Bob Friel - The Barefoot Bandit

A TEAM OF OFFICERS arrived from Nassau and took charge of Colt. They wrapped a heavy chain around his ankles and closed it tight with padlocks. And Colt finally got the bulletproof vest Pam wanted him to wear. Then they hustled him—still barefoot—onto a ferry boat and to the North Eleuthera Airport where an RBPF plane waited.

OVER AT PETAGAY’S, THE instant the service came back on, our phones lit up with the news Colt had been caught. On the Romora dock, I met Kenny, Mauris, and police officers who were on the boat that caught him. Going through the events of the entire night moment by moment with them, there was only one spot of disagreement: how Colt got out to the Intrepid. Both Kenny and an American boater who claims he saw Colt as he motored away say that he waded in from the shore and swam beneath the dock out to the boat. Chief Inspector Moss, though, noted that Colt’s T-shirt and shorts were “perfectly dry” when they captured him, meaning he must have simply—and once again, audaciously—ninja’d his way past all the cops and down 275 yards of dock to where the Intrepid was tied up.

At the Intrepid that morning, one of the policemen was watching the owner tie the boat alongside its mothership, Lady BJ . The owner told the cop he wished they’d shot “the little shit” instead of his outboards.

I asked the officer if Colt had ever threatened to shoot back at them.

“At one point, yeah,” he said. “I guess when we opened fire he sorta changed his mind.”

When I looked closely at the Intrepid, I spotted drops of blood on the rod holder and the driver’s seat. Kenny, standing next to me, said that Colt had not been hit by any bullets or pellets. “He was all torn apart with trees and briars from coming through the bush and running on the rocks with his bare feet.”

It was, once again, almost inconceivable that Colt wasn’t seriously injured or dead. Black night, jerking spotlights, the chase boat rocking as police jostled into firing position, Colt’s boat lurching along the sandbar, Colt actually firing a shot, then refusing to drop his gun… then somehow not getting hit by a stray, a ricochet, or one of the shots that went straight toward the spot where he’d been standing.

“You can see on the boat that they did fire a shot to hit him!” Kenny said. “But God put it so it was not for him.”

The RBPF say they didn’t shoot at Colt. When I press Chief Inspector Moss, he admits that Colt gave his men more than enough excuse to fire at him instead of the boat engines. Moss credits the “experience, professionalism, maturity, and discipline” of the officers on the boat as to why Colt came out of it alive… along with “divine intervention.”

Kenny agrees with the last part. “The Lord put it so Bandit come runnin’ to me,” he says. “He needed to get a blessing to make sure he don’t die that night.”

Escorted by Bahamian police with assault rifles, Colt deplaned in Nassau. They marched him barefoot across the tarmac for the first of many perp walks. The asphalt was hot enough to feel through my shoes, but it didn’t seem to bother Colt. He maintained his head-down posture, though it wasn’t in disgrace, just disdain for “the paparazzi.”

Catching a fugitive that the FBI, Homeland Security, Canadian Mounties, and a host of local departments hadn’t been able to get their cuffs on was a heroic moment for the oft-maligned RBPF, and they wanted to make the most of it. The fourth time they paraded the shackled Barefoot Bandit for the cameras within twelve hours, Colt appealed to his guards, “Come on, let’s make this one fast.”

I expected Colt to be shipped back to the United States as fast as possible after the Bahamian police got to show him off. There was an impressive list of crimes the Bahamians could nail him with: at least five burglaries, three boat thefts, a car theft, and, most serious, possession of a loaded gun during a crime. But no way they would. The Bahamian authorities were in a tough spot, politically. There’s only one prison in the country, the notorious Fox Hill, which doesn’t make it into tourist brochures and is rarely mentioned by locals without a shudder. Past inmates talk of its maximum-security block as an overcrowded, HIV- and TB-infested, shit-and-sweat-stinking hellhole lorded over by abusive guards. Along with U.S. State Department and Amnesty International condemnations, almost all Bahamian citizens themselves feel the conditions at the jail are deplorable.

Recent reports say that all convicted prisoners are initially sent to the (mad) Max unit as a means of “breaking them in” to prison life. With all the press attention focused on Colt, sticking him in Fox Hill would turn the Bahamians’ moment of glory into an embarrassing exposé. While many arrestees go to Fox Hill just to await trial, Colt was instead held at the RBPF’s Central Detectives Unit, a menacing enough government-issue stained-concrete building.

Colt tried to phone his mom, but couldn’t get through. So he made a tearful call to his aunt Sandy.

BAHAMIAN LAW ENFORCEMENT BRASS HELD a press conference about Colt that Sunday… then realized that not all the international media had arrived in Nassau yet, so they scheduled a repeat for Monday.

At the E Street Barracks, Commissioner of Police Ellison Greenslade announced that the investigation was progressing, that the firearm charges against Colt were “very serious,” and that they looked forward to proffering charges very soon. I kept waiting for the punch line: “… but, we’re going to turn him over to our good friends in the U.S.A. tomorrow.” But it never came.

“He has committed criminal offenses in the Bahamas,” said Greenslade. “Our laws are very clear… A number of people have made legitimate claims to the police department and we will bring charges where they are necessary to the satisfaction of those victims.”

The commissioner himself said he’d already interviewed his famous prisoner. He was clearly smitten. He smiled when asked about the Bandit. “Colton is obviously a very intelligent young man… level of diction, semantics… He gives a good account of himself. He’s quite a stand-up guy, quite a mature young man.”

Greenslade said that Colt understood his rights and was being afforded due process. Also that he was very calm, he “understood the realities of the situation he was in,” and had given them no problems since the capture.

On Monday, the U.S. federal authorities started making noises that inferred it could be a long time—months—before the fugitive was repatriated.

Colt dominated the local Bahamian news just as he’d become a front-page and top-of-the-newscast story across the United States. Everyone was fascinated with the kid determined to fly no matter what. A seventy-two-year-old Bahamian who pumped me for every detail taught me a local expression I’d never heard before: after each plane crash or SWAT chase I recounted, he exclaimed, “Mutha Blue!”

ON TUESDAY, A SUNNY, hot, and humid afternoon, the entire press corps gathered outside the Bahamas’ courts complex. A line of metal barricades held back a large, mostly local crowd of the curious that included a few very vocal Bahamian Colt supporters. In front of the barriers posed the RBPF’s top officers, all spit-shined and smiling. RBDF soldiers and police tactical units patrolled the area along with a couple of oversize guys packing serious weaponry and scary eyes, which were all you could see because their heads were covered with black balaclavas—Colt would finally get to meet some real ninjas.

The police orchestrated everything so that the media could capture another all-important perp walk. I got a quizzical look from the RBPF press officer when I repeatedly told her I didn’t care about seeing the show, but that I’d really like to get inside the courtroom. She finally waved me across the barricade.