Way from p 9 tences, to collect reward money, to betray those who’ve betrayed them, to get an ex- tra cookie before lights out in the cell block. They do it for all kinds of reasons, but they’re rarely eager to admit they do it. Byerly had his share of self-serving motives, but in his case, what started out as a form of payback became a death-de- fying crusade, a quest for redemption. Another man in his po- sition would have vanished quietly into the federal wit- ness security program, also known as Witsec, keeping his head down, never look- ing back for fear that some- thing was gaining on him. Not Byerly. He wears his snitch jacket like a badge of honor. After he got out of Florence, Witsec provided him with a new identity and a new start, but he left the program a few years ago and went to court to have his name changed back to Byerly. He’s had a series of names over the years, from the aliases he adopted in his bank-rob- bing days to those he used in prison (where he was known as “Spud” among prisoners and by the code name “Uncle Sam” to the Bureau of Prisons intel offi- cer) to the identities Witsec supplied. But Byerly, the name he was born with, suits him best. He’s not hiding anymore. More emails followed. ters and medical records that hinted at what his double life as a convict infor- mant had cost him, physically and emo- tionally. I had never thought of snitching as having a heroic dimension, but clearly, in some cases, justice depends on it. In a world where loyalty to your tribe is prized over individual conscience, where the president of the United States rages against the “flippers” among his own in 1961 and spent much of his childhood on Army bases in Kansas, Alabama, Geor- gia, and Idaho. His father, John Owen Byerly, served 30 months in Vietnam as a Special Forces officer and received the Bronze Star. To Wayne and his three sib- lings, he was a forbidding presence. “He was a good man, but he was a har- dass,” Wayne says. “I’m sure he did and saw things over there that changed him. He never spoke of Vietnam to our family, ever.” In 1973, John Byerly, now a lieutenant colonel, retired from the service and moved his family to a 35-acre farm in Middleton, Idaho, a tiny community a short drive from Boise. He worked at the local bank, drank heav- ily, and was often at odds with Wayne, the younger of his two boys. Wayne was bright but hyper and impul- sive; from an early age, he was frequently found in some place he’d been told not to go, doing something he wasn’t supposed to do. By the time he reached Then phone calls. One day he made the 13-hour drive to Den- ver from southern Idaho, where he grew up and now lives. He brought a pile of legal papers and a guitar. I brought pizza. I sifted through documents that had At 17, Wayne Byerly joined the Army Reserve. A series of burglaries sent him to Idaho’s state penitentiary at 21. been filed in court under seal, attesting to his cooperation with the government in convicting his former bank-robbing part- ners, disrupting prison gang operations, and putting the meth cook on death row. He talked for hours, showed me the mis- aligned, impacted knuckles he’d acquired from bare-fisted fights behind bars, and sang a few songs he’d written, ballads about loss and the outlaw life and the long road home. I flew to Idaho. I talked to family mem- 10 bers, ex-girlfriends, lawyers, prosecutors, and a man who used to rob banks with Byerly in Arizona. I studied crime-scene photos from his last disastrous bank job in Tucson, which ended in a shootout with police, and letters written to his attorney during his 13-month high-wire act in Flor- ence. What had seemed far-fetched at first checked out, from major events to minor details, all the way to the surprise twist at the end, which I can’t get into right now (or it wouldn’t be a surprise). Deep in the paper trail were some let- merry men and declares that it ought to be illegal to cut deals with the govern- ment, Byerly’s journey to redeem himself has a certain resonance. “You can say he ratted his way out,” Byerly says. “I understand that. I lived the prison culture. But I did what I did for a reason. I became a human being and left the garbage behind. And if that meant sweeping up some garbage on the way out, to show the world I really meant it and to put myself in a position where there was no way of going back, I was proud to do it.” THICK AS THIEVES S ome people seem destined for a life of crime because of their origins. Shake the family tree, and you’ll find a history of substance abuse and pri- vation, adult male relatives cycling through gangs and prison, a profusion of cousins and godfathers named Vito, and so on. Not Wayne Byerly. He comes from hardworking, law-abiding, middle-class stock, and his transformation into a career criminal, a pariah, a three-time loser — what he