The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  “He came in and very politely asked to use the Internet,” says Ruthie. “I told him I was sorry but the computers were down.” Colt noticed that Ruthie’s son had a laptop online and told her that if the Internet worked he could use his own computer. “He said he hadn’t been in touch with his mom for months, and he also wanted to call his girlfriend. He had a great smile and his eyes… very pretty, like to just swallow you up. I said sure, and we set him up at one of the tables.”

  Colt pulled a laptop and headphones out of his backpack and spent an hour making Internet phone calls. One of Ruthie’s granddaughters, a five-year-old, was running around the store. “I said to him, ‘I hope she’s not disturbing you.’ And he said, ‘Oh no, she’s not bothering me at all, just let her play.’ He was kind, and very nice, very nice… I never would have suspected him of doing anything wrong. Never. If he told me he was hungry I would have cooked him a meal.”

  Colt took his time and finished his calls, then bought a deli sandwich, said good-bye, and left. “Then the police came in with a poster and told me to call if I saw this guy,” said Ruth. “I looked at the picture and said, ‘What?’”

  Investigators swarmed in. “I told them I don’t really have anything to say, I don’t want to get involved.” When they left, Ruthie says her main feeling was fear—for Colt. “They’re out there with guns, and Lord, if they find him and he tries to protest… I’m afraid they’re going to shoot him.”

  BACK IN THE UNITED STATES, Pam the quote machine did not disappoint. She said she was glad Colt was out of the country, “the further the better. I’m glad he’s able to enjoy beautiful islands, but they extradite. It doesn’t help matters at all.” She also wanted a message relayed to Colt, reprimanding him, not for stealing a plane, but for stealing the wrong kind: “Only take twin-engine planes, and carry a parachute. That’s the rules.”

  BY TUESDAY, THE EAST Coast media had descended on Marsh Harbour—“they on our ass,” as one Bahamian told me. Another Bahamian friend said he could tell something big was going on because for the first time in recent memory, “the police have actually left their station.” With Colt this active, the government decided to reinforce the RBPF with the RBDF. Tommy Turnquest, Bahamas national security minister, who announced, “If he is there to be caught, our police will catch him.”

  Assistant Commissioner Hulan Hanna of the RBPF said he was locking down Great Abaco. “We have taken steps to neutralize the areas he may try to use to leave the island.” Bahamian cops and soldiers flooded in to keep watch on the airports and marinas. Leaflets with Colt’s photo papered the island. The game was on.

  ON ORCAS, IT FELT like it was going to be all over before I even made it to Seattle to catch a plane east. I was packing when Sandi came home early from work, sick. My selfish first thought was that the last thing I needed was to catch her cold before a long trip. But then her fever soared. I’d never seen her this ill. I changed all my tickets, pushing the trip to Marsh Harbour back a day. I called Tim Roberts again. He said nothing new had happened, but more police were running around. There was also, he said, some local vigilante action, “soon come” style. “A bunch of guys at the bar were talking about getting together to go look for him, maybe snag the reward,” he said. “But they were disappointed the FBI was only offering ten thousand dollars,” so they ordered another round.

  I warned Tim to keep an eye on his boat and said I’d see him on Thursday.

  That evening, a bartender said Colt—barefoot and with a cap pulled down on his head—walked into a Marsh Harbour sports bar, ordered a Kalik beer, drank it, and left after five minutes. Another sighting had him stopping by to use a bar’s restroom, and one young woman later claimed she had talked with Colt and that he’d told her who he was. None of the sightings was confirmed.

  First thing Wednesday morning, my phone rang. It was Tim, but something was wrong. “Bob… ,” he said in a hoarse whisper, then paused. I immediately thought he was going to tell me that Colt was dead.

  After an agonizing few moments of silence, Tim said, “I can’t talk louder because there’s a TV crew in here sniffing around for information.”

  My heart started beating again. He said he’d just heard that a boat had disappeared from the marina. Boat theft is not unknown in the Abacos, so that didn’t necessarily mean it was Colt. I asked him what kind.

  “Forty-five Sea Ray,” he whispered.

  New and tricked out, a forty-five-foot Sea Ray Sundancer is a $750,000 sex bomb of a boat.

