The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  “What was taken?”

  “Water, Gatorade, snacks… ”

  “Any rum?”

  “Nope.”

  Colt.

  “I know he was watching TV, too,” said Denaldo. “I came in the morning and the remotes and my chair were moved.”

  Maybe Colt sat down to check to see if he was still making news. Denaldo pointed out the section of screened wall cut out so the Bandit could climb into the patio. After that, he said, Colt jimmied a deadbolt to get into the rum shop. He said that the same night, someone had also hit the administrative building at the center of the dock.

  Denaldo, who lives across the water on Briland, said he’d also spotted Colt. “I saw him when I was closing up Wednesday night about ten o’clock. He was just about to go into the water. He stood up a little when we saw him—tall guy, slim, just shorts, bareback. The water taxi man was saying that the night before, someone trifle with the boats. So we look at this guy and no, no, not him, he wouldn’t trifle with the boats, didn’t look that way. This is just a tourist, just a tourist having fun. You know: love yourself. When we drove off, he went into the water.”

  When the police came out to investigate the break-in at Coakley’s, they never mentioned the Barefoot Bandit and suspected the burglar was just a local troublemaker.

  I ordered another Kalik and asked Denaldo what exactly had been taken. He pointed to cartons of bar snacks on top of the drink fridge. “He got Honey Buns and some of the Planters Go Packs, but his favorite was the Snickers.”

  Ah, Snickers, the candy bar that fueled fifty burglaries. If he lived through this, I could see Colt’s first endorsement deal: “It’s tough staking out airports and marinas all night, so when I need an energy boost, I pull out a Snickers.”

  “How about the drinks?” I asked.

  “He took a few bottles of water and a couple Gatorades,” said Denaldo. “Oh,” he suddenly added, “and a few Heinekens and Kaliks.”

  Regardless of whether Colt actually took the beers (which I kinda doubt), it was very interesting that he hadn’t emptied the place out. Why not fill his entire backpack with Snickers and water? If he’d been willing to carry a boat battery he could certainly handle a dozen bottles of Fierce Grape Gatorade to keep himself hydrated, and more Snickers to keep himself topped up on nougaty goodness. To me, that meant either he already had a campsite or an empty home stocked with food and water… or else he was supremely confident in his ability to forage what he needed whenever he needed it.

  I looked up at all the candy bars and pastries Colt had left behind. “He’s going to come back here,” I told Denaldo.

  He didn’t seem concerned. They’d put up some plywood over the one torn screen, but that left another forty feet of patio screen for Colt to slip through. And he’d already proved that the door lock was no contest. From Colt’s experience over the last few days, he must have thought things shut down early on the dock, leaving him plenty of dark hours to come back and raid Coakley’s and maybe take another shot at a taxi boat if he hadn’t found one elsewhere.

  Tonight would be different, though, because of all the parties happening and people moving back and forth among islands. I wondered if Colt knew that.

  I finished my beer and looked at the rum display. This would be a fine place to wait for Colt. I’ve spent many amiable afternoons that stretched into pleasantly lost evenings inside Bahamian rum shops. You order a bottle for your table and the bartender keeps you supplied with Cokes or fruit juice mixers. It’s one of the best ways to meet people because, like pubs in Ireland, Caribbean rum shops serve as the social centers of every small village.

  Petagay broke my reverie, saying she was starving. I bought her a Honey Bun.

  “No thanks,” she said. Cell service had popped up momentarily and her phone buzzed in a couple of messages. Two stories were floating around the island. “Some people are saying a boat was stolen today down in Governor’s Harbour. Others say a boat is missing from Harbour Island.” Denaldo added that he, too, had heard about a boat theft in Governor’s.

  It was close to 10 p.m. Governor’s Harbour was a forty-mile drive south. Harbour Island was a ferry ride across the bay. Both rumors, though, said only that boats were missing. That could mean Colt had found his long-range craft and was already on his way farther down the chain to Cat Island or the Exumas. Both were a day’s travel by scheduled flights even though they were only twenty and thirty miles, respectively, from the southern tip of Eleuthera. And there was no way for me to even start a trip tonight. These were also just island rumors. I suddenly felt the sleeplessness of the last few days catching up with me. Even more, I realized I was hungry, too, and yeah, you’d have to be desperate to be in the Bahamas on Independence Day and settle for Honey Buns and Snickers bars. I turned to Petagay. “Let’s go to the Bluff.”

