How the FBI Gets Its Man - The Wheelman

BLING HAD ALWAYS BEEN THE BANK HEIST MASTERMIND, but he didn’t talk shop too much. Just concrete details, like this joint here’s got an ACU that sniffs gunpowder. Lennon would nod and file it away. All Lennon really had to know was that Bling knew his shit enough to be outside, with the money, no worries. Most of what Lennon knew about bank heists came from books he read as a kid in Ireland—stuff brought over by his American dad in a duffel bag. They were musty paperbacks with titles like How the FBI Gets Its Man and The Bad Ones and We Are the Public Enemies and I, Mobster and New York: Confidential. They sparked his adolescent imagination and led him to crime encyclopedias and lurid biographies and yellowed men’s magazines he nicked from bookshops in Listowel.

Lennon always knew his father was a bad guy, but Lennon’s mum never shared the details. She’d only spent a couple of weeks with him while on holiday in New York City in 1971. Freddy Selway made a few visits to see his boy later on, but only when he needed a place to hide overseas. It was during one of these visits, in 1979, that he’d brought along the duffel bag full of paperbacks. Freddy had to split, so he left the bag behind. Or maybe he’d left the bag behind on purpose. Lennon never knew. In late December 1980, Freddy Selway was killed trying to kill somebody else. Lennon’s daddy was a hit man.

Lennon kept his father’s paperbacks in a safe-deposit box in a small federal bank in Champaign, Illinois, along with $54,000 in emergency funds. The books were among his most prized possessions; he didn’t dare leave them somewhere that might be compromised.

Right now, his mind kept coming back to How the FBI Gets Its Man. It was one of the many books produced by the FBI, under the watchful eye of J. Edgar Hoover, meant to glorify the agency. The bad guys were punished; the G-men were always smarter and sharper and quicker to their guns. But Lennon, even at a young age, identified with the heisters and killers, who had cool names and led interesting lives. Lives he imagined his father leading.

He knew all about bank robbery from How the FBI Gets Its Man.

There were lone-wolf note jobs, and multiple-man takeover teams. Since Lennon lacked a team and a voice, a takeover was out. It had to be a note job. Quick and clean. He also knew that bank tellers were instructed to cooperate with bank robbers no matter what, lest the bank robber go crazy and start pumping the clientele full of lead. So the key was the note. The note had to be fucking scary. So scary, the teller had to think twice about an alarm, or a dye pack, or any other bullshit.

This is why Lennon thought a bank inside a supermarket was his best bet. There were moms and kids and old people and all kinds of innocent bystanders, there to buy milk and bread and juice and cereal. No teller was going to argue with a scary man with a gun.

Fuck. A gun.

He’d have to fake that … .

No. Wait.

This was America, post–9/11. He’d only have to fake a bomb.