Randy Adair was a familiar face in Rancho Santa Margarita. With a shock of white hair and a bushy white mustache, the 70-year-old grandpa was popular among the deep-sea fishermen at the harbor, where he’d pose for photographs holding 30-pound yellowtails. He had coached football players at Dana Hills High School, and he even appeared in court on behalf of boys who found themselves in trouble. Adair was the perfect character witness, having spent two decades in the Los Angeles Police Department as a detective, many of them in the crime-pocked Rampart Division.

Then one day in July 2015, Adair steered his red Dodge SUV into a strip mall two miles from his home. He parked, put on a Panama hat, and walked across the parking lot, studying the rooftops of the KFC drive-thru and the Bowl of Heaven açaí joint. Satisfied that there were no security cameras, Adair headed toward the First Citizens Bank, opened the door, and checked to make sure there weren’t any customers. Then he went to the first teller and flashed a note that read ‘‘Relax, be calm.” Seeing a revolver inside the old man’s waistband, the terrified teller emptied her register.

This wasn’t the first time Adair had robbed a bank. It wasn’t even the first time he’d robbed this branch. Between March and July of 2015, the septuagenarian pulled off five bank heists, all in broad daylight and with little more than a hat for a disguise. Adair knew to hit branches without bulletproof “bandit barriers” to protect their employees and avoided the dye packs that tellers sometimes slip into the money they give to robbers. He left few clues. FBI investigators nicknamed Adair the Snowbird Bandit, after the old folk who migrate to warmer climes for the winter. For a time he seemed unstoppable. When Adair was finally arrested near his home on July 22, 2015, the day after his last robbery, the question was not how a 70-year-old retiree could rob a bank but why a decorated detective would.

“Anyone who worked for the department, is getting his pension and is committing bank robberies, I’m blown away,” Jim Wilke, a retired LAPD detective who knows Adair, told The Orange County Register. After Adair pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven years in prison, I sent him a letter, asking for an interview. In slanted capitals he wrote back, saying that if I was “interested in the truth,” then a meeting could be arranged. And so this spring I drove across a short bridge in San Pedro to FCI Terminal Island, a grim federal prison complex surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire. Passing through a maze of corridors that Al Capone and Charles Manson had walked through, I arrived at the visitor’s room. There, in a glass-enclosed space within the room, the Snowbird sat like a museum curiosity. He wore a tan-colored prison uniform and offered a weak gap-toothed smile as he peered at me through spectacles held together by green tape. “Ask what you wanna ask, and I’ll try and answer,” he practically yelled after I sat down, adding that his hearing aid was broken. His robbery method was speed, he said: “Zip. Bam. Boom. In. Gone.” But the forces that led to his downfall had been slowly percolating for decades.

The son of a rodeo-riding dairy farmer, Randolph Adair was born in 1944 and grew up in Artesia. He acquired a taste for detective work during police-science classes in junior college. It was the only schoolwork that ever interested him. In 1965, during the Vietnam War, Adair was drafted and assigned to the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command in Panama. As soon as he returned, he enrolled in the LAPD Academy, graduating near the top of his class. As was normal in those days, he had to buy his own uniform.

Six months later, on June 5, 1968, the 23-year-old cop clocked onto a swing shift that started with a crackling voice on his police radio announcing a shooting at the Ambassador Hotel. Adair and his partner pointed their ’65 Plymouth toward the scene. The victim, shot three times at close range during a campaign rally, was Senator Robert Kennedy. “We got to the pantry, and you could see that Kennedy was down on the floor,” Adair told me as a prison guard stared at us from afar. “He’s lying face up, and I saw fluid, you know, from the head injury—brain matter looks kinda like snot, you know?”

Almost casually Adair remembered arresting the shooter, Sirhan Sirhan, who was still at the scene. “I thought he was, you know, just like crazed,” he recalled. “A little bitty guy. So we handcuffed him, and we took him out the back way.” After delivering the suspect to the station, Adair was in his police car again when he saw a station wagon speed through a stoplight on Alvarado. Adair threw on his red lights and gave chase.

“When we got close, it looked like a government car, and there’s two fan belt inspectors”—a derisive old cop term for FBI agents—“in the front,” he said. In back sat Kennedy’s wife, Ethel, and the astronaut John Glenn. They were lost, so Adair led the way to the Central Receiving Hospital on 6th Street. Inside, as Ethel Kennedy argued with a doctor, Adair walked to a small treatment room and pulled back the curtain. “There was Kennedy on the gurney,” he told me, “nobody around him; he wasn’t hooked up or anything. My opinion was he was graveyard dead.”

