The Scottish Mail on Sunday - You
‘I FROZE WHEN I SAW DAD’S MUGSHOT ON THE NEWS’
The daughter of a bank robber attempts ot understand her afther’s crimes
Astack of old Polaroids I found in a drawer, some of them peeling and stuck together, show what appears to be a regular family: Dad and my sister on the sofa watching TV, both grinning for the camera; me and my sister holding our new kittens, thrilled; me and Mum lying in the sun in the back garden, raising glasses of lemonade; a Lego fort I had built for my dolls. We looked so normal. At the time, I was unaware of the trouble beneath the surface.
When I think back, I did notice how much Dad yelled at the TV. It used to wake me up. After bedtime I’d sneak down the hall to look at him in the living room, watching a basketball game in the dark, sometimes two TVs set up side by side with different games during the playoffs; him yelling, holding papers, pencils, making calls. I had no clue he was gambling or any notion that this was what gambling looked like. I thought it was horrible that he would yell so loudly. I thought he didn’t care how much it frightened me. Once I cut my foot on a loose nail in the hallway and tracked blood back to my room. I didn’t tell anyone.
Then the fighting started, and soon it was constant. The more Mum and Dad fought, the more the house became all about the fighting. I could feel their anger in my gut, even when there was silence, like a shadowy hand threaded through me.
Eventually the house felt completely wrong. I used to love it: the brass and glass coffee table with Dad’s squashed feet (he told me he wore shoes too small as a child) propped up; our big TV; our dining suite with lacy woven cane seats that printed octagons on our thighs in the summer; the cracked patio; the elms with white-painted bottoms like tube socks. Once the fighting started, it made me mad, how nice all of it was. It didn’t seem to matter any more; it wasn’t for us.
Our parents divorced. My sister went to live with Dad and I went to live with Mum. Life carried on as we grew into young teens, although our lifestyles certainly differed with each parent. Mum was a mum – a good one, although strained. Dad was a dad, but it had become clear he was hiding something. There was an unknowable self he covered up with stories and bluff. He was like fragments of a picture that didn’t match up. I couldn’t figure him out, couldn’t pin him down.
Then came the day he would be pinned down as he had never been before.
It was the summer of 1994 and he had just lost his job at General Motors. A production-line worker, he wasn’t allowed to borrow company cars – that was a privilege for white- collar workers and executives – yet he ‘borrowed’ one anyway; a red Corvette for my sister’s 16th birthday. A few days after receiving her ‘gift’, she was pulled over by the police and informed the car was stolen. Dad said it was all a big mistake and tried to smooth it over. He was fired, but he didn’t tell us, kept pretending to go to work. On one of those pretend work days, Dad entered a small branch of a local bank, walked calmly up to the cashier and handed her a note: ‘Act normal. This is a robbery.’ It looked like a transaction to everyone else in the room. He just walked out with the money, easy as pie. He robbed ten more banks that summer.
The shocking revelation was made to my sister, who walked into their flat to find it being torn apart by the FBI. Men in black uniforms swarmed her and bombarded her with questions – where’s the money? Where’s the gun? Mum and I had gone camping and were unreachable as my sister repeatedly called us from the police station.
The day after Dad was arrested, Mum and I arrived home, tired from the drive back from Canada and dirty from a week of camping and hiking along the coast of Lake Superior. Mum pressed the blinking button on the answering machine and I dragged my bag upstairs to unpack. I dumped my clothes in my small room and sat for a moment, listening to the muffled sound of Mum on the phone downstairs. Then I started listening properly. Her voice was getting louder and sharper. I had already moved back towards the stairs when she called my name.
She sat at the kitchen table, the curly phone cord stretched to her as she held the receiver with her thumb on the button. Her voice was high with exasperation. ‘That was Grandpa. Your father has been arrested. Your sister is staying with them.’
I paused for a while, staring calmly. ‘What did he do?’
‘Robbed banks.’ She looked at me and we didn’t say anything. She hadn’t tensed up or pinched her face in anger. In fact, her face cleared out flat, like the look of someone who’s just remembered something. ‘Robbed banks?’ I finally said. ‘Robbed banks,’ she repeated dreamily. ‘Bank robbery. Huh. You don’t say,’ she murmured to herself, nodding blankly, clearly in shock.
It didn’t feel like some kind of mistake, as it sometimes does when you don’t want to believe what’s happened. It was horrible how easy it was to accept; almost funny. In the pressurised silence, the beginnings of a laugh could have crept over me, but I fought it.
