Be it overcrowding, or the fact that Evans never caused that much trouble while in prison, he was set free on March 31, 1984. What he had dreamed of all along (getting out of jail without the umbra of parole hanging over him), however, wasn’t going to be a reality. Because he was being released early, he was placed on a “conditional release program,” which simply meant he was on parole until his sentence was exhausted. For the next nine months, he would have to be on his best behavior, once again reporting to a parole officer.
With no direction and absolutely no intervention with any sort of postrelease program to set him on the right track, Evans went back to committing burglaries right away.
On January 10, 1985, Evans’s conditional release expired. He was totally free now, unconstrained from any type of parole.
Since his release almost a year ago, he had again been living with Michael Falco and Tim Rysedorph. Although Tim had devoted himself to his music and rarely—if ever—participated in any of the jobs Evans had been doing at the time, Falco had become, in many respects, Evans’s partner.
Near the beginning of February, a friend of Evans’s told him about a flea market in East Greenbush, a little town just southeast of Albany, where there was a lot of “gold and valuables.” This interested Evans. He loved stealing gold and jewelry; both were easy to pawn and hard to trace.
A few days afterward, Evans confided in Damien Cuomo, a known thief in the neighborhood, someone with whom he had just met, and asked him if the flea market in East Greenbush was worth the effort.
Cuomo, Evans said later, agreed it was a good location to burgle. It was set back from the road and no one was ever around at night.
With that, Evans went to Falco and asked him if he wanted to do the job. “Go check it out first,” Falco suggested. “See if they have anything worth our time.”
East Greenbush, New York, a mostly white, middle-class suburb of Albany, presented Evans and Falco with a plethora of potential targets. Most notably, the large flea market on Route 9 that Damien Cuomo had sanctioned. Flea markets were a common faction of Albany County’s culture and economics. With large strip malls spread about East Greenbush, many antique dealers set up circuslike tents and offered customers a wide variety of items. From simple 99¢ knickknacks to $5,000 and $10,000 paintings and statues.
What interested Evans most as he walked around, casing the place one afternoon, was the setup of the place. He and Falco, he realized, could get in and out quickly, and take with them plenty of gold.
The East Greenbush Plaza Flea Market, as it was called, located at the intersection of Route 20 and Route 9, was always a favored spot for “antiquers.” A one–story building, antique dealers could rent out spaces along an arm of the mall. It was a fairlike atmosphere, vendors and customers bartering and trading, trying to get the best price.
On February 16, a Saturday, Evans and Falco loaded up Falco’s brown Plymouth Satellite with a rope ladder, some common burglar tools, two empty duffel bags and a police scanner.
“You ready, Mikey?” Evans said as they took off.
“Let’s do it.”
At thirty, Jim Horton was a young and eager Bureau investigator working for the East Greenbush division of Troop G. By February 1985, Horton had hit the year mark as a Bureau investigator. He had been married to his high school sweetheart, Mary Pat, for five years. His son, Jim, was four years old, and his daughter, Alison, had just been born on February 3.
Horton was hungry. He needed to make his mark as an investigator and prove himself worthy. For the past three years, he had been literally working double duty. For the most part, he was a “road trooper,” chasing speeders on the interstate. But on an “as needed” basis, he was also part of an elite team of troopers who had been chosen, after a rigorous set of tryouts, for the dive team. They were called out at various times to search lakes, ponds and rivers for dead bodies. It was rewarding, Horton, an admitted thrill seeker, said later, but at the same time caused him some problems at home.
“My wife was against it because of the danger involved and the fact that our job centered on finding dead bodies.”
As the years passed, and Mary Pat realized how much it meant to her husband to be part of the group, she accepted it. Yet it still didn’t make it any easier.
“There is always some fear in the back of your mind when you are married to a cop,” Mary Pat recalled later. “You think of things like him being left bleeding on the side of the road after a routine traffic stop goes awry…. These images pop into your head. You can’t prevent them. But as an optimistic person, I have always felt we were decent people and that God wouldn’t let anything that horrible or tragic happen to us. Maybe that is naive. But it sure helped me get through each day.”
Since joining the Bureau, Horton hadn’t been involved in too many cases of any merit. He had investigated burglaries and robberies, larcenies, sexual abuse cases and rapes, but nothing that put what his superiors knew were his expert investigative skills to the test.
The East Greenbush Bureau didn’t operate as a twenty-four-hour, around-the-clock police force. Because of the type of work involved, investigators were split into two shifts: 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., 4:00 P.M. to midnight. Since the East Greenbush division didn’t have a cop at the station all the time, they would trade off on being what Horton later referred to as the “call guy.”
The call guy would take a beeper home with him and be on call for the night. If any crimes that needed intervention by the Bureau took place throughout the midnight to 8:00 A.M. hours when no one was around, the call guy would be asked to begin an investigation immediately, while the remainder of the shift showed up in the morning.
Evans and Falco took off at about 11:00 P.M. on February 16—Falco drove, Evans road shotgun—with the thought that the flea market in East Greenbush would be vacated for the night.
When they arrived, Evans suggested they park around in back of the building. It was dark. There were woods on the opposite side of the back of the building. For a person to see them, he or she would have to drive around back and literally look for them.
Evans, always thinking, noticed right away when they got out of the car that there was a portable toilet standing directly next to the building about one hundred yards from where they had parked.
“Let’s hop up on top of that,” he whispered to Falco. “It’ll put us right on the roof!”
“Looks good.”
The building they had climbed up on top of wasn’t the flea market section of the building, so they had to walk along the roof until they found what Evans described later as a “hatch door” leading down into the flea market section of the mall.
Within a few minutes, while Falco acted as lookout, Evans slipped the pins holding the hinges of the door out, lifted the door up and hung a rope ladder down into the building.
Just like that, they were staring at well over $30,000 in merchandise they could take without stirring a field mouse.
For the next fifteen minutes, smashing jewelry cases and breaking open boxes, they loaded up two large duffel bags with all the gold and jewelry they could find. Evans took one side of the building, while Falco took the other.
Back at Falco’s car a bit later, after getting out of the building the same way they had gone in, they piled the duffel bags into the trunk and took off slowly.
As Falco made his way around the back of the building toward Route 9, a local East Greenbush cop making his nightly rounds hit his lights and stopped them along a dirt road leading to the main road from the back of the building.
“Shit,” Evans said. “Just play it cool, Mike. He didn’t see anything.”
“What’s going on?” the cop asked as he approached Falco.
“Not much…,” Falco began to say.
“We just stopped to take a piss,” Evans said, leaning over to look at the cop. He had a police scanner hidden under his left leg. Most everything else was in the trunk. Falco had cut out the side panels near the backseat of the car so he could hide stolen merchandise down inside, and they had loaded some of the more expensive jewelry inside. Smart enough to know better, they had nothing in sight that would indicate they were burglars.
“What are you doing coming out from behind that building?” the cop wanted to know.
“Well,” Evans said, “we didn’t want to piss here…out in the open.”
By this time, Evans had his hand on the door handle. “I was ready to split at that moment,” he said later. But just as he was going to make a break for it, the cop said, “Okay, but just get the hell out of here. Don’t come back here again. Piss somewhere else.”
After writing down their names and addresses, the cop got back into his cruiser and took off.