I also tried a more direct approach than writing to the government, and went to a police station in Quebec with his death certificate. The officers on duty told me that they most likely had nothing on file, and then checked and appeared shocked. Though they said that there was definitely a file and that he’d done a lot, they insisted that they couldn’t share the information. Instead, they asked me several questions, as if concerned that I might be like my father. They finally said that I would have to go through the government.
Lastly, I have occasionally changed some of the characters’ details in order to protect their identities, and, for the sake of my brother’s and sister’s privacy, I have intentionally said little about them except where necessary.
Note for the Revised Edition
THIS BOOK IS the edited version of the original 2012 publication. Nearly five years after its initial publication, I reread it and chose to make changes for the sake of clarity and accuracy, as well as to remove some repetition. Also, in the intervening years, in response to questions I received regarding whether my father could have robbed as many as fifty banks, I did some research. Between 1965 and 1975, the number of bank robberies in the United States (not including burglaries) spiked from 847 a year to 3,517, eventually reaching a peak of 12,000 annually in the 1990s. The ratio of burglaries to robberies was approximately one in fifty, depending on the year. The majority of these were committed by serial criminals, suggesting that it wasn’t at all unusual for a criminal to commit a great number of small bank robberies that allowed him to make off with only the relatively modest amount of money held by the tellers. Interestingly, the one to fifty ratio of burglaries to armed bank robberies corresponds to my father’s claim of his crimes: that he robbed approximately fifty banks at gunpoint but pulled off only one burglary.
Further supporting his claims is a 1967 Los Angeles Times article found by two fact-checkers at Maisonneuve magazine in Montreal, Ian Beattie and Amelia Schonbek. At that time, Maisonneuve was preparing to excerpt the “Big Job” chapter, in which my father describes the bank burglary in Hollywood on the night that President Johnson was speaking. The article contains a nearly identical description of my father’s Big Job, except that the vault held seventy thousand dollars, not half a million, as he claimed. Seventy grand wouldn’t have had the same ring and would have been worth a lot more in 1967 than in the early 1990s when he was telling me stories. I presume that he was more intent on impressing his teenage son than bothering with veracity, though he was likely also accounting for inflation.
The article corroborated his claim that he broke into the safety deposit boxes, and it included a photograph of the burglarized vault, with the bank manager looking out the hole that my father had jackhammered through the concrete. Later articles named criminals arrested in connection—two women and two men—a detail that doesn’t match his version, though I assume he was simplifying or being selective with details to impress me. The Los Angeles Times article quotes a Bank of America official: “It was the first successful bank burglary in recent history—for our bank. Jobs like this are very rare.”
Acknowledgments
I WOULD LIKE to thank the following organizations and people for their support over the years: the Anderson Center at Tower View, the MacDowell Colony, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Ledig House at Omi International Arts Center, the Jentel Artist Residency Program, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec; T. Wilson, Laura Stevenson, Jaysinh Birjepatil, Janice Kulyk-Keefer, Judith Thompson, Constance Rooke, Patrick Holland, Harry Lane, Ray Klein, Tracy Motz, James Arthur, Robert Olen Butler, John August Wood, Joanna Cockerline, George Grinnel, Robert Hedin, Heather Faris, Graham Moore, Arthur Moore, Joanne Cipolla, Tristan Malavoy-Racine, Kevin Lin, Leza Lowitz, Greg Foster, Heather Slomski, and Austin Lin. I would also like to thank Mark Anderson for helping translate the quotation from Aristotle’s Politics. I am grateful to my brother and sister for their permission to be included in the memoir, to my family in Quebec for their stories and friendship, and to my mother for decades of encouragement. I am deeply indebted to everyone at Milkweed Editions, especially Allison Wigen and Joey McGarvey for coordinating the production, and, above all, Daniel Slager, for his enthusiasm, constant support, and editorial guidance.
DENI ELLIS BÉCHARD is the author of four other books: Vandal Love, winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Of Bonobos and Men, winner of the 2015 Nautilus Book Award for investigative journalism; Into the Sun, winner of the 2017 Midwest Book Award for Literary Fiction; and Kuei, My Friend: A Conversation on Racism, an epistolary book coauthored with First Nations poet Natasha Kanapé-Fontaine. His work has been featured in Best Canadian Essays, and his photojournalism has been exhibited in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. His articles, fiction, and photos have been published in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including the LA Times, Salon, Reuters, the Paris Review, the Guardian, Patagonia, La Repubblica, the Walrus, Pacific Standard, Le Devoir, Vanity Fair Italia, the Herald Scotland, the Huffington Post, the Harvard Review, the National Post, and Foreign Policy. He has reported from India, Cuba, Rwanda, Colombia, Iraq, the Congo, and Afghanistan. His new novel, White, is forthcoming with Milkweed Editions in 2018.
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