Even in that first moment, the immediate acceptance felt so dark and solid. I didn’t cry or scream. I remember standing still for a while in the kitchen, looking at the linoleum floor and saying nothing, feeling as though I were waiting for instructions. In some ways I felt it was good; I probably experienced some relief. He would be removed from our lives in an official and secure way. It solved him in a way none of us could. He was exposed, finally; made into something specific – a bank robber. It was terrifying, but also satisfying how pinned down Dad suddenly was in that moment.
We didn’t say much. We both knew it was a big moment. Everything would soon be different for us, but for then we just sat with the last of our old reality. I stared out of the window in the kitchen to the normal day outside. Eventually Mum went upstairs to take a shower and shut herself in her bedroom.
Helpless, I plopped in front of the TV and turned it on. The first of the evening news was just coming on, something I would normally turn away from, but I froze when I saw his face:
It had become clear that Dad was hiding something… I couldn’t figure him out, pin him down
Dad’s mugshot floating in the corner next to the familiar local news reporter, who was talking about him, saying his last name, my last name, a breaking story. I couldn’t hear, the sound disappeared. I could only see his sad face, baggy eyes, deep frown… Dad.
He was finally caught in a stakeout. He had been working his way around the banks just north of the Detroit city outskirts and the FBI guessed right on his next hit. They followed him to a golf club after the robbery and found the money and his disguise sitting in plain view in the back seat of his car. Inside, he was at the bar, eating a sandwich calmly. In his pockets were chips from Casino Windsor and betting slips from the Hazel Park Raceway.
The disguise? A plain newsboy cap and a bushy black fake moustache. Ridiculous, really. He was dubbed the Mario Brothers bandit because of his resemblance to the game character while wearing it. When he was arrested, the nickname was splashed all over the evening news and the papers.
We found out more when the story was reported on the late news. They said he had robbed banks all summer – 11 in all – and that the FBI had been tracking him for a while, staking out banks, hoping to catch him at one.
First he’d rent a car, then drive to a hotel. He’d take the licence plates off the rental and switch them with the plates of any nicer-looking car in the hotel lot. He’d drive to a bank, wait in the car, looking for a calm moment, then go in. After the robbery he’d switch the licence plates back and go out for a meal or a round of golf.
I saw grainy grey photos of him from the security cameras of a bank. He had on the hat and large fake moustache and a pair of glasses, but I could see his mouth and chin, and I knew it was him. He looked like he does when he is certain of himself – an iron calm. He had no gun. Cashiers reported that he pointed something at them from inside the pocket of his jacket – probably his finger or a toy gun. He would wait in the queue, calmly slide a withdrawal slip under the window on which he had written the demand note. The cashiers passed him money and he left, acting normal, just as he wanted it to be. The customers around him went about their business, oblivious.
When he was caught after the last robbery, one newspaper article reported that he said he was relieved. Would he really have said that? I doubted a lot of the facts in the flurry of articles following him; many were wrong.
Dad served seven years. By the time he was released, in 2001, I was 21. He settled into a normal life again, working, trying to support my sister and I when he could, and he even started dating again – for seven years he lived a normal life. Then it all came crashing down again.
‘Are you sitting down?’ My sister called to tell me the news. I knew right away what it was. She spilled the story of how his gambling debts had caught up with him again and how, again, he had made the desperate and incomprehensible choice to rob a bank. This time, he’d been caught on the way out, chased down by a citizen who noticed the dye pack in the bait money had exploded and was fuming smoke. Dad went back to prison and we tried to go on with our lives.
He’s there now, out of contact with every member of his family – except for me. I suppose I’m still not satisfied with the facts. Everyone else is happy to accept him as a simple sociopath, driven by greed, gambling addiction and selfishness. But there were years and years of normalcy, of Dad just being a dad, coaching my sister’s softball team, mowing the lawn, playing catch at the park. I wanted to know which one of these dads was the real Dad. It mattered to me to know, for certain, because it would help me understand myself better. Did Dad love us? Or were we just his cover? Or just in his way?
For years I wrote to him in prison through the official correctional department email service. I visited him a few times, trying to analyse his face for the truth. But he gave me the same stories he gave everyone else. I came away with no new information.
The only thing I’ve learnt is that there are no easy answers; that simplistic narratives cannot be so easily laid over the messy and unpredictable events of the real world. I realise Dad is – like so many of us – an irreducibly complex person, and I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with that.
Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir by Molly Brodak is published by Icon Books, price £14.99. To order a copy for £11.24 (a 25 per cent discount) until 6 November, visit you-bookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640; p&p is free on orders over £15
I visited Dad in prison, but he gave me the same stories as everyone else