Life of Evel: Evel Knievel Read Online Free PDF

hubcaps from cars to sell on as replacements or as scrap metal, a technique he perfected while still at school but one which escalated over time to almost industrial proportions. ‘One time the police caught me and another boy with about three hundred hubcaps. I sold them for about a buck apiece. Christ, I needed a few bucks to go out. I could steal a guy’s hubcaps when he was sitting in the car. You know, those ore trains go by, make a lot of noise. A guy’s sitting in his car, I didn’t care whether he had the radio on or not, I’d just steal the hubcaps right off his car. Every kid in town knew I could do it. But I moved on to bigger and better things.’
    Those bigger and better things included running a ‘protection agency’, which was, by Knievel’s own cryptic admission, really an extortion racket. While his well-meaning police-officer friend Mo Mulchahy politely referred to Bobby’s ‘job’ as being that of a merchant policeman, there were others in Butte who recognised it as something rather more corrupt. Knievel visited various businesses around Butte and asked if they would like him to keep an eye on their properties when they were closed. If they paid up, Bobby would check locks, make sure there were no open windows or doors and generally scare off any prowlers. Job done. If, however, any particular business refused his offer, they were very likely to find their premises had been broken into shortly afterwards.
    The differing accounts of Knievel’s ‘job’ among those who knew him show just how undefined his role was. Officer Mulchahy believed it to be legitimate, saying, ‘He went around on the south side of town and he’d rattle doors and shake windows; he was one of us. He went to different merchants down on the south side and asked them for a job. Course, a lot of people who knew Knievel, they said “we’d rather not do that”. They didn’t have break-ins, they had breaks; they had breaks in their windows or breaks in their doors but he’d be back the next day and tell the businessmen “If I was watching your place, this wouldn’t have happened”, and they’d hire him.’
    Knievel’s own take on the situation was rather more telling, even if it did stop short of an absolute confession. ‘When I was a merchant policeman I had a deal – you don’t want to give a little kid that’s trying to make a dollar a five-dollar bill every 30 days to watch your place then you might get robbed. That’s what it amounted to. You pay me ten dollars a month, five dollars a month, to watch your place of business, you don’t get robbed. They found out that my protection was well worth the five or ten dollars a month after not subscribing to it for a while.’
    Knievel’s friend Bob Pavolich, who ran the Met Tavern in Butte at the time – one of Knievel’s favourite watering holes – showed no such ambivalence when asked for his interpretation of Bobby’s scam. ‘When he was a doorknocker here he used to come around my place at two o’clock in the morning – he was a merchant cop is what they called him. Well I would have to say that he probably knocked over mine and about a dozen others on the route. He always had money and he didn’t make that kind of money knocking doors. Really, he told me he’d knocked over my place.’
    Knievel eventually owned up – and apologised for – committing a string of burglaries around Butte, and he confessed that he tried for a whole weekend to break into the Prudential Federal Savings building but couldn’t manage it. Addressing a meeting of Butte townspeople in the late 1990s, he blamed his misdemeanours on his youth and insisted he had eventually made amends for those acts over the years and was now a model Butte citizen.
    But the money Bobby was spending in Butte bars was coming from increasingly more dangerous criminal activities. He had by now become so desperate for more money that he’d started robbing grocery stores, pharmacies and even banks