Brazen Bandit : Police Say It Will Be Tough to Capture Daring Outlaw Who Broke Out of Orange County Jail

On a wall in his island home on Puget Sound, Michael Taylor hung a picture of himself posing in front of posters of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted fugitives.

Police who searched the place saw it as an expression of an ambition, which they found unsettling.

“It seemed like it would make his life to be on that 10 Most Wanted list,” said Newport Beach Police Detective John Desmond.

Today, Taylor may be a candidate for just such a distinction. He is the target of an intense nationwide manhunt that began last November when he and four other inmates escaped from the Orange County Jail by rappelling from the roof of the four-story structure with a rope of braided bed sheets.

Almost immediately, authorities concluded that Taylor was the mastermind of the daring jailbreak. Almost 3 months later, he is the only one of the five escapees who is still at large.

Taylor has a reputation as a self-confident thrill seeker who has been an extraordinarily successful outlaw because he is also intelligent and a perfectionist. The jail breakout, like other brazen escapes in his past, fit the profile.

Police say that Taylor, 35, has made a career out of armed jewelry robberies and that he goes about it like a corporate employee bucking for a promotion. He’s usually well dressed--sometimes in a three-piece suit--and he uses rented, full-sized American cars for getaways.

Last week, police say, Taylor committed yet another bold robbery, holding up a jewelry store near Chicago in which he and an accomplice made off with about $450,000 in gems.

The fact that his picture is being passed around at police roll calls all over the country--including his native Chicago--has not seemed to deter him. In fact, the element of high risk is almost part of Taylor’s signature.

Since 1987, police estimate, Taylor has stolen about $2 million in jewels from almost two dozen Southern California stores, including seven in Orange County.

In the adrenalin-charged minutes of the robberies, police say, it is Taylor who barks assignments to his partners, keeps track of the clock and quickly gathers the loot.

“He is not an emotional robber,” said Jack Price, owner of Designer Jewelers Inc. in Huntington Beach, who was the victim last year of a $450,000 holdup allegedly committed by Taylor. “It’s a business for him. I was in the Army Rangers in Vietnam, and we were taught to do everything click, click, click; he was that kind of a methodical guy. He knew what he was doing . . . and he was good at it.”

What police fear most is Taylor’s cool temperament and cold-blooded character. He has never been charged with shooting anyone, although police say he has been armed in all of the robberies he has pulled--and two of the Orange County heists erupted into shoot-outs.

“You’ve got a potentially dangerous person--there’s no doubt about it,” said Huntington Beach Police Detective Tom Gilligan.

Both the authorities and inmates who knew Taylor in jail distinguish this man from most people in the system.

He doesn’t drink and he doesn’t use drugs, they say. He has a middle-class life style with a live-in girlfriend and two kids, one of which he fathered. After the string of robberies in Southern California, the family moved into a waterfront house on Vashon Island in Washington state with a hot tub on the rear deck and a private dock.

Police who searched the house found--in addition to the photograph on the wall--an aquarium in which the gravel was sprinkled with stolen rubies.

Taylor is glib, friendly and a master at assuming fake identities.

Fake Identities

He has used numerous fake identification cards, including one that said he is an employee of a bogus company called the Criminal Research Assn. in Chicago. Another pictures him as the owner of the California Home Improvement Co. in Long Beach.

Taylor, who has been known to carry an 18-karat gold handgun, assumed the alias of Anthony Gianetti so effectively that some police departments still don’t know his real name. The Orange County Sheriff’s Department released the Gianetti alias when he escaped from jail. His former jail mates still call him Tony.

“I would probably describe him as the kind of person you’d find selling automobiles or real estate,” said Huntington Beach Sgt. William Van Cleve. “He’s very outgoing, very friendly and he has a tendency to be charming in a phony way.”

Newport Beach Police Detective John Desmond tracked Taylor for months, and traveled to Washington for the search of his home.

