As the lilacs began to bloom and the ground thawed in the Capital Region during spring 1983, Evans was back on the streets of Troy running with his old “business partners,” looking to set up a few jobs. It had been only months since Flora Mae’s death. But Evans was never one to dwell on pain. His mother and father were gone. His sister lived in Florida. Alone now, he pondered his own misconstrued notion of what the future held. He didn’t want to find a “real” job, or even begin to think about going straight. He had made quick money in the past burglarizing homes, businesses, antique shops and jewelry stores. He had done hard time in the nation’s toughest prisons and survived. All he wanted now was the perfect score. Once he had enough money, he was taking off on what he referred to as a “tour.”
Still, there were some loose ends in Troy he had to clear up. Either while in prison or shortly after he had been paroled, it was never made clear, Evans found out that a few Angels had roughed up a judge’s son pretty bad. They broke his face…, he later wrote.
Because of what he knew about the incident, a district attorney in Troy had been encouraging him to testify before a grand jury. His testimony could help put the perpetrators behind bars for a long time.
For Evans, nothing he ever did came without a price. In fact, in some of his later letters to Robbie, he claimed that the DA’s office in Troy had even promised to trade his testimony for a few charges he was facing regarding a “market [he] tried to hit.”
There was one problem, however. Word among criminals on the street traveled like junior high gossip. No sooner had Evans begun talking to the DA’s office, then he developed a reputation on the street for being an informant. Interestingly, he had chastised and threatened some of his old business partners in letters to his sister for the same reason, yet here he was doing it himself.
On another level, Evans looked at the Hells Angels situation as a “get out of jail free” card. He felt that if he got caught doing another burglary, he could simply float his grand jury testimony and walk—that is, providing the Angels didn’t get him first.
With Easter, 1983, fast approaching, Evans was back in Troy living with Tim Rysedorph and Michael Falco on Adams Street. Since Evans’s departure, the apartment had become, not only a place to sleep, but a storage facility for stolen merchandise, according to law enforcement. A favorite spot was in the floorboards.
Evans’s latest run with Rysedorph and Falco, however, wouldn’t last long, because on April 22 he was picked up for burglarizing a home. While out on bail for that charge, he was picked up again on May 10 for grand larceny and burglary.
At the time, he still owed the New York parole department sixteen months from his previous two-to four-year bid, for which he had been released twenty-four months early. Even if, by some mere happenstance, he beat the latest charges, he was still looking at a year or more for violating his parole.
After he spent a few days behind bars in Saratoga County Jail, where he had been picked up, Evans’s court-appointed attorney visited him to discuss what—if any—options he had.
“You can’t beat this case,” his attorney insisted.
“I’ll plead guilty to two misdemeanors,” Evans said, “as long as I get sentenced to sixteen months and do the time here!” He could have agreed to a lesser sentence of twelve months, but the time would have to be served in a state prison, something he wasn’t prepared to do. The last bid had broken him. State prisons were “hell,” he said later. They hardened people.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Evans was always thinking ahead. In Saratoga, a county jail that generally held people awaiting sentencing, he knew he was safe from the Angels. Out in the state prison system, there was no telling where he would end up, or who he would run into. Doing an extra four months in a county jail would be far easier than facing a pack of Hells Angels in Attica or Clinton.
Within a week, his lawyer returned with some good news. The DA agreed to the sixteen months in county. He ran the risk of getting transferred, but he would never see a state prison, at least that’s what the DA promised.
According to Evans, he had set up his latest burglary so he could secure enough money for a piece of property he wanted to buy in his sister’s name in upstate New York or Vermont. Sitting in jail once again, counting the days until his release, he realized his dream would have to wait for at least one more year.
You were almost a property owner in N.Y.! Evans jokingly wrote to Robbie on May 10, 1983, just days after he began serving his sentence. I thought I’d be making some decent money…. Oh, well, have to cancel that one for a while.
Talking about an appearance he had made in court to seal the deal with the DA’s office, Evans carried on about the behavior of some members of the state police he had witnessed while in court: You wouldn’t believe the way [they] were lying. Under oath even. And trying to look all righteous and truthful. Man it got me pissed.
