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Last November, two days before Thanksgiving, a 22-year-old named Roger Dillon posted a message on MySpace. It was meant to be understood by only his closest friends, but it would soon come to the attention of the FBI. Writing in a curiously baroque language, Roger described a fictional universe called New Acadia, a world of floating fortresses and magic-casting goddesses that shared little in common with the one outside his window: the city of Youngstown, Ohio, once a thriving industrial mecca on the Mahoning River, now a landscape of sunken porches and vacant storefronts and boarded-up windows through which televisions flicker on pirated electricity. Roger had imagined the world of New Acadia for an upcoming session of Dungeons & Dragons, the role-playing game that has long served as an outlet for creative minds that feel hemmed in by circumstance. He and his friends met twice a week to play, with Roger presiding over most sessions in the role known as the Dungeon Master. A lanky young man with short dark hair and wily hazel eyes, he was a quick thinker, mischievous and unpredictable, with an innate understanding of the game's appeal. "Of course it's fun to live this whole other life," he liked to say, "when you don't exactly like the life you're actually living."
The D&D games that Roger organized typically unspooled over months, propelled by his well-established flair for melodrama. From his MySpace page: I enjoy every moment for what it is and not what it could be. I find great amusement in consequences for my actions. I am not for this world, this world is for me. The session he was planning that day in November, however, was of a different sort: a single marathon game to be played from start to finish over 24 hours, which Roger had conceived of as a farewell gesture. Upon the game's conclusion, he told his friends, he would be leaving Youngstown for good, heading to Virginia Beach with his girlfriend, Nicole Boyd. She was 24, pale and comely, with a pierced nose and eyebrow, her auburn hair dyed an electric shade of vermilion. A massive tattoo of fairy wings fanned out across the curvature of her back. Though too shy to wear a bikini at a swimming pool, Niki, as everyone called her, had supported herself by dancing nude under the name Desiree, a job that had colored her perspective on life in ways she hoped to reverse with the move out of Youngstown. She had christened herself "Tragedy" on MySpace, and in the section where users list their heroes, she wrote, Why have heroes? They can only let you down. It was one of a number of philosophies she shared with Roger. If you aren't your own hero in at least some way, he noted on his page, you suck.
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Their friends were not shocked to hear that the couple had decided to leave Youngstown. Once known as Steeltown, home for more than a century to one of the nation's most thriving industries, in recent years Youngstown has acquired a number of nicknames that better capture its present state. Struggle City. The Armpit of Ohio. Murdertown. Billboards rising along the highways encourage fathers not to abandon their children; others advertise the services of bail bondsmen. Thirty percent of Youngstown residents live below the poverty line. The unemployment rate is nearly three times the national average, and the median household income less than half. The grim statistics reflect a state of protracted desperation that first came to define the city more than 30 years ago, on September 19th, 1977, a day known locally as "Black Monday." It was then that the region's largest steel company, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, announced massive layoffs, an event that signaled the end of the steel economy and the dawn of an era marked by the disappearance of thousands of jobs and the prevalence of so much Mafia-related crime that the term "Youngstown tuneup" became common slang used to describe those assassinated by car bombs.
Today the city's current population — about 80,000 — is half what it once was, giving Youngstown the disorienting feel of an inhabited ruin, and every year, it grows a little smaller for reasons Roger and Niki understood as well as anyone. Having been medically discharged from the Marines after high school, Roger had worked a variety of menial jobs, never declaring more than $6,000 on his tax returns and relying heavily on Niki's income from stripping for survival. In their three and a half years together, they moved from home to home in the area's more dilapidated neighborhoods, living out of a tent during a particularly bleak stretch, and losing a home to foreclosure.
Still, there was something peculiar about the circumstances surrounding Roger and Niki's move. "There was a sense that they were keeping something from us," recalls Jared Mason, Roger's best friend since elementary school. Casually, as if it were an afterthought, the couple had let everyone know only a week prior that they would be leaving Youngstown.
