Gym. Tan. Larceny.
Written by Alex Zdan
Momentary silence reclaims an open clearing in the dead of night. A safe harbor between repeated, slashing blasts of sound.
Trees on the periphery hold the wet night air protectively close. Pines stand motionless, umