An Enigma Wrapped in a Mysterious Racial Identity

It is tempting to liken him to smoke. He coils in and out of view, his presence an omen of danger. Then he evaporates into a sunlit afternoon, while those left behind wonder what it is they have just seen.

He is, however, the opposite of ghostly. Many have seen this man up close--while he ordered them to the floor, his gun pointed at their heads. Nameless so far, he is considered the most wanted bank robber in California. Eyewitnesses describe him in detail, and bank cameras have captured images of him, yet he remains elusive. Part of the problem is that when people look at him, they don’t agree on what they see.

It is a strange meeting of two Southern California phenomena: There are more bank robberies here than anywhere else in the nation; the population is so multiethnic that race can often be a meaningless descriptor.

The elusive bank robber defies racial categorization. He is that prototype of the future: Multiethnic Man. An amalgam. A little of this, a little of that.

“We’ve had him described as a dark-skinned white male, as a light-skinned African American, as Puerto Rican, as Brazilian and I think we had Middle Eastern,” sighed agent Joseph T. White of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Santa Ana. “You know they all can’t be right.”

Or could they?

“Well, this is California,” White said.

Dubbed the “Kangaroo Bandit” by the FBI because of the knapsack he wears dangling in front, the robber has hit 24 banks in 19 months, including ones in Calabasas, Brentwood, Marina del Rey and Mission Viejo. His racial mutability is not the sole reason he has eluded capture--the bandit does his homework, casing banks carefully before robbing them. But the myriad and inconsistent racial descriptions of him add an intriguing complication to the hunt.

No one seems more aware of his mutability than the Kangaroo Bandit himself. In some robbery photos he has a mustache and beard. In others he is cleanshaven. Sometimes his skin looks fair, sometimes dark. A few tellers have said they believe he had on makeup--particularly dark foundation.

“In reviewing the surveillance photos from the different robberies, it appears he’s making a conscious effort to disguise his race,” said Agent Mark C. Hunter of the FBI’s bank robbery squad in Santa Ana.

What is known: The Kangaroo Bandit is between 25 and 30 years old, stands 5 feet 10 inches to 6 feet tall and weighs about 180 to 200 pounds. He wears long-sleeved shirts buttoned at the cuffs, dark sunglasses and a baseball cap. After a robbery, he has been seen fleeing on foot, but also getting away in a red Toyota Tundra pickup and a black sport utility vehicle--possibly a Lincoln Navigator.

His method is the same. He enters a bank, orders tellers to place money on the counter and then tells everyone to lie down on the floor. He then walks down the teller line scooping the money into his knapsack--it is standard FBI policy not to reveal how much. The bandit has done this in banks in San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

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The case suggests how important race is in identifying people--in a backdoor way, said professor David Wellman, a sociologist at UC Santa Cruz. “When people can’t establish a racial category for this guy they can’t see him; in a sociological sense he’s invisible. “But what makes him interesting is not just that he could be passing--moving between races--but that he’s playing with it.”

The Kangaroo has been written about by newspapers, featured on the news and was even the subject of an “America’s Most Wanted” segment last August. The FBI has offered a $15,000 reward for his capture and, as a result, hundreds of people have called to turn in men of every ethnic hue.

“What is fascinating is that by simply applying foundation, he is able to move from one group of millions of people to another group of millions of people,” said Matt Kelley, publisher of Mavin, a quarterly devoted to interracial issues. “But it especially makes sense in California, where there is so much intermarriage that all of a sudden there is all this racial ambiguity.”

Statewide, a Times analysis of birth certificates conducted last summer found that one in six births in 1998 was to parents of mixed race or ethnicity, up from one in seven in 1989, and the trend is accelerating. In California, multiracial births are now third, behind white and Latino births. Also, although the state accounted for only 13% of all newborn babies nationwide in 1998, it accounted for almost one-quarter of all births to parents of mixed race and ethnicity.

Using race as the only tool to identify someone is the flawed methodology behind practices such as profiling, said Wellman of UC Santa Cruz. Yet the opposite, being colorblind, means ignoring the profound role of race in social, economic and political hierarchies.

Still, using visual racial identifiers is a natural processing method that begins in childhood, Wellman said. “There’s kind of a popular wisdom that classifying people by race is racism, and I don’t subscribe to that. From the time we are very little, we begin to classify things and people. It is how we learn to maneuver our way through the world. We see things as big, small, dark, light, round, square.”

