Every Move You Make (25 page)

At the time, he still owed the New York parole department sixteen months from his previous two-to four-year bid, for which he had been released twenty-four months early. Even if, by some mere happenstance, he beat the latest charges, he was still looking at a year or more for violating his parole.

After he spent a few days behind bars in Saratoga County Jail, where he had been picked up, Evans’s court-appointed attorney visited him to discuss what—if any—options he had.

“You can’t beat this case,” his attorney insisted.

“I’ll plead guilty to two misdemeanors,” Evans said, “as long as I get sentenced to sixteen months and do the time here!” He could have agreed to a lesser sentence of twelve months, but the time would have to be served in a state prison, something he wasn’t prepared to do. The last bid had broken him. State prisons were “hell,” he said later. They hardened people.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Evans was always thinking ahead. In Saratoga, a county jail that generally held people awaiting sentencing, he knew he was safe from the Angels. Out in the state prison system, there was no telling where he would end up, or who he would run into. Doing an extra four months in a county jail would be far easier than facing a pack of Hells Angels in Attica or Clinton.

Within a week, his lawyer returned with some good news. The DA agreed to the sixteen months in county. He ran the risk of getting transferred, but he would never see a state prison, at least that’s what the DA promised.

According to Evans, he had set up his latest burglary so he could secure enough money for a piece of property he wanted to buy in his sister’s name in upstate New York or Vermont. Sitting in jail once again, counting the days until his release, he realized his dream would have to wait for at least one more year.

You were almost a property owner in N.Y.!
Evans jokingly wrote to Robbie on May 10, 1983, just days after he began serving his sentence.
I thought I’d be making some decent money…. Oh, well, have to cancel that one for a while.

Talking about an appearance he had made in court to seal the deal with the DA’s office, Evans carried on about the behavior of some members of the state police he had witnessed while in court:
You wouldn’t believe the way [they] were lying. Under oath even. And trying to look all righteous and truthful. Man it got me pissed.

It was around this same time that members of the Bureau began showing up at the jail to talk to Evans. They were fishing, trying to see what he knew about certain people. Evans had no trouble giving up information when it served him. There were times when he would brag about major drug deals he had heard about in Troy and Albany on “such and such” a day. He hated drug dealers. He believed a drug dealer was no better than a child molester or rapist. Stealing from them, in his mind, wasn’t a crime; he was doing the public a service. Furthermore, giving up information about drug deals was a bartering tool. He could have cared less if word ever got out and he became a target.

By July, he had been given a release date: September 16, 1984. What made this date special was that not only would he become a “free man” once again, but he would no longer be on parole. To Evans, parole was bondage. It was like being held hostage by the system. It had nothing to do with his paying back society for his crimes; to him, it was “the man” holding him down. In September 1984, he would be clear to go wherever he wanted, do whatever he wanted, without being tied to a parole officer.

A short time before the Fourth of July holiday, 1983, Evans penned a succinct letter to let Robbie know where he was. After explaining briefly that he was clear of any “problems” with the state police, he wrote,
A guy I do things with got busted and bought his way out by telling on me. He knew about music equipment I got because he helped me sell it—guns also….

A few weeks later:
The State Police brought a fed to see me. I arranged to have my nice gun dropped off. No charges against me. No problems. My whole troubles started when a guy I have known for years, and have done a lot of things with, got caught in Vermont. He started telling on me to get out of charges he had here in New York.

Members of the Bureau later confirmed that the “guy” Evans was referring to in that letter was Michael Falco:
Anyway, I gave back my gun and a $900 power saw I got for cutting safes.

Regardless of how hard he tried, Evans couldn’t get over the fact that he was playing a game of “you tell on me/I tell on you”—a game he and Falco had been ostensibly playing with each other for years. The old cliché, Bureau investigators later acknowledged, was true:
“There is no honor among thieves.”
They give up one another on a routine basis. It’s just part of who they are.

The DA in Troy who had been pursuing a case against a few Hells Angels had begun to finalize his plans for putting Evans in front of the grand jury. The pressure was on. A judge’s son had been beaten severely. Someone was going to pay. In August, Evans would be expected to tell the grand jury everything he knew about the assault.