  As I paid our tab, Denaldo remembered one more detail about the burglary.

  “Oh yeah… he also took the emergency light.” He pointed to a spot on the wall where the battery still hung, part of a system designed to pop on whenever the power went out, which was frequently. The lights had been unplugged and taken. The grid had intermittingly blinked off Wednesday night, so Colt could have just been ensuring he wasn’t suddenly lit up inside Coakley’s. But why take the lights?

  Another explanation for Colt’s machinations aboard the taxi boats suddenly made sense. By MacGyvering together Ricky Ricardo’s boat battery and Coakley’s fixture, Colt could create a powerful spotlight to illuminate a campsite or cave, or even to use on the front of a boat to help him navigate unfamiliar waters. His portable GPS worked well for charting general courses, but depending on the exact model—as well as meteorological conditions—it might be accurate only to within ten or fifteen yards. Like many, many boaters before him, Colt had already learned a tough lesson on the Devil’s Backbone: if you couldn’t see the myriad rocks, reefs, and sandbars in the Bahamas’ shallows with your own eyes, being off course by just a few feet could mean the difference between smooth sailing and coming to grief hard aground. If he was going to be boating after dark, a light would help him read the water in those shallow areas where just a couple hours of tidal rise separated a safe passage from bellying up to a sandbar.

  THE TAXI DRIVERS HAD been right: the Bluff was definitely the place to be that night. We heard the music and smelled the barbecues a block away. People swarmed the waterfront, piling in front of the food and drink stands that lined the settlement’s large concrete dock. High-energy calypso pumped from the walls of speakers you find at even the smallest Bahamian public parties. At the booze booth I ordered a rum and Coke in an attempt to maintain the island vibe and stay awake at the same time. Petagay and I then sat on the seawall digging into huge plates of grilled lobster and cracked conch with mounds of peas ’n’ rice on the side.

  We’d just finished eating when the the Falcons, one of the Bahamas’ best party bands, came onstage and kicked into a cover of “Harbour Island Song,” which celebrates pink sand on your feet and dancing in the street.

  The crowd pressing toward the stage parted for small groups of Bahamian women in impossibly tight jeans who wanted to get their booties bouncing. Then everything suddenly went silent… except for the drummer, who kept thumping the bass. Power to the sound system had gone out, cutting all the mics and guitars. I took the opportunity to sidle up to an RBPF chief inspector who stood out from the crowd in his bright tunic, red-sashed cap, and swagger stick. I started to say hello but double-taked because hidden behind the six-foot-three well-fed inspector was a scrawny patrolman about a foot shorter whose cartoonishly large round motorcycle helmet made him look like Marvin the Martian.

  I nodded to Marvin, who stood stiffly at attention, ignoring me. I looked up at the chief inspector, wished him a happy Independence Day, then said, “I hear the Barefoot Bandit may be in the area.”

  He looked me up and down, then finally said, “We have that information,” and he made it clear that was all I was going
to get.

  “EVERYTHING FOR US AT that point was just information, information, information,” says another chief inspector, Roston Moss. “There was only suspicion, no proof that this individual had landed on Eleuthera.”

  At forty-two, Moss is already a twenty-five-year veteran of the Royal Bahamian Police Force. He’s spent most of his career in Nassau, home to the Bahamas’ meanest streets. At the end of February 2010, however, he was reassigned to Harbour Island. Normally, Briland, like Orcas, has a sergeant as its top cop, but there’d been a recent surge in crime, primarily what Kenny Strachan calls “looting.” In just the week before Moss arrived, the tiny island suffered eight burglaries. The night after he got there, robbers broke into an American tourist’s hotel room and hit him with a cutlass (the pirate-era name still used in the Bahamas for a machete). Since Harbour Island is the Bahamas’ prime destination for the rich and famous, it was extremely important to the country’s overall tourist industry to quell the crime wave and ensure it maintained its pastel-colored, celebri-quaint reputation. So Nassau sent the big man—Chief Inspector Moss stands six feet two inches, 295 pounds—to take over the station.

