'Kangaroo Bandit' hops over racial lines: Bank robber is man of many faces
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It's tempting to liken him to smoke. He coils in and out of view, his presence an omen of danger. Then he evaporates into a sunlit afternoon, while those left behind wonder what it is they have just seen.
He is, however, the opposite of ghostly. Many have seen this man up close - while he ordered them to the floor, his gun pointed at their heads. Nameless so far, he is considered the most wanted bank robber in California.
Eyewitnesses describe him in detail, and bank cameras have captured images of him, yet he remains elusive. Part of the problem is that when people look at him, they don't agree on what they see.
California convergence
It is a strange meeting of two Southern California phenomena: There are more bank robberies in the region than anywhere else in the nation; the population is so multiethnic that race can often be a meaningless descriptor.
The elusive bank robber defies racial categorization. He is that prototype of the future: Multiethnic Man. An amalgam. A little of this, a little of that.
"We've had him described as a dark-skinned white male, as a light-skinned African American, as Puerto Rican, as Brazilian, and I think we had Middle Eastern," said Agent Joseph White of the FBI office in Santa Ana with a sigh. "You know they all can't be right."
Or could they?
"Well, this is California," White said.
Dubbed the "Kangaroo Bandit" by the FBI because of the knapsack he wears dangling in front, the robber has hit 24 banks in 19 months. His racial mutability is not the sole reason he has eluded capture - the bandit does his homework, casing banks carefully before robbing them. But the myriad and inconsistent racial descriptions of him add an intriguing complication to the hunt.
No one seems more aware of his mutability than the Kangaroo Bandit himself. In some robbery photos he has a mustache and beard. In others he is clean-shaven. Sometimes his skin looks fair, sometimes dark. A few tellers have said they believe he wore makeup - particularly dark foundation.
"In reviewing the surveillance photos from the different robberies, it appears he's making a conscious effort to disguise his race," said Agent Mark Hunter of the FBI's bank-robbery squad in Santa Ana.
What is known: The Kangaroo Bandit is 25 to 30 years old, stands 5-feet-10 to 6 feet and weighs 180 to 200 pounds. He wears long-sleeved shirts buttoned at the cuffs, dark sunglasses and a baseball cap. After a robbery, he has been seen running away, but also getting away in a red Toyota Tundra pickup and a black sports-utility vehicle - possibly a Lincoln Navigator.
Standard modus operandi
His method is the same. He enters a bank, orders tellers to place money on the counter and then tells everyone to lie on the floor. He then walks down the teller line scooping the money into his knapsack - it is standard FBI policy not to reveal how much. The bandit has done this in banks in San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
The case suggests how important race is in identifying people - in a backdoor way, says Professor David Wellman, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "When people can't establish a racial category for this guy, they can't see him; in a sociological sense, he's invisible.
"But what makes him interesting is not just that he could be passing - moving between races - but that he's playing with it."
The Kangaroo Bandit has been written about by newspapers, featured on the news and was even the subject of an "America's Most Wanted" segment. The FBI has offered a $15,000 reward for his capture and as a result, hundreds of people have called to turn in men of every ethnic hue.
Lateral mobility
"What is fascinating is that by simply applying foundation, he is able to move from one group of millions of people to another group of millions of people," said Matt Kelley, publisher of Mavin, a Seattle-based quarterly devoted to interracial issues. "But it especially makes sense in California, where there is so much intermarriage that all of a sudden there is all this racial ambiguity."
Statewide, a Los Angeles Times analysis of birth certificates conducted last summer found that one in six births in 1998 was to parents of mixed race or ethnicity, up from one in seven in 1989, and the trend is accelerating.
In California, multiracial births are now third, behind white and Latino births.
Also, although the state accounted for only 13 percent of all newborn babies nationwide in 1998, it accounted for almost one-quarter of all births to parents of mixed race and ethnicity.
Using race as the only tool to identify someone is the flawed methodology behind practices such as profiling, said Wellman. Yet the opposite, being colorblind, means ignoring the profound role of race in social, economic and political hierarchies.
Natural selection
Still, using visual racial identifiers is a natural processing method that begins in childhood, Wellman said. "There's kind of a popular wisdom that classifying people by race is racism, and I don't subscribe to that. From the time we are very little, we begin to classify things and people. "
The 2000 census is the first in which people were invited to check one or more races. That created 57 new categories reflecting anywhere from two to six races per person.
The official acceptance of the multiple-race categories came after years of urging by advocates in the multiracial movement - and strikes at the core of historic American beliefs about human biology.
Playing catch
Murky racial issues aside, the FBI's job is still to catch the Kangaroo Bandit.
"I'm always looking for suspects" White says, "so what I want to do is to narrow down the number of people I need to look at. Sex helps, and race helps. We go from the broadest to the most narrow we can get until we catch someone."