A ‘Great Guy’ Surfaces as a Wanted Man

The two local police officers had a hot tip.

A student at the nearby university had told them the picture on an FBI poster for a California fugitive wanted in a bank robbery and murder looked a lot like a man working at the campus cafeteria.

The officers were greeted by Derrick Anderson, a university executive known for his congeniality, hard work and business success.

Anderson said the man on the poster didn’t look like him or anyone he knew, and the officers left his office.

Moments later, Anderson left too, and he hasn’t been seen since.

Federal agents now say the 47-year-old Derrick Anderson who headed the school’s dining services operation probably was the man on the poster--Derrick Stevens, the getaway driver in a 1983 Los Angeles holdup that involved a murder.

Then the largest bank heist in Los Angeles history, the $228,000 robbery is thought to have inspired scenes in the movie “Point Break.” In both the film holdup and the real robbery, one of the bandits wore a Richard Nixon mask.

All three of Stevens’ alleged accomplices were arrested and convicted. But most of the money was never recovered.

The bigger mystery has been what became of Stevens--a militant black Muslim with a string of criminal arrests.

It now appears he reinvented himself, emerging on the East Coast as churchgoing Derrick Anderson--a highly respected executive with one of the nation’s leading black-owned firms.

The man known as Anderson headed large cafeteria operations at three predominantly black colleges back East--Clark Atlanta University, Hampton University and the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore--eventually earning a salary that enabled him to buy a handsome brick home overlooking a lake near Princess Anne, a pre-Revolutionary town of 1,800 on Chesapeake Bay’s eastern shore, about 100 miles south of Baltimore.

In his spare time, Anderson catered private parties, including several for high-ranking members of the Maryland State Police.

This wasn’t the kind of man Police Chief Russell Pecorero and Det. Scott Keller were looking for when they drove up to the University of Maryland campus Oct. 4 on a mission they hoped would “put a feather in the cap” of the Princess Anne Police Department.

“I’d been thinking the guy we were looking for probably was washing dishes,” Keller said ruefully a few days later. “I hadn’t been thinking it was a guy in a three-piece suit.”

Disappointed by the near-miss, FBI agents say they won’t give up looking for a man they consider a robber and an accomplice to murder, no matter how respectable he looks.

“People have to answer for the crimes they commit, no matter how long it takes,” said Los Angeles FBI Agent Mary Hogan, who is heading up the search for Stevens. “I’d like to bring this man to justice.”

Court documents, law enforcement files and dozens of interviews across the country shed new light on the man Stevens was--and apparently became.

Born Sept. 11, 1952, in Youngstown, Ohio, Stevens moved to the Pomona area with his parents, Pearl Barganier and Don Stevens, while still a child.

He soon became well known to Pomona police, who arrested him at various times, beginning in 1967, on suspicion of auto theft, shoplifting, arson, burglary and receiving stolen property. In 1971 he was arrested in San Diego County on suspicion of armed robbery, and in 1980 he was arrested in Los Angeles County on suspicion of auto theft.

By then, the FBI says, Stevens, then 27, had become a member of a militant wing of the Nation of Islam. Agents say he began associating with three other members of the religious group--Gregory Lewis, then 28, Augustus Evans, then 19, and Kevin Jackson, then 25.

A Young Man Is Killed for His Van

Stevens, meanwhile, had been learning the food service business at his family’s restaurant--Shabazz--in the Crenshaw district. He had a girlfriend and they had a daughter, now a student at a prestigious university. To some, Stevens seemed to be settling down.

But it was while working at the restaurant, Hogan said, that Stevens decided to try bank robbery.

“Stevens and Lewis planned it,” said Tom Powers, an FBI agent who worked on the case.

The FBI says that on Oct. 27, 1983, the four robbers spent the night at the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The next morning, agents say, Lewis and Stevens went to the wholesale vegetable market complex southeast of downtown to steal a getaway vehicle.

“They took a van from a 22-year-old vegetable buyer, Tuong Truong, and Lewis shot and killed him,” Powers said. “They buried his body in a pile of garbage at the market.”

About three hours later, the four men drove to the bank on South Figueroa Street, Powers said. While Stevens waited in the van, the three others burst into the bank.

“All three of them wore coveralls and Halloween masks. One was a Nixon mask,” Hogan said. “One of them had a shotgun, one of them had an AR-15 [assault rifle] and the third one had a 9-millimeter [pistol]. They fired a shot into a pillar to show everyone they were serious.”

Grabbing $228,000 in cash, the robbers raced away in the van.

Identified through a laundry bag tab found in their abandoned getaway vehicle, Jackson and Evans were arrested, convicted of armed larceny and given 15-year prison terms. Both have since been released.

Lewis, arrested in Colorado after a routine traffic stop, became the first person convicted of murder under federal statutes involving a slaying prior to the commission of a bank robbery. He was sentenced to life in prison, but the murder conviction was later overturned on appeal. He is still serving time for the bank robbery.

