When Mark Brown wrote to a prolific Twin Cities bank robber locked up in a federal prison in Minnesota, he wasn’t surprised to hear back.
The documentary filmmaker thought: “If I were in prison and really bored and I got a letter from someone who was interested in my story, I’d probably write back.”
Brown wanted to make a short film about John Whitrock but he didn’t imagine that it would become his first full-length documentary, unfolding over nearly a decade, and the twists and turns he’d encounter along the way.
“The Fishing Hat Bandit” premieres at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival on Friday, April 19.
It’s not just a true crime documentary, but a story about the power of restorative justice and taking a different approach to forgiveness, Brown says. He arranged a meeting with Whitrock and one of the bank tellers he’d robbed, who remained traumatized 20 years later.
“I think a lot of times, in the current environment, these films are whodunits,” Brown said. “But I wanted to figure out what John’s motivations were and figure out how it affected the people that were victims of these crimes.”
Photographer becomes filmmaker
Brown took up photography when he was a child. He followed his passion and became a photojournalist at the Santa Maria Times in California before he took a job at West Virginia University as a multimedia producer.
“Leaving the news business made me even more hungry to tell these kinds of stories,” Brown said, and, outside of work, he planned to work on a photo essay about a Pentecostal, snake-handling family he met. The family ran a small church, but when Brown went to their sermons, he realized “still photos could not capture what was going on.”
He’d always been interested in documentary filmmaking and he made his first short documentary about the family and their church. “Sermon of the Serpent” won best short documentary in 2014 at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival.
Brown, originally from Long Prairie, Minn., moved back to Minnesota and started working at the University of St. Thomas in 2014. He’s now director of photography for the university’s marketing department. He’s teaching at the university for the first time this semester, an introductory photo and video course.
Brown, 47, calls documentary filmmaking his “passion project.” When he started, he was single and living on his own. In the time that he’s been working on “The Fishing Hat Bandit,” he got married; he and his wife now have two children and live in Roseville.
The film is “something I’ve chipped away at,” Brown said of his working on it between his full-time job and family life. “It literally just finished in time” for the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival.
‘Wonder where that guy is now?’
When Brown settled back in Minnesota, he started looking for his next film project. He especially enjoys watching true crime documentaries and set out to make his own.
Brown was living out of state in 2005 when Whitrock was arrested in the bank robberies, but he remembered reading about the case in the news. The FBI said at the time that they believed the Fishing Hat Bandit set a record for the most bank robberies in Minnesota; since then, a man pleaded guilty in 2013 to holding up 31 banks in less than a year.
A federal grand jury indicted Whitrock, then 56, in 2005. He pleaded guilty to 21 bank robberies between July 2003 and January 2005 in St. Paul, West St. Paul, Inver Grove Heights, Roseville and beyond. Often seen wearing a bucket-style hat on video surveillance footage, Whitrock walked into banks, threatened to pull out a gun and demanded cash.
Brown thought, “I wonder where that guy is now?” It was 2015 when Brown sent his first letter to Whitrock in prison, introducing himself as a documentary filmmaker who was curious about his story. They corresponded by letters and phone calls in 15-minute increments until 2018, when Whitrock was released from prison and he moved to Iowa to live with a relative.
Brown started taking road trips to interview Whitrock, thinking he would make a short documentary.
“If you didn’t know his history, you would think he’s a very typical guy in his 70s,” Brown said of Whitrock.
Whitrock realizes it wasn’t ‘victimless crime’
As Brown planned his film, he didn’t want the victims to be an afterthought.
“I was genuinely curious about what it was like to be on the other end of these robberies,” Brown said. “I wasn’t going to make just a profile piece about John. … I wanted to see how it really impacted people.”
Brown was able to track down nearly all the tellers who’d been robbed. Most wanted to leave it in the past, but four agreed to let Brown interview them for the documentary.
Meanwhile, Whitrock had told Brown “he had always kind of convinced himself that this was a victimless crime.” That was until he took a mandated victim-impact class in prison and “he really had come to this epiphany” that he’d been wrong, Brown said.
From prison, Whitrock wrote letters and mailed them to each bank he targeted, addressing them, “To the teller I robbed,” and apologizing, but he was never sure if the victims received them, Brown said.
Teller thought demand note was a joke
One of the tellers who took part in the documentary is Brent Haupt, who worked at Highgrove Community Federal Credit Union in St. Paul’s Highland Park at the time. It was the first robbery in the string of cases to which Whitrock pleaded guilty.
