Latest news with #JohnDillinger
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
Getting away with murder: These fugitives fled prisons – and were never caught
The New Orleans jail breakout and the time it has taken to capture all 10 conjures images of previous newsworthy escapes involving the likes of gangster John Dillinger, serial killer Ted Bundy and Mexican cartel leader Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. While those notorious criminals were eventually apprehended or killed by law enforcement, which typically nabs more than 90% of escapees, a relative few eluded searches and remained at large, presumably until their dying days. Here's a look at some of those instances: The ingenious plot by Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin in 1962 probably stands as the nation's most famous prison break, memorialized in the 1979 film "Escape from Alcatraz" and countless tourist visits to the former maximum-security penitentiary in a San Francisco Bay island. President Donald Trump even wants to restore it. Morris, a convicted bank robber who had attempted to flee from other prisons, was regarded as the mastermind of a plan that featured dummy heads with real hair left on the cell beds to fool guards and a raft made out of raincoats to carry the escapees to freedom. Nobody knows whether they made it alive or perished in the cold, treacherous bay waters. Their bodies were never found, so their legend lives on. Like true crime? Check out Witness: A library of true crime stories Glen Stewart Godwin was serving a sentence of more than 25 years for a stabbing murder when he escaped in June 1987 from the Folsom State Prison outside Sacramento, California, a maximum-security facility that had yielded only two previous breakouts in a quarter century. Godwin found his way to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where later that year he was arrested for drug dealing. The FBI says he was convicted and sent to a prison in Guadalajara, where in 1991 he was accused of killing another inmate. Later that year he escaped and hasn't been tracked down. "Godwin is fluent in Spanish and may be traveling throughout Central and South America, and Mexico," says the FBI, adding that Godwin goes by several aliases. "He is thought to use illegal drugs and be involved in narcotics distribution." If alive, Godwin would be 66 now. The FBI is still offering $20,000 for information leading to his arrest. William Leslie (Les) Arnold was just 16 in 1958 when he killed his parents for not letting him use their car and buried them in the backyard of the family's home in Omaha, Nebraska. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison, arousing few suspicions of an attempt to escape until he and a fellow inmate – James Edward Harding – made their getaway in 1967 with the help of a former convict on the outside who provided them supplies. After cutting through window bars, they scaled a 12-foot fence topped by barbed wire. The fugitives reached Chicago and split up there, but while Harding was caught the next year in Los Angeles, Arnold was not to be found alive. The U.S. Marshals Service, which solved the cold case in 2023 with DNA evidence, said Arnold worked in Chicago for a while before moving to California and later to Australia. "Arnold obtained an alias and was married within three months of escaping," the service said. "But investigators learned he eventually made his way to Australia, with his second wife, had a family and worked as a businessman until his death in 2010. At that time he had been living under the name John Vincent Damon." Joanne Chesimard, who changed her name to Assata Shakur, is a New Yorker who in 2013 became the first woman to be added to the FBI's list of Most Wanted Terrorists. The bureau's reward for information leading to her arrest sits at $1 million. Chesimard was a member of the militant Black Liberation Army when a group she was traveling with was stopped for a vehicle violation by two New Jersey Police troopers in May 1973, at a time when she was the subject of arrest warrants for felonies that included bank robbery. A shootout ensued, killing a police officer and injuring the second trooper. Chesimard was convicted of first-degree murder and several other charges in 1977, and sentenced to life in prison. Two years later, three men who visited Chesimard at a New Jersey prison pulled out guns, took two guards as hostages and commandeered a prison van to flee with her. The FBI says Chesimard lived underground for years before a 1984 move to Cuba, where she is believed to still reside. Glen Stark Chambers was facing execution for the 1975 fatal beating of his girlfriend in Sarasota, Florida, when later that year he and two other inmates escaped by rappelling down from the third floor of a county jail building after stringing together bed sheets. Chambers was caught after three days. He later had his sentence reduced to life in prison, but that didn't keep him from conceiving ways to flee. In 1990, when he was helping build furniture at the shop of a state prison in Polk City, Florida, Chambers convinced fellow inmates to put him in a box that was loaded onto a truck headed to Daytona. He escaped enroute without the driver noticing. Authorities said he was later seen in Florida and Alabama, but never captured. If alive, he would be 73 now. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Getting away with murder: These prison escapees were never caught
