Campsite Media.
In the summer of nineteen fifty nine, Roger was free as a bird, well free as a bird on parole. He was out of the Kingston Penitentiary. He was living in his parents' home in Cornwall, Ontario, and he was determined to not just pull his weight, but to help
his parents with their financial woes. His dad's cancer was getting worse and his mortgage and hospital payments were falling behind, so Roger decided that he was going to help out in the only way he knew how, which is why a few weeks later, he found himself five hundred and fifty five miles away from home in Fredericton, New Brunswick, behind bars again. But Roger wasn't too concerned to be here.
Being hind bars in the literal sense was sort of best case scenario, because the thing about bars is you can cut through them. From iHeart podcasts and Campsite Media, I'm Sam Mullens and this is Go Boy, Episode three, Legend of the jail Breaking bank Robbery. When Roger was first brought to the Fredericton County Jail, the guard search had failed to discover two very important items that he always tried to have on his person no matter what.
Number one, the soul of his right boot contained a hacksaw blade, and number two, the soul of his left boot also contained a hacksaw blade.
I got this hat that pattin bars all the time. I cut so many right in my life, So I went to county jail and handed paptain bars. I always got actual ways hidden in his soul by shot.
When Rogers set out to help his dad get some money, he didn't expect to be cutting bars in a prison cell two provinces over less than a month later. But there was a score he'd heard about in his hometown. There was a rumor that at a nearby Cornwall general store there was a safe chalk full of the owner's savings. So the plan was simple enough. Typically with these kind of scores, he'd physically remove the safe and take it away to a private barn or garage somewhere so that
he could blow towards his way in. But when he was in the act, something went sideways and the place was surrounded by police before he even got the thing outside. How bitter he must have felt that on his very first foray into the robbing arts as a graduate of KP. He couldn't even get a safe from a general store. How hopeless it must have felt to know that he'd be back behind bars again for likely a much longer stint.
This time, it was game over right, Not so fast, as the Ontario Provincial Police were leading him to a cell in the Cornwall police station, Roger suddenly broke free, and still handcuffed, dove headfirst through a window, falling two stories. He disappeared before anyone with a badge could even figure out which way he went. And from there it was a summer to remember. He stole a car and drove two provinces over to Fredericton in Atlantic Canada, where he
spent most of the summer working at a carnival. When the carnival gig was over, he stole another car and headed to Montreal, where he immediately got into a high speed chase with the police, was arrested and sent back here to Fredericton, the city he stole the car from, and he was booked into the county jail where he was awaiting his trial. Roger didn't like awaiting anything, so he started cutting the bars right away. When they arrested him.
He gave them a bogus name and claimed to have never been in trouble with the law before, But he knew it was only a matter of time before they figured out who they had a kid that was a bona fide go boy, so he had to work fast. The Fredericton County Jail was just a small operation with a handful of holding cells, a boutique purgatory for those on their way to much larger prison, or the gallows, which were still a thing. Cutting bars is a lot
more complicated than you'd think. It's more of an art form, one that Roger eventually became a master of and would talk about often. You need to choose the right ones, learn how to evaluate which section of the welding looks the weakest, the quietest, and figure out which direction one should saw.
And don't cut the bar in an angle, because you've got to keep putting the back and take us a week to cut you all day.
Trying to cut a prison bar with a hacksaw blade is a lot like trying to cut the strings of a violin with a spoon. It can make an awful amount of racket and take a long time to get through. Its bar. And at the end of a successful night of sawing, you of course need to hide your work. It's not like you can throw up a construction cone and walk off the job. You need to find something to hold the bar perfectly in place.
I take the bar I grew from the library books, and some scotch tape from the library books and soap and all that, and I take the bar in place.
The shave soap would be the glue, and then he'd take a small strip of tape off the spine of the library book and finish it off with a coat of shoe polish for color.
So when using the seam scotch tape for a week now, it's starting to let out.
The time in between the first cut of the first bar and the final cut of the final bar is an extremely stressful time. Every time a guard would walk by, Roger's entire being would clench.
Then like the garden com walk down this hall pass all the cells go into the washington and come by the steel barrier of ent into the hanggun room, and you give the barrier shake And every time he'd shake that game my heart just a bus stop that gate along.
And if it wasn't the guards fraying his nerves, there was the bar cutter's other greatest foe, gravity.
And it's heartbreaking when you work on a bar for a week, and at three o'clock in the morning, while you're waiting to wake up in the morning to work on it and more, it falls down in the middle of the night.
