Heist (2021) s01e01 Episode Script

Here I am, 22 years old,
being whisked away with the man I love,
with three million dollars.
It is a fantasy dream
that was a reality back in 1993.
Holy cow.
If you want trouble, you got it ♪
Everyone who comes to Vegas
hopes to score that elusive jackpot.
Heather Tallchief
appears to have gotten away
with what some may call the perfect crime.
Heather Catherine Tallchief
vanished on Friday
along with the Loomis armored van.
In Las Vegas today, a suspect
in one of the most infamous
armored car heists
remains on the run.
No one has seen her,
the truck, or the money since Friday.
This beautiful young woman
got away with millions.
A 21-year-old pulling off
a multimillion-dollar caper?
No one could believe it.
The armored truck was packed
with more than
three million dollars in cash.
An absolutely incredible
real-life crime story
straight out of a Hollywood script.
A story of sex,
magick, money, murder.
One of the biggest heists
in Las Vegas history.
This is a love story at heart.
The prince who took the princess
and, against all odds,
whisked her away
on this wild ride into the sunset.
We're in a bar,
and this guy came up to me and asked,
"Can I buy you a drink or something?"
"Yeah, okay."
Because I didn't have
a single dollar to my name,
I kid you not.
And he just He was just flirtatious
and full of charisma.
He asked me something weird.
Something like,
"Do you believe in the devil?"
And I'm like, "Well
that depends on whether or not
one considers that there's a God."
Ask me a dumb question,
I'm gonna give you a dumb answer back.
Yet I was kind of chuckling,
'cause that's not the usual pick-up line.
So, I was like,
"Okay, this will be interesting."
"I'm gonna engage here on this one."
So, he says, "Do you wanna go do a line?"
And I'm like, "Well, yeah."
I was like "What is all this?"
He was really into
a lot of eclectic mysticism,
pagan-type thoughts, sex magick.
And he's like, "This is my little altar
where I do a lot of goddess worship."
Well, he would write poetry,
and I remember him reading quite a bit.
It was pretty dope.
The love of a woman
s tumbles drunk into my tavern,
and I break the law, serving it wine.
And I chance disaster
The headspace I was in
at the time I met Solis
was very disjointed,
very disconnected, very disillusional.
and surrender to,
guilty of everything.
I was a certified
nurse's assistant.
The majority of the people
that I took care of had full-blown AIDS.
Young, twenty-year-olds.
You get attached to these folks.
I remember being in the room
when someone passed away.
It's the most
profound thing you'll ever feel.
I just wanted to escape.
A girl at work introduced crack cocaine.
It was a very, very quick downward spiral.
I lost my job, was going nowhere.
So, when I discovered
all of these metaphysical concepts,
it made me feel like I'm not floating
out here in the ether.
It was a feeling of discovery,
and finding something about yourself
that was never really apparent before.
The poetry I write
brings out a warrior consciousness.
We emerge as the living,
the strong, the willing.
He was the stillness
in the eye of the storm.
He gave a sense of purpose
direction, security.
I ended up moving in with him
not long after that.
He made me feel like a queen.
I'm talking flowers,
white doves, petals on the floor.
The kind of Romeo that's cliché
and kind of like, "Oh, please."
But yet the female part of me loves that.
It was easy, it was comforting.
It was very safe.
However I define love,
he was that definition.
There's a guy in town
Who gets all the chicks ♪
From what I hear, this dude ♪
I wasn't naive to the fact
that he was a career criminal.
He was already an outlaw when I met him.
Chaos is exciting. Chaos is sexy.
One night he calls me up and he's like,
"I need you to be ready to go."
And I'm like, "Go where?"
And he's just,
"Be ready to go, bring clothes."
So we go to the back of this mall, and
my job is to sit in the car with the key
and make sure nothing happens to the car.
Meanwhile, he conducted a robbery.
I remember him breaking into the lockbox,
and there was something
like 30 grand in this box.
And a very nice gold Rolex.
And I was like,
"Oh, that's nice. Let me wear that."
"What are you doing?"
