Way from p 10 caller that no such person worked there. A few minutes later, the caller was back on the line, asking for Tony Martin. It was Steve Boyce. Having found the terms of his own parole too onerous, Boyce had decided to move to Arizona. He dropped by his old buddy’s apartment, finance a visit to a pawn shop that offered a selection of reasonably priced used fire- arms. The first bank was a place on Cam- elback Road where Tony Martin cashed his paychecks. They wore fake beards but carried real guns. Boyce took one teller, Byerly another. They showed the guns. The tellers pulled stacks of cash out of their drawers and handed it to them. Byerly was astonished at how easy it was. They’d wrapped their fingers in transparent tape, in an effort to avoid leaving prints, but Byerly was sweat- ing so freely that the tape hung in loops as he scooped up the dough. Rattled, he started to head back out the front door, even though the get- away car was parked out of sight in back. “Homie! This way!” Boyce shouted. Byerly spun around. Bills spilled out of his hoodie as he ran. “It was a learning Byerly (left) and Steve Boyce met in prison — and later robbed banks together in Phoenix. played Monopoly with his hosts until the wife went off to bed, then took Byerly aside and showed him a few items hidden in a toiletry kit. They included a starter pistol, a wig, and a fake mustache. From his wallet, he produced a brief article clipped from a newspaper. The headline: “Bewigged Man Robs Boise Bank.” With the right tools, Boyce explained, a man could do well for himself. For just a few seconds of heart-pounding effort, he’d walked out of that bank in Boise with $10,000 — damn near half of what Tony Martin made in an entire year. Byerly listened, his own mind racing with ideas. If he ever did anything that crazy, he told himself, he wouldn’t carry around a clipping announcing it to the world. And he would have a better dis- guise. And something better than a starter pistol. And — “Most of the time I had good inten- tions,” Byerly says. “But part of my brain was always on the lookout for an opportu- nity. He broke it down for me right there, and I couldn’t help myself. It had already started in my head. I started thinking about cash stashed, and how nice it would be to have some of that.” STACKS OF CASH T hey used the starter pistol on a cou- ple of trial runs, stickups at hotels that generated just enough cash to experience,” Byerly says. “We got some- thing like $17,000. I’d never had that much money in my life. I knew I was going to do it again.” Three weeks later, they hit the Western Savings & Loan on Bell Road, the kind of target they preferred be- cause it had a walled-in parking lot in back. You could hop the wall, jump into a getaway car none of the employees could see, and get away clean — in theory, any- way. This time they made off with close to $30,000 and a dye pack, which exploded in the plastic bag Byerly was carrying as he was going over the wall. He got a face full of red dye and tear gas — “just like those idiots in Raising Arizona,” he says. Coughing, wheezing, snot and bills fly- ing everywhere, Byerly told Boyce to drive while he tried to clear his eyes. They man- aged to save most of the haul, tossing out the dye-drenched outer bills and trim- ming the red off the borders of the rest. That, too, was a learning experience. In subsequent jobs, Byerly avoided the bait packs, ordering the tellers to make the withdrawals from their lower drawer or the “cash cow” cart kept nearby. He began to carry a radio frequency detector, so he could quickly find and discard any track- ing devices planted in the stacks, and a po- lice scanner as well. “He was strictly professional,” Boyce recalls. “We crossed all our Ts and overan- alyzed everything, every possible aspect of the operation, and what could go wrong.” Not long after embarking on his new career, Byerly put his arm in a sling, walked into the PR firm and told his boss that Tony Martin was in- >> p 15 13 phoenixnewtimes.com | CONTENTS | FEEDBACK | OPINION | NEWS | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | PHOENIX NEW TIMES JAN. 31ST–FEB. 6TH, 2019 COURTESY OF WAYNE BYERLY
