Bob Friel - The Barefoot Bandit

Colt ran off the Romora grounds heading east. Kenny grabbed his phone and dialed Sergeant Hart to tell him the Bandit was loose on Briland. “Hart told me to go get my shotgun.”

Kenny also had the presence of mind to do something that severely limited Colt’s chances of escape. He ran back down to the dinghy dock, turned off the Whaler’s engine, and pocketed the key.

LANDLINES WERE STILL DOWN throughout the island, and cell service was spotty, so Sergeant Hart sent a runner to wake Chief Inspector Moss. Hart then grabbed his weapon and rushed down to Romora. Kenny met him at the edge of the resort and was just pointing out which way Colt had fled when they heard a scream. The men ran east and found a woman standing in the street crying. She’d come outside because of the shouting, and suddenly Colt appeared, gun in hand. He looked at her, she screamed, and Colt dashed off into the bushes next to her property. As Hart and Strachan ran up, the woman was trembling. She pointed to the trees. “I just saw him! Right through there!”

Kenny says they clearly saw the path where Colt parted the scrub. “If the police had a good canine or good experience, they would have got him right there in the bush… But they didn’t go in.”

Instead of rushing into the black woods, Hart began to gather as much manpower as possible. “He called up some other neighborhood crime fighters,” says Kenny. “They all have licensed guns, and he directed us to spread out and try to keep Bandit trapped in the woods.”

Hiding in the bushes, Colt was in his element, but also in his nightmare. He’d told his mom that a doctor said he had PTSD. “And Colt thinks it’s from the cops chasing him in the dark,” says Pam. “He said, ‘Every time I see a little light in the dark, I go insane.’”

Now Colt was crouched amid strange scrubby trees on an unfamiliar island three thousand miles from home with a rapidly growing group of armed men probing the woods with flashlights. He was also already bleeding. Instead of the soft moss and cedar branchlets of the Northwest, the ground here was sharp limestone rock, and the forest was filled with tearing thorns and scaly, tripping roots.

Colt had gotten his chase. Now he could see the lights and hear the voices and crackle of walkie-talkies as the men tried to pen him in. But he wasn’t ready to give up by a long shot.

The two-hundred-square-yard section of Briland backabush where Colt hid was connected to other patches of woods he could sneak through to reach any of nearly one hundred nearby homes. He could also stay under cover all the way across the island, which is only five hundred yards from bay to beach in this area. Or he could pull a Colt and try something no one would ever expect.

CHIEF INSPECTOR MOSS WOKE to the banging on his door and got the news about Colt. He knew he’d need more manpower to have any chance of corralling the outlaw who’d escaped so many police operations over the last two years. Neither his landline nor cell phone was working, so Moss pulled on a pair of jean shorts, threw his bulletproof vest over a muscle tee, grabbed his 9mm, and ran out of the house in his slippers.

Like everyone else on Briland, the police generally drive around in golf carts. Moss, though, had brought in an actual patrol car after taking over. He raced to Pink Sands, the island’s most famous resort, which had an Internet connection that didn’t rely on the phone lines. Moss booted up Vonage and called Nassau headquarters and Governor’s Harbour. The same VoIP technology Colt had been using to communicate during his time on the lam was now used to call in reinforcements to catch him.

Calls were relayed via radio to officers spread across Eleuthera, still out policing the late-night festivities. Eight of them hightailed it to Three Island Dock and commandeered a boat to carry them over to Briland.

By 1 a.m., Moss had sixteen men. He broke them into two teams. With no night-vision equipment and no dogs, his strategy was simply to contain Colt until sunrise, when he’d be easy to spot in the low scrub. Moss led Team One, which included unarmed members of the local Crime Watch. Their job was to seal off the island so Colt couldn’t escape. Team Two—all cops packing Uzi submachine guns, shotguns, and their 9mm sidearms—was ordered to continue patrolling the edges of the woods near Romora to keep Colt bottled up.

Dawn would break in five hours.

Moss and his team drove to the island’s other marinas, telling them “to remain on red alert” so Colt couldn’t grab another boat. They handed out more wanted flyers and gathered drinking water and bug juice for everyone involved in the operation.

“It seemed like half the island was up and around by now,” says Moss. Many came up to the chief inspector asking to be deputized. He told them to just keep their eyes open but not to put themselves in danger since this was an armed fugitive.

Word had gotten downtown, and all the guests had returned to Romora Bay. One of the boats in the marina, a ninety-two-footer named Picasso , lay berthed adjacent to the dock office. The captain of the $4 million aluminum yacht checked the footage from its surveillance cameras and found images of Colt running back and forth.

Kenny Strachan went back to his post, patrolling the resort, now with his shotgun strapped across his back. Time dragged on, with no sightings and no action for more than two and a half hours. It was the dead of a dark, moonless night. Everyone was tired and bleary-eyed. Talk among the cops dropped to occasional whispers, then to nothing. Kenny walked out onto the dock and sat down.

At 2:45 a.m., Chief Inspector Moss got a report of a possible escape boat on Pink Sand Beach. He and his team drove across the island to check it out. As soon as they left, Colt made his move.

Kenny and another guy were on the dock near the marina office, discussing whether Colt might be able to sneak back and take one of Romora’s boats…

“Just then a white guy come up and say he heard a boat startin’,” says Kenny. “We listen and suddenly hear boat engines bog down and go WHOOOOO like when you go full throttle. We start yellin’, ‘Dat’s him! Dat’s him!’”

COLT HAD MANAGED TO creep from the woods east of Romora Bay and through the cordon of Team Two cops. He crossed the resort grounds and then made it out onto the dock. At the farthest corner of the marina lay the Lady BJ . The owners of this seventy-six-foot yacht—a Miami real estate investor and his family—were fast asleep belowdecks with the generator thrumming and air conditioners blowing. They never heard Colt climb down off the dock onto the thirty-two-foot Intrepid they’d towed over from Key Largo as their sport boat. The keys were on board, and Colt fired up the pair of 275-horsepower Mercury outboards.

Colt pulled out of the slip and pushed the throttles forward. With a full tank of gas aboard what the Bahamians would definitely call a “go-fast boat,” Colt had the range to get to Nassau or Cat Island or Rum Cay or Long Island, or to lose himself amid the hundreds of Exuma Cays—all before daylight. If he could just get out of the bay.

Colt opened her up and headed south toward the deep cut between Harbour Island and Whale Point that led to open water.

SERGEANT HART AND THE cops of Team Two ran down to the dock with guns at the ready, but Colt’s boat had already disappeared into the darkness. The only chance to catch him was to find a boat of their own. Hart asked the Picasso ’s owners if the RBPF could borrow their sport boat and their captain, New Orleans native Ron Billiot. The owners said yes. The Picasso ’s go-fast was the owners’ son Jordan’s Dr. J , a twenty-seven-foot Boston Whaler Outrage powered by twin 250s. With one or two people aboard, this boat could top 50 mph, just like Colt’s Intrepid. However, Sergeant Hart, three RBPF officers heavy with body armor and weapons, Jordan, and another visiting boater also got aboard. Billiot fired up the engines, tossed off the lines, and headed out into the dark bay. They were already about four minutes behind Colt, and all the extra weight meant there’d be no way the Whaler would ever catch the Intrepid in a chase. All they could hope for was a lucky break.