McNEILL OF THE FBI : Owning Race Horses Helps Agent Forget Bloody Shoot-Out

There were 96 American law-enforcement officers killed in the line of duty last year. Two of them were co-workers of FBI agent Gordon McNeill. McNeill is lucky he didn’t die, too.

Next month will be the first anniversary of what has been called the bloodiest shoot-out in FBI history. McNeill and 13 other agents, using 11 cars, attempted to surround two murderous bank robbers in their car on a side street just off the busy South Dixie Highway in a suburb south of Miami.

The robbers, both in their early 30s, had become friends in Korea while serving as military policemen with the United States Army’s elite Ranger corps.

At 9:30 on the bright, clear morning of April 11, William Russell Matix and Michael Lee Platt were driving a black 1982 Chevrolet, which they had recently stolen after shooting the owner four times, to their 10th bank robbery in 11 months.

Matix and Platt had with them a 12-gauge shotgun, two .38-caliber revolvers and a semi-automatic rifle. They had recently bought 5,000 rounds of ammunition and they apparently were prepared to fire every round they had.

The robbers’ vehicle was rammed by one of the FBI cars on a tree-lined neighborhood street, and an ensuing shoot-out lasted about five minutes. Short as it was, it made the gunfight at OK Corral look like a one-shot duel at 10 paces. More than 140 shots were fired. Matix, Platt and two agents were killed.

Five more government agents were wounded, and one of the three critically injured was McNeill. He was shot in the chest, hand and arm and lost half of his blood.

Gordon McNeill, 44, a 22-year FBI veteran, has been back at work for only a few weeks, and he’ll be behind a desk until he retires later this year.

Lately, though, McNeill has been spending almost as much time at Hialeah and Gulfstream Park as he has on the job, following the careers of three thoroughbreds that he partly owns.

“I’ll never be able to forget last year,” McNeill said the other day, “but at least the horses help. I’ve been following the horses since I sneaked over the fence at Garden State Park when I was 14 years old and growing up in North Philadelphia.”

McNeill’s parents weren’t wealthy. His father worked for the post office and when he and his wife went to the track, they were $2 show bettors.

McNeill went to college at St. Joseph’s in Philadelphia, borrowing $4,000 that was still unpaid as graduation neared. One winter day, at the neighborhood meat market, Charlie the butcher was talking about a Philadelphia trainer--Angelo somebody--who had a horse that loved to run on frozen tracks. His name was Wide Horizon and he’d be running at Bowie, in Maryland, in a few days.

When Wide Horizon’s name appeared in the Bowie entries, Helen Loretta McNeill and her son took off for Maryland.

They wheeled every horse in the first race with Wide Horizon, who was running in the second. The winner of the first race, a 30-1 shot, was disqualified. But the horse the stewards moved up to first place was 19-1, and when Wide Horizon won the second race, just as Angelo the trainer had guaranteed Charlie the butcher, the McNeills were in the silk.

“We had won the $4,000,” McNeill said. “Then something else happened. I picked out some horses in the next four races, and they also won. My mother and I walked out of Bowie with $7,000. St. Joe’s got their money.”

McNeill’s mother, dead now, had a recurring dream. “She used to always dream about owning a race horse,” McNeill said. “But of course, she could never afford it. I’d like to think that I’m living out my mother’s dream now. These three horses are 3-year-olds, and they haven’t won a race yet, but it’s the kind of thing my mother always would have liked to have done.”

Actually, McNeill owned a piece of a horse before the shoot-out. Assigned by the FBI to Houston in 1981, he was a catcher for a team playing in the championship game of the Law Enforcement Softball League. On a play at the plate, McNeill was struck in the face by a relay throw and blinded in his left eye.

The money from the insurance settlement enabled McNeill to join a group that owned Important Business, who won the Illinois Derby at Sportsman’s Park in 1985. Important Business is now a 5-year-old who’s been running at Santa Anita this season.

One of McNeill’s Florida horses is named Heavy Lifter, something the FBI man will never be again. He has a permanent spinal cord injury, there is no feeling in his chest and he has trouble getting around.

“My legs feel as bad as they did the day I got shot,” McNeill said. “I’m told that what’s happened is that my legs, when I want to use them, aren’t sending the proper messages to the brain.”

McNeill used to be a runner. He competed in three Orange Bowl Marathons. One of the houses he passed in his morning runs, nine blocks from where he lived with his wife and two teen-age daughters, was where Matix lived.

But McNeill never saw Matix until that morning last April. After the robbers’ car was disabled, McNeill jumped from his car and saw Matix smiling through his walrus mustache on the other side of the windshield.

“He looked directly at me and kind of had a half smile on his face,” McNeill said. “I turned my head quickly around. That’s when I felt just a breeze over my ear and then the full impact of getting hit.”

Matix and Platt died hard. One was shot nine times, the other five times, yet they stumbled from their car to the car that two of the wounded FBI agents had vacated. McNeill, who had blacked out after being shot, temporarily regained consciousness in time to see one of them “execute” a fellow agent who was already lying on the ground in a pool of blood.

“They had to know by then that they were dying and not going to get out of there,” McNeill said. “But these guys were real wackos. They were your classic right-wingers, without portfolio. They were like kamikazes and this was their Custer’s last stand.

“They were trying to start the FBI car to escape. I know they said to themselves, ‘As long as we’re not going to make it, we might as well go out in a blaze of glory.’ ”

McNeill talks about Matix and Platt unemotionally.

According to the FBI, they probably killed a man in 1985, taking his car and leaving him at a rock pit they had used for target practice near Miami. Matix was a suspect in the murder of his first wife, who five days after Christmas in 1983 was found at the hospital where she worked, bound, gagged and stabbed 16 times, apparently without having offered resistence There was an insurance death benefit estimated at $180,000, and Matix was said to have been bitter because the insurance company hadn’t paid double indemnity.

Before Matix and Platt went on their bank-robbing spree, the FBI theorized that they had murdered one another’s wives. Regina Platt’s death, four days before Christmas in 1984, had been listed as a suicide.

“She died from a shotgun blast directly into her mouth,” McNeill said. “If she was a suicide, that would make her the first woman in the history of the FBI to kill herself with that kind of a gun that way.”

Matix and Platt were not particularly good bank robbers. The take from all their robberies was only $253,000. Once, they attempted to hold up a Wells-Fargo truck, but drove off with no money after wounding a guard with a shotgun blast.

“They did no homework whatsoever,” McNeill said. “If they had waited 10 minutes, that truck would have had $475,000 in it.”

Toward the end, Matix and Platt were robbing the same banks with the same car bearing the same license plates. At least they picked the optimum day of the week to strike. All of their holdups were on Fridays, big payroll days for banks.

Last April 11 was a Friday, and McNeill called his men together early in the morning. “It’s been a couple of weeks since these guys have done anything,” he told them. “Today’s the right day and I have a hunch they’ll be in business again.”

One task-force car spotted their car and radioed the others to surround the area. Matix and Platt realized that they were being followed and at one point made a U-turn, passing McNeill as his car approached them.

One of the crack shots among the government agents lost his glasses during the ramming of the Matix-Platt car and had to do his shooting without them.

McNeill credits Ed Mireles, a former Marine, with saving his life and a few others. Mireles, critically wounded and near blacking out, fired six shots that finally silenced Matix and Platt, who were attempting to back the car over one of the fallen agents.