For ten suspenseful months starting in September 2006, he preyed on New Jersey banks and became known as the Hat Bandit. Today, he is simply inmate 28803-050.
Since May 2008, James Madison has been a resident of the federal prison system. His latest home is the Loretto Federal Correctional Institution, a low-security facility in a converted monastery 90 miles east of Pittsburgh. “It’s right up in the mountains with trees all around,” Madison says. “It’s beautiful, really beautiful.”
Madison, 52, lives in a dorm-style cell with about twenty other men. All his roomies are in for nonviolent offenses, “guys who bounced checks—you know, scam artists,” he says. At deadline, he was new to Loretto and had yet to be assigned a job. Previously, he had been housed in a medium-security prison in Edgefield, South Carolina, where he worked five days a week making military clothing and equipment bags.
As the Hat Bandit, Madison pulled off nineteen heists in Union and Essex counties. He struck first on September 22, 2006, taking $3,935 from a Commerce Bank branch in Springfield. At the time, Madison was living less than two miles away in Maplewood. He attended classes at the Drake College of Business in Elizabeth and worked six days a week for $18 an hour as a machinist at CB Kaupp & Sons. Owner Clem Kaupp says he thought Madison was “a little bit odd,” maybe too quiet, but otherwise “a good machinist.”
It wasn’t until January 2007 that Madison earned his nickname. After seven stickups, law enforcement agencies released photos of the serial robber, always in a different hat: a Yankees cap, a beach hat, a red knit hat, a baseball hat with an Air Force insignia, and others. A month later, after two more robberies, the Star-Ledger dubbed him the Hat Bandit. Star-Ledger columnist Mark DiIonno took a special interest, speculating that the robber might be a down-on-his-luck “everyman.”
In late March, the Hat Bandit’s saga went national, airing on America’s Most Wanted. By then, even some cops involved wondered if the everyman angle was true.
“There were people who were really rooting for him,” says Sargeant Bridget Lawrence, who was then a detective with the Union County Prosecutor’s Office. During one of the robberies, Lawrence says Madison apologized and claimed to have a sick daughter. “It was an investigative area we explored. We did not give him the benefit of the doubt, but we were trying to determine a possible motive.”
The Hat Bandit task force grew into one of the most extensive law-enforcement operations in state history, authorities say. Drawing hundreds of investigators from seventeen law-enforcement agencies, the task force did thousands of hours of bank surveillance (catching at least two copycats), ran down countless leads, and conducted security training with banks (one of which instituted a no hats, hoods, or sunglasses rule).
The Hat Bandit was luckier than most crooks. He eluded capture twice despite his clothing being marked when dye packs in the money exploded.
But on July 22, 2007, Madison’s luck ran out. On that day, he strolled into the Pathmark in the Union Plaza Shopping Center and, pulling his yellow baseball cap low over his eyes, nonchalantly made his way to a mini Bank of America in the store. There, he approached a slight, 21-year-old teller named Steven Gomez. The hatted man, whom others had described as having “Paul Newman-blue eyes” and gleaming white teeth, held out a handwritten note: “Give me on top of counter 100s, 50s, and 20s. Don’t press silent alarm. No dye pack.”
Gomez handed over everything in his drawer, $3,060. As he watched the man walk off, Gomez decided to follow. He spotted the robber climbing into his car and jotted down the license plate: MBX93A.
With that, a part-time teller majoring in finance at Rutgers provided the crucial lead that had eluded hundreds of experienced law-enforcement officials who had worked close to 4,000 total man hours.
“No matter how much work you put in on a case, you can always use a break,” says Union County prosecutor Theodore Romankow, whose office helped coordinate the manhunt. “That teller gave us that break.”
The car, a Nissan Altima, was traced to Brenda Thomas, who turned out to be Madison’s girlfriend. When investigators interviewed Thomas, she told them Madison had borrowed her car that morning. The authorities moved in and captured their man.
It turned out the Hat Bandit was not the hoped-for everyman. He was, instead, an ex-con who had made previous headlines in New Jersey for an infamous murder.
When interviewed by New Jersey Monthly, Madison would not talk about his old case but politely offered, “It’s all in the book”—referring to his unpublished jailhouse autobiography, From Temptation to Ruin. The book details Madison’s checkered past, starting with his childhood in Chatham, where at age 14 he rode his motorbike into a steel cable, crushing his windpipe and breaking his neck. He recovered, trained to be a machinist, married the boss’s daughter at 20, had a son, and settled into home life in Cedar Knolls. The idyllic picture ended when Madison was caught embezzling from his father-in-law’s machine shop to fuel a cocaine habit. His wife filed for divorce.
That was just the start of Madison’s troubles. On January 26, 1986, Madison got into an argument with his girlfriend, Terry Wells, 25, in their apartment in North Plainfield. Grabbing a lamp, he killed Wells with a blow to the head. Madison put her petite body into a nylon garment bag and dropped it into the Passaic River in East Hanover.
Two months later, Wells’s body surfaced in Parsippany. Police tracked Madison down in California. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and did eighteen years before being paroled in May 2005.
In the thirteen months the Parole Board monitored Madison after his release from a halfway house in May 2006, parole officers called him in for fourteen office visits, made thirteen unannounced home inspections, ran eleven computer checks for new arrests, and drug tested him several times. Everything checked out; there were discussions about lifting his curfew. Meanwhile, the Hat Bandit continued to pile up robberies.
FBI agent Steve Grassie, who took part in Madison’s arrest, calculated the Hat Bandit accounted for 16 percent of all the bank heists in New Jersey over those ten months. For his effort ending that streak, Gomez, the bank teller, was fired for publicly accepting a $10,000 reward in violation of bank policy. Madison was sentenced to ten years.
Why did Madison turn to bank robbery? The answer is simple: money. For what still is not clear.
Citing security concerns, the warden of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn granted me only a telephone interview with Madison earlier this year (we had previously corresponded extensively by mail). During that monitored chat, he described how robbing banks was really no different than cashing bad checks.
“I’d say, ‘Listen, I’m sorry I have to do this,’ and they would just put it on the counter, and I would just leave,” he said. “It was very nonconfrontational. I guess that made it less traumatic to go back and do it again. There was never any yelling or screaming. When I found out how easy it was, I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to do it one more time.’ It was always only one more time.
“I thought that one day when I got back on my feet, I was going to pay everything back anonymously,” he said.
So what did the Hat Bandit do with the $80,833 he took? Law-enforcement officials admit they have no clue. When asked about it, Madison was vague. “I started when all the bills, car, insurance, and a lot of things…just got out of control,” he said. “I accumulated more bills than I could handle.”
Eight thousand dollars a month in bills? Well, a lot went to his girlfriend and her large family, he explained. And a lot went to “help out people” from the Christian Love Baptist Church in Irvington, he added.
A deacon at the church, who agreed to speak anonymously, acknowledged that Madison had spent time around the church and was helpful to the congregation. But as far as being a Robin Hood? “Uh-uh,” she said. After his arrest, shocked church officials checked their donation records. It turned out Madison had given a total of $320.
Madison will be nearing 60 by the time he is eligible for parole in 2014, but he remains upbeat about his prospects after prison.
In our most recent communication, he wrote: “I have such great expectations when I get out, which still include meeting a nice mate and starting a family. I want that house in the suburbs and the picket fence and four little ones running around.”
Sean Gardiner is a freelance writer and private investigator. He lives in Cranford.