Byron Shane Chubbuck

Alias Oso Blanco

His Story

Byron is a wolf clan Cherokee/Choctaw raised in New Mexico, his Indian name is Oso Blanco
and he became known by the authorities as “Robin the Hood” after the FBI and local gang unit
APD officers learned from a CI that Oso Blanco was robbing banks to send thousands of dollars
with of supplies to the Zapatista Rebels of Chiapas on a regular basis during 1998 and 1999.

Chubbuck is now serving 80 years at the US Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, for bank rob-
bery, aggravated assault on the FBI, escape and firearms charges. Byron engaged federal agents
in a gun battle on August 13th 1999 at his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Although Chubbuck
escaped, he was arrested later that day and sentenced to time in New Mexico’s state Penitentiary.
After serving just over a year in New Mexico, he escaped from a prison transport van and
almost immediately began robbing banks. He was recaptured a short time later. Byron never used
a gun in any bank robbery, but he has a long history of living by the gun and will not hesitate
to use it on the agents of repression or the occupiers of Atzlan whom force false laws on the
true people of this land. Byron is not asking for monetary support, he’s only asking that people
become aware of indigenous people’s issues. In an interview Oso Blanco claimed: “I am still able
to hold my head up high and feel the gratification for my work in a world where money, power and
destructive industries are regarded far above humanity, indigenous and impoverished peoples and
cultures. I cannot help that I got deeply into my work….”

See latest news, urgent: http://www.osoblanco.org/

A Few words from Byron:

I guess when I get down to basic hope-
I just want people to be free-
and realize and discover the powerful
elements of the Great Creator-in all things living.
Free from destructive energy sources.
Free from political religious formats of control.
Free from lies.
Free from toxic chemicals.
Free from fast food.
Free from sin.
Free from the masters of political sheep control.
Free from gasoline.
Free from coal.

Free from TV and all the tech junk.
Free from make up.
Free from drugs.
Free from alcohol.
From all the things we humans have
locked our selves in…
Help the sick-the poor-the old-the handicapped.

I myself come from a violent wild west background and if I can
find a loop (hope) hole to compassion then a lot of people can
learn to think positive and take effective action.

*******************************************

An article on Byron

Thank you Joline Gutierrez Krueger from The Albuquerque
Tribune that you gave me your permission to publish your
article "Utter Chubbuck" here on my website:

UTTER CHUBBUCK

For the first time since his Albuquerque capture, the bandit
known as Robin the Hood speaks out. About his respect for women.
About those "minor" bank robberies. About earmarking drug profits
for the poor people of Chiapas. And Byron Shane Chubbuck makes
this vow: "I can't be stopped forever."

Two hours after escaping from a prison transport van, Byron Shane
Chubbuck was relaxing in a Motel 6, knocking back a beer, eating
Burger King and watching TV coverage of the havoc he had wrought.

And smiling a lot.

It was all good, he said, except for the hamburger. "I told my
people, `We are New Mexicans. It's Blake's Lota Burger from now
on,'" he said. "We've got to support our home state burger joint."

Loyalty, even for a local sandwich, is big with Chubbuck, whose
bold bank robbery style and quixotic tales of aiding the poor
with his ill-gotten gains earned him the name Robin the Hood -
and 40 years in federal prison.

Come Oct. 15, when Chubbuck is expected to be sentenced on addi-
tional charges stemming from that van escape last December, the
34-year-old bad boy of bank robberies could face an additional
40 years. Or more.

But Robin the Hood will not go quietly. And, if he has his way,
not for so long. "I can't be stopped forever," Chubbuck said
recently in phone interviews and letters from his cell at the
U.S. Penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

"I will not be broken in my spirit of determination and will
power. And if I were to escape again I'll naturally be polite
doing it, never hurting anyone, while smacking the federal
government across their face of hypocrisy."

For the first time since he aired his jailhouse blues and his
bravura last February on an Albuquerque radio rock station - an
interview that ultimately led to his capture two days later -
Chubbuck is speaking out about what he did while on the run, his
reasons for robbing banks and the bullet that brought him down.

"My life story is very full, long and complex," he said. "I only
wish someone would take an interest in the real story revolving
around these 20 minor bank robberies and my reasons."

Somewhere therein lies the truth, big and bold like Chubbuck himself.

Disarming charmer

You either hate Byron Shane Chubbuck or you love him. And if you
love him you might hate that you do. Or you might feel guilty. Or duped.