“(Whitrock) walked in and looked a little odd because he had a coat and leather gloves on and it’s the end of July and 90 degrees outside,” Haupt said recently of the 2003 robbery.
The man approached Haupt and handed him a demand note. It was Haupt’s ninth day working for the credit union and his first day at that location.
Haupt thought at first it was a joke and he was being put to the test at his new job. But the man patted his waistband, as though he had a weapon, and told Haupt, “I’m serious.”
Haupt reconsidered: “That would be a pretty cruel joke or pretty cruel test to do,” and he followed his training about how to handle a robbery. He handed the money over to the man — “it all happens in just a blink,” he said.
Haupt, then 27, talked to the FBI and was ready to get back to work for the day, but the credit union sent him home and told him to relax. He returned to work the next day with co-workers expressing amazement, asking “You came back?”
“I said, ‘Yeah, why wouldn’t I? This is just part of the job, I guess,'” he said. He said he’s told people over the years about the robbery as an interesting story that happened to him, but he knows other tellers were deeply changed by the experience.
Left traumatized
Whitrock says he never had a gun during the robberies, though the demand notes he passed to tellers threatened that he did. Another teller who is in the documentary, Dawn Jewkes, remained “really traumatized” by the robbery, Brown said.
“John had mentioned that he wanted to find a way to express how sorry he was for doing this to people,” Brown said.
Brown traveled to North Dakota to interview Jewkes, where she now lives, about the robbery in Richfield. She told him she remembered receiving Whitrock’s apology letter and Brown asked if she’d be interested in meeting Whitrock. She said “yes,” but Brown said he knew he wasn’t qualified to “bring someone who is traumatized face-to-face with their perpetrator without possibly doing more harm.”
Brown enlisted the help of Brenda Burnside, CEO of Let’s Circle Up Restorative Services in St. Paul. “That’s the culmination of the movie — I don’t want to give too much away,” Brown said recently. “It’s the third act and it’s what brings the story into the present.”
Kelly Nathe, a documentary programmer at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, said they watch hundreds of films before deciding which ones will be in the festival. They pay close attention to Minnesota-made films and, because Brown worked on his for years, “it was on our radar” and they were looking forward to him completing it, Nathe said.
“He assembled a film that is entertaining and riveting and really brings people on a ride that also tells the side of the story that people don’t often think about when they think about bank robbers — the effect on the bank tellers and the residual effects of that trauma.”
The films from Minnesota filmmakers always sell out at the festival, Nathe said, and she suggests people who are interested get tickets as soon as possible.
What’s next for filmmaker
Brown is a member of Docuclub MN, an informal group of Minnesota documentary filmmakers, and he said he talked to people there about his approaches to the film. Chris Newberry, who became producer of “The Fishing Hat Bandit,” met Brown through Docuclub.
“The biggest draw for me was Mark himself,” Newberry said of why he wanted to work on the project. “I really admire Mark as a filmmaker, a storyteller.” And the premise of the film was compelling to him — that a bank robber was prolific enough to get a nickname, and his journey after prison of “trying to figure out what his life was all about,” Newberry said.
Also contributing to the film is composer Charlie McCarron of St. Paul, who wrote 60 minutes of original music for the 81-minute film.
Brown said he made “The Fishing Hat Bandit” on a shoestring budget. “It’s a $200,000 film, but we did it out of pocket for maybe $50,000 over nine years,” he said.
He received a $10,000 grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and raised $25,000 through Kickstarter to pay the editor, sound mixer, composer and colorist. Other friends in the local filmmaking community donated their time and equipment to help him. The rest was self-funded.
The experience of working on “The Fishing Hat Bandit” changed how Brown views his work and he only wants to focus on criminal justice stories going forward.
He’s already begun working on his next project: He’s filming inside the Stillwater prison’s new tattoo shop, which is providing apprenticeships to people who are incarcerated and want to pursue a career in the tattoo industry when they’re out of prison. He doesn’t yet know when it will be finished.
“Hopefully sooner than a decade,” he said.
How to watch ‘The Fishing Hat Bandit’
“The Fishing Hat Bandit” will be screened April 19 and 20 at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival and April 21 in Rochester, Minn. There will be a question-and-answer session with Mark Brown, John Whitrock and other collaborators after each of the three screenings. Tickets can be purchased at mspfilm.org.
The documentary also will be shown at the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival in Iowa on April 25 and 27.
Brown has submitted his documentary to other film festivals around Minnesota and the U.S., but he doesn’t know yet which ones may accept it. Upcoming screenings will be listed at thefishinghatbandit.com/screenings.
