“I’ll tell you a quick story,” said Gary Craig, and I leaned forward.
Craig and I sat at the same high-top table in Starbucks where we’ve met dozens of times. His digressions are thrilling – juicy anecdotes about infamous local crimes and the ways in which Craig finds himself entangled with their instigators.
About a decade ago, Craig and I worked on a project about a cold case that became the podcast “Finding Tammy Jo.” Since then, we sporadically meet for coffee – or in his case, green tea – and swap stories.
The 65-year-old North Carolina native is many things: A husband and father of two daughters, an avid runner, a Rochester International Jazz Festival enthusiast. But he’s also one of the most respected journalists in town. Often, our coffee meetings are interrupted by prosecutors, judges and all kinds of other somebodies in Rochester eager to shake Craig’s hand and feed him a scoop.
As an investigative reporter for the “Democrat and Chronicle,” Craig has amassed a trove of stories about crimes, court cases and, recently, country club drama. He coauthored a book about the Attica prison rebellion, and his reporting on wrongful convictions helped exonerate an innocent woman. But one story stands out, and that’s the subject of his book: “Seven Million: A Cop, a Priest, a Soldier for the IRA, and the Still-Unsolved Rochester Brink’s Heist.”
Craig had been living and working in Rochester almost three years when $7.4 million dollars was stolen from a Brink’s depot on South Avenue. On a cold night in January 1993, masked robbers broke into the facility, held up the guards and made off with the cash.
The cop was Thomas O’Connor, a retired Rochester police officer-turned-Brink’s guard. The priest: Reverend Patrick Moloney, who worked with homeless kids and other vagrants in Manhattan. The solider: Samuel Millar of Belfast, Ireland, who served time in a prison for Irish rebels before being smuggled into the United States.
“A screenwriter couldn’t craft a tale with a more unlikely group of bandits than the men accused of the nation’s fifth largest armored car-company robbery,” Craig wrote after the arrests in November 1993.
In his book, Craig tells the histories of this “cast of characters,” as he would come to call them. He recreates the night of the heist and the events that followed in vivid detail, a testament to his meticulous research.
But it wasn’t the men, the missing money or the supposed ties to the Irish Republican Army that compelled Craig to keep revisiting the case. It was the boxer: A man who did not make the title of the book but who nonetheless looms large over its author.
Joseph “Ronnie” Gibbons was a prizefighter who lived in New York. He was Irish, like the others, and was originally in on the robbery. As one version of the story goes, Gibbons backed out when he heard there would be guns involved.
“He was a piece of work, a strange character, entertaining as heck,” Craig said. “I almost feel like I know him.”
Two years after the heist, Gibbons headed to Rochester looking for his cut and was never heard from again. Police assumed he was dead.
“Since 1996, when I first learned of Gibbons’s disappearance, I have gone down more dead ends, tumbled down more rabbit holes, rammed into more brick walls and chased more wild geese than I care to remember,” Craig wrote in a December 2011 blog post.
Maybe it was Gibbons’s wide smile that captivated Craig. Or maybe it was the friendship he developed with Gibbons’s mother, Rita, who longed for a proper burial for her son.
More likely, it was Craig’s own humanity. Decades of covering crimes could turn a man misanthropic, but Craig remains friendly and curious about people. They open up to him and, he thinks, that’s probably because he treats them all – cops and killers – with respect.
“I like people,” he said, adding, “and, of course, you never know where the story is going to come from.”
That attitude and Craig’s style of gumshoe journalism shows up in his earliest reporting on the heist. While investigators held a press conference about the case in New York City in November 1993, Craig was in Queens talking to neighborhood kids about Millar’s comic book shop. While another journalist was chased away from the youth shelter Moloney headed, Craig persuaded residents to talk.
In 2004, when an inmate at Clinton Correctional Facility claimed to know where Gibbons was buried, Craig talked to him. First, he sent him letters, then eventually visited him in prison, hoping to persuade the inmate to reveal the location of the body.
“We started talking and developed this weird kind of closeness,” Craig said. “It was weird, sort of, (knowing) where the lines were that whole time.”
In the end, it was a wild goose chase. But Craig chased down every lead, no matter how wild.
Gibbons was eventually found. In 2010, a forensics investigator revisiting unsolved cases connected Gibbons to human remains that had washed ashore in Cape Vincent, a small town along the St. Lawrence River, in 1999.
Gibbons was put to rest, and Craig set out to write his book.
Along the way, he dug into Rochester’s Irish roots, stories about the first Irish families who settled here. About the area’s sympathies for Northern Ireland, and the Irishmen connected to organized crime in New York. About the Irish Americans that dominated the political structure in Monroe County for a time.
For a man steeped in Irish history, Craig’s own ancestry is an outlier.
“I’m more Scottish,” he said, though he has never done a DNA test to confirm it. But ‘Craig’ is Gaelic, and the Scots and Irish share ancient Celtic roots that predate borders, politics and other such distinctions.
The crime was adjudicated decades ago. O’Connor was acquitted; Moloney and Millar served their time. Craig has answers for some of the mysteries behind the robbery (was the IRA involved in the planning? Probably not.) but not others (where are the missing millions? No idea). The mystery of what happened to Gibbons is now mostly understood, though Craig hopes someday his killers will be identified.
So, what now?
The heydays of armored truck robberies are over. The IRA has disbanded, and Irish political influence has splintered. Some of the case’s prominent figures have passed away.
“Maybe it’s time to move on,” he said.
Unlikely.
The “Democrat and Chronicle” employs a fraction of the staff they did even a decade ago. The media landscape in Rochester shifts beneath our feet, and yet, Craig continues to tell stories: through books and blogs, documentaries and YouTube videos.’
The story of the Brink’s heist endures. And, for Craig, there are always more stories to tell.
Veronica Volk is a reporter for CITY/WXXI. She can be reached at vvolk@wxxi.org.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
