It's a stick-up!
After Australian Corey Donaldson robbed a US bank, he claimed he'd given all the loot to poor and needy Americans. But is he really a modern-day Robin Hood or simply a con man? By Paul McGeough.
Published in The Sidney Morning Herald, December 21, 2013
Corey Donaldson is perched on a stainless-steel stool behind a thick slab of security glass in the visitor's center of the Davis County Jail, north of Salt Lake City, Utah, fiddling with the stub of a pencil as he answers my questions through a perforated grill. Dressed in regulation striped prison overalls with the words "DC JAIL INMATE" stencilled across his back and "INMATE" down his right leg, the rotund 40-year-old Australian cuts a forlorn figure. He's certainly a far cry from the high-flying wheeler and dealer in the expensive double-breasted suit who, in April last year, hosted would-be business partners in the fine surrounds of the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV), on Melbourne's Bourke Street.
But then Donaldson's life has taken many odd turns, the most bizarre on New Year's Eve 2012 - at 11am, to be precise - when he strode into a branch of the US Bank in the ski-resort town of Jackson, Wyoming. Looking dapper in a fetching blue jacket, flat cap and tie, with dark sunglasses and sporting a grey beard, Donaldson had an appointment to see the manager, Jared Williams. After asking Williams to close the door and sitting himself down, Donaldson explained, in a fake South African accent, that he owned a textile plant in Mexico, but gangsters had stolen his payroll, taken him hostage and were monitoring him from outside the bank building to make sure he was following their instructions. Donaldson opened his brief case and handed Williams a note, which - among words like "blood" and "carnage" printed in bold - threatened that there were four military-grade explosives buried in the snow outside, ready to be detonated if $US2 million in cash wasn't handed over.
The manager, who was warned in the letter not to alert the authorities, otherwise he would be "hunted down and killed", anxiously explained that there was only around $US100,000 in the vault. On Donaldson's orders, he emptied the vault and had all the tellers hand over the cash at their stations, before putting the entire stash, which amounted to $US140,700, in an orange duffle bag. Donaldson ordered Williams to carry the bag out of the bank and hand it over on the curb. "Now remember, there are people watching you," Donaldson said ominously, while shaking Williams' hand. He then drove off in a grey Toyota Tundra SUV.
It took police just over three weeks to track down Donaldson; they were able to identify the call in which he made his appointment to see the bank manager. It was traced to a local petrol station, where surveillance video footage revealed Donaldson alighting from his friend Kevin Day's Toyota Tundra to make the call.
Shortly after he was arrested in Salt Lake City's northern suburbs, Donaldson claimed he had visited homeless shelters in Nevada and California handing out cash to America's homeless, painting himself as a modern-day Robin Hood.
At his trial in April this year, four months after the robbery - the biggest in the local area in decades - Donaldson claimed that he wanted to put the US government and banks on trial for the millions of home foreclosures spawned by the 2007-08 global financial crisis. He claimed that the collapse of his own investment business, worth tens of millions of dollars, which he had been nursing since those meet-and-greet sessions at the RACV last year, had reduced him to joining the homeless on the streets of US cities. After gaining a deep insight into the plight of the homeless and destitute, he felt compelled to strike a blow on their behalf.
Or at least, that's the vision of himself he tried to present to the world via a trial in which he mounted his own defense and attempted to steal the moral high ground before a jury bemused by his attempt at robbery-as-protest. But talk to former business associates, Donaldson's ex-wife and others who know him well and instead of a born-again Robin Hood, you have a picture of a not-as-clever-as-he-thinks con man, too lazy to do a decent day's work, but happy to rip off others to sustain his delusions of grandeur. His New York literary agent and the Broadway publisher of his self-help books won't return calls. Officers of the Nevada welfare groups he helped were vague in recalling his largesse.
And in Melbourne, an embarrassed, self-declared victim still couldn't quite believe that Donaldson took him down for $250,000 - and, like all the others, the businessman won't allow his name to appear in this story.
Not surprisingly, Corey Donaldson was very keen to control how this article would turn out. "Tell only my side of the story," he demanded in his first letter to me back in October. He also wanted to dictate who I might interview, perhaps steering me away from a portrayal of his life that is less about Gandhi and civil disobedience, and more that of a relentless wannabe dissatisfied by his relative success as a self-help author and his erratic career in real estate speculation…
…As the trial wound up in Cheyenne, Wyoming,judge Alan Johnson acknowledged Donaldson's "substantial gift for spinning a story". But he kept him on a short leash, confining proceedings to tight legal questions - was a bank robbed? Who did it? How long should the perpetrator be behind bars? - while Donaldson stubbornly tried to turn his crime into a pressing social issue. After being blocked at every turn, the defendant tried to grill former bank manager Jared Williams - who left his job because of the trauma of the robbery - on the hard-heartedness of the banks' treatment of the poor. Donaldson asked Williams whether the fear he had experienced during the robbery was the same as that experienced by the homeless on the streets or in shelters across the US.
Williams was visibly distraught. Explaining how the sight of a man with a beard like Donaldson's caused him to almost knock over a woman as he tried to hide in the aisle of a grocery store, Williams explained, "I couldn't go anywhere without studying people. My wife and I ... if we went out to dinner or if we went to the grocery store, if we went even to Walmart, every person I saw in the aisle was him. And I had, I had ... I would stare at people. I couldn't eat my meal without staring at people. Anyone that had, had that goatee, you know, anybody that was, that looked anything like, like him, I would study."
Donaldson did apologize to the bank manager, telling the judge, "Importantly, my civil disobedience will begin and end with this one act. The point is made - I will not break the law again."