“I think he’s not driven like a lot of guys are because they’re addicted to drugs,” Desmond said. “He’s doing the best way he knows to make money; he’s just going about his business. And he’s good at what he does.

“I don’t know if his ego is so big that he does it for notoriety too, but that’s a possibility.”

No Doubt of Mastermind

When they heard Taylor was involved in the escape last Nov. 20, detectives Gilligan and Desmond had no doubt that he was the mastermind. Desmond said Taylor had boasted that he was going to break out.

The district attorney had told Taylor he was facing more than 40 years in prison for the seven Orange County robberies, and Los Angeles prosecutors were planning to charge him with an additional 10 armed robberies.

Taylor was in a five-man cell in the Orange County Jail along with two other inmates involved in the escape, Steven Wilson and Richard Fluharty. Sources said the two other inmates who broke out with Taylor, Wilson and Fluharty were not involved in planning the escape but joined in at the last minute.

One of those two broke his leg when he fell from the roof because the makeshift rope ripped on barbed, razor-wire. He was captured outside the jail that night. The other, who was in jail facing a murder charge, turned himself in on Thanksgiving Day.

The five inmates involved in the escape made off from a rooftop recreation area after cutting through a chain-link fence. Contrary to policy, they were not searched for weapons or tools before being taken to the recreation area that night.

Deputies Miscounted

And, as the Orange County grand jury found later, the deputies on duty at the jail that night miscounted the 68 inmates as they left the roof, so the escape was not discovered for several hours. A neighborhood caller told police he had seen men running down the street in jail clothing.

The two deputies assigned to the rooftop area that night are still on administrative leave pending the outcome of an internal Sheriff’s Department investigation.

After their escape, Wilson, Fluharty and Taylor stripped to their shorts and convinced a bystander that they needed a ride to a hospital. Once inside the car, police said, the escapees displayed a jail-made knife and threw the driver out of the car.

Two weeks later, Wilson and Fluharty were arrested in Denver with the same getaway car.

For Taylor, it may have been his most daring escape, but it only added to a longtime reputation. After Taylor’s arrest in Huntington Beach, police there considered him so slippery that they warned the Sheriff’s Department, which runs the county jail, in writing: “Given a chance, he will escape.”

“Escape is kind of his middle name,” Desmond said later.

Jumped From Car

Last June, Taylor had eluded Seattle police who spotted him on a ferry. Police say Taylor escaped during a chase by jumping from his car while turning the wheel over to his girlfriend.

A few weeks later, police say, he slipped away from the Border Patrol in New Mexico when he was stopped at a checkpoint while driving a stolen pickup truck. He ran more than 10 miles across the desert before police search dogs found him buried in the dirt trying to hide from helicopters.

Taylor also escaped from California’s Chino state prison in 1975 while he was serving a sentence for an armed robbery committed when he was 21.

His history of escapes has caused some to question whether he should have been treated as a greater security risk at the Orange County Jail.

There are four security categories in the jail that are designated by colored wristbands worn by the inmates. A white band calls for minimum security, and the grade increases through yellow, orange and red. Red-banded inmates are isolated from the rest of the prison population.

Taylor wore an orange band.

Won’t Discuss Security

Sheriff’s Lt. Richard Olson said that overcrowding at the jail prevents the department from designating very many red-band prisoners. But he would not say whether the overcrowding was a factor in classifying Taylor.

“The security is something that we generally don’t talk about,” Olson said. “All I can say is that I don’t want to get into that.”

The search for Taylor now involves dozens of police agencies across the country, including the FBI. The day he allegedly staged the robbery last week, Chicago’s rank-and-file police officers had just been shown his picture and heard a lecture about his typical “method of operation.”

Because of his cunning, police say, he is going to be difficult to capture. But also, partly because of his confidence, they are convinced he will be caught.

“He is certainly brazen,” said Los Angeles Police Detective Jim Barry. “It’s going to be difficult to catch him . . . he’s obviously very transient--from Los Angeles to Seattle to New Mexico--but I don’t doubt that he’ll make a mistake somewhere along the road.”