Bank robber outdid Dillinger, lived to tell about it

Will Higgins | The Indianapolis Star

Show Caption Hide Caption Cities use local outlaws as tool for economic development Could Indy benefit from local outlaws like John Dillinger and Morris Johnson?

Johnson twice escaped maximum-security U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta by scaling 40-foot wall

Even police officers who chased Johnson seemed to get along with him

At age 76%2C he%27s currently serving time at federal penitentiary in Arkansas

INDIANAPOLIS -- The visiting room at the federal penitentiary in Forrest City, Ark., is plain as a church basement — tile floor, cinder block walls. A mural in one corner depicting the New York skyline offers the only color. Inmates and their visitors stand in front of it and have their photographs taken for $1.50.

Most of the visitors are wives or girlfriends. They sit a few feet from the prisoner they came to visit in plastic chairs. Eye contact is intense and non-stop. Everyone looks excited, everyone looks energized, everyone looks about 29 years old.

Into all this shuffles Morris Lynn Johnson, who was once more intense, more non-stop, more excited and energized than anyone in here. Except now he's closing in on 80.

Johnson robbed banks. He was real good at it. John Dillinger robbed two dozen banks. Johnson, like Dillinger an Indiana man, robbed at least three dozen. Dillinger escaped from prison twice. Johnson did it three times.

Twice, Johnson threw together makeshift ladders and went over the 40-foot wall that surrounds the exercise yard at the maximum-security U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta. The prison, built in the 19th century, had been broached just once before, in 1926.

Johnson first scaled the wall in the late afternoon of Nov. 9, 1966. He lowered himself to the ground via a rope, quickly and without gloves, burning his hands severely. As he sped away in a hastily stolen car, he got relief for the pain by holding his hands out the window, cooling them in the breeze while steering the speeding car with his knees.

A long line of criminals has sauntered and strutted through American history and been judged not simply jerks who take things that don't belong to them but instead daring risk-takers, rakish folk heroes with charm and good jaw lines: Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, Slick Willie Sutton, and, of course, Indianapolis' own Dillinger.

Morris Johnson may be the end of that line.

Publicity shy

He never saw himself that way.

"I never tried to get in the papers or get famous," he said in a recent interview. "The more people knew what you looked like, the worse it was. You'd escape and then some old hotel clerk would recognize you? Nope."

(Case in point: Johnson's photo was widely circulated for the first time in May 1976 when, following his escape from a jail in Selma, Ala., the FBI placed him on its "10 Most Wanted" list. Just one month later, he was apprehended, he and his exotic-dancer girlfriend, in a suburb of Minneapolis — by 28 FBI agents, eight more than took down Dillinger).

"Publicity was never your friend," Johnson said.

Yet he made good copy, great copy. Like during his arraignment in Indianapolis for a 1967 bank robbery he committed shortly after his first prison escape. He recognized Carolyn Pickering, who was the first woman to cover the crime beat for The Indianapolis Star, and brought her up to date on his exploits with enthusiasm:

"Well I gave them a pretty good run anyway, didn't I?" Johnson said. "Well, I sure lived it up for a couple of months. Boy, I really been livin' high. I sure hope I can figure out a way to get out for a while again."

He figured out a way again and again and became the city's most colorful criminal, and in some quarters its most likeable.

Johnson grew up one of seven children in a two-bedroom house in the Drexel Gardens neighborhood on Indianapolis' Westside.

"Morris was a natural leader, almost like a businessman," said Bill Warren. A childhood friend of Morris' brother Leon and also a product of that hardscrabble neighborhood, Warren would become a pioneer in the online job recruiting industry as president of Monster.com. "He didn't come across as a thug or anything like that, and I never knew Morris to be violent."

By 1960, police had identified Johnson, and Leon Johnson, as trouble, and they made frequent trips to the Johnson house, sirens blaring. But despite such disruptions, the Johnsons remained on good terms with their neighbors.

"Morris Johnson was the leader and a good-looking boy, and he was always a polite boy," said Marvin "Jock" Earles, who lived across the street from the Johnsons and still lives in the same house. "Yes, him and them was robbing banks. But around here, we didn't have no money in any banks anyway."

In 1964, while imprisoned, Johnson confessed to police he'd committed hundreds of crimes, including — and there's no proof of this — the looting of an appliance store of 10 televisions. These, he said, he gave to "poor people who didn't have TV sets to watch — I didn't need them."

But banks were the thing. In robbing them, Johnson almost always had a partner. Typically, the two men would arrive at a bank in a stolen car, leave the engine running and enter the bank wearing bandannas and sunglasses or ski masks. Johnson would have studied the bank's interior and its employees. He'd have a gun, and he'd remain calm.

"Those people knew he was in charge," said retired FBI agent Wayland Archer in a 2005 interview, "but Morris Johnson wasn't reckless."

Even the police officers who chased Johnson seemed to get along with him.

