As a crook, Paddy Mitchell was charming, manipulative and flamboyant. He was one of Canada's most lucrative bank robbers, but he prided himself on never physically hurting anyone. His signature was hanging a stopwatch around his neck, its ticking a reminder to keep moving in order to get in and out of a bank in less than two minutes.
During an 11-year crime spree, he and the Stopwatch Gang, which included Lionel Wright and Stephen Reid, stole $15-million from banks across North America without firing a bullet or assaulting any bank employees or customers. Devilishly clever, they'd often plan diversions such as calling in bomb threats in the opposite end of town while they were pulling a bank heist. Mr. Mitchell was also a master of disguise who was said to have undergone plastic surgery when he felt his face, plastered on wanted posters throughout the U.S., was becoming too familiar to law enforcement officials.
He estimated he had taken part in more than 100 robberies. At the peak of his notoriety, he was at the top of the FBI's most wanted list and had stolen more than $10-million. His gang's exploits were the subject of a film, television documentaries and a 1992 book called The Stopwatch Gang, written by Greg Weston.
In a telephone interview, poet Susan Musgrave said her husband, Stephen Reid, who is incarcerated in a prison near Victoria, B.C, was "very sad to have lost his best friend."
Patrick Michael (Paddy) Mitchell was born on Preston Street in Ottawa in the middle of the Second World War. He grew up in the then scrappy neighbourhood with his two older brothers, boxer Fred "Pinky," and Bobby, also a thief, who died in 2002. In 1974, Mr. Mitchell was the brains behind the Great Gold Heist, a robbery at Uplands airport in Ottawa. He and his cohorts stole six gold bars, worth more than $750,000 that had been destined for the Canadian mint.
He got away with that one, but he was charged, tried and convicted for another crime, although he always claimed he was innocent, when the Ottawa Police and the RCMP connected him to a suitcase filled with cocaine at the same airport. He said he abided by the criminal's honour code of not snitching on a fellow thief, but police linked the suitcase to Christopher John Clarkson, a nephew of Stephen Clarkson, a University of Toronto professor.
Mr. Clarkson jumped bailed in 1976 and fled Ottawa while awaiting trial on charges of conspiring to import cocaine from Curacao, but was extradited back to Canada late in December to begin a 20-year prison sentence he had been given in absentia 30 years earlier.
Meanwhile, Mr. Mitchell had been given a 17-year prison sentence on the cocaine charges to be served at a Kingston-area penitentiary. The prison walls couldn't contain him, though, because he was prepared to risk his life for freedom. In 1979, he soaked a pack of cigarettes in a cup of water, filtered the resulting mixture, and then swallowed it. The result was a massive jolt of nicotine which simulated the symptoms of a heart attack. Prison guards rushed him by ambulance to a Kingston hospital, where Stopwatch Gang members, Mr. Wright and Mr. Reid, were waiting with Mr. Mitchell's brother Bobby. The three men overpowered the prison guards, grabbed Mr. Mitchell and spirited him away in the ambulance. Later, he reported that his heart was beating double time for days, but whether that was solely the result of the nicotine rush, was never clear.
After his heart calmed down, he took a train across the border into the United States, where he kept right on thieving for nearly five years, including holding up two armoured cars that were delivering $283,000 (U.S.) to a San Diego bank. He was finally arrested in the Phoenix, Ariz., area for another robbery in Dec. 1981, but walked away after giving the police a false name.
He disappeared until 1983, when the FBI found him living with a girlfriend in a suburban bungalow near Orlando, Fla. He was tried and sentenced to 17 years in Arizona State Prison. After serving only two years, he and two inmates escaped by slithering to freedom through overhead air ducts. They pulled a robbery, unusually for Mr. Mitchell, using a .22 revolver that one of the three had bought in a bar for $100. Apparently, the gun was in such poor condition they had to twist an elastic band around the barrel to keep the bullets from falling out.
Mr. Mitchell's luck held for more than a decade. He fled to the Philippines, where he married a local woman named Imelda, who believed the tale he spun about being a wealthy American named Gary Weber. Together they had a son, Richard, who is now a teenager.
All was sweet until the television show, America's Most Wanted, flashed his mug on the small screen in 1994. That's when Mrs. Weber knew she had been had. Neighbours reported him to the FBI and he fled the country, bizarrely going back to the U.S. for one more big score that he hoped would set him up for the rest of his days.
He stole $160,000 from a bank in Southaven, Miss., several weeks later, but the small-town sheriff took him down. He was again convicted and sentenced, this time to 65 years in Leavenworth Prison in Kansas with no possibility of parole. Escaping from Leavenworth was not an option. The 1906 prison has walls that go 12 metres below, and tower equally high above, ground. This is where Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, spent 30 years enhancing his knowledge of birds.
Mr. Mitchell tried three times to get a transfer to a Canadian prison, writing appeals every two years. After the final rejection, he settled down to follow the model established by his friend Steven Reid, who wrote an autobiographical novel, Jackrabbit Parole, while in prison, and took a creative writing course. Eventually, he produced his autobiography, The Bank Robber's Life: The Life and Fast Times of Patrick Mitchell.
In the final chapter of the book, he admits that he allowed another thief, Ron C. Gaskins, to take the rap for a 1980 robbery of $65,000 in cash and cheques from a Sears store in St. Petersburg, Fla. By the time Mr. Mitchell confessed, Mr. Gaskins had died of cancer, handcuffed to a hospital bed in Jacksonville, Fla., still desperately trying to clear his name.
In a series published in The Ottawa Citizen in June of 2000, Mr. Mitchell described his life as a bank robber. "Our number one rule was: nobody gets hurt," he wrote. "You want to know the greatest thrill in the world? It's being back at an apartment after a successful job, counting the money."
He also confessed his fear of dying in prison. "I think about it constantly," he said. "It's a horrible fate."
A year ago, after he was transferred to Lewisburg, Pa., he felt a lump under his rib cage. Mr. Mitchell was told not to worry about it by prison officials, but it grew so rapidly that he became alarmed. At sick call, he pushed to the front of the line, opened his shirt and showed the lump, by now the size of an egg, to a specialist. "The doctor was shocked," Mr. Mitchell later wrote to his friend Jimmy Allen. "He told me it was a cancerous tumour and ordered X-rays."
The tests indicated that Mr. Mitchell had a large tumour in his lungs that had already metastasized to his brain. Nobody ever determined whether it had any connection to the nicotine cocktail he had imbibed back in 1979 to escape from Kingston Penitentiary.
He was airlifted to Federal Medical Center, a high-security hospital for convicts in Butner, N.C., where the tumour in his brain was surgically removed, although with some impairment to his cognitive abilities. The doctors decided the illness had progressed too far for any further chemotherapy or radiation to be effective. "He just wanted to be near his family, near us," his older brother Pinky Mitchell told the Ottawa Sun on Sunday. "We did everything to try and get him back here" so he could be near his brothers, his children and his grandchildren.
Patrick, Michael Mitchell
was born in Ottawa on June 26, 1942. He died of metastasized lung cancer in a prison hospital
in Butner, N.C., on Sunday, Jan. 14, 2007. He was 64. He is survived by his sons, Kevin and Richard, two grandsons and his extended family.
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