Hunter and Hunted: An FBI Agent Sits Down with the Bank Robber He Caught

Summary

SOFREP Radio: "Hunter and Hunted: An FBI Agent Sits Down with the Bank Robber He Caught"

Host: Rad (SOFREP Radio, iHeartPodcasts)
Guests: Shawn Johnson (Retired FBI agent), Stephen Myers (Former bank robber, author)
Date: June 2, 2026
Duration: ~1 hour 26 minutes

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Episode Overview

This gripping episode brings together two men on opposite sides of a dramatic cat-and-mouse game from the 1990s: retired FBI agent Shawn Johnson and Stephen Myers, one of the notorious “Hollywood Bandit” bank robbers. They recount their intertwined stories—how Johnson investigated and ultimately helped capture a highly sophisticated, non-violent robbery crew led by Scott Scurlock ("Hollywood"), the innovative tactics used by both law enforcement and robbers, and how, three decades later, an unlikely friendship sprang from their shared history. The episode delves into criminal psychology, law enforcement strategy, personal transformation, and the strange bond forged by a high-stakes pursuit.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Unusual Reunion—FBI Agent & Bank Robber

• Host Rad sets the stage: “My two guests today have the craziest friendship that you could possibly imagine… It's yin and yang right now, all right, because Steve is a bank robber and was in prison, and Shawn is the FBI agent who caught him.” [03:53]
• Both guests acknowledge the oddity and depth of their connection, reflecting mutual respect for the professionalism each brought to their roles.

2. Shawn Johnson—FBI Career & Approach

• Shawn Johnson recaps his 29 years in the FBI, focusing on violent crime and bank robberies, later also teaching law at Quantico:
  • “I retired 10 years ago, January of 2016 after 29 years of service.” [04:12]
  • On mock trials: “It’s a moot court session… It’s a suppression hearing, not a trial. But I try and get rid of the evidence. Suppress evidence is what my goal is.” [05:08]
• Explains the demands of understanding the criminal mind: “Sometimes you have to put yourself in the web to catch the spider.” [06:11]
• At the time, Seattle was a hotbed: “We had on average about 300 bank robbers a year in Seattle division, which was in the top five in the country…” [13:34]
• Emphasizes switching from reactive to proactive investigations as he tracked the Hollywood crew. [13:55]

3. Stephen Myers—From Crew Member to Author

• Myers describes his background, prison experience, and role in the robberies:
  • “I ended up doing about 15 years, all told.” [07:42]
  • Prison insights: “There’s a lot of upside to prison. Things I took out of there, which I would have never experienced in other outside of prison.” [09:21]
• Explains how he got drawn into the crew by childhood friend Scott Scurlock, providing not muscle, but artistry—using his skills as a sculptor to refine realistic prosthetic disguises. [18:50]
• Highlights critical difference: their robberies were meticulously planned, non-violent, and psychologically calculated:
  • “It’s a psychological game… He would always show his gun, he would holster it… but he never showed fear, was never screaming and yelling.” [20:00]

4. The Craft of Robbery—Professionalism, Planning, & Human Intel

• Myers outlines their division of labor:
  • “Our operation was two of us, me on the outside running electronics and scanners… he was on the bank alone… We had to hire certain situations… they were free from any fallout.” [11:47]
  • On picking banks: “We would always have two or three options of which one we wanted. I would surveil the police routes, scanners… I became familiar with them because it’s a security for us.” [24:23]
• Johnson details how surveillance, minor forensic clues (like tire serial numbers), and patterns (bank location, size, timing) became their linchpin.
  • “Trace them to a tire shop in Tacoma, Washington… after that we were able to install tracking devices…” [15:43]

5. Cat-and-Mouse: FBI Goes Public, The Crew Responds

• Johnson describes how media was used with intent: publishing photos and details in the newspaper forced the crew to notice law enforcement closing in.
  • “At this point, let’s give it a shot… I interviewed with the Seattle paper… [The crew] see the article…” [26:21]
• Myers: “Now we had his face. We had his picture. We knew that there was definitely—they were on. They were working to get us. And so this helped us… it made us a challenge.” [29:28]
• The dynamic became personal—a battle of intellect and patience.

6. Methods of Evasion & Law Enforcement Response

• The robbers used elaborate measures: multiple vehicles, hired intermediaries, deep local surveillance, and “inside” knowledge—sometimes even embedding people in banks.
• Myers on technological escalation:
  • “We had already bought all the transceivers to jam the frequencies of the Seattle police… our cars set up… and then everything changed in Seattle.” [31:57]
• Johnson counters with new tech—tracking devices (Pronet), netting Seattle with electronic traps.
  • “I supervised the installation of these tracking devices in over 60 banks in Seattle, put them in the vaults…” [40:43]
• Both discuss how small lucks of geography and incomplete tech coverage nearly let the crew slip through. [40:43]-[41:46]

7. The Capture & Aftermath

• Myers candidly reviews their missteps—from underestimating $20 bill tracking to the increased complexity of splitting up larger hauls.
  • “Here’s our mistake… if we had only gone for 50s and 100s… we would have never been caught…” [43:44]
• Johnson: “If they had stopped before that last robbery, we probably won’t be talking today.” [44:32]
• The final, tragic confrontation: SPD opened fire on their van, wounding Myers and Mark. Scott Scurlock escaped, later committing suicide.
  • Myers: “The only time… violence… was the SPD when they ambushed us and started shooting in the back of the van… I got shot in both my arms.” [64:10]-[64:59]

8. Reflection & Forgiveness—From Adversaries to Friends

• Johnson and Myers explore the psychological toll and their surprising friendship:
  • “It kind of relates to how we got together, to some degree… 30 years elapsed. And then the Netflix show came out… I got his number through a mutual acquaintance…” [55:00]
• Myers brings his original prison manuscript to Johnson: “He brings this manuscript up, comes to my house… This is totally, totally wild.” [56:37]
• They both describe a bond no one else can really know:
  • Myers: “Not until Sean. We have a connection that nobody else can share in the world… it was a saga, it was a journey, an episode of life.” [73:10]
• Conversation about the importance of second chances and personal growth—a theme reflected in both men’s lives.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the game of pursuit:

  • Rad: “This is cat and mouse, Tom and Jerry, Roadrunner and Coyote. It’s like, well, bro, Sean’s the roadrunner.” [31:00]

• On professionalism and respect:

  • Myers: “He was always embossed in my mind. I always thought him as a good guy… just because he was professional and doing his job.” [58:47]
  • Johnson describing his approach: “This is nothing personal, strictly professional. I’m not judging for what you did. I just want to know why, what happened.” [56:46]

• On tactics and miscalculations:

  • Johnson: “We had funny things. We go to the bank robberies… Scott wore this elaborate facial disguise and so we typically would publish photographs… I had folks calling up, ‘I know this person!’ Well, he’s wearing a disguise!” [17:50]
  • Myers: “Our philosophy was, you abort. You’re not there for harming people… You’re there for one reason and you get out and everybody’s safe.” [20:00]

• Most creative period:

  • Myers: “All my life… I’m an artist. But I have to say, these four and a half years with Scott was the most creative thing I’ve ever in my life done.” [78:59]

• On prison:

  • Myers: “Prison as bad as it can be, it has a very creative side to it, at least it did for me… 2-3% of the population are fantastic humans in there.” [66:57]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [03:53] – Guest introductions; FBI and bank robber, unlikely friendship
• [13:34] – Bank robbery trends and law enforcement strategy in Seattle
• [18:50] – The artistry and science of disguises and psychological strategies
• [24:23] – Surveillance, prepping, and inside knowledge
• [31:57] – Planning the final big score and the impact of countermeasures
• [40:43] – FBI tracking technology, Pronet tags, and near-misses
• [44:32] – If they’d stopped, they’d have escaped; human errors and fate
• [55:00] – Reconnecting 30 years later, transition from hunt to friendship
• [73:10] – Reflections on a unique bond after adversity
• [78:59] – The creativity (and pain) of the criminal experience

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The Book & Netflix Show

• Stephen Myers’ Memoir:
  • The Treehouse: The True Story of Hollywood the Bank Robber
  • Written first as a prison manuscript, now expanded; praised by Johnson for unique insights
• Netflix Documentary:
  • How to Rob a Bank (features their story, but both men feel it misses the full depth and humor)

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Final Thoughts

• Both guests stress that their story is not intended to glorify crime. Instead, it reveals the complexity of human choices and the way redemption or friendship can rise from unlikely places.
• Rad’s closing words: “You can meet different people and have conversations without getting at each other's throats… that’s really important.” [65:17]
• Johnson and Myers convey respect, humility, and the value of learning from life’s wild turns—reminding listeners that even adversaries can, through empathy and time, become friends.

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Additional Resources

• Book: The Treehouse: The True Story of Hollywood the Bank Robber by Stephen Myers
• Netflix: How to Rob a Bank
• SOFREP Book Club: Watch for the addition of The Treehouse to their curated list.

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“Not until Sean. We have a connection that nobody else can share in the world… We went through. It was a saga, it was a journey, an episode of life.”
— Stephen Myers [73:10]

“Sometimes you have to put yourself in the web to catch the spider.”
— Shawn Johnson [06:11]

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This summary captures the unique interplay of law and lawless, the forging of respect through rivalry, and the powerful human capacity for growth and connection.

Transcript

[Rad]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Want to get more work done with less effort. On TikTok. Creators are sharing AI automation tips that save time and deliver better results. Tap to discover. Try TikTok now. Turn someday into Right now with Buddy by Jake Radio. Non stop workout music and expert tips 24 7. Hey. Head over to iheart.com search body by Jake Radio and stream it for free right now. Health and wellness tips 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Remember, stick to the fight when your hardest hit. It's when things seem worse that you must not quit. Don't quit. Body by Jake Radio where hope meets momentum. Search Body by Jake Radio and stream it for free. Have a great day.

[Stephen Myers]

I heart radio.

[Rad]

Brute force. If it doesn't work, you're just not using enough. You're listening to Software Radio, special operations, military news, and straight talk with the guys in the community. Is this thing on? Welcome to another episode of Soft Rep Radio. I am your host, Rad. And today I have a very cool episode for you to listen to and to watch. I got these guys to go on video. This is very big deal, okay? Because what we're going to talk about is some pretty crazy stuff today. But first, before I introduce you to these two guys who you already know because you clicked on the link, but before I introduce you to them, I want to talk about the merch store. We have softrep.com merch and you go to the software.com website, click on the merch tab and check out all the cool stuff that have been designed by the operators behind the scenes here at Soft Rep. And for you, you know, something on your keychain, maybe a little dangly Soft Rep something. Go support us. It keeps the fireplace going right here.

[Stephen Myers]

All right?