"The investigators had great respect for him, and he did for them," retired Indianapolis cop Lou Christ said in an interview several years ago.

"It's totally different than today. The motivation now is different; mostly it's a quick fix — they've got to have a little money. Morris Johnson's motivation was: He was a career hold-up man. He never got caught in a bank or jeopardized any civilian that was in the bank. In those days, we called them professionals."

Powerful enemies

But in the city's halls of power, Johnson was reviled.

Charles Boswell, the mayor from 1959-62, had clear and awful memories of Johnson even after 40 years.

"Morris Johnson!" fumed Boswell in a phone interview in 2003, four years before he died. "Of course I remember Morris Johnson! He was running wild. He was a menace. When I was mayor we were so proud that the crime rate had gone down a little bit each year. So it was so disappointing to us he was able to get away with what he did."

Boswell and the Marion County prosecutor, Phillip Bayt, complained in the media that Johnson and his people over and over freed themselves by posting bond — at one point Johnson was free on five bonds totaling $120,000 — then committed more crimes to pay their lawyers.

It was galling that Johnson, an uneducated Westsider with no visible means of support, could hire the city's top lawyers to defend him. The lawyers proved to be money well spent, too: By late 1963, Johnson had been arrested 20 times but convicted just three times, and two of those were for traffic violations.

And on top of all that, Johnson was handsome and self-confident. He was 6 feet tall, 170 pounds. He wore his hair slicked into a pompadour. His "10 Most Wanted" poster described his eyes as "blue (unusually vivid blue)." He dressed snappily.

On Feb. 11, 1963, Republican state Sen. John C. Ruckelshaus introduced a bill in the Indiana General Assembly, clearly aimed at Johnson, that would make posting bond harder for people charged with committing crimes while free on bond. And the FBI began watching him around the clock.

Johnson attempted to fight by seeking a restraining order against the police, the FBI, the mayor, even the governor of Indiana. The weird request was of course denied.

And two months, later Johnson and a childhood friend and sometime "wheelman" named Frank Rance were convicted of robbing the Merchants National Bank & Trust Co. branch.

Johnson admits to robbing many, many banks, but even now he insists he did not rob that bank. He still claims an associate, William Kindler, was Rance's partner that day, and Kindler admitted it at the trial. Nevertheless, Johnson was convicted and sentenced to 18 years.

It might have been the end. But it was only intermission.

Escape artist

Two years later, Johnson would break out of Atlanta spectacularly, return to Indianapolis, rob another bank, be arrested and sent back to Atlanta.

He rode in the backseat of Frank Anderson's Buick, manacled but cheerful, recalled Anderson, then an entry-level cop who decades later would become the first African-American to be elected sheriff of Marion County.

"Morris was a thinker, and personable," said Anderson. "Good sense of humor. I remember him telling me, 'The height of my ambition is to escape from you.'"

"I could have done it, too," Johnson said recently, "but I liked Frank."

Anderson delivered Johnson to Atlanta, and Johnson broke out of Atlanta, for the second time, in 1975. He was captured eight months later in New Orleans. Five months later, in November, 1976, he escaped from a jail in Selma.

During his periods of freedom, Johnson roamed the South robbing banks with another celebrity criminal, J. Paul Scott, who in 1962 earned the distinction of becoming the first man known to have escaped from Alcatraz.

The best part of bank robbery, Johnson said in a recent prison interview, was the planning and execution. When the job was done, he said, there was always a letdown. "There was never as much money as I'd expected," he said.

Mostly his takes were in the $10,000 range, though in the mid-1970s Johnson had two $100,000-ballpark paydays after robbing banks in Louisville, Ky., and Little Rock.

Being on the run is expensive, he said, so it wasn't retirement money. But it did buy some high living, at least in the short term.

It all ended May 12, 1977, when he was captured in a suburb of Minneapolis, with the exotic dancer.

They'd had a lovely few months, traveling the country, thrilling to the sounds of the Commodore's new single, "Easy," with Johnson's favorite line: "Why in the world would anybody want to put chains on me?"

Johnson agreed to cooperate with authorities in solving numerous bank robberies "if leniency was shown to his companion," The Indianapolis News reported.

He and the dancer still talk occasionally on the phone but haven't seen each other since 2005, when Johnson returned to Indianapolis after being paroled. It was the first time he'd been free in 28 years.

He bought a Camaro, and a pair of Johnston & Murphy shoes and occasionally exercised by walking along the Monon Trail near Broad Ripple. He had a birthday party, attended by, among others, two of his three ex-wives (the third having died).

But just eight months after his release, and one month after his party, Johnson was arrested at the Motel 6 near Indianapolis International Airport. He was allegedly trying to buy machine guns. He was returned to prison. He was 68.

Today, he's 76. The pompadour is long gone. He has spent 47 of the last 50 years behind bars and says, "Hell no, it wasn't worth it — nothing is worth even one year in prison. But, a man takes his chances."

Johnson's scheduled release date is Nov. 22, 2018.