April 1980. Mira Loma, California.
Chris Harven was at the bottom of the pit. He set the shovel down, leaned against the cool dirt sides, and looked straight up at the rectangle of blue sky visible above the coffin-shaped mouth of the hole. A figure darkened the pit’s opening, a big man with a full beard and a mound of black curly hair circling his head. George Wayne Smith crouched down at the edge to inspect the pit, now 12 feet long, 8 feet wide and 10 feet deep, extending beneath the foundation of the garage. “We better start reinforcing these sides,” he said to Harven.
Chris climbed the homemade wooden ladder out of the pit and into the choking smog of another scorching-hot Riverside County afternoon. He raised his hands above his head and stretched out his back, muscles hardened by eight years working as a city parks landscaper. With sandy brown hair, mustache and something of a Clint Eastwood squint to his blue eyes, Harven had rugged good looks to go along with his powerful build.
Harven surveyed the work they had put into the backyard. The entire perimeter of the property was secured now. They had raised the height of the walls separating them from their immediate neighbors by adding three feet of corrugated fiberglass to the top of the cinder block. Razor wire was strung along the fencing, and hundreds of carpet tacks hammered in with the sharp ends sticking up through the wood on top. Harven inspected a cluster of tacks, running his finger over the sharp tips.
Shielding the sun from his eyes, Harven looked up at George standing on a ladder, uncoiling concertina razor wire across the top of the greenhouse filled with over one hundred young marijuana plants. “Those tacks rusted up pretty good,” he called to Smith.
George paused and looked around the place. The son of a Japanese mother and Anglo father, Smith had a light brown complexion, round face, full lips and jet-black hair he had recently let grow out wildly in all directions. What drew most people’s attention were the dark, almond-shaped eyes, giving him a gentle, soulful look. At 27, George was a year younger than Chris, an inch shorter, and 10 pounds lighter with the same sort of lean-muscled build.
“Sure did,” he said. “Tear up your hands and give you tetanus too, climbing over that.”
Christopher Harven and George Smith met on the job, maintaining parks and the grounds of municipal buildings for the city of Cypress in 1973. The two young men hailed from the same sort of working-class Orange County neighborhood and found common ground in things they both loved: camping, guns, music and marijuana. Harven had a strong interest in survivalism but was less clear on exactly what he would need to survive. Smith knew what he would need to survive but not exactly how to survive it. So they talked about guns, bomb shelters, Jesus and the end of the world while shoveling dirt, planting oleander, and mowing lawns, sneaking off every few hours to get stoned.
With both their marriages on the rocks, Harven and Smith scraped together a $5,000 down payment and bought the house in the Mira Loma area of Riverside County in the spring of 1979. It was a ratty-looking, ranch-style affair that was becoming overgrown with weeds, the fruit trees in the back-yard withering from neglect.
The carpet tacks and barbed wire had been Harven’s idea, partly to keep the neighbor kids from stealing their weed. The pit was George’s brainchild, designed as an escape tunnel leading from the garage to the backyard if the cops ever came busting in. But both had in mind something much bigger than protecting a greenhouse full of pot. The pit would be stocked with food and water to serve as a bunker when the great earthquake hit or the A-bombs started to fall. The perimeter fortifications would help them hold off the bands of marauders who would come after their supplies. For any who managed to breach the perimeter, well, Chris and George had plenty of firepower to take care of them.
The two young men might have had varying visions of how it would all go down, but their beliefs led to the same place: a catastrophic event followed by social collapse, anarchy, and a fight for survival in a nightmarish, post-apocalyptic landscape.
Each had their timeline for how it would come about. For Chris, it was called “The Jupiter Effect,” a rare alignment of planets scheduled for March 1982, resulting in huge enormous tidal shifts, volcanic eruptions, and a massive earthquake that would tear California lengthwise up the San Andreas Fault. For George, it was a prediction by Calvary Chapel founder Pastor Chuck Smith that the Rapture would come before 1981. With the Iranian Hostage Crisis now in its sixth month and reports beginning in March that an ancient volcano in the Pacific Range named Mt. St. Helens might be about to blow, both felt confident it was going to be one or the other.
But, in August of 1979, Smith was fired from the city of Cypress parks job he had held for most of the decade. Several months later, his wife left him, taking their young daughter along with her. By Christmas, George was without a job, without a car, and without a family. That’s when things started to get weird. He began to grow out his hair so he could weave it into seven braids like Samson and convinced Chris that it was time to start turning the Mira Loma house into a fortress. After all, if they were not going to have enough money for George’s ultimate plan to buy a remote cabin in Utah, they better make sure they were prepared to ride out the Apocalypse right where they were.