Lawrence Hirschfeld, author of “Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds,” and a professor of anthropological sciences and psychology at the University of Michigan, has conducted numerous studies about race and visualization. “There is tension between what we think is true and what is true, because race is contrived,” he said. “It is actually not an accurate description of biological diversity.”

The sorting process begins early in life, Hirschfeld said, and we first notice gender, then race, then age. “Children organize people into racial categories--and have strong racial biases--by age 3, Hirschfeld said. “The idea that they gradually learn this stuff later turns out not to be the case. At first they’re just not very good at sorting individuals into the right race.

“You don’t start seeing bias until elementary school, and that leads most people to think little Johnny’s colorblind.” Hirschfeld said. “Children just don’t have the ability to sort well before that.”

That people identify the Kangaroo Bandit as a variety of races means they are using the habitual sorting process. “If some people are saying they think he’s white, or they think he’s black, another says he’s Latino and so on, then that’s not saying they don’t know what he is, they are trying to sort someone who can’t be sorted,” Hirschfeld.

The 2000 census is the first in which people were invited to check one or more races. That created 57 new categories reflecting anywhere from two to six races per person. The official acceptance of the multiple-race categories came after years of urging by advocates in the multiracial movement--and strikes at the core of historic American beliefs about human biology.

Murky racial issues aside, the FBI’s job is still to catch the Kangaroo.

“I’m always looking for suspects so what I want to do is to narrow down the number of people I need to look at,” White said. “Sex helps and race helps. We go from the broadest to the most narrow we can get until we catch someone.”

Even those who are multiracial say the new reality can be confusing. “Any mixed person or anyone who has an ambiguous face goes through this all the time,” said Kelley, the publisher of Mavin. “We all just nod and laugh because it’s something that happens every week.” Kelley, whose mother is Korean and father Caucasian, adds that his own mother says he looks Mexican or Filipino. “My own mother,” he said wryly.

A Loud and Aggressive Type of Robber

Patrick Conley, a 14-hour-day kind of agent on both the FBI’s bank robbery squad and SWAT team, is the lead agent on the Kangaroo Bandit case. “I am obsessed with him,” Conley said.

Far from a mysterious figure, he sees the bandit as a violent man who has been difficult to catch--so far. “When he robs a bank, he’s very aggressive, very demanding,” Conley said. “He displays his weapon, is very loud and uses vulgar language--you’re supposed to be afraid.”

Typically a lone robber will slip a note to a teller or ask for money quietly, attracting as little attention as possible and leaving as quickly as possible. Though gangs working together have been known to take over an entire bank, ordering customers, tellers and managers to the floor, it is rare for one person to do so. The odds are against successfully controlling large numbers of people, and it shows a willingness on the Kangaroo Bandit’s part to take high stakes risks.

At the FBI Los Angeles office, the 10-person bank robbery squad keeps a bulletin board of robbers who recently have been released from prison--waiting for them to rob again. Where the bandit has been, Conley and the robbery team follow--often within minutes of each other.

“I go to see a teller who’s in tears and maybe even a month later still can’t talk about it and you can really see the psychological damage that happens. He has caused a lot of harm to a lot of people,” Conley said.

For bank employees and customers, being held up is often a lasting trauma, and in Southern California it is almost an occupational hazard for a bank teller.

Scott Dowds, vice president and manager of an Orange County Farmers & Merchants bank, has been robbed by people with notes and people with guns, by gang members and lone bandits. He has been in three hostage situations. “I’ve had the same robber hold a .45 to the back of my head four days apart,” he said.

When his bank was robbed yet again last summer, Dowds and a teller dashed out the door after the robber. “I’m not some kind of banking Lone Ranger,” Dowds said. “We were just trying to keep him in sight until the police got there.” Which they did--allowing police to make an arrest. The man was later convicted.

For the record, the FBI strenuously opposes civilian pursuit of armed robbers.

As for the Kangaroo Bandit, Conley tries to walk a fine line between enlisting public interest in catching him and glorifying him.

“I don’t want to make him out to be more than he is,” Conley said. “The bottom line is he’s just a robber and he’ll be arrested. I guarantee we’re going to catch him.”