Gang’s Real Theft Was Victims’ Sense of Safety

By the end of 1996, the FBI agents were sure they had their man.

They had phone records linking calls from Doug Daigle’s home to the bank manager’s house in Chattanooga. They had witnesses and informants.

“Give yourself up,” agents Ralph Perrigo and Phil Krumm would tell Daigle when he called, trying to keep him talking. But the con man thrilled in hanging up moments before the calls could be traced.

“You got a warrant for me yet?” he would sneer.

On Dec. 12, 1996, Perrigo and Krumm sat in the U.S. attorney’s office, pleading their case for a warrant yet again. Daigle was blowing a lot of money in Las Vegas, they argued. When his cash ran low, chances were he’d pull off another bank job. They needed to get to him first.

Right then the phone rang.

Another robbery, this one at the First American Bank in Clarksville, 225 miles from Knoxville. This time the gang had hit the jackpot--$851,000.

And this time things had turned uglier. The ringleader had sexually assaulted the bank manager while his accomplice held her husband, child and elderly parents hostage.

We just felt sick, Perrigo said.

But the robbery also gave them a crucial break. The father of the Clarksville bank manager, ailing with Parkinson’s disease and ignored by the gang, had secretly gathered the intruders’ cigarette butts and hidden them. There was a good chance that saliva from the butts could produce DNA linking Daigle’s gang to the crime.

A warrant was issued for Daigle that afternoon.

Perrigo and Krumm raced out of the U.S. attorney’s office and drove to Daigle’s home. Usually, after a bank job, Daigle lay low for a couple of days, making sure the coast was clear.

But this time he knew the FBI was on his trail. This time, agents thought, he might stop home to see his wife, take off and never come back. So they huddled in a neighbor’s yard and waited.

All they saw was Daigle’s son, 18-year-old Gordon, lighting a fire in a trash can behind the trailer. Suddenly an explosion knocked Gordon to the ground. The agents guessed what had happened. Daigle, sensing that his house would be under surveillance, had called and told his son to get rid of bomb materials. Gordon had chucked them into the fire.

“More proof that Daigle was serious when he talked about explosives,” Krumm said.

Through the winter of 1997, the cat-and-mouse game continued. Daigle would call from Mississippi or Florida, taunting Perrigo and Krumm.

“Give yourself up,” investigators said, but Daigle just laughed.

His wife, Capri, became a nervous wreck.

“I had tracking devices on my car,” she would say later. “I was constantly having the FBI over at my house. He was constantly calling, my husband, seeing what had happened.”

On top of it all, Capri claimed to be broke. Daigle, she said, blew the last of the bank money gambling. And so, after one of Daigle’s late-night visits, Capri broke down and told the FBI everything

“I know my actions were wrong,” Capri said in the end. “I just always did what he told me to do.”

But her remorse rang hollow when agents were tipped off on April 16 that Daigle had spent the night. Perrigo stormed into the trailer. He lit into Capri. You could be arrested for harboring a fugitive, he thundered. You’ll do jail time.

Capri sobbed. Her little girl wailed. Her mother tried to calm them down.

And then, in the chaos, Capri’s phone rang. It was Daigle.

Throwing her a warning glance, Perrigo grabbed his cell phone. He called Krumm. Daigle was in the area in a rented blue Ford Taurus, he said. Put out an all-points bulletin.

Even as they closed in, Daigle made one last brazen call.

“Sayonara,” he shouted at Krumm from his car phone. “You will never hear or see from me again.”

He was arrested moments later on Interstate 40, about 100 miles from Knoxville.

“Ah, you got me,” Daigle said, holding out his hands to be cuffed.

That night Daigle confessed to everything, then vowed that nothing would keep him behind bars. Five months later he was dead, strangled by a noose he fashioned out of the wire rim of a notebook. He had outfoxed the system one last time, committing suicide while under suicide watch in prison.

In a letter to Capri, Daigle said it was the best deal he could cut.