Back in the Frederickton County jail, Roger had made some real headway. He only had one or two bars to go before he could fit all the way through, and he was determined to get the hell out of here so that he could get back to the mission at hand and find a way to score some cash to help out his folks. Everything was going according to plan until one of the guards work in the graveyard shift must have heard roger sigh. They slammed the door open suddenly at three am and caught him blade in hand.
The guards wrestled him out of his cell and put him into a different, more secure one. Roger still had the other hacksaw blade taped to his foot, but the joke was on him because in the new drum they threw him in, there wasn't a bar to cut, just four cinderblock walls with a solid door. The next day, the guards added a series of extra locking mechanisms to the other side of his door, confirming to Roger that his time was up. They had finally figured out his
real name and thus his reputation. And this is where things got weird. Picture Roger in this new coffin like cell, sulking about this considerable setback, just feeling lower than ever, waiting for them to transport him to his next slice of hell. When he hears it, someone was tapping on the side wall of his cell. When he stood up to investigate, he heard that the taps were moving in a pattern. They begin in the back corner and move
slowly to the front of his cell. He started following the percussive sound as it moved, when he discovered that he was being led to a tiny hole in the wall about knee height that was stuffed with toilet paper. When he dug the paper plug out, he got down on all fours to peer through when he saw staring back at him but two feet away, a very pretty eye, the eye of a young woman halfway through a six month sentence in the cell beside his She said her
name was Ninni excitedly. Roger gestured for her to step back so he could have a look at her. Roger describes meeting Ninny in his book as read here by an actor.
By midnight we were fast friends, and things got informal, to the point where she would strip down to her bra and panties and roll around teasingly on her bunk. The thought that I would be returning to the penitentiary still a virgin troubled me very much, and that thought inflamed the passion in me for a girl. When she smiled wickedly and arched her back, I'd clowt the plaster
and break out and sweat. If you want me, Roger, she'd murmur, silkily, why don't you find a way to come over and visit me.
Ninni obviously didn't know that she was talking to the one man who could accomplish just that. Roger and Ninni hatched the most naive of plans. She slid him a butter knife that she'd hidden from the guards, and he was to use it to chisel through the wall so that he could cut the bars in her cell, and then they could run away together. Roger worked frantically desperately in the way only a virgin young man could. He got the first cinderblock out of the wall.
I became so obsessed with my little project that I had very little inclination for small talk, and Ninni was beginning to pass. To keep her spirits up, I would fill her mind with happy thoughts about what we would do together after we escaped. But the excitement started wearing thin, and the dire consequences dawned dark and threatening.
Roger was only a few hours from getting all the way through when suddenly he heard the unmistakable sound of her cell door swinging open. Roger froze and pressed his ear to the hole, just in time to hear his dear Ninny's voice shout. And he has a hack saw blade too. He staggered to the center of the cell, his face buried in his hands, disbelieving what he'd just heard.
Out in the corridor, there was a wild stampede of confused activity and hysterical yelling as the sheriff and his powerful trustees started fumbling with the locks.
And this is where you need to understand something about Roger Karan. When he is totally cooked, when he is cornered, it is never over. As the three guards prepared to open the door, they had no idea what was waiting for them on the other side an explosion. When the door swung open, the guards didn't know what hit them. Roger came at them ferociously, fists swinging.
My assault was so fierce and unexpected, I momentarily had the edge. As I struggled to my feet, Roger saw a stairwell and leapt down them a flight at a time. With the guards in hot pursuit, he ran into an office, and most people would have hidden, would have realized that they were cornered and had no choice but to come out with their hands up.
But that's not Roger's style. At the instant of the guards burst into the office, Roger dove headlong through a window, hit the ground, and limped away, with a guard shouting at him through the open window. Roger made his way to the highway, where he hitched a ride bound for the US Board. The painful part about being on the run that summer was that Roger knew the one place he couldn't go was the place he wanted to be
the most home. Roger would call his dad on the phone in the middle of the night to tell him that he was okay. Since he last saw his father, he'd been pursued by police in three provinces, had stolen two cars, and had escaped custody twice. It had been less than a month. Roger was surprised that his dad never told him to turn himself in, perhaps because he
still had that bootlegger spirit in him. Roger thumbed a ride from some teenagers who took him to the main border where he crossed undetected, and he thought he was home free. But then in one of those this could only happen to Roger Strokes of profound bad luck, one of the guards from the very prison he just escaped from, was on a road trip with his family when who should he pass hitchhiking on the main highway but the young man the rest of the country was looking for.
