Every Move You Make (26 page)

Evans had always viewed burglary as a full-time job. When he applied his smarts to it, he came up with several unique ways to steal that simply amazed cops when they found out later. One of his favorite things to do, for example, involved scouring parking lots of five-star restaurants, jewelry stores and antique outlets for luxurious vehicles: Mercedes, BMWs, Jaguars, Cadillacs. Once he found a vehicle that interested him, he would look inside the car to see if the owner had left his or her garage door opener clipped to the sun visor or somewhere out in the open. Then he would break in, steal the opener and rummage through the glove compartment, hoping to locate the car registration to find out where the person lived. Once he had the address, he would write it down and literally walk into the home after opening the garage door.

“I knew the person wasn’t home,” he said, “because they were at the restaurant eating dinner. It was the perfect score.”

In 1982, Wingate was investigating a string of burglaries throughout the upper north country, which included Warren County, Essex County and Hamilton County. During that investigation, he had developed a contact in Troy by the name of
Tyler Jacobs
, a two-bit thief who had a reputation for beating up people. Jacobs was a “strongman,” known more for his ability to break legs than anything else.

One day, Wingate got a call from the state police in Bennington, Vermont. A trooper explained that Jacobs and another notable Troy thief,
Raymond Bosse
, a guy Evans knew pretty well, had committed a burglary. Jacobs had been caught in the act and was locked up in Bennington. Bosse had escaped when the cops showed up, took off for Troy, but was caught by two Back Room troopers in Brunswick.

“Bosse was a pretty tough kid,” Wingate recalled. “There was a whole crew of these guys who were burglars. Really tough kids. They did not do drugs. They did not drink. When they went out to do a burglary, they were stone-cold sober. Professionals all the way.”

Bosse was, indeed, no slouch. He had arms on him almost as big as Evans’s, but he was taller and heavier. When Wingate went in to talk to him, he wouldn’t say a word. Because he wouldn’t talk, and he had committed a crime in Vermont, Wingate had him shipped back to Bennington to face charges there.

Throughout the years, Jacobs had become one of Wingate’s informants, and always had information about what was happening on the street. As a criminal, though, one of his downfalls was that whenever he had his back against the wall, he talked.

“Before I left to go to Bennington,” Wingate said, “I got clearance from the DA to give Jacobs carte blanche on any burglaries or larcenies.”

After getting hold of Jacobs’s attorney, Wingate set up a meeting.

Over the next two days, Wingate and Jacobs built a rapport and talked about several different unsolved burglaries in and around the Capital Region.

“Tell me about some of the
other
burglaries,” Wingate said, just to see what Jacobs was willing to talk about.

“Am I home free on those, too?” Jacobs asked.

“I’m sure I can take care of that.”

“There’s a meat market in Guilderland. I did that job with Raymond Bosse.”

“You’re a codefendant; how can I get Bosse?”

Raymond Bosse was someone the DA’s office, Wingate and other members of the Bureau were looking at for some time. He was a “tough guy,” Wingate recalled, “a wise guy, in the sense that we wanted to get him on more than what we had.”

“Well,” Jacobs said, “I know he’s just a codefendant, but if you really want Bosse…talk to this guy named Gary Evans.”

Wingate had never heard the name before.

Puzzled, Wingate asked, “Who is Gary Evans? Why would he want to talk to me?”

CHAPTER 43

Over the next few days, Tyler Jacobs, looking to trade information for jail time, continued to talk to Doug Wingate about Gary Evans and, moreover, the burglaries Jacobs knew Evans had been involved in.

This, of course, piqued Wingate’s interest. Perhaps Evans could shed some light on some of the Bureau’s unsolved burglaries. In particular, there was a jewelry store heist in Oneonta, New York, Jacobs said Evans had masterminded. The Bureau had been trying to solve the case for nearly a year.

“Gary went down there one day with a kid named Mike Falco,” Jacobs said, “and they cased the place out. They went back there that night and, for whatever reason, Mike chickened out.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, they took off. But Gary went back the next day with Raymond Bosse.”

