The Flying Bandit Page 25

  While Janice was being questioned, arrangements were made to execute search warrants on 450 Dominion Street as well as 350 Trafalgar Street, Janice’s mother’s house. Tom Murray’s OPP police dog was brought in to assist the searches. At Whiteman’s house, letters were found addressed to B. F. Stafford at 450 Dominion Street. Also a phone book was discovered on top of the fridge that had B. F. Stafford’s name circled in it. The listing showed Stafford lived at 43 Hemlock Street in Hull. OPP Ident. took photos of the house inside and out. The grounds outside the house were searched with a metal detector. Nothing of any value was found outside. The search of Mrs. McKenzie’s house on Trafalgar Street also yielded nothing.

  Just after 8:30 p.m. Janice and the baby arrived home to find the police going through her house with a fine tooth comb. During the search Shawn Smith confiscated three rings from Janice which he turned over to the Ottawa police. These would be taken to Birks for possible identification. Subsequently the manager at Birks declared that the three rings were not stolen from the Ottawa store but were of a quality of ring that Birks would handle. He also said that they may have come from other Birks stores that had been robbed.

  During the course of the search Sgt. Gord Weir saw Tommy Craig and his wife, Linda, drive onto Dominion Street in their Chrysler 5th Avenue. They stopped in front of Robert’s house. Weir asked Tommy what he was doing there.

  Tommy told him that he had received a call from Robert’s lawyer, Scott Milloy, who said that Robert’s child was sick. Tommy said he was there to check on the condition of the child. Weir told Tommy they were conducting a search on Whiteman’s house and Tommy was not permitted inside. He was advised he could come back and enter the house in about three hours when the search was finished. Tommy didn’t argue. He and Linda left the scene.

  At 9:15 p.m. in the detachment office, Whiteman was escorted to the main office and appeared before a Justice of the Peace who remanded him in custody for a bail hearing on Monday. Then he was put in an OPP cell and Inspector MacCharles came around to have a brief conversation with him. Robert made it clear he had nothing to say about the robberies. He did say, “I want to thank your officers for being cautious when my wife was around.” Later he quipped to MacCharles, “You guys ruined that pilot and co-pilot’s whole day. They’re going to be in a lot of trouble with their company, you know.”

  Around 9:45 p.m. Robert rolled over and went to sleep. He’d had a long, busy day. While he slept, George Snider kept an eye on him. They had seen each other briefly in the detachment office but, as yet, George hadn’t introduced himself to Whiteman. George was in no rush to talk to him; he knew they would be spending lots of time together in the future.

  That night Janice put Laura to bed two hours later than her normal time. Then she fell exhausted onto the couch in her living room and drifted into a fitful half-sleep. Just before midnight, her brother Peter and his wife, who had just heard the news, came in to console her.

  On Saturday morning Ottawa Sgt. John Zoschke filmed Whiteman with a video camera. The London evidence against him was solid but he was also the primary suspect in the Winnipeg holdup two weeks earlier. The OPP wanted to make a video lineup and send it to Winnipeg to see if the bank tellers out there could pick him out of the lineup and identify him.

  When the first fingerprint results came back from the FBI, Smith and Snider knew they had a problem. Whiteman’s prints were an exact match with a Vincent James Mears, DOB October 25, 1959, who had been charged with burglary in Las Vegas in June 1983. The notification from the FBI had Mears’ weight, height, eye colour and hair colour matching Whiteman’s. The report, however, did not list any distinguishing scars or body marks on Mears. Whiteman had large panthers tattooed on his right and left upper arms and noticeable scars on five different parts of his body. Smith and Snider thought Whiteman might have gotten his tattoos after the 1983 charge in Las Vegas but they couldn’t understand why his scars weren’t listed. Something didn’t add up. They suspected they might be heading in the wrong direction with the Mears’ identity.

  The two detectives decided to play a bluff and went to Whiteman’s cell. Smith announced, “We know who you are now!”

  Whiteman, sitting on his cot, turned laconically towards the detective. He seemed bored.

