Gary Evans had heard the name Damien Cuomo in the past and had run into him once in a while, but he had never considered working with him. During the early part of the summer of 1988, Damien was living in an apartment on Industrial Park Road in Troy with his longtime girlfriend, Lisa Morris, and their daughter, Christina. Damien loved the place, mostly because it was located just behind the old-fashioned red-brick home where he grew up.
Around town, Damien was known as a “good thief,” a former friend later said. He was small—“about 130 pounds soaking wet”—and could scale walls and fences like a cat. As a teenager and into his early twenties, he would show off by shinning his way up two adjacent walls as if he were Spider-Man. He could get in and out of houses quickly, without waking anyone up. For years, police had suspected an African American man of being what locals had dubbed “the hillside burglar,” because several burglaries had been committed in one “hillside” neighborhood in Troy. But Horton and friends of Damien’s later said the hillside burglar was Damien Cuomo.
Born on September 10, 1961, Damien was almost seven years younger than Evans. When they hooked up in 1988, Damien had just turned twenty-two. At five feet six inches, he was nearly as tall as Evans, but Evans had close to sixty pounds—all muscle—on him. Standing next to Evans, Damien looked scrawny, frail.
Where Evans excelled at burglarizing antique stores and jewelry stores, slipping in and out seemingly at will, Damien was a professional residential burglar. He had broken into homes since he was a teenager, some claimed. It started, according to an old family friend, with bicycles.
“As a kid,” a friend later recalled, “Damien would steal bicycles in the neighborhood. His parents were really strict. His father, who went to church, I think, every single day of his life, would lock him in a back barn whenever Damien got into trouble.
“They had this [water] well in the front yard that had dried up. Damien would steal the bicycles and put them in the well so no one could find them.”
Evans just showed up at Damien’s apartment one afternoon and knocked on the door. Lisa Morris was home at the time. Damien was gone. She had never seen Evans before, nor had Damien ever mentioned him.
“Me and my girlfriend,” Lisa said later, “were sitting behind Damien’s parents’ house one day [not too long after that] sunning ourselves when Gary came up. He was looking for Damien and then he said something. After they met, he was always pulling Damien out of the house. They would be gone for a long time. I didn’t like him. He took Damien away from us, his family.”
The hatred Lisa had for Evans began after Lisa and Evans “had words” one afternoon and Evans threatened to “throw her off the balcony if she gave him any more trouble.” Lisa was working two jobs at the time, trying to make the best of what she saw as a pretty good life with Damien and Christina. She knew Damien was a thief and took off to commit burglaries, but she was determined, she recalled, to have a family with him and Christina.
Throughout the next year, Damien and Evans became inseparable. They hung out together. Traveled together. Committed burglaries together. And enjoyed what had become a rather reclusive life as two of Albany’s most notorious, and successful, burglars. Other thieves in town envied their successes.
While Evans worked on his relationship with Damien Cuomo, he still kept his eye on Horton. At one point, he went to Horton and explained how he could set up a sting to buy two stolen weapons from a local Troy burglar.
“What do you want, Gar?”
“Nothing! I just want to fuck this guy hard.”
So Horton gave Evans the money and told him to set up the deal.
A day later, Horton had two stolen weapons off the street and a local burglar in jail, and Evans was back on his way.
“He would come to me and talk about what was going on in Troy,” Horton recalled. “He needed to stay in touch with me. Keep me thinking he was doing good things for me—which, in many ways, he was. But it was all a ruse.”
On June 28, 1989, Cuomo and Evans were driving north on Interstate 87 from New York City in Damien’s Chrysler Fifth Avenue. They had just finished meeting with someone who was going to start fencing stolen merchandise for them when a state trooper pulled them over for speeding.
“Fuck,” Evans said. “We’ve got the trunk full of shit.”
“Relax,” Cuomo said, slowing the car down. “Let’s play it cool.”
While the trooper was asking Damien for his license and registration, Evans began to shuffle in his seat. Trained to snoop out any suspicious behavior, the trooper had enough sense to ask Damien Cuomo and Gary Evans to get out of the car. Then, “Pop the trunk,” he said as another trooper pulled up. “We’re going to have to take a look.”
There on the floor of the trunk were several items one might use during a burglary, kidnapping or both: three black ski masks, two stun guns, a police scanner, two walkie-talkies, a slim jim, crowbar, screwdrivers, duct tape, rope, two sets of handcuffs, two sets of thumbcuffs, a plastic Uzi machine gun, gloves, hats, several maps of the Northeast and a book of police radio frequencies.
Looking at everything, the trooper assumed Evans and Damien weren’t heading to a masquerade ball, but were perhaps either coming from a burglary or en route to committing one.
The stun guns was Damien’s, Evans said later. Cuomo had a habit of breaking into homes when people were asleep, and would often use the gun to put people down who woke up. Evans hated him for it. If there was one thing Evans never did, he claimed, it was break into homes while people were inside. He found it too risky. Not to mention there were plenty of homes where people weren’t home.
“‘I’m the good burglar,’” Horton recalled later in a sarcastic tone. “That’s what Evans always wanted me to believe. He’d tell me that he was a better person than Cuomo or Falco because he never did what they did. The truth of the matter is, Gary would break into homes if people were home if he thought he could get away with it.”
In a scene straight out of the children’s classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Cuomo once broke into a home while a family was sleeping, a former girlfriend of Damien’s claimed, and woke up a small child, who ended up walking down the hallway and staring at him as he rummaged through the home looking for items to steal. Upon seeing her, Damien told her to scoot back to her room without saying a word.
The child said she was thirsty.
So Damien got her a glass of water and sent her off to bed before cleaning out the house.
After spending nearly the past year turning dozens of jobs together—homes, businesses, antique shops, jewelry stores—Evans and Cuomo had become good friends. When they committed burglaries, one of their favorite ways to throw off authorities was to wear sneakers three or four sizes too big. This way, any footprints left behind wouldn’t match. By all accounts, they were good at what they did. Professionals. Where one man lacked a certain flair for climbing walls or cutting a hole in a window without being heard, the other made up for it.
It was common knowledge inside the confines of the state police that Horton and Evans had a relationship that perhaps stretched a bit over the cop-informant line. So with Damien and Evans in lockup at the Albany Thruway State Police barracks, just outside downtown, it was no shock to Horton when he got a call at home alerting him that Evans and his “partner” had been pulled over for speeding, but were suspected of possessing burglar tools.
“Jesus,” Horton said mockingly, “what a shock that is!”
When Horton arrived at the barracks, Evans looked embarrassed, as if he had been scolded by a teacher and sent to the principal’s office. He was both humiliated and disappointed that he had let himself get caught for something so seemingly inconsequential. The last thing he wanted was to look bad in front of Horton.
Cuomo, never one to talk to cops, said nothing when Horton introduced himself. Turning to Evans after not getting a response from Damien, Horton said, “I can’t help you much. This is your mess. Stay out of trouble and this won’t happen.” He could tell Evans didn’t want to talk.
“I’ll try,” Evans said.
“Yeah, right…just keep me out of it from now on,” Horton said, and left.
Years later, Horton would find out that Evans and Cuomo had the entire inside of Damien’s car lined with stolen merchandise, but the cops never found it. It was in the side panels and underneath a rug in the trunk.
“That day was a turning point for Gary Evans,” Horton recalled later. “He had been arrested for something trivial…in a sense, making a stupid mistake. He realized he was getting sloppy in his work. It upset him. But little did I know then, of course, what was going to happen next.”