 6: another helicopter and bring in some more people and hunt
Speaker 6: and kill team. Tell us about this endeavor on the
Speaker 6: next day.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and and and I'm sorry you asked me and
Speaker 5: I didn't wrap up. They kind of wrap up the
Speaker 5: pursuit that day as it goes up into Lytle Creek. Uh.
Speaker 5: There is a couple of things that have occurred. Number One,
Speaker 5: there is a a Sambernardino deputy named DJ McCarty who
Speaker 5: happens to be sitting in the station getting off a shift,
Speaker 5: and he starts to hear the radio traffic through the
Speaker 5: squawk box there and and then he decides that he's
Speaker 5: just start to put his uniform back on and maybe
Speaker 5: get out there. And then another deputy, Jim McPherrin, is
Speaker 5: out in the field and he hears the helicopter be
Speaker 5: grounded and he radios back to the to the station.
Speaker 5: He says, uh, get the ar And what he meant
Speaker 5: was there was the Uh. There was a M sixteen,
Speaker 5: a you know, a military M sixteen rifle that they
Speaker 5: had confiscated from a drug dealer in a pursuit. Drug
Speaker 5: dealer throw it out the window on the freeway. And
Speaker 5: that was the only high powered rifle that either of
Speaker 5: those departments had was this one confiscated M sixteen rifle
Speaker 5: and the military didn't want it back, so it was
Speaker 5: sitting around in a sergeant's trunk of their car and
Speaker 5: DJ McCarty runs out. He grabs that weapon, and this
Speaker 5: is a fully automatic M sixteen, you know, rifle that
Speaker 5: they use in Vietnam, and four magazines full of ammunition.
Speaker 5: And he jumps in with McPherrin and they start to
Speaker 5: try to make their way up to the front of
Speaker 5: the pursuit line, and they are radioing to other vehicles,
Speaker 5: you know, get out of our way. We have a
Speaker 5: you know, we have a rifle here. And so they
Speaker 5: are starting to move up the pursuit line when this
Speaker 5: pursuit then goes onto a fire road, a very narrow
Speaker 5: fire road that is clean to the side of this mountain,
Speaker 5: and Jim Evans is then in the lead, and by
Speaker 5: then DJ McCarty has gotten to number two in the
Speaker 5: pursuit line behind Evans. But Evans, again because of the
Speaker 5: radio situation, does not know that there is a there's
Speaker 5: a vehicle behind him that has that high powered rifle
Speaker 5: that they're trying to bring the bear on the pursuit.
Speaker 5: There are about forty police cars still there, winding still
Speaker 5: in the pursuit line as they head up this very
Speaker 5: treacherous fire road. And what happens is when they get
Speaker 5: around a curve, the uh, the truck encounters wash out
Speaker 5: in the road and they have to they have to
Speaker 5: bring the pursuit to a hall pen. They can't go
Speaker 5: any farther. They jump out and they ambush the pursuing
Speaker 5: police officers and and deputies. And I won't give away
Speaker 5: that that's a very dramatic scene. It is again another
Speaker 5: ferocious firefight, this time seven thousand feet up a mountain side.
Speaker 5: And and when it's over again, Evans is dead and
Speaker 5: the remaining four bank robbers disappear into the canons of
Speaker 5: Mount Baldy. They run up the fire road, they climb
Speaker 5: over the the washout, and they uh, they they disappear
Speaker 5: in the canyons. By that time, it's it's it's uh,
Speaker 5: you know, it's it's coming on five o'clock in the evening.
Speaker 5: There's a it's cold up there. The helicopter's a cloud
Speaker 5: covered descending, so that they're gonna lose their helicopters soon.
Speaker 5: It's starting to get dark, and the law enforcement decides
Speaker 5: they're just gonna hunker down and start a massive man hunt.
Speaker 5: The next day to UH to round up these four
Speaker 5: escaped bank robbers and at this point cop killers ad no,
Speaker 5: I'm sorry yeah, And this this leads to UH your
Speaker 5: question about putting together this man hunt, which turns into
Speaker 5: the largest man hunt in UH California law enforcement history.
