38 left you feeling next to naked.įor facing this risk, couriers received an additional 75 cents an hour. The courier was on his own out there, and in certain neighborhoods at certain times of day the bulletproof vest and the. He is not to open the truck and let his buddy in. If there is trouble, the man in the cab might radio for help and maybe squeeze off a couple of rounds through the gun portals, but he is not to climb out. Johnson was the courier, the guard who climbs out alone at each convenience store and supermarket, hauling the empty canvas bags from the big red and black truck and bringing them back full, while the driver stays in the cab, doors locked at all cost. "So go find him and we'll give you a half a million." The Heist "He looks like anybody," says Mike Heard, the FBI agent leading the search for Johnson. Philip Johnson is no rampaging serial killer with flair and style and savagery. It is intense, but not desperate, not like the one for Andrew Cunanan. There's a reward, offered by Loomis Fargo. He's also worth $500,000 to anyone who turns him in. He carries with him an air of complaint, going through the day in a slow burn. People working with him - most of them seem to be older men, more even-tempered, maybe working just to get out of the house, keep busy - give him a wide berth. He is a little sweaty, but the wet places are starting to dry under his shirt. When he turns away from you to do something, he addresses you without turning back around. He's the big, sullen guy in the uniform down at the Jiffy Lube, or maybe in the lumber section at Hechinger. Johnson, by every appearance, did it all by himself. That someone was a guerrilla task force, armed with bombs. In January 1976 someone took between $20 million and $50 million from the vaults and safe deposit boxes of the British Bank of the Middle East in Beirut. Worldwide, Johnson's caper approaches even what Guinness calls the biggest bank job of them all. (Four of the five were caught, but only $1 million was returned.) His take dwarfs the $11 million five robbers stole from an armored car vault in New York City 15 years ago. Johnson has set the new domestic robbery mark by a country mile. "These are the kinds of records that don't get broken," he says. But what Philip Johnson has done gets his full attention in a hurry. He answers the phone not "Hello," but with a distracted "Huh," as if what he has in front of him is more interesting than anything you're calling about. editor for the Guinness Book of Records, a man people constantly call about the most trivial things. "Twenty million? And he's still out there?" "Damned impressive, actually," says Mark Young, from his desk in Stamford, Conn. Tim Gray was at a funeral when a friend sidled up and gave him the extraordinary news: Not in the North Carolina forest where Johnson left another shaken colleague chained to a tree.Īnd certainly not at the warehouse of the Loomis Fargo armored car company where the three men had been working side by side when Johnson unsnapped his holster and pulled out his company-issued. Not at Johnson's concrete-block Jacksonville ranch house, where police found one of his co-workers handcuffed in a bedroom closet, with snack food and a jug of water. Yet for almost four months now, Johnson has managed to keep it out of sight.Īnd despite an international manhunt, no one has laid eyes on him, either. All told, the loot weighs close to half a ton. It is also more money than anyone could easily carry around by himself, which right about now might be becoming an overwhelming reality to a fugitive. It is more money than anyone has ever stolen in the United States. But when it was over, instead of driving his beat-up VW Rabbit home to another lonely Saturday night, Philip Noel Johnson, 33, climbed behind the wheel of a company van groaning under the weight of $20 million in cash and trundled off into American mythology. On March 29, the cranky, embittered wage slave pulled a regular shift. That may have changed the day before Easter. Phil once told his friend Tim Gray that he would never get married because no girl would want him. These things tend to erode your self-confidence. The money, as Johnson grumped to anyone within earshot, was lousy.Īn armored car guard, he made $7 an hour. But what really scorched his shorts was the money. The routine was stultifying - extended periods of boredom interrupted by brief, terrifying sensations of vulnerability. For 10 years Philip Johnson went every day to a job he hated.
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