The abruptness of the couple's decision was made all the more strange by the fact that, for the first time since they met, their lives had taken a turn toward something resembling stability. For the past nine months, Roger had been employed by an armored-truck company called AT Systems, a job that offered, at $10 an hour, a salary higher than that of most of his friends. He and Niki lived together in an apartment on Lowell Avenue that may not have been ideal, but it was affordable at $300 a month — a dramatic improvement over past situations.
But any lingering resentment felt by Roger and Niki's friends over the couple's imminent departure quickly dissipated on the brisk, overcast afternoon of November 24th, when everyone met up for Roger's final D&D session in a friend's basement. Roger was in top form. He had put together a playlist to complement the game's more theatrical moments — "Sharpest Lives," by My Chemical Romance, to kick off the session; Korn's "Coming Undone" during a gruesome fight — and he had constructed the New Acadia narrative around an all-star cast of beloved characters from past gatherings on a quest for something called the Golden Muses. "I usually played characters who are like me, not necessarily of the best morals but lovable nonetheless," Roger recalls. "Antiheroes, is what they are labeled as, I suppose." This time, however, he stuck to the omniscient role of Dungeon Master, while Niki played a swift-footed character named Kira. "She was a fighter, a vampire, like from Underworld," Niki remembers. "I could fall off buildings and not die." The game lasted until 3:00 in the afternoon on November 25th. As he always did at the end of a session, Roger stood up in the middle of the room and bowed. When an epilogue was demanded, he focused on the life of a character named Maupheaestian, the King of Hell, who had lost a climactic battle but was already plotting a return to greatness.
"Get my armor!" Roger bellowed, imitating the fallen king. "We've got worlds to conquer!"
After the game ended, the mood in the room was dominated by a collective melancholy. When one friend asked Roger for his new address in Virginia, he became evasive, and quickly changed the subject. Cally Mason, an 18-year-old who worked at Arby's, struggled not to cry. "They had made it clear that they wouldn't ever be coming back," she recalls. For Niki, the fantasy game had served as a much-needed distraction, allowing her to temporarily forget the secret that she and Roger had been keeping. "I was caught up in the game," she says. "It was good because, honestly, I didn't like thinking about what we were gonna do." Roger later summed up his feelings about the moment in a letter: I can remember it kinda being like we all had something to say, but couldn't put it into words. Finally, I just hugged everyone and promised they'd see me again, no matter what, and we all left. We were all strung out, so it was a little unreal. I remember driving home and thinking about not seeing everyone for a long time and just couldn't wrap my mind around it.
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At 11 o'clock thefollowing evening — Monday, November 26th, 2007 — two drivers for AT Systems, the armored-car company where Roger worked, pulled into the company's garage on Tibbetts Wick Road in Girard, five miles north of Youngstown. Chris Walters and Carl Cook had finished a nighttime run to a bank in Cleveland, three hours through driving rain and fog. The two men were looking forward to heading home when they noticed something that made them hope their minds were playing tricks on them: The two large safes used to store money awaiting armored transport had been emptied completely. No doors were jimmied. No glass shattered. The tape from the security cameras was gone. The police soon learned that the alarm had been disabled by an employee's PIN at 8:20 that night and reactivated at about 8:45.
The crime, seemingly flawless in execution, was also perfectly timed. Thanksgiving weekend had just passed, and with it Black Friday, when shoppers in even the most economically depressed regions stampede into the nation's malls, spending an estimated $20 billion. In 25 minutes the thieves had made off with $8.4 million in unmarked cash and checks, making the theft one of the largest cash heists in American history.
Within 48 hours, Roger and Niki had been named suspects in the crime. As the news spread, Youngstown was gripped by the improbable tale of the couple's big score. Some came to see the crime as a result of minds dislocated by fantasy; to others it was a case study in the kind of greed that corrodes so much of America. But to most, the crime was processed as a tale of Rust Belt redemption. "GO ON, TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN!!!!!" posted one reader on the message board of the local paper, The Vindicator, triggering a discussion that snowballed in the days that followed. "I think it's awesome. . . .Hope they left the country," chimed in another. One commenter praised Roger: "He made his fortune in the steal business, in the Mahoning Valley of Ohio, where most steel companies have gone belly up." Others were disgusted by such sentiments. "Typical Mahoning Valley resident," someone responded. "Admiration for criminals." Some began to call the couple the "Goth Bonnie and Clyde."