"It was like, oh, my God, is this the same cute guy I knew?" said
Carolyn Butterfield, an old girlfriend of Chubbuck's from his mid
-1980s Colorado days when he sported Marlon Brando leather and
called himself a solo poet/sing-songwriter/artist. "If you meet
him, you're instantly charmed," she said. "There's a charisma
about him, a magnetism."

Women staffers at Albuquerque's Project Share, which feeds the
poor, had also been charmed by the handsome stranger who arrived
on their doorstep in 1997 as a federal parolee needing to do
community service. They also were suspicious.

"He was too good to be true," said one woman there, who agreed to
allow The Tribune to use the Project Share name but not her own,
saying the situation was too sensitive for her to be connected so
publicly to Chubbuck. "You could not have met a nicer guy. He was
so helpful to us here, a total workhorse. People loved him here."

Chubbuck, whom they knew as "Blanco," was the first to shake a
hand, stock a shelf or serve a homeless person, she said. He knew
to ingratiate himself with the staff, particularly the single
women, sometimes taking 25 or more of them to elaborate lunches
at Romano's Macaroni Grill. "Everything was big with him," she
said. "He could never do just a little. He had to do it huge.
"When bread or paper supplies dwindled, a massive donation of
the needed goods would suddenly arrive.

"He'd just say he knew some people and boom, there it was," she
said. "We joked that he probably was in the Mafia." Chubbuck told
them only that he was "connected."

While he was serving the hungry at Project Share, Chubbuck was
also serving as jefe and social conscience of a local gang. "He'd
tell us, `Just because you're in a gang doesn't mean you're bad,'"
Brew Town Chris Perez said. "He always told us to be good
examples, do positive things, help old people and like that. He'd
do it, too. If he saw some homeless guy on the street begging for
a dollar he'd give them $100."

In turn, Chubbuck said he found his brothers, his carnales, men
and boys who would lay down their lives for him and the causes he
said he championed. Siempre con honor, he told them. Always with
honor. "When I found my brothers I was granted a chance to use my
creative ideas to instill in the hearts of gangsters passion for
a cause, compassion for the desperate and slick ways to make more
money with the money we were rounding up," Chubbuck said.

Those slick ways would become his claim to fame. And his demise.

Easy money

Chubbuck said he never feared robbing a bank. "After I was past
the first door, it was too late to turn back," he said. He said
he doesn't remember how many banks he has hit but notes that
Albuquerque isn't the only place he has plied his nefarious
trade. "I can tell you the FBI knows about one in Denver and
some in Dallas," he said.

Chubbuck insists he robbed his first bank to help pay off a
drug debt for a relative. The others, he said, paid for food
and supplies for the indigenous people of the Mexican state
of Chiapas.

Chubbuck said he was in Mexico around 1998 looking to score two
drums of ephedrin for making methamphetamine - the same activity
that had gotten him sent to prison five years before - when he
decided to pay a visit to a woman whose card he had kept since
1997 when he had seen her at a protest rally in Downtown
Albuquerque.

The woman was in Guatemala City caring for impoverished and
broken children - Guatemala street children. "It touched my
heart," he said. "It made me want to be like her, help people
like she did. "Chubbuck said he gave her $3,000. "I could only
afford to buy one drum after that," he said.

Chubbuck said he began robbing banks, sometimes two a day, never
brandishing a gun and always attempting to charm tellers with his
polite polish and his handsome swagger and his talk about how the
money would help feed starving children.

But Rudy Espinoza, regional security officer for Wells Fargo
banks, said Chubbuck was not as winsome as he thought. "I will
tell you that his efforts were not without emotional conse-
quences. "Espinoza said. Many of the tellers he interviewed
after a Chubbuck heist asked to be relocated, retired or
sought counseling, he said.

Chubbuck said he purchased marijuana with the bank loot and
then sold it, tripling and quadrupling the initial amount.
The profits went to the Chiapas cause, he said; the rest went
to him. "I'd keep about $10,000 and go help people in my barrio
or spoil my wife, "he said.

Robin the Hood's run seemingly ended in August 1999 in a shootout
with FBI agents at his Southeast Heights home. He pleaded guilty
in October 2000 to the shooting and robbing an unprecedented 14
banks across Albuquerque. He received a 40-year sentence. Two
months into it he was gone.

Out

Chubbuck says there was no master plan, no team of accomplices
waiting in the wings for him to make his daring escape Dec. 21,
2000, from a prison transport van on its way back to the Santa
Fe County Detention Center from a hearing in Albuquerque.

"I didn't go with some diabolical plan," he said. "They're making
me out to be some mastermind. I was just desperate. I was getting
beat up. I was getting gassed. I had to get out of there, and I
had to tell people about the treatment we were getting in jail."

