Every Move You Make (22 page)

The pleurisy would become, in the years that followed, a subtle premonition of where her life was headed and the tragic way it would soon end.

By 1970, her fourth marriage had dissolved. So she moved north, to Pottersville. Within a year, she would give up on men entirely and begin a lesbian relationship with a woman who, some said later, was “the only person who had ever loved her unconditionally.”

But regardless of the new love interest in her life, when Gary found out about the relationship, he disparaged her and told those around him she was “sick.” Gary’s bigotry was not confined to blacks and Jews and Puerto Ricans; he also claimed to hate homosexuals—but doubts about his own sexuality would later surface and cause one to question whether he actually hated homosexuals or himself.

By the time he turned seventeen, Gary was once again back in Troy, hanging around street corners, stealing food to feed himself, breaking into abandoned buildings to sleep and meeting up with old friends. It was the beginning of the seventies.

Free love. Drugs. Music. Sexual freedom. Vietnam.

Gary wanted nothing to do with any of it. He was a loner. He traveled by himself and worked by himself. He felt people pissed him off and let him down. Still, as he began to think about a career, there was only one vocation that interested him.

“I think Gary had dollar signs in his eyes,” Jim Horton said later, “throughout his childhood and into his teen years. He always told me he wanted more than what he had. Instead of settling for what life brought him, he decided, from an early age, to take the ‘easy’ way out by getting more for less effort.”

Early in his life, Gary learned that crime
did
pay. He could get what he wanted and not have to give up forty hours of his week. No boss. No coworkers. No one telling him when to show up, when to leave, what to wear.

After living on the street for what amounted to the summer of 1970, “stealing to survive,” he later said, it was around this time when Gary became involved in petit larceny. He had even spent ninety days in a county jail after being caught breaking into a house. The sheriff who had arrested him, perhaps feeling responsible, ended up getting Gary a job at a local cemetery digging holes after he got out of jail. But it lasted only a few days.

“I, too, got him jobs over the years,” Horton recalled. “In the early days, when I first met him, I talked a local landscaper into hiring him. But Gary called one day and told me that it was ‘too hard’ for him. ‘I don’t like people telling me what to do,’ he said. ‘I can make more money stealing.’”

By the mid-1970s, Gary hooked up with two old neighborhood friends, Tim Rysedorph and Michael Falco. They ended up sharing an apartment together on Adams Street, down a few blocks from Gary’s childhood home. Tim lived inside the apartment with Michael Falco, while Gary lived out back in an old abandoned shed before moving in. Tim, who had spent two years in a Catholic school, a family member later said, “didn’t care for Catholic school and went to public.” He was a good kid, that same family member insisted. He just happened to fall in with the wrong crowd.

Michael Falco had a reputation around the neighborhood as being a troublemaker. He always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Family members and friends later claimed Falco’s troubles with the law didn’t start until he met Evans. But law enforcement confirmed that Falco had been arrested on numerous occasions before Evans emerged back in town. Born on February 3, 1959, Falco grew into a handsome kid: curly black hair, parted in the middle, a thin face, high cheekbones, olive skin. He was scrappy and petite, about five feet six inches, 140 pounds. He was streetwise and knew the neighborhood.

Evans was four years or so older than Falco. They hadn’t really hung around together much as kids, but knew each other from the neighborhood.

As Evans grew out of his teenage body and into his twenties, he became a rather large, muscular man that people around town feared. Because he was short, he was often compared to a wrestler. He began lifting weights obsessively and grew a long, square, wiry beard, much like that of ZZ Top frontmen Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill. He wore bandannas and large Elvis-type sunglasses. In photos, he rarely smiled. His hair was kept hippielike, par for the times, down to his shoulders. For years, he camped in the woods. But now he was living with Falco and Tim—and beginning to set his sights on the future.

As a thief, Evans’s appetite was no longer whet by car stereos, five-and-dime rings and pendants for the neighborhood girls. While studying antiques—reading books, browsing local antique stores, pricing items, disguising himself as a dealer, comparing items with shop owners, learning about expensive artwork and rare prints—he saw a gold mine. It was big-ticket items for Evans now: jewelry, antiques, rare books and pricey artwork. If he was going to take the chance of getting caught during a robbery, it was going to be well worth his effort.

CHAPTER 37

By January 1977, Flora Mae was living in upstate New York with her lesbian lover in what could be called the first “healthy” relationship she had ever been involved in. Robbie, beginning a new life, had moved to Florida. With Roy still living in the Troy apartment by himself, visited rarely by anyone, and Gary pulling off burglaries and robberies with his new pals, Michael Falco and Tim Rysedorph, it seemed as though everyone in the Evans family had gone their separate ways for good this time.

On January 13, Gary went through what can be called a “learning curve” in what had now become his sole passion in life. He had burgled a home in Lake Placid, New York, got caught in the act and was ultimately sentenced to four years in a state prison after being convicted of third-degree larceny. Even more brawny now, at about 155 pounds—all of which was lean, cut muscle—he was getting his first taste of hard prison time at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. It would be the first of almost two dozen serious arrests and the first of several prison bids.

The prospect of being confined behind bars for so long scared Evans; it was apparent in some of the letters he later wrote to family and friends. The main focus of his insecurity came from doing his time with, he said, “those people: spiks, niggers, faggots and diddlers (child molesters).” Drug dealers were also on his list of “scourge.” If he had contained a seed of hatred for anyone he saw as being lower on the food chain than himself because of their color or creed, now he was being thrust into an environment where his life would be centered around those same people.

Evans harbored such a hatred for African Americans that he couldn’t as much as look at a black person without saying anything hurtful. There was one time when he and Horton were driving back to his apartment after a meeting and Horton had driven by a few black guys who were walking down the street minding their own business.