On the morning after the heist, a sedan carrying three FBI agents pulled up the driveway of 162 Lowell Avenue, the home where Roger and Niki rented the two upstairs apartments with Roger's mother, Sharon Lee Gregory, who had recently kicked an addiction to crack. The landlord, a lifelong resident of Youngstown named Cookie Bowman, was unfazed by the men standing outside her door. "I thought to myself, 'The grass doesn't need cutting,'" she recalls. "'The leaves don't need raking, there's no snow yet, and I already know Jesus, so I'll just tell them to go away.'" The FBI agents introduced themselves and started asking questions. They didn't mention that Roger hadn't shown up at AT Systems that morning. Or that Niki, a few days prior, had given away her Chevy Cavalier with no explanation. Or that, the previous afternoon — the day of the heist — Roger's mother had purchased a used black GMC Safari for $1,400, asking the dealership to please remove the back seats. In fact, the agents did not mention anything about the theft at all.
"Have you noticed anything unusual about Roger lately?" they asked.
No, Bowman had not. Roger, Niki and Lee, as Roger's mother was known, were as good as any tenants she'd ever had. Just yesterday, in fact, Niki and Lee had rushed out in the pouring rain to help Bowman's elderly mother, who had slipped in the driveway and shattered her hip. The reason for the FBI agents' visit became clear the following morning, when Bowman saw the front page of The Vindicator: "Liberty Police, FBI Probe Heist." What followed were some very hectic days for Bowman: more visits from the FBI and from television news vans and reporters, first local, later national. When she finally got around to sorting all the mail that had piled up, she discovered a plastic sandwich bag with a piece of notepaper inside. Bowman unfolded it to find six $100 bills — December rent for Roger, Niki and Lee — along with a single word written in large block lettering: Sorry.
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Three and a half years before their faces appeared on posters identifying them as among the federal government's most wanted criminals, Roger Dillon and Nicole Boyd spent an afternoon hiking through Mill Creek Park, a rambling collection of dense forests, winding streams and lush gardens in which it is possible to forget that you are still in Youngstown. It was March 2004, the grass underfoot still patchy with ice from the harsh Ohio winter. Roger and Niki would come to think of that afternoon as their first date. It was the first time they had spent any real time alone together, the first time they had realized all they had in common: a love for video games, an interest in the Wiccan religion, and most of all, a fractured upbringing and a desire to get out of Ohio. After a few hours, as the sun began to set and the air grew cold, Niki turned to Roger and confessed something that, until now, she had kept to herself.
"I want to leave my husband," she told him. "I want to leave him, but I don't know how."
Niki and her husband, a talented musician named Mike Stuckey, had grown up together in Salem, just south of Youngstown. In high school they were both "a bit outside the normal box that's placed upon you," Stuckey says. They listened to Nirvana and played the video game Final Fantasy, seeking to escape homes immune to all forms of stability. By the time Niki was five, she was accustomed to explaining to friends that she lived with her grandmother because "my mom is in rehab for drugs and alcohol." Her parents divorced when she was in kindergarten, after which her father, an alcoholic, moved to South Carolina and was not heard from until Niki was in junior high. Her mother, a school-bus driver who found sobriety, remarried a man with whom Niki struggled to get along. And so at 17, Niki moved in with Stuckey. Within a year, the couple married. The bride was 18.
Roger, too, had come of age in the Salem area, moving from Virginia Beach at age 11 when his mother married a man from Ohio. It was her third marriage, and like the others it ended quickly. Roger had never known his father and never saw either stepfather in a paternal light. In the halls of South Range High School he carried himself with the freewheeling poise of someone who had always been his own authority. "Roger would wear a black coat, had a pierced tongue, a tattoo, and dyed his hair neon blue," says Lauren Semple, a close friend. "He was very affectionate, but people were afraid of his outward appearance."
