Blessed Are The Bank Robbers · Will Be Wild
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The crime
When surf journalist, one-time hostage and short-term bigamist Chas Smith gets word that his cousin is in prison for a streak of nineteen bank robberies carried out over the course of just six weeks, he knows he has something. When he visits his cousin, Daniel David Courson, he urges Courson to use the time he has on his hands to put his story down and send it to him. Eventually, Courson does, sending Smith a series of long letters and emails both from prison, and, in time, from his time on the run.
The story
Those messages are the heart of Smith’s shaggy, processy Blessed Are the Bank Robbers: The True Adventures of an Evangelical Outlaw, and are far more focused than the suppositions and place-setting that Smith brings to the table.
The unlikeliness of Courson — known for a time as “the floppy hat bandit” — breaking bad is the hook of the narrative. Both Courson and Smith hail from a California evangelical mega-church family, and grew up in an environment filled with stories of mission trips to exotic locales and Republican politics (Ollie North was a family friend). Smith makes an effort to link this upbringing with Courson’s turn to crime, but the connection is tenuous at best. Lots of people were brought up believing that the law didn’t really apply to them (there’s Ollie North, again); lots of people were brought up with stories of adventure from relatives. Few wind up going on bank robbery sprees, attempting to escape from prison, then going on the lam for years.
In ethnographic research, in which researchers closely observe the people they’re studying for long periods of time, there’s an adage that you never ask people why they’re doing what they’re doing. None of us really knows why we do things, but we’re very good at making up stories to explain and justify our behavior, even to ourselves, so asking people directly is more likely to confuse the matter than shed light on it. Rather, if you want to know why someone does something, you’re supposed to look at the how, and extrapolate from that. Smith spends a lot of time with his memories of Courson growing up, trying to build a story of why, but Courson’s own words do a better job of it.
The story, as Courson tells it, is straightforward. With a too-young marriage on the rocks, Courson goes to a casino with his buddies, and wins enough money to pay off the family’s debts, but can’t understand why his devout wife leaves him over his gambling. He’s soon addicted to gambling, and despite his attempts to count cards and move the odds in his favor, he gets deeper and deeper into debt. His work as a nurse suffers, he’s missing child-support payments, and so he decides to knock over a bank. Like blackjack, he figures that if you plan everything out correctly, it’s a low-risk game: have an escape route set up, be in and out in 90 seconds, wear gloves, no guns, hit banks near a confluence of freeways. Most bank robberies go unsolved, so Courson figures that he can make enough money to pay off his gambling debts and get back on his feet. And it works.
That is, until he gambles away his take, and has to rob another bank, and another, and soon he’s as addicted to that as he is to the gambling, and one slip-up — a ripped glove leads to the leaving of a partial fingerprint — gets him arrested. He somehow gets off with an eight-year sentence for 19 robberies and an attempted escape from a hospital after faking appendicitis, but when he gets out, his record means that he can’t get a job. At this point, Smith loses track of him for a while, until he sees that Courson is wanted for what looks like a romance scam on a terminally ill art collector gone awry, and his cousin is now on the run from the law.
It’s in this period that the book is at its best. Courson starts an email correspondence with Smith, giving him all the details of his life as a fugitive, which Smith dutifully passes on to the reader. I’ve read plenty of true crime, but I’ve never gotten a step-by-step guide to finding and buying fake IDs on the dark web, or a discussion of their limitations: good ones will fool anybody but a Las Vegas bouncer, but if anyone tries to run your name through a database, during a traffic stop, or as an employment check, you’re toast. Unable to get a paying job, Courson is still robbing banks regularly to make ends meet, but is also going on lots of dates through online services, and losing lots of money at casinos. He even has a chance to make a final getaway — a commune in Virginia that would keep him off the grid permanently — but decides that it feels too much like incarceration. Unable to leave one of his girlfriends behind, he’s caught, and goes back to actual prison.
Smith’s contributions to the story are mostly unnecessary. Courson’s early life, as seen by Smith, don’t really tell us much about why he became a bank robber. There’s nothing in Smith’s rambling chapters on the cultural history of outlawry or fugitives that isn’t covered better elsewhere (Eric Hobsbawm’s Bandits is the best exploration). We also don’t need Smiths attempts at explanation: Courson sees bank robbery as being like blackjack, except with better odds, and figures that as long as he prepares enough, it’s a profitable line of work. It’s when Courson himself is writing — via his messages to Smith — that the book is at its strongest. Criminals, by and large, aren’t generally great at writing, or willing to put down what amounts to a detailed confession, but Courson is an exception. The details of robbing banks, of living on the run, from someone doing it in the moment are a treat for process junkies, even if what surrounds it is skippable. — Dan Cassino
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Zero calories, low transmission rate, free shipping. — SDB
Will anyone have time for broadcast TV with all the bold-type series hitting streaming in the next week? Probably not, but just in case, a couple of premiere notes:
A two-hour 20/20 “uncovers information” on a decades-old unsolved murder // “In 1998, 12-year-old Anthony Harris confessed to murdering his five-year-old neighbor, Devan Duniver … even after a judge found him guilty, Harris and his lawyers maintained his innocence, saying that police coerced his confession using intimidating interrogation techniques on the child. After spending two years in juvenile detention, Harris won his appeal and later had his conviction overturned.” Harris is interviewed on the episode; Duniver’s murder remains unsolved. That airs Friday 5/6 on ABC, and hits Hulu the next day.
