Bob Friel - The Barefoot Bandit

They took Colt to the Briland police station and handcuffed him to a chair. Moss sent word to Nassau that they’d successfully captured the Barefoot Bandit. He pressed his superiors to come get Colt as soon as possible because he didn’t have the resources on Harbour Island to handle crowd control and any “media frenzy” that might occur. “We just wanted him off the island,” says Moss. A nurse came to check out the scratches on Colt’s legs and feet while investigators gathered around. They hoped that, like many fugitives, Colt might be so relieved it was all over and that he’d survived, that he’d have loose lips.

Colt remained eerily calm and cool, though. He spoke politely to the officers but was careful not to implicate himself. “He was very evasive,” says Moss. The cops offered him food and drink: “No, I’m good,” he said. They brought out a photo of Spider Miller’s Cessna 400 nose down in the Great Abaco muck and asked Colt about it. “I never saw that plane before in my life,” he said. The officers laughed and began bantering, trying to get Colt to respond to some good cop–good cop.

“How you crashed if you a good pilot?” one of them laughed.

“You missed the runway, eh? You overshoot?”

One of the cops was a licensed pilot who tried flattery. “He didn’t crash… He did a good job. He meant to put it there. That plane didn’t break up, it didn’t explode… I couldn’t even do better myself with plenty years of experience.”

The other cops added the chorus, saying it’d been an excellent job. One said, “He land in the mud… That mud saved his neck.”

Colt laughed along with the police, but got testy when he noticed an officer was filming the interview on a cell phone. “Get that camera out of my face,” he said.

“Where you get that gun?” an officer asked him.

“I don’t remember,” said Colt.

IN A SEPARATE ROOM, detectives opened Colt’s backpack and laid out the contents. Along with a black nylon shaving kit, there were Ziplocs that had protected his important papers. These were the things he’d carried with him thousands of miles across the country, through all the campsites and chases and midnight boat crossings.

Inside one plastic bag was a series of drawings. Colt had been designing his fleet of future aircraft. One depicted an ultramodern helicopter with an enclosed tail rotor. Another showed a single-propeller plane on floats—larger than a Beaver and with similar lines to a Pilatus, it looked like a melding of the two planes in Chuck Stewart’s hangar, where Colt had spent so much time. Another craft was a twin-tailed wonder, a civilian spacecraft. The drawings showed a definite design flair. And all of the aircraft were marked with the name of Colt’s dream company: Phoenix Aerospace.

In the other Ziploc was Colt’s fifth-grade class picture from Elger Bay Elementary School along with his fifth-grade headshot. The only other paper he carried all this way was the certificate from the Boy Scouts of America awarding him the rank of Wolf Scout.

The Bahamian police claim that when they captured him, Colt had less than $40 in cash and no credit cards on him. By my accounting, though, Colt could have been carrying well over $20,000, most likely in a Ziploc. The money has never been reported found.

SHORTLY AFTER DAYBREAK, cHIEF inspector Moss grabbed his snorkel gear and went back out to the sandbar. Now high tide, he estimated it was about ten feet deep at the spot where Colt had gotten stuck—way more depth than the Intrepid needed to cross safely. Moss quickly found a black zippered case that held an Apple laptop. Then he spotted a handheld GPS, and Colt’s iPod with earbuds still attached. It took him fifteen minutes to locate the pistol, a black-and-chrome .38 caliber Walther PPK with the serial number filed off.

The Walther looks cool and, of course, has the “Bond, James Bond” cachet, but it definitely would not be the first choice for an experienced gunslinger headed to the Bahamas. Colt had spent the last week in the sand and muck and moist salty air. A Walther PPK, if not kept fastidiously clean in that kind of harsh environment, is prone to extractor failures.

Colt fired one round as the police approached. In a semiauto like the Walther, the force from one shot ejects the spent shell casing while a spring in the clip automatically loads the next round. Simply pull the trigger again and another round will fire.

When Colt fired his first shot, though, the shell casing never ejected, and the next round didn’t chamber. He could have pulled the trigger again, whether aiming into the sky, at the police, or at his own head, but until he manually cleared that spent shell, the gun wouldn’t have fired.

There were two live rounds left in the clip, both hollow points.

KENNY WENT OVER TO the Briland police station later that morning to give his statement. He sat down in a chair next to Colt, who, he said, looked a little worse for wear from his Bahamian visit. “Oh, he had skin look like checkers from mosquitoes! He had a lot of bits in him!” As Kenny sat there, a nurse came to check on Colt again. “The nurse was asking him if he was all right, if he feel any pain, and he said, ‘No pain, I’m okay.’ He was extremely mannerly, respectful, humble. He didn’t give no aggressive answers like I seen some criminals when I was livin’ in New York.” Kenny laughs. “But he wasn’t giving too much information!”

Colt did eventually loosen up enough to tell the Bahamian police what his future plans were—no crime in just thinking about it. Like he’d told Mauris, Colt said his next stop was Cuba, where the American authorities wouldn’t be able to follow him. Once he lost them, he said he planned to move on to the Turks and Caicos Islands because his research showed they had very few cops.

It wasn’t a bad plan, but it had some problems. A number of U.S. citizens have gone to Cuba to stay out of the reach of American courts. However, they tend to bring very large amounts of cash with them to smooth their way, like Robert Vesco, or else they’re high-profile asylum seekers, like Black Panthers Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver.

Colt may have been packing some new Spanish vocabulary words, but he didn’t mention any plans to officially seek asylum. His $20,000-plus—if he had it—would have gone a long way in a country where doctors earn less than $50 a month. Even if he made it to the island without getting shot down or blown out of the water, though, the odds of a six-foot-five gringo fading anonymously into the Cuban countryside were slim. The Cuban people are very open and friendly, though, so if he arrived with enough greenbacks that he didn’t have to steal to feed himself, and kept a big smile on his face, Colt might have been okay.

It would have been bad timing, though, to make the Turks and Caicos a long-term stop on his Caribbean tour. The British had recently kicked out a crooked premier there who’d been putting the banana back in the concept of a banana republic. The Brits reinstituted direct rule from Westminster and had launched a law-and-order campaign to keep the islands safe for tax evaders and tourists, the two legs of the Turks and Caicos economy.

Colt would have most likely had a similar experience in the Turks as he’d had in the Bahamas. If he’d been able to stay at large for a couple more months, he’d be heading into the Caribbean’s September swelter season when the air becomes a sopping, oppressive stew. A week in that late-summer tropical humidity—caked with salt sweat and covered in no-see-um bites, with fine sand invading every orifice—is enough to force a nun into taking a bird bath in a baptismal font. If Colt couldn’t find an air-conditioned hideaway, he’d be begging to get back to the cool Northwest.