Though Roger spoke often of wanting to write fantasy novels, as a student his focus on academics was eclipsed by more immediate concerns. "Roger didn't have a lot of girlfriends, but he had a lot of girls," is how Semple puts it. When he graduated in 2003, he joined the Marines, but in boot camp he sustained a hip injury that resulted in a medical discharge. Living with his mother back in Youngstown, Roger found himself wrestling with a sense of failure he later described in a letter: I've always had this dread of being one of those people. The ones who hate their job, hate the positions their lives are in, the ones who will look back and regret. What's that but a life unlived?
It was a fear that Niki could relate to, living a few miles away and wrestling with the unforeseen pressures of married life. Stuckey found a decent job selling advertising, but he and Niki were mired in debt, made even deeper by the birth of their son, Julian. "It was not something I wanted," Niki says. "It was like I was feeling old before I was old. I kind of felt like, 'OK, now I'm a mom, and this is all I'll ever do.' It just wasn't the life I had expected."
To bring in extra income, Niki talked of various schemes that never panned out. She toyed with the idea of working in fashion, but never got beyond having her head shots taken — a grim series of photographs in which the sullen 20-year-old redhead could be mistaken for a middle-aged woman. She worked part-time at Big Lots, the discount household retailer, but spent much of her $6.50 hourly wage on pyramid schemes advertised on the infomercials that aired late at night when the baby was feeding, promising instantaneous fortune to the dedicated follower. "As far as I can remember," Stuckey says, "Niki had no aspirations as far as a career. If anything, it was the lack of one."
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Ignorant of the couple's growing troubles, their friends had turned the Stuckey home into a central meeting spot, a place where everyone gathered to collectively escape the limitations of Mahoning County through epic sessions of D&D. "Since we were the only ones who didn't live with parents, everyone came over," Niki recalls. "Most people were unaware that we were having problems. We looked like the perfect family." Among those who gathered regularly was Jared Mason, Roger's best friend, who invited Roger to join in the sessions. What Jared didn't expect was the immediate connection between Roger and Niki. The pair shared an unnerving flirtation that went unacknowledged until the afternoon in March when Niki asked if anyone in the group felt like going to Mill Creek Park, and Roger was the only one to say yes. Less than a week later, Roger was telling Jared that he had some important news to share.
"Me and Niki? Well, we're gonna be living together."
It was not hard to understand what they saw in each other. In Niki, Roger had found the prospect of the abstract adventure he was forever seeking; in Roger, Niki had found a swaggering teenager who embodied the life she felt had passed her by. That June, they shocked their friends a second time by making an unannounced move to Virginia Beach. It was 500 miles away from the realities they were leaving behind in Ohio — including Niki's son, Julian. They settled in a derelict seaside community called Ocean View, getting a deal on an apartment because the previous tenant had been shot. Across the street was a Food Lion, where there was a permanent 10-for-10 special on Pop-Tarts, their meal of choice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Niki found work at 7-Eleven, while Roger got a job at a quick-print shop — a destitute period that they would look back on as the high point of their relationship.
"There was so much that we didn't have, but the simple little things that we did have meant so much," Niki recalls. "We had our little television and our PlayStation 2, and every night we'd go walking down the beach. We were always kind of trying to get back to that time."
Driving an armored truck is in many respects no different from any form of menial labor — tedious, unrewarding, taken out of necessity — with one exception: The driver has the peculiar distinction of earning his hourly wage by hauling millions of dollars on a weekly basis. What if I took just one of those bags? What would my life look like? Such questions are part of the job, typically kept in check by the federal government's penchant for prosecuting grand larceny. But every year there are exceptions. According to the FBI, an average of 40 armored vehicles have been robbed annually since 2004, and while it is not surprising to learn that most of these thefts are inside jobs, it comes as something of a shock to discover that in the majority of the cases the money is never recovered.
