Lower-ranking Rangers earn a base pay from $1,400 to $1,800 a month, according to the Army. Others earn considerably more with allowances, benefits, and special payments for airborne, combat, and other duties. "I've made $70,000 a year," the accused holdup man claims in a lengthy telephone chat.
Not that the case needs another strange twist, but the real reason for the BOA raid, the accused man insists, was to expose war crimes and other military secrets.
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The team "purposely" got caught, he says, so they could draw media attention and be assured of coverage when they eventually air their allegations in court. To avoid going to prison, he intends to present issues of national security that would be embarrassing to the Army and Bush administration, he claims. His tortured logic: To expose abuses, he first had to get public attention, hence the bank job.
"One of the people implicated in the robbery is a witness to rape and the murder of 16 people at a battlefield interrogation facility, which makes Abu Ghraib [prison] look like kindergarten," said the accused man, who spoke at times in the third person and referred to "hypotheticals" when discussing the heist so as not to directly admit any role.
"Another [accused robber] has electronic access to the locations of 65 CIA prisons around the world. Sixty-five! There's a lot of shit out there that has to get said."
He wouldn't discuss why robbing a bank seemed the best way to expose such allegations, and didn't respond when asked if he had tried any other way to get the information out. He insisted he wasn't making it up as a last-ditch defense.
And despite the heavy artillery, the accused man says, the robbers planned the heist so no one would be physically harmed.
"Hypothetically, what if, during the robbery, [a robber] announced that under no circumstances would customers or tellers be hurt? . . . They had banana clips, but you can tell in [bank surveillance] pictures, by the position of the [AK-47] bolts, there was no ammo in the weapons."
(All that could be true. However, FBI spokesperson Robbie Burroughs points out that posttraumatic stress is well documented among employees and customers caught in a bank robbery. "Shots don't have to be fired for people to suffer trauma," she says. "People have needed counseling even when a gun is never shown.")
Two of the Rangers, the accused says, are Army medics. "I understand they were both carrying bleeder kits just in case anyone inside the bank got hurt. One employee was really scared, so a robber put a hand on her shoulder and told her to go stand aside, everything will be OK."
A federal source indicates the heist might have involved the threat of explosives but wouldn't elaborate. "It will probably come out in court fairly soon," the source says.
As for that license plate, it was intentionally not covered, the accused robber says. Why would they be so meticulous about the robbery, yet so sloppy in their getaway, he asks rhetorically. "Because that's how we planned it," he says, "so we could get caught and all this shit would come out." It all will soon, he promised, in court proceedings.
Assistant U.S. attorney Dion, who is prosecuting the Ranger cases, said he couldn't discuss likely motives. An attorney for another of the accused soldiers agrees money might not have been the motive but wouldn't say what was.
A federal law-enforcement official speculates the BOA takedown "was done for the money and the thrill" of it. He theorizes the robbers didn't count on anyone espying their getaway car—the Audi waited on a side street at the end of an alley about 50 yards from the bank. If they really wanted the plate to be seen, wouldn't they have pulled up out front?
Fort Lewis officials had no comment. Carol Darby, spokesperson for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., says it would be "inappropriate to discuss or release any information that could impact investigations," but notes that "Rangers are trained to be highly skilled light-infantry soldiers and defend this nation against our enemies."
A daylight holdup typifies "the kind of bold, fearless, risk-taking, thrill-seeking personality suitable to the Rangers," says Dr. Frank Farley, a former president of the American Psychological Association. "It's probably ideal for the Rangers." But he thinks the Rangers' "military training and military code would generally work against what they apparently did."
Whether or not the uncovered license plate was intentional, it was clearly the team's undoing—an otherwise inexplicable slipup for soldiers trained in the dark arts of subterfuge and evading foes.
It was the reason Shaide, the FBI agent, and Todd Karr, a detective sergeant with the Pierce County Violent Crimes Task Force, huddled with Army criminal investigators at Fort Lewis the day after the heist, asking about the Audi's owner, a solider named Alex Blum.
Army officials confirmed that Pfc. Blum, 19, a slight, 145-pound enlistee, was one of 660 soldiers in the Fort's 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment—Pat Tillman's illustrious former unit.
With two other battalions in Georgia, the 75th Rangers are a light-infantry special-operations force prepared for immediate deployment anywhere in the world. In Ranger School, they're taught to survive jungle, desert, arctic, and mountain conditions and undergo grueling airborne, indoctrination, and survival training.
