Life of Evel: Evel Knievel - Stuart Barker

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were forced to pull over and sleep the night in Bobby’s grandparents’ car, hoping the blizzard would abate by morning. But, by the following day, word of Knievel’s escapade had got out and the couple were intercepted by a police road-block before they could reach Idaho. Knievel was charged not with kidnapping but with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, but since Linda did not want to press charges he was merely reprimanded by the authorities.

      However, now feeling fully justified in his assessment of Knievel, Linda’s father subsequently succeeded in obtaining a restraining order against Bobby, forcing him to stay away from Linda for a period of two years. Knievel had little choice but to obey – at least in public – but he still never gave up hope of one day marrying Linda Bork. His patience paid dividends and that day finally came on 5 September 1959 when the pair tied the knot having eloped with the help of a $50 loan from Knievel’s grandmother and the use of the family car. Linda had only managed to elope because her father was away on a fishing trip at the time of the marriage and by the time he discovered the truth there was nothing he could do to change matters, no matter how furious he was.

      A married man he may have been, but Bobby Knievel was still without gainful employment and the only money he was bringing in to the caravan he and his young wife were staying in was from a number of petty criminal activities. Knievel had long since realised that most of the people he saw in Butte with money had gained it on the wrong side of the law and he wanted a piece of the action, having seen the benefits of a life of crime. ‘All that you can desire in life or want to be is what you can see immediately around you,’ he explained, ‘and what I saw immediately around me was a pimp with a shiny pair of shoes and a ‘49 Mercury. In Butte, if you weren’t a pimp or a thief you were nothing. And I needed a few bucks to get out.’ It was all the incentive Bobby needed; if he couldn’t earn an honest buck, he’d earn some dishonest ones.

      Knievel had long been used to the wrong side of the law, having been involved in several fights and charged with petty theft, but that was not exactly out of the ordinary for young men in post-war Butte. He was no stranger to dreaming up scams to make money either. One particular favourite was stealing hubcaps from cars to sell on as replacements or as scrap metal, a technique he perfected while still at school but one which escalated over time to almost industrial proportions. ‘One time the police caught me and another boy with about three hundred hubcaps. I sold them for about a buck apiece. Christ, I needed a few bucks to go out. I could steal a guy’s hubcaps when he was sitting in the car. You know, those ore trains go by, make a lot of noise. A guy’s sitting in his car, I didn’t care whether he had the radio on or not, I’d just steal the hubcaps right off his car. Every kid in town knew I could do it. But I moved on to bigger and better things.’

      Those bigger and better things included running a ‘protection agency’, which was, by Knievel’s own cryptic admission, really an extortion racket. While his well-meaning police-officer friend Mo Mulchahy politely referred to Bobby’s ‘job’ as being that of a merchant policeman, there were others in Butte who recognised it as something rather more corrupt. Knievel visited various businesses around Butte and asked if they would like him to keep an eye on their properties when they were closed. If they paid up, Bobby would check locks, make sure there were no open windows or doors and generally scare off any prowlers. Job done. If, however, any particular business refused his offer, they were very likely to find their premises had been broken into shortly afterwards.

      The differing accounts of Knievel’s ‘job’ among those who knew him show just how undefined his role was. Officer Mulchahy believed it to be legitimate, saying, ‘He went around on the south side of town and he’d rattle doors and shake windows; he was one of us. He went to different merchants down on the south side and asked them for a job. Course, a lot of people who knew Knievel, they said “we’d rather not do that”. They didn’t have break-ins, they had breaks; they had breaks in their windows or breaks in their doors but he’d be back the next day and tell the businessmen “If I was watching your place, this wouldn’t have happened”, and they’d hire him.’

      Knievel’s own take on the situation was rather more telling, even if it did stop short of an absolute confession. ‘When I was a merchant policeman I had a deal – you don’t want to give a little kid that’s trying to make a dollar a five-dollar bill every 30 days to watch your place then you might get robbed. That’s what it amounted to. You pay me ten dollars a month, five dollars a month, to watch your place of business, you don’t get robbed. They found out that my protection was well worth the five or ten dollars a month after not subscribing to it for a while.’

      Knievel’s friend Bob Pavolich, who ran the Met Tavern in Butte at the time – one of Knievel’s favourite watering holes – showed no such ambivalence when asked for his interpretation of Bobby’s scam. ‘When he was a doorknocker here he used to come around my place at two o’clock in the morning – he was a merchant cop is what they called him. Well I would have to say that he probably knocked over mine and about a dozen others on the route. He always had money and he didn’t make that kind of money knocking doors. Really, he told me he’d knocked over my place.’

      Knievel eventually owned up – and apologised for – committing a string of burglaries around Butte, and he confessed that he tried for a whole weekend to break into the Prudential Federal Savings building but couldn’t manage it. Addressing a meeting of Butte townspeople in the late 1990s, he blamed his misdemeanours on his youth and insisted he had eventually made amends for those acts over the years and was now a model Butte citizen.

      But the money Bobby was spending in Butte bars was coming from increasingly more dangerous criminal activities. He had by now become so desperate for more money that he’d started robbing grocery stores, pharmacies and even banks all over the western United States. Knievel teamed up with a gang of six other men in order to be able to carry out more and more ambitious crimes. He claimed most of them were drug users, hence their penchant for turning over pharmacies to steal drugs as well as whatever was in the cash registers.

      The techniques employed by his crew usually followed a similar pattern: they would stake out whichever building they planned to rob to gain the usual information about workers’ shifts, opening and closing times, and where the entry points and exits were, then Bobby would drill a hole through the roof to allow the gang to drop down into the premises, by which point the adrenalin would really start to flow. Knievel, for one, found he liked the rush. ‘That feeling I got inside a bank was the same feeling I got later when I started to jump [a motorcycle]. I could crack a safe with one hand tied behind my back faster than you could eat a hamburger with two.’

      But Knievel soon realised that the prize of adrenalin alone wasn’t enough to justify the risks he was taking. ‘When we dropped through a hole in the roof there was so much pressure we’d sweat our shoes off. And it wasn’t really worth it. We’d have to split the money between four or five people (depending on how many were in on any particular job) and averaged only a few grand apiece.’

      If the FBI really were on the gang’s trail, as Knievel claims, then the risks could not have been worth the slight rewards. After all, Bobby may have had a few dollars to throw around on beer but he and his young wife weren’t exactly living in the lap of luxury as a result of his endeavours – and things would only be worse for Linda if Bobby was thrown in the county jail.

      One long-standing mystery from this period relates to whether or not Knievel used dynamite stolen from his former employers, the Anaconda Mining Company, to blow up and rob the local courthouse in Butte. While Evel has sometimes boasted of carrying off the job, he has at other times backtracked and claimed, ‘The courthouse was not blown up, the courthouse was burglarised. As to whether I did it or not, that’s nobody’s business but mine and that’s the way it’ll always remain.’

      Either way, it was only when one of his accomplices was shot while trying to flee from a crime scene that Knievel was shocked into abandoning his evil ways. It brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown, which in turn made him feel so low that he actually contemplated suicide. His accomplice, Jimmy Eng, had been shot dead in the street by police while on a job in Reno, Nevada, and while Knievel escaped with his life, he broke down on the way home and vowed to change his ways and turn his back on crime. ‘I was crossing

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