He's like, "This'll get you in trouble.
This is identifiable."
Las Vegas was where he was gonna hit.
It was an opportunity to try a new path.
We were gonna hit big.
Well, here's a man who was
really keen on accumulating wealth,
but not in any kind of traditional way.
He was always trying to hit big
by doing something totally off the wall.
Selling a boat, selling art,
playing craps.
Working hard, clocking in,
clocking out, was not an option.
"Why don't we just get jobs?"
He's like, "You're a fool if you think
that's gonna happen that way."
I just got absorbed
in this whole feeling of security,
and this warmth.
"Somebody's really invested in me."
Never really experienced that before.
I was born
Kensington-Bailey area of Buffalo.
Our house was a big, beautiful house
on the corner of Comstock and Amherst,
and it was the spot.
Dad was "The Dude."
Let me tell you something.
We were smoking weed one day,
and were putting, uh, formaldehyde on it.
It's like doing horse tranquilizer.
You put it on the weed and it just like
I was giving it to heroin addicts
and they were just freaking out,
like, "This stuff's bad." You know?
You don't smoke formaldehyde, you know?
You don't put that shit in your system.
That's what they do
to dead bodies, you know?
But I wanted to get high at all costs.
A lot of people would just hang out
on the front stoop drinking.
I remember being little
and the police coming
on different occasions.
Fights, there was always
some kind of domestic fight.
I remember coming,
like next morning, waking up,
coming downstairs,
there might be bodies laying around.
People passed out on the floor,
on a couch, on a chair,
on the kitchen floor.
And just trying to find out
which one's my mom, which one's my dad.
"I think I gotta go to school."
My mother and father had me
while they were still in high school.
We had sex,
but it was just a mistake,
and then we had she got pregnant.
I didn't know anything.
I didn't know a girl got pregnant,
nobody told me they got pregnant.
"What do you mean you're pregnant?
When did this happen?"
Then we had Heather.
So, shotgun wedding.
My mother and father
didn't last very long.
I get a letter in the mail
says I'm divorced,
and I have custody of this child.
I get custody of Heather.
Who would give custody
to this damn drunken fool?
Custody of a three-year-old child,
two-year-old child, whatever she was.
I mean, what the fuck is going on?
One day we were hanging out,
drinking and partying,
this girl, Cindy,
she liked what we were doing,
getting high all the time,
and she fit right in.
She'd need a place to stay
and I said, "Hey, you could stay here."
"Help me watch my daughter."
And she never left.
There was some resentment there,
because she was not my mother.
I'm Fred's child,
and she's having to care for me.
It was very, very clear
how much she hated me,
and she would let me know.
Tell me what a fucking failure I am.
Nobody wanted me.
Who would care about me?
"Your own mother doesn't want you.
I don't want you."
I mean, I'm going to fucking kindergarten.
If you've never been loved in your family,
if you've never been shown
any kind of, like, warmth,
or this sincere affection just for you
and a man is finally gonna come
and proclaim this love
and all of these other wonderful things
I would have just done anything.
I really would have.
The tarot cards would reinforce
these readings of extreme good luck,
success, wealth.
But I'm like, "How are we gonna do it?"
And that's where the sex magick
starts coming into play.
The sighs and groans
of an ecstatic woman
The highest
achievement of sex is orgasm.
But after that release, it's done.
Where does this energy go?
It's just expended out into the ether.
So how do you harness this energy?
The end goal is to actually speak
something into existence.
Freedom released
in the psychic explosions of energy.
Abracadabra.
In our case,
the goal was to make some money.
The money's dwindling,
We need jobs.
And he's like,
"Why don't we get you a security job?"
So I applied for a position at Loomis.
Whether by cash,
check, or electronic transfer
we're part of how you spend your money.
They asked if I had ever done a job
like this before, and I said no.
But they needed to hire
a certain amount of females.
Fuck, yeah. Click.
Hey, Heather.
Hey, guys.
I didn't know
my way around Las Vegas.
Probably only had my license
for a couple of months.
