Dude! Your post brought back memories. As a teen in Visalia, California, around 1983, my buddy and I used to walk down to Visalia Mall around midnight and run from the security guards so they would chase us.
This became a every Saturday thing.
He almost hit us with his truck one night, so we returned the next night with two milk jugs of diesel (after a rain) and painted a curved section of the parking lot. We then taunted him with rooster crows until he gave chase.
He rounded that curve and slid off into the bushes.
We made friends with all the dogs in the backyards that bordered the mall by handing out treats, so we could jump a fence and the dogs would bark at the guards.
Then Visalia PD got involved one night and we escaped by going to the rooftops.
Officer Murphy brought his K9 one night, so we stepped up our game. Knowing policy is K9's cannot be released on misdemeanants or known juveniles, we loaded up on dog treats and cayenne pepper. Several times we hid from his dog in a cardboard box behind the pool supply after laying a trail of pepper.
This went on for several months. We would scale a radio tower off Walnut Avenue, about 100 yards from the mall and watch the cops set up traps for us through binculars.
We soon discovered that the slough, near Ben Maddox and East Main - behind what is now a Carl's Jr, which is dry most of the year, flows under the city and allowed us to walk right under the bridge at Ben Maddox and connect to the storm drain system.
We could literally pop up anywhere we wanted and disappear just as quickly.
The city eventually put an article in the local paper asking the public to help capture us and even offered a reward, but repeatedly we had residents help hide us out.
Off and on, throughout the summer months, we did this on a fairly regular basis...monitoring thd cops activities, communicating with walkie-talkies and then just running from the guards and cops.
When I moved to SoCal in 1988 (to make it big in rock LOL) my buddy suggested we do it one more time, when the paper printed an article on the Visalia Mall Bandits.
We resumed in the summer of 1990 - planning a Friday and a Saturday event. We spent weeks reacquainting with the dogs and a buddy's family who lived nearby.
Then, we wrote a ransom style letter to the editor and told them the 1983 bandits would hit again. We also divulged details, such as the cop's and K9's names to authenticate our identities.
We donned our black outfits and made our way to the tower and surveyed the area. The PD had officers posing as homeless, but we were monitoring their radio traffic and we had a high vantage point.
After watching for a week, we noted a pattern. The cop's called it a night at 2:30am.
The following Saturday we struck. First by tethering an entire train of shopping carts to the guard's Ford Ranger, then mooning the guard shack with "we're back" written on our cheeks.
The Guards couldn't pursue us with all the carts ziptied together, so they chased us on foot.
We could hear the cops coming, so we scaled the drain onto the roof, and ran south across the rooftops. We could see the cops coming down Mooney Boulevard code 3, so we dropped doen the west wall of the mall and moved west though several backyards.
The place lit up like daylight with all the spotlights and emergency lights, but we managed to move south before they could set a perimeter.
We waited about 30 minutes then started moving back towards the mall.
As we crossed Mooney between Walnut and Tulare Avenues, we heard four barrels open up and Sam 10 call out on radio that he saw us....
We crossed Mooney heading East and climbed onto the roof of Waterbed Outlet and hid in the shell of an industrial evaporative cooler we had used previously.
Again we waited for things to die down about 30 minutes.
Visalia PD cars were solid dark blue back then. All of a sudden we started seeing black and white Tulare PD cars showing up from the neighboring city. This was getting serious.
We were now where they didn't expect us to be - on the East side of two lane Mooney Boulevard - and a block North near Tulare Avenue. We called the PD (non emergency line) from the pay phone at 7-11 and reported seeing the "bandits" outside the abandoned Young's Trucking building behind the 7-11 - an AutoZone stands there today.
It took less than a minute for the cops to show up. We let them see us run into the old shop building.
Sergeant Abbott (who can be seen on old episodes of Cops) announced that we were surrounded and if we did not give up, he would order police K9's be released.
We had already opened a manhole cover in the floor of the truck shop several days before and we were in the storm drain system and had closed the cover before they made entry.
In less than 45 minutes, we emerged from the slough, several miles away, near Shagnasty's Bar. We walked the short distance to my buddy's house and called it a night.
The local paper reported the event in typical exaggerated fashion and we wrote another fingerprint-less letter to the editor calling out the cops on their BS description of the event.
The city actually took out an article, later that summer, asking us to return.
Ironically, two years later, I would attend the police academy, 2 miles from the mall, and listen to my instructors tell stories about the elusive Mall Bandits....
