“Please do not deceive yourself by committing that old sin of only believing in what you see. I am not what you see. I shatter all stereotypical images associated with being a Black man in America. I am not of an age, but for all times, my life works will endure throughout time.”
—Armand D. Moore, prologue to The Heist that Shook a Nation: One in 70 Million
For one circle of Hollywood insiders it was a long-anticipated night. For the man at the center of the much-hyped Heist 88 movie, its Oct. 1 premiere on the Showtime network was a snoozer.
“I don’t really know if I’m in a position to make an intelligent determination or review of the film, because I fell asleep [during] it three times,” says Armand Moore.
The man whose ballsy, $70 million bank-wire theft 35 years ago inspired Heist 88 isn’t known for mincing words.
Portrayed by one-time Detroiter and Emmy Award-winning actor Courtney B. Vance, the fictional character Jeremy Horne was written based on Moore’s real-life exploits — but without Moore’s input. Home in Michigan after a 30-year federal prison sentence, Moore self-published his memoir, The Heist that Shook a Nation: One in 70 Million, which he calls the only “true story,” in 2022. Meanwhile, he says the battle to separate fact from fiction, including the possibility of legal action against Vance and his wife, Oscar-winner Angela Bassett, is far from over.
“I just feel that it was very poorly and cheaply done,” says Moore.
But he notes that Vance co-starred in the Aretha 2017 TV series, portraying the late Detroit pastor C.L. Franklin, father of soul legend Aretha Franklin, before actress Jennifer Hudson’s 2021 turn as Franklin in the film Respect “blew that first version out of the water.”
“So, consequently, when my mini-series is done, it will have the same effect,” he says. “We’re going to do it. The only question is who it’s going to be done with.”
Supporting Moore’s vision for the re-telling of his story is fellow Detroiter Delrhonda “Big Fifty” Hood, whose life was portrayed by rapper Remy Ma in 2021’s American Gangster Presents: Big Fifty — The Delrhonda Hood Story. Hood, an east side native whose maneuvers in the drug game led her to street-legend status and eventually to prison, is using her entertainment industry contacts in hopes of executive producing Moore’s authorized series.
“Do I want his story to be told, and told by him? Yes, I do,” says Hood. “Give him that. He deserves it.”
“Big Fifty” is in her 50s and Moore turned 69 years old Oct. 7, and she says their friendship goes back “many, many, many years.” In fact, even before his brazen heist attempt of almost $70 million from First National Bank of Chicago, Hood says Moore’s story was worth telling.
Son of a preacher man
Having made his entry to the ’80s drug scene by flying under the radar as a cook at the former Juanita’s bar in Detroit, Moore became known for flashy displays of style, or arrogance, depending on the beholder’s eye. Hood says she personally witnessed Moore on dates at fine restaurants where he refused to be seated until the table cloth and silverware, though already clean, had been replaced by the staff.
“I said, ‘This is a crazy motherfucker,’” Hood chuckles.
As Moore tells it in The Heist that Shook a Nation: One in 70 Million (a book that was edited by this reporter), it wasn’t simply ego that fueled his later exploits, but an early life spent experiencing Southern racism and degradation in the Black community. The son of Baptist preacher Arnold Dwight “Gatemouth” Moore, who’d been a blues singer in the 1940s, Armand Moore grew up in Tennessee. He recalls hearing his parents discuss the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s efforts in places like Memphis, where King was assassinated during Moore’s early teenage years.
“I always understood that the disparities in housing, employment, and education in Memphis left me with little hope for a bright future, based on racial division,” Moore writes in The Heist that Shook a Nation. “I realized sooner than most that there were far too many social stigmas in place, meant to stifle the growth, economic and otherwise, of those who looked like me.
“I also knew that if my parents couldn’t afford to send me to college, or at least to a good trade school, all I had to look forward to was a back-breaking job at the liquor warehouse, the Army Depot, or if I was lucky, a shift at the Post Office. Unlike most of those in my immediate circle, I never looked at any of those opportunities as a pinnacle of success.”
