The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  Instead of using four hundred yards, the plane went from flying to a full stop in an eye-bugging 150 feet.

  The landing was rough enough to set off the plane’s distress beacon, which began signaling that N660BA had gone down hard at 11:44 a.m. The U.S. Coast Guard in Miami picked up the satellite signal and immediately went into search-and-rescue mode.

  When Colt gathered himself and lifted the Corvalis’s gullwing door, he was 1,050 miles and a world away from where he’d taken off. He could officially check off another item from his prison collage/shopping list: the colorful Caribbean logo.

  Even with the adrenaline of surviving another hairy landing, the kid from the misty cool Northwest couldn’t help but feel the saunalike assault of the July Bahamas heat, especially back in the mangroves where breath comes in moist bites. The other things that come in bites are the flying teeth, aka no-see-ums or nippers, along with the mosquitoes. In the still air of the marsh, they can be ferocious, especially on cloudy days like the fourth. As Colt climbed out and slid down the wing of the Corvalis, the local bloodsuckers must have rejoiced over the big helping of manna from heaven.

  A Bahamian had watched in disbelief as the Corvalis came in lower and lower—apparently under control but far from any sensible landing spot—and then crashed into the swamp. Calls went out to the Royal Bahamian Police Force (RBPF) and Royal Bahamas Defence Force (RBDF), the country’s sole military branch.

  BACK IN INDIANA, NO one suspected a thing. Even though it was a Sunday and a holiday, Spider Miller went to work. The Fourth of July weekend is a busy time for a beer distributor, especially in a college town like Bloomington. Late that morning, his cell rang, but he let it go to voice mail.

  One minute after receiving the distress signal, the U.S. Coast Guard had called Spider’s brother, whose contact info was on the Cessna’s registration, to check whether it was a false alarm. Don told them he thought the plane was safe in Bloomington, but that Spider was the pilot they should check with.

  When Spider retrieved his message, you could have knocked him over with an empty beer can. “It was from the coast guard’s Miami station, saying they were receiving an ELT ping that my plane had gone down in the Bahamas.” Miller figured there was no sense in calling them back until he could answer their questions, so he jumped into his car and raced to the airport. “I’m thinking, Oh hell, how can this be? I’d never heard of Abaco. I didn’t want to believe the plane might be gone, but the ELTs are accurate, they work, so I had myself prepared when I got there.”

  Spider arrived at his hangar to find it filled with just an echo. He called the coast guard back shortly after noon. The second big surprise was to find out that his $650,000 airplane had been taken by a teenager who’d been on a tear across the country and who authorities suspected had been staking out the airport for a week. To top it off, he learned that his was the fifth aircraft stolen by Colton Harris-Moore, unlicensed pilot.

  “Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that a kid like him was out there,” says Miller.

  THE COAST GUARD ALERTED the Bahamians that the plane had been stolen. RBDF soldiers set out for the site by boat, but couldn’t get close because it was low tide. Once again a combination of luck and choosing the right spot gave Colt enough time to land and get away before the cops arrived. Part of his luck was the fact that the Bahamians didn’t send anyone overland to the site that day.

  Colt and the plane sat 2.2 miles from the Great Abaco Highway, the one road that runs through the undeveloped south end of the island. If an officer had gotten within binocular range, he would have been able to see Colt moving, and possibly get men in position to intercept him. As it was, Colt almost stumbled into an RBDF trooper who got close enough to report seeing a white male “with lacerations” who ran off when he was spotted.

  Whether he got cut up in the crash or picking his way through the mangroves, Colt was in good enough shape to make his way the eight or so miles to Sandy Point, a fishing village of about four hundred. The owner of a little gas station–convenience store says that sometime after dark, Colt stopped by to fill up. He broke in and left with a Gatorade and two bags of potato chips, though he’d gathered a lot more. The owner guessed that Colt may have been frightened off by someone passing by because he left a bunch of drinks and snacks on the counter. Colt then stole a brown Chevy Tahoe and aimed it north up the highway for the forty-nine-mile drive to Marsh Harbour, the island’s single-stoplight main town.

