Failed lives

Alan Hurwitz

Eight years ago yesterday, I wrote a post on this blog reviewing the novel Canada, by Richard Ford.  Canada was the story of Dell Parsons, a boy growing up in Great Falls, Montana.  His father, after a career in the Air Force, makes unsuccessful business attempts in Great Falls, and ends up owing money to some local Indians.  Not a lot of money, just $2,500.

His father and mother concoct a scheme to rob a bank of that amount in North Dakota, and then to blend into what they consider the vast anonymity of the Great Western Plains.  They are caught almost immediately, and sentenced to prison, where his mother commits suicide.  Dell was only 15, and is left without parents.  Looking back, at the age of 60, he concludes:

[B]ecause very few people do rob banks, it only makes sense that the few who do it are destined for it, no matter what they believe about themselves or how they were raised. I find it impossible not to think this way, because the sense of tragedy would otherwise be overpowering to me. Though it's an odd thing to believe about your parents -- that all along they've been the kind of people criminals come from. It's like a miracle in reverse.

I thought of Canada yesterday, exactly eight years after I wrote about the novel in my blog, when I read an obituary for Alan Hurwitz in the New York Times.  Like Dell's father, Mr. Hurwitz served in the armed forces.  He then became a successful middle school teacher of English and social studies.  He became an adviser on desegregation for the Detroit public schools, and a member of a state task force studying school violence.

And then he became addicted to crack cocaine.  In a period of nine weeks in 1992, he robbed 18 banks in the Great Lakes area, and became renowned as the Zombie Bandit.  He was finally caught and spent the next twelve years in prison.   Several years after release, in 2008, he went on another rampage, robbing banks in Northern California and Oregon.  He was sentenced to another 17½ years in prison.

He died of Covid-19 in prison at the age of 79.  He left behind two daughters, two sons, eight grandchildren, and two great grandchildren.  Between the two prison terms, he told a Detroit newspaper that: "I was raised in the liberal Jewish tradition of justice, learning, and equality."

Dell's father did not have crack addiction to blame for his rash robbery, of course.  But he had a small debt which apparently loomed large in his eyes.  Too many lives have been ruined because of crack, but the ruin -- although petty theft is common --is not so often accompanied by two strings of bank robberies.

Dell Parsons, in the novel Canada, couldn't help but believe that some people are predestined to commit criminal acts -- they have a "criminal personality."

I've seen this phenomenon in the faces of other men -- homeless men, men sprawled on the pavement ... -- I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.  It's a theory of destiny and character I don't like or want to believe in.  But it's there in me like a hard understory.  I don't, in fact, ever see such a ruined man without saying silently to myself:  There's my father.  My father is that man.  I used to know him.

Mr. Hurwitz never felt any remorse for the robberies.  "He hated banks," one of his daughters recalled, "and they were federally insured."  He was sorry for any trauma he caused the bank tellers, however.

Alan Hurwitz.  Successful teacher of junior high school kids.  A man who gave skillful advice to the Detroit schools on how to fight school segregation.   A man who helped study how to end school violence.

A man who robbed banks.