News.com.au
15-05-2025
- News.com.au
Man charged over botched 900kg coke import plan alleged to have procured placement of 'bombs', 'IEDs' in businesses, court told
The alleged Australian ringleader of a botched plan to import 900kg of cocaine, which ended up washing up on beaches along the east coast, allegedly procured others to plant IEDs or 'bombs' in residential businesses, a court has been told. Australian Federal Police allege Daniel Wayne John Roberts is the head of a domestic crime network that organised the collection of the illicit drug using sea routes. Mr Roberts, 38, was arrested in April last year in connection with the alleged plot to import bricks of cocaine off the coast of Queensland's Moreton Island in November 2023. The alleged plan backfired after those accused of being involved failed to collect the drugs from the ocean, resulting in bricks of cocaine washing up on beaches along the NSW coast in late 2023 and into 2024. The AFP further alleges Mr Roberts, from the Brisbane suburb of Aspley, went by the names of 'WANTED' and 'John Dillinger' – the same name as the notorious US gangster during the Great Depression – when using dedicated encrypted communication platforms to contract out drug pick-up jobs. Mr Roberts is facing a raft of charges, including six related to the alleged importation of commercial quantities of drugs and dealing in proceeds of crime. He is also facing state charges including arson, wilful damage, carrying dangerous goods in a vehicle, dangerous conduct with a weapon and acts intended to cause grievous bodily harm. The AFP alleges the state charges relate to using violence and threats to collect debts and intimidate rivals by engaging criminal associates to assault, firebomb, shoot at and extort his customers. Allegations surrounding these were detailed in Brisbane Supreme Court on Thursday as Mr Roberts applied for bail. The court was told a seventh charge linked to the alleged importation would be discontinued by the Crown. Defence barrister Angus Edwards, acting for Mr Roberts, said the full brief had still not been delivered, despite his client having spent more than a year in custody on remand. Mr Edwards said cross-examination of witnesses would still need to take place at a committal hearing even if a full brief of evidence was delivered by the Crown. 'One can imagine the trial itself will be years away,' he said. 'It's relatively unusual for someone to sit in custody for a year and one month and still not have a brief and still not have a date by which the full brief is intended to be supplied.' Mr Roberts had agreed to 'strong' bail conditions which would effectively leave him under 'house arrest'. Mr Edwards said his client could report to police every day and wear a tracking device, in addition to agreeing to not using devices. 'There is also a condition he must allow access by police to his residential address … for the purpose of searches for compliance with his bail conditions,' Mr Edwards said. A prosecutor from the Queensland Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions told the court bail was opposed due to Mr Roberts' alleged risk to Crown witnesses and the 'community at large'. She said some of the allegations against Mr Roberts included him procuring others to plant 'improvised explosive devices or bombs' in business premises located in a residential neighbourhood with 'no consideration as to the potential for community injury or damage'. Others included allegations Mr Roberts 'outfitted persons with weapons', including guns. Justice Declan Kelly refused the bail application, noting the conditions were not sufficient to ameliorate any risk Mr Roberts might pose while on bail. 'The (alleged) state offending reveals far-reaching violent and persistent offending,' Justice Kelly said. 'There is reference to the use of improvised explosive devices, attacks on places of business and residences, and the use of firearms … in furtherance of (alleged) trafficking offending.'
USA Today
21-03-2025
- USA Today
Stick-up at the cellphone store: USA's new heists go after iPhones and not bank vaults.