On August 8th, 2007, six months into his job at AT Systems, Roger made a run to JP Morgan Chase Bank in Akron, 50 miles west of Youngstown. When cash is picked up from a bank, it often comes in plastic bags containing bricks of $100 bills totaling $50,000, each one itemized and accounted for at pickup and drop-off. Bag, number, check. Bag, number, check. Roger knew the drill. Today, however, he decided to change the pattern: When no one was watching, he slid a single plastic bag of $50,000 into his jacket.
When the money was reported missing, there was some stern questioning by his superiors, but neither Roger nor his co-worker was punished. It was an impulsive act, one he would later struggle to explain, given that, for all the very real financial problems that had followed him through life, money was not something Roger thought too much about. Whereas Niki worried constantly, Roger didn't require much to get by. As he later wrote, I've never been big on introspection, but looking at the situation now, I guess it was sort of an act against the way things had gone in general.
Things in general had not been going well. Not long after the couple had moved to Virginia in 2004, the print shop where Roger worked burned down, making their apartment suddenly unaffordable. Their car's engine died, making finding work even more difficult. Meanwhile, Roger's mother had started calling to ask for money, alluding to mysterious financial problems she and her boyfriend were having. By the end of 2004, Roger and Niki were on a Greyhound bus bound for Ohio, having learned that a Potemkin happiness like theirs — borne on escape, built on a foundation of denial — can only withstand the pressures of reality for so long.
Back in Ohio, Roger and Niki moved in with Roger's mother and her boyfriend, where they soon learned the cause of Lee's financial distress: She had developed a serious addiction to crack. Looking to move into a place of their own, Roger and Niki found work on the loading dock at Wal-Mart, but without a car, they often had to turn down the limited hours they were offered. That was when Niki noticed an ad in a local paper promising good pay for "dancers" at a strip club called Chaser's in the Country. Borrowing Lee's car, the two drove 30 miles to Rootstown, a forgettable strip off Interstate 76, where the club stood across the street from a gun shop called Armageddon Arms. The windowless rectangle contained a pool table, a jukebox, a dry bar and a T-shaped stage on which, when Niki and Roger arrived, one girl was dancing for two slump-shouldered older men.
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Until that moment, Niki had figured she would never see the inside of such a place. For the next two years, however, she found herself dancing at Chaser's a few nights a week, a job that she approached not unlike a game of D&D: a few hours spent inhabiting a character who operated in an alternate universe. "I had created a whole different persona in my head because Niki wouldn't do what I was doing," she recalls of her nightly transformation into Desiree, a dancer who wore black garments she designed herself and who performed to gothic rock. But she didn't fit in with the other dancers. "She never drank, and she was always telling people that she was a witch," recalls a dancer named Roxy, who, like Niki, was a young mother. "She was nice, don't get me wrong. The only thing I didn't like about her was that she had no interest in her son. She was like, 'I'm really not the mommy type.'"
Before long, Niki was one of the club's top earners, enabling her and Roger to buy a used Dodge Neon and move into an apartment of their own. Within a year, however, the job began to take a psychological toll, and Niki tried to escape by joining the Army. But during her first couple of weeks of boot camp, she wound up in the psychiatry ward at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where she was prescribed Zoloft. Niki was sent home to Ohio less than a month after she had enlisted, ending up back at Chaser's and later stripping at Club 76, a venue on the outskirts of Youngstown next to a Thai massage parlor.
In September 2006, making better money and wanting to put an end to their peripatetic lifestyle, Niki brought up the idea of buying a house, a notion preposterous enough that Roger saw it as an adventure of sorts. That fall, they moved into a pale-blue duplex next to an abandoned Pennzoil station, taking on a $60,000 mortgage that the real estate agent explained could be theirs for no money down. They were once again playing regular D&D games with their friends, and the house was large enough that Roger could move his mother into one of the empty rooms, where she got clean under his supervision.