Later moving to Chicago to join his father after his parents split, Moore worked in assistant capacities for his father’s clergy friends. While in these circles, he observed men of his own complexion enjoying prosperity and being treated with respect. It was also in Chicago where Moore eventually got a job working in a bank’s mailroom. In The Heist that Shook a Nation he describes his first visit to the cash vault: “After making my delivery I continued to stand in awe, admiring the neatly stacked bills that went from the floor almost to the ceiling: ones, tens, twenties fifties hundreds, by far, the most wonderful thing I’d ever laid eyes on. Seeing that much money in one place was like a religious experience for me, like being front and center with Moses during the parting of the Red Sea.”
In the book, Moore recalls being haunted every night by dreams of carrying two enormous suitcases into the vault and filling them with his take, but, ironically, waking hours at the bank are what proved more than he could handle and he quit the mailroom job.
“The daily temptation was mounting and my ideas were flowing like rivers, but the good in me refused to do anything to embarrass myself and, in the process, tarnish my father’s reputation,” he writes.
Flying high
Following a stint in the Navy after joining in 1977, Moore moved to Detroit. By this time his mother and sister had left Memphis and were settled on the west side where Moore reunited with them. Juanita’s lounge, located on Six Mile Road, was owned by a family friend who hired Moore as a short-order cook. Not only was it a popular spot for enjoying food and music, it became a hangout for some of Detroit’s biggest drug-dealers in the 1980s.
Moore writes: “They usually ordered food and bottle service and sat near the back, or in the VIP section, handling ‘business.’ Apparently, my mannerisms, but particularly my speech, drew a lot of attention from club patrons and after a few weeks I became known as that ‘Black, uppity, burger-flipping snob.’ But by those who appreciated my abilities I was more affectionately referred to as that ‘proper-talkin’ nigga in the kitchen.’”
After inconspicuously eavesdropping on conversations about transporting drugs, Moore seized an opportunity to get in on the action by proposing that dealers use his jet service instead of moving dope in the trunks of cars. Having gained their interest, there was just one problem: Armand Moore had never owned a jet in his life. But it wasn’t too long before he worked through the dilemma – Moore researched banking policies and generated phony letters of credit to finance what became his charter jet company, American National Air Services Investments, Inc. By sending planes from the Midwest to Florida, California, and points in between, he began earning 25 cents on every dollar of drug profit.
Moore also describes in The Heist that Shook a Nation the thrills of personal jet usage, such as having group sex with women, snorting cocaine while soaring through the clouds, and traveling cross-country just to enjoy expensive steak dinners. But when a man he met at Juanita’s and hired to help support his operation betrayed him, Moore was charged with multiple counts of fraud and soon sentenced to six years in prison.
Undeterred in his quest for wealth, Moore finished the sentence, passing time by reading and, ultimately, by preparing for the scheme that would put his name in headlines as the mastermind behind one of the boldest crimes in banking history.
“Now that I was back at home,” he writes, “I remembered another subject I had studied between case law and financial mastery: the ins and outs of electronic money wiring. I don’t mean wiring from one measly individual account to another; I had read up on how banks used computer transfer services to deliver significant amounts of money across the world every day, from one corporate account to another. It fascinated me that the push of a button could move thousands, millions, of dollars in mere seconds.”
The heist’s true price
A Nov. 28, 2017 Chicago Tribune article, “FX developing drama about Chicago bank fraud,” contains a photo of Courtney B. Vance, who was “set to play veteran con man Armand Moore if ‘Heist 88’ is picked up as a series.”
It further reads, “Moore masterminded the money transfer from three First National corporate accounts to two banks in Austria in what one prosecutor at the time called ‘the most massive and almost successful computer crime I’m aware of in the history of the United States.’”
That Vance has been interested in portraying Moore for several years is well-documented; not known is whether he ever considered inviting Moore to serve as a consultant for any iteration of the project. Initially conceived as a series for FX, the project was also considered by HBO before it was picked up as a movie by MTV Entertainment Studios, a film production subsidiary of Showtime parent company Paramount.
Requests from Metro Times to Vance’s company, Bassett Vance Productions, the Showtime network, and a representative for Angela Bassett all received no response.