  To assist him, Moss had eight regular officers and five reserve officers. They provided twenty-four-hour policing for the 1.3-square-mile island (compared to forty-square-mile Camano and fifty-seven-square-mile Orcas, both of which have fewer cops). As soon as he took charge, Moss also created a citizens advisory board to enhance the local crime watch.

  Moss followed the events on Great Abaco after the stolen plane landed and knew about the boat found off Preacher’s. It wasn’t until Thursday, though, after the incidents and sightings at Three Island Dock, that he felt there was enough evidence the Barefoot Bandit was in his area to plan a search.

  “On Friday, the ninth, at eight a.m., myself and seven officers started the manhunt in North Eleuthera,” says Moss. He split his men into two teams. Four drove around the top of the main island while Moss and three others searched by sea in a “go-fast boat,” scouting the beaches and rocky shorelines of Spanish Wells, Russell Island, Current Island, and Harbour Island.

  “We were looking for footprints, a tent, a boat out of place… ,” says Moss. “But there was no sign of him.” Moss called off the search at 7 p.m. Friday, and resumed it Saturday morning, Independence Day. At five that afternoon, after again finding nothing suspicious, Moss stopped by the homecoming party at the Bluff to grab something to eat before heading back across to Briland.

  AFTER NEARLY TEN MINUTES of solo boom, boom, booming, the Falcons’ drummer was drenched with sweat and looked about to pass out. I felt the same way. The cell towers were dead again. The only rumor we could scare up from anyone at the Bluff was another sketchy report about “the Bandit.” In the Bahamas, where so many people are often barefoot, almost everyone dropped that part of his nickname. The Bandit had maybe been spotted and maybe jumped off a boat and swam away. Didn’t sound likely.

  A sudden screech of feedback and an electrician jumping three feet into the air after sticking something somewhere it shouldn’t have gone told me that the music wasn’t coming back for a while. Worse, the line at the drink booth was now twenty minutes deep.

  Decision time. Whereas I’d made pretty good gut calls up to this point, I now made one of the worst.

  I could take a chance and go over to Briland, maybe wind up having to spend the night on the beach if I couldn’t scare up a hotel room. We could go back to Coakley’s and wait until it closed and hope Colt showed up. I was going on thirty hours with no sleep, though, and if he did show, either my snoring would scare him away or I’d wake up with a bare foot drawn on my forehead. Option three won: go crash on Petagay’s couch.

  We had people all over Eleuthera and the surrounding islands keyed up to call us if anything broke. Besides, what were the chances something big would happen in the next few hours? My gut told me he was still around and wasn’t planning on going anywhere tonight.

  I hate being half right.

  WE SWUNG BY THE airport on the way home. The police substation was empty, closed down. There was no security at all besides a chest-high chain-link fence along the runway. Commuter planes sat close to the tiny, dark terminal. Private planes—at least a dozen, including seven that Colt could fly—were farther down the tarmac. No lights, no police, no guards, and the world’s most successful plane thief somewhere within a few miles.

  One of the planes on the field was a Cessna 400 that looked ready to leap into the air if you just tickled its tail. Suddenly I felt a strange urge to hop the fence, jump in, and take off.

  At Petagay’s, I lay sweating beneath a ceiling fan with Bella’s dog, Jazzy, beating her tail against the couch as I fell asleep petting her.

  BACK AT THE BLUFF, they finally fixed the sound system and Homecoming cranked up again. Ferry boats carried so many Brilanders over to Three Island Dock to go to the party that the couple of taxi vans still working couldn’t keep up with the flow. A crowd gathered near Coakley’s waiting their turn. One of the dock staff from Romora Bay Resort, nineteen-year-old Mauris Jonassaint, stood at the end of the dock talking to a friend while they waited for a ride. Suddenly they heard a boat engine coming toward them. The water was pitch-black except for the reflection of lights from Harbour Island, two miles away. Mauris says he figured it was a boat coming to pick someone up, but he could tell it was moving way too fast through the shallows.