Speaker 5: And they start to bring in specialized teams. There's UH,
Speaker 5: there's UH there's dog, there's a search dogs, you know,
Speaker 5: sniffer dogs and uh uh uh uh deputies on horseback
Speaker 5: and uh search search and rescue teams. They start to
Speaker 5: bring in helicopters. The military brings in uh Arctic parkas
Speaker 5: that some of the deputies put on. It gets very
Speaker 5: cold that night, and it does. There's a dusting of
Speaker 5: snow and freezing rain. And when they set off the
Speaker 5: next day there they have SWAT teams up there. They
Speaker 5: have these tracker teams and what they brought in from
Speaker 5: a Los Angeles county where what's known as the hunt
Speaker 5: and kill teams, and a hunt and kill team is
Speaker 5: is two two swap members, one with a shotgun and
Speaker 5: one with a high powered rifle. And they are then
Speaker 5: accompanied by one UH one deputy and and one UH
Speaker 5: tracking team. And you can tell by the name that
Speaker 5: their their job is uh, you know, they're they're not
Speaker 5: officially called the hunt and kill team, but they're they're
Speaker 5: meant to, you know, to to be able to bring
Speaker 5: to locate suspects and if necessary, have the firepower to
Speaker 5: as they say, neutralize that suspect. So there are the
Speaker 5: hunt and kill teams up there as well. When they
Speaker 5: start this massive man hunt the next.
Speaker 6: Day, yeah, interesting. The next day you say, it's incredibly cold,
Speaker 6: and these robbers, some of them awake. Russell awakes, George
Speaker 6: Smith awakes. He thought he might be dead because he
Speaker 6: had been hit significantly and was bleeding. Who do the
Speaker 6: hunt and kill teams? Who do the police first encounter?
Speaker 6: And what does that person have to say once encountered?
Speaker 6: Is very interesting? Somebody is there to record?
Speaker 5: Yes. Then when they had escaped up the fire road,
Speaker 5: they had split up. The first to kind of go
Speaker 5: off the road and down the side of the mountain
Speaker 5: side to hide was George Smith had been shot in
Speaker 5: the groining back in front of the bank with a
Speaker 5: with a shotgun pellet, and had been twice and had
Speaker 5: been had been bleeding out in the back of that truck,
Speaker 5: and he fully expected that he was going to die
Speaker 5: because he had lost so much blood so he was weak.
Speaker 5: He went about two hundred yards down the mountain side,
Speaker 5: kind of hid behind a bush, sat there through the night,
Speaker 5: and it was just a miserable night. They were soaked
Speaker 5: through with freezing rain. He'd thrown away his rifle at
Speaker 5: this point. He just had a couple of handguns on him.
Speaker 5: And George was kind of done by the time, as
Speaker 5: as you mentioned, he was waking up during the night
Speaker 5: and kind of looking up and certain times thought he
Speaker 5: was actually dead, you know, kind of am I alive?
Speaker 5: Am I dead? And the first the first person law
Speaker 5: enforcement encounters as George Smith and the other two, as
Speaker 5: I said, Chris Harvin, Russ Harvin Manny Delgado, had all
Speaker 5: individually at some point gone over the as they go
Speaker 5: over the side off the fire road and down down
Speaker 5: into the mountains and the canyons, but they've gone separately.
Speaker 5: So George next morning, George Smith is the first to
Speaker 5: be found and he really gives himself up. But he's
Speaker 5: a few hundred yards down this very treacherous mountain side
Speaker 5: and it's gonna in his condition, it's gonna take him
Speaker 5: a while to walk him down to where a helicopter
Speaker 5: can take him out, and uh Sam Bernadino uh sends
Speaker 5: a homicide detective up the mountain side with a tape
Speaker 5: recorder to interrogate George Smith as they're bringing him down,
Speaker 5: and it's it's very dramatic audio. You can hear the
Speaker 5: helicopter in the back and uh rosta Ork homicide detective
Speaker 5: roster of Orick is interviewing George Smith. And the first
Speaker 5: thing he tells him is, George, you realize you have
Speaker 5: a bullet in you You you realize you may die,
Speaker 5: right George? And George says yeah. And then and so
Speaker 5: basically what roster of Orick has got him into is
Speaker 5: sort of a deathbed confessional. And roster Worick honestly thought
Speaker 5: he might die before he gets him down this mountain side.
Speaker 5: He can only go about, you know, fifteen feet before
Speaker 5: they need to have him rest. He keeps saying he
Speaker 5: wants to go to sleep, and but he gets a
Speaker 5: rather stunning confession and full accounting of the bank robbery
Speaker 5: and the names of the other bank robbers, and George
Speaker 5: admits that he'd put the whole thing together his idea
Speaker 5: as they're as they're going down that mountain side, and
Speaker 5: in the end George survives, and a lot of that
Speaker 5: is is used against them all in the in the
Speaker 5: coming trial. So George is the first to give up.