  Smith announced, “You’re an American named Mears – Vincent James Mears.”

  Whiteman said nothing; he just smiled. The disdainful expression on his face said, “You’ve got me now. Oh, yes! You guys are so good, so smart.” The look of mockery in Whiteman’s eyes convinced Snider that they didn’t have the correct solution to his identity.

  Snider pulled Smith aside.

  “Shawn,” he said, “I know this guy’s jacking us around.”

  Smith tended to agree. He went back to Whiteman’s cell alone and grilled him for over an hour but Whiteman would not admit to being Vincent James Mears. He wouldn’t admit to anything.

  When Smith rejoined Snider in the front office he told him that Whiteman wouldn’t budge.

  “If he isn’t Mears, who the hell is this guy?” Snider asked.

  Smith shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t know.”

  As they sat pondering their problem another notification from the FBI came in. It indicated that there was a second set of prints that matched Robert Whiteman’s. This time the panther tattoos and body scars were listed and they matched up with Whiteman’s tattoos and scars identically.

  The print-out revealed that Robert Whiteman was:

  GALVAN, GILBERT WILLIAMDOB: 1957 JULY 20

  HT: 5’11” WT: 200 lbs

  BLACKHAIR,BROWNEYES,SALLOWPOCKMARKED COMPLEXION

  PART MEXICAN ANCESTRY

  TATTOO OF BLACK PANTHER ON LEFT BICEP

  PLACE OF BIRTH: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  ALIASES: GLAVAN, GILBERT

  MOSKAL, JOHN

  DOBBIN, SHANE

  COLLINS, SHANE

  MEARS, VINCENT JAMES

  SWANSON, DALE

  This time Snider and Smith knew they had the right identification. From his fingerprints to his tattoos to the scar on his leg, Robert Whiteman was Gilbert Galvan. The lengthy printout indicated Galvan was an American criminal with a long record who had been unlawfully at large for the last three years, having escaped from a Michigan jail in 1984. One of the counts on his record showed that, at one time, he had been charged in Las Vegas under the alias Vincent James Mears. This explained their previous problem with his identity.

  “Will you look at this guy’s record,” Snider said. “It’s unbelievable! He’s been active all over the United States.”

  “How could a guy who looks so clean get into so much trouble in so many places?” Smith remarked.

  “I don’t know,” Snider replied. “Let’s go and try to find out.”

  They went back to Whiteman’s cell. Smith said, “We’ve just come to say good night, Gilbert. We had it wrong before, but everything matches up now. We know you’re Gilbert William Galvan.”

  Whiteman looked up at Smith and blinked.

  Snider said to himself, “Gothcha!” He was positive they had the right man. He was also very satisfied knowing they had not only snared a major criminal, but one who was also an escaped convict.

  Once Whiteman’s true identity was known, he seemed resigned to his fate. He asked the police to let him tell his wife about his identity and his past. They agreed he could do that.

  When Janice came to visit him in the Pembroke County Jail that afternoon she opened her conversation by saying, “OK, asshole, I am not at all happy about all this.”

  Then she began to cry.

  “How could you do this to me, Robert?” she sobbed. “Christ, they told me yesterday your name probably isn’t Robert Whiteman. They said you might not even be a Canadian. What the hell is going on here?”

  Robert was hesitant. He didn’t know quite where to begin. Before he could say anything, Janice whimpered, “Yesterday ... was the worst ... day ... of my
life.” She gasped for air as she spoke. “Last night ... when I went to sleep ... I hoped ... it would all be a bad dream ... that it would go away in the morning. But ... it didn’t.” She looked at him expectantly.

  As gently as he could, Robert began to untangle his life of deception. He told her about his background and the circuitous route that brought him to Ottawa and into her life. It was difficult for both of them. The more he revealed, the more distraught she became. Before long, she was weeping uncontrollably. Robert tried to calm her down but nothing he said could stop her crying.

  Even though he suspected their conversation was being recorded, Robert tried to be as honest as he could.