  The Bahamians told the coast guard that they were planning a mission to the crash site for early the next morning and requested air support. At 6:11 a.m. on the fifth, a USCG Guardian jet detoured on its way to deliver spare parts to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and arrived on scene. The pilots had no trouble spotting the downed plane, and reported, “Does not seem to be in distress.” They stayed on-site for three minutes and didn’t see anyone in the area.

  Later that morning after a four-hour slog, Bahamian police officers got to the plane. As expected, they found no one. Cushions had been taken out of the Cessna and laid on the ground in the shade of the wing. There was also a bucket beside the plane with used towelettes inside.

  SPIDER MILLER WAS RELIEVED when he got ahold of the Bahamian police and they told him there was no one at the crash site. “I was happy to hear that he hadn’t been hurt and, especially, didn’t kill himself in the airplane.” Spider’s next priority was securing the aircraft. “The first cop I talked with said everything was inside the plane, my four thousand-dollar Bose noise-canceling headsets, oxygen equipment, all the valuables. So I asked him to hold on to that stuff and I’d find someone to go over and collect it from them. When I called the same cop later to say someone was on the way to get my valuables, he said, ‘We don’t have anything like that.’”

  Spider hung up. “That was the second theft committed against me.” He says the third was dealing with the insurance company, which didn’t want to say the Cessna was totaled. Miller says he wouldn’t risk flying his kids in that plane again, so he had to pay the difference in value.

  Spider, who has five kids of his own and supports the Boys & Girls Clubs and other youth organizations in the four counties where he does business, saw Colt as “misguided.” He and Don grew up as part of a huge family living in a house with only one full bathroom. There were struggles, he says, but it was always a loving and supportive home. “It sounds to me like Colt was dealt a bad hand right from the start.”

  Even though he’d wind up about $100,000 out-of-pocket, Spider was philosophical about the theft. “I’ve had people steal from me before, and most of them didn’t use a gun. Hedge fund and investment managers, they steal without using guns, and so did this kid. He’s just one more in a line of thieves, but I don’t mind him because at least he never pretended to be anything but a thief.”

  BACK IN WASHINGTON, OUR Fourth of July was spent on board a boat with friends, bobbing in Fisherman Bay, Lopez Island, along with what seemed like half the population of the San Juans. We ate and drank too much, laughed more than was reasonable, and whenever there was a lull in the action we fired a pirate cannon off the bow to wake the bay. The Fisherman’s Fourth always tops off with the islands’ best fireworks show, paid for, in part, by passing the hat—via dinghy—from boat to boat.

  I was blissfully disconnected from the news for two days. On the fifth, we did a slow cruise back to Orcas, not getting to the cabin until 9 p.m. Only then did I reluctantly sign on to the Internet. Cue the cartoon reaction, eyes bugging, jaw dropping. It wasn’t because Colt had taken a plane—I expected that to happen any day. And it wasn’t even that he’d flown a thousand miles and left the country—if at any time he’d turned south and vamoosed to Mexico, we’d have all gone “duh, obvious.” My shock came from where he’d chosen to go.

  My first trip out of the country was to the Bahamas. It was a flight in an ancient DC-3 “Gooney Bird” with a door that fell open as we took off. In the ensuing thirty years, I’d been back scores of times,
flying over on every kind of puddle jumper made, and even flying around the cays in an amphibious ultralight trying to spot mating sharks for a nature documentary. I’d also crossed the Gulf Stream from Florida to the Bahamas in boats as small as a nineteen-footer (at 2 a.m., in search of a bottle of rum) and as big as the cruise ship I worked on for all of a week. Wherever I moved around the world, the Bahamas always remained a second home, especially the Out Islands.

  Most people know the Bahamas as just a cruise ship or casino destination because they’ve only gone to Nassau (New Providence) and Freeport (Grand Bahama). All the others are collectively called the Out Islands, or, as the locals say, the Family Islands. That’s where I’d spent almost all my time in the Bahamas, diving, fishing, drinking, and chasing Hemingway’s ghost.

  Not only did Colt pick the Bahamas, he went to the Out Islands, specifically the Abacos—the place I’d spent more time than any other spot in the archipelago. My Abacos photos and magazine articles are scattered all over the Web. One of my favorite trips ever was a recent visit to Great Abaco for an article about male bonding called “Blood, Sweat and Beers,” when my dad, uncle, a cousin, and a friend joined me for a week of marlin fishing, shark diving, rum drinking, and conch fritter feasting.

