Because a hostage negotiation can be the start of a 50-year friendship.
On a Monday afternoon in 1975, Ray “Cat” Olsen walked up to a bank manager’s desk and yelled, “Put down the phone or I’ll kill you.” Larry Haber looked up and thought it was a prank. The West Village was still a mystical scene in the ’70s, and Olsen, a 23-yearold drifter wearing a psychedelic T-shirt, fit right in. Then Haber saw the rifle, the revolver, and the two hunting knives.
Olsen listed his demands: $10 million in gold, a jet to Cuba, and the immediate release of the recently arrested Patty Hearst and a handful of her Symbionese Liberation Army comrades and captors. “Everybody knew the SLA back then and knew that they were killers,” Haber told me. “I was really, really stressed out. My heart was pounding.”
Two years earlier, spurred by a two-day hostage standoff in Bushwick and the killings at Attica prison and the Munich Olympics, the NYPD created the world’s first hostage-negotiation unit. Detective Lieutenant Frank Bolz was its first commanding officer. He arrived on the scene in his shirtsleeves and backward ball cap and, over the phone, began working on Olsen. His priority: getting the hostages out. “You talk to all different kinds of people on the job, but the idea is always the same: I want to get this guy to come out,” Bolz said.
“It was obvious Frank knew what he was doing,” Haber said. “He took the tension out of the air. It had such a calming effect on me. Olsen was calmer, too. That was the first time that I thought we had a good chance of making it out alive.”
Olsen had been inspired to hold up a bank after seeing the Sidney Lumet film Dog Day Afternoon, which had premiered two weeks earlier. He tried his best to match Al Pacino’s performance as a troubled but charismatic Everyman, calling into one of the city’s most popular radio stations to chat with an on-air DJ and request a Grateful Dead song.
This eight-hour saga, chronicled on the NYPD podcast Talk to Me, ends the way all good hostage negotiations do: with a whimper. Olsen, tired and worried about the consequences of his actions, let Haber take his rifle and revolver. Haber opened the door and officers swooped in. That afternoon was the beginning of a nearly 50-year friendship between Haber and Bolz. While Haber credits Bolz with saving his life, Bolz says Haber is the only hostage (out of more than 900 he helped free) who ever became his friend. The two saw each other at dinner, charity events, and at Haber’s son’s bar mitzvah. Once, they met Lumet. “I said to him, ‘You son of a gun—you almost got me killed!’” Haber said.
Haber, now 78, and Bolz, 92, recounted the Olsen affair recently during lunch at Fogo de Chão, where they love the “gaucho” buffet. They started going to lunch weekly in 2021 after Bolz’s wife died. “I’m a different person than I was back then, all because of Frank,” Haber said, sipping coffee. “How many people do you know who can say that one person not only saved their life but changed their life?”