Speaker 5: At about nine eight thirty in the morning, Russ had
Speaker 5: found his brother Chris. During the night, Chris had had
Speaker 5: been had been shot in the back during the ambush
Speaker 5: up on the fire road. He he had he had
Speaker 5: about had it midway through the through the night and
Speaker 5: ahead and started a fire just kind of, you know,
Speaker 5: the heck with it? If I if I get seen
Speaker 5: and caught, you know, I'm not getting out of this anyways.
Speaker 5: Russell sees the fire and uh and goes down the
Speaker 5: hillside and and meets up with his brother and as
Speaker 5: it becomes light, and they just decide they're going to
Speaker 5: start walking out of the canyon. And if they walk
Speaker 5: out of the canyon, great, but they fully expected that
Speaker 5: they would be captured at some point down the way.
Speaker 5: So Chris has got the bullet in his back and
Speaker 5: he is coughing of blood. Russell Harvin is diabetic and
Speaker 5: he has no insulin or food on him, and he
Speaker 5: had also taken a shotgun pellet underneath his scalp in
Speaker 5: the intersection in front of the bank. It had not
Speaker 5: penetrated the skull, but it was still underneath his underneath
Speaker 5: his scalp. And they are spotted and picked up. They
Speaker 5: had actually quite made it quite a ways out of
Speaker 5: Lytle Creek canyon, and but they were spotted and picked
Speaker 5: up and gave up about ten thirty in the morning,
Speaker 5: and that led Manny Delgado. Manny Delgado was the only
Speaker 5: one who had not been wounded during the firefight, but
Speaker 5: he had seen his seventeen year old little brother die
Speaker 5: in front of him, or you know, badly wounded and
Speaker 5: honest clearly on his way to death. He was paralyzed
Speaker 5: at the time by the round and you know, may
Speaker 5: the thinking was Manny was probably not going to give
Speaker 5: himself up at this point. Is is generally considered his
Speaker 5: state of mind. And he ran the farthest up the
Speaker 5: fire road and then began during the night making his
Speaker 5: way over mountaintops, you know, ridge lines and things like that,
Speaker 5: and when daylight came, he was under it. He was
Speaker 5: kind of at the crest of a ridge line. Then
Speaker 5: we're talking seven thousand feet up in the mountains. Eight
Speaker 5: thousand feet I think is around where he was under
Speaker 5: some very thick brush, so thick you'd have to crawl
Speaker 5: on your to really to be able to penetrate it.
Speaker 5: And he is a hunker down there. Of course, he's
Speaker 5: got no food whatever, water, he's just squeezing out of
Speaker 5: his clothes to drink. He is armed. He also has
Speaker 5: thrown away as a rifle, and he's armed with a
Speaker 5: thirty eight revolver. The hunt and kill teams and the
Speaker 5: SWAT teams up there assume he has a high powered rifle,
Speaker 5: but at that point he didn't. And Manny Delgado gets
Speaker 5: just by almost sheer luck, gets spotted by a helicopter
Speaker 5: when they see just a flash of blue from some
Speaker 5: some gloves Manny was wearing for warmth that he'd used
Speaker 5: during the robbery, and they signal to a hunt and
Speaker 5: kill team in La County Sheriff's Hunt and Kill team
Speaker 5: where he is. They hover down below him to to
Speaker 5: you know, to cause such a racket. You know, they're
Speaker 5: they're using the rotor blades to part the brush. Of course,
Speaker 5: it's a huge amount of noise and spraying dirt all
Speaker 5: over him and everything that kind of just packed him
Speaker 5: while this hunt and killed team sneaks up and when
Speaker 5: they get about fifteen feet away, they yell for Manny
Speaker 5: to freeze. Manny looks over, kind of leans up, and
Speaker 5: you know, these guys are not trained to give a
Speaker 5: to give a fugitive, especially one who's already killed a
Speaker 5: police officer anytime. They don't give them any breaks, and
Speaker 5: they immediately, you know, they open fire on him and
Speaker 5: they they kill Manny Delgado.