He immediately called it in and Roger was picked up by the highway patrolman, delivered to the RCMP, or, as Roger called him, the Horseman, and before he knew it, he was back in maximum security with a fresh two and a half years to serve. Summer was over, Roger was sent to serve his time in a new Brunswick prison called Dorchester. Up until this point, when Roger entered a new institution, he would lay low at first and
suss things out for a time. But he decided that he was going to things a little different this time. This time, he decided he was going to check's notes, fight everyone.
You could fight with your best friend and be best friend at one guy in the next time you just looked back to fighting. We could be fighting as like at Jungle.
The toughest guys in prison, three guys in one day. It didn't matter. He just wanted to throw his hands. He needed to.
My fists would act like demented playmates, with mind and temper of their own. It was as if all the hate and frustration of being a born loser had seeped down into my fists. Sick at heart being pushed around, I lashed out viciously at anything that was cool to me.
Roger got into so many fights in Dorchester that they had to move him to another province, to Saint Vincent de Paul in Quebec, where his fists picked up right where they left off. And it was during this toxic time that Roger got a left her from his sister Sue from back home, sharing the unfortunate news that their father had passed away, and it was too much for Roger to process, so he snapped. When my father died when I was in prison, I was in the cell.
I went berserk. He destroyed every possession he had, and by the time he was done, even his own body had been smashed to pieces. The last bit of hope he'd held on to was gone.
That Roger was devastated when my father passed away. He was inside because I remember writing to the warden. You know, it was worth a shot to see if he could attend the funeral, and that was not granted. But I did try, you know, hoping maybe you know that that might be a closure for Roger whatever. But he did not get to see that. I don't think that was easy for him.
Roger's final months at Saint Vincent were spent not in a rage, but in quiet reflection, turning over an inescapable thought he had failed his father. He wasn't there for him when he died, and he certainly hadn't been there to help out with the bills like he said he would to help keep his father comfortable at the end. Roger was never guided by any faith or ideology, but one animating force that he did hold on to was that one day he was going to make his father proud.
One day he was going to clean up his act and turn into the man his father believed he could become. But now he'd never have the chance. And with this devastating realization came in a lusive bit of clarity. When he got out this time, there truly be nothing to hold him back now. When he got out of Saint Vincent, Roger said.
I no longer have any intentions of going straight about my release.
I have wasted all those years I kept saying to myself, I can get that one big score. I'll prove to them that they're wrong.
Roger was paroled in nineteen sixty two, and he was hungry to make a name for himself. This wasn't going to be like the other times he'd been let out. No, this time he had a plan, and he knew exactly where he wanted to go.
America.
France and Britain have influenced the growth of Montreal, capital of Canada's Quebec province.
In the nineteen sixties, Montreal was the place to be if you wanted to be a thief, and not a small time thief. Montreal was where you went to become a bank robber. So the plan for Roger was this, build a solid bank robber crew and start hitting banks.
I must admit when I first got out, I used to look at things like some guys look at girls and miniskirvis.
There were so many bank robberies happening in Montreal that the police let it be known that there would be serious consequences to anyone they caught pulling a job, that they were going to show up shooting if they had to. But that didn't seem to deter Roger in his gang. The only thing that did seem to stop them was if the bank they pulled up to was already in the process of being robbed by another crew.
And I've nearly walked thanks. I'm trying to to went to all that's a good good day. We pulled up to a bank and bank arbor Tres running out and he said, oh, Dan, you're here first.
No. Roger was grateful that he'd been accepted into a group of professionals like this. Things were going well at work, and would you believe it that, in between robberies Roger managed to finally fall in love. Denise was the sister of one of the guys on his crew, a single mother and cocktail waitress who was a little older than Roger. She got a kick out of him right away. He was rough around the edges in the way most ex cons are, but he was also surprisingly chivalrous, gentle, and funny.
While he had experienced more things than other twenty some things, it was clear that he was delayed in other areas, and she loved seeing how hard he'd blush when she flirted with him.
Roger wrote, it took me twenty three years to finally lose my virginity, and when it did happen, it was as wonderful and fulfilling as the literature on the subject had prepared me to experience.
After their first night together, Roger showed up the next day at Denise's with a bunch of boxes and announced that he was moving in.
I moved in with all my belongings, accepting the responsibility of caring for loving both her and her daughter, Diane, who was at boarding school.