Well, Satan invented the guitar ♪
Because he didn't want
To be second fiddle ♪
To the man who lives up there
With a golden staff and a halo ♪
She either was
a naturally bad driver
or had just learned how to drive.
- She used to two-pedal the Remember that?
- Two-pedal and
And remember she hit me
with the truck one time?
And couldn't Yeah, she couldn't
stop at stop lights, stop signs either.
She got hired
by our branch manager at the time
because she was young and she was pretty.
And I think he
She just snowballed him. I really do.
The ATM truck
is a three-person team.
You have the driver and then you have
the two employees in the back
that actually handle the money.
We serviced ATM machines
on the all the casinos,
and Bank of America machines.
Ah, we'd go in, remove all the cash
that was in the machines,
and replace it with brand new cash.
There was in excess of, like,
four or five million on certain days.
I would tell Solis,
"You should see
all the money in the back of it."
We're laying in bed discussing things.
He used to ask me how was my day.
"Oh, God, I don't know."
"Monday, we got to go to the west.
Tuesday, this."
"What days, you think, are the more
like, the heavier days?"
And over time, I could see
that I was telling him what he needed.
And it becomes a plan slowly.
And then he said,
"Could I write down the routes?"
And he would take my notes and follow
so that he could see
what that Monday route looked like.
What did that Tuesday route look like?
What did that Wednesday route look like?
Go at different times of the day,
go at different times of the week.
See what's going on
with the environments and surroundings.
What was it like
at nine o'clock in the morning,
what was it like at ten?
What kind of activities are going on?
Where are the security guards?
Obviously, I told him
which day was my heaviest day,
and the beginnings of this heist
is starting to come into formation.
We're gonna take this truck full of money.
Circus Circus was the first service point
straight out from the yard.
And they only took what they were using
to service those machines,
so the majority of the money
was still with me.
It was the only location that we
would have to be dropped off at one spot
and picked up
on a completely different area.
From where we get dropped off
to where we get picked up,
we have six or eight ATM machines,
and they're in various locations
of the building.
They're in there
for a really long time on that day.
I expressed that to Solis.
"This is what I'm seeing,
and these guys take forever in there."
And he's like,
"That's where this will happen."
Because they're gone for a long time,
they won't recognize
or be alerted to the fact
that I'm missing.
Maybe they'll think
I forgot to go to the other entrance.
She couldn't remember
the route week by week.
We'd come in and go out the same doors.
Andshe'd forget,
and she'd move around to some other place
and then we'd have to go locate her.
She could never remember exactly
how to get to a machine or where to park.
And then he rented the garage,
which was a ploy,
and he had put a banner
on the outside of it,
as if we're gonna do
something for your vehicle.
This is where things started
becoming more solidified.
It was determined that on a Friday,
when they left to go in there,
that would be the opportune time.
Because they only took a few bags each
to do their ATM stock.
And then I would drive to that garage.
There was a neighbor next door.
And he tried to engage us
in conversation one time.
And I'm like, "Oh, hey! Hi, hello."
And he's like, "So, what do you guys
What kind of business is this?"
And I'm like, "Yeah, you know, it's,
like, an armored car repair service."
And then Solis would be like,
"Stop fucking talking to people."
"The fuck you doing?
This person can identify you."
The man was not a stupid criminal.
Okay. I'm in deeper
than I probably can manage.
I think he could sense
some little trepidation inside of me.
Life moved very quickly for me
and it was like a blur.
As things went on,
I knew I was not gonna be well received
if I expressed to him how
"I don't know about this. I'm scared."
Stay focused.
He would play
these self-hypnotizing tapes
to help build my confidence,
calm my nerves.
In a way, I didn't think
it was really gonna ever happen.
I decided not to address
those feelings and those fears.
They had to go away, to disappear.
Do you think I'm gonna be like,
"Oh, no, honey."
"As much as this sounds great,
I think I'm gonna bow out now."
Saying no to him was not an option.
This is a man
who lived a very violent life.
Today, a murderer
was paroled from a life sentence
because of his poetry.
A so-called "prison poet."
