After 17 Years, Fugitive Gives Up

Thirteen months after vanishing from a second life on the East Coast as a respected food services executive, a fugitive wanted in a Los Angeles bank robbery and murder has surrendered to the FBI, agents said Monday.

“He realized we were getting closer,” said Mary Hogan, the FBI agent assigned to track down Derrick Stevens. Stevens, she said, simply succumbed to the pressure of being on the run.

“He was traveling, moving from place to place, and I think he got tired,” she said. “I think he was running out of money. He didn’t have that comfort zone at the university any more. It was inevitable.”

Agents say that Stevens, 48, was the getaway driver in a 1983 bank holdup that involved a murder. Then the largest bank holdup in Los Angeles history, the $228,000 robbery is thought to have inspired scenes in the movie “Point Break.” In the real robbery and the movie, one of the robbers wore a Richard Nixon mask.

The three other suspects in the robbery were arrested and convicted. Most of the money was never recovered, but for years, the bigger mystery was what had become of Stevens, a militant Black Muslim with a string of criminal arrests.

It now appears that he reinvented himself, emerging on the East Coast as churchgoing Derrick Anderson. The man known as Anderson headed large cafeteria operations at three predominately black universities, earning the respect of colleagues who included campus law enforcement officials.

Everything was going fine for Anderson until police in Princess Anne, Md., were alerted that a man who resembled Stevens was working at nearby University of Maryland, and officers showed up Oct. 4, 1999, with an FBI wanted poster.

Police admit that Stevens outsmarted them that day and gave them the slip. But for Hogan, the FBI agent who helped bring in fugitive and accused Symbionese Liberation Army member Kathleen Soliah, now known as Sarah Jane Olson, the hunt was on again.

Hogan said that as Stevens kept moving from place to place, she kept pressure on some of his relatives and friends, whom he contacted sporadically.

Hogan would not reveal details about the chase, but said she made sure Stevens got the message that the FBI was on his trail, and that “it was just a matter of time.”

On Friday, Hogan said, she was napping at a relative’s home in Orange County when her pager went off.

“It was a friend of Stevens, someone I had talked to earlier,” she said. “The friend said Derrick would like to turn himself in. I said the best place would be the federal building in Westwood. I got in my car and drove there as fast as I could. . . .

Owner of Van Slain

“At 5:40 p.m., his friend’s car pulled up in front of the building,” Hogan said. “As soon as Derrick stepped out of the car, we took him into custody.”

Stevens was taken in handcuffs to the downtown Metropolitan Detention Center. On Monday, he made a preliminary appearance at the adjacent Edward R. Roybal federal courthouse in connection with the bank robbery.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Gregory W. Jessner said Los Angeles prosecutors will decide whether to file charges against Stevens in connection with the killing of 22-year-old Tuong Truong.

The FBI says that on the morning of Oct. 27, 1983, Stevens and one of his accomplices, Gregory Lewis, then 28, went to the vegetable market complex southeast of downtown to steal a getaway vehicle for their planned robbery.

FBI Agent Tom Powers said that after the men stole Truong’s van, Lewis shot him to death.

“They buried his body in a pile of garbage at the market,” Powers said.

The FBI said that about three hours later, as Stevens waited behind the wheel of the van, Lewis and two accomplices burst into the Family Savings and Loan Assn. branch on Crenshaw Boulevard with guns drawn, fleeing moments later with the $228,000.

Lewis, Augustus Evans, then 19, and Kevin Jackson, then 25, were arrested months later and served time for armed robbery. Lewis was also convicted under a federal statute in Truong’s slaying, but that conviction was overturned on appeal.

Stevens, who was sought but never arrested, disappeared.

Then in the late 1980s, a personable man in his 30s applied for work with Atlanta-based Gourmet Services Inc. Energetic and intelligent, the man known as Derrick Anderson moved up quickly in the company, heading cafeteria operations at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta and Hampton University in Hampton, Va., before taking over the food service operations at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore.

FBI Revives Investigation

Earning a salary that enabled him to buy a handsome home overlooking a lake, Anderson catered parties in his spare time, including several for high-ranking members of the Maryland State Police.

The 1983 bank robbery was largely forgotten until the summer of 1999, when FBI Agent Hogan decided to update the investigation by sending wanted posters on Stevens to 56,000 post offices and police departments across the nation.

One of the posters ended up next to the copy machine in the cramped, first-floor offices of the Princess Anne Police Department, where it was noticed by a student from the university. The student said the picture looked a lot like Anderson.

Armed with the poster, Police Chief Russell Pecorero and Det. Scott Keller headed over to the campus cafeteria.

“I’d been thinking the guy we were looking for probably was washing dishes,” Keller said later.

Anderson, who met them in a three-piece suit, studied the poster they had placed on his desk.

“Anderson doesn’t flinch,” Keller said. “He picks it up and says, ‘Now why would anyone think this looks like me?’ ”

Still suspicious, the two officers stepped outside what they thought was the only door to Anderson’s office while waiting for campus police, who had jurisdiction there, to arrive, Keller said.

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

But when the policemen reentered the office, it was empty.

“It turns out there is a back door,” Keller said. “He faked us out of our jocks.”

The van Anderson used to flee Maryland was found later at the airport in Philadelphia, the FBI said. But that was one of the few clues Hogan had to work with.

Patiently, relentlessly, she pursued the people Stevens knew and occasionally contacted. She left the same message with all of them: Tell him to give himself up.

She said that as she waited for him Friday afternoon, he called her by cellular phone from the car heading to Westwood.

He said, “Hi. I’m ready to surrender,’ ” she said. “I said, ‘Thank you, I think you’re doing the right thing.’

“When he stepped out of the car, I shook his hand,” Hogan said. “I said, ‘Hi, I’m Mary Hogan.’ ”