Photo courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library

Adair would remember 1968 for another big reason: It was the year he met his future wife, Susan Hackworth. Talking about their romance was the only time he smiled in the prison visitor’s room. A striking blond Italian who worked in data processing for Bank of America, she lived in the apartment next door to Adair and his academy buddies. One night she knocked on his door to borrow some ice trays for a party. “So we had to listen against the wall all night long while the music’s going on,” Adair said. “The girls are giggling and all that…. They didn’t bring our ice trays back.”

Adair went into action: He grilled steaks outside the apartments one night, waiting for her to walk past. Eventually he persuaded her to have dinner with him, and on September 7, 1968, they wedded in La Puente. Susan knew LAPD marriages usually didn’t last and that life as a cop’s wife was full of worry. “The only thing I won’t agree to is having you work vice,” she told him. “I think you can give me that much. Because vice is so horrible.”

Instead Adair was promoted to detective with LAPD’s Metropolitan Division, an elite mobile crime-fighting unit. One of its primary occupations: catching bank robbers. There were a lot back then. “At one time I was involved in seven bank robbery arrests,” Adair told me.

His first was on the afternoon of March 24, 1969, when a silent alarm inside the United California Bank in Mid City signaled a robbery in progress. Exiting the bank with the cash and a loaded revolver when Adair and company arrived, the thief turned and ran back into the building. They found him in a second-floor restroom, where Robert Lee White surrendered. He’d eventually confess to being the Wilshire Bandit, who’d hit nine banks in the area, and to being the Blue Blazer Bandit of Fort Worth, Texas. Adair’s career was in full swing.

As the arrests mounted, the detective earned praise from superiors for his “initiative, his alertness, and his imagination.” He felt proud to wear the badge and enjoyed the perks: Half-price chili burgers at Tommy’s on Beverly and free smokes at Sam’s Corner Liquor Store on 6th left him with enough cash to play the ponies and buy bottles of Jim Beam.