But first [the DA’s office] had to agree not to try to charge me,
Evans wrote,
with the market I tried to hit.

Once again, Evans had escaped any real hard time behind bars. He would be out of jail in September 1984 and, most important, totally liberated from parole. Nevertheless, with two felony convictions under his belt already, if he got caught and convicted of a third felony (any serious crime punishable by more than one year in prison), it was possible he would be branded a persistent felon and face twenty-five years to life. This scared Evans. The thought of being locked up that long shook him up. Still, as he began to make plans for his release, he couldn’t comprehend that it was his own behavior that had put him behind bars to begin with. He repeatedly blamed anyone but himself for being locked up—and continually vowed to pay each and every one of them back after he got out.

There’s people in Troy that have to pay, and people that jammed me up…and I know enough now not to do anything with anybody. I should have known before!

Whenever he was locked up for more than a night or two, Evans would begin to obsess over what he was missing on the outside, fantasizing and dreaming about the most obscure things. His latest pipe dream included building a “dream house” in the woods when he was released. He said he “deserved” it after all he had been through in life. Where he was going to get the money was never an issue. He just assumed a “big score” was going to fall in his lap one day.

He also mentioned a “para-plane” he desperately wanted to buy when he got out, and even drew a picture of it. It was a helicopter about the size of a large lawn tractor. It had a parachute attached to the back of the seat. The propeller was in the back of the vessel as opposed to on top. Most interesting to Evans as he explained it was that there was no way it could crash.
It goes 35 MPH, but will climb to 6,000 feet (over road blocks!). Only needs 50 feet to take off or land. Folds up into a car trunk!!

He called himself “Evans the air pirate.” He talked about traveling around the country, apparently committing burglaries at will, but being able to avoid police as if he were some sort of superhero.

In August 1983, Evans finally went before the grand jury and implicated members of the Hells Angels in the beating of a local judge’s son. The way he saw it, because of what he had done for the DA, his record would be wiped completely clean. He was under the impression that when he was released in September 1984—one year away—he would be an absolute free man—“no parole”—for the first time in seven years.

CHAPTER 42

The next year was a cakewalk for Evans as he finished his sentence. He had been transferred to Warren County Jail, north of Albany near the Vermont border. A new program had been initiated at Warren whereby inmates who had proven they could stay out of trouble and act reasonably sane were afforded the opportunity to work outside the prison grounds on the interstate picking up garbage. Surprising to Evans, he had been chosen to participate in the program shortly after his arrival. What’s more, when he wasn’t outside soaking up the sunshine between 8:00
A.M
. and 4:00
P.M
., he now had access to weights and a gym. He had put on about fifteen pounds of muscle since he had been incarcerated and was bench-pressing, he claimed, about 120 pounds more than his own body weight. His ZZ Top beard had grown long and thick and now nearly reached his nipples. It was clear in his letters that he was happy for the first time in years. The only real trouble he had gotten into while at Warren was a scuffle with a “child molester,” whom he had pummeled one night after the guy began pestering him.

As he counted the days until his release, Evans trumpeted the idea to his sister that any future “jobs” would have to be done alone if he wanted to avoid prison in the future.

“No partners” became his mantra.

One of the downsides to doing a longer sentence in the county jail system was the anxiety of knowing you could be transferred at any moment. Just when an inmate might get comfortable and develop some sort of routine, a transfer would undoubtedly come through. Thus, by the end of February, Evans had been moved to Montgomery County Jail, about one hour west of Troy. But a month later, he was back at Warren. The main reason inmates were moved around like checkers while in county jail was the need for beds. As the mid-1980s progressed, cocaine distribution became the number one source of income for drug dealers, and the drug of choice for buyers. Troy was known as a refuge for hard-core drug users and drug traffickers. Logistically, it was the perfect location for major dealers in New York City, where the mother lode of cocaine generally came in, to traffic the drug throughout upstate New York, New Hampshire, Vermont and even Canada.

