Houlahan - Norco 80 : The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History

Table of Contents

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS FOR their help and cooperation in the making of this book:

A. J. Reynard, Andrew Delgado Monti, Bill Eldrich, Capt. C. Brandon Ford, Capt. Leland Boldt, Clayton Adams, Cynthia Lumley, D. J. McCarty, Dan Smetanka, Danielle Simson, Darrell Reed, Dave Madden, David Templeton, Dawn Stott, Doug Earnest, Dr. Charles Hille, Frank Girardot, Fred Chisholm, Fred Grutzmacher, Gary Hakala, Gary Keeter, Gerard Brooker, Herman Brown, Holly Wilkens, Howard Leslie, James and Olivia Houlahan, James Kirkland, James McPheron, James Richardson, Jeff Ourvan, Jennifer Lyons, Jerry Baker, John and Judy Houlahan, John Burden, John Plasencia, John View, Joseph Wambaugh, Julie Gilbert, Justice Jay Hanks, Kari Tesselaar, Kenneth McDaniels, Kevin Ruddy, Kurt Franklin, Larry Malmberg, Lt. Jacqueline Horton, Mary Evans, Melvin Bukiet, Mike Lenihan, Mike Watts, Mikel Linville, Nancy Bohl-Penrod, Paul Dillinger, Pete Kurylowicz, Phillip Gay, Robert Hellman, Robert Noe, Rolf Parkes, Rosie Miranda Johnson, Ross Dvorak, Sgt. Will Edwards, Shawn Kelley, Sheila Marten, Sheriff Cois Byrd, Shirlee Pigeon, Stacey Sanner, Steve Cunnison, Steve Harmon, Tom Mellana, William Crowe, William Edwards.

California Office of the Attorney General, Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department, Riverside County Sheriffs Department, Riverside Sheriffs Association, West Redding Fire Department, Mark Twain Library, Ben Clark Training Center, San Bernardino County Sheriffs Department, the FBI, California Highway Patrol.

Thank you also to all who preferred not to be acknowledged here.

Olivia J. Houlahan

PETER HOULAHAN is a freelance writer contributing to a wide range of publications. In his career as an emergency medical technician, he has written a number of articles related to his profession. He holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. A native of Southern California, Houlahan now lives in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Find out more at www.peterhoulahan.com.

THE MOTIVE FOR ROBBING BANKS HAS REMAINED THE SAME SINCE FEBRUARY 13, 1866, when members of the James-Younger Gang walked into the Clay County Savings Bank in Liberty, Missouri, stole $60,000, and shot a bystander to death in what is widely believed to be the first bank robbery in United States history. Robbers rob for money and rob banks because thats where the money is. The motive for the 1980 robbery of the Security Pacific National Bank in Norco, California, may have been typical, but the reason the men who planned it wanted that money was not. They were not drug addicts desperate for their next fix, a ring of thieves looking to pull a string of heists, or members of a street gang eager for a roll of hundreds to flash around. They were none of those things. The two men behind the Norco bank robbery believed that America was on the verge of a catastrophe of biblical proportions, one in which only the well armed and well prepared would survive.

George Wayne Smith and Christopher Harven were certainly not the first people to conclude that humanity was headed for imminent disaster. They were part of a long line stretching back at least two thousand years to the time when an apocalyptic preacher known as Jesus of Nazareth roamed the Sinai Peninsula warning of the end of the world. The book of Revelation had laid out the general game plan. All George and Chris had to do was untangle the parables, decode the timeline, and match up the current events that would usher in the Rapture, Great Tribulation, and the Second Coming. If one were on the lookout for warning signs of the collapse of civil society and the obliteration of mankind, there were plenty of them to see by May 1980.

To understand why a group of young men with no serious criminal records would attempt a bank robbery that turned into one of the most violent events in law enforcement history, one must first understand the times in which it took place. At the time of the robbery, George Smith and Christopher Harven were twenty-seven and twenty-nine years old, respectively. They had both entered adulthood at the dawn of the 1970s, so whatever beliefs and world views they possessed were formed almost entirely by the peculiar zeitgeist of that decade.

The 1970s were not a hangover from the 1960s, but more like those menacing, early-morning hours of a party that has gone on way too long. It was a decade of national disillusionment and self-destructive indulgence where many of the counterculture philosophies formed in the late 1960s played themselves out in very ugly ways. Drug use became drug abuse as recreational pot smoking evolved into daily pot smoking and then cocaine, crystal meth, and the mind-obliterating angel dust. The idealism of Woodstock became the pure hedonism of Club 57. Pornography evolved from sexy girls in bunny tails into the explicit raunchiness of Larry Flynts Hustler. Free love became an epidemic of venereal disease and unwelcome pregnancies. Cities descended further into lawlessness, poverty, and bankruptcy while violent crime across the country escalated at a rate that would be almost unimaginable today. Communes turned into cults or business opportunities for predatory self-help gurus. In November 1978, just eighteen months before the Norco robbery, more than nine hundred members of the Peoples Temple died in what cult leader Jim Jones labeled an act of revolutionary suicide but was, in fact, mass murder.

The more traditional idea of armed revolution was also particularly active in the 1970s. It was not long before the 1960s idea that you could change society morphed into the belief that you must destroy it first. In the first half of the 1970s, just after their graduation from high school, George Wayne Smith and Christopher Harven witnessed a constant parade of radical groups who not only believed they could overthrow a government, start a civil war, or collapse a society, but actively tried to do just that. Leaders of 1960s sit-ins and protests went underground, made bombs, blew up others and sometimes themselves. There were more than 2,500 bombings by radical groups in the United States over an eighteen-month period between 1971 and 1972 alone. Cops became pigs, regarded by the radical underground as foot soldiers of a deeply corrupt status quo and targeted for assassination in major cities from coast to coast. It did not matter that groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army, Weather Underground, and Black Liberation Army had little support and stood no chance of succeeding. What mattered was that for the first time in the countrys history, many, including George Smith and Christopher Harven, were looking at American society and seeing a house of cards teetering on collapse. Smith and Harven did not want to change the world, they just wanted to survive it once the whole shithouse went up in flames.

IF CREATIVE INTERPRETATION WAS REQUIRED TO MATCH UP EVENTS AND CULTURAL trends with End Times biblical prophecy, the means by which that prophecy would be fulfilled was utterly unambiguous. Vast arsenals of nuclear warheads locked and loaded on land, sea, and air assured that the Apocalypse was not only possible but, in the view of millions, inevitable. Never was that threat more acute than in the 1970s. Dtente and the SALT I treaty notwithstanding, what made the 1970s so dangerous was the dramatic increase in tactical battlefield nuclear weapons deployed throughout Western Europe by both the United States and the Soviet Union. By 1980, the number of European-based tactical nukes reached well over ten thousand, including missiles and artillery shells tipped with W48, W50, and W70 thermonuclear warheads with kiloton loads reaching well into double digits.