Crime Fiction and Fantasy

Heat, Thief, and their source material

Lately, I’ve been listening to The Dollop podcast¹ on my lunchtime walks, and I got to the three-part history of the LAPD. The third episode focuses on police militarization, and mentions the Symbionese Liberation Army shoot-out—which inspired Warren Zevon to include Patti Hearst in his brilliant saga, “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”—and the infamous North Hollywood bank robbery and shoot-out, which inspired at least three films of varying quality and realism. 44 Minutes is a TV movie meant to be almost a docudrama; 211 stars Nicolas Cage and makes it about stolen Russian mob money, to use the latest boring Hollywood tropes; and Heat by Michael Mann turns a story of two heavily armored schlubs into a tragic opera of obsessed, highly focused men on opposite sides of law.

The real story is much less glamorous and compelling, but that’s how fiction works. Two of my favorite movies are Heat and Thief, but diving into the source material is educational: there are occasional criminal geniuses who plan brilliant heists and masterfully evade the law, but most of the time, they used conventional means and insider information, were idiots who got lucky, they faced incompetent law enforcement, or a combination of all three.

Thief is the movie that got me into crime fiction, and I named Jay Desmarteaux’s prison mentor “Okie” in homage to the character “Okla” played by Willie Nelson in the movie. If you haven’t seen it, James Caan plays a professional thief who focuses on high end jewel heists that involve safe cracking, bypassing security systems, and burning through vaults with a thermal lance. He owns a car dealership as a front, not a bad gig, so he’s in it for the juice, the excitement now; he’s a child of the system, saved by his crook mentor Okla, who languishes in prison. His dream is to have Okie released, and to adopt an orphaned kid and save them from the foster home pinball and institutions that he survived as a child.

It’s a great story and a great character, and if you read up on the movie, it began when Michael Mann optioned a memoir called The Home Invaders written in prison by burglar Frank Hohimer. I hunted it down, paid too much for it, and read it to find the secret gospel of thieves that inspired the movie I loved. I was sorely disappointed. Hohimer was no heist man, he was, as the title suggests, a home invader. No thermal lances here, his crew would break into a rich family’s home and stick a gun in their face and make them open the safe.

That’s the reality. Hohimer and his crew were only caught after they robbed a politician and roughed up his daughter. No glamor, no Topkapi style swinging on trapeze ropes to rob jewels. You can read a deeper dive into the differences between that book and the movie in this article by Wallace Stroby, one of my favorite crime writers, who writes the Crissa Stone series. (Stone, like the infamous Parker character written by caper maestro Donald E. Westlake under the name Richard Stark, robs with a gun. The Dortmunder books by Westlake involve hilariously bungled heists.) I like stories where crime pays, but I like the tension when a heist falls apart, too. My own dive into Thief and William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. can be read on Criminal Element.

Not all stories need to mimic reality; but it’s interesting to compare the two. The North Hollywood bank robbery, as told by the doofuses on The Dollop, was at least as entertaining as Heat in my opinion. That doesn’t invalidate Michael Mann using the robbery as a set piece in his battle between obsessed professionals, but it’s important for us not to impose the tropes of fiction upon reality. For example, stories that depend on law enforcement’s opinion of forensic science—some of which does not deserve to be called “science”—have affected juries to such a degree that it’s difficult to explain to them that DNA evidence is not completely infallible, and scientists have debunked methods that the FBI has used to convict people, such as “denim wear matching,” and even bite mark impressions. Stuff that CSI and other shows have made us all take as common sense, such as arson investigation and accelerant markings, have um, come under fire. (Sorry).

But this isn’t about the flimsy evidence often used to convict and execute the person that law enforcement “had a feeling about” when they saw them. This is about how we think about crime and criminals, and how two untrained men with a trunk full of assault rifles and body armor turned North Hollywood into a war zone. I assumed that the robbers were ex-military, because every depiction has given them a veneer of mercenary professionalism, but apparently they were a habitual grifter and a hulking computer nerd with access to military weapons and armor. (In the “gun grabber state” of California, of all places.) They had successfully stolen $1.5 million recently in two similar robberies; if they weren’t greedy, they may have gotten away with it. Was it the rush? They took phenobarbitol to calm their nerves before the final robbery, and were still so high strung that when they only found $300,000 instead of an expected 3/4 million dollars, they shot up the safe and the ceiling. These weren’t calm and collected professionals.

The real North Hollywood Shootout Suspects.

We romanticize the outlaw, but the reality is much uglier. Bonnie and Clyde, who I wrote about previously, are a good example. My favorite successful (last time I checked) bank robber was the RV bandit; a retiree who robbed banks and used the cash to buy a used RV, and was being hunted by the FBI. There are lots of RV parks across the United States, so it’s a good way to hide and keep on the move. All they had was a photo of an old man with a beard and a trucker’s hat. This is the bank robber’s favorite disguise, so even then “old white male” they had to go on may have been dubious. Here are two women who used it.

Woman robbed bank wearing fake beard

Peggy Jo Tallas, aka “Cowboy Bob,” who committed suicide by cop in her RV after one last bank robbery.

As an aside, there’s a Motor Coach builder not far from where I live, and every time I drive past it, I get the itch to buy one and go mobile. Sarah wouldn’t want to live that way, but something about it draws me. But where would I keep all my damn books, in a storage locker? With the price of fuel high and unlikely to drop, it may be a dying lifestyle. There aren’t even hybrid RVs yet, much less electric or hydrogen fuel cell models. The future of Recreational Vehicle Outlawdom will be stealing gas, like in The Road Warrior.

Just don’t wear jeans.

1. They got in trouble for not naming their sources, essentially reading other people’s work and performing it without attribution. They are spectacularly uninformed funnymen, at least at the beginning. I hope they’ve gotten better. I’m still on episode 40 or so out of over 500.