American Times, Princess Anne, Maryland: Bank robber is unmasked as pillar of respectability

THIS IS a story about the Nation of Islam, Richard Nixon, Patrick Swayze and the Princess Royal, though the last link is a bit of a cheat.

The story starts in Los Angeles on 28 October 1983, when three men dressed in overalls and Hallowe'en masks, including one of the stubbly former president, burst into a bank on South Figueroa Street. They were armed with a shotgun, an Armalite rifle and a pistol, and they fired a shot into a pillar to let everyone know they were not tooled up just for a laugh. They took $228,000 from the tellers and ran out to a waiting van they had stolen earlier that morning after shooting dead its owner, a young vegetable trader.

The crime was committed by four young men with links to a militant arm of the Nation of Islam. Two of them - Augustus Evans and Kevin Jackson - were quickly caught, and a third - Gregory Lewis, who killed the vegetable trader - was picked up in a routine traffic stop in Colorado.

But the fourth, Derrick Stevens, the getaway driver, was gone. There was some evidence he had been around Chicago for a while, but he disappeared, and the trail went cold.

The crime, once notorious, was forgotten as a wave of drug-related violence burst across America in the 1980s. The police had better things to do. It resurfaced briefly in popular culture, when the bank robbers in the 1991 film Point Break, which starred Swayze, wore masks of past presidents - including Tricky Dicky.

Now that crime is falling precipitously, the FBI is twiddling its thumbs and looking for things to do, such as clearing up old cases. The FBI found Kathleen Soliah, for instance, a former member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the group that kidnapped Patti Hearst. She was wanted for pipe-bombing police cars - none of her bombs went off - but had metamorphosed over the years from urban guerrilla into suburban housewife. The FBI pulled her in anyway.

The FBI agent Mary Hogan helped to find Soliah and, as the Stevens case was linked to "terrorism", she thought it, too, was worth pursuing. She sent out some new "Wanted" posters, one of which finished up in the police department in the tiny settlement of Princess Anne, in rural Maryland's Eastern Shore.

There is not a huge amount of terrorism on the Eastern Shore, and the police cannot have expected very much; but then they are dutiful people, the Maryland police.

"We posted it by the copy machine," Detective Scott Keller told The Los Angeles Times.

To their great surprise, a student who had come into the office peered carefully at the ageing picture and said he recognised the man. Detective Keller and a colleague drove up to the local University of Maryland campus, hoping to put a feather in the cap of the local police department. They walked into the catering department, where they found a smartly dressed chap called Derrick Anderson, who was director of dining services.

Anderson looked at the poster. "He goes, `Why would anyone think that was me?'," Detective Keller told The Washington Post. "He was completely calm ... I'll tell you, the guy was good. He was really good."

Detective Keller and his colleague waited outside while the campus security officers came over. It seemed improbable but not impossible. Maybe Derrick Anderson was Derrick Stevens; maybe not.

By the time the university police arrived, Mr Anderson was gone. He had taken his girlfriend's van, which was found later at Philadelphia airport. Whoever he was, he had pressing reasons not to speak to the police.

"It turns out that there is a back door," said Detective Keller, whose finest hour this was not. "I went, `Oh, oh.' I know he's gone. He faked us out of our jocks."

Mr Anderson was a well-liked employee by all accounts, a black professional who had risen rapidly through the ranks of Gourmet Services of Atlanta to run the department. A former employer of his told The LA Times: "He did say he had spent some time in California, but we didn't know too much about his background. Back then, in food services, they were looking for a body. If you looked good, they didn't look too deep."

Heaven knows how many other terrorists are in catering across America.

Mr Anderson had risen to middle-class status, with a good salary of $70,000. He had a nice house by the seashore, gave barbecues, attended a local church. He had achieved what every American likes to believe is their inalienable birthright: success through hard work, something that the black radicals of days gone by claimed was impossible for Americans of African descent. All of that is gone now, of course, which must please the FBI tremendously.

Were it not for the stereotypes of the Princess Anne police, Mr Anderson would be behind bars and Detective Keller would be a hero in the war against evil.

"I'd been thinking the guy we were looking for probably was washing dishes," said Detective Keller. "I hadn't been thinking it was a guy in a three- piece suit." Cunning chaps, these terrorists.