Speaker 6: It's found out later that he killed himself.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's a bit of a mystery about the death
Speaker 5: of Manny Delgado. As they say, these this hunt and
Speaker 5: kill team came up, one with a high powered rifle,
Speaker 5: one with a shotgun. And when I said, they didn't
Speaker 5: give him a break, they just they're not gonna take
Speaker 5: any risk that this that the fugitive is going to
Speaker 5: fire back at him. And when Manny Delgado hears them yell,
Speaker 5: he leans up. He's lying flat on his stomach at
Speaker 5: the time. He leans up kind of on his left
Speaker 5: and they see he's got the gun in his hand
Speaker 5: and they fire on him. But the autopsy later on
Speaker 5: shows that Manny Delgado was killed from around from his
Speaker 5: own gun, shot straight through his heart. And there is
Speaker 5: kind of a poetry if you will about that. You know,
Speaker 5: he'd just seen his little brother get killed, his little
Speaker 5: brother who he talked into, talked into becoming part of this,
Speaker 5: and you know, sure he was broken hearted. And there
Speaker 5: was some rumors that went around that maybe he had,
Speaker 5: you know, just just killed himself, but it's more likely
Speaker 5: that he had fallen on the gun when the first
Speaker 5: round went through and the gun been discharged. But it
Speaker 5: was the cause of death in the end, was a
Speaker 5: self inflicted gunshot wound through the heart.
Speaker 6: He would have been dead one way or another right away.
Speaker 6: You have the fascinating aspect of that recorded confession from
Speaker 6: George Smith when he thought he was going to die.
Speaker 6: What's even more fascinating is when these characters are arrested
Speaker 6: and in prison, in jail awaiting, and there's different responses
Speaker 6: now that there's the confession, but now that George realizes
Speaker 6: he's not going to die, and Chris has a different
Speaker 6: attitude with investigators once he's arrested. Tell us about those
Speaker 6: people being questioned, but first tell us what both of
Speaker 6: their thoughts are, but especially George, once they are arrested
Speaker 6: and concerning this whole revelation idea end times.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the day they are captured. The three surviving bank
Speaker 5: robbers there, of course split up, and we still have
Speaker 5: the interrogation tapes on all of them. Russell Harvin is
Speaker 5: he sounds utterly stunned to have found himself in this situation.
Speaker 5: And it's just saying, I'm boy. You know my parents
Speaker 5: are boy or my parents going to be surprised, surprised
Speaker 5: and needless to say, they were and devastated. He also
Speaker 5: begins to just cough up information. You can hear he's
Speaker 5: a he's reluctant to he's trying to hedge it. He's
Speaker 5: he keeps saying he forgets things, but he does keep talking.
Speaker 5: You know, Rest is a guy who's easily talked into things,
Speaker 5: and he was not much of a challenge for these interrogators.
Speaker 5: Plus they've been pretty much caught red handed.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 5: Chris Harvin also also gives out details. Chris is a
Speaker 5: little bit uh, it turns out more during the trial,
Speaker 5: a little a guy who's kind of in it to
Speaker 5: protect himself and and but he he tells about and
Speaker 5: he's also saying, I can't believe I got talked into
Speaker 5: This is such a stupid idea. I knew this was
Speaker 5: a stupid idea. I knew it wouldn't work, and he says,
Speaker 5: you know, George did this, and George gave pure pressure
Speaker 5: on me to do it. George's helicopter to a to
Speaker 5: a hospital, and George just just kind of freely talk.
Speaker 5: He's he's his usual very soft spoken, intelligent self, and
Speaker 5: uh he also you know, he just says, I put
Speaker 5: it all together. I did this. I told these guys
Speaker 5: to do this. I told them where to go. I
Speaker 5: picked the bank and everything. So they all confess, and
Speaker 5: at that point they don't really neither of them mention
Speaker 5: anything about their beliefs out of what propelled them to
Speaker 5: do it. It's only later when they go to trial
Speaker 5: that they begin to to bring it up and almost
Speaker 5: use it as a strategy, you know if, rather than
Speaker 5: just it just being a you know, a greedy bank robbery,
Speaker 5: they kind of assign it a higher purpose, you know,
Speaker 5: that that they believed that the end of the world
Speaker 5: has come and one of the just and that they
Speaker 5: were doing it because they needed to save those who
Speaker 5: they loved, so it was almost a you know, a
Speaker 5: higher purpose to it. One of the most unusual things
Speaker 5: is that two weeks after they are captured. Is when
Speaker 5: Mount Saint Helen's volcano blows up in Washington State and
Speaker 5: both George and Chris see that, you know, that catastrophic event.
Speaker 5: You know, a lot of people, a lot of people die,
Speaker 5: but mostly just a natural, natural phenomena natural disaster event.
