Part I: Wayne Byerly got out of prison and moved to Phoenix to work in PR. He found robbing banks more lucrative. After several big scores in Maricopa County, he and his crew, known as the Wells Fargo Bandits, headed for Tucson for what they expected to be an easy job. T hey settled on the Friday before Christmas, when the super- sized Wells Fargo on East Grant Road in Tucson would be well stocked for holiday shoppers and people cashing paychecks, and the merchant tellers would be raking in deposits from cash-heavy retailers. “Irish” Tigue drove and stayed with the car, a Buick Park Avenue. Wayne Byerly, Brad Leonard, and “Red” Tigue headed into the bank shortly after noon, ski masks down. The plan was for Byerly to rob the regu- lar tellers while Leonard went to the mer- chant stations and Red covered them both. They would meet at the back door, and Irish would pick them up on the blind side of the building, by the drive-thru. But Leon- ard, Byerly says, deviated from the plan. He tried to find someone to open the vault, and then he almost pulled a bookcase down on top of himself while trying to extract the videotape recording the robbery. After two minutes, Byerly heard the call on his police scanner of a 211 in progress; the call had come sooner than expected because a by- stander outside had seen masked men go- ing into the bank and called 911. Byerly waited impatiently by the back door, wondering what was keeping Leon- ard. “Ándale, ándale!” he screamed, their prearranged signal to flee. (The cry was supposed to mislead the police into think- ing the robbers were Hispanic.) Finally, Leonard came running toward the exit, his still-empty bag flapping. Red climbed into the front of the Buick. Byerly and Leonard piled into the back and started rummaging through Byerly’s bag of cash, looking for tracking devices. Byerly threw two out the window. They missed one in the scatter of bills on the floor. They had gone only a few blocks when Irish spotted a police car behind them, the cop on his radio. “Sharkey! We’ve got a sharkey!” They made a couple of quick turns. The police car followed, staying a respectful dis- tance behind. The Buick pulled over. Byerly kneeled on the back floor, cocked his 9-mil- limeter and fired, blowing out the Buick’s back window. The Buick roared off. The chase through midtown and the north side of Tucson reached speeds of 50 mph or more amid occasional bursts of gun- fire. When Irish had managed to put a little distance between them and the police, he slowed for one turn and Red leapt out, tum- bled along the asphalt, and started running. Leonard was the next to go, scootching out from his seat, knocking the scanner and wads of money out with him, rolling and skidding and finally on his feet and running, the wind snatching at the bills in his wake. A few moments later, Irish pulled over behind an abandoned building, trying to lose the tail, but the description of the car was out. They were soon spotted by another officer, who’d left his patrol car and was approaching on foot; as they sped off, the officer opened fire with a shotgun. Byerly felt something rip into his back and returned fire. Byerly got out a few blocks later, along a desolate stretch of East Delano Street. He told Irish to dump the car and leave the money behind. The car was found a couple of blocks away, riddled with 22 bullet holes. The back tires were flat, the interior a mess of blood, shards of glass, and loose bills. Witnesses saw a stocky red-haired man with a Hawaiian shirt and a torn pants leg walking nearby, pausing to stuff something in a clump of palm trees. The man was soon arrested, and $4,000 in cash and a semiau- tomatic pistol retrieved from the palms. Helicopters, dogs, and a SWAT team descended on the area, which was sealed off to traffic. Byerly hid in a storage shed for two hours, then surrendered as the swatties surrounded the place. He had no gun on him and none of the loot, but he says the police worked out their frustra- tions on him anyway. In addition to the pellet in his back, he’d acquired numerous contusions, a dislocated jaw, aching ribs, and a ruptured testicle by the time he saw a doctor. Miraculously, no one else had been injured, though at least three police officers reported being fired upon during the chase. Red and Leonard eluded the dragnet. For a few days, Byerly sat tight, expecting his partners to come to his rescue with ace defense attorneys; in his more delusional moments, he even imagined they might break him out during one of his trips to court. But on Christmas Eve, a call to his girlfriend, Alexa, clued him in to the true state of things. Byerly had asked her to retrieve some belongings from his house. She reported that she’d found the place cleaned out, pre- sumably by Tigue and Leonard. Leonard soon showed up at her house, she added, with a six-pack of beer, and told her that Byerly was never going to get out of prison, that she should just forget him. He tried to kiss her. (“I remember being very emo- tional, very upset,” she recalls now. “And he was trying to hit on me.”) Byerly was furious. He would never betray a partner like that. And >> p 14