  “And it’s going to get worse, Janice,” he said. “It’s going to be ugly ... that’s all I can tell you. There is more to this and it’s not good news. Maybe we should just break this off.”

  He told her he was concerned about her losing the baby.

  “It might be best if you didn’t have to go through all this. I’m really sorry for everything and I can understand if you walked out and never returned.”

  Janice wanted more information. At that point he was reluctant to tell her very much about his criminal activities because he was hoping to use that information to bargain with the police. The best he could do was to keep apologizing and ask for her forgiveness. She was immobilized with disbelief.

  Over the next few day Robert’s confession to her continued. As torturous as it was for her to hear about his deceit, Janice realized she still had strong feelings for him. Throughout their rocky relationship she had never stopped loving him. Now, although she felt lost and abandoned by his betrayal, she also felt Robert was desperately alone and needed her. She couldn’t walk away and leave him at a time like this. Besides that, he was the father of her children.

  Together they had created one child and a second was well on the way. They were a family. How could she abandon him? It was all very painful and confusing for her, and in the end, she resolved to stick with him and see him through his ordeal.

  In the meantime, Gilbert Galvan had other problems to contend with. When his lawyer, Scott Milloy, arrived on Saturday, Galvan implored him: “Listen, just see if you can get me bail, any type of bail. Let them set it at anything, but get me out of here on bail.”

  Milloy tried but there was no way Galvan was getting bail, not even for a million dollars. No judge in his right mind was going to release an alleged major criminal, an alien with a record, who would likely flee the country as soon as he was let loose. The way the police presented their case to the court, Gilbert Galvan, alias Robert Whiteman, might as well have been Jack the Ripper.

  When the news about Robert’s arrest became public the Whitemans’ neighbours couldn’t believe it. Much like Danny Belland and the waitresses at Wally’s Restaurant, they thought Robert’s arrest was a practical joke or, at worst, a case of mistaken identity. They could accept that he might have outstanding parking fines or speeding tickets, but to conceive of Robert Whiteman as an armed robber? That was too much.

  As a result of Robert’s arrest the police obtained a search warrant for Tommy Craig’s house at 1701 Boyer Street in Orleans, a suburb of Ottawa. Monday morning June 15, Tommy answered a knock on his door at 7:30 a.m. to find George Snider standing there with a retinue of twelve policemen behind him. The street was lined with police cruisers. Tommy let them in and woke up his wife, Linda, and their young son.

  Craig asked Snider if Linda and his boy could be excused from the house during the search and Snider, after Linda’s purse was searched, agreed to let them go. While the uniformed men spread throughout the house, Tommy poured himself a drink and sat at the kitchen table.

  “This is not a doghouse,” he called to the police. “There was no crap in here when you came in and I don’t expect to find any when you leave.”

  Tommy was confident that they wouldn’t find anything in the house because everything he had of value was stashed in a secret compartment he’d had built into the wall of the basement family room when the house was originally constructed. Out in the back yard, the only thing the metal detector discovered was a rusty old auto wrench that had been buried there before the time of Henry Ford. As Tommy had demanded, the police left the house as neat as they found it.

  That same day Tommy’s sister’s house was searched as well. Nothing incriminating was discovered in either investigation.

  Janice’s Chrysler 5th Avenue was impounded and thoroughly searched. All of her bank accounts were frozen and her credit card documents were seized. A hold was put on her chequing account which contained a balance slightly in excess of $10,000. In effect, she had become destitute overnight.

  “Robert,” she advised Galvan, “they’ve taken the car, they’ve taken the cash. What am I going to do?”

  “Don’t worry,” he said,”you’ll have them back within a week.”

  Galvan thought he knew a way to make a deal with the police to get both the money and the car back to Janice. Snider and Smith had been repeatedly asking him about a Brinks armoured truck robbery in Quebec and Galvan had been telling them he had nothing to do with that.

  “How about taking a lie detector test?” George had asked.