If there’s a point when Randy Adair began edging toward the day that he, too, would begin robbing banks, it’s probably here. The gambling and booze would figure prominently in his life, as would the health problems that he traces back to a January night in 1971. That’s when Adair, cruising through Westlake in an unmarked car, spotted smoke billowing from a fire in the basement of a rundown apartment building. With no sign of the fire department, Adair dashed into the building. “The place started really filling up with smoke bad,” he said. “They had paint and loads of cables covered in grease and oil. Highly toxic fumes.” He could barely see or breathe as he began to carry residents—some too drunk or disabled to move—over his shoulders to safety. Adair told me he saved “25 to 30” victims that night. He received a “Class A” commendation for bravery, but there was a cost. “We didn’t know about smoke inhalation,” Adair said, referring to the long-term damage it can wreak. He just squirted water onto his face and went about his business. Days later he was in riot gear at an antiwar march when he collapsed. The doctor diagnosed him with bronchial pneumonia and directed him to take time off. Free from the structure of shift work, Adair drank all day. Returning to duty helped slow the drinking, but he was an alcoholic. “I started sneak drinking…. I wouldn’t drink on the job,” he said. “I didn’t go out and party with the guys. I wasn’t a bar drinker.” Adding to the strain: Adair’s son, Andrew, had been born in 1971 with hearing loss and speech problems, requiring frequent medical visits, and it was a battle to get his son the appropriate education. But Adair told me he had joined Alcoholics Anonymous and was sober by the time his daughter, Kateri, was born in 1975. When he was promoted to homicide detective at the Rampart Division—the same one that would be engulfed in a corruption scandal in the late 1990s— he moved his young family from Walnut to Dana Point, wanting to get as far away from the madness of the city as possible. Working on homicides wore on him. One of his cases, in 1979, was William George Bonin, aka the Freeway Killer, who raped, tortured, and murdered at least 21 boys. Another was Richard Ramirez, the rapist and serial killer known as the Night Stalker. The worst memory for Adair, though, was the case of Johanna Nevarez, who went missing one August near MacArthur Park in Westlake. “She was a beautiful little girl. Four years old,” Adair recalled. The police searched much of the area before noticing that a nearby apartment had two refrigerators. “We opened the door, and there she was,” he said. “She was stuffed inside the refrigerator on a rack, nude.” As he detailed her gruesome injuries, Adair sounded like he was dictating a police report. “She was dead, of course,” he added. RELATED: The Locations of L.A.’s 100 Most Memorable Crimes by Neighborhood It was around the time of Nevarez’s autopsy that Adair grew distant at home, his wife would later tell me. “He couldn’t sleep,” Susan said. “He’d wake up in the middle of the night, and he’d be standing in the hallway, staring at Kateri.” The killer, Manuel Gomez Gonzalez, a 31-year-old drifter, fled to Mexico, where Federales apprehended him. Adair went to pick him up. “The return trip sitting next to this suspect was one of the longest drives I’ve ever experienced,” he said. “My desire was for him to attempt to escape…. I would have killed him in a heartbeat.” Photo courtesy of the Adair family Life was exacting its toll on Adair. He struggled with repeated bouts of pneumonia and bronchitis. Susan’s health began to decline, too, so her husband put work aside to care for her. “Then for no reason in the world other than stupidity, I took a drink,” he said. It was 1980, and his relapse had begun. Susan Adair lives in a small Rancho Santa Margarita home with Kateri and her husband, Matt Fogleman, and their two young children. Everyone shouts, especially if they’re talking to Adair on the phone from prison. “When you grow up with a deaf brother,” Kateri explained, “you forget you’re shouting all the time.” She had inherited her mother’s Italian looks and talked animatedly, often finishing Susan’s sentences and bickering with her over details. Many of their stories about Adair began with “he had been drinking.” Susan, who described her husband as a “sad drunk,” recalled how he phoned her from Santa Monica once and informed her that he was holding a loaded gun. “He was just saying goodbye to me and telling me ‘I’m ending it because I can’t handle it anymore, things are too horrible,’ ” she said. Susan talked him down: “There’s too many people that love you…we can handle anything as long as we’re together. You have children that love you very, very much and a wife that loves you. And you’re throwing away a love that most people don’t get to have.” When he fell silent, Susan said, “I hope you’ll be home soon.” And he was. In 1988, Adair retired from the LAPD. He was 53. Equipped with a P.I. license, he worked as an insurance investigator. Then in 1991, Susan was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and their lives began to unravel. “She was going to the shrink,” Adair recalled. “They had her on all kinds of medication…. I was doing everything—washing, cleaning, chauffeuring her around.” Kateri told me that her father was “beyond depressed” once his sex life evaporated. “Not having intimacy, that can wear on a man,” she said when Susan was out of earshot. The couple was socked with money troubles, too, owing to all of their medical expenses. Despite Adair’s police pension, they had to unload their house in a short sale in 1990. By then the housing market had cratered, and they walked away with nothing. The IRS got involved, pursuing them for $60,000, and marshals arrived to evict the family from the rental home they’d moved into. Adair added construction work to his résumé, but sobriety proved elusive. He was drunk at his son’s first varsity football game. When he got a DUI, Susan, who was in a 12-step group for families of alcoholics, had had enough. Soon he was sleeping in an abandoned car at the beach. Finally, on December 21, 1996, Adair walked back into AA and quit drinking again. Sobriety saved his marriage but did little to improve his finances. Bank robbery is a tough way to make a living. Given the risks, the takes are