For years, John and Trish Farry didn’t talk about their ordeal, not to family, not to each other. They survived without their daughter knowing, and all that mattered was protecting her.

Even now, all the child knows is that her mother’s bank was robbed and no one was hurt.

She knows nothing about how gunmen burst into her home and held her parents hostage while she was sleeping. She knows nothing of her mother’s courage or her father’s terror, or of the taunting phone calls the couple received, telling them it could happen again.

The girl doesn’t know because her parents kept her life as normal as possible. They asked teachers and friends, doctors and dentists, never to talk about the case and to remove newspaper articles if their daughter was present.

Trish went back to work two days after the robbery and still works at the bank, now called AmSouth. Briefly, the couple thought about moving, but Trish was adamant that they stay. To leave, she said, would be to surrender.

So they stay in their home, but it is not the same. There are guns under the bed, a chain-link fence, a dog. The bad memories intrude in other ways, in the fear they feel when a stranger comes to the door, the distrust they never had before.

So many times Trish wondered: Would they ever be rid of the evil of these men?

March 9, 2001. From his front-row seat in court, John Farry watched the three defendants shuffle in. He showed no emotion. He said not a word.

Daigle was dead, and John was only sorry the gangster hadn’t suffered more. But Daigle’s henchmen were there, including John Crisp, the other man who had burst into the Farry home.

(The list of charges for which Crisp had been convicted included bank robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, unlawful transport of firearms, fraud.)

Crisp, a bald, stocky 57-year-old, was in leg irons and an orange prison jumpsuit. He looked as helpless as John had been that September night more than five years ago.

This was the man who had spun the revolver at John’s head, who had sucked the safety out of his home, who had changed forever the way he viewed the world.

John stared at him coldly.

Other victims broke down as they described the damage to their lives, weeping openly about homes that now felt like Alcatraz. John didn’t speak. He and Trish had long ago decided that Daigle and his gang would get no more of their emotions or tears.

When the weeping subsided, Judge Curtis Collier addressed the court.

A man’s home is more than his castle, the judge began, his deep, throaty voice resonating through the wood-paneled room.

“Our homes are much more than the amalgam of wood, stone, bricks and glass,” he said. “Our homes are a refuge from the vicissitudes of everyday life, and a warm and welcome place of safety and security from the demands, concerns, headaches and heartaches of our modern society. But even more than all of that . . . our homes are in a true sense a reflection of our very identity as individuals.”

John leaned forward, listening intently. Finally someone understood.

And what the judge understood was this: that the real crime was more than breaking down a door or breaking into a bank. The real crime involved stealing something more precious than money--a sense of safety from the place where people should feel most safe.

That was the evil behind the crime called “the love connection.” And that, said the judge, was the evil for which these men would pay.

Crisp was the last to be sentenced.

Fifty-two years.

A smile spread across John Farry’s face. He didn’t take his eyes off Crisp as the prisoner was led away in shackles. Fifty-two years.

Silently, John wished him a long, long life.

Postscript:

John Crisp is serving his time.

Albert Nichols was sentenced to 25 1/2 years and still faces extortion charges.

Carlton Smith was sentenced to 15 years and still faces extortion charges.

Capri Daigle pleaded guilty to money-laundering and has yet to be sentenced.

Dena Farmer was not prosecuted.

Ted Roberts’ disappearance remains unsolved.

Agents Ralph Perrigo and Phil Krumm retired. Perrigo recently caught his first snook.

This story is based on interviews with John and Trish Farry and agents in the FBI’s Knoxville Field Office, as well as a review of police reports and trial transcripts.

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The Story So Far

The gang that had terrorized bank managers into robbing their own banks was beginning to crack. The ringleader was on the run. Another member--the one they all thought was most likely to talk--had mysteriously disappeared. FBI agents were turning up the pressure, cornering gang members in parking lots and in their homes, threatening long jail sentences. And the ringleader’s mother-in-law, who knew the whole story, was ready to talk.