But as millions of Americans have learned over the past few years, a home purchased without writing a check comes with a number of hidden costs: leaks, repairs, stratospheric heating bills and high-interest rates buried in small print, none of which could be covered by Niki's tips from Club 76. "The job was making me a very bitter person," she says. "I hated that job. I hated the customers. In that kind of work, if you don't like the people you're supposed to be being nice to, they notice and stop giving you money."
Then Roger learned of an opening to drive an armored truck at AT Systems, a job offering pay high enough, he and Niki hoped, to allow them to keep the duplex. But by the time Roger was hired, in February 2007, the notices of impending foreclosure had already begun to arrive: A mortgage company in Fort Worth, Texas, demanded they pay a sum so large — $53,980.50 plus 9.575 percent — that they soon stopped opening the letters. Instead, in March 2007, they vacated the property and moved into what would be their last residence in Youngstown, the one-bedroom at 162 Lowell Avenue. Five months later, Roger stole the $50,000.
At first, he kept his unlawful windfall from Niki, worried about how she would react. She had finally quit stripping and was working as a seamstress. That fall, she started taking classes in a fashion-design program at Kent State University. Soon after, Roger began taking her out for celebratory steak dinners a few nights a week — a gesture so financially foreign that it didn't take long for her to become suspicious. After one dinner in mid-September, they got into a rare argument when Niki, for years accustomed to loaning Roger cash, demanded to know where he was getting the money.
"A friend gave it to me," he said.
"Roger," she said. "How stupid do you think I am?"
The conversation continued in this vein until they reached the apartment on Lowell Avenue, where Roger flashed a disarming grin and told Niki to look in her sewing desk.
"Bottom drawer," he said. "The one you never use."
Inside, she found a stack of bank-crisp $100 bills, a stack so ridiculously large that it could not have been real.
"Roger?" She cut herself off. She lowered her voice to a paranoid whisper. "This must be, like, $2,000!"
"Try 50."
"What?"
"Niki," Roger said. "You are looking at $50,000."
"Holy shit," she said. "What are we going to do?"
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Maybe they would have done nothing, just sat on the money, used it for occasional splurges. The fact that stealing $50,000 had been so easy got Roger thinking about the possibility of taking more. At work, he started memorizing the alarm codes used by his fellow employees, as well as the complex safe combinations known only by his superiors. Casually, he began asking when the vaults in the warehouse would contain the most money, learning that they were at their peak after the Thanksgiving holiday. But whenever he mentioned this to Niki — half joking, half serious — she would end the conversation. She was in school, after all, and could finally imagine a future better than her present. But then, in early October, Niki received a letter from Kent State notifying her that her financial aid didn't cover the full tuition, and that she owed the school more than $1,000. Worried that the $50,000 could be traced, she and Roger didn't want to risk using it to pay the fee, leaving Niki no choice but to drop out. Now, whenever Roger talked about doing "something big," Niki did nothing to discourage him. She could see that the idea wasn't totally about money. "It was about the idea that we wouldn't again have to worry about anything," she says, "but for him it was also going outside the normal bounds of what people would do, breaking out of that."
Telling their friends they were taking a vacation to Mexico, they drove down to West Virginia in a purple pickup truck they had borrowed from Lee's boyfriend. They were looking for a place to rent in the sort of rural town where your neighbors are out of sight and no one asks too many questions. In Pipestem, a community of 633 located along a raw stretch of country, they found a trailer near a lake for $350 a month. They signed the lease on the spot under the names Michael Weaver and Samantha Capeli. In town, they ordered a supply of heating oil for the winter and arranged to have it delivered to the trailer. On their lease, under source of income, Roger stated that he was a writer. Niki wrote, "Trust fund."
The robbery itself was the most surreal 24 minutes of Roger's life. After Niki picked him up from work at 6 p.m., they packed their bags and tossed them in the back of the GMC Safari that his mother, who was now on her way to West Virginia, had purchased earlier in the day. They had originally planned to use the purple pickup truck, but at the last minute they grew worried that it was too conspicuous, and left it in a parking lot. A few hours later, Roger called a co-worker to make sure that the company garage was empty. Then he and Niki drove over to AT Systems, backing the Safari into the loading dock.