“You didn’t go with them?”

“No. Evans decided they should take a Greyhound bus to do the job,” Jacobs continued. “They wouldn’t be noticed that way.”

“What?”

“Yeah, a fucking Greyhound. Gary is smart.”

“What’s he look like?”

“He wears a bandanna all the time. You can’t miss him. Once you see him, you won’t forget him.”

Wingate began by running Evans’s name through the system. After a quick search, Evans turned up at Saratoga County Jail. He was halfway through his most recent bid, with a release date set for September 1984.

When Wingate showed up at Saratoga, he and Evans had, what he called later, a “standoff.” Evans just stood there, sizing Wingate up. Then, after a few moments, asked, “Why the fuck would I
ever
talk to you?”

Wingate said, “I don’t know much about you. But my goal right now is to do Raymond Bosse. I need help on a couple of cases he was involved in. One is a meat market job in Guilderland…you know all about that, don’t you?”

Evans became enraged. “I didn’t do that!”

“Well, I know you didn’t.”

“I don’t do anything in Albany County.”

“You do know about it, though—”

Evans wouldn’t let Wingate finish a sentence without interrupting.

“Still, why the hell am I going to talk to
you
?”

“Look, if you’re just going to stonewall me,” Wingate said, “fuck it. I’ll just go to Ray and we’ll talk about going to Oneonta on the bus and…”

That seemed to lighten Evans up some. Wingate hadn’t given up Tyler Jacobs as his informant, and wasn’t about to. But he wanted Evans to know—without coming out and saying it—that he wasn’t just dangling a carrot. He was working with solid background information.

As Wingate continued, Evans stared at him in disbelief:
How do you know so much about this job?

“I know you went down there with Mike Falco. I know he chickened out. And I fucking
know
you went back with Bosse.”

“Wait a minute,” Evans said.

“You know, Gary, when you take a bus to a little town like Oneonta, you really shouldn’t wear that bandanna. You went in and cased the place…. Who is going to forget you? Just look at yourself!”

“Okay…okay,” Evans said. “What do we need to do?”

“You need to start by telling me all about the meat market job.”

In the end, Wingate and the Albany County DA’s Office used Evans and Jacobs to nail Raymond Bosse on the meat market heist, and within a few months, Bosse was indicted.

That one chance encounter Wingate initiated with Evans, however, would turn out to be much more. It was, for Evans, the first time in his career as a thief he had truly trusted law enforcement and wasn’t burned.

What was odd about Doug Wingate and Evans’s first encounter, and the fact that information Evans provided ended up putting Raymond Bosse behind bars, was that Evans, in his letters during that same period, blamed Bosse for his latest stint in prison.

I talked to the state police investigator,
Evans wrote on September 29, 1983,
that (so far) hasn’t lied to me (that I know of, anyway). He says I have no problems anywhere….
Later, in the same letter, he added,
I positively learned one thing: Don’t ever let anyone know what I’m doing. [Raymond] got talkative to the wrong people and here I sit.

CHAPTER 44

The closer Evans got to his release date, the more he began to focus on revenge. It was clear that prison life, once again, was getting to him. He complained about “authority having a hold on” him. About being confined “like an animal” when there were serious criminals walking the streets, committing evil acts and getting off. Yet, regardless of what he talked about, Evans always brought the subject back to what he was going to do to those people who had, in his mind, been responsible for every day he spent behind bars.

You know I have a lot of hate,
he wrote,
for a lot of people—and eventually that will be straightened out.

A few months before he was released, he came up with a rather unique plan to avoid capture when he got out and inevitably he promised, started a new reign of burglaries—a plan, indeed, straight out of a spy novel.

After talking about the serious money he was going to be making with the Italians he met recently, he wanted to have the Italians point him to a “crooked doctor” so he could “get skin grafts” on his fingers. His reasoning behind the painful surgery? In what sounded like a child’s voice, he wrote,
So I can’t never be proved to be me.