  A small white hull appeared out of the darkness headed right for the dock. Everyone started waving it off, shouting, “Whoa! Slow down!” When the driver got close enough to see that there was a crowd of people there, he immediately spun the boat around and started back for open water. “But he didn’t slow down,” says Mauris. “Just went back out at full speed. Mauris and the others watched, dumbfounded, as the tall white guy, in a light T-shirt and camouflage shorts, drove the little boat aground on a submerged rock within sight of the pier.

  Colt had busted into a vacation home at Whale Point, a finger of North Eleuthera that points at Harbour Island from across an 850-foot-wide inlet. He broke in looking for one thing: a key to the shiny new thirteen-foot Boston Whaler Super Sport sitting on a trailer outside. He found it inside the garage, then muscled the half ton of boat and motor into the water and started its forty-horsepower Mercury outboard. The unsinkable $10,000 Whaler, designed for use as a yacht tender or as an all-purpose sport boat, wasn’t big enough to get Colt farther down the Bahamas chain, but it was plenty of boat for buzzing between the islands at the top of Eleuthera.

  After running aground, Colt was able to rock the Whaler free and then drove off a ways. Then he did something that set the course for his foreseeable future: he decided to turn around and come back.

  Colt motored up and stopped the boat about twenty feet away from the pier, then shut off his engine. Mauris says Colt was laughing. “I asked him what he was doing.”

  Colt looked up at Mauris and said, “Did you hear about the plane I crashed?”

  “That was you do that?”

  “Yeah,” admitted Colt.

  “What’s your name?” asked Mauris.

  “Colton Harris.”

  Mauris says Colt was very friendly, and as they started talking, he sat back and put his bare feet up on the gunwale. Mauris asked why he’d come to the Bahamas. Colt told him that he couldn’t get any farther. “He said he didn’t have enough fuel to go to Cuba.”

  Colt answered every question Mauris and his friend asked. He told them he was from Camano Island and still planned on getting to Cuba. “I asked him how he’s getting there and he said, ‘Plane.’ My buddy was playing with him and said he wanted to go. But Bandit said, ‘No, I fly alone.’”

  Mauris told Colt that there were plenty of planes at the airport for him to choose from, but apparently the Bandit had already checked out the flying stock. He shook his head, saying, “I don’t drive old planes.”

  While they were chatting, the current carried the little boat toward the dock. Ma
uris and his friend knew about the $10,000 FBI reward and watched as the boat came closer and closer. When he was just about within jumping range, though, Colt calmly reached over and started the engine. “He moved out to about twenty feet away and shut it back down… and he was laughing.”

  Mauris asked Colt if he was hungry. “He said, ‘No, I’m fine.’ And we asked him if he wanted some liquor, and he said, ‘I don’t drink and drive.’”

  The Bahamian then mimed a toke and asked if Colt was interested in a little weed, but Colt just laughed and said no. As the Whaler again drifted in close to the dock, Mauris asked, “Why don’t you come up here and talk?” Colt nodded to the large group of men standing off a little ways. “You see all those guys? You think I’m crazy?” Then he slowly motored the boat back out of reach and stopped again.

  “He was just chillin’,” says Mauris, who nonetheless remembered the “armed and dangerous” part of the police warning.

  “Do you have a weapon?” he asked.

  Colt smiled. “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”

  “I was like, yeah, he’s packin’. So there’s this big steel pole I was standing next to and I moved a little behind it.”

  Mauris says the conversation had gone on for more than half an hour when Colt started to get agitated. “I ask him if he miss his mom, and he’s like, ‘Yeah,’ so I said, ‘Then why don’t you go back home?’”

  “Too many cops,” said Colt, who then asked, “So where are your cops?”

  “We don’t have that much cops,” answered Mauris.

  “Well, call them,” said Colt. “I’m bored… I want to get chased.”

  Naturally, Mauris first thought Colt must be joking. “But then he started to get mad, saying, ‘Call the cops, call the cops! I want to get chased! For real, call them! Call them!’”

  Mauris tried to calm Colt down. “I’m like, ‘There ain’t no cops, man.’”