[Rad]

It's natural gas. I got to pay for it. So come on now, let's do that. Second, the book club. We love to use a book for your brain. It's a gym. Your mind is a muscle. It grows with knowledge. So please read some books and check out softrep.com book club. That's our book club. We're very proud of it. It's curated again by Brandon Webb and the likes behind the scenes for you because we think that if you like us, you'll like what we read as well. So go check out softrep.com book club. Now, my two guests today have the craziest friendship that you could possibly imagine, okay? But I can already sense it before we even get the show going, that it's real. All Right. And so on the right side of the screen, I have Shawn Johnson, former FBI, retired from the Hollywood bank robbery segment. Seattle district, Wisconsin, Madison Millewauke, Two Rivers, you know, Manitowoc, that whole Wisconsin, Chicago, Sheboygan area. Okay, going after Jimmy Hoffa. And then, and then I'm not going to call him Jimmy Hoffa, but then I got Steve Myers with the popping collar right there sitting right next to Sean. And Steve Myers, you might know from Netflix, he wrote a book called the Tree House, which is the Hollywood robberies that went. Took place. We're going to crack that open right now. And I want to welcome both Steve and Sean to the show. Welcome to the program, gentlemen.

[Stephen Myers]

Thank you, sir. Thank you.

[Shawn Johnson]

Thank you.

[Stephen Myers]

Pleasure to be here.

[Rad]

It's a total pleasure. Okay, first, let's just talk with. Let me ask Sean a couple questions. Sean, you're the federali. You're the FBI? Federal Bureau of Investigations. Love you guys. It's a very interesting time right now to be FBI. And you're. How long ago did you retire from the FBI?

[Shawn Johnson]

I retired 10 years ago, January of 2016 after 29 years of service.

[Rad]

29 years of service. So did you work with Director Comey?

[Shawn Johnson]

He was a director while I was working. Yes, I. My first director was, well, Louis free during the 90s when this was all going down. Lee Free was a director.

[Rad]

Oh, Lou. Okay.

[Shawn Johnson]

I joined the Bureau in 1987 as William Steele Sessions was the director at that point in time.

[Rad]

Okay.

[Shawn Johnson]

After that was Mueller and after that was Comey, and then of course Director Ray and now Cash Patel. But I've been retired now 10 years, of course.

[Rad]

And you're still advising with your classroom schoolhouse, right? You have your own. Go ahead.

[Shawn Johnson]

I have my own business, a contract with the government, teaching onboard agents, human intelligence operations and also teach at the Academy. I'm an attorney, don't hold that against me. But I teach at the Academy for their court sessions. I actually portray a criminal defense attorney at Quantico.

[Rad]

Oh, is that right? So you'll go in. Are these mock trials?

[Shawn Johnson]

Mock trials, yeah. It's a moot court session and have cross examined the agents on their operations as they do the scenario through the training of 20 weeks up there. So at the culmination that they have the court session and then it's a suppression hearing, not a trial. But I try and get rid of the evidence. Suppress evidence is what my goal is.

[Stephen Myers]

Sure.

[Rad]

Try to try to hide it, like get it, like they got to try to figure it out. I love that, actually. So When I went through high school, I did this whole test on what I should be when I grow up, right? A 500 question test. It's like either a lawyer, law enforcement, or an actor.

[Shawn Johnson]

There's a bit of acting involved in all that.

[Rad]

You know, I was like, if you saluted someone and gotten away with it or told your mom a story and got away with it, you should probably be an actor. So here you are, you're in the courtroom, you get to use some acting chops. You get to use your law degree. You get to use your. You get to, like, be the. You're slippery. You're trying to be slippery.

[Shawn Johnson]

That's. That's the job.

[Rad]

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes you have to put yourself in the web to catch the spider, you know, like. Or some. Some analogy, like, where you have to be entwined. I've talked to other people who have gone undercover, and they basically had to become like, the guy that found the Russian FBI agent inside of the FBI and he became his intern, really the agent. I interviewed him, and he's the reason why that guy got busted. But he had become kind of that guy. He had to work with him and get him to tell him all these different things and get him promoted and, like, tell him all these things and follow through with some of those acts. And so, I mean, you know, being in the FBI, you know, that. That can be. Go both ways. Like, you're saying you're learning, you know, how to be kind of in the mind of. Of a criminal.

[Shawn Johnson]

Right? That's what I tried to do. This case get in the mind of Scott Scurlock.

[Rad]

So Steve here. Steve, you guys may not. Okay, it's yin and yang right now, all right, Because Steve is a bank robber and was in prison. And how long ago did you get out of prison for the bank robbery?

[Stephen Myers]

How long? How many years I was given.

[Rad]

Well, how many. How long ago did you just get out? How long ago have you been out?

[Stephen Myers]

10 years ago. About 10 years ago.

[Rad]

And how much time were you given for your crime?

[Stephen Myers]

Oh, it was initially a 21 year sentence. And then, you know, because of certain circumstances in prison, you get time off for this. You get. There's different things you do. I ended up doing about 15 years, all told.

[Rad]

15 years. And was any of that ever like, lock them up in solitary confinement Alcatraz style, or were you pretty much a good.

[Stephen Myers]

There was a few times that I got in altercations and I. I was in the hole and. Yeah, I mean, I. One was a beautiful one. I wanted to get out of that one federal prison to be transferred somewhere else. And it's not easy to get transferred. You have to have special circumstances. And there was an event that took place and I got put in the hole and I finally got transferred. So, you know, that was advantageous to me.

[Rad]

My goodness. What, what facilities did you go to? What was the first one that you went to?

[Stephen Myers]

I started out in Sheridan, Oregon, which was, I, I wanted to be there. It was a very, very, very good prison actually.

[Shawn Johnson]

I mean as prisons go, I mean

[Stephen Myers]

really, it's hard to explain, but it was a medium high. And when the federal prison system has categories, they have like supermax and they have the high mediums and then they have lows and they have camps and medical facilities. You know, there's a lot of variations going on, but in my experience, the higher the prison level, the better it is. You have more professional, more sane people. The lower you go, you have more riff raff, more everyday, you know, gang bangers, drug on both sides.

[Rad]

Right, both sides. The people working it and the people in it, they're both.

[Stephen Myers]

It's kind of like, you know, it depends, you know. Yeah, is like a lot of the, you know, when one prison I was at was in Arkansas, remember, and a lot of the guards, it was in a rural area. A lot of the guards were cousins and friends of the prisoners. So it's all family. It was like a, it was like a sex pool.

[Rad]

It's like who's who. You have blue eyes, I have blue eyes. We all have blue eyes.

[Stephen Myers]

You know, the game is a game, but you have to understand it's an ugly situation. But there's a lot of upside to prison. Things I took out of there, which I would have never experienced in other outside of prison. Does that make sense?

[Rad]

Before I get into why you got into prison, was there something while you were in prison that said, oh, I should have like maybe just joined the military.

[Stephen Myers]

My operation is bank robbery. Was Scott and I, that was our military. I was a Vietnam, I was a Vietnam draft, I never went to Vietnam. But. And that's a whole nother story itself, but I never had a problem with military, but I had a problem putting my life up for politicians that had no right to ask me to go die for them for their cause. Do you see what I'm saying?

[Rad]

I do, yeah. You're a conscious objector is what we called it.

[Stephen Myers]

But I would fight in a minute. I. One of my cellies was ex army ranger and I asked him during that time, the years that I was there. I said, in my condition the way I am, would I be able. He said, you would make the Rangers very easily. And you know, a lot of things I would fight for, you know, for this country, sure. But you have to, to me, I have to have a very clear understanding in the way the political spectrum is, has been in the last years. It's just since Vietnam. To me it's, it's crazy.

[Rad]

Muddy waters.

[Stephen Myers]

None of them are on the field.

[Rad]

Yeah, right.

[Stephen Myers]

There's no patent anymore.

[Rad]

Well, yeah. Where's their sons and daughters enlisting? You know what I'm saying?

[Stephen Myers]

They love the, you know, they love to talk the talk, but when it comes down to action. No, they don't.

[Rad]

Well, Joe Biden, though, let's just give him some credit. President Biden's son, he totally was a captain in the army. He's of, you know, he went and served and you know, and so respect to that right there. For a president of United States, having a son in combat and in the military, that's a big deal.

[Stephen Myers]

It does mean something. I agree with that, you know. You know, so you can't just sort of a white, white slate and say everything is like that. You know, it's variations. But no, our operation, the way we performed our work in bank robbery was kind of like a military undertaking. It was a sort of sacrificial thing because once you step into that world, you're no longer in this world and

[Rad]

you're plotting and you have, you know, timelines and you have probably a captain and you probably have soldiers, foot soldiers. You probably have, you know, people that are mechanized, that drive, you know, there's, there's.

[Stephen Myers]

We minimize as much. It was basically the two of us that we had to hire. Like, yeah, we had to hire certain situations. We would have to hire people to do certain things that were non committed, committable for them. I mean, they were free from any, any fallout, you know, but still we hired them and paid them to do what we needed because we couldn't control all aspects all of the time by ourselves, the two of us. But basically our operation was two of us, me on the outside running electronics and scanners and radios, communication with him and you know, being able to visually see in routes and out routes of police and pro. And you know, he was on the bank alone. So imagine having the safety. You could be in there for a half a day as long as there was never a call out if need be. So having that security is so Sean.

[Rad]

Sean's FBI. Okay, so Sean is stationed in like Seattle.

[Stephen Myers]

Right.

[Rad]

Is that my understanding or. Washington area.

[Shawn Johnson]

I was there for 11 years. 87 till 98.

[Rad]

And then you got into the Hollywood scene.

[Shawn Johnson]

Yes, I became the case agent of this investigation about nine robberies into their spree.

[Rad]

So there was already nine robberies?

[Shawn Johnson]

Yes.

[Rad]

You're trying to figure out where the tan line goes on them when they're pulling them down. I'm referencing Point Break. Okay. So essentially these guys, he's like Bodhi Zephyr in Point Break and you're Johnny Utah.

[Shawn Johnson]

There you go.

[Rad]

I don't know if you've seen the movie with Keanu Reeves, but. Okay. And these guys have already done 9, 9 commissioned acts of robbery and now you're pulled in.

[Shawn Johnson]

Yeah, it was about a year, seven months into their four and a half year operation when I became the lead investigator.

[Rad]

And so what makes you so good?

[Shawn Johnson]

So we had on average about 300 bank robbers a year in Seattle division, which was in the top five in the country for field offices.

[Rad]

I'm blown away. That's a lot.

[Shawn Johnson]

A record year was 320. Wow. Top five. LA was the. We call the bank robbery capital was LA. They had a thousand plus every year.

[Rad]

That's amazing. I didn't even think those numbers, but.

[Shawn Johnson]

So we had a lot to deal with. Right. And most of our bank robbers were. They'd go into the demand note or just a verbal demand, and their disguise at the most was a baseball cap and sunglasses and that was it. They got maybe a thousand dollars, if they're lucky, out of the teller drawer. And sooner or later, after a couple robberies, we'd catch them. Because a lot of those guys were just doing it for drug money. They get. Go in, get money, buy the drugs, come back for more. And they weren't professional, they didn't plan. They just randomly walked by a bank. You know, I'll go in here and get some money. Right. So most of our arbors were those types of folks. But early on in, in Hollywood's career, it was typical bank robbery. It wasn't anything exceptional. And that's why at a point, about five robberies in, they started, you know, going into doing takeovers, going to the vaults and extra money. By the sixth robbery, they were getting a quarter million dollars. So my situation was I'm looking at this entire investigation up to the point I became the case agent and going, it's reactive, it's reactive, it's reactive. We're not going to catch these guys just being reactive. We have to be proactive. We have Come up with a strategy to put in place to catch them and to hopefully utilize the clues that the few that they left to come up with a plan here. And that's where it all evolved up until the last robbery was the planning, the strategic operations, the cooperation with local and other federal law enforcement. Again, that was all my responsibility to put in place. So it was a process over a year or two that we were actually point where now we were in a position that we could actually be successful in this operation.

