Life of Evel: Evel Knievel Read Online Free PDF Page B

all over the western United States. Knievel teamed up with a gang of six other men in order to be able to carry out more and more ambitious crimes. He claimed most of them were drug users, hence their penchant for turning over pharmacies to steal drugs as well as whatever was in the cash registers.
    The techniques employed by his crew usually followed a similar pattern: they would stake out whichever building they planned to rob to gain the usual information about workers’ shifts, opening and closing times, and where the entry points and exits were, then Bobby would drill a hole through the roof to allow the gang to drop down into the premises, by which point the adrenalin would really start to flow. Knievel, for one, found he liked the rush. ‘That feeling I got inside a bank was the same feeling I got later when I started to jump [a motorcycle]. I could crack a safe with one hand tied behind my back faster than you could eat a hamburger with two.’
    But Knievel soon realised that the prize of adrenalin alone wasn’t enough to justify the risks he was taking. ‘When we dropped through a hole in the roof there was so much pressure we’d sweat our shoes off. And it wasn’t really worth it. We’d have to split the money between four or five people (depending on how many were in on any particular job) and averaged only a few grand apiece.’
    If the FBI really were on the gang’s trail, as Knievel claims, then the risks could not have been worth the slight rewards. After all, Bobby may have had a few dollars to throw around on beer but he and his young wife weren’t exactly living in the lap of luxury as a result of his endeavours – and things would only be worse for Linda if Bobby was thrown in the county jail.
    One long-standing mystery from this period relates to whether or not Knievel used dynamite stolen from his former employers, the Anaconda Mining Company, to blow up and rob the local courthouse in Butte. While Evel has sometimes boasted of carrying off the job, he has at other times backtracked and claimed, ‘The courthouse was not blown up, the courthouse was burglarised. As to whether I did it or not, that’s nobody’s business but mine and that’s the way it’ll always remain.’
    Either way, it was only when one of his accomplices was shot while trying to flee from a crime scene that Knievel was shocked into abandoning his evil ways. It brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown, which in turn made him feel so low that he actually contemplated suicide. His accomplice, Jimmy Eng, had been shot dead in the street by police while on a job in Reno, Nevada, and while Knievel escaped with his life, he broke down on the way home and vowed to change his ways and turn his back on crime. ‘I was crossing a bridge when I stopped and took out all my burglar tools – ropes, crowbars, nitroglycerine, drill bits, all of it – and dumped it into the Sacramento River in California. I just vowed right then that I would never steal another dime or rob another place and I never did.’
    Knievel may have decided to go straight but he would continue to have run-ins with the law throughout his life, even after he had given up trying to make a living from crime. His skills as a bank robber appeared questionable anyhow and are perhaps best summarised by his childhood friend Paddy Boyle who once said of Evel, ‘Actually he wasn’t a bank robber cos he never got nothing. I think that’s why he started jumping motorcycles – cos he couldn’t make it as a burglar.’
    Further pressure for Knievel to find a legitimate job came with the birth of his and Linda’s first child, a son, Kelly Michael Knievel, on 21 August 1960. Now with a wife and child to feed, Bobby needed not only to find a source of regular income, he also needed to ensure he wouldn’t be facing a lengthy jail sentence and leaving his family helpless.
    In 1961, Knievel formed the Sur-Kill hunting service, another scheme which was not quite above