Speaker 5: You know, they think, well, here we go. You know,
Speaker 5: George is thinking it's the first son. Chris Harvin, you know, Okay,
Speaker 5: the Jupiter effect isn't there at that time. But Chris
Speaker 5: had always thought it would be volcanic activity and seismic
Speaker 5: earthquakes and things along the Pacific rim that would that
Speaker 5: would throw California into chaos and destruction. So it's it's
Speaker 5: kind of an unusual, unusual coincidence.
Speaker 6: You talk about the attorneys, and of course there are
Speaker 6: people that are opposed to the death penalty because this
Speaker 6: is potential for a death penalty with this. What's interesting
Speaker 6: is the who do they blame? They have to blame someone,
Speaker 6: so who do they blame in this?
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, you know, the trial was what was the
Speaker 5: most unexpected thing in this entire entire book and entire event.
Speaker 5: I grew up in southern California. I knew when this
Speaker 5: event happened It was absolutely astonishing to me. I mean,
Speaker 5: we've really seen nothing like it before. And the trial,
Speaker 5: you get this whole new cast of characters come in,
Speaker 5: these very is very interesting and defense attorneys, and it's
Speaker 5: it's it's a death penalty trial. And it's not a
Speaker 5: matter of whether these guys are going to be found
Speaker 5: not guilty, it's whether they're going to be sentenced to death.
Speaker 5: But it is still a very dramatic trial and it
Speaker 5: starts to go off the rails almost immediately with a
Speaker 5: jury selection and that lasted six months, which is absolutely
Speaker 5: unheard of. But this trial just becomes a fascinating you know,
Speaker 5: probably the most unusual development comes about twelve months into
Speaker 5: this trial. One of the more unusual when Chris Harvin's
Speaker 5: defense attorney, Chris Harvin and his defense attorney to try
Speaker 5: suddenly throw a hail Mary defense into this in which
Speaker 5: they say that Chris was never even there for the
Speaker 5: bank robbery. In fact, Chris had tried to talk everybody
Speaker 5: out out of doing this the morning of, and that
Speaker 5: there was a mysterious character named Jerry Cohen who was
Speaker 5: actually the guy mistaken for Chris Harvin in the bank,
Speaker 5: and it was Jerry Cohen, who had forced them all
Speaker 5: to do this, and Chris had bailed out at the
Speaker 5: last second, he claimed and testifies to, and was running
Speaker 5: up Hamner Avenue to just to get back home when
Speaker 5: all of a sudden, the yellow truck came and Manny
Speaker 5: do and he says, Manny Delgado and Jerry Cohen pointed
Speaker 5: a gun at me and forced me to drive the
Speaker 5: truck and I didn't want to do it, but that's
Speaker 5: why I'm up on the mountain. But I wasn't part
Speaker 5: of this. So this Jerry Cone, who of course has
Speaker 5: never been found, is is the one they blame. And
Speaker 5: the other is that they start to put the blame
Speaker 5: on Manny Delgado. Manny's not there to defend himself. Manny,
Speaker 5: by all accounts, was he and Russell Harvin probably the
Speaker 5: most prolific shooters in the entire pursuit. So they've been spotted.
Speaker 5: Many has been sitting outside the cab for most of
Speaker 5: the pursuit out the passenger window. And the real, uh,
Speaker 5: the the what was going to get them the death
Speaker 5: penalty was the death of Jim Evans, Deputy Jim Evans,
Speaker 5: and uh and so then there then there becomes another
Speaker 5: person who they start to blame on all this when
Speaker 5: it comes to the death of Jim Evans, and that
Speaker 5: is they claim they put on a friendly fire defense,
Speaker 5: and they claimed that DJ McCarty, the Sambernandino deputy, who
Speaker 5: had the M sixteen rifle that he had never used
Speaker 5: before in his life and did bring it to bear
Speaker 5: during that ambush and was in the vehicle right behind
Speaker 5: Jim Evans. So when they all jumped out of their
Speaker 5: out of their vehicles, they say that DJ McCarty opened
Speaker 5: fire with a gun he'd never used before and shot
Speaker 5: Jim Evans, who was ten feet in front of him.
Speaker 5: And so they so DJ McCarty not only has the uh,
Speaker 5: you know, the traumatic experience of watching another deputy killed
Speaker 5: in front of him, the terror of almost being killed himself.