Dealing drugs wasn’t something Evans had ever wanted to get involved with. He had always said how much he hated drugs and drug dealers. But robbing big-time dealers of their cash became a potential new business he began to think about pursuing after his release.

A big shipment of coke came up to Troy (with a wimp!),
he wrote,
from Hollywood, Florida. But I found out too late to ambush it.

In that same letter, he spoke of an “Italian friend” whom he was going to hook up with when he was released.
But no felonies till I’m ready. Just lil’ stuff.

That Italian friend, he promised, was going to introduce him to a new line of work, which could, he insisted, yield huge amounts of cash quickly.

Long before the Bureau’s senior investigator Jim Horton had ever considered becoming a cop, Albany native Doug Wingate was chasing down bad guys and working cases as an investigator for the Bureau in Loudonville. Wingate had joined the NYSP as a trooper in 1968. He was asked to join the New York City division of the Bureau as a narcotics officer in 1972, but he declined the position because of what he described later as a serious “cut in pay.” Wingate had a part-time job on top of working a lot of overtime as a trooper. Working in New York City would have meant being away from his family for long periods of time. He would also have to put the brakes on his part-time job, which he didn’t want to do.

“They held that against me,” Wingate said later, laughing a bit at how ridiculous it seemed that because he had turned down the NYC offer he wasn’t offered another position with the Bureau for almost ten years. “Back then,” he continued, “the test question was: ‘Would you like to go into narcotics?’ If you said no, they held it against you.”

Either way, Wingate never looked back, and had “no regrets,” he said, about a career that would ultimately span some thirty-six years.

By 1979, he was working in Loudonville, Troop G, as a Bureau investigator, for the most part looking into burglaries, robberies, rapes, sexual assaults and murders.

At five feet nine inches, 195 pounds, Wingate was cookie-cutter perfect when matched up against the rest of his Bureau counterparts. He was garrulous and conniving when he needed to be, friendly when the job called for it, and even crass, authoritative and brassy when he felt a suspect had information he needed.

The perfect cop, in other words.

Wingate had met Evans a few years before Horton walked into Troop G as a green investigator. It was spring 1981. At the time, Wingate was stationed in Brunswick, a little town in the mountains just north of Troy. Each Bureau barracks had what investigators called a “Back Room”—an in-house nickname for a group of investigators that, basically, investigated anything that fell under the heading of “crime.”

In those days, Brunswick was a bit of a reprieve from the hustle and bustle of Troy. There were large, stately homes with well-manicured lawns and expensive cars parked in three-and four-car garages. Ten-story pine trees—faultless triangles of nature—dotted the countryside. A hilly town, with streets snaking and twisting around valleys, mountains and streams, Brunswick was scenic and hunter-friendly. People moved to Brunswick to get away from the confines of city life. It was quiet. Private. People kept to themselves.

For Evans and his cohorts in Troy, however, Brunswick became a treasure trove of potential merchandise to steal. Most people didn’t equip their homes with alarm systems back then, or didn’t feel the need to, so breaking and entering into homes for Evans and his cronies became as easy as walking through the door.

One characteristic that had set Evans apart from those with whom he burgled was his cleverness. He was always looking for the perfect way to steal.

“Gary was very intelligent,” Doug Wingate said later. “I’m not talking just as a thief—but an intellectual. He would read books, cover to cover. Study those areas he wanted to excel in.”

When Evans realized what Brunswick could offer him as a thief, he didn’t think twice about focusing on the town as a place to turn out quick, small-time jobs that would ultimately finance the bigger jobs in other parts of New England he had always dreamed about. Further, Wingate explained, Evans had an astute quality to the way he spoke and could carry on an educated conversation about anything. This impressed Wingate. He had become used to dealing with criminals who were, for lack of a more appropriate term, “stupid,” he said. Many had chosen a criminal life because they couldn’t make it in the real world. But not Evans. He could have done anything he wanted, Wingate was quick to point out, and been successful at it. When he applied that knowledge and general intelligence to turning jobs in Brunswick, he realized quickly the windfall the town offered.