  Now Galvan agreed to take the lie detector test but only if they gave Janice back the car and access to her bank account. Snider got MacCharles to agree on condition that Galvan pass the lie detector test. MacCharles felt this was a good deal because they couldn’t hold the car or the money much longer anyway. Time was running out when these items could be legitimately held as a part of their ongoing investigation.

  An OPP specialist was brought in and administered the lie detector test, which Galvan passed. This freed him from any further suspicion in the Quebec Brinks heist, and gave Janice her car and her money back.

  This type of quid pro quo exchange between the police and Galvan was a harbinger of things to come. Many long hours of manoeuvering and negotiating lay ahead.

  CHAPTER 17

  Negotiations

  Now a tense game of cat and mouse began between Galvan and his captors. Each had their own agenda and their own objectives.

  Galvan, aware that he had no chance of being released on bail, was preoccupied with his chances for escape. Since the Pembroke County Jail was a run-down relic of a prison he felt confident that, given a little time and study, he could find a way out. If he couldn’t break out on his own he figured there was always the distinct possibility he could get some assistance from his friends.

  Galvan realized that prolonged interrogations would have to take place between him and the police and the conditions at the Pembroke Jail were not suitable for such meetings. That meant he would be transported on a regular basis from the jail to the more modern facilities of the OPP detachment office which was located a mile away in downtown Pembroke. Galvan soon learned that he would be escorted from one building to the other by car, accompanied only by detectives Snider and Smith. These frequent outings gave him the opportunity to assess his chances for escape. Whenever he was transported Galvan studied every door, gate and hallway, making mental notes.

  At the same time Lyle MacCharles, who was aware that Galvan had escaped jail in Michigan, knew they were taking a risk moving him back and forth from the county cells to the detachment office. He wasn’t concerned about Galvan’s friends coming to rescue him because the police had Pete Bond as an informant and he would forewarn them of any plans of that nature. MacCharles was more concerned that Galvan would use his ingenuity and try to escape on his own.

  MacCharles assigned Snider and Smith to take Galvan’s statements because he was confident that the two of them could handle him. They were both experienced detectives and weren’t about to get careless with a prize like Galvan. They were both physically strong and fit. MacCharles knew that Galvan could never muscle his way past them and if he ever bolted, they could easily run him down in a foot race.

  But MacCharles warned them to take all precautions and not be f
ooled or distracted by Galvan’s affable manner.

  He told Snider, “Look George, this guy’s a runner. You and Shawn have to watch what you’re doing with him.”

  Snider nodded he understood.

  “The way I read him,” MacCharles confided, “I don’t think he’s got a very high threshold for pain. George, you make it clear to him that he’s going to get the shit thumped out of him if he tries anything funny.”

  Although Galvan never gave up hope of escape he gradually realized that his captors were extraordinarily diligent. Accepting that, his next major concern was to have his sentence reduced to the minimum. He knew the police were interested in taking down Tommy Craig, and although he had no intention of giving him up, he wondered what it was worth to them.

  MacCharles too was interested in connecting Tommy Craig to the jewellery store robberies. If he could get Galvan to roll over on Craig he promised some consideration would be given to reducing Galvan’s sentence. Lessening Galvan’s sentence to get Tommy Craig off the street for a good long stretch would have been a worthwhile tradeoff.

  Unfortunately this was an inducement that Galvan didn’t pursue. Galvan had doubts about the Fat Man. Initially he thought it was Tommy who had turned him in. When Craig sent Scott Milloy to act as Galvan’s defense counsel, Galvan didn’t want to use him because he suspected Milloy was tied to Craig. Galvan even believed that Tommy had some policemen on his payroll, and consequently, anything he might say about Tommy to the police, however non-incriminating, would get back to him immediately. Because of this belief, as paranoid as it may have been, Galvan refused to deal with any other detectives other than Snider and Smith.

  His obstinacy in this regard did not sit well with the Ottawa police who wanted their own detectives to interrogate Galvan regarding the many Ottawa robberies he’d committed.

  But Galvan wouldn’t budge. He would only deal with Snider and Smith.