Speaker 5: I mean, he had been shot once and he was
Speaker 5: taking heavy gunfire before he was able to figure out
Speaker 5: how to use this gun properly. Now he has the
Speaker 5: you know, the whispers and everything of other cops saying, well,
Speaker 5: you know, you know, they say that DJ McCarty kill
Speaker 5: killed Jim Evans. So it was a really terrible experience
Speaker 5: all around for for DJ McCarty, who was a really young,
Speaker 5: young deputy at the time. So yeah, the blame goes
Speaker 5: to this mysterious character Jerry Cone.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 5: Most of the time they're blaming Manny Delgado for being
Speaker 5: the one who who who's doing most of the shooting,
Speaker 5: and then you know they're just saying, oh, no, that
Speaker 5: was Manny, No, that was Manny who was doing that,
Speaker 5: and the other is DJ McCarty. So that was the
Speaker 5: basis of a lot of their defense.
Speaker 6: Yes, it's also interesting when you talk about g J.
Speaker 6: McCarty also and the the idea that that Evans was
Speaker 6: shot and that these uh, these perpetrators were all putting
Speaker 6: it on each other and this mysterious Jerry Cohen. But
Speaker 6: part of the defense of George Smith. Uh, they as
Speaker 6: per customary, they hire an investigator to assist the defense lawyer,
Speaker 6: especially in a capital case like this. Again and just
Speaker 6: another fascinating twist to this story. We don't want to
Speaker 6: go too far into it, but what happens with this
Speaker 6: investigator named Painter.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I won't go too far into it for obvious reasons.
Speaker 5: The most fascinating characters, if you will, I mean, I
Speaker 5: never lose sight that these are real human beings on
Speaker 5: both sides. But if you will, that characters are the
Speaker 5: defense team of George Smith, and that is an attorney,
Speaker 5: a real pitbull of an attorney both in looks and
Speaker 5: an attitude, named Clayton Adams who who is fighting dinner
Speaker 5: to save George Smith's life. And he is assigned a
Speaker 5: investigator from the Public Defender's office named Jeanie Painter. And
Speaker 5: Jeanie Painter is thirty three years old. She's a veteran investigator.
Speaker 5: She has done hundreds of felonies before. She's considered extremely good,
Speaker 5: also very Harry's heavy workloads. And investigators are you know,
Speaker 5: needless to say, they're just absolutely critical to a trial.
Speaker 5: They're they're out there gathering evidence, they're out there interviewing people,
Speaker 5: they're orchestrating all everything in the courtroom for the for
Speaker 5: the defense attorney. And Jennie Painter is say thirty three
Speaker 5: years old, and she's she's very attractive. There's a bond
Speaker 5: hair and uh you know, a real head turner around
Speaker 5: the courthouse which is mostly men in that era, and
Speaker 5: uh uh. As this trial moves ahead, and the trial
Speaker 5: was moved out of a Riverside County down to San
Speaker 5: Diego County, there begins this relationship that develops between Jeanie
Speaker 5: Painter and George Wayne Smith. And a lot of it
Speaker 5: had to do with a you know, where Jeanie Painter
Speaker 5: was in her life, and she was she was still
Speaker 5: as much of a veteran as she was, she was
Speaker 5: still a young woman. She was now transferred away from
Speaker 5: her family and under incredible stress and incredible workload. And
Speaker 5: George Smith is a very compelling, it's very compelling, articulate guy.
Speaker 5: And and so this relationship, and that's a kind word
Speaker 5: for it, begins to develop between the two of them,
Speaker 5: and and then soon turns into a lot of misconduct
Speaker 5: on the part of Genie Painter, and she sort of
Speaker 5: falls under the h the spell of George Smith. And
Speaker 5: there's accusations of jail house sexual misconduct and smuggling drugs
Speaker 5: into the prison or into the jail, bringing in naked
Speaker 5: photographs of herself for George. And so Genie Painter really
Speaker 5: takes a beating in this and it really suffers under
Speaker 5: kind of a from this relationship that that she's developed
Speaker 5: with George Smith.
Speaker 6: Yes, incredible and you know, threaten.
Speaker 5: It threatens to derail this entire trial. I mean in
Speaker 5: this trial is now months. I mean in the end,
Speaker 5: it took sixteen months this trial and between jury selection,
Speaker 5: and this was late in the game that this this
Speaker 5: bombshell revelation comes out. And when the jail says Genie
Speaker 5: Painter is not allowed to visit George Smith and jail anymore,
Speaker 5: we won't have this going on, and it almost creates
Speaker 5: a mistrial in this at this late stage. But the
Speaker 5: judge is just desperate not to have this trial end
Speaker 5: after twelve months or fourteen months, so he manages to
Speaker 5: keep it, to keep Genie Painter involved and keep the
Speaker 5: keep the trial moving.