  “That’s him,” I said. “Any idea where it went?” I could hear Tim shuffling the phone around before he said one word into cupped hands: “Preacher’s.”

  I thanked him for the tip and hung up, laughing. Colt was writing his own story and here was some more heavy-handed symbolism. Preacher’s wasn’t in the Abacos. It was the name of a cave at the north end of Eleuthera, the next island heading southeast down the Bahamas chain. The Lucayans named it Cigatoo, but again the Spanish wiped them out and the island was uninhabited in 1648 when a group of English came journeying south from Bermuda in search of a new homeland that would offer freedom from the Crown’s religious mandates. As they sailed toward Cigatoo, they were blown into a treacherous stretch of stony corals, a reef called the Devil’s Backbone. They shipwrecked, but were able to make it to the beach.

  As the soggy pilgrims waded inland through the seagrapes, they found that Providence had brought them ashore near a large limestone cavern, which provided shelter. It became their holy place. They used Preacher’s Cave for religious services and, as the Lucayans before them, as a burial ground.

  The pilgrims rechristened Cigatoo “Eleuthera,” a derivation of the Greek word for “freedom.”

  That Colt would choose as part of his great escape to run to an island named “freedom,” and then land at the very same spot and in the same manner as the Bahamas’ first liberty seekers was storybook imagery.

  It was also a very ballsy trip. He had to start a boat and sneak out of a crowded marina that was supposed to be under surveillance. Then he had to navigate the shallows around Marsh Harbour’s Eastern Shores before running about twenty miles south through the Sea of Abaco. At Little Harbour, he was forced to leave the protection of the fringing islands, flushed out into the deep blue. As Colt steered the Sea Ray into the open Atlantic, he motored directly past the luxury resort where the dreaded paparazzi—in the form of American network TV crews—were staying.

  I spoke with friends who were sailing to Eleuthera that day, and they reported that sea conditions were very rough. Colt had a lot of boat under him, one capable of doing more than thirty knots, but he still had to pound his way across fifty-six miles of open ocean over thirteen thousand feet deep, with big swells rolling in on his port beam the entire trip. It must have been one hell of a ride.

  AS SOON AS I got off the phone with Tim, I changed my tickets again, now Orcas/Seattle/Houston/Fort Lauderdale/North Eleuthera, with an overnight in Seattle. Sandi, though, was even sicker. She went to the local doc, and I pushed my trip back another day in case I had to take her to a mainland hospital.

  Fortunately, other than the Abacos, the place I’d been to most often in the Bahamas was Eleuthera. I started making calls to local friends, but no one had heard anything about a stolen boat or the Barefoot Bandit. Even police officers I spoke with didn’t know anything about it yet. Then reports started coming in of Colt sightings—but these were back in the Abacos. He was seen in the woods, he was seen on the street, he was back hanging in the Marsh Harbour bars.

  More media poured into the Abacos and the government sent even more reinforcements. The police patrolled Marsh Harbour with shotguns and German shepherds while the RBDF strode the streets with M4 assault rifles. The assistant police commissioner, Glenn Miller, announced, “We are intensifying our search and we are going to be relentless until we catch him.” Each new rumor sent armed troops up and down Great Abaco.

  I checked Eleuthera again—still dead quiet. Then eve
n more unconfirmed Colt sightings came in from the Abacos. Picking the wrong island would be very expensive, both time- and money-wise. I reserved a second set of plane tickets, and now held them for Marsh Harbour and Eleuthera.

  Sandi started a course of mega-strength antibiotics, but continued to get worse. Neither of us slept that night, and at 3 a.m., I rebooked both sets of tickets, moving them back one more time. Now I was set to leave Orcas Friday afternoon and get to the Bahamas on Saturday evening, July 10.

  By late Thursday evening, Sandi’s fever finally broke. It felt safe for me to go. But where? All of the media and law enforcement remained on Great Abaco. My gut, though, said Eleuthera.