“Fucking niggers,” Evans said, staring them down as Horton drove by.

“Come on, Gar,” Horton shot back. “There’s no reason for that shit.”

“They are wasting my oxygen,” Evans said, shaking his head.

It was, no doubt, a seed that had been planted by his father, who himself was an admitted racist.

The Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, where Evans was being held, had a reputation as a no-nonsense maximum-security penitentiary where the state of New York sent some of its most hardened criminals. Considered a “super-max,” Clinton is the “largest and third oldest of New York’s seventy facilities.” More than 150 years old, it was built as a mining prison back in the 1800s. Located 350 miles north of New York City and seventy-five miles south of Montreal, Canada, it was known as “Little Siberia”—mainly, one would have to imagine, because of its close proximity to Russia, New York and the fact that northern New York generally enjoyed only two seasons: winter and fall.

Not that it mattered to Evans, but six months into his bid at Clinton, his father, at fifty-five, lost a battle with throat cancer and died at an Albany veteran’s hospital.

“Roy died a lonely old man,” Robbie Evans said later. “His family contacted me a month after his death; he said that’s what he wanted. I shed one tear and that was all. I did not mourn his death.”

Whereas Robbie had acknowledged Roy’s death, Gary never mentioned it.

While confined at Clinton, Evans began to lean on Robbie for support. The tall concrete walls, loud and crowded hallways, outside rifle towers and razor wire kept it real. This wasn’t the county jail. It was hard time in a setting Evans had never—and would never—consider himself a violent enough offender to be subjected to.

There is a saying many inmates live by behind bars: “Don’t let the time do you; you do the time.” As Evans began to count the days until his release, he started writing letters and sending drawings to Robbie. He talked about everything: from what he was going to do when he got out, to the filthy and vile behavior he was witnessing while locked up, to how and why his life had turned out the way it had.

One of his favorite forms of writing became poetry:

Sister Robbin,

Thinking about yesterdays.

Not every day was alone and gray.

The times I wasn’t alone, a helper sometimes came to talk. And try to let some sunshine in.

Named for a bird, [you] should’ve had my eyes.

But brown isn’t bad.

A little big sister golden hair.

Nobody knows when nothing shows.

Where will you go from there?

Growing up and sometimes apart.

Still she’s one of the few invited to my movie.

Technicolor true-life now time.

At the end of the letter, which was written entirely in verse, he finished by writing, Not
a good time, but rainbows are coming!

He soon started to include drawings with his poetry. He drew mountains and stars and landscapes. In one, he sketched a naked man sitting on the ledge of a cliff. The man had long hair brushing down his back. He was grabbing at the grass below him and throwing it off the cliff into the wind. Although he had denounced vehemently the lesbian relationship Flora Mae had been involved in now for a few years, the drawing and the accompanying poem had been addressed to her.

I sing now with eyes that rain,
Evans wrote.
My freedom and I are back again. I sit on stone and sing of alone. Free.

Convicts are transferred from one prison to another during their sentences for a wide variety of reasons, largely because of overcrowding. New York State, however, one of the more populated states in the country, had always been in the top five states for housing the most prisoners. Because of overcrowding, New York was constantly moving prisoners from one facility to the other so it could maintain open beds for the flood of inmates it processed each month. When a prisoner became too familiar with a certain facility, or a prison gang began to bulk up in size in one prison, certain inmates were transferred to discourage any behavior that might get out of hand. It is a common part of prison life to wake up one morning in one prison and go to bed that same night in another.

About midway through his sentence at Clinton, Evans was transferred to Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Washington County, New York, southeast of Lake Placid. It wasn’t because Evans had become unruly or had joined a gang. In fact, he had done everything by the book and became known, as the cliché goes, as a “model prisoner.”

Great Meadow was a facility geared more toward helping inmates acquire an education and deal with the many social and mental problems they either had before they became part of the system or developed as a prisoner. In terms of getting closer to freedom, Great Meadow was a stepping-stone; getting transferred to Great Meadow meant Evans was on his way out the door.

While at Clinton, Evans had developed such a respectable reputation as an artist that inmates began commissioning greeting cards from him. He would draw cards for birthdays, Mother’s and Father’s Day, along with other holidays and special events, dotting them with an incredible artistic hand that he had likely gotten from his mother. Making just $7 per week working, he would trade the greeting cards for commissary items: Twinkies, doughnuts and cookies.

On the street after serving two years out of a four-year bid, Evans wasted little time going back to his old behavior. Burglary was about the only thing he knew how to do, he would say years later. Burglarizing homes and antique stores came easy to him and he was good at it.

Since his release on March 31, 1980, he went back to living with Michael Falco and Tim Rysedorph. Run-down, seedy and unkempt, the apartment became more of a place to crash during the day rather than anything else. At night, Falco and Evans would go out and commit burglaries—either separately or together—and use the apartment as a place to store their stolen property and set up other jobs. Tim, who, some later claimed, was only dipping his toes into the pond of thievery his roommates were swimming in, began to focus more on his music. Tim, many claimed, was never a guy who had planned any of the crimes; he more or less went along for the ride, at times, to make some extra cash.

Evans and Falco fell into a routine: stealing and fencing stolen property. Day in and day out, they were either working on a score or setting one up. They had a “fence” in Troy who could turn stolen property over for them quickly, so it became a matter of “don’t shit in your own backyard” that initially drove them to commit burglaries in other parts of the state. They would bring the merchandise back to Troy to sell, but would rarely steal anything in town.

In the spring of 1980, Evans was caught with a few hundred dollars’ worth of stolen property he had lifted from an antique store in upstate. Already on parole, finishing two years of a previous two-to four-year bid, he was sent directly back to jail to await a court hearing to decide where he would serve the remainder of his previous sentence, along with any additional time from his most recent possession charge.