Clayton Ross Tumey mastered the art during a spree of expertly-planned, perfectly executed bank robberies in 2005 and 2006. On each occasion he fled with about $5000 cash in $100 and $50 bills.
He got away with it until five months after his last robbery when out of the blue he phoned the police and confessed. He would do a little over three years hard time for his crimes before finding a job, repaying a debt and raising a family.
Almost 10 years after he first turned to a life of crime, Tumey took his story online, in a lengthy, no holds barred Q&A session on social networking site Reddit.
The conversation, which started on Thursday night, tackled how he did it, the weapons he used, the close calls and why he doesn’t feel guilty.
“In 2005-06, I studied and perfected the art of bank robbery,” Tumey wrote on the thread titled “I’m a retired bank robber”.
“I never got caught. I still went to prison, however.”
Tumey said his technique was very simple.
“(I) walked in the bank and waited in line like a regular customer. Whichever teller was available to help me is the one I robbed. I simply walked up to them when it was my turn to be helped, and I told them — usually via handwritten instructions on an envelope — to give me their $50s and $100s.
“I just told them what I wanted, and they complied. This is how it works in America because the amount of money a bank gives up ($5-$7k on average) per bank robbery is infinitely less than the amount of business they’d lose if sh*t got wild in a bank full of customers.”
He said on more than one occasion bank tellers were uncooperative but he had a weapon in his pants leg if he needed to use it.
“One teller skimped out on me and didn’t give me all I had asked for, and I told her, ‘You can do better than that”. She just shrugged — palms up like a little kid — and said, ‘That’s all I got.’ Pretty ballsy on her part. She was being a really brave idiot.”
He said his weapon of choice was a hammer.
“I strapped a hammer to my leg under my pants just below my knee in case I needed to break out of a locked door or something, but I never used a gun or anything like that.”
Tumey said he never got caught because he was extremely secretive about the whole thing.
“I studied countless reports of other robberies that had gone wrong and people who were caught. I never told anyone what I was doing. One of the main things I learned from research was that an overwhelming number of people are caught because they didn’t do it solo. So I never let anyone (not even my wife or best friend) know what I was doing.”
Does he regret it? No, not for a second.
“I still acknowledge what I’ve done, but the process and experience of going to prison and finding myself (as well as a purpose in life) has really made it all worth it, relatively speaking. It’s hard to regret something that has turned into something so good.”
In a television interview earlier this year, Tumey told The Dave Ramsey Show he was led to robbing banks because his life was boring.
“My life felt stale and I wanted to pursue things that excited me,” he said.
“I was a very arrogant person. There’s was also that self loathing.”
All that changed when his son was born.
“It had no appeal to me anymore. There was no joy, no excitement, no thrill. I was like, ‘you know what, I’ve got a 2-month-old baby who has a daddy robbing banks.”
He called the police from a hotel room and spent his first night in prison that night. Prison, he said, was no walk in the park.
“(It) was shi**y and awesome,” he wrote on Reddit on Thursday.
“Prison was like church camp without the girls or weird counsellors. I played a lot of chess and read a lot of books. I also wrote a lot, of course. Mail is the highlight of anyone’s day in prison.
“There are some pretty bad dudes there, but nobody really wants any trouble unless you just really f**k them over. There’s always trouble if you want it, but it’s pretty laid back most of the time. You learn the way of life pretty quick in there if you’re smart.”
He said it also turned his life around.
“Prison is lonely and depressing, but it’s also a great place to really work on yourself if that’s what you want to do. Most men and women waste that opportunity. Thankfully, I didn’t.”
These days, Tumey is writing books. On Reddit he asked people to support his fundraising efforts to publish “a true story about crime, prison and second chances”.
He might want to stop giving away all the good plot points online.
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