Niki stayed in the car while Roger went to the safes, tossing her the bags of money. He had planned to take the tape from the security feed, but he worried it might be backed up by other cameras, so he had asked his mother to buy him a mask. She gave him a large wool cap in which she cut out holes for his eyes and mouth. "I must have looked totally ridiculous," Roger recalls.
When the last bag was loaded, Roger closed the safes, and he and Niki were soon on Route 77, heading south to the West Virginia border. They did not say a word. Their biggest indulgence with their new fortune was the purchase of a PlayStation 3 and a single game, Lair, in which you control a dragon that flies over ancient kingdoms, spewing fire upon your enemies in an attempt to save the world from disaster.
On Wednesday, November 28th, two days after the heist, Niki's parents stopped by the apartment at 162 Lowell Avenue. Her father, Allen Boyd, sifted through the apartment. "You know, I hope she gets away with it," he told Cookie Bowman, the couple's landlord. "I don't want to see my child in prison." Niki's mother, Valerie Rosati, took some baby pictures of her daughter. "I don't know what to think," she told Bowman. "If she gets away with it, I'll never see her again. If she gets caught, she's behind bars. What am I supposed to hope for?"She didn't have to wait long to learn her daughter's fate. Three days after the theft, a team of FBI agents investigating the crime noticed a purple pickup in a Salem parking lot. It looked a lot like the one that they had learned through interviews that Niki and Roger had been driving over the past few weeks. Inside the truck, the agents discovered a number of receipts — including the one for the heating oil that had been delivered to the trailer in Pipestem. Soon a team of federal marshals was racing toward West Virginia.
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Oh, shit," Niki said.
"It's them."
It was the first day of December, 4 a.m., the temperature dipping below freezing. When the marshals turned on the floodlights, they cut right through the sheets Roger had hung in the trailer's windows. There was a furious knocking on the door, and a stern voice over a megaphone: "Step out of the trailer slowly with your arms in the air."
Roger peeked through the window: There were more than 30 federal and state authorities, mostly men, all of them in body armor, shotguns in hand. Roger and Niki had been sleeping nude. "Don't let them catch us," she had said before drifting off. Roger got up and looked for some clothes, forgetting to put shoes on as he walked outside.
"How'd you find me so quick?" he asked the FBI agent who placed him in handcuffs.
The three of them had been in West Virginia for 72 hours — three days and four nights that Roger would later describe in a letter: Ah, my four days as a millionaire. A good four days. I remember a very relaxed time, at least for me. I think Mom and Niki were on edge, but I can't really blame them. Me, I figured the stressful part was over, either they'd catch me or not. Why look over my shoulder? If they found me, I was done. If not, I wanted to enjoy my time. A lot of time I was unpacking, putting together the furniture, sitting in my living room listening to the CD player and playing Tetris with plywood. Reheated steak and potatoes for lunch, fresh steak and potatoes for dinner. And those chunky soups — the ones I could never afford! They're totally worth the extra money.
The trailer was searched, the money packed into vans, and Roger, Niki and his mother were driven to state-trooper headquarters for interrogation. Without a lawyer present — they didn't know you were supposed to ask for one — the three offered written confessions detailing the crime and their motives. (From Niki's: Despite an attempt to live a normal life, things just never worked.) Before taking them to the regional jail, from where they would eventually be transferred to federal prisons, the agents allowed the three of them to have time alone together. When Niki and Lee entered Roger's cell, Niki started to cry, and the three stood like that in silence for some time. "Eventually Niki asked if I'd still love her when we got out," Roger says. "I was taken aback. This girl had every reason to hate me and was worried about me not loving her? So I asked my mom if she'd be the first guest to my wedding. But their eyes lit up and all the crying was happy now. I felt like a hero then. As long as I could keep them from despair, I had no doubt we could make it through this."
