The Flying Bandit: Bringing Down Canada's Most Daring Armed Robber

Louis A. Knafla is a professor of history at the University of Calgary,
the co-editor of Law, Society, and the State: Essays in Modern Legal
History, and the author of Lords of the Western Bench.

Gilbert Galvan will go down in recorded history as Canada’s greatest
bank robber, albeit with an asterisk: he was a citizen of the United
States. Born in 1957 in Los Angeles to a dysfunctional family that moved
to Texas, he lived on robbery from his late teens onward. Conducting a
one-man crime wave in Chicago, he honed his profession with aliases in
Idaho, Colorado, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He escaped from the Penal
Institute at Centreville, Michigan, in 1984, and made it across the
border through the Windsor tunnel.

In Canada, he adopted the name of Robert Lee Whiteman. While he was
working as an ice cream street vendor on Parliament Hill, he met and
fell in love with social worker Janice McKenzie. Thus began his double
life as husband and father, securities courier and IBM computer systems
analyst—and “flying bandit.” By the time of his eventual capture,
he had committed 59 bank robberies in 14 cities across Canada, for a
total take of more than $2.3 million. On March 18, 1988, he received a
70-year prison sentence. Seven years later, he was deported to the
United States, where he was freed in June 1998.

Whiteman’s charm, his wife’s gullibility, the incompetence of local
police forces, and the laxity of Canada’s judicial system come out
strongly in this engaging account. Whiteman says that he loves Canada
because our banks are so easy to rob and our federal prisons are
comfortable. Indeed, he promised one detective that he would return.
Given his talents, we should not be surprised if he does.