Let me go with my chest raised high
Roberto Solis,
also known as Pancho Aguila,
was sentenced to life in prison
for the brutal murder
of Loomis armored car guard Louis Dake
during a botched robbery in 1969.
While serving at Folsom Prison,
Solis wrote five books of poetry
and has won wide acclaim.
It was a recent letter-writing campaign
involving several prominent poets
and publishers
that convinced the parole board.
And so today, he finds himself free
after serving only 23 years
of that life sentence.
After 16 years of imprisonment,
all the rosy-colored eyeglasses
have been shattered
to be replaced by a clear vision
of history and human nature.
Solis felt he deserved this
because of what the Loomis robbery
had taken from him.
The years Loomis had taken.
So, he was gonna get back, somehow.
You're dealing with an individual
that's capable of cold-blooded murder,
but I didn't focus on that at the time.
"You deserve to get back
what they took from you."
"We deserve this. This is our destiny."
You convince yourself
that what you're doing
is the right thing to do.
Because you love that person.
I loved him unconditionally,
without a doubt,
and I was gonna be there with him
regardless of what your subconscious says.
We weren't taking from Joe Schmo,
who's a blue-collar worker,
or someone like my old man
that punched a clock.
We weren't hurting
somebody that was working hard,
just trying to provide for their family.
We were taking from a conglomerate.
I was right there with him.
I wasn't gonna let him down.
To be honest, I wanted it too.
I wanted some opulent shit in my life.
I wanted material wealth.
We had all these grand ideas,
like what to do with the money.
We'll live on a farm,
we'll have goats, we'll have chickens,
we'll be self-sufficient,
we'll have solar power.
We wanted utopia.
We knew once I was driving away,
we'd have less than an hour
before every cop in Vegas
was looking for me.
The question was how to move millions
in cash without anybody noticing?
He took control of that situation,
I just went along with it.
In the meantime, we had to figure out
what to do with me.
How to get from garage point
to this airplane and beyond
without looking like the girl
that's probably gonna be on the news
later that night.
What do we do to make myself
look the most different?
And I was like,
"I could get a blonde wig."
And he was like, "No, no, no, you just
You're not You're not getting this."
"We're getting you a gray wig
and you're gonna be old."
So, gray wig, bogus glasses,
and I'm like, "Oh Ohh!"
"Clever."
How you build up a robbery
is by taking time and observing.
And let's reinforce it now
with this practice of sex magick.
This is all the energy
that we've expended.
We're tapping into this resource,
and it's gonna come back.
And he was like,
"We gotta do a couple test runs,
make sure you're confident, you're smooth,
you're not making any mistakes,
you're not making any wrong turns."
Go through the motions,
go through the motions,
what it would feel like.
The universe is abundant,
and we're part of the universe.
So why can't we have
some of the abundance?
I am the vessel for this magick
to be turned into reality.
This was our purpose.
Kismet.
We deserve this.
This was our destiny.
Eight o'clock in the morning,
sun's coming up.
I wasn't crying, I wasn't nervous.
I wasn't trying to be weird.
I just go over the plan.
This is step one, step two, step three,
step four.
Doing, uh, the tape one last time.
He had all the costume stuff ready to go,
and he was really focused.
All the adrenaline's coursing
through your veins,
and you're like, "Oh, my gosh."
You know, like,
"Hey, this is really going down."
She wore a dressier shoe that day.
It wasn't like a work boot
that she'd normally wear.
"That ain't right." I actually went
to our operations manager and said,
"That ain't right."
And he told me to not worry about it,
just get on the road.
We had an area that we were
supposed to park in at Circus Circus.
When we left, we took all the money
for all the ATM machines.
Probably about a million.
A million and change.
But it was enough to get
those ATMs filled for a weekend.
They no longer existed.
Everything to the left of me
did not exist.
I was going right.
From the time she dropped us off
to the time we walked out,
everything was normal.
It's once we walked out,
that's when it became abnormal.
It was like,
"Okay, where's she at?"
First thing in my mind wasn't like,
"Oh, God, she got into an accident."