[Rad]

What was some of the main evidence that just kind of gave you the lead sniffing dog on the trail, the scent, like, what was it that they didn't tidy up?

[Shawn Johnson]

Well, they tidied up most things. That was the problem. But we recovered two vehicles during the course of this that they had purchased for cash about two months in advance of the robberies. Found out that those vehicles are purchased in Tacoma, Washington, Kent, Washington, south of Seattle. So I knew at least two months in advance that at least one of this crew was operating in the area to make buy vehicles. Now, we didn't know at the time that they'd actually hired folks to buy the vehicles, but we knew that the first vehicle recovered, I brought the owner up and had him look at the car, and they had purchased for cash and nothing, nothing to follow up on. The second vehicle we recovered was another station wagon. And I brought the owner up to see that. They said, anything about this vehicle that's different from when you sold it two months ago? He said, those are not the tires that were on that car when I sold it. Those are new tires. So with that, people may not know, but there's serial numbers on tires. You can trace where those tires came from. Trace them to a tire shop in Tacoma, Washington. So again, this was about two months in advance. Wow. Hopefully they had, you know, paid in a check or something. Of course they paid cash. Right. But at that point, I knew we had folks operating there, buying cars, buying tires. So that was the first thing we had going for us was those vehicles. After that, of course, we were able to install the tracking devices, which we'll get into in a minute. And then my analysis of all the robberies, up to a point where I looked at the banks, the location of the banks, the size of the banks, the. The neighborhoods, the roadways, day of the week they rob, the time of the day, the weather conditions, how much money they're going through each month. So that's what I put into plan. You know, eventually that ended up on Thanksgiving 96. So it was. It Was a process.

[Rad]

Wild.

[Shawn Johnson]

It was a learning curve for me, but it's also a learning curve for, for these guys too, right. They're perfecting their craft as these robberies went on, the years and went on, you know, so we had to step up our game because they were stepping up their game.

[Rad]

Right. And I mean, that's wild. So you just really just like, hey, what's different about your vehicle? Anything at all? And they're like, well, those aren't the tires. I mean, that's something simple like that, that's, that's. Is that considered human intelligence? Yeah.

[Shawn Johnson]

I mean, we had funny things. We go to the bank robberies, right? And of course, Scott wore this elaborate facial disguise, guys. And so we typically would publish photographs, the surveillance photos from the banks in the paper every week, Thursday entertainment section, hoping somebody would call. And I know this guy, I know this guy. Right. Most of those were folks that didn't wear a disguise. So that was easy. But I thought, what the hell? I mean, I gotta make this work. So I went to the papers and put photographs of Scott in the paper. Of course he's wearing this, this makeup and disguise.

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah.

[Shawn Johnson]

You know, and I had folks calling up, I know this person. I know this person. Well, how do you know this person? Well, I know he looks just like that. I said, no, no, no, he doesn't look like that. He's wearing disguise. So no, that's not going to help. You know, every, every little thing we could do, you know, no matter how, you know, potentially successful it was. I had to try. I had to try everything possible now.

[Rad]

Now, Stephen.

[Stephen Myers]

Yes.

[Rad]

Not. Not Scott. Who's Scott?

[Stephen Myers]

Scott's dead. Scott was Hollywood. Scott is Hollywood. He is the actual creator of everything. And we had been friends long before he started robbing banks. And then I was in Chicago at the time and he came in and he recruited me. He wanted me to do his pro. I was a sculptor. I'm a sculptor all my life. Of course you are. Yeah. And so he wanted me to help make his prosthetics, refine them and make them better for his disguise for banks. Because he's his, you know, he. He studied bank robbery after he got out of a previous business and he

[Rad]

turn someday into Right now with Buddy by Jake Radio Non stop workout music and expert tips 24 7. Hey, head over to iheart.com search body by Jake radio and stream it for free right now.

[Stephen Myers]

Awesome.

[Rad]

Health and wellness tips 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Remember, stick to the fight when your hardest hit it's when things seem worse that you must not quit. Don't quit. Body by Jake Radio where hope meets momentum. Search Body by Jake Radio and stream it for free. Have a great day.

[Stephen Myers]

Always wanted to be a bank robbery said and he'd studied case files from the FBI journals and, and you know, found out failures, successes and he knew that the main thing was to be able to go into a bank. And if you go in with a mask and you go in like you're already, you're done, the game's over with. The only way to do it is to do it as you are in there, calmly, openly and you can't see who the person is and it's a psycho. It's a psychological game. It's a psychological thing. It's not what Hollywood portrays where you go in and you jump up on desk and like wave guns. It's just not, it's all fake. It's all fake and it's in my mind. Back in the day I used to say, man, they're doing this so that bank robbers do this so they're easy, easily catchable and psychologically the public feels they're being protected by the police that always apprehend them. It's not that way the bank. It's a, it's a psychological game because he would go in and he learned it. His technique was you go in there, he would always show his gun, he would holster it, make sure everybody was demand. But he never showed fear, he was never screaming and yelling. And this brings more authority to the people working in the banks because they feel like this person knows what he's doing and I better, you know, he's not some crazed out, you react because you don't want any violence. It's because he understands what's happening and it's a calm thing. And his, his philosophy was if there ever happens to be a, a police officer in there, you know, that, you know, that's dressed normally or just some ex military whatever is not going to take that for a day and you know, he comes out with a gun, then what are you going to do? You, you know what, what's your point? If you go in screaming and yelling and somebody, you know, confronts you, then what are you going to do? You're going to sit there and, but if you go in calmly and, and do this and then if there's a problem. Our philosophy was you abort. There's no, you're not there for harming people. You're not there to get into violent behavior, to show your macho. You're there for one reason and you get out and everybody's safe. And so this was his operation and it sophisticated and became more and more. And then the prosthetics, which was an interesting psychological thing and there has been a lot of newsreels after the fact that tellers would say, you know, this man comes up to me and you see that, you know, there's this face and then you think he has a skin disease. And then so you don't want to look at him because you don't want to embarrass him. And then you see that it's not really his face and there's somebody behind that. And they're like a few times I saw on the news, on the Seattle news after a robbery, they're almost happy because he was nice, you know, not nice in a way, like goofy nice, but respectful.

[Shawn Johnson]

And yeah, he, he had three different c first banks. Three times each.

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah.

[Shawn Johnson]

So by the third time he came back, they all knew him.

[Stephen Myers]

They knew him.

[Shawn Johnson]

Hollywood's back.

[Stephen Myers]

And they would put up, they would put up, you know, glass, you know, plastic glass, bulletproof glass. He says, oh, you think that's going to stop me? And he'd hop up and jump over and get over or you know, call the teller's name, come over and unlock the door so I can go to the vault. And they would do it. Everything was, oh, became obedient. And that's why we never, I mean we surveilled other, other cities. San Francisco and obviously we did a couple in Portland and then, you know, he wanted Chicago. But all of these cities, it takes so much time and money and forensic cover up. Logistics, logistics to start over again.

[Rad]

Really.

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah, yeah. You know, and you in Seattle is such an environment, I mean political environment as well, made it easier. And then you have the terrain, the trees, the rain, the snow, the chaos, the hills. And it's just very easy to. In the way that they created banks and in neighborhoods that had residential combined with commercial areas. So the banks in those areas were always filled with money.

[Shawn Johnson]

They're building new banks, building grocery stores, spending hours into weekends. So it was a target rich environment.

[Stephen Myers]

So all of the, all of the establishments in that area would probably put their money in those banks. Yeah, yeah. And you know, well, that's what the

[Rad]

banks are hoping too. It's like, hey, it's a booming area. They're like, hey, looks.

[Stephen Myers]

Yes, yes. And so, you know, my job, my job was I did all the surveillance, you know, prepping for the Banks we'd always had before we did one, we would always have two or three options of which one we wanted. And that was his decision in the end. And I would surveil the police routes, their ends, their outskirts. The I would have the scanners. I would know the cops that were the police that were in that area, wherever it was of that district of Seattle. I knew their names, their Charlie One, their Edward, their Nora, whatever they may have been. I knew the voices of the dispatch at different times of the day. I became familiar with them because it's a security for us. It's a familiarity.

[Rad]

You just didn't know. You just didn't know. Shawn Johnson, we knew. This is. Your scanner was not scanning for Shawn Johnson, bro.

[Stephen Myers]

This is the beauty of. This is the beauty. Scott was obsessed with. Obsessed and respected the FBI, CIA, Mossad, all of that. He studied them. He respected the FBI. We had no knowledge of spd. I don't want. It was easy in the sense, not because of failure on their part, just because they have routines.

[Shawn Johnson]

Their job is to be reactive.

[Stephen Myers]

Reactive. And they have their patrols, they have their ins and outs that you can monitor them. And it's easy to use them for our purpose and avoid them when we need to avoid them. Whereas the FBI, we had no knowledge and we wanted it. We wanted their frequencies. But the only way to get them is to go to some special place, some special electronics place, and then you're going to be suspect. Why are you asking?

[Shawn Johnson]

Frequencies?

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah. What do you want FBI frequency for?

[Rad]

Right. You know, exactly.

[Stephen Myers]

And we never had that, but we were always behind our head. They were there. And those were the ones that. I wouldn't say paranoia, but we were the one. Those were the ones that made us reactive as far as evidentiary. Leaving things for them, not leaving things, making sure that people who bought cars were not us, that we would pay people to go do what we needed. So there was no trace back to anything.

[Shawn Johnson]

So speaking of the proactive approach, like I said, just after I became case agent, typically we didn't use the media very much because you couldn't trust the media to actually tell what we needed him to tell out. So it was close to the health. So I figured at this point, let's give it a shot. So I interviewed with the Seattle paper and they came up with a two page article. I was picturing me on the article. Picture of the surveillance photographs in back of me, all from the bank robberies and other agents standing with me. It was just a litany of everything going on. So I figured, you know, somebody may see this and have some information. At the conclusion of that article, it mentioned that one of the perpetrators, one of the subjects may be named Mark. His name may be Mark. And of course that happened because the first robbery that Scott. Mark did, Scott actually used Mark's name in the bank. So they overheard that. Anyway, so he gets in the article, it's published, and then these guys see

[Stephen Myers]

the article every day. When I was, when I would be in. When we were preparing for a bank robbery, we would always buy all the newspapers. You didn't have Internet back then, so you buy all the local newspapers, Seattle newspapers, Portland, because it was in Olympia where we were living. And I went out. He was in the tree house in the back of the property. It was a 20 acre lot. I was living in the front cottage up by the road. And I went out and I bought coffee and newspapers and I was reading, having coffee and reading the newspaper. It was the Seattle Intelligence, it's a major newspaper up there. And I think the second page, I opened it up and there was this photograph of Sean leaning up against his desk with the clipboard behind him with all the photographs of Hollywood. And you know, I can't remember the title, but something Hollywood, Hollywood Bandit. And I started reading. It was a two page article, a full page, you know, and I'm reading this, and I'm reading this. In the very end, it comes the word. And it might have been an accomplice called Mark. And Mark, who was the first, you know, Scott's friend and who was the first one to. Before I got involved his first bank and it was debacle, everything went wrong. But Mark is a big man. He's six four, very deep voice, very. He's known around town.