  I TOOK A KENMORE seaplane to Seattle on Friday, and sat in a hotel room until 3:30 a.m., when I went to Sea-Tac for my next flight. As a major handicap for someone who’s spent a career traveling, I can’t sleep on airplanes. I was bleary-eyed by the time we landed in Fort Lauderdale. I went online at the airport and read the newswires that declared the trail of the Barefoot Bandit had gone “cold.” Glenn Miller was now backpedaling on whether Colt was even in his country, saying the only reason his police force suspected he was in the Bahamas was because the U.S. authorities had told them so.

  * * *

  Although I did take a twin-engine plane for my flight over the water to the Bahamas, Colt’s had more advanced avionics and much more leg room—plus he got to skip dealing with the TSA. He also had a much better view out his windshield. Minutes after takeoff, we left the French-manicured Florida coast and flew across the soft blue line marking the edge of the fabled Gulf Stream. The Stream churns north, forming a fast-moving moat between Florida and the Bahamas, though it’s never been an obstacle to pirates, bootleggers, or drug runners, and certainly wasn’t a barrier to a boy with a plane.

  Ever since Christopher Columbus first got New World sand in his stockings on an Out Island beach, the Bahamas have played host to a long line of outsize characters. For a short eighteenth-century stretch, the Bahamas capital, Nassau, was even declared the pirate republic and run by the likes of Blackbeard, Calico Jack, and Anne Bonny. During the silliness of Prohibition, Captain Bill “the Real” McCoy ran Irish and Canadian whiskey from the Bahamas to the States to slake thirsts and stock the speakeasies. Hemingway pounded typewriter keys, rum, and marlin in Bimini during the 1930s. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the pirate republic rose once again, this time fueled by Carlos Lehder’s Colombian blow and Medellin millions. Out Island airstrips transshipped an estimated 80 percent of all the cocaine inhaled by the United States during those years later caricatured in Miami Vice. Aviator and recluse Howard Hughes spent his last years holed up in a Grand Bahama hotel. Gary Hart’s Bahamian shenanigans aboard the aptly named yacht Monkey Business blew his presidential chances. And so on.

  There’s something about the Bahamas. Now a nineteen-year-old who’d become the world’s most famous airplane pirate and, for the moment, its most famous living outlaw, was having his moment in the sun.

  TOWERING THUNDERHEADS FORCED US to fly a serpentine course toward Eleuthera. The blooming cumulonimbus clouds rose like slow-motion nuclear explosions in the subtropical summer heat. They have a severe beauty from a distance, but fliers respect them for the thermal turbulence and deadly downdrafts. Whenever our pilot couldn’t totally avoid the outer edges of the clouds, the little plane rocked and shuddered.

  Coming around one great anvil cloud, a shallow bank topped by the Berry Islands came into view. And there it was, the vision that has blown away so many when they first see it: the watercolors of the Bahamas. What was Colt’s reaction, an evergreen kid suddenly engulfed by these shocking blues? Presumably the same as mine and everyone else’s: awestruck. The sea is so clear that sunlight bounces off the white sand bottom, soaks up a particular tint of turquoise depending on water depth, and then beams it back into the sky to coat the bottoms of clouds as they float across the flats.

  Channels and cuts and currents flowing between the small cays sweep and swirl the seafloor into fantastical designs, with each change in depth reflecting a singular blue so that from the air the islands appear set amid elaborate sand paintings.

  Old Bahama boat hands navigate by color, reading the dozens of blues and greens that reveal sandbars, grass beds, and coral reefs. A subtle change in shade can mean the difference between safe passage and shipwreck. Past the Berrys, the water dropped precipitously from Tiffany to ultramarine as we flew out over the fourteen-thousand-foot-deep Great Bahama Canyon, the abyssal valley Colt crossed in the Sea Ray. Then Eleuthera appeared.

  Colt joked about having been to the Bahamas when he came back to school tanned from a stretch in juvie. Something put these islands in his mind. For me, it was Hemingway. For Colt, it might have been his James Bond fixation. Thunderball and five other Bond films were at least partly filmed in the Bahamas.

  Along with a desire to visit tropical islands, both Colt and I grew up wanting adventure. Neither of us was congenitally rich, and apparently neither had the patience to work fifty weeks a year in exchange for two weeks of thrills. My solution was to become a travel writer and photographer. What options did Colt have once he dropped out of school? Pilot? Becoming a private pilot doesn’t earn money, it costs money. You need a job to support your flying habit.