You see, Roger never half ascidly does anything it seems like Denise coming into Roger's life when she did change things. Whereas before he walked into these banks, they were knocking off like he was invincible, he suddenly had something to lose. And I guess it was only through this first hit of romantic love that he finally grasped how risky and unsustainable this life he was living was, and if he kept going like this, it was only a matter of time before he got pinched or worse shot.
So I burst into I remember running in the bank and he looked kind of empty, and I'm saying, stick him up, arroy lyon the floor. All of a sudden a half a dozen big policemen popped up and behind the town of both group vets and sheet and got into shotguns. He said, do stick them up, and I said no, no, no, I gotta go.
Soon as he said you stick him up, I was about take feet off the groundling the ringstrake through the lake glass window.
By this point, jumping through a window was almost a normal occurrence in Roger's life. What was new was the bullets whizzing past his head.
Running down the street, the machine guns, shotgun bullets, Everything's winding around by years ago.
It was only when Roger made it back to the getaway car that he realized he had badly injured himself on the broken glass and was bleeding everywhere. Making matters worse was that his crew had a rule, if the first bank doesn't work, we hit a different one before calling it a day, even if you're bleeding out in the back seat.
We pulled up to our secondary bank about two miles away, and getting behind the car, I'm all gloody, we're going all He ran.
To inspect the banks, big banks, boom boot without being weight. He zoomed the way.
He took me to it. N behind the world doctor.
The underworld doctor had his work cut out for him that day.
He's putting all these meadow plants, about one hundred and baggy meadow plants, always said on the skin to get you know, is that kind environment?
With all these close calls with the Montreal police, a sense of anxiety was creeping into Roger and his gang's psyche. The city was getting too hot, even for a crew as skilled as theirs.
The jug patrols were so well organized that it was suicide to remain inside of a bank for longer than ninety seconds with a countdown restriction on each heyst. The take was small whatever was in the teller's cages, and so the ambition of the gang I joined up with was to hit that one big score.
Roger and his crew got to thinking that instead of making off with all these small scores from the tellers, what if they instead made plans for something really big.
I was living in bliss with Denise when our gang was offered that one big score. We'd all dreamed of. An ex con in the city of Saint John in New Brunswick set he had a score that was worth almost a quarter of a million dollars and wanted to know if we were interested. So we immediately set out by plane to check it out personally.
By no means was it going to be an easy tank. It was a job where everything would have to go perfectly on account of the geography of the place. The city of Saint John, New Brunswick is surrounded by water, the Atlantic Ocean in the Bay of Fundia on one side and a treacherous river on the other. The only way to get back to where their hideouts would be was via bridge. So more so than any job in the past, They needed to be one hundred percent positive when they took control of the bank that no one
pushed the silent alarm. The police station was only a few blocks away, and Roger's crew came to understand that the police could close the bridge in just a minute or so, thus trapping them. It was risky, but the thing that set this job apart from every other one that they pulled was that they weren't just going to empty the safe. Every second Thursday between eleven and eleven twenty five am, an armored truck with just two armed guards would deliver one hundred ten thousand dollars cash to
the branch, making the job in irresistible two four. So the plan was this, secure the bank without the alarm, empty the vault, wait for the armored truck to arrive, disarm the shotgun guard at the moment he walks in, empty the truck, and high tail it over the bridge, where the five of them would be split up in separate hideouts while things cooled down. After that, they could head back to Quebec victorious and chop up the score of their dreams.
My dream at the time was to make just enough bread to invest in a health Gym, thus joining the land Lunchbucket Brigade and maybe even marrying Denise to complete the picture.
Thursday morning, March first, nineteen sixty two, the bandits checked their weapons and went over the plan one final time. It had been decided that Roger, the only member of the crew who spoke without a French dialect, would be the one doing all the talking. They didn't want anyone to know that they were a Montreal gang. Roger pulled up at the downtown bank of Nova Scotia just before
eleven am. He watched as the first two members of his crew went inside posing his customers, and moments later, Roger shifted a shotgun into his coat and got out of the car. Gripped with adrenaline, he stormed into the bank wearing a ski mask gun in hand.
The next most danger spotted when you first out of the bank and you expect them to say put your hands up on then, oh I'll never win.
You just black to be as it said exactly. That's how he secured macrones up and kill at least one of them.
Two members of the crew got all the bank employees away from the alarm buttons and onto the floor Roger shouted, hold up, this is a hold up, then jumped on the counter and said to the tellers below, touch that alarm and I'll blow your feet off. With a bank secure and everyone in position, the crew took a small breath.
