The Doting Boyfriend Who Robbed Armored Cars


5d7a64f95c31e.jpg


Beginning in 2015, Houston was plagued by a series of brutal armored car robberies that bewildered FBI agents for nearly two years. To finally bring down the unassuming mastermind behind it all, the agents had to stage an elaborate trap—and catch him in the act.

In September 2016, when FBI agents first started tailing Redrick “Red” Batiste, he seemed to be an ordinary young man leading an ordinary life.

direct.jpg

Batiste was 36 years old, tall and slim, with dark eyes and an easy smile. He lived with his two bulldogs in a two bedroom, 956-square-foot house in Acres Homes, a modest neighborhood twelve miles north of the skyscrapers of downtown Houston. By most indications, he was exceedingly straitlaced. He dressed well, usually wearing pullover polo shirts and tightly belted cargo pants. Once a week, he went to a barbershop to get a haircut and a manicure. He was so meticulous about keeping his house clean that he asked visitors to take off their shoes before coming inside so they wouldn’t track dirt across the carpet. “Red even had the toilet paper coming out over the top of the roll,” said Tommie Albert, an older man in the neighborhood who’d known Batiste since he was a boy. “He said it looked better than toilet paper coming out from behind the roll.”

Shadowing him around Houston in their unmarked cars, however, FBI agents weren’t convinced that Batiste was all that he appeared to be. They had begun to suspect that he was leading a secret life that Okoh, his parents, and his neighbors knew nothing about. Red Batiste, they believed, was the leader of an armored car robbery ring, one of the most daring and diabolical the FBI had ever encountered.

WFdirect.jpg

5d7a6636b7500.jpg

Stilldirect.jpg

This is how they caught him: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/t...=pocket-newtab