Evans insisted he was going to stay in the Northeast when he got out of prison, because it was “where [he] wanted to be.” But in his next letter, he changed his mind and began talking about moving to West Virginia. Houses and land were cheap there, he said. Then, in typical Evans fashion, a week after that, he was thinking Connecticut, Maine or New Hampshire:
I’m getting the hell out of New York.

Those last letters written before he was released were shrouded with paranoia:
I think how easy it would be for a parole officer, a cop, or a Hell’s Angel
[sic]
to plant something on me and get me busted—like a gun or drugs…. It’d be my third felony, twenty-five to life. There was this nigger that had two felonies. The Angels were looking for him. So he started keeping a pistol in his car. They found out and told the cops, and the cops stopped his car. He got twenty-five to life.

Like he had in the past, Evans began setting goals for himself that were entirely unattainable. The amount of money, for example, it would take for him to give up burglarizing, he said, was an enormous figure he could not possibly have ever made.
I figure if I make a minimum of $500,000 I won’t have to rip-off again.

During the summer of 1984, he began talking about someone he called his “best friend.”

He doesn’t do any criminal shit…. He’s like me, stays alone, no drugs or drinking. He’s just into bands.

It had to be, law enforcement later said, Tim Rysedorph. According to Evans’s letter, “Tim” had been laid off recently. This bothered Evans. He wrote if it had been him, he would have
burn[ed] the place down after [stripping] it.

Evans’s developing psychosis of shedding blood when he got out of prison was, one might argue, directly related to his upbringing. The rage and anger he voiced in his letters had always been flavored with anecdotes about his childhood, interwoven with stories of getting back at those who, he believed, had turned on him.

For example, as he battled with himself, debating on paper whether to kill when he got out or not, throughout his prose were memories of the hell he had gone through as a child:
I didn’t really grow up with anybody when I think of it. I never went outside thanks to that dead asshole [Roy Evans] who I plan blowing out of his grave sometime in the future.
And it wasn’t enough for Evans that his father had died an early, horrible death; he wanted to kill him all over again.
Maybe I can talk myself out of my bloody plans afterwards. I don’t know. Only time will tell. Probably can.

Doug Wingate, as he got to know Evans throughout the years, pointed out later that Evans’s father was, indeed, one of the main sources fueling Evans’s violent behavior.

Whenever Evans had been picked up, the police had always found several handcuff keys on him.

“I asked him one time why he carried all those handcuff keys,” Wingate recalled later.

Besides the obvious reasons, Evans said his motive was much deeper emotionally, and far more personal.

“He said to me,” Wingate added, “‘I was handcuffed long before I was ever arrested.’ So I questioned him about it. I wanted to know what he meant by that.”

Evans then began to talk about his childhood. He said his father would handcuff him to a post in the basement of their First Street apartment and savagely molest him in the most vile ways.

This deep-seated hatred for his father undoubtedly played a part in his behavior later on. In 1984, as freedom drew closer, he projected that “hatred” he often spoke of in his letters toward those people he thought had been responsible for his incarceration.
I think sometimes if I could buy some land in the mountains and go away by myself for a long time I could get all the hate out of me, but now I know it’s too late.

A death wish began to materialize as the months and weeks until his release turned into days and hours.

As far as becoming a mellow old artist in a stone home in Vermont,
which he had often written about,
that’s a fairytale. I’ll never be old, and I really don’t care. I know who I am. I hate all authority. Respect none. I live for revenge and that’s all.

CHAPTER 45

Be it overcrowding, or the fact that Evans never caused that much trouble while in prison, he was set free on March 31, 1984. What he had dreamed of all along (getting out of jail without the umbra of parole hanging over him), however, wasn’t going to be a reality. Because he was being released early, he was placed on a “conditional release program,” which simply meant he was on parole until his sentence was exhausted. For the next nine months, he would have to be on his best behavior, once again reporting to a parole officer.

With no direction and absolutely no intervention with any sort of postrelease program to set him on the right track, Evans went back to committing burglaries right away.