[Rad]

Hard to miss.

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah, it's hard to miss the man. I mean, you know, he was a drinker, a smoke, you know, heavy, heavy guy with, you know, not drug addict. He was never that, but he was, was that world back then for those, for him. And I, you know, I, I was like furious. First of all, Scott never told me that he blurted his name out incoherent, you know, accidentally. And I laid out the. I was in the. There was a. The back door. It was a sort of an entrance, a foyer you come into. And I opened the page up, open the newspaper, laid it on, lay it on the floor with Hollywood and Shawn Johnson's picture and. And he comes in from the treehouse, walks up through the forest, through the treehouse to come up, you know, in the morning and he sees that and he's just like, oh, whoa. You know, he says, what do you. What if somebody came in? I said, yeah, you came in. You know, and this is when we first. We'd always had not apprehension, but we wanted to know the FBI. And here he was. Here's the man.

[Shawn Johnson]

Here's my picture in the paper.

[Stephen Myers]

So now. Now we. Yeah, his picture. Now we have. Now we know who's. Who's. We are confronting, who are who our problem is who we have to be aware of. And it became very personal for us then. Not in an antigonicity. It was like he almost became part of our crew. He almost became part of our.

[Rad]

I was gonna say he's Elliot Ness, but no, no, no, no, no, no. He's Shawn Johnson.

[Stephen Myers]

He's Sean Johnson. Yes, exactly.

[Rad]

He's his own. He's in that. He's in that tier. You know what I'm saying? The Dick Tracy, you know, And I think coming at you.

[Shawn Johnson]

And I was even the show out there. And I said, you know, I knew. I think I know who they are. That's what I'm trying to find out. I want them to know who I am. Yeah, I want them to. I am. I'm out there too.

[Stephen Myers]

And so. And so now we had his face. We had his picture. We knew that there was definitely. They were on. They were working to get us. And so this helped us. Not in a. I mean, not in an egotistical way, but solidified us. It made us. It made us a challenge. But there was no. Like, we had him. Scott, after about a week of the. After a week or two weeks after that, he hired somebody to do surveillance on Sean for about two weeks to get some sort of smut or anything that might. We might be able to use in the future if need be. Nothing ever came of it. It was like, perfect.

[Shawn Johnson]

Clean home, went to work. Back home, went to work.

[Rad]

Yeah, you know, I would have stopped. I would have said, hey, you know, Hollywood, look, you know, we could probably just walk away from this right now, but it seems like you guys were like, challenge accepted. I'm not trying to justify and glorify what you did as a good thing. It's just like you guys were like, oh, well, okay. Cat and mouse, Tom and Jerry, Roadrunner and coyote. It's like, well, bro, Sean's the roadrunner.

[Stephen Myers]

Like that. It became more professional. It became more intimate. And once you step into that world, we had a goal. Our goal was to take down three banks in one night, one afternoon. And you Know, Retrieve, you know, we had inside. We hired people to work in the bank for us. So we knew when deliveries. I followed the armor car deliveries. We knew the banks that would contain the most money. And we had this set up. We were planning it two years in advance, and we were going to do three in one evening and, you know, retrieve 15 to $20 million, you know, depending on the banks, which we.

[Shawn Johnson]

One big last home.

[Stephen Myers]

One big last home. That was it. And that was our goal. That was Scott's goal, and it was my goal. And it was like, okay, we're going to do it. We. We'd already bought all of the transceivers to jam the frequencies of the Seattle police frequencies. We had mobile units. We had our cars set up every. And then everything changed in Seattle.

[Shawn Johnson]

And what do I think about that article? That's the first time we made public the name Hollywood because. Oh, yeah, we typically. If you didn't know the person who he was, we'd come up with a nickname like the Polite Bandit or the. A Cowboy Bandit or something. So came up with the name Hollywood because of the makeup. So that was publicized in the same article. And then Scott found about his nickname.

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah. And Scott, tell me, whatever we do, don't ever mention it offhandedly. Don't even. We don't even say it when we're together alone, because I don't want it to slip out accidentally sometime. I mean, I loved it. He loved it. It was perfect. And I mean, when I. When he hit. When I saw that and I knew he created that. So this man's. He's good. I like him. You know, he's really.

[Rad]

You don't get to choose your nicknames in life. Usually they show up on you like, you got a guy named Spills, you got a guy named. Guy named Puddles. You don't want to know. You know, and just because my name is Rad, but it's my Miss, my last name Butchered, and everybody called Rattle, and it's Radl. So I didn't, like, choose Rad. It just comes through my life. And here he's getting Hollywood, and it kind of goes up here a little bit, but it's for a different reason. It's because he's. That's not. Yeah, you don't get to choose your nicknames.

[Stephen Myers]

He honed in on who this man was, and it's. It was a perfect. I mean, Hollywood's used a lot, but I get it. Context. This was so perfect. And, you know, it wasn't just the. The Prosthetic, facial, disguise and makeup. It was. I. Depending on the weather and the time of the year, I would buy the. His. His clothes would be different. One thing, you know, one time would be one thing and another time would be another one. In the winter of Seattle, we make him look like a lumberjack with a big wardrobe changes. Yeah. Rough and ready, you know, and another one. We make him look like on the book cover. On my book cover. It's the mafia. It was in the summer. So you can't dress up in Parkers. You have to have. And he had his. He had his radio, he had a scanner. He had not a scanner, he had his radio, he had his gun, he had his taser and you know, so you have to cover all that.

[Rad]

I would have a scanner. Growing up, my dad was a Green Beret here in Utah. And so I remember every night going to bed, listening to like the Layton City Police Department doing all of their, like, hey, meet me for a 1010 over here at 7 11, whatever.

[Stephen Myers]

You know, if you're in controlling a bank, you don't want a scanner going

[Rad]

or 10, 10 NCIC, you know, like, you know, no federal, no, no, no Internet, no warrants or anything. So I, I get having a scanner and my dad back then, he had a book this thick, probably like 2, 3 inches. And we would just open it up. It was all the different frequencies. Exactly. All the freaks, you know, and you can thank the Internet for that. Back in the day, like early 90s.

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah.

[Rad]

Late late 80s.

[Stephen Myers]

That was our. That on the last robbery. I mean, I'm jumping ahead of it, but that when I came back for the last robbery, which we were going to do three and I went up to start, you know, doing surveillance, you know, after being away from Seattle for some time.

[Rad]

What year was that?

[Stephen Myers]

It was in 96. Right. Two months before. Two and a half months. Three months before Thanksgiving. So we were preparing for the last big haul, the last big operation, and that was the three banks. And then I went up to start doing scanning and setting my, you know, sending the scanner up and the radios and everything, and I would be there up all day long, driving around, doing. Following police, following armored cars. But when I went up there and set the scanner up to the frequencies that I'd had for all those years, which were always the same thing, they weren't working. Nothing worked. They were gone, they were done. And I go back to Limpy and I say, man, we got a problem here. You know, there's no. The frequencies no longer function. So I Called an electronic operation up there and asked them. I said, I'm trying to scan the fire department, and I can't pick up the frequencies like they used to be. Oh, well, they changed the system to a trunk system in Seattle, which means they have. The police have, like, 25 or 30 channels, and they just keep randomly going. So they never get caught up in one channel if there's another, you know, so this was a problem. You couldn't. For us to do this robbery, there was no way we could do three. And plus, we knew they had the PRONET tags in there, so we had that problem. And we couldn't do three in a row not having resolved the Pro Net problem. You know how we get, you know, divert those. And then we had the scanner problem. We had the frequency problem. So we were dealing with two different things. And that's how after that, we aborted the three. And we had a bank that we wanted to do years prior was in way north Seattle, but it was too big for Scott at the time to do it alone. This was like, in the beginning, but we'd always had it in the back burner that it was like a beautiful bank to do. And I said, well, let's do the one we did in north. Let's go back to that. We saw it some years before, and it was big enough that we knew there would be quite a lot of money in there and, you know, millions, up to five or so million. And he said, okay, let's check it out. We started doing surveillance and all of that. And then, you know, I finally. What we had to do was to determine to get over these problems of the PRONET tags and the scanner of the frequencies. We robbed a little bank that we'd done years before in the same area. And so our purpose was not for the money, but for to retrieve the Pro Net tags to see how they have them in the money, where they're at, their response. And what we did was we disguised Scott. We no longer went in with his prosthetics. We put a ski mask on like a normal bank robber would do, and so that the response wouldn't be toward Hollywood, because we knew at that time there was a whole task force involved. And, you know, Hollywood was, you know, that.

[Rad]

Did that throw you off the set, Sean? Were you like, oh, it's a ski mask. It's not him.

[Shawn Johnson]

At the time when that robbery happened, we had no idea it was connected to Hollywood at all, just because of the disguise. And he wasn't going in vaults. He just went in and got teller money. So, yeah, it didn't fit the MO at all. So we had no idea. This was a week, this was a week before the last robbery.

[Rad]

The traits just weren't there from the previous.

[Stephen Myers]

There was nothing different, There was nothing identifiable. That was our purpose. And so my purpose was to. To lock in the frequency that the call came out to through the police, which I got because they called the police and I had this.

[Rad]

And it freezes on that frequency.

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah. And I logged it into the scanner that was there. And then plus we got into the van, we did a rendezvous, we got into my van and Scott went through the money. It wasn't a huge volume, it was only about 30,000 or so. And so he went through and within five minutes he got rid of three pro knit tags. We threw them out and it was, it, it was easy. So we said, okay, I think if we hire Mark to work with us because it's going to be a lot larger volume and we train him to tell him where they are, the Pronet tags, then we'll get through them and we'll achieve our thing.

[Rad]

Is a prone tag what I would consider like a die pack or something like that.