You know?
The first thing in my mind was,
"She got lost."
- "She got lost."
- Yeah.
Basically. And then we're like,
"Oh, man, I bet she's still back there
where she dropped us off at."
So then we backtrack
to the drop-off point.
Your brain starts racing because
you're in a potential worst-case scenario
with the job that
you're supposed to be doing.
Your vehicle
that is your safe haven is gone.
I said,
"I think the bitch took the truck."
Anybody seeing us walking out with
no truck there, they just could've said,
- "Hey, look at these guys."
- Yeah.
"Walking around with that big canvas bag.
I bet there's money in it."
I'd never been left,
like, stranded like that.
If I would've saw her
within the next 20 minutes,
I probably would've shot her myself.
I'm a street cop
on the Strip in Las Vegas.
We get the call
when people are still crying
and sweating and blood is still rolling.
Go, go, go. You clear one call,
you get another one almost immediately.
It's just my luck
'Cause I'm always on the run ♪
It's one of the only jobs
that you can have
where you get to drive fast
and mess with people.
This particular day,
something had happened at Circus Circus.
Four-zero-seven,
four-zero-seven,
robbery reported
at 2880 South Las Vegas Boulevard,
Circus Circus Casino.
And while I'm en route to the scene,
I'm looking for an armored truck.
'Cause I don't know what we have,
but I'm looking for
that armored truck on the way.
He becomes Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde,
'cause he's now in this take-charge,
"This is what we're doing,
you need to just get a grip,
take your fucking gun off."
And he gets my weapon.
Hurry the fuck up!
I'm just butt naked
in a fucking garage
with a man with my gun.
That moment of no return
is standing there with your britches down,
trying to put on a costume,
meanwhile a man convicted of murder
is in possession of three million dollars
and a loaded firearm.
In a fucking closed garage.
That moment of fear hits you,
and you're like, "Fuck!"
I started taking witness statements
from the two guards that were there,
and initiated a crime report from Loomis.
I remember it was the FBI,
Las Vegas Metro,
they had questions.
And I don't know, who else?
I talked to
Chief of Security at Circus Circus.
They brought in
our Security Vice President
- Yeah.
- from Houston at the time.
Everybody was involved.
I got information
Heather Tallchief had only been
working for Loomis for a couple of weeks.
She's sitting alone in the armored truck
with a couple of million dollars
in cash, unsupervised.
I started thinking this could be
a kidnap or a hostage situation.
The sanctity of life
turns it into a whole new deal.
The larceny was no longer
foremost in my mind.
I was trying to find the armored car
so that I could find Heather.
I got a copy of the route
they were supposed to go,
just to make sure the car wasn't there.
Every police car in the city
are looking for this car.
Okay. I'm still here.
Come on!
We start loading the money up.
And then these other fears
started coming in,
because now
we have to get into mode to escape.
Police are looking for you,
you don't have time to think,
and so this different type of thing hits.
You know, a different type of adrenaline.
And after that moment,
or that thing where
Like when you almost get
into a car accident but you don't,
and you're like, "Whew!
That was fucking close, man."
It was, like, fast, fast, fast.
I don't remember conversating.
It was work time.
The boxes were quite big,
and they were heavy as fuck.
So, you got stacks of hundreds,
stacks of twenties, stacks of fifties,
and they're vacuum sealed
so they're, like, perfect bricks.
This stuff is happening in seconds,
second, seconds, seconds, seconds.
Boxes in the vehicle,
garage door opens, we go out.
I'm down in the well of the car.
And then he parked
so he could mail the boxes.
We can't take it on a plane.
So, we mailed it.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to put
these contacts in
Oh, my God.
I can't get
these motherfuckers in my eyes.
"Oh, my God, you're cracking up."
This is the moment
where you lose your mind.
Solis comes back.
"Okay, stay down!"
I'm staying down.
And he said, "You know what those are?
They're looking for you."
I did not know
while I was in the wheel well of that car,
but my life as a fugitive began
with the fluttering
of those fucking helicopters
above my head.