Stick-up at the cellphone store: USA's new heists go after iPhones and not bank vaults. A Washington, D.C., man was sentenced to 22 years in prison for robbing four cell phone stores. His spree is the latest in a trend that's replaced the classic bank heist. Show Caption Hide Caption Suspects wanted in cell phone store robbery Houston police are asking for the public's help to identify two suspects in a robbery at a cell phone store. Fox - 26 Houston The man in the Maryland cell phone store quits pretending he's a customer when his partners enter behind him brandishing guns. 'Yeah, you know what time it is,' he says, drawing a gun and pointing it at the clerk, according to federal court documents. 'If you don't want to die today, do what I say.' He leads the employee to a safe in the back and orders him to open it. But it's not stacks of cash he's after. Today's stickup artist is after something else: smartphones. The trio cleans out the safe and leaves the store in Owings Mills, Maryland, with a grand total of $48,767 worth of Apple and Samsung Galaxy devices— 76 in total, according to federal court filings. They also take $322 from the store register. It's the final heist in a spree that's seen the robbers take roughly $120,000 worth of stolen phones across four stores around Baltimore, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. The case out of Maryland is the latest in what criminology experts and law enforcement see as the modern-day form of bank robbery— with significantly higher takes. In the United States, bank robbers net just over $4,000 per robbery, according to FBI statistics. If noted gangster John Dillinger were alive today, he'd be robbing cellphone stores instead of banks. The heists have grown to the point that federal agents call the trade 'phone trafficking' in reference to the vast sums criminals aim to score and sell in far-flung black markets such as Iran and North Korea. Doug McKelway, a supervisory special agent with the FBI's Major Theft Enterprises division, told USA TODAY that phone store heists spurred by international organized crime elements came to the bureau's attention just a few years ago. 'These cases start out with crimes that appear to be low-level street crimes the FBI would not normally investigate,' McKelway said. 'But then when you take a closer look you see it's a transnational crime.' The take? Anywhere from $500 to $1,000 per phone for the lowest level of criminal involved. Ringleaders make millions of dollars, McKelway said. 'It got them sent to jail for a long time, so I don't know if it was worth it,' he said, recalling the first major phone heist case he handled. They are big-money heists that carry big prison terms. Xavier Jones - a 26-year-old involved in all four robberies in late 2020 including Owings Mills - was sentenced to 22 years in prison in February after pleading guilty to multiple counts of brandishing a firearm and interference with interstate commerce by robbery. Accomplice Rico Dashiell, 26, pleaded guilty for his role and was sentenced to 12 years in prison; Donte Herring, 25, was convicted at trial and sentenced to 20 years. Jones recognized going after highly valued but poorly secured technology offered a big payday but technology was also his undoing. The crew failed to notice a GPS-tracking device in the Owings Mills store loot. Federal agents tracked them down using the device to put them in a plain old-fashioned prison. FBI agents 'pull the thread' in Dallas The case where FBI agents saw phone heists were more than just stickups came in Texas in 2020, McKelway said. Law enforcement in Texas alerted the FBI to an astounding number of phone heists at Dallas-area stores. Federal agents began investigating and uncovered that the case was anything but local. 'As we began to pull the thread a little bit, we saw there were armed robbery crews coming to Dallas from all around the country,' McKelway said. The draw, according to the FBI, was a store that helped move stolen phones out of the country. 'It was this one particular fence that drew them there,' said Mckelway, using law enforcement parlance for a store that deals in stolen goods. 'Word got out in criminal networks that this store was paying good money for phones.' The store dealt out over 70,000 stolen phones for $100 million. Countries accepting the phones included China and the United Arab Emirates, according to federal court filings in the Eastern District of Texas. 'That case really opened our eyes to what's going on beneath the surface in this realm that is the theft of phones all around the country,' said McKelway. Prosecution of the 101 people charged is ongoing but 42 people have been sentenced since June, according to Jillian C. Kaehler, an FBI spokesperson. They received sentences of up to 12 years and four and a half on average. The two brothers responsible for moving the phones overseas, Abdul Basit and Arsalan Bhangda, were sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to pay nearly $12 million in restitution each, according to reporting by the Fort-Worth Star Telegram. More: Group of 'violent' cell phone robbers stole a fortune from AT&T stores, get stiff prison terms Bank robbing for the 21st century The trend of phone store heists is so new that criminologists told USA TODAY that little research exists on the topic. But long-standing criminology theories make sense of the trend, according to Dr. Seungmug 'Zech' Lee, a professor of criminal justice at Texas A&M International University: Criminals go after easy targets and when a target becomes difficult they find another. Bank robberies, said Lee, used to be a relatively easy way to score big. At the turn of the century, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and their crew