On the day of his arrest outside his friend Kevin Day's home in Clinton, a suburb of Salt Lake City, Donaldson was registered as a guest at the city's Grand America Hotel, where he had stayed often enough for staff to know him by his real name and his alias, Dooby Zonks. The Grand is Salt Lake City's only "Five Diamond" hotel, as rated by the American Automobile Association, and boasts Flemish tapestries and handcrafted Richelieu furniture, original works of art, inviting balconies and big, Italian marble bathrooms in all rooms.
The fugitive checked into suite 489, handing the desk attendant an upfront payment of $US3500 to cover the $US347-a-night tariff. But Donaldson says he had hardly used the room - he had arrived in Salt Lake City in the early hours of that same morning, after travelling from Reno, Nevada by taxi, an 850-kilometre ride worth about $US1500 for the cabbie.
When police pulled over the hotel limousine in which Donaldson was a passenger, they found envelopes addressed to one of Donaldson's brothers and a sister in Australia - they contained a total of $US11,000 cash. He had more than $US5000 in his pockets, and in the suite at the Grand America they found more bundles of cash - another $US19,000.
In all, $US38,640 was recovered. The $US11,000 in envelopes addressed to members of his family was, he says, always intended to go towards the cost of hiring an attorney. He claims he gave away $US60,000 to $US70,000 in the streets of Reno and about half that much to the homeless in Oakland, California. Also, he had put $US8000 under the mat at Day's home, to help with the payments on his truck and to fend off impending foreclosure, and at the time of his arrest he had intended leaving more money for Day.
While being interviewed by FBI agent John Barrett, Donaldson directed the agent to a Yahoo! email account, in which he had stored an unsent email in the "draft" folder, outlining his reasons for staging the robbery and stating an intention to turn himself in a few days after the cops had actually nabbed him. He figured he needed the extra time to distribute the last of the cash, but he had been planning all along to use his trial as a platform to attack the banks.
As various arms of the law - including the FBI and the County sheriff - pieced together Donald-son's movements after the robbery, it emerged that he had headed south, first to Reno, then to Oakland. Assuming the cops would be searching for Day's SUV, he abandoned the vehicle in California and took to travelling by taxi and hotel limousine, usually by night, with the intention, he tells me, of staying on the move until he had distributed the money. "I walked the streets, handing out bags of money. Some of them said all they wanted was a hot meal, a warm bed, a bottle of whisky. If they said how much they wanted, I'd give them 10 or 20 times that much."
The FBI independently verified that Donaldson had dropped $US15,000 on the Salvation Army in Reno. The Salvation Army's director of operations, Jason Arnold, tells me that records from the time did not show a donation of $US15,000, but he remembered an Australian who claimed to be a contractor at Tahoe, California, making a sizeable donation. "He asked for a receipt and he was given one," Arnold says. A staffer at another Reno shelter, run by Volunteers for America, tells me that she had not met Donaldson, but colleagues had told her about a man who was doling money out to homeless people at the shelter early this year.
In his closing argument, Donaldson declared, "You should find me not guilty, so that you never have to explain ... that you condemned a man who stood against the strong to stand for the weak." Donaldson quoted from Henry David Thoreau's essay Civil Disobedience, he invoked the name of civil rights activist Rosa Parks and he urged the jurors to ponder the real meaning of the words "God bless America". But the jury wasn't buying it. After just 50 minutes deliberating, they found Donaldson guilty.
On July 11 this year, Donaldson was hauled back to the Cheyenne court to be sentenced. In a pre-sentence report prepared for the court, his father Barry talks about Donaldson's concern for the homeless, even as a 21-year-old. Lost on the court, because Donaldson revealed none of it, was that up until a few months before the hold-up at Jackson, Donaldson was running his multimillion-dollar business venture, in which he was cashing in on America's homelessness, urging Australian investors to join him in snapping up their foreclosed-on homes to be sold on in bulk to his mysterious Chinese benefactor - or so he said. Now he was presenting those same banks as evil incarnate.
Judge Alan Johnson was clearly impressed by Donaldson,describing the defendant as "out of the ordinary". But he was not fooled by the performance. Johnson locked Donaldson away for just under six years and ordered that, on his release, he be delivered to US Immigration officials for deportation.
Apart from his prison duties, Donaldson busies himself these days preparing an appeal against his conviction and drafting his defense on a charge that he stole his friend Kevin Day's vehicle - the Toyota SUV in which he made his getaway.
He guffaws on being told of the theorizing that he had staged the bank robbery as a device to land himself in prison and thereby to avoid a possible thrashing at the hands of angry clients. "You have to be joking," he tells me. "In jail they have me cleaning bathrooms and doing yard duty - prison is much worse that any beating."
What will he do on his release? Even before he was sentenced he was trying to sell a book on his criminal exploits. He bills this impending book as the "most original crime story since Ned Kelly". At one stage in his sentencing submission, he was bent on studying English literature and political science. "The way the world is degenerating to the point, right now, that almost the only way to feel human is through literature, cinema, theatre and music," he told the court. "And I want to deepen my contribution to that when the time comes."
During one of our meetings in prison, Donaldson suggests that perhaps he is the right man to lead a serious campaign on behalf of the homeless in Australia. "Regrets? I'm here until 2018 but no, no regrets at all. This story is far from over. I lost the court case, but victory has yet to be determined. The most credible thing I'll have done in my life is still coming."
This story was found at:http://www.smh.com.au/national/its-a-stickup-20131216-2zfwg.html