  Now, amazingly, Colt was there. It was already almost tomorrow Bahamas local time, but I picked up the phone. Who can you call at midnight in the Bahamas? A buddy who owns a bar.

  The party was in full swing at Nipper’s on Great Guana Cay, one of the islands across the Sea of Abaco from Marsh Harbour. Johnny Roberts named his bar for the no-see-ums that bedeviled him and his crew as they hammered together a bare-bones drink shack atop a high bluff overlooking the dramatic blue and white of Guana’s Atlantic-side beach. Johnny’s joint has since grown into one of the most storied bars in the tropics, famous for its massive Sunday pig-roast parties attended by everyone who can beg, borrow, or steal a boat ride to the cay. Two of the biggest events each year at Nipper’s are the concerts put on by another piratical old buddy of mine from back in my days of living on Grand Cayman: the comic Calypsonian, singer of such songs as “Time Flies When You’re Having Rum” and “A Thong Gone Wrong,” who goes by the name of the Barefoot Man. Barefoot, aka George Nowak, was scheduled to give his Abaco summer concert at Nipper’s less than three weeks after Colt landed. When I talked to George, he was already penning the Barefoot Bandit song:

  First he stole my golf cart,

  then my aeroplane,

  but what really pissed me off,

  he went and stole my name.

  JOHNNY HAD TO SHOUT above the music and laughter. It sounded like a pretty wild Monday, even for Nipper’s. He reminded me it was Regatta Time and asked why I wasn’t there. The annual Abacos regatta is a giant wind-powered party, with salty crews racing back and forth across the Sea of Abaco to a different beach bar blowout each day. I told him I was looking up flights as we spoke, but it wasn’t to get in on the sailing bacchanal.

  Johnny had heard the first coconut telegraph beats about Colt, that Nassau had sent a team of detectives to Great Abaco that day, but he said no one was sure where the kid was. He told me to call his cousin Tim over in Marsh Harbour in the morning, and he’d have the latest word. Once we narrowed down which cousin—most of the Abaconians are cousins—I hung up.

  The U.S. embassy in Nassau and the FBI had already posted a $10,000 reward for Colt’s capture. Apparently by taking his road show international, Colt had finally irked and embarrassed them enough to officially admit they were after him.

  The universal reaction to the news that Colt had gone to the Bahamas was “Dumb move.” I wasn’t so sure. Everyone said he’d be spotted immediately—and not because of his height. They thought a white kid in the Bahamas would stick out like a sugar cube in a cup of coffee. Not so. After the Spanish wiped out the Lucayans who originally inhabited the Bahamas, the Abacos were next settled by British Loyalists who fled the United States at the end of the Revolutionary War. Even today, when countrywide 85 percent of the Bahamas is black, half the residents of the Abacos are white.

  There’s also a population of expats in the Abacos, and about two thousand vacation homes that are mostly American owned. Parts of Great Abaco seem more like a suburb of Fort Lauderdale.

  Plus, it was peak tourist season. The Abacos aren’t like those Caribbean destinations that traditionally go nuts only in the winter. Many of its visitors are Floridians who can do easy weekends in the Bahamas all year. Families head over once school lets out for summer, and everyone who comes across is there to be on the water—boating, fishing, diving, and snorkeling, which are all at their peak in June and July.

  To make it even easier for Colt to go unnoticed, it was regatta week. Abaco marinas and anchorages were filled with visiting yachties, the Top-Sider shoes and Jimmy Buffett–dreams crowd. They gather every evening for big parties where people start out strangers but become fast friends over their shared love of boats and the sea—and the rum doesn’t hurt.

  If Colt played it cool and didn’t cause trouble, one more laid-back barefoot white guy would blend right into the beach party. He’d want to get a hat and some dark shades in case they put up his picture, but otherwise locals would assume he was just another tourist and stop to give him a ride if they saw him walking along the highway. If he chatted up some regatta folks at a marina or party, Colt would definitely end up invited aboard a boat for the next leg of the race.