members made off with some $37,000 in gold - about $1.4 million today - in robbing a bank in Winnemucca, Nevada, in 1900, author C. F. Eckhardt writes in Tales of Badmen, Bad Women, and Bad Places: Four Centuries of Texas Outlawry. Bank security have vastly improved since then. Common measures include everything from alarm systems and surveillance cameras to exploding dye packs and electronic tracking devices, according to FBI bank theft data. The Bank Protection Act of 1968 mandated that banks nationwide improve security, according to Robert McCrie, a professor of security management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Bank robberies have fallen to record lows since then and the average payout has dropped to about just $4,000, according to FBI statistics. Federal agents registered 1,263 bank robberies in 2023. That's an 80% decrease from 2003 when there were 7,465 robberies. 'If a note passer goes into one of these banks today, he will get some cash but not very much,' said McCrie, referring to a preferred method nowadays of simply passing a note demanding money to a teller rather than a guns-blazing stickup. 'Their picture will be taken and there may be an exploding device in the cash, so it's not a very good crime to commit anymore.' New American stickup artists More criminals are turning to cellphone stores. Accounts of holdups in court filings read like modern-day escapades of Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson— iconic, audacious American gangsters known for thoroughly planned bank heists throughout the Midwest. Robdarius Williams, D'Maurah Bryant and Quintez Tucker were sentenced in October to a collective 65 years in prison after hitting eight cellphone stores in Indiana over 25 days, according to the Justice Department. They entered stores brandishing guns and ordering people to get on the ground, according to Bryant's guilty plea agreement. One robber waved an AR-style rifle in the face of a two-year-old during the course of a hold up of an Indianapolis T-Mobile store. Bryant hit a Verizon store employee in the face with a gun. He felt the worker was moving too slowly. Some thieves became brutal. Lawrence McKay and his crew showed an escalating pattern of violence in robbing six cellphone stores in and around Philadelphia, according to federal court filings. McKay and his crew left victims tied up in the bathroom by the fourth robbery, according to federal court documents out of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. On the fifth robbery, one crew member entered the store and immediately shot an employee. McKay committed the worst of the violence: on the sixth and final robbery, he shot one of the victims in the stomach and then proceeded to kick him in the face. The 37-year-old McKay was sentenced to 32 years in prison in February. He plead guilty to six counts of robbery and multiple counts of using a firearm during a crime of violence. What are phone store owners doing about it? Some cellphone store owners have begun using security measures similar to what banks use. Stores may hide tracking devices among phones, like the store in Owings Mill, Maryland, that led police to Jones and his crew. A stickup crew out of Chicago hit a snag at a T-Mobile store in Rockford, Illinois, when the phones were kept in a safe that only opened at designated times. They were left to steal devices left outside the safe and nearly $600 from the register, court filings say. The six-man crew — which robbed five other cellphone stores in Illinois — received a collective 60 years in prison for the robberies. The last member pleaded guilty in July, the Justice Department said. Even as some stores adapt, many do not. McCrie said little will change until stores nationwide adopt better standards. McCrie said he first noticed thieves targeting phone stores around 10 years ago and that heists have only become more frequent. Store security has hardly improved while the newest smartphones now cost around $1,000. "Not only have these incidents begun but there is no concerted program or plan to mitigate these risks," he said. 'It's not surprising that this has become an attractive area for criminal activity... Look at the vulnerability that cellphone stores have, they don't expect to be robbed the way banks expect to be robbed.' Cellphone providers (try to) punch back Network providers have taken steps to undercut phone trafficking by blocking the use of stolen devices. The Global Standard Mobilization Association, a phone trade organization, maintains a massive database of stolen phones that over 100 providers worldwide refer to when granting a phone access to a network. Major companies including AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon subscribe and add to the organization's list of stolen devices. But not everyone participates. Among countries that don't are China, Russia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, according to court documents in the Dallas case. Stolen phones blocked from accessing cell networks can still be used to access Wi-Fi. Transnational crime 'whack-a-mole' Special Agent McKelway describes stopping phone trafficking as akin to whack-a-mole under the circumstances. Investigators can root out fence operators and shut down significant local networks - as in Dallas - but new ones pop up around the country. Plus thieves resell phones online. 'They're easy to get rid of and there's a huge demand for them and there's lots of ways that they end up overseas and the internet certainly makes it easier,' McKelway said. 'There's just a huge demand for these phones around the world.' Michael Loria is a national reporter on the USA TODAY breaking news desk. Contact him at mloria@ @mchael_mchael or on Signal at (202) 290-4585.