The only suspect to elude arrest was Stevens. A credit card check indicated that he may have been in the Chicago area about six months after the robbery.

“That was the last I ever heard of him,” Powers said.

Several years passed.

Sharp, Experienced, Personable

Then, in the late 1980s, a personable man in his 30s applied for work with Atlanta-based Gourmet Services Inc. His pleasant demeanor and obvious skills in the food service industry landed him a job, according to Alvin Branch, a vice president of the firm.

“He did say he had spent some time in California, but we didn’t know much about his background,” Branch said. “Back then, in food services, they were looking for a body. If you looked good, they didn’t look too deep.”

But the man they knew as Derrick Anderson was more than just a body, and he moved up quickly in the company.

His first executive assignment was at the modern downtown campus of Clark Atlanta University, where he was named director of food services.

“He never talked about himself, or his past, at all,” said Mike Hopson, another Gourmet Service employee who knew Stevens in Atlanta. “But he was one sharp guy, with great people skills.

“The company was taking off, and he was a front-runner,” Hopson said. “He was the image of a clean-cut, well-dressed young urban professional on the way up. Derrick told me he was on his way to bigger and better things.”

And he was. After a brief stop-off at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, in the early 1990s, Anderson was given one of Gourmet Services’ premier accounts: the directorship of dining services at Hampton University in Hampton, Va.

Leaving behind a new wife and a young daughter in Atlanta, Stevens devoted extraordinary energy to his new job on the tree-shaded waterfront campus at Hampton, Branch said.

“He was a great guy, a good manager and a hard worker,” Branch said. “But he was a very private person, and he kept his distance. I really don’t know that much about his personal life.”

Other friends said that Anderson occasionally attended local churches, including a Baptist church, and did mention that he had lived in California and had once been affiliated with the Nation of Islam.

In 1994, officials at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, decided to stop contracting their food services and handle the job in-house.

They remembered Derrick Anderson.

“He had done an outstanding job for us, and we wanted him back,” said Ronnie E. Holden, a university vice president. “When he came back, the quality went up, the student satisfaction went up. The program improved a lot.”

“He was a great guy,” said Clarence Bell, the campus police chief.

Alvern Chesterfield, one of Holden’s assistants, was a guest at some of the barbecues Anderson hosted at his attractive house on a wooded one-acre lot beside Johnson’s Pond. Anderson shared the home with CeCe Collins, a former employee from his time at Hampton who has declined to comment.

The 1983 robbery was largely forgotten until last summer, when FBI agent Hogan--who had helped bring in Symbionese Liberation Army fugitive Kathleen Soliah, now known as Sarah Jane Olson--was assigned to check things out.

Suspect Stays Cool Under Pressure

As part of routine updating, Hogan said, she ran off new wanted posters, which were sent to 56,000 post offices and law enforcement agencies. One of them went to the Princess Anne Police Department, housed in the cramped, first-floor offices of a 175-year-old stone building near the center of the picturesque farming town.

“We posted it by the copy machine,” Det. Keller said. “Someone who came in said it looked like a man named Anderson who worked at the university cafeteria. “

Keller said he and the chief drove over to the cafeteria.

“The next thing I know, Mr. Anderson confronts us,” Keller said. “ ‘What can I do for you?’ he asks, looking real calm. We told him we wanted to talk to him in private.”

Keller said the three of them walked into Anderson’s office, and the chief laid the wanted poster on Anderson’s desk.

“The chief says, ‘We have a person who says they believe you might be the man on the poster,’ ” Keller said. “Anderson doesn’t flinch. He picks it up and says, “Now, why would anyone think this looks like me?’ ”

Keller said he and the chief “still had doubts in our minds.” But they walked out the front door, thinking it was the only entrance to the office.

“We kept that door in sight,” Keller said.

Campus police--not Princess Anne police--have jurisdiction on campus, and Keller summoned them by radio.

“A UMES officer walks up, and he looks at the poster,” Keller said. “ ‘That’s him,’ the officer tells us.”

When the campus officer entered Anderson’s office, it was empty.

“It turns out that there is a backdoor,” Keller said. “I went, ‘Oh, oh.’ I know he’s gone. He faked us out of our jocks.

“It’s a sad story.”

Police now know that before leaving his office, Anderson looked out a window and saw officers near his car. He then telephoned his girlfriend, who also worked on campus, and told her he was borrowing her van.

The van was not spotted until a week later, when it was found in a parking lot at the airport in Philadelphia.

Most of those who had known Anderson seemed shocked to learn he apparently is Stevens, a man wanted in a bank robbery and murder.

“That Derrick Stevens they’re talking about is a man I never met,” said David Scott, the new director of campus dining services at the Maryland campus.

“You never want to glorify anything that is wrong,” said Margot Winfield, who remembered the ambitious, clean-cut man she knew in Atlanta.

“But, like Robin Hood,” she added, “this is a bad guy everybody loves.”