[Shawn Johnson]

So as far as security measures, we had back then, of course, you had surveillance cameras in the banks, right? Sometimes it works, sometimes it didn't. Sometimes there wasn't any film in them. So it didn't work in the 35 millimeter. So we had to get them developed. Some had video. We had bait bills which are pre recorded serial twenties or tens, whatever that we could trace back particular bank. We had die packs that would activate once they walked out the door as a timer device. So then they'd explode. Red dye, CS gas would ruin everything. And Scott actually got one of those in a robbery, so he knew die packs. But then at some point in time, I started working with a company out of Texas called Pronet, and they were manufacturing these tracking devices. So this is, this is fantastic. This is something that they wouldn't know about. Right, right. So I supervised the installation of these tracking devices in over 60 banks in Seattle, put them in the vaults, and one of the things I did with that was he had gotten a die pack before. So I purposely set a die pack next to the box of money that had the Pronet tags and thinking his attention would be diverted to the die pack. Oh, I'm not taking that. Take this box of money. Right. So again, 60 banks. We had a lot more than that in Seattle. So the, I don't know, the funny Thing is, but the. The bank they hit at Lake City branch that last time, that was as far north as it had gone with these tracking devices. If they had gone two blocks north of that, they would not have not gotten these tracking devices because you hadn't

[Rad]

gone that far up to.

[Shawn Johnson]

We didn't have enough equipment.

[Rad]

Yeah, you're trying to, like, put a net out of like, hey, I'm gonna put some. Some bait over here, some over here. Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, well, amazing work. I mean, today we call those, like air pods. I mean, air tags, they have these tracking devices, but triangulation, yes.

[Stephen Myers]

Trackers.

[Rad]

Yeah. You know, well, the world's changing and evolving from what you guys were. Vietnam, raised up in the 80s. You know, the lights go on, you go home at night, you know, as a kid, jumping your bike off a piece of wood with a, you know, for a jump out front on the sidewalk. Yeah, right. All of those things were starting to change with these electronics and the Internet,

[Stephen Myers]

it was on the borderline.

[Rad]

Yeah.

[Shawn Johnson]

These operated. These operated radio frequencies. So we had towers throughout the city and we had monitoring devices in our. In our vehicles. SPD did that, would, you know, hit on certain towers hot and cold, and the bars would raise up and, you know, closer you got to the target to the tag, it start whining right in front of you.

[Stephen Myers]

So, you know, our goal was to take. Retrieve a tag, throw it out. You throw it out of the car, and then we're gone. You know, we're running, driving the whole time. So they're going to focus on the triangulation of the car. The vehicle that's tracking us is going to focus on that steady reception tone. And we're going off. Even if there's other tracers, even if we have other pro. Net tags, they're going to be concentrating on that one that's solidified. And then they got to get out and they got to deactivate it.

[Shawn Johnson]

And they found one. That last driver they threw.

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah, we got one, but they missed one. They missed one. And in my. In my subjective, honest opinion, I think it was Mark Biggins, the one we hired to come in, the big guy who missed it. I mean, I don't blame him. It's just that, you know, Scott had done it four days before and gotten three out in five minutes without a hitch.

[Shawn Johnson]

But it wasn't.

[Stephen Myers]

You see what I mean? Whereas.

[Shawn Johnson]

But they didn't have to look through a million dollars.

[Stephen Myers]

But there wasn't a million dollars.

[Rad]

That was what I was going to say, because that's Got to weigh some weight. You know, when I am watching Point Break and he does say, go to the vault. He's like, but we never hit the vault. And he's like, go to the vault. And then they like, got to get that money and put it in the bags. And that's heavy, right?

[Stephen Myers]

I mean, yeah, it was a. It was over. That was one reason why we wanted Biggins, Mark, is because he's a strong guy and he's six four and he slang. The slung that bag up over his shoulder to leave. You know what I mean?

[Shawn Johnson]

Yeah.

[Stephen Myers]

It was about over £80, I think something. And you know, I mean, you know, 80 pounds, we all can lift it and do it, but for how long? You have to get to the vehicle. You have to. You know what I mean? There's logistics.

[Rad]

You got to get it in the back seat.

[Stephen Myers]

All of this. Well, they were in the van and then they. We transferred into my van and all

[Shawn Johnson]

stuff in the back of the van.

[Rad]

All over the place.

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah. Spread out. They had not. They didn't do a very logistical thing.

[Rad]

Oh. So it was just like scattered. So they would have got pulled over. There would have been money everywhere and too much.

[Stephen Myers]

I mean, they were all bundled and they had. Once you open the bundle, then the money scatters. So you got to find it, you know, you got to go through it. Yeah.

[Rad]

And they're going to get trickier because the FBI is the FBI.

[Stephen Myers]

It's a lump glue between two bills. Yeah. And you know, here's our mistake, is that that small bank we did where we retrieved the pro net tags, they were all between 20 bills. And why. I didn't think that. Just don't take the $20 bills. Don't take $20 packs. Only go for 50s and hundreds. And that would have saved us. We would have never been caught because that's.

[Rad]

No, it would have been. Because Sean wouldn't have stopped.

[Stephen Myers]

Well, no, that we were going to

[Shawn Johnson]

stop, I didn't see. I was thinking, these guys are not going to stop because again, I didn't know Scott personally. I knew Hollywood, but whether it was the greed, the money, the adrenaline rush, the challenge, I didn't feel like he was going to stop. If they had stopped before that last robbery, we probably won't be talking today.

[Stephen Myers]

Right.

[Shawn Johnson]

Gotten away with it. Yeah, they would, but they came back, which I wanted to come back. I wanted to rob another bank.

[Rad]

Well, a criminal is kind of dumb and leaves, you know, evidence. They don't. I'm not trying to. I'm not Trying to dish you, bro. But I'm just saying, you know, people get caught because they're not thinking clearly in the first place, and they get caught because they leave something, you know, at a crime scene.

[Stephen Myers]

It's a world you get into, and this is not, you know, there was never, you know, I keep reiterating, the violence was never present in this, but it's are your psyche. You become. You've created a new world, and you have to fulfill it. It wasn't as if we want to get another bank. It was as if we wanted to satisfy and show this is it. This is who it is, and this is why we can do it.

[Rad]

And.

[Stephen Myers]

And it's not because we can do it. We were just too. I mean, I'm an artist. I'm not a career criminal. I'm not from New York, grew up in a mafia family. Scott wasn't. He was a studied as a doctor, you know, free kid, you know, but

[Rad]

that did come down on you though, right? Because you did spend 15 years in prison for multiple. No, you.

[Stephen Myers]

Me? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Rad]

Like, multiple crimes. Right. I'm just letting my listener know, like, hey, it's not good, you know, to commit crime. That's all I'm saying. Even though I'm talking about this.

[Stephen Myers]

But I'm just trying to explain the psyche inside of us. It was not as if, you know, when you look at Point Break, it's all this challenge. We'd never had adrenaline going in. Everything was meticulous, calm, over, over thought out, overplayed. And there was no, like, oh, man, let's go get, you know, nothing. It was a very, like a slow paced heartbeat. Boom, boom. Everything was conscious.

[Rad]

You're not spending all your time in the bank. You're like, okay, we're gonna go in. We got three minutes. We got to get into this. You got to hit this, and you got to get out. Right?

[Shawn Johnson]

Most bank robbers, they go in a bank, they're in there for 30 seconds a minute. That's it. Get in, out as quickly as possible. The last robbery they did, they were in the bank almost. Almost five minutes.

[Stephen Myers]

Five minutes. Another one. One of the bigger ones, one of the hawthorns. I mean, he was in there over five minutes. And I mean, that's when they offered him to give him another bag because he ran his bag space wasn't enough. And he came out with two bags, one bank bag and the one he brought in. And, you know, that was over five minutes, but it doesn't matter. It could be a half a day. Because he knew I was outside. And we had all of that as long as everything was covered. When. When a call goes out to the police, it's. He's easily getting away. There's not going to be a cop. Unless I would see them. That's near the bank. And they have to come from wherever they're coming. So it's a good three, four minutes before they can get there normally.

[Rad]

Did you see yourself, like, as a Robin Hood?

[Stephen Myers]

You know, we never did that. I mean, you know, we.

[Rad]

Because the banks are insured and you're like, oh, hey, you know, it seems like there might be.

[Stephen Myers]

You know, I mean, you know, they say the Robin Hood. I don't know what it is. You have to understand the psyche of this guy, Scott Scurlock. He had a backbone of iron and he was a free will. I mean, he loved America and. But there was just. He was not a conformist. And he wanted. This was a challenge to him. He wanted to be a doctor. He wanted to study to be a doctor.

[Rad]

But you also had to want to be something as well.

[Stephen Myers]

What was that? It became. The thing was the intriguing. I mean, I never had a moral issue with banks. I mean, I never. I would have never done it on my own. I would never even. Never thought. I mean, I. Like I said, probably everybody's thought about robbing a bank at some time in your life, but who doesn't, right?

[Shawn Johnson]

Right.

[Rad]

And the funny thing is, is you guys are friends now. You guys are good friends, right? Is that what I understand? Like, you know, and. Did you ever read Sean's bio? Did you ever. Did you ever read. Can I just read you a little bit about your FBI agent friend here who was looking into you? Can I read your bio a little bit? Okay, let me. Let me. For my listener. Let me read who was. Who is Shawn Johnson? Okay. Shawn Johnson graduated from Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota with a degree in criminal Justice. Sean then attended William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, receiving a Juris Doctorate. So cool, bro. You're a Doctor of Law. He was accepted immediately into the FBI and trained at the FBI Academy prior to his first assignment to the Seattle Division. Initially, he was part of the task force investigating the Green river serial murder case. After that, he was assigned to the Violent Crime Squad, where he investigated and responded to bank robberies, fugitives, interstate theft, extortions and kidnappings. His law background proved valuable as the Assistant Chief Division Counsel. Soon as he was assigned to the National Security Squad where he worked both counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations. He was afforded the opportunity to work jointly with the United States army and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and overseas investigations. Following that, he was reassigned to the Violent Crime Squad, during which his time and his responsibilities included the Hollywood investigation. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Puget Sound Violent Crimes Task Force, where he became the bank robbery coordinator and wrote the bank robbery response plan for the division. He then volunteered for a transfer to the Milwaukee. Milwaukee, Wisconsin division. Okay, I'm just explaining who this guy is sitting next to you and how he was tracking you. Okay, listen to this. So he see. He then volunteered for a transfer to Milwaukee, Wisconsin division and was assigned to the Madison Resident Agency. Here he applied his knowledge to the area of drug conspiracies, utilizing sophisticated surveillance techniques, resulting in substantial takedown of drug organizations in the Chicago, Illinois and Madison venues. Following 9 11, Shawn managed the newly established Madison Joint Terrorism Task Force, or jttf, consisting of federal and local agencies responsible for investigating international terrorism activities. An opportunity led him to return the FBI Academy in Quantico, which we touched on earlier, Virginia, where he instructed new agent trainees in the areas of criminal investigations, counterterrorism investigations, and human gathering, which is human intelligence gathering. His last assignment with the FBI was the Directorate, Directorate of Intelligence, Training Onboard Agents in human policy and procedures. Upon his retirement from the FBI, he established his consulting company, Wolf Owl, LLC, where he continues to train FBI personnel for its mission to protect the United States. I just wanted to get that out there real quick for my listeners. That's who's. That's who's coming at you.

[Stephen Myers]

I know. And it's like, if Scott were here, these two guys would be great friends. Because Scott thinks like he thinks, and that was the beauty of it. He only wanted the. The best. That's why the Seattle police. It was just. It became too easy. It was like, you know, I don't know how to explain it. It's just.