notoriously small—$7,500 on average, according to the last figure released by the FBI. About a fifth of robbers get caught, and many are shot in the process. Randy Adair must have known some of this, just as he must have known about the notoriety surrounding cops who get caught running afoul of the law. So his decision seems to defy logic, or at least to underscore his desperation. Adair pointed to his money troubles, but much of what he and his family actually described was equal parts despair—over his illnesses, over Susan’s declining health, over his frayed marriage, over his struggles with addiction. Adair liked to bet mostly on horse racing, but one time in 2009 he fed $20 into a slot machine in an Indian casino and watched all three symbols align with a ding, ding, ding. The $50,000 windfall covered some bills, he said, and paid off a couple of cars. The gambling continued. Kateri suspected brain damage was a factor in her father’s downward spiral, citing the nine-hour surgery Adair underwent in 2010, at age 65, after suffering an aneurysm. He suffered another blow in 2012, when he developed a serious bacterial infection. “They gave me a 5 percent chance to live,” he said. In 2013, Adair survived five heart attacks. At least once Kateri’s father-in-law, a pastor, performed last rites. For a little while Kateri put her parents up in a tiny spare bedroom in her house, but she eventually found them a studio apartment with just enough room for two recliners and a bed. But the rent kept increasing. Adair had given up on P.I. work, and he was no longer able to do construction. With only his pension for income, he struggled with his gambling losses. “I started playing video slot machines on the iPad,” he told me. “It only cost five or ten bucks to buy a million points or something like that.” He was losing $20, $40, then $60 at a time. Susan felt alone. “I was missing that key component that I could lean on to get through another crisis because he was the crisis,” she recalled. In 2014, Adair was back in the hospital—stomach pain this time. Doctors discovered he had only one working kidney, and it was blocked. Bypass surgery left Adair with a huge hernia, and he temporarily lost the use of his legs. He and Susan moved into the tiny spare bedroom in Kateri and Matt’s house. Susan’s health was also sliding. “Her teeth started falling out. She was this beautiful woman; she’s gorgeous, right? She got heavy, she can’t lose weight, started losing her hair,” Adair said softly. “Nine root canals, over and above my dental insurance, at 900 bucks a pop…. I was being just completely wiped out and drained.” Her father became increasingly forgetful around Kateri; she would tell him the same information over and over. “No, you never told me that,” he would protest. If she argued with him, he would explode: “Kateri, damn it!” When he collapsed in an armchair at her house in 2014, Adair begged the paramedics, “Just let me die.” Adair sought refuge at a bar called Sammy’s in nearby Lake Forest. Rather than drink, he joined dozens of other seniors beneath a wall of 30 giant TV screens for off-track betting. He studied Today’s Racing Digest, betting on exactas, trifectas, and superfectas with money he didn’t have, trying to win back what he’d already lost. One afternoon in February 2015, Adair drove to his daughter’s house and asked her husband to loan him money for rent. Matt checked with his wife. When she angrily confronted her father, urging him to get help, Adair lowered the boom: “If you don’t loan me the money, I’ll have to blow my brains out.” Kateri began to sob, but he got his way. The shocked couple loaned him $2,000. Days later Kateri noticed her father pick up the Panama hat she had just bought for a summer cruise. Matt’s parents were funding the trip, which sent galloping a stable’s worth of insecurities in Adair. She still wonders whether this was the moment when her dad decided to rob banks. Not long after Adair hit his first bank, four elderly gentlemen in London were mapping out their own heist. Their plan: to use a diamond-bit drill to break into the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit vault. On April 5 the foursome pulled in an estimated $300 million but were caught after their electronic bus passes and cell phones linked them to the crime scene. Adair had overlooked the advances of modern technology, too. “I knew inside the bank they were gonna have some fairly poor, grainy pictures,” he explained as his fingers nervously drummed on the table. That didn’t turn out to be the case, but Adair wasn’t too reflective about much of anything with me. Clearly the man’s mind wasn’t healthy; he misremembered dates and got the name of his favorite bar wrong during his account. He said he decided, “I’m just gonna go and make a withdrawal, you know, without an account.” Mainly he was concerned with paying his bills and financing his low-roller gambling habit. “In my mind, which wasn’t working real well then,” he said, “I thought that if they thought I had a weapon, they would not look at me.” The first heist was a Friday afternoon, March 20, at 1:45 p.m. at the California Bank & Trust in Dana Point. Adair wore his bifocal sunglasses and a navy blue baseball cap. With his Smith & Wesson revolver in his waistband, he produced his note. Moments later he emerged from the bank with $1,731 in cash in his hands, walking as fast as he could (“You don’t wanna lollygag,” he told me) to his SUV. His vehicle had license plate frames that read “KMA-367”—the call sign of the L.A. police radio transmitter. The whole thing was so quiet, he thought. There was nobody screaming or yelling, “not any bells and whistles.” At that moment an alert chimed on the smartphone of FBI Special Agent Chris Gicking. A tall, muscular 51-year-old with a goatee and a surfer’s tan, Gicking has worked on more than 500 bank robberies. Stationed in the FBI’s Westwood office before transferring to Orange County in 2007, he often surfs at Dana Point, just a mile from Adair’s first bank heist. “I got the photos minutes after,” Gicking told me, and drove straight to the bank. Even he was surprised at the bandit’s age. “I always tell people, ‘Everybody robs banks—young, old, fat, short, green, purple, male, female.’… I mean, we arrested two transgender bank robbers just in the last couple of years…. But this guy, you know—pretty unusual.”