  When it came to sleeping outside in July, though, I’d much prefer Colt’s Turtleback Mountain camp on Orcas to sweating and swatting on an Abaco beach or in its pine forest. But Colt could not have chosen a better place in the Bahamas if he planned on more couch squatting. Great Abaco has hundreds of vacation homes, most concentrated around Marsh Harbour and Treasure Cay, a big resort and real estate development twenty miles farther up the S.C. Bootle Highway.

  As for the rest of Colt’s MO, there are three airports on Great Abaco. Marsh Harbour and Treasure Cay always have small planes tied down out on the field. A Cessna with a full tank of gas could make it from Abaco to the Yucatán, Cuba, Turks and Caicos, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, or as far south down the Caribbean chain as the Virgin Islands. For boat selection, there are hundreds of all sizes and styles in the Abacos, both in marinas as well as moored at private docks.

  Arrayed against him at the moment, there was only a small contingent of RBPF officers in Marsh Harbour. Even though the Bahamian police announced that they were sure they would very quickly round up the young miscreant, it felt to me like Colt had done his homework. Either that or he was just very lucky in that he picked another welcoming, unsuspecting community.

  I BOUGHT A TICKET to Marsh Harbour that night, but the more I thought about it the more I worried that I’d wind up on an open-ended stay in the Abacos while Colt went surfing from villa to villa, unseen for months. Or, worse, I’d arrive just as he island-hopped somewhere else. One thing about the Out Islands is that most of them are “you can’t get there from here” destinations. Unless you have your own plane or boat—or steal one—getting between Out Islands can take all day or even require an overnight in Nassau.

  The next morning I called Tim Roberts at his Concept Boat Rentals office. There was definitely news, and Colt had decidedly not laid low and kept out of trouble. During the night, he’d basically done a Blood, Sweat and Beers tour, hitting Curly Tails Restaurant and Above & Below Abaco dive shop—both places I’d written about in my story. He’d even attempted to break into the hotel where we stayed. It felt like the Sports Illustrated cover curse.

  At Curly Tails—named after one of the local types of lizard—owner Alistair McDonald said that Colt broke in at 4:20 a.m. and strolled around the restaurant “as if he owned the place.” He calmly probed the dark restaurant with a flashlight until he spotted the three security cameras, and then turned them to the wall. He pulled the network cables out of McDonald’s modem and plugged in his laptop to get online. Other than ether, though, he didn’t
steal a thing.

  Colt did a bit more damage at the dive shop. Curly-haired scuba queen Kay Politano said he broke in sometime in the early morning. He neatly sliced three sides of a screen to get to the window, which he jimmied open. He took $156 out of the cash drawer and then pulled four shark T-shirts off their hangers, but threw three of them back. “Only one was missing,” said Kay. “I assume he was looking for his size.” The shop was filled with expensive scuba gear, but none of that was gone. Her computer hard drive had been pulled out of its slot and the Internet cable disconnected and left unplugged, but nothing else was disturbed. Detectives flown in from Nassau found a handprint on the window. “It was very big, long fingers, and very distinct,” said Kay. “It looked like someone had intentionally smacked their hand against the window to leave a calling card.”

  During the same night, the FedEx building, a bike shop, and the Abaco Cancer Society Thrift Shop were also broken into. A few pieces of clothing were taken from the thrift shop, and a first-aid kit went missing from another business.

  “It’s a lot of excitement for this little island,” said Kay. “Many of the people are expressing frustration, irritation, and anger that he’s here doing this.” But, she said, there was also a little of that pirate side of the Bahamas showing. “No one is condoning it, but a little twinkle creeps into the eyes of some people as they talk about it.”

  ONCE AGAIN, COLT ALSO induced a motherly response. The next call I made was to sixty-one-year-old Ruthie Key, who said that Colt had walked, barefoot, into her Bahamas Family Market on Monday, before the police started handing out flyers with his photo.

  Along with the Robertses, the Keys settled in the Abacos 230 years ago. The Keys have been boatbuilders and farmers, and Ruthie’s brother represents South Abaco as a member of Parliament. Ruthie’s late husband, Frank, was from Pittsburgh, and together they ran the friendly store where I always provisioned when boating in the Abacos. After Frank’s passing two years ago, Ruthie’s kids convinced her to go high-tech, adding computers and offering free Internet at the market. That’s what drew Colt.