“Courtney B. Vance and Angela Bassett, they advertised my name for five years!” Moore says. “Even now you’ll see my name pop up.”
Though Vance’s Jeremy Horne character’s name appears to have been a late script revision, Heist 88’s plot bears obvious resemblance to what became publicly known about the actual crime Moore executed. He initially planned to steal $230 million from First National Bank of Chicago, but settled on the almost $70 million sum after discussing it with co-conspirators, who included bank employees. Moore’s intricate strategy was devised around a wire system at the time that incorporated confirmation telephone calls to approve transfers; Moore recruited a team whose plan was to follow the procedure by essentially impersonating corporate account reps and redirecting calls to Moore’s crew, who gave the unauthorized confirmation.
“So now that we knew which accounts to tap into, and for what total amount, we moved on to the secret codes, confirmation tapes and other pertinent details necessary to make this work,” Moore writes. “We had already decided who would be used to impersonate the voices necessary to make confirmation phone calls, so we didn’t have to discuss much there, but we still had to coordinate our timing.”
Not long after carrying out the scheme, Moore says he and his recruits were awaiting the arrival of millions in “dummy” accounts they’d established, but one of the inside men at First National folded and informed authorities about the conspiracy.
Asked what motivated him to commit such an audacious crime, Moore’s answer is simple: “The money! I didn’t just get bored over the weekend and say, ‘I’m gonna steal $70 million.’”
While he’s forthcoming about the role he played in the heist, Moore still maintains that a conspiracy to kill a prosecutor and witnesses, for which he was convicted, was trumped-up to teach him a lesson for not “selling rocks or taking a pistol and running into a liquor store,” but instead for being smart. The added charges extended his time in prison by decades and he was finally released in 2019, two years after Vance’s role as Moore was first announced.
“People will think that if I bash this film or Mr. Vance’s portrayal of me, that it’s just sour grapes,” Moore says. “That’s the farthest thing from the truth. The most important factor, the most important element of that film, is Armand D. Moore. That’s it.”
“I didn’t just get bored over the weekend and say, ‘I’m gonna steal $70 million.’”
tweet this
While it has been long established and generally accepted that films about historical or public figures can be produced based on records such as court filings, news stories, or other generally accessible sources, Moore doesn’t excuse Vance, because he and Bassett are “millionaires.” “I spent 30 calendar years and three months in federal prison — straight,” he says. “I don’t ever recall receiving a card, a letter, or a money order from Angela Bassett or Courtney Vance.”
He adds, “While I was away I lost my mother. I lost my father. I lost two brothers and a host of relatives. No amount of money can replace that.”
Damon Moore, Moore’s attorney of no relation, says he spoke with legal representation from Vance’s camp last year, but nothing appears to have resulted from the conversation except the Heist 88 character’s name change, which wasn’t requested.
“The central piece of the story is taken from Armand Moore’s life and they have taken that without compensating him, despite the ability to do so,” Damon Moore says.
He adds that he is exploring action “by agreement or other means” to address Moore’s lack of compensation.
Although Armand Moore was painted by prosecutors and by some in the media as greed-driven and self-centered, he has a reputation of generosity among those close to him.
“Armand’s a very nice person,” Hood says.
“He’s genuine at heart,” she adds, “and for someone to put out a story on him that doesn’t help him, a 70-year-old man, there’s not much that he can do. I just think that Armand needs a second chance. He needs a shot at life, to tell his own story.”
Subscribe to Metro Times newsletters.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
![Episode 1: The Raven LoungeIn episode one, K-9 invites Meech to a business dinner at the historic Raven Lounge, which opened in 1966 by Sam Watts and prides itself on being Detroit’s oldest blue’s bar. The club was created “to give up-and-coming Motown [talent] a place to play,” owner Tommy Stephens told National Geographic “It’s where stars came to listen to the blues.” Those stars included B.B. King, Diana Ross, Martha Reeves, and Smokey Robinson.](https://media1.metrotimes.com/metrotimes/imager/the-best-detroit-moments-from-bmf-season-2-photos/u/slideshowthumb/32714586/bmf2-201sg-00-19-27-08-a.jpg?cb=1679947664)