  Becoming a commercial pilot would have given him both the adventure of flying and a job. A neighbor here on Orcas, Grant, is a great model for someone like Colt. Grant grew up obsessed with planes and flying. So he worked at a gas station every day after school. Every time he got enough cash together, he’d pay for another hour of flight instruction. He slowly earned his way through his ratings and now he’s a top pilot for Alaska Airlines. Of course he also had to make his way through college: commercial pilots without bachelor’s degrees are almost nonexistent, another big hurdle for Colt.

  “This kid could have been Top Gun if he’d gone the right way,” says Grant. “Out of the people like me, those totally into flying all their lives and who actually became airline pilots, probably 90 percent would have killed ourselves attempting to do what he did—flying without instruction and landing off-field three times. It’s a huge waste of talent.”

  A WONDERFUL SIDE BENEFIT of what I do is that over the years I’ve been able to bring family members on some of my travels, particularly my father. Together, we’ve snorkeled with humpback whales, rappelled into caves filled with the skeletons of human sacrifices, hiked among grizzly bears, and had many other adventures—including several in the Bahamas. Seeing the blue-on-blue water again prompted memories of those trips and even much earlier times, like my dad teaching me to fish and squeezing us into a tiny, inflatable Kmart raft—basically a pool toy because that’s all the boat he could afford at the time—for a trip down the Delaware, our first great adventure.

  Somewhere down there was a teenage boy who never had that. A kid with a lot of the same interests but no steady male role model to share the fun and teach him the life lessons that go along with learning how to handle boats as well as bullies. What would I have done if I didn’t have that man who came home from work every night to do what good fathers do, however imperfectly? My parents didn’t have a dime to spare for a lot of years, but they were always there, unconditionally. To grow up without them modeling responsible behavior and the rewards of hard work, I can’t imagine how I would have ended up. My own strong tendency toward risk taking got me into enough trouble coming from a good, stable home.

  I felt a sudden pang of… embarrassment, maybe guilt. My blog that Colt had been reading linked to collections of my stories, including at least a couple of those father-son Bahamas-bonding trips. I wondered if Colt read them and, if so, how they made him feel.

  THE PILOT REDUCING POWER to start our descent brought me back to the present. Another threatening cloud dominated the view out my window, dropping a curtain of rain across the north end of Eleuthera and its satellite islands: Spanish Wells, Royal, Russell, and Harbour Island. Suddenly a rainbow arced o
ut of the thunderhead. I took a picture just to prove it wasn’t a sleep-deprived hallucination. It had to be a good omen for somebody.

  By the time we touched down, the shower had scrubbed the air fresh and moved on, but it was still hot enough—about 90 degrees—that wisps of steam rose saunalike from the tarmac. It was 6:30, p.m., July 10, Bahamas Independence Day.

  There’s a tiny police substation at the North Eleuthera Airport. Inside the dim room semi-cooled by a rattling air conditioner, a female officer sat behind a desk while a male cop sat opposite, fussing over an imaginary spot on the shiniest shoes I’d ever seen. A wanted poster with Colt’s picture hung on the wall. I pointed to it and asked if they had any evidence that he was on the island. I got a couple of noncommittal grunts until I pressed the question. Officer Shiny Shoes looked me up and down, then shared a nod with the other cop. “All inquiries as to current investigations should be made through the public affairs office in Nassau.” I asked about the boat at Preacher’s. “All inquiries as to… ”

  I walked back outside. Mine had been the last flight in and all the other passengers were gone. Two taxi drivers who hadn’t snagged fares sat on a bench solving the world’s problems. I went over to get the skinny.

  While I was talking to the taxi guys, Kenny Strachan was speaking to God.

  “I PRAYED THAT DAY, talkin’ to the Lord, and He told me that the Barefoot Bandit was coming here to me,” says fifty-three-year-old Strachan. Born in Nassau, Kenny lived in New York for fifteen years, where he learned to install kitchen equipment. He came back to the Bahamas in the late eighties and worked at the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island, but eventually decided to try the slower pace of the Out Islands. In 2005, he moved to Harbour Island, the toniest of the Bahamas, famed for its pink sand beach and the fashion models and celebrities who pose and repose on it.