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When you see Rogerin person, sitting in a locked metal cage behind two-inch-thick Plexiglas, you are struck first by his size. Inmate number 08325-088 is even skinnier than he looks in photos, and in his bright yellow jumpsuit he gives off the impression of a kid in a grown-up's clothes. After he was caught, once the seemingly flawless crime was revealed to be the half-thought work of an amateur, the narrative of the goth Bonnie and Clyde shifted. A Youngstown lawyer named Alan Matavich wrote a country song called "Dumb as Dillon" that enjoyed a few weeks of play on radio stations: "Don't be dumb as Dillon, or you will seal your doom/Not to remember what Mama said, and always clean your room." People magazine, in an article headlined "Clueless!" listed Roger and Niki as among America's "dim-witted desperadoes," declaring, "Initially hailed as a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde, Dillon and Boyd now look more like Abbott and Costello."
Roger pleaded guilty to avoid the maximum charge against him — 25 years. When discussing the crime, he talks about the debts he and Niki had long been facing and about the difficulty of taking care of his mother, but he does not sound like someone looking to make excuses, and it soon becomes clear that money was not the motive.
"You know, it sounds crazy, but at least I did something, you know?" he says. "I honestly can't say I have any real regrets. I mean, come on. I didn't hurt anyone. I didn't use a gun. I just took some money that was there." He flashes a mischievous grin and then grows quiet for a moment. "Actually, that's not totally true," he continues. "My one real regret is that I got Niki and my mom in trouble." He shakes his head. "I stole the money, OK? I get that. They watched me steal it, they were with me when I stole it. It doesn't seem right that now they're going to jail too, and I'm not even allowed to talk to them to say I'm sorry."
While Roger was ordered to remain in prison until sentencing, his mother went to a rehab facility, and Niki was allowed to go free on bond. Back in Youngstown, she drove to a local mall and spent a few hours at a bridal shop trying on wedding dresses. "One of the things that helps me when I'm sad is thinking about what we'll do when we see each other," she says. "I figured I'd plan the perfect wedding."
In late July, Niki and Roger learned exactly how long they will have to wait to be together. Wearing a red blouse and a flowing white skirt, Niki sat quietly before Judge John Adams at the federal courthouse in Akron until she was called to the podium to offer her statement. "Your honor, I've learned a lot from this," she began. "This is going to help me be a better person. I've learned that I have a lot of issues with relationships." She started crying, her voice cracking. The judge asked her to speak up. Her lawyer had advised her to say that her relationship with Roger had been the biggest mistake of her life. But when the judge asked her how she felt, Niki said, "I still love Roger. I'll always love him."
When Niki finished, Adams explained his decision, citing that the court was obligated to recognize that the "highly publicized" nature of the crime "may feed the fantasies of others." He also said that he was "concerned that she maintains some form of relationship with Mr. Dillon, the mastermind of the crime." She was sentenced to five years. She will be 30 when released.
Roger and his mother were sentenced the next day. Recognizing that Lee had little to do with the crime, Adams sentenced her to three years and offered some sympathetic words about having lived a life "that everyone in this room can recognize as a hard and unfortunate one." For her son, however, the judge showed little sympathy. He derided Roger's "claim that he lived in poverty," noting that Roger's "economic circumstances were not nearly as dire as he makes them out to be." He then sentenced Roger to eight years in prison. When he gets out, in his early 30s, he will have to pay back the $50,000.
In prison, Roger is already finding ways to pass the time. He has been giving lessons in Dungeons & Dragons, starting up a game with a handful of inmates not far from where he hosted his final session back in November 2007. He also discovered a Website called Voice for Inmates, which is essentially MySpace for prisoners. His description of himself is classic Roger: Hello world! I recently almost stole eight million dollars. OBVIOUSLY, they caught me. I was a multi-millionaire for 4 days though. So here I am, doing well but, immeasurably more bored. I am seriously people deprived. If you write me I promise to be as witty, charming, and engaging. I am a hopeless quixotic. I tend to view new things as adventures. Granted my current state isn't quite as exciting as I might have hoped but what can you do? In any case, drop me a line and make my time less sucky, I'll do my best to be worth your time. I rarely disappoint.
[From Issue 1062 — October 2, 2008]
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