Speaker 6: It's one of the most fascinating parts of this book
Speaker 6: is the trial. Like you say, but what Chris Harvin
Speaker 6: taking the stand and weaving this incredible story fable, But
Speaker 6: it also hurts his fellow cohorts.
Speaker 3: Doesn't it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it certainly does. In the process to Save You
Speaker 5: the To Save You explained it a little bit, and
Speaker 5: I do describe why the mechanics of the legal system
Speaker 5: and trials kind of opens. Once Chris takes the stand
Speaker 5: and he begins to tell his own story. He then
Speaker 5: opens the door for evidence that had previously been excluded
Speaker 5: to now being included including his statement, his confession or
Speaker 5: or you know, statement to police, and as well as
Speaker 5: the other guys which had actually been ruled out up
Speaker 5: to that point because it implicated the others. You can
Speaker 5: implicate yourself in a confession. But they were being tried together,
Speaker 5: all three of these, Russ, Chris, and George were being
Speaker 5: tried together. And yeah, so in the in the prosecutor
Speaker 5: Jay Hanks just completely tears apart Chris Harvin on the
Speaker 5: on the stand because it's just a it's a preposterous story.
Speaker 5: And Chris is trying to act like he's just this
Speaker 5: innocent victim and never shot a gun, tried to stop
Speaker 5: this from happening, and but he but he Chris has
Speaker 5: opened up the door. So Jay Hanks just dismantles him,
Speaker 5: and in the process, Chris implicates Russ. He effectively puts
Speaker 5: a gun in Russ's hands at the as well as
Speaker 5: George at the ambush site during his testimony because his
Speaker 5: confession he had mentioned it. And so you know, these
Speaker 5: are guys are trying to trying to blame it on
Speaker 5: Manny or on DJ McCarty, and you know some of
Speaker 5: them were even George saying I was too weak. I
Speaker 5: couldn't even fire. Others say I didn't even have a gun.
Speaker 5: Chris is saying I was shot in the back, and
Speaker 5: true enough. But so he didn't do it. But it
Speaker 5: was a very big deal when when Chris Harvin for
Speaker 5: throwing this hail Mary defense, this crazy defense, and then
Speaker 5: ends up implicating, as they say, his best buddy George
Speaker 5: Smith and his little brother putting a gun in their
Speaker 5: hand that might have gotten them the death penalty.
Speaker 6: Yes, very interesting, needless to say, what is the outcome,
Speaker 6: what do jurors decide and what's the sentence?
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, they were. They were found guilty on forty
Speaker 5: six major felonies, including kidnapping, explosives, twenty four counts of
Speaker 5: attempted murder on a police officer. They were actually, you know,
Speaker 5: found guilty of the murder of Jim Evans as well
Speaker 5: as Billy Delgado under the felony murder rule because they
Speaker 5: started the firefight in which Billy Delgatto got killed. So
Speaker 5: they had forty six major counts and then it went
Speaker 5: into the penalty phase. And one of the more unusual
Speaker 5: things in the penalty phase is Clayton Adams had George
Speaker 5: Smith named a co council in it, and it allowed
Speaker 5: George Smith to actually question some of his some of
Speaker 5: his witnesses, or at least one of them during the
Speaker 5: penalty phase. But it also allowed George Smith to give
Speaker 5: a closing argument, but only if George would would refer
Speaker 5: to himself from the third person, and so that made
Speaker 5: it a kind of a creepy aspect to it, with
Speaker 5: George Smith's standing up there, and this is the first
Speaker 5: time anybody, any of the jurors had heard George Smith.
Speaker 5: And what it did is allowed George Smith to kind
Speaker 5: of make a statement about himself without being cross examined.
Speaker 5: So it's a bit of a legal trick, and it's
Speaker 5: it's quite a speech George gives, and it is overflowing
Speaker 5: with very with religious prophecy and very scholarly interpretations of
Speaker 5: the Bible, which frankly lose a lot of the juries
Speaker 5: dur along the way. But George is basically saying, George
Speaker 5: Smith would never kill another human being. George Smith believes
Speaker 5: in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, George Smith
Speaker 5: would never do this. And it's a very odd moment.
