This story was originally published in our January 2004 issue, under the title Ocean's 91.

"Are you kidding?” the girl behind the teller window said to the man standing on the other side of the glass. It was the morning of August 12, 2003, soon after the First American Bank of Abilene, Texas, had opened, and the man had walked in, crossed the floor to her station and handed her an envelope with the word ROBBERY written on it in red marker. He was tall, and he was wearing a blue baseball cap and a black long-sleeve shirt. At first the teller didn’t understand what was happening. “What do you mean?” she asked, and the man got irritated and told her to go over to her drawer and put the money in the envelope he’d given her. That’s when she asked him: “Are you kidding?”

He wasn’t kidding at all. His name was JL Hunter Rountree, and he pointed to her station and demanded again that she put the money in the envelope. Still, the teller couldn’t quite believe it. She turned to another teller, who was standing nearby, and said, “I’m getting robbed. Is he kidding?” The other girl told her to go ahead and put the money in the envelope—twenties, tens, fives and ones, plus a little bait money, marked so that it could be traced back to the bank. It came to just under $2,000. As the teller tripped the silent alarm, the robber turned and walked out of the bank, got into a white Buick Century and drove away.

Here’s what made the teller balk: The scalp around his cap was bald and liver-spotted; the body under his shirt was thin and stooped. One of the other tellers would tell the police that he looked to be in his seventies or eighties; the teller he robbed thought he was about 80. They were off by at least a decade: Rountree, known as Red to almost everyone who knows him, was born in 1911—just one year after Bonnie and two years after Clyde. He was married at 20, a millionaire at 50, bankrupt at 60, widowed at 70; and only then, when most men are luxuriating in the relief of their retirement, did Red Rountree begin his second career. He began robbing banks in his eighties, he was finishing up a three-year sentence in a federal prison in Florida when he was 90, and when he walked out of the bank in Abilene with an envelope full of cash and the cops already alerted, he was a full 91 years old, and he wasn’t kidding, not at all.

“I was born in a farmhouse about seven miles south of Brownwood, Texas.” This is Red speaking, ancient history told by one who lived it. “And the doctor didn’t get there for two days—and when he showed up, he was drunk as a buggy. He spent the night, and he circumcised me the next day.” He’s sitting on a metal folding chair in a cinder-block room in the Dickens County Correctional Center in Spur, Texas, a tiny little town on the edge of the plains. He’s six feet tall and 160 pounds, and time has bleached all the color out of him; his skin is pale to the point of translucence, his beard is white, and he walks with a metal cane. He stares through thick glasses, not maliciously but with the fixed uncertainty of the aged. Even in a gray prison jumpsuit, he looks like someone’s favorite great-uncle; he looks, incongruously enough, like Pete Seeger, and he speaks with a thick East Texas accent. He’s explaining how he became, quite likely, the oldest bank robber in U.S. history, and as befits his achievement, he’s taking the long way.

“I lived on this farm until I was 6 years old. It was the sorriest farm I have ever heard of. We had cotton, we had corn, we had turkeys in quantity. We had sheep, we had milk cows, and when I was a 3-year-old and they went to milk the cows every night and every morning, I had a tin cup and I’d follow them, and I’d get that hot milk and drink it.” He tells this story and his eyes glow, as if he can still taste it. “My long-term memory is good,” he says, and you believe him. “My short-time memory, I don’t have,” he says, and you believe that too. “No fooling. At times I can’t hardly remember my name.” But he can recall a time so distant that an automobile was an uncommon sight. “My father’s father had a drayage company—”

A what?

“That’s like a trucking company, but with horses, big horses.”

So he talks. He tells a near century’s worth of stories, and tells them as much, it seems, to keep the tales alive as to convey anything to his visitor. They might as well be legends, ballads, bedtime stories; there’s no one to confirm them, no one left in this world who knows Red Rountree well or knows very much about him. Everyone he’s ever been close to is dead: his parents, his wife, his stepson, his brothers, his in-laws, his friends. He’s been orphaned by time, and it’s as if he’s re-creating a world by remembering it out loud.

Listen: “Farmers in Brownwood had an account at the grocery store and an account at the dry-goods store. And they charged things, and at the end, when they sold the crops and got some money, they went and paid. Didn’t have a very good crop one year, so JL Hunter Rountree is my name. JL King was the dry-goods man, and Hunter was the grocer. I used to work for JL on Saturdays, when I was going through high school.”

He talks: the ‘20s, work for the Santa Fe Railroad, college, then back to the farm to wait out the Depression. In the early ‘30s, one of his brothers got him a job working in the oil fields in Duval County. It was around then that he met his first wife, Fay, a waitress with a young son named Tom. “Less than a year later, we got married. The boy was 4 years old, and he become my boy. This was 1933.” Red Rountree was a fortunate man: “It was a fifty-year love affair,” he says.

JL Hunter Rountree doesn’t see the harm in his crimes: “Okay, it’s stealing,” he says. “But it’s fun stealing.”

He was lucky in business too. After the war, he started Rountree Machinery Co., and soon he was wealthy. Buddy Rountree, Red’s nephew, now 74 years old, remembers seeing the couple on those few occasions when they came by to visit the rest of the family. “Fay was a nice lady, a real sophisticated type person,” he says. “Red gave her everything she wanted. He had a big business and a lot of money. She came to a family reunion a time or two, but she didn’t mix very well. She was just a different kind of person; some people mix and some don’t. Rountrees, we get by and do what we have to do, but she liked nice things and fine jewelry and clothes.”