Entering the Capital District of New York from Massachusetts on Interstate 90, at times an eight-lane roadway that cuts a path through the Berkshire Mountains, one gets a sense of how vast, immense and spread out the land truly is. Homes are out there, nestled among the millions of pine, oak and maple trees, but they are hard to spot from the road, only their snowcapped roofs and smoking woodstove pipes visible from ground level. Along the edge of the interstate, deer graze in herds like cattle on the wild grass and berries, seemingly undisturbed by the noise pollution the interstate produces. Christmas season in the region, like much of the Northeast, is straight out of a Hallmark greeting card: lustrous, charming, elegant.
As Horton took in the 1986 holiday season surrounded by family and friends, he began thinking about how his career had progressed since he joined the state police back in 1978. Inside just eight years, he had accomplished more with the state police than most do during their entire careers. He had gone to interrogation school and ended up getting an offer for a job to teach; he had been one of the NYSP’s top divers; and now he was beginning a career in the Bureau that had already produced positive results as far as developing sources and arresting, as Horton liked to put it, plenty of “the bad guys.”
Shortly after Horton and Mary Pat sent family members packing after the holiday season, he received a letter from Evans. Looking at it as he walked from his mailbox down the long driveway to the spacious contemporary home he had built himself on family-owned land, he developed a feeling the letter was perhaps only the beginning of a relationship that might surpass any other cop-source relationship he’d had.
Well, guy, Evans opened the letter, I was…afraid mostly that the DA…had cooked up some bogus shit on me…. I really don’t know what to do when my release date comes, I can be set up so easily…. Even my release date I’m getting fucked out of: it’s supposed to be next December, but now they are saying it’s March of ‘88, which is bullshit.
Horton could only shake his head while reading the opening line.
“Here you have a repeat offender upset over the fact that he is going to do extra months on two years, when he should have been serving four years to begin with,” Horton said later.
In some ways, Horton wanted to scold Evans and tell him to wake up and do the time without bitching about it and blaming everyone else for the misfortune he had brought on with his own behavior. Yet, he knew Evans was—and would become—an asset to the Bureau. The situation had to be handled delicately. Unprecedented was the fact that here was a career criminal, which most cops in the Capital District wanted to put on the trophy stand, writing to him, giving up drug dealers and thieves. Horton couldn’t alienate Evans. He had to play the game, and make him believe he was on his side.
Since the last time they had spoken, Evans had been transferred to Clinton Correctional. He said he had been transferred because there were still a few Hells Angels after him. His counselor had put him under protective custody.
Someone was screaming at me out of the window…. Turns out it was [Michael Falco’s brother], Evans wrote. He had told scores of inmates that Evans was a snitch.
Then Evans applauded Horton for his efforts in keeping “quiet” about any leaks from developing about our talks. I was worried about that, he wrote.
Next he talked about allowing the Bureau to use him as an undercover to nail the same drug dealer in Troy he had himself robbed—the crime, in fact, for which he was doing his latest bid: I wouldn’t mind playing bait to the scumbag if I knew the Calvary [the Bureau] would prevent me from getting my head shot off. It’s something to think about, anyway, and I don’t have anything better to do.
Throughout the remainder of the three-page letter, Evans drew maps and pointed Horton to locations where he could find jewelry he knew other burglars in Troy had stolen and hidden. He also listed the names and places where Horton could find fenced jewelry: Anything I can ever do to aid in sweeping these people out—let me know.
There was Evans again trying to place himself morally above the same group of individuals for whom he could have been considered their ringleader.
At the end of the letter, he focused his attention on the person he knew Horton would be asking questions about once they got a chance to sit down again and talk—Michael Falco: P.S.: I had [Tori Ellis’s] address but some of my papers got lost in this shuffle. If you have it and want to send it, I’ll write and ask for any info on Mike.
It was Evans’s way, he later admitted, of baiting the hook.
Evans viewed the dawn of the New Year, 1987, and all those years before it where he had spent his days and nights locked up, as “stolen from him.” It was the same old story. He wasn’t paying a debt to society or accepting responsibility; he was complaining that the system had been set up to “screw” criminals like him. He couldn’t decipher the difference between those who didn’t commit crimes and weren’t locked up and those—like himself—who were habitual offenders and locked up all the time. Any time taken off his sentences for good behavior or overcrowding wasn’t enough; he thought he deserved more, especially since he was now sending Horton a wealth of information regarding some of Troy’s most notorious offenders.
“Gary Evans was greedy,” Horton recalled later. “Even though he got caught and arrested many times throughout the years, those arrests pale in comparison to the number of crimes he committed. He worked his job—which was burglary and murder—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Whether casing a place to hit, committing the crime, fencing the merchandise or simply looking over his shoulder and planning ahead. There were even times when he was well off financially but would never turn down an opportunity to steal.”
Horton was an expert at profiling criminals. Perhaps as obsessively as Evans dedicated his life to crime, Horton spent his time studying people like Gary Evans, their movements, behaviors and minds.
“Gary was a classic antisocial personality. He took no responsibility for his actions. Our rules weren’t his rules.”
He was selfish, Horton added, and cared only about his own well-being. He had no close friends. He was lazy and flat out refused, under any circumstances, to take orders from anyone.
When it came to women, be it Stacy, Lisa Morris or even his own mother, he showed no respect and, some later claimed, despised their very existence.
“He hated my mother,” Robbie Evans recalled later, “for being such a weak person throughout her life and ours. He hated her lover, too. Gary thought all women were, in his own words, ‘snakes,’ and could not be trusted.”
In a certain way, Evans’s assumptions regarding the females in his life perhaps held some truth—because, in the end, it would be the one woman he put the most trust in who would ultimately turn on him.