The most important part was done. They took the manager to open the big safe in the rear and throw the cash into some pillowcases, while another member of the crew kept an eye out for the arrival of the truck and slickly took hostage anyone who unknowingly entered the bank.
By eleven twenty am, two pillowcases were overflowing with money. As yet, there was also no sign of the armored truck, and we were all becoming increasingly anxious.
About this time, an old lady in her seventies entered walking with a cane. She was thin and wore a flowery dress and gold spectacles. Upon seeing the crew, she exclaimed, oh my. As Roger came over to tell her that everything was going to be okay. He led her over to a chair in the manager's office, where he quickly pulled the telephone cord out of the wall and told
her to sit tight. At eleven twenty eight am, the armored truck was now officially late, so in a panic, the gang started making preparations to get out of there while they still could. They began hurting what had become a sizeable crowd of hostages, about thirty people into the big vault so that they could lock them in quickly. I ran over to the office, where the little old
lady was sitting patiently, leaning forward on her cane. A few minutes earlier, I had a heated confrontation with one of my partners, who wanted me to lock her in the vault with the other hostages, something I flatly refused to do. I shouted in her hearing, aid, my friends want me to tie you up in the chain, but I won't do it if you promise not to yell for help or leave the office until the clock up
there reaches twelve o'clock. Can I trust you? She promised that he could, and with that Roger and his gang were out of there. They peeled away in their getaway car and switched vehicles. A few blocks later, they fishtailed on the icy roads like winter demons, trying desperately to make it across the bridge in time. Did someone call it in yet? Did the manager have a way of opening the safe from the inside. Was Roger wrong to leave the old lady outside the vault? They wouldn't know
until they made it to the bridge. Picture it. The roads were slick, and down the steep ledge the river would have been raging, matching their pace above it. Clutching their score, they kept turning round to look out the back window, praying that they'd slipped away undetected. One last turn, and there it was. There were no flashing lights awaiting them as they approached, so they tore across the bridge as if it were built for them and them alone, and they made it. All five men made it to
their hideout safely. They didn't get to knock off the Brinks truck, but the job had gone as smoothly as they could have hoped for. Roger was set up for success in his flat. He had a fully stalked fridge, and for a man like him, laying low in a cozy apartment was nothing. But unbeknownst to him, a chain
reaction was working its way to ward him. A nosy landlady had just heard on the radio that the crooks were believed to have been from Montreal, so she called the police and told them that she'd heard two men laughing and speaking French the night before about a bank. In short order, the police arrested those two, then arrested the guy whose name the flat was rented in, which eventually led them to Roger, who was asleep when the door was kicked in. After losing his trial, Roger appealed
and lost that one too. He was sentenced to ten years, but then he escaped almost immediately, leaving two guards gagged and tied up behind him, only to be caught again, so they bumped the ten years to twelve years. Roger's life was like Groundhog Day, stealing prison escape, stealing prison escape.
So I kept escaping from prison, and I ended up escaping in a period of twenty four years, more than any other prisoner in Canada.
By the end of nineteen sixty two, Roger had escaped from prison so many times that no warden in the country wanted him, so the government had to figure out where to put him for the long haul, and there was really only one place where they wouldn't need to
worry about him anymore. The worst place there was. Roger arrived at Kingston, penn with twelve years in front of him, but unbeknownst to him, this time would be different because a surprising new era in Roger's life was about to begin, and the thing that would put Roger on a whole new trajectory, the thing that was about to change his life, was a package of jelly beans. Seriously. Go Boy is a production from Campside Media in partnership with iHeart Podcasts.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you'll get your podcasts. Go Boy was written and hosted by me Sam Wellins. Our producer is Rob Lindsay of Paradox Pictures. Laine Rose is our senior producer. Sound design, mix and engineering by Garrett Tiedeman. Original music by Garrett Tiedeman. Fact checking by Michael kenyon Meyer. Selected archival clips are from CBC Licensing. The book Go Boy was written by Roger Koran.
iHeart Podcasts executive producers are Lindsay Hoffman and Jennifer Bassett. Excerpts from Roger Koran's book Go Boy, read by Jamie Cavanaugh. Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa, Gregoriatis, Adam hoff and Matt cher A. Special thanks to our operations team, Doug Slaywyn Ashley Warren, Sabina Marra and Destiny Dingle. If you enjoyed Go Boy, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.