[Rad]

I'll explain it this way. I had a skateboard shop when I was 13 years old, believe it or not. It had skateboards and snowboards, and I had an arcade. It was 92, 93, 1992. And then when I was 18 years old, five years later, I had like $60,000 worth of inventory, but I couldn't afford insurance. It was either you pay your rent or you pay insurance. And I was like, well, shit, no one's going to steal from me, right? I know everybody in Layton, Utah. I know all the skaters, the community. We all love each other. We have a Great bond. And then these two yahoos got transferred to Hill Air Force Base with their parents from Nowhere Land to us. And all of a sudden, I get a crowbar to my front door, and I get a phone call from my dad saying, It's 10:00am Come to the shop from school. You've been snatched. Everything out of your life, just stolen. I was 18 years old. All my skateboards, all my snowboards, all my shoes, all the clothing. They took the candy bars, okay? I was just like, bro. So the police come to me, and they're like, rad. We can't do much. We don't have manpower. But if you find anything, let us know. If you see anything, let us know.

[Shawn Johnson]

We are.

[Stephen Myers]

There you are. Yeah.

[Rad]

So here I am six months later at parties, talking to kids. They're drinking Millers. And he's like, I know who broke into your skate shop, Rad, but don't tell nobody. I was like, oh, yeah, tell me. I won't tell nobody. I swear to God. And I totally, totally crossed my fingers. And he told me who these two dudes were. Never met him. Put them in jail. They went to Point of the Mountain for four years. Here for the juvenile detention center for stealing all my stuff. They had a bunch of other charges.

[Shawn Johnson]

Four years.

[Stephen Myers]

Four years, yeah.

[Rad]

Four years. Yeah. Because they were 17.

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah.

[Rad]

So they went till they were 21. And they got out on good behavior. I got a restitution check for $1. Literally, the government sent me on a piece of paper stamped with ink, $1 from the Department of Corrections for restitution. I was like, what is this? How am I going to pay back all my snowboard debt? How am I going to pay all this back? Right? And all I'm getting at is, you know, I met those. I met the one dude later in life, after I'd got out of the military. I had a totally shaved head. I'd come to Jesus in the military of some sort of, like, hey, divine intervention, etc. The only reason why I went to the military was because someone stole my livelihood. And I was like, oh, geez, I got to do something now. I got to go back to school. I got to graduate. You know, These guys came in and jacked my stuff. And I don't mean to be so vulnerable about this, but it's. It just. You're talking about, you know, these robberies and stuff, and it's personal to me. 60 grand got stolen.

[Stephen Myers]

No, I get it. I get it. Yeah.

[Rad]

So this kid, I finally meet him, I'm hanging Out at a buddy's house, and he comes walking down the stairs in his mother effing house. I was like, bro, are you a part of the guy that broke into my skate shop? He's like, what are you talking about? I was like, that dude, that is your roommate right there. We were hanging out in the skate shop all the time. Bro, are you telling me that you're friends with him? Because if you're friends with him, that means that you're involved with this. He's like, no, he's just renting a room. He just hit me up out of the ad and wanted to rent my room. And I was like, that's the mother effort that stole my stuff. And he looked at me like, oh, rad's gonna kill this guy. And I was 21, 22 at that time. So I took a big, deep breath of some good mountain air oxygen here in Utah. I inhaled it, and I went into the garage that night and I talked to that guy, went to his face, and I said, hey, I know things have happened between you and me, but I have grown and I've learned to forgive you. And he didn't know who I was still. And he walked into the garage, and then my buddy told him who I was, and he came back out like a ball of piss. Yeah, come talk to me and tell me how sorry he was and how he had wished he. And now he's trying to be a car salesman, and he's trying to be better, and he needed a room to rent because he's. You know, I'm like, bro, I had grown. I was like, if you had met me before you broke into my shop, you would never have broke into my shop.

[Shawn Johnson]

So that's a great story. And it kind of relates to our. How we got together to some degree, because this all came to the end 30 years ago. Right? I hadn't seen Stephen since 97, when I sat down four days to interview him on all the bank robberies. 30 years elapsed. And then the Netflix show came out in June of 24. So I got his number through a mutual acquaintance. Hey, Steve, this is Sean. I can't remember. Sean Keith. What do you want?

[Rad]

Yeah, I know. I was like, I'd be nervous. He's like, what? What? What? What?

[Shawn Johnson]

I said, hey, no, I just. Have you seen the Netflix show? And what. I asked what his impression was and that we shared, you know, what we thought about the show. And some good. Some not so good. But that was in, you know, 94. And then last fall Again, talking about Stephen's book, the Treehouse. I found out they'd written a book. So I called him up again last fall and said, hey, Steven, Sean again. Hey, I've read your book. A lot of things in that book. I had no idea it happened because he wasn't totally honest with me 30 years ago.

[Rad]

Of course, of course.

[Stephen Myers]

But.

[Shawn Johnson]

So I said. And he said, well, thank you. And he said, I have the original manuscript that I wrote in prison. Would you like to read it? And I said, yeah, fantastic. He said, I'll bring it up to you. He lives about three hours from me. And I think, okay, this is totally, totally.

[Rad]

It's wild.

[Shawn Johnson]

Wild.

[Stephen Myers]

This is the manuscript that I wrote. Oh, wow.

[Rad]

That's it right there. That's a big binder, bro. That's like 1980. What year was that?

[Stephen Myers]

It's 1997 to. Into nine, middle of 98.

[Shawn Johnson]

He brings this manuscript up, comes to my house, and I'm thinking, would I do this normally? I mean, I. I don't have any contact people. I sent a lot of people to prison for years.

[Rad]

Yeah.

[Shawn Johnson]

I would never follow up with them. But it just seemed like at this point, we had that connection going back 30 years. And my interaction with him back then was. I told these guys when I interviewed him the first time. So this is nothing personal, strictly professional. I'm not judging for what you did. I just want to know what. Why, what happened? Anyway, he comes up last fall, we meet, and he was staying downtown at a hotel. And I said, hey, I'll take you out to lunch. I take you out to dinner. My wife was with me because she had never met him. And they're friends, too. So I went to a restaurant.

[Stephen Myers]

Oh, it's a family. We're a family now.

[Rad]

I'm laughing with you.

[Shawn Johnson]

So we go to this restaurant downtown Fredericksburg, called Foodie F O D E. And it's a great restaurant, food wise. But it's also inside an old bank building. Oh, it's a bank. And there's. The vault is still there. So when I made a reservation, say, hey, can I get a table inside the vault? Because I have a special guest.

[Rad]

I love that. I love that.

[Shawn Johnson]

They said, well, they couldn't guarantee getting a table in the vault, but we got a table next, next to the vault door. So I'm walking in. Stephen's walking in behind me with my wife.

[Stephen Myers]

You didn't tell me this. They didn't. And I didn't know you're going to this restaurant.

[Shawn Johnson]

I go, okay, yeah, I Understand? He goes, this is a bank. And goes, yeah, it is. He said, you did this, didn't you? You set this up. So we're sitting at the table in the bank, in the. In the restaurant, and then the waitress comes up and you say, remember the waitress?

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah, I remember.

[Shawn Johnson]

You said, hi, I'm Steve. I'm a. The bank rob. This is the guy who caught me and the waitress. Are these guys escaped from the nursing home or something? Are they crazy?

[Stephen Myers]

But it's amazing how normal people. I mean, these are young kids. You know, they're early, late teens, early 20s. And then we're talking FBI agent, ex bank robber. It doesn't come. You don't meet that in life.

[Shawn Johnson]

And I wasn't sure because I didn't know what his sense of humor was, what he thought about me or, you know, after all these years. So I'm thinking, well, I'll give it a shot to see, you know, it just fell into place, you know, I mean, I.

[Stephen Myers]

If I can backspace. When I. Like I said in the newspaper, when I saw him, he was always embossed in my mind. I always thought him as a good guy. I don't know why. Just because he was professional.

[Rad]

Because he was doing his job, and

[Stephen Myers]

he's doing his job. And we always had respect for the police and the FBI.

[Rad]

Yeah.

[Stephen Myers]

And we. There was nothing. There was no war. There was no idea of shooting it out, any of that stupid stuff. But he was there in my mind. And then when I went through debriefing, and it. I'll paraphrase. The book was written through the debriefing. It goes in and out of time. The story. It's a saga you're going through. You're living our lives in my book, and you're living a life. And then the debriefing. You hear him in, you know, asking me questions, and I'm giving him answers. And then after his. That period is over, then I flip back to those bank robberies that we just discussed. And then you hear the real story, what I was lying to him about, and then what really happened. So it's going in and out of time, and it's bouncing up and down, you know, and you learn Scott, his personality. You learn me, girlfriends, disasters, humor, cop humor, everything that went on. You're there in the bank robbery. You're in my car when I'm scanning, and you're listening to the police. The police coming, you know, the dispatch coming out, and the police responding to the dispatch. And this is. I wrote this the first year and a half in prison and everything was visceral dialogue, everything. People. I mean, I lived it. I mean, it's still in me, but not to the degree that it was then. So you're going, you're getting a void. You're getting a real, you know, everybody that has done work on us, Netflix, 48 hours, all these other secondary. It's all truncated and it's all gravitating toward the police side, which is always trying to be heroic and this and that, which it's not. I mean, it's, it's not a humiliation on them. But we abused, we embarrassed them, and we defeated them for four years. And that's not an easy thing to adhere. Him, on the other hand, no, he's just a professional. He looked at it as a challenge, as a, As a. Okay, this is a. This is making me.

[Rad]

Want me to backspace to what I read you about him. You want me to backspace? I. Like, I know you use that term. Backspace only backspace. Let me go back to his bio. Look at his bio. I know, look what Sean.

[Stephen Myers]

I know who he was trained.

[Rad]

Well, first of all, the Constitution of the United States. You take an oath, right? Okay. And that's straight up right there. And then he's coming after whatever FBI oath comes with that, okay? And then whatever internal oath that he has to his faith that he has, he. He's just got an oath. And then you're. You're, you're true patriot. That's how I would consider to say that to you, in that terms. So I appreciate you on that. And I'm not saying that you're not a patriot.

[Stephen Myers]

I am. I'm even more. And I get that after all that I came through, I am very much a patriot now. And with the defects and the successes of what this country represents in the world. And. Whereas before I was probably less that in a sense, philosophically, because, I mean, I'd lived a lot of years in Europe. I lived, you know, 15 years over there. So, you know, and I'm coming back. Whereas Scott, he was Sean John, I mean, he loved America. He says, where can you rob banks? Anywhere in South America. Where can you do. This is great. You see that? Like, did you see the, the quirky. It's, it's like.

[Rad]

And they get a Netflix special about it. Okay, what's the Netflix show called? Tell me the name of it.

[Stephen Myers]

How to Rob a Bank.

[Rad]

How to Rob a Bank. A bank on Netflix. I'm gonna sit down and watch that with my Wife. Okay.

[Stephen Myers]

You have to. Yes, you have.