likes to call a “knucklehead” — was truly a matter of choice. Byerly was born in Anchorage, Alaska, high school, his siblings say, Wayne was running with the wrong crowd. Amid the boredom of life in Middle- ton, what really jazzed him was fast cars and impressing girls, both of which required cash. When he was 16, he and another juvenile bur- gled a neighbor’s house, making off with a stash of bills, cameras, and a coin collection. Jammed up by detectives afterward, he was required to make restitution and released, even though he refused to give up his accom- plice. He dropped out of school and joined the Army Reserve. He learned to box and discovered he wasn’t bad at it. A few months later he enlisted in the Navy, part of a plea deal that got him out of another jam after he and a buddy were picked up by police in a stolen car outside Las Vegas. The Navy failed to deliver on its promise to provide him training in electronics, and he was honorably discharged after a year. More thefts followed. Still not quite 20, he was arrested for stealing 18 pigs from a Middleton farmer and selling them at auc- tion. He got county jail time, probation, and a suspended prison sentence. The set- back didn’t dissuade him; it encouraged him to think bigger. He began to plan a job at a local market where he’d worked for years — and had been unfairly discharged, he insists, for a shortage in the register that wasn’t his fault. The score went down without a hitch. Byerly chatted up the owner at the front of the store while his accomplice came through the back door and raided the safe, which was generally left unlocked during business hours, slipping away with $1,500. Byerly figured he had plausi- ble denial, since he stayed away from the vicinity of the safe the whole time he was in the place. He was mistaken. The theft was quickly pegged as an inside job, and Byerly was the logical insider. Some wit- nesses even claimed he took the money himself. This time the judge sentenced the baby-faced heist-meister to five years in prison. The decision shocked Byerly, who had hoped for probation or at least a boot camp for young offenders rather than the state pen. The day he arrived, he hit the yard with trepidation, expecting bad things. “I was a pretty boy,” he says. “I was 21 but looked 17. I could fight, but I was afraid of getting ganged-up on.” As it turned out, he had more cred than he realized. One of the first people he encountered was the penitentiary’s most famous resident, Claude Dallas, a trapper who’d been the focus of a nation- wide manhunt after he gunned down two state game wardens in his remote camp. Byerly had met Dallas briefly at the county jail in Caldwell; Dallas remem- bered him and greeted him warmly, which gave other inmates the impression that the new fish wasn’t quite as green as he seemed. Byerly also began to hang out with Steve Boyce, a large, soft-spoken athlete who’d played baseball and foot- ball at a rival high school near Middleton and was also doing time for burglary. He and Byerly had never crossed paths be- fore, but they knew some of the same people and had blazed down some of the same streets drag-racing, Byerly in his ’67 Cougar and Boyce in a ’68 Camaro. In prison, they became thick as thieves. Byerly’s reputation as a fighter also helped. He quickly let it be known that he was the 1983 Golden Gloves state cham- pion in the welterweight division (a slight exaggeration; he’d actually made it to the quarterfinals). He moved well enough to dispel doubts, pummeling anyone who took him on in the pen’s boxing ring; most of his fellow cons knew almost nothing about the sweet science. Paroled after two years, Byerly made a stab at the square-john life. He married the longtime sweetheart who’d waited for him and launched his own business pour- ing concrete in Boise. He was doing well for someone just out of the joint, but the money wasn’t coming in fast enough to suit him. He’d also discovered cocaine, and it wasn’t long before a nosy police offi- cer caught him in a parking lot by the Boise River, snorting the devil’s dandruff in his car with a barmaid. The infraction didn’t land him back in prison, but it did lead to his parole being extended for an- other year. “That was unacceptable,” Byerly says. “I wanted to be a free man.” An obliging friend provided him a So- cial Security number and other vital statis- tics. Byerly left Idaho. Calling himself Tony Martin, he found a job in Phoenix with a public relations firm. He brought his wife down, introduced her around as his girlfriend. Months later, a call came in to his of- fice, someone wanting to speak to Wayne Byerly. The receptionist told the >> p 13 JAN. 31ST–FEB. 6TH, 2019 PHOENIX NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | NEWS | OPINION | FEEDBACK | CONTENTS | phoenixnewtimes.com COURTESY OF WAYNE BYERLY