In February, Chris Harven’s wife Lani, who had been living at the Mira Loma house off and on, finally took their young son and left for good. In March he lost his job along with all the benefits of a municipal worker. Chris told his mother he felt like his life was going down the tubes.
By the spring of 1980, they were barely scraping by, picking up day labor jobs here and there for lousy pay. The two were running low on money and beginning to get desperate.
One day while Chris was sitting at the kitchen table, George came home and announced he and a 21-year-old former co-worker from Cypress named Manny Delgado were going to rob the Denny’s restaurant in neighboring Corona.
Chris told him it was a ridiculous idea. “If you’re gonna rob anything,” he said, “why don’t you just rob a bank?” When George asked if he would help pull off the heist, Chris had one condition. “I’m not going into any bank unless we’re armed up.” George agreed, stating what would become his mantra for the whole enterprise. “I won’t get taken alive.”
•••
Manny Delgado was 21 years old from Crow Village barrio of Stanton. A bantamweight, barely over 5 feet tall and weighing in at about 120 pounds, Delgado had worked for the city of Cypress parks department along with Chris and Smith since he was sixteen.
When George suggested the bank job instead of the restaurant stick-up, Manny was in. He already had one child under age 2 and was expecting another. Succeed or die, George told him. Manny quit his job at Cypress and told them he was moving to Arizona.
One more thing, George asked. They needed a getaway driver.
Manny’s little brother Billy Delgado was just 17 years old, but always in pain. He had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis that one doctor had told him would rob him of his ability to walk by age 25. So, when George and Manny asked him to come in on the robbery as the driver, Billy figured he had nothing to lose.
Thirty miles due west of Norco, Russell Harven was not preparing for the Apocalypse or anything else. Chris’s younger brother was doing what he usually did: nothing. At 26, a typical day for Russ consisted of lying around his little bedroom in his parents’ house in Anaheim smoking dope and throwing back cans of RC Cola despite being a diabetic.
The two brothers were not close. In fact, Russell often wondered if Chris’ only purpose in life was to torment him. But Russell Harven could usually be talked into just about anything, especially by Chris. So, it didn’t take all that much badgering to get Russ to complete the robbery crew.
•••
With the gang recruited, George and Chris emptied their remaining savings accounts on more weapons. Why not? George said. They’d either end up with a boatload of money from the job or die trying. Both had accumulated a modest collection of handguns, shotguns, and hunting rifles throughout the 1970s, but it was not nearly enough for what they had planned.
On Feb. 3, Harven and Smith went to Dave’s Guns in Costa Mesa and picked up a semi-automatic handgun and a Heckler & Koch HK93. The HK93 was a top-of-the line German-made .223-caliber assault rifle, the civilian semiautomatic version of the M16 used by American forces in Vietnam.
Harven came back to Dave’s on Feb. 13 and bought a sawed-off, antipersonnel version of the Remington 870 Wingmaster shotgun known as a riot gun. A week later, Smith stopped in and picked up hundreds of rounds of .223 ammunition, high capacity magazines, and forty rounds of German Rottweil Brenneke shotgun slugs powerful enough to crack the engine block of an automobile.
On April 28, Chris went to the Gun Ranch in Garden Grove and purchased a second .223-caliber assault rifle, this time a Colt “Shorty” AR-15 with a collapsible stock and shorter barrel for use in confined spaces. Along with it he bought a handful of 40-round, high-capacity magazines.
With his arsenal complete, Chris switched his focus to turning the garage in Mira Loma into a bomb-making factory, where they began assembling an arsenal of explosive devices. Working from a recipe in “The Anarchist Cookbook,” they created two dozen fragmentation grenades using beer cans, PVC pipe filled with gunpowder surrounded by a lethal mix of shrapnel. Using a shotgun as a grenade launcher, Harven and Smith had a devastating antipersonnel explosive with a launch range of one hundred yards.
But it wasn’t enough for George. Concluding that everyone involved in the robbery should be armed to the teeth, he made his biggest purchase yet – and the one that finally raised eyebrows at Dave’s Guns. Smith picked up another Colt AR-15 along with a Heckler & Koch HK91 semi-automatic assault rifle. The HK91 was essentially the same gun as the AR-15 but chambered for a .308-caliber round three times the size of the .223. A .223 might kill you, but a .308 would literally blow your head off.
Guns like these might have been legal, but they were not big sellers in 1980. “What are you doing,” owner Dave McNulty joked, “getting ready to start World War III or rob a bank?”
Smith just laughed.
The date was May 2, 1980.
•••
Coming Wednesday: Part 3 – Even in the “Bank Robbery Capital of the World,” there was no way sheriff’s deputies could know what was coming.
