Audio By Carbonatix
Colton Harris-Moore stole five airplanes, hot-wired boats and cars, flew a plane from Indiana to the Bahamas with no formal training, won almost 30,000 friends on Facebook, and had his life’s movie rights optioned before he turned 20. The Barefoot Bandit, in short, is much cooler than you.
But Harris-Moore’s epic life on the lam came to an end in the Bahamas over the weekend, and now he’ll appear later this afternoon before a federal district judge in downtown Miami. Unless he gets away again! Run, Colton, run!
Colton, in fact, did not get away this time. He appeared in a downtown courtroom just after 1:30 in a beige inmate jumpsuit. Click through for more details.
Harris-Moore — a strikingly tall, baby-faced 20-year-old (think Gordon Hayward except even younger) — briefly appeared before Magistrate Judge Robert Dube for a hearing on his transfer to Washington.
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Speaking in a steady tone, Harris-Moore told the judge that his mother had hired him an attorney but that he didn’t know the lawyer’s name.
“I spoke with my mother, and she said she had one,” he told the judge. Asked if he could find out who was representing him, he told the judge: “I’d have to speak with my mom first.”
Dube set a new hearing for Friday morning and asked a public defender to help Harris-Moore get in touch with his attorney.
Harris-Moore’s long, spectacular crime spree came to a fittingly cinematic end this past Sunday.
Bahamanian police had spent days scouring the sparsely populated Abaco Island looking for the six-foot-five-inch fugitive after a plane stolen off a Bloomington, Indiana runway was found crash-landed near the beach. On Sunday, the cops closed in after finding a 44-foot powerboat that Moore had stolen and piloted to nearby Eleuthera Island.
As they surrounded the Bandit in Harbour Island, police shot out his boat’s engines; Harris-Moore threw his laptop into the sea and held a gun to his head. Eventually, they talked him down.
Somewhere in Hollywood, Michael Bay is high-fiving a screenwriter who is putting the capture into a script as we speak.
Harris-Moore pleaded guilty in a Nassau court Tuesday and was flown overnight to Miami. In court today, he’ll face charges related to the crime spree he began after escaping from a Washington halfway house in 2008.
He earned the nickname after breaking into houses barefoot and leaving chalk footprints as a calling card. The FBI put out a Most Wanted bulletin for the Bandit after he stole a plane in Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho and then crash-landed it in Washington.
Harris-Moore’s arraignment is scheduled at 1:30 this afternoon before Magistrate Judge Robert Dube, says Annette Castillo, a spokeswoman for the U.S. District Court of Southern Florida.