[Rad]

Well, I'm burning through right now. I'm on Sopranos Season 5, Episode 6. So no spoilers. Okay, you guys, but no spoilers. No spoilers. And I really like your suit and I like your collar a lot. And it makes me need to get a suit jacket just to throw it on. You know what I'm saying? I need a suit jacket. Even with a blue shirt. It's fine. Just a suit jacket. But, you know, I don't want to say you should go out and like this is your lifeline is to go, you know, be a bank robber. But if you want to know the story about these two gentlemen who have become friends through the course of 30 some odd years of cat and mouse, but, you know, the cat got the mouse.

[Stephen Myers]

I mean, you can look at it from my point of view. Why would I ever want to befriend a person that captured me? I mean, I got shot up not by Sean, but by the SPD and you know, why would I would. You would think I would have hatred. But on the other, on the contrary, You know, everything was just clean, done and over with in until the next episode. And I had a.

[Rad]

So none of the robberies that were involved had any gunplay whatsoever? No one.

[Stephen Myers]

He would only reveal part of the theatrics. He would reveal that it was there because you can't, you know, you have to show some sort of, you know. But he never go in waving and telling everybody to get on the ground and all of that? No.

[Rad]

And there was never like, oh, we're being tailed, you gotta shoot back. Nothing like that. Nothing like, you know, ever.

[Stephen Myers]

The only time, the only violence that ever took place was the SPD when they ambushed us and started shooting in the back of the van. That was the violence. And, you know, it is what it is. I don't have a. I don't have a problem with that. That's their job to do that. But what I have a problem with is that they lie about it and they distorted the reality. And I have. There's no reason for me to lie. It's over with. You know, you could say in the beginning when I said that we didn't ambush. They accused us of ambushing them, but we didn't. And the proof is in the forensics. And right now for me to say it, there's nothing. I'm not benefiting from it. I care less. In fact, if you're a tough guy bank robber, you would think, why would you not shoot back? Well, I didn't and we didn't. Shots were fired after they started shooting us and shot us up, but nothing ever came from there.

[Rad]

Did anybody in the van get hit?

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah, I got shot. Both my arms. Mark got shot, and Scott escaped, and he escaped from the van and. But he was shot. Pretty sure he was shot. That's why he hit out. You got to see it. Hit out in the camper. And then he committed suicide.

[Rad]

I'll watch the show. I'll watch.

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah, he committed suicide. Yeah.

[Rad]

Well, the great thing about this conversation, first, let me just kind of say thanks for being so open and vulnerable and, you know, talking with me. I'm not your average, you know, interview style guy. You know, I just want to kind of get to know you both and. And say, hey, you know, at the end of the day, you know, I'm gonna go watch the show. I want to teach the people that listen to my show that you can meet different people and have conversations without getting at each other's throats and, you know, being vindictive to one another and just hearing each other out back and forth. Right? And that's really. We just met earlier. You said, hey, we're gonna go do our hair. We'll be right back on. And here you are. You know, no, it's a pleasure.

[Shawn Johnson]

You.

[Stephen Myers]

You have your own angle in the way you present. We like that. That. I like it, too. It's a different angle. You know, we've done a number of podcasts now, and everybody has an angle. I mean, an angle that sounds cheap, but it's just the, you know, your personality, your presentation, your format, it's nice. It's different, and I like it. And, you know, it's coming from law enforcement, which is very good. And, yeah, you know, it's.

[Rad]

Well, I was never a cop, you know, and, you know, again, my high school thinks that I should have been

[Stephen Myers]

looked back, but, you know, people ask me, what would I change? And I think I wouldn't even going to prison. I would not have changed. It changed my life. It gave me something that I didn't have before going through this process, and I would never. I wouldn't go back to say, I don't want to do that because I don't want to get caught. I want to go. No, all of it has had a. Had a building prison, as bad as it can be. It has a very creative side to it. At least it did for me. And, you know, you meet there's 2, 3% of the population which are fantastic humans in there, and I Was long

[Rad]

as you got parole coming up, I think it's. You could probably maintain, you know, parole in 2040. Bro, I don't know.

[Stephen Myers]

No, I know what you mean, but no, that's. You know, for me to be friends with Sean, it came out of circumstance. I didn't get out of prison thinking I was going to be. I mean, I started my life started. Started working. And then it just came after the Netflix thing. We both had. We were both disgruntled about the editing they did on us, you know, and the things they put in, which was cliche and nonsensical and DEI and all, you know, stuff that should have never. Especially when he had access to my book, to my manuscript, which he did take stories out without my permission for the Netflix. And that should have been used. There was so much more beautiful, interesting forensically. Also humorous. The situations with the Seattle police, the humor. Not that it's their fault, but it was just humorous. And to put that in a cinema, you know, in a production series or something, I mean, it's just exciting. And you see the life. Yeah, you see a life. It's not what you've. It's even Heat, which is one of the better bank robbery films ever done. It's. It's got holes, loopholes, you. The things they did, you wouldn't do.

[Rad]

Oh, yeah.

[Stephen Myers]

It's all Hollywood.

[Rad]

And everybody's always more marveling at the firefight with Val Kilmer. Honestly, his Mac change is what everybody talks about. See how he goes like this and then he goes like this, and then he goes like this, and he goes like this. Val Kilmer, right? Let's just say RIP to the one of the greatest actors ever, Val Kilmer of my generation, in my time portraying these.

[Stephen Myers]

I agree.

[Rad]

The whole De Niro, Pacino, like, they're both like on the same level, but one's a good guy guy, one's a bad guy. They're both like family guys and stuff. But at the end of the day, I just want to make sure I read Shawn Johnson's bio dynamic that with

[Stephen Myers]

us, because once we realized who the FBI was, Shawn Johnson, Scott and I both, we were tied in to the FBI. The Seattle police was. We managed them. It wasn't a big deal. You know, you always had to. You wouldn't. You wouldn't get confident, but you had to. You could deal with them. Whereas the FBI we could never deal with, but we at least had us in that became our. Became our glue and, well, I'll tell

[Rad]

you, Shawn Johnson sounds like a Surfer, bro, you know, or some pro skater from like, you know, I'm not a good swimmer, so.

[Shawn Johnson]

No, thank you.

[Rad]

Shawn Johnson, you know, hitting it for the tube country.

[Stephen Myers]

And Scott and I would jog. Scott was a fanatic jogger. Five miles in a night through dogs in Olympia, you know, and the water got on the sound. And he was fanatic basketball player. We played tennis at 12 o'. Clock.

[Shawn Johnson]

I would have done with him.

[Stephen Myers]

That's what I'm saying.

[Shawn Johnson]

You and basketball.

[Stephen Myers]

More in tune to everything. I mean, he was. He should have been an agent or CIA agent.

[Rad]

Well, like the dude that broke into my shop. I mentioned that he was my buddy's roommate. I'd go see my buddy and I'd have to see this guy every time. And pretty soon it just became like, hey, what's up?

[Stephen Myers]

That's good.

[Rad]

Like, what's up? They were in the garage, hanging out in the garage. And I'm just like. Like, I was like, you know, if you would have met me before any of this bs, you probably wouldn't have done what you did. Because the shop that I had was for all of us to have.

[Stephen Myers]

Right?

[Shawn Johnson]

Right.

[Rad]

But this dude had to have it for. They had to have for themselves and ruined that. But here I am today. I run my business. And you know what I told myself if I ever did my business again, I would have two things. Location, location, location, and insurance. Before I ever did anything. I'm insured.

[Stephen Myers]

That was a learning curve for you

[Rad]

there, brother, let me tell you. And you guys have been a great. I want to call you Flotsam and Jetsam or something. I don't even know, man. Like, you guys are just. The two of you are yin and yang. And you've been a great conversation. And I want to talk about Wisconsin. I was like, my dad's from Two Rivers, bro. I was like, you know, that's when I was thinking of, how am I going to talk to you guys? I was like, I'm gonna talk about Phil Rohrs Burgers and Manitowoc or something and like all these things.

[Shawn Johnson]

But you must be a Badgers fan then, huh?

[Rad]

Oh, yeah. Oh, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, well. You know, my dad is Two Rivers RIP Former Green Beret. And, you know, I grew up fishing. We'd go visit my grandfather. He lived on, literally Lake Michigan. And so we'd go fishing on the piers and all these big carp would always be flipping out of the water. And I just wanted to catch one of those big boys so bad. I would just throw my Line in, please give me a big carpet harp. I don't even care, you know. And so I just wanted to say respect to Wisconsin on your behalf of going there. And I had to throw that out there. I had to get my dad in there somehow for Wisconsin, bro. So with that said, I want to pitch your book. Okay. And I know that it's called the Tree House, but what's the full title of your book?

[Stephen Myers]

The Tree House the True Story of Hollywood the Bank Rome.

[Rad]

And you're holding up the book right now and it's the Tree House the True Story of the Hollywood Bank Robber by Stephen Myers. And that's a cool looking hat. And I guess I need to get a blazer.

[Stephen Myers]

This was one of the robberies in the summer. Look at that. Can you imagine this guy coming into your bank, walking away with the confidence in this man?

[Rad]

Yeah, he's just like, this is just what I do. It's like kind of a thing.

[Stephen Myers]

It's my world. I created this film. I titled it the Hollywood Way.

[Rad]

And Johnson wasn't going to let that continue.

[Shawn Johnson]

No, I didn't.

[Rad]

No, you didn't. And sir, I know you have a lot of life left in you to give your wisdom to others, and I hope you do so with that fashion. And I appreciate you instilling what you know into these young guys that are going into the field. And you know, please keep them on the straight and narrow so that we can have a cool America still. Please.

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah. I like to say since being here, meeting his wife and his, his. His son and his daughter, speaking to her, he has a great family. He has a great. It's. It's a beautiful family entity. I mean, since Scott, who was my best friend ever and I haven't had one. I mean, I have friends, but I. Not to that intimacy that we were. Because we were glued.

[Shawn Johnson]

Yeah.

[Stephen Myers]

Not until Sean. I feel the same. We have a connection that nobody else can share in the world. I'm sure Sean has peripheral friends and everything, but you can't share what we share. We went through. It was a saga, it was a journey, an episode of life.

[Shawn Johnson]

Storm, Storm.

[Stephen Myers]

I mean, his wife explained the tensions of. Especially during the last robbery. You know, their life was affected and, you know, we didn't know that, but.

[Rad]

Oh, no, I'm sure, you know, when I went and saw my friend graduate as a law enforcement officer and he got his certification, the. The commander of his Ohio patrol said, you know, don't take your work home. He's like, if I can give you young Men and women who are becoming Ohio patrolman here today, any advice is don't take your work home. And I just looked over my buddy Razor and I was like, that's not going to happen, dude. He is. It is not. It's not. And so that does affect him. And so you guys do have a crazy bond and it's one that can flourish. You're off parole, right? You're not on parole or paper. Any.

[Stephen Myers]

Never. No, nothing.

[Rad]

Yeah, yeah, I'm pointing to him. Yeah, no, I know you're married. You're always on parole.