It was around this same time that members of the Bureau began showing up at the jail to talk to Evans. They were fishing, trying to see what he knew about certain people. Evans had no trouble giving up information when it served him. There were times when he would brag about major drug deals he had heard about in Troy and Albany on “such and such” a day. He hated drug dealers. He believed a drug dealer was no better than a child molester or rapist. Stealing from them, in his mind, wasn’t a crime; he was doing the public a service. Furthermore, giving up information about drug deals was a bartering tool. He could have cared less if word ever got out and he became a target.
By July, he had been given a release date: September 16, 1984. What made this date special was that not only would he become a “free man” once again, but he would no longer be on parole. To Evans, parole was bondage. It was like being held hostage by the system. It had nothing to do with his paying back society for his crimes; to him, it was “the man” holding him down. In September 1984, he would be clear to go wherever he wanted, do whatever he wanted, without being tied to a parole officer.
A short time before the Fourth of July holiday, 1983, Evans penned a succinct letter to let Robbie know where he was. After explaining briefly that he was clear of any “problems” with the state police, he wrote, A guy I do things with got busted and bought his way out by telling on me. He knew about music equipment I got because he helped me sell it—guns also….
A few weeks later: The State Police brought a fed to see me. I arranged to have my nice gun dropped off. No charges against me. No problems. My whole troubles started when a guy I have known for years, and have done a lot of things with, got caught in Vermont. He started telling on me to get out of charges he had here in New York.
Members of the Bureau later confirmed that the “guy” Evans was referring to in that letter was Michael Falco: Anyway, I gave back my gun and a $900 power saw I got for cutting safes.
Regardless of how hard he tried, Evans couldn’t get over the fact that he was playing a game of “you tell on me/I tell on you”—a game he and Falco had been ostensibly playing with each other for years. The old cliché, Bureau investigators later acknowledged, was true: “There is no honor among thieves.” They give up one another on a routine basis. It’s just part of who they are.
The DA in Troy who had been pursuing a case against a few Hells Angels had begun to finalize his plans for putting Evans in front of the grand jury. The pressure was on. A judge’s son had been beaten severely. Someone was going to pay. In August, Evans would be expected to tell the grand jury everything he knew about the assault.
But first [the DA’s office] had to agree not to try to charge me, Evans wrote, with the market I tried to hit.
Once again, Evans had escaped any real hard time behind bars. He would be out of jail in September 1984 and, most important, totally liberated from parole. Nevertheless, with two felony convictions under his belt already, if he got caught and convicted of a third felony (any serious crime punishable by more than one year in prison), it was possible he would be branded a persistent felon and face twenty-five years to life. This scared Evans. The thought of being locked up that long shook him up. Still, as he began to make plans for his release, he couldn’t comprehend that it was his own behavior that had put him behind bars to begin with. He repeatedly blamed anyone but himself for being locked up—and continually vowed to pay each and every one of them back after he got out.
There’s people in Troy that have to pay, and people that jammed me up…and I know enough now not to do anything with anybody. I should have known before!
Whenever he was locked up for more than a night or two, Evans would begin to obsess over what he was missing on the outside, fantasizing and dreaming about the most obscure things. His latest pipe dream included building a “dream house” in the woods when he was released. He said he “deserved” it after all he had been through in life. Where he was going to get the money was never an issue. He just assumed a “big score” was going to fall in his lap one day.
He also mentioned a “para-plane” he desperately wanted to buy when he got out, and even drew a picture of it. It was a helicopter about the size of a large lawn tractor. It had a parachute attached to the back of the seat. The propeller was in the back of the vessel as opposed to on top. Most interesting to Evans as he explained it was that there was no way it could crash. It goes 35 MPH, but will climb to 6,000 feet (over road blocks!). Only needs 50 feet to take off or land. Folds up into a car trunk!!
He called himself “Evans the air pirate.” He talked about traveling around the country, apparently committing burglaries at will, but being able to avoid police as if he were some sort of superhero.
In August 1983, Evans finally went before the grand jury and implicated members of the Hells Angels in the beating of a local judge’s son. The way he saw it, because of what he had done for the DA, his record would be wiped completely clean. He was under the impression that when he was released in September 1984—one year away—he would be an absolute free man—“no parole”—for the first time in seven years.