The 'Pay Phone Bandit' Who Baffled the FBI in the '80s

I love these stories to be shared here on HN. There was one also submitted some time ago about a cyclist who wouldn't make it into the olympics (or something like that) and started to rob banks and used his cyclist skills to escape. If I recalled correctly this was in the 80' or 90' and he used to give away the stolen money. Shame I don't have link.

Here's the America's Most Wanted segment about the guy, James Clark, from 1988:

https://youtu.be/e56gA8NBXuQ?t=1204

Seems like the hardest part would be getting rid of all the coins. I'm not surprised he got caught, given two appearances on America's Most Wanted, and his tendency to pay for hotel rooms with rolls of quarters.

As another comment noted, perhaps he should have opened a laundromat or video arcade to launder the stolen money.

Sometime in the 80s we happened across a payphone that was spitting out quarters from the change return, partially jamming the return door in the process. Until then I always assumed that change was held in some kind of side compartment so the same coins inserted could be returned but either someone went crazy jamming it up with quarters earlier or there was a way for the payphone to make change.

Wonder if the guy ever thought about running a video arcade or laundromat. It would have been a great way to cover up his source of so many quarters and convert some of them into paper currency in the process.

Was expecting more phreaking from this story

> Though it’s hard to imagine today, there was once a time when making a telephone call meant going home, asking to use someone’s phone, or plunking a quarter into a freestanding pay phone

Pfffft, what about the classic: "You have a collect call from PICKMEUPATBILL'S" ?

>By one estimate, he hit phones in 30 of them,

Wouldn't they know exactly how many states he did this in since he was the only one that knew how to do it?

I wonder why the method was to take the box rather than replacing it after emptying it. Would that have made the crime harder to detect?

On a related note, I remember in the 80s, coin fed parking meters in Berkeley were systematically cut off. I never knew if it was simple thievery, or some anarchy protest.

Also on HN today:

Adding a USB Port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40833960 , https://jcs.org/2024/05/29/x1usb#

Which lead me to see what else the author has written:

https://jcs.org/projects -> https://github.com/jcs/payphone

Payphone Project 'These are some notes from my project to install a working payphone in my home and configure it to make and receive calls through an Asterisk PBX.

I love stories like this.

Just thinking of out with the old, it mentions there are only 100,000 payphones left in america from 2 million.

Is there any value in maintaining payphones or will they all ultimately go? I dunno, it seems of value for emergencies, say one gets into an accident late and night and your phone is damaged, a payphone was impretty much in walking distance, now not so much.

Same with copper landlines. My mom still uses an old school phone that doesn't need power. A bad storm hit a few years back and everyone was without power for three days, but my mom still had phone access, unlike the rest of us scrambling to charge our phones.

It was the most reliable communications network we made and to just let it go seems wrong.

Now I want to see how long it takes Lock Picking Lawyer. Someone mail him a pay phone with a bottle of booze in the coin box!

Inspiration for Bruce Sterling's short 'Jim & Irene!'

Why didn't he replace the coin box with a previously obtained, now empty, coin box? Then they'd never really know if they'd been hit... much harder to tell.

Not condoning his actions, but "a thinker and doer" is certainly a fitting eulogy, and not a bad one to have in ones grave.