US: Man caught living double-life as fugitive bank robber for over 50 years

He was involved in one of his city's largest-ever heists in 1969, which he kept secret until he confessed on his deathbed

For more than 50 years, a Boston man kept a secret that not even his family knew until just before his death last May.

Just before Thomas Randele died, his wife of nearly 40 years asked his golfing buddies and his co-workers from the dealerships where he sold cars to come by their home.

They gathered to say goodbye to a guy they called one of the nicest people they’d ever known — a devoted family man who gushed about his daughter, a golfer who never bent the rules, a friend to so many that a line stretched outside the funeral home a week later.

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By the time of their final visit last May at Randele’s house in suburban Boston, the cancer in his lungs had taken away his voice. So they all left without knowing that their friend they’d spent countless hours swapping stories with never told them his biggest secret of all.

For the past 50 years, he was a fugitive wanted in one of the largest bank robberies in Cleveland’s history, living in Boston under a new name he created six months after the heist in the summer of 1969. Not even his wife or daughter knew until he told them in what authorities described as a deathbed confession.

How he was able to leave behind one family and create a new life — while evading a father and son from the US Marshals Service who never gave up their hunt — is just now being pieced together.

Ted Conrad quickly figured out that security was fairly loose at the Society National Bank in Cleveland after he started as a teller in January 1969.

He told his buddies, “It’d be so easy for me to walk out with all kinds of money,” Russell Metcalf, his best friend from high school, said in an interview with The Associated Press. They thought he was blowing smoke when he brought it up a few more times.

Then just a day after his 20th birthday that July, Conrad walked out at closing time on a Friday with a paper bag stuffed with $215,000 from the vault, a haul worth $1.6 million today.

By the time the missing money was noticed the following Monday, Conrad was flying across the country. Letters sent to his girlfriend showed he made stops in Washington, DC, and Los Angeles within the first week.

In one letter, he mistakenly thought he could return in seven years when the statute of limitations expired. But once he was indicted, that was no longer true.

Conrad apparently cut off contact with his entire family, including three siblings and his parents, who were divorced. Some family members eventually presumed he was dead because so many years had passed, said Matt Boettger, whose mother was Conrad’s older sister.

His mom, he said, was relieved more than anything to find out her brother had lived a happy life. “She thought she would go to her grave and never know,” he said.

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The bank heist in 1969 didn’t capture the attention of the nation, or even the city of Cleveland. Everyone else was focused on Apollo 11’s historic flight to the moon that week.

But for John Elliott, a deputy US marshal, it was personal. He and Conrad came from the same side of town. Elliott used to take his family to the ice cream shop where Conrad worked. They shared a doctor.

The problem was that Conrad’s head start allowed him to disappear, and he was disciplined enough not to make any missteps. The last credible sighting came in October 1969, when a Cleveland couple visiting Hawaii met a man they later realized looked very much like Conrad.

Elliott traveled across the US looking for Conrad and even after retiring in 1990 he would come in the office just about every week and pore over the files, said his son, Pete Elliott, now the top US marshal in Cleveland, who inherited the hunt for Conrad nearly 20 years ago.

His father died in March 2020 before investigators pieced together details from Randele’s obituary and signatures from his past. Then in November, Randele’s family confirmed that just before he died he told them his real identity and what he had done, Elliott said.

“It always stayed on my dad’s mind,” he said. “We kept this case going because it was important to my father.”

Why Conrad committed the robbery has been analyzed endlessly.

“It wasn’t about the money. He always wanted to impress people,” said Metcalf, his high school pal, who remembered how Conrad once stole a deck of cards just to prove he could. “He had no fear.”

Investigators believe he was inspired by the 1968 movie “The Thomas Crown Affair,” about a bank executive who got away with $2.6 million and turned the heist into a game.

Conrad saw the film at least six times and copied Steve McQueen’s character, driving sports cars and drinking high-end liquor, according to friends.

After the real-life robbery in Cleveland, Conrad wound up in the Boston area, where much of the movie was filmed. It’s a good possibility that he chose his new first name “Thomas” based on the movie, Elliott said.

“He modeled his whole life after the movie,” he said.

The man known as Thomas Randele came into existence the first week of January in 1970, investigators have found in recent weeks. That’s when Conrad walked into a Social Security Administration office in Boston, asked for an identification number under his new name and made himself two years older, Elliott said.

At that time, it wasn’t unusual to wait until you were an adult, so his application didn’t raise any red flags. With a new identification card, he was able to open a bank account, build credit and create his new life, Elliott said.

During the 1970s, Randele worked as an assistant golf pro, giving lessons at a country club outside Boston and later becoming its manager. He spent a few winters golfing in Florida, according to his obituary.

He also met his future wife not long after arriving in Boston. They were married in 1982.

Around then he began working in the car business, selling Land Rovers and Volvos at a handful of dealerships until he retired after nearly 40 years.

It was a job that put him in front of dozens of strangers every day.

What’s not clear yet is what happened to the money. The Marshals Service is looking into whether he lost it early on through bad investments.