Speaker 5: And in the end they are sentenced to life without
Speaker 5: parole rather than the death penalty, and a reporter comments
Speaker 5: who had covered the entire trial, comments that he thought
Speaker 5: it was sort of like Stockholm syndrome. You know, when
Speaker 5: you spend that amount of time in a room as
Speaker 5: the we had in the same room with three human beings,
Speaker 5: no matter what they've done, you're just simply not going
Speaker 5: to be sentencing them to death. So they did get found,
Speaker 5: they were sentenced to life without parole, and that's that
Speaker 5: is where they remain today. Just a quick thing, Dan,
Speaker 5: I'm sure people have commented before, well, you're telling so
Speaker 5: much of the story, you know, how do you Why
Speaker 5: do you tell so much of the book? And I
Speaker 5: got to tell you, and I hope you'll agree, is
Speaker 5: there is so much detail that goes into these just
Speaker 5: fascinating details, and so much more that happened during that
Speaker 5: pursuit that I haven't mentioned that. Uh, No one has
Speaker 5: ever felt like I gave away the book by by
Speaker 5: even by kind of telling what the major events are
Speaker 5: in it.
Speaker 6: No, I think it just prompts somebody to want to
Speaker 6: read the entire thing, to catch everything that, to grab
Speaker 6: everything and to understand everything that we've spoken about excitedly.
Speaker 6: Both of us because it's such a fascinating, exciting tale.
Speaker 6: The pursuit is incredible, these brave officers, the citizens running
Speaker 6: a mock, the effect of this trial, so all of
Speaker 6: these things, and we hadn't even touched on just one
Speaker 6: little thing that again, it was interesting about George Smith's
Speaker 6: father being dismissed from or quitting the police force after
Speaker 6: he encountered resistance when he was being an honest cop
Speaker 6: and found a corruption and again just another little thing
Speaker 6: that added to George Smith's it seemed in conflict with
Speaker 6: his character that George Smith would end up where he
Speaker 6: did end up. So it's very, very fascinating how the
Speaker 6: background and everything that you brought into the story factors
Speaker 6: into this incredible, this incredible tale.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, one of the elements of the seventies,
Speaker 5: of course, was this uh what range from distrust or
Speaker 5: adversarial kind of attitude towards police officers. You know, some
Speaker 5: some people hated them, you know, thought them the foot
Speaker 5: soldiers of the status quo, and uh, George and Chris
Speaker 5: certainly didn't hate them, but they didn't trust them. And
Speaker 5: George had that uh yeah, that experience in his family
Speaker 5: where his father, uh was at Casper, Wyoming and arrested
Speaker 5: two police officers who he caught in the middle of
Speaker 5: the night robbing a store on Main Street. And uh,
Speaker 5: when he brought him back to the department, the he's
Speaker 5: the one who gotta you know, they let him go
Speaker 5: and said, what the hell are you doing arresting these guys?
Speaker 5: And he found really kind of deep corruption and it
Speaker 5: was very disillusioning. His father had always wanted to be
Speaker 5: a cop, so that that was kind of circulating in
Speaker 5: the family, this this idea that you can't trust policemen,
Speaker 5: which made George and Chris even want to arm up
Speaker 5: more because they felt their attitude was, well, cops kill
Speaker 5: people if they find them. You know, if they catch us,
Speaker 5: they're going to try to kill us. So uh, you
Speaker 5: know they set out to kill any cops, but they
Speaker 5: certainly certainly tried once they uh once they had these
Speaker 5: uh once once the firefight began.
Speaker 6: Yes, I want to thank you very much Peter for
Speaker 6: coming on and talking about Norcowati, the true story of
Speaker 6: the most spectacular bank robbery in American history. It's been
Speaker 6: actually an absolute privilege and a thrill for me to
Speaker 6: talk to and share this book with other people the
Speaker 6: listener for those people that might want to look at
Speaker 6: this as a website or Facebook page quickly that you
Speaker 6: could refer us to.
Speaker 5: Yeah, certainly, and thank you, Dan, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 5: My website is Peterhulahan dot com. H o U l
Speaker 5: A hj N. But really, the book is available everywhere.
Speaker 5: There's an audiobook that's out now as well, was released
Speaker 5: at the same time, so all the places you normally
Speaker 5: buy books you can find this one. And uh so
Speaker 5: so it's it's it's out there in the world and available.
Speaker 6: Thank you very much, Peter Hulan, good night, Thanks Jim,
Speaker 6: good night. M