Never truly know: My buddy, the former armed robber

He’s dead now, but I had a good friend who proved that the old adage is true — you never really know a person.

Our friendship spanned about 30 years, and we spent too many hours just sitting around talking. I’d go in to sell him an ad for his restaurant, and an hour later we were still back in his office talking, drinking coffee. About local politics mainly, along with the state of the world.

While we were sitting inside his restaurant one day, with no one nearby to hear us, he said to me, “You know, Gregg, you think you may know me, but you really don’t.”

By this time I’m intrigued.

Twenty years older than me, I found him to be one of the most interesting men I’d ever met. The life he’d led, the places he’d been, and on top of that, he was one of the hardest workers I’d ever met.

He proceeded to tell me that when he was young, he was into armed robbery.

I mean, this isn’t something I run into on a normal basis — a guy telling me that he was once a serious violent felon. He never shot anyone, but just the thought of robbing a grocery store, in broad daylight, with gun in hand, well, that’s a special kind of individual capable of that. So, no, I really didn’t know the guy. My buddy was right.

I grabbed a second cup of coffee because I wanted to hear more, and the restaurant was empty.

Turned out, he came from a decent family. But for some reason he started engaging in criminal activity in his teens. Stolen cars. But by the time was around 22, he was already robbing grocery stores with gun in hand.

He went to prison once, got out, went back to robbing stores, got caught, did more state prison time again. And then he tried to go clean, get a job, but the cops kept coming around, he said, “rousting” him as he put it.

Time after time, he’d get a job, the cops would show up, his boss would get upset, and there went the job.

One day he decided that if he ever wanted to make a clean break for himself, he would simply have to get away. Skip parole.

Keep in mind, this was in the early 1960s, which is why this story is even possible.

The Great Escape

So he skipped parole and drove to another state, found a small town, and went to the Social Security office. He told the woman behind the counter that even though he was in his mid to late 20s, he had simply never had a Social Security card. Even though he had no ID, she made out a Social Security card for him, gave him his new number, which then allowed him to go get a driver’s license in another state, far from the state that still had his arrest warrant on file.

From there he was off and running and never looked back.

He got work, saved money, started several businesses before finally landing in the RGV, where he built another successful business and a local restaurant.

One year, he had run for public office long before he told me this story, and I asked him about that.

“Weren’t you afraid that one of your opponents would do a background check on you and find out that you still have an outstanding arrest warrant with your name on it?”

He said, no, because when he gave his name to the woman in that old Social Security office so long ago, he had changed the spelling of his surname.

That made it easy for him to transition because at least both spellings sounded the same whenever someone called out his name with his back turned.

To make this story even stranger, one day a former cop from his old hometown walks into his restaurant. The former cop is now a Snowbird living at one of the local RV parks.

My buddy, in his youth, had a bad habit of mouthing off to cops. Back then, criminals knew better. Most of them, not counting my friend. He said he got into trouble a lot, running his mouth, and as a consequence, he’d been administered relatively severe beatings by either street cops or prison guards during his two arrests and subsequent years spent in the slammer.

But that was the past, and the now is the now. He said he didn’t blame them. He knew he was trouble in his youth.

Turns out, one of the cops who had beat him up when he was cuffed, no less, is this Snowbird now sitting down to eat at his restaurant.

I never asked him how they got connected. Surely after, I’m guessing, 30 years they didn’t recognize each other.

Nonetheless, they got to talking, reestablished this connection between them — cop and former crook — and drank coffee together for years.

Some stories do have a happy ending.

My buddy never shot anyone, but he did carry some guilt for the trauma he caused people by brandishing a gun during an armed robbery.

But he’d done his time. He paid his debt to society.

He just couldn’t catch a break while on parole, which I fear still happens today for too many felons looking for honest work.