The van was nearing the intersection of Second Street and Monta§o
Road Northwest when Chubbuck used a smuggled key to free himself
from his handcuffs, waist chains and leg shackles, and kicked out
a van window and the steel-bar grate covering it.

"When I first got away from the van I ran to the ¹hood," he said.
"I didn't know where I was going."

Chubbuck said he jumped over fences, cutting a hand already
bloodied from the van escape. He exploded into the front door
of a home in the 200 block of Gene Avenue Northwest, startling
Stephanie Angus, 28, and a friend, her mother and her young
children. "I said: `Please help me. The cops are trying to kill
me,'" he said. "I told her `I need a ride out of the ¹hood right
now.' I did not command her to do anything. I asked and pleaded.
I have respect for women, and when you're looking at a woman as
pretty as Ms. Angus, you better have respect."

Angus, he said, was his angel.

Stephanie Angus said she was terrified. But Chubbuck's charm
and honest manner left her with an odd compassion for her captor,
she said. "Looking back, it was the scariest experience of my
life," Angus said in a recent interview. "But I don't think he
was a bad person. I don't think he would hurt anybody."

Chubbuck said Angus and her friend drove him out of the North
Valley and the grip of a tightening dragnet. "I almost cried
right in front of them because they had been sent by God," he
said. "They gave me $20 and a water and Chap Stick. I told them
who I was and what I just did and what I'm about, and I asked
them to pray for me."

After stays at a Motel 6 in midtown Albuquerque and at another
"safe place," Chubbuck said he stole a blue Camaro Z28 with a
snowboard inside and drove to El Paso.

"I saw myself in their paper, too," he said - disappointed that,
like the Albuquerque media, the El Paso newspaper was running a
mug shot of a pudgier, surlier, shaved-head Chubbuck bloody and
bitten from an earlier encounter with a police dog.

After crashing the Z28 into a pole, Chubbuck said he made his
way on foot for the next four days to Cuidad Juarez and later to
Chihuahua, where he had friends. Eventually, he said he settled
into a $300,000 home he had been paying off in Juarez. One day
he hoped to share the home with his wife, Leticia Antillon,
and their two sons, Carlos, 12, and Eduardo, almost 2.

It all might have worked, too, had Chubbuck not returned to
Albuquerque and resumed his Robin the Hood ways.

From Jan. 12 to Jan. 30, at least six bank robberies were tied
to Chubbuck, two more to his associates.

Chubbuck said he had been forced to leave Mexico and return to
Albuquerque after being robbed himself. Thieves broke into the
home in Juarez, he said, taking radios, scales, BB guns and
$11,000 in cash. "I give them credit," he said. "They were
pretty darn smart."

Chubbuck said he returned one last time to retrieve his wife
and children. "The plan was to sneak back and get a multiband
radio to my wife," he said. When things were ready, I would
give her the word and say, `Babe, pack up the truck and the
kids, it's time to go.'" But Chubbuck could not sneak back
silently.

Going public

Realizing and relishing the notion that he was now the hottest
news in town, Chubbuck decided to use his notoriety to spread
his gospel of aiding the poor, thwarting the government and
fingering Santa Fe County Detention Center officials he said
had made his incarceration so miserable. He chose as his conduit
the unlikely T.J. Trout, long time morning drive-time disc
jockey at KZRR-FM (94.1).

Chubbuck wrote Trout several letters and asked fellow gang
member James Thompson to send them off. He also spoke with
Trout by phone Feb. 5. The conversation was broadcast several
times the next day.

But Chubbuck said he hadn't expected Thompson to deliver his
letters personally to the radio station and risk being
identified.

"I hit the roof when I found out," he said. "I said: `Are you
kidding me? Oh, my God.'"

Thompson's image was captured by surveillance videotape at the
radio station. Early the next morning, Chubbuck was in custody
and in a hospital bed with a bullet wound through his chest,
courtesy of the Albuquerque police.

End of the line

Last June, jurors took 35 minutes to reach guilty verdicts
against Chubbuck on charges of escape, brandishing a firearm
during a violent crime and being a felon in possession of a
firearm. Then they had lunch.

It was an anti-climactic ending to one of the more colorful
criminal episodes in recent New Mexico history.

A juror was reported as saying the defense simply rested its
case without providing any statements or a version of the events
that happened that night.

Chubbuck still fumes over that. He remains angry at his attorney,
Gary Mitchell, a longtime and well-respected Ruidoso lawyer who
has served as counsel for some of the state's most notorious felons.

