Botched Heist or Successful Suicide?

This essay first appeared in the Los Angeles Times Op-ed page, March 4, 1997.

I used to be a bank robber. Watching last Friday's daylong TV coverage of two robbers blasting their way out of a North Hollywood bank, I saw the obvious mistakes. Bandits with masks, in full body armor, commando-style dress and AK-47's were shooting at anything that moved. Bank robbery isn't supposed to be bloody and complicated. If you want the loot, then you go in and grab the loot. It's about getting in and out.

So what wrong? Well, in my opinion, everything and nothing at all.

Watching the drama, I felt a mounting sense of doom. Any robber in L.A. has to know that helicopters will track him and/or trap him. There is no escaping the all-seeing Skycam.

Yet the two gunmen walked away from the Bank of America branch with the mechanical verve of the Terminator, marching straight ahead toward a seemingly deliberate death. What you may not understand is just how easy it is for sentient beings to volunteer to die on camera.

Americans have a romance with the notion of the outlaw--wild men in saloons at the edge of the frontier--and bandits are no exceptions. Val Kilmer as the bad guy shooting at Al Pacino, the good guy, in the open road.

A few years ago, while serving time for bank robbery, I looked to recruit a crime partner. One man, after I explained the heist and its elaborate getaway plan, recommended that we intentionally design a car chase into the robbery finale. An adrenaline junkie, he wanted higher stakes. The nearness of death thrilled him, so he wanted us to slow down and risk a suicidal shoot-out.

Last Friday, one robber strode brazenly to his demise, shooting straight ahead, animated by the bizarre assurance that death was a friend. The other robber was felled a few blocks away, surrendered his weapon, was handcuffed, then left bleeding to death, on the asphalt.

The TV camera beat a dead horse by beating back to the dead body again and again, as if teasing a lesson out of the crumpled corpse. God provides each man one death, and television provides him several more. "Flog that man, Mr. Christian," Captain Bligh demands. "But sir, he's dead!" "Mr. Christian, I said flog that man!" The body becomes a cautionary tale. Crime does not pay in life and will embarrass you in death.

Incarcerated men talk often about how "next time" they won't allow themselves to be captured. The "you won't take me alive, copper" boast. They'd rather hold court right there on the street and try to take with them as many cops as possible. A kamikaze mission they'd consider worthy if it made the thin blue line bleed real red.

In that context, I'm not surprised that last week's bank robbers in North Hollywood chose their bloody hunt. They packed AK-47's and 100-round magazine clips into their car and ended up on national television to show us all how it is never any fun when the rabbit's got the gun.

The official spin on all this will be to call for providing more powerful weapons to the LAPD so they won't show up at a war zone with "squirt guns." But the real question is being ignored: What adversary were those thieves imagining when they strapped on body armor from neck to ankles, stepped into the bank and started firing at the ceiling?

I think what these men did defied the motivational logic involved in planning a bank heist. On the surface, it seems as if the bandits had no aptitude for "outdoor chess;" they played the most dangerous game and lost. But did they really give up on the game on the first move?

These men chose to end their lives. They got what they wanted. Some TV commentator called it a "botched bank robbery." I call it a successful suicide. If two fatalistic robbers set out to die last Friday, then the loser, by the twisted logic of the criminal, won the game.

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