The true-crime TV show "America's Most Wanted" called the now 27-year-old Adam Blue Galli a modern-day Jesse James and leader of the "Preppy Bandits" in Salt Lake City.
Wearing fedoras and long military coats that hid sawed-off shotguns and 9mm pistols, the gang - two pairs of brothers, Adam and Aaron Galli, and their cousins Christopher and Nathan Galli - went on a major crime spree in September 1991. Police suspect them of committing one murder and 25 robberies before Adam fled and the others were arrested three years ago.Late last month, Adam Galli was captured. For several weeks a summer ago, a year before my current internship at The Wall Street Journal, he was my roommate.
Federal agents collared him outside the carpentry shop where he was working in Northfield, Minn., where I attend Carleton College. Northfield is famous for thwarting a bank robbery by the real Jesse James in 1876.
In the end, Northfield apprehended Adam Galli. But he still managed to live there for nearly two years, cultivating the image of a charming, well-read and worldly young man. Using the alias August Blue Cedergren, the tall, skinny fellow fit in well in the small college town, though he was never a student there. Adam Galli's boss thought well of him, and he had girlfriends galore. Even their fathers seemed to like him.
"Some people take a cigarette break; he'd go out and look at the green grass. He really had this thing for bunny rabbits," says Rick Churchill, who owns Schurwood's, the cabinetry store where "August" worked. Adds Richard Haugland, the father of one of Adam Galli's girlfriends: "He was a reasonably good fellow, friendly and smart."
And what about the roommates he lived briefly with last summer?
We viewed him as a pretentious fop. We would hang out drinking beer; August would sip cognac. Parked on a torn sofa on a porch cluttered with empty cases of Pig's Eye beer, he would lose himself in Hemingway and Melville and books on nautical history and antiques. He spent hours listening to National Public Radio. He baked gingerbread.
To us, his many affectations seemed ridiculous in a slacker who was always late with his rent. He had agreed to pay $168 a month to sleep on a plaid mattress in a side room of our two-bedroom apartment. Behind his back, we called him "Lame Boy."
None of us had any idea that he was on the lam, an accused mur-der-er.
If the charges against him are true, Adam Galli turned to crime to get back together with his family. He and Aaron Galli, who is two years younger, were the only children of two professional surfers in Southern California. The boys were separated when their parents divorced in 1971.
Adam Galli was just 3 years old at the time. He stayed with his father, Stephen, who as a single father raised him in Salt Lake City. The boy had few friends, his father says, and didn't date until his last semester in high school. He was a quiet and diffident student, ditching his homework to read novels that interested him. Aaron Galli lived with his mother, Valerie Cedergren, and they traveled widely before settling in Hawaii.
In flight, Adam Galli appropriated details of his brother's life, embellishing them and making them his own. To friends, he praised mom and trashed dad. "From what I hear, Adam may have been using Aaron's story," says Stephen Galli, "maybe because he really didn't want his own story to have been his story."
A compulsive storyteller, Adam Galli would spin one outrageous tale after another. He told us he grew up in a rain-forest village in Hawaii. He said he had ripped off a pot smuggler and blown up his boat. The escapade, he said, landed him in jail, where he learned to make weapons of wire and toothbrushes. (Police say that Adam Galli's only prior arrest was for stealing a backpack at a ski resort.)
The story he didn't tell was the one about the four cousins who held up stores in Salt Lake City.
Police say the 1991 Salt Lake crime spree began when Adam Galli strolled alone into a Subway fast-food place, ordered a sandwich and, after it arrived, stuck up the cashier with a pellet gun. He fled with $360 in cash - and his food. Police allege the Galli gang then robbed at least five restaurants, the King's English Book Shop and several theaters.
On May 17, 1992, the comic romp turned tragic. Someone shot and killed Merritt Riordan, a cook at the Green Parrot Cafe. Police say that it was Adam Galli who pulled the trigger after he and his brother were found hiding in the basement, waiting to rob the restaurant.
Police rounded up Adam's three alleged partners in crime on June 10 that year, but Adam Galli managed to flee to Seattle. Soon thereafter, he wrote a rambling, 17-page letter to the girlfriend he left behind, professing undying love, likening himself to tragic heroes and lying about being holed up in Mexico. Sounds like the spinner of yarns I got to know last summer.
He hid out with a friend in Seattle, and she turned him in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was arrested, shipped back to Utah and charged with armed robbery. After about a month in jail, he was released on $40,000 bail; his father and an aunt put up cash, three cars and a condominium, which they lost when Adam ran again in November 1992.
He actually did go to Mexico this time and worked as a cabin boy on a yacht. By June 1993, he was in Puerto Vallarta and had befriended two girls from Oregon who were celebrating their high-school graduation. One was Marina Haugland. The other girl was Lila Andrate.
"He was romancing both of us," says Andrate, now a 20-year-old artist in Seattle. "Have you ever seen `Six Degrees of Separation'? That's exactly what he reminds me of," she says, referring to the play's main character, a charming con artist.
Adam Galli followed the girls to Eugene, Ore., staying for a month with Haugland and her parents. She headed for Carleton in the fall, and Adam went to Santa Cruz, Calif., to be with Andrate.
She says she wasn't romantically involved with Adam and kicked him out after two weeks.
Early in 1994, "August" went back to Northfield and, in June, moved into my apartment. In September, after he had left us, he met a new love, Erica Small, at the local laundry.
They spent nearly a year together, but Adam never divulged his secret to her, Small says. "He was my best friend. I don't know how to reconcile the person I knew with what everyone seems to say."
She was present when the authorities arrived to arrest him. A "wanted" poster had arrived by mail at the local FBI office, with a scrawled message disclosing Adam Galli's whereabouts. When two agents approached him outside the place he worked, he denied he was Adam Galli, then grabbed for one agent's pistol, the agent Kevin Rickett says, as they struggled to handcuff him.
Adam Galli is now back in custody in Salt Lake City. His brother is already serving a one-to-15-year sentence on a single count of robbery. Aaron's conviction for first-degree murder as an accomplice to the killing of Riordan was overturned after his cousin Christopher, who had turned state's evidence, told friends he had lied to the court about Aaron's involvement in the murder. Their cousin Nathan got five years to life on four counts of aggravated robbery, and Nathan's brother, Christopher, got one to 15 years on a robbery count. Adam Galli faces four charges of aggravated robbery and one count of capital murder. If convicted, he could face execution by lethal injection.
After Adam Galli moved out, we found a box he had left behind. Its odd contents included a clipped-off brown ponytail and a sharp knife with Haugland's name scratched into the handle. The only other thing he left was the message from a fortune cookie, taped above the kitchen sink. It read: "A day is a long time."