[Stephen Myers]

No, so that was years ago.

[Rad]

That was.

[Stephen Myers]

That was years ago, actually.

[Rad]

Well, good then. I can only imagine what your guys's little car conversations could be like. It's like, why'd you take a left, not a right at that street, bro? You're like right there behind me. But I didn't know it. You know, we crossed paths at the 7:11. You know, have a.

[Stephen Myers]

You'll have an interesting ride on the last robbery. It's at the very end of the last chapter. It goes through street by street how we're evading the police and finding. Throwing one of the tracers out. And we're going because we had to create a very complicated securitas route. It goes in and out because when you're triangulated, if you're in a straight line, it's easy to get you. But when you're back and forth up in and around.

[Rad]

Yeah, right. Backtrack.

[Stephen Myers]

Very difficult to triangulate, you know, so that was. You get that you're in the. You're in our. You're in the robberies. When you're reading the book in the personalities. So, you know, it's not a true crime novel where you got a third person psychologically analyzing subjectively. Oh, this guy did that because his. His mother slapped him in the face when he was five years old and stuff like that, you know, it's not that silly. It's just direct our life and wow.

[Rad]

And you should go buy the book. Go buy the book. And wherever you buy their book, please leave a review on that retailer's website. So if you happen to buy it at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or. Yeah, exactly. Then please leave a review comment down below on even this right here, this podcast, wherever you're watching it, if it'[e-mail], feel free. We. I like to check it out and I reply back to everybody and yeah, you're very welcome. And you two gentlemen have been a pleasure to be on the show and

[Stephen Myers]

You're a spark, man. You're a real spark. We're going to have the rest of

[Shawn Johnson]

the day to talk about this, you

[Stephen Myers]

know, come and just start hounding us, questioning us. What? You should have said this. You should have. No, no, she's really good. She's our agent, though. She's really good.

[Shawn Johnson]

She keeps.

[Rad]

Well, shout out to everybody that support you too, okay? Your families that are behind you and, you know, and everybody. Everything you've ever been through, Sean, and, you know, obviously with you, Steve, going away and everybody that supported you and

[Stephen Myers]

it's all good, you know.

[Rad]

Thank you.

[Stephen Myers]

Our agent, she's really helpful. She's really wonderful woman too. She's her agency in la and, you know, she's done a lot, so we really respect her.

[Rad]

Well, I'm glad that you were brought into my life and so crazy, bro. It's so wild. You guys are so cool, but yet so crazy wild. Okay? So just continue to be that, all right? You can still be cool and be FBI, bro. I promise you.

[Shawn Johnson]

Okay?

[Stephen Myers]

He does, he's, he's all that. He's a great guy, man. I mean, we have our future. We're, we're, we're dying, you know, designing our future, how this is going to go forward and, you know, this is what we're working for together, you know, because the story needs to get out in its complexity and it's beautiful. It's a beautiful American outlaw story, if you want to say outlaw, you know. And yeah, Scott Scurlock was an individual that is a one of a kind. The mold was broken after him and there's nothing cliche about it. It's. There's tragedy, there's humor, there's love. There's all the elements that cinema, you know, cinematography, cherishes to have. Heroes, villains, the good, the bad and all of it.

[Rad]

You can still be an actor today, bro. You look good. Okay. I just want you to know you can still get an audition. You both could audition, you know. Hey, you know, you could be the. You could be the Fed. No, you be the Fed, Steve.

[Stephen Myers]

Yeah, that would work. Yeah.

[Rad]

That's acting, okay. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Who would ever think it? It's like. And by the way, this guy was the guy in the movie and this guy was the FBI agent in real life. And they switched and I just want to be. So I'll be the teller. You can. Or the Dr. I'll be a 6 foot 5 guy, under 6 foot 5 guy.

[Stephen Myers]

We need people like you to help pitch, to help promote, to help do this. This is really wonderful because it is a. It's a unique story and it's not going to ever happen again. JESSE JAMES it's not going to ever happen again. You know, those. Those entities in American history. And I'm not looking at it for my own benefit. I'm just looking at it, the story. Why would I be possessed by it at this time after. It shouldn't be. Why did I write the book? It took a lot of mental energy and effort and truth. And why would I do that if I was just an out and out, you know, why would I want to reveal it? It's something I'm proud of. Does that make sense?

[Rad]

Yeah, it does. I understand that it's something that you have to hold on to because it's who you were. And then when you went through for 15 years in the can, it's who you were trying to shed. And then now that you're out, you can't help but have those things attached to you, you know, you can't help.

[Stephen Myers]

I mean, I created all my life. I've never been employed in the sense of normal employment. I'm an artist. I exhibited in Europe and America, sold commissions and. But I have to say, this process, these four years, four and a half years with Scott, was the most creative thing I've ever in my life done. It'll never be replicated. I can never recreate another time like that. It's over. But it was the most vital, traumatic in a lot of ways, and a lot of psychological discomfort, often. But creative in a way that nothing I ever did could match it. And the book comes out. I had that force in me when I wrote the book. So there's philosophy, there's poetry, there's real live dialogue. It's different. And I think it's worth reading. It's a long. It's 500, almost 500 pages. So, you know, but you can just open it up in the middle without having gone through it and get into it, if you want.

[Rad]

Well, if it's based on what you've been talking about, just even in the slightest, it would probably be a pretty easy read. And if he already read it, Sean, you know, and he got it and he's like. He probably cruised through that thing real quick, bro.

[Stephen Myers]

They through the manuscript, he and his wife.

[Shawn Johnson]

And the first time I read it, I read it just specific to the bank robberies and specific to my interaction with him.

[Rad]

Exactly.

[Shawn Johnson]

Read the whole book. I was investigating it the first time. The second time was for entertainment value.

[Rad]

Right, exactly. That's what I'm saying. The first time you're just like, okay, he didn't. He did not tell me about this part.

[Shawn Johnson]

Yeah, this, this.

[Stephen Myers]

So the different people that we hired. The different people people we hired were in there. And not all of it I could put in because you just. The story became too huge, so I had to edit a lot of stuff out that was in the initial manuscript, and that's why I gave it to him, because I wanted to have him see all the different forensic stuff that would have. Could help him possibly in the future for, you know, contracting works, you know, studies and so forth. There's a lot of stuff in there that was left out that I. It's not in the book. It's just too big.

[Rad]

That's wild. That's wild. Can you believe we've been talking for like an hour, 20 minutes about this,

[Stephen Myers]

like for half a day, all day,

[Rad]

every day, you know, And I can only imagine being your celly.

[Stephen Myers]

I had some marvelous cellies. I had all kinds. I had FBI agents, I had CIA agents, I had serious bank robbers, you know, Good, interesting people, you know? Sure. Friends with one of the Waco survivors.

[Rad]

Oh, wow.

[Stephen Myers]

I was friends with. Do you remember the film the Falcon and the Snowman? The son of the FBI agent in LA during. They made a film of him with Sean Penn was in it. And anyway, he was a friend of mine at the end before he got released, and he was son of an FBI agent who smuggled information. He was working in the FBI agent office in la and he. Digital tape that came out and he had Sean Penn, who was called the Snowman because he was a hair cocaine freak, he went to Mexico City to deliver this, you know, this coded information from the FBI that his friend the Falcon, he was a Falconer guy. And that's the. If you ever get this, it's an interesting, very good movie, Falcon and the Snowman, and. But anyway, he was friends of mine. He was an interesting character.

[Rad]

Oh, my goodness.

[Stephen Myers]

He was a very interesting character. And, you know, all kinds of subplots in prison and different people. John Conley, who was the FBI agent for Whitey Bulger, he and I were good friends. And, you know, that whole. You know who that is, don't you?

[Rad]

I don't know no names. I don't know no names. Oh, no, I know. I. I mean, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The gabagool. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Stephen Myers]

Anyway, you know, these are kinds of people you come across and, you know, I was fortunate Enough to be around these high level professional people that when you got the real story behind what the media slams in your face, of course you shake your head, man, and it's just tragedy. There's a lot of tragedy.

[Rad]

I will tell you this, though. The only place where everybody is innocent, that's locked up is the zoo. Okay? I just want you two to swallow that for a second. Okay? The only place where everyone is really innocent is in your local zoo. Okay?

[Shawn Johnson]

Use that in the future.

[Rad]

Yes, please.

[Shawn Johnson]

I'll give you credit.

[Rad]

Yeah, please, please. It's true. It's true. Because when you think about it, you know, what did they do? Okay, so I just want to say. I just want to say thanks for being on our Soft Rep radio podcast. I. I'm. I'm honored to have had spoken to both of you too, you know, and I love all of your resume, Sean. And I almost called you Whitey, bro.

[Stephen Myers]

I look like Whitey holding up.

[Rad]

I know.

[Stephen Myers]

My hair has gotten white.

[Rad]

I'm trying not to laugh so hard.

[Stephen Myers]

We're good.

[Rad]

Steve Myers. Steve Myers. My man, Steve, put this book in

[Stephen Myers]

your book club, the one you announced in the beginning.

[Rad]

Well, what we'll do is I'll get my guy, his actual name is Guy, he's the editor of Soft Rep, and

[Stephen Myers]

publicize it in your club.

[Rad]

I'll link it up with Eve, your publicist. We'll just do an email and say, hey, they're interested in the book club. Is there any way. And we'll just go from there. I'll start a little email thread to get that going.

[Stephen Myers]

The publisher, Spines Spines Publishing. Yeah, S P I N E S Spines Publishing. And they would be very happy to

[Rad]

do that for you if you have my email. I think we do. We can just create that offline here and we'll just get that put in there. Okay, no problem. No problem. Okay. Yeah, by all means. And listen, I want you to go check out Steve's book, Steve Myers, and it is the Treehouse, how to Rob Banks.

[Stephen Myers]

The True Story of Hollywood.

[Rad]

Story of Hollywood. Yes.

[Stephen Myers]

Bankroll.

[Rad]

Yeah. Please go look up Steve Myers and the Treehouse. Go check out his Netflix series. Yeah. How to Rob a Bank on Netflix. Go watch that. And please leave a review and a comment where you buy the book so that it helps the rankings get up there and it just helps the authors. And I've learned that through all of these different podcasts. Just leave a comment down there. Okay. And, boy, I'm going to wind it down. Okay, guys, I really am happy to have had you on for so long and you guys are great. And to my listener that is new. Welcome to Soft Rep Radio. And to you, the veteran listener out there who has turned me on so many times to listen to me, that is thank you for from the bottom of my heart and all of us here at Soft Rep, we're grateful for that. Check out the merch [e-mail], check out our book club. We'll see if we can get the treehouse in there, the story of Hollywood in our book club. And we'll go from there. And on behalf of everybody here, I want to say thanks again to Shawn Johnson, FBI retired, and to Stephen Myers, retired, now author. Okay. And myself, Rad and Brandon Webb. And everybody here behind the scenes says thank you and keep keep us in your hearts and check us out for the next episode. And this is Rad saying.

[Stephen Myers]

You've been listening to Soft Rep Radio.

[Rad]

This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human.