Never Seen Again hits Paramount+ Tuesday 5/10 // This one’s on a streaming service. The first episode of “a new, emotional docuseries told from the point of view of those left behind when a loved one vanishes without a trace” will land on CBS’s news app 5/7; the rest of the season will be on Paramount+ days later. This isn’t unintriguing…but the streamer’s PR blast dances too close to a famous series’ tagline for my taste: “NEVER SEEN AGAIN poses a crucial question: Someone out there knows something ... Is it you?” I mean, I can’t be the only one who started humming the Unsolved Mysteries outro theme, can I?
Accused: Guilty or Innocent? returns for a third season Thursday 5/26 // In case you’ve forgotten the logline on this one: “Each immersive episode follows the accused person’s journey through the planning of their legal defense, their appearances in court, and, ultimately, awaiting justice.” This is one of those shows that does do something slightly different in the basic-cable docuseries genre, but doesn’t do it quite so well that I kept watching it after reviewing it in its first season. Still, if you’ve never sampled it, it might be worth your time, if only to see what a network that historically favors law-enforcement POV programming does with a slice of defendant life. The teaser for S03 is below. — SDB
The crime
The January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The story
A few months ago, we asked which content creators you guys wanted to confront the topic of the J6 insurrection, and while I’d still like to see Leah Sottile’s breakdown of the attack and its aftermath, in the meantime we have a slick eight-parter from Wondery, Will Be Wild, which dropped in early April. Will Be Wild’s landing page says the pod is
about the forces that led to the January 6th insurrection and what comes next. Through in-depth stories from a wide range of characters – from people who tried to stop the attack to those who took part – hosts Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz explore the ongoing effort to bring autocracy to America, the lasting damage that effort is doing to our democracy, and the fate of our attempts to combat those anti-democratic forces. Because January 6th wasn't the end of the story, January 6th was just a practice run.
Bernstein and Marritz, who worked together on WNYC podcast Trump, Inc. prior to teaming up for WBW, talked to WNYC’s Brian Lehrer about their new venture last week, but if you think you probably already know what to expect from a public-radio Trump-beat team making a Wondery podcast, you…almost certainly do. Will Be Wild — the reference is to a Trump tweet, one urging his followers to attend the Stop The Steal protest — is professionally built, the connective narration and exposition delivered in measured tones, albeit with a couple more swear words than you’d find in straight-up NPR product. It’s very listenable, despite the enraging nature of the subject matter (remember Trump’s border-moat scheme, complete with crocs and snakes? uch), and it gets access to a wide range of voices: former Homeland Security officials, including the dude who penned that Times op-ed about mounting an internal “resistance” to the Trump Administration; that kid who phoned in a tip to the FBI on his dad; a former Mrs. Idaho who road-tripped to the rally (and claims she didn’t go inside the building).
When you scan the available eps (as of this writing, three on all podcasts apps; Wondery+ customers can get advancers), it might seem to the progressive listener like MAGA accounts and perspectives get a bigger proportion of the runtime than seems healthy. But the fact is, we can’t understand anything about the lunacies of that day — what led up to it, what’s coming after it; what got it started, and why it couldn’t be stopped — if we don’t spend at least equal time with willing participants. It doesn’t make it any easier to understand or tolerate revisiting, and if the insurrection overall isn’t a day you can go back to without elevating your heart rate, Will Be Wild is not for you. The audio of Trump’s “on both sides” remarks is used in the third episode, and it made me want to punch something, so I’ll echo the podcast’s content warning, especially in light of the current week’s news cycle. But if you do want a reasoned, collaged chronicle of J6 and you think it won’t give you agita, I recommend Will Be Wild, which I’ll keep listening to (or at least pop back into at season’s end for a car-trip binge; each chapter is about half an hour, less if you skip the ads).
“Buntsy, I just want to roll around like a cat in a patch of ’nip in a list of stories about what a D-plus Trump is at life.” Friend, I got you.
“Journeys in Trump World” (WaPo’s Jason Wilson undertakes a mediocrity tour of five Trump-branded properties; 2018)
“Donald Trump’s 13 Biggest Business Failures” (Rolling Stone managed to confine itself to 13, somehow; 2016)
“Donald Trump’s Business Failures Were Very Real” (The New Yorker reminds us once again that he basically lit a large inheritance on fire; 2019)
And of course that Michael Lewis joint for the Guardian on the crazeballs transition, featuring Karen Pence “congrats, now kick rocks”-ing ol’ Mike (2018). — SDB
Friday on Best Evidence: Montgomery, Peterson, the Clue Awards…it’s all happening.
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