"He's a snake, a con man and a sellout," Chubbuck snarls.

He accuses Mitchell of failing to seek a motion for a change of
venue, for not seeking a motion to suppress testimony he had given
under morphine while hospitalized. And for not having lab tests -
fingerprints, DNA, blood - performed that might have proven Chubbuck
never touched the Tec-9 semiautomatic weapon Albuquerque police said
he aimed at them in the flurry of his Feb. 7 capture.

"The state is not required to dig up exculpatory evidence - that's
my lawyer's job," he said. "And he seemed to refuse to accomplish
or even try to take it on in order to fight the police claims."

Mitchell, though, said Chubbuck had a hand in every decision.

"Obviously, I did the things I thought were in the best interest
of my client after conferring with my client about those," he said.
"You don't represent Chubbuck without Chubbuck being totally involved."

Chubbuck could be sentenced next month to up to 40 more years for
the three new convictions. Six charges of bank robbery were
previously dismissed to streamline the process, prosecutors have said.

Prosecutors have also said they might seek a life sentence under the
federal "three strikes" law, which targets repeat offenders.

Mitchell is filing a motion seeking to be fired as Chubbuck's attorney.
It is Chubbuck's request. But he won't soon forget his charismatic client.

"Shane's a very interesting character," he said. "If in fact he was
robbing banks to give the money to poor people, well, that's a little
bit different scenario than somebody robbing banks to feed a drug habit.
And you sort of like guys like that. We Americans are like moths to a
light bulb when it comes to that kind of stuff."

Prison, again

Letters from strangers, girls mostly, arrive for Chubbuck in prison,
a small reminder of the charm he exudes, even from behind bars.

He spends much of his time writing letters, poems, his life story.
He makes ceramics. He prays for strength from the Great Creator.
He has friends in prison.

He cries that he hasn't seen his sons since he arrived. He rails
that he must be imprisoned longer than those who kill.

Already he has been accused of concocting an escape plan, this
one involving a helicopter, he said.

He makes no apology for the crimes he has committed, no promise
that he wouldn't do it again if given the chance.

"I am still able to hold my head up and feel the gratification for
my work in a world where money, power and destructive industry are
regarded far above humanity, indigenous and impoverished peoples or
cultures," he said. "I cannot help that I got into my work."
 

His Art

His Poems

'Zapatismo'

"The indigenous movement in which zapatismo is inscribed is not trying
to return to the past, nor to maintain the unfair pyramid of society,
just changing the skin color of the one who mandates and rules from above.
The struggle of the Indian peoples of Mexico is not pointing backwards.
In a linear world, where above is considered eternal and below inevitable,
the Indian peoples of Mexico are breaking with that line and pointing
towards something which is yet to be deciphered, but which is already
new and better."

From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

What Are the Causes of the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas?
By: Iris Cowher

The Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas has been a major problem for the Mexican
government since it began in 1994. The rebellion has garnered much sympathy
abroad and has even earned some support within Mexico with the Zapatista’s
populist doctrine (Hernandez 1999). The ELZN’s recent fifteen-day march from
Chiapas to Mexico City in the name of Indian rights was a triumph for the
rebels as they prepare to negotiate a peace with the Mexican President Vicinte
Fox. Zapatistas describe their fight as one for indigenous rights. The basis
for indigenous grievances in Chiapas concern the recent development of the
region’s energy resources, poverty, land scarcity, destruction of the rain
forest, and the subsequent soil erosion of these lands. The state of Chiapas
is the poorest in Mexico (Fiederlein 1996). High poverty, infant mortality,
and unemployment rates, in addition to low literacy rates, illustrate that
it is a region facing significant problems. These problems, however, have
traditionally plagued many of the states of Mexico and Central America.
What has caused this region, in particular, to erupt in a massive uprising
that has destabilized the entire state of Chiapas and is potentially
threatening to the Mexican government? The answer lies in the massive
population increases in Chiapas since 1970, deforestation and soil erosion
due to this population growth, and the resulting poverty from loss of arable
lands. Additionally, government attempts to develop infrastructure to extract
oil and natural gas in Chiapas have further threatened the lands of the
indigenous peoples leading to unrest and rebellion.

I can recommend the following book:
"Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas"
by Authors: George Allen Collier and
Elizabeth Lowery Quaratiello

Want to support Byron? Write him!

Byron Shane Chubbuck # 07909-051
Coleman I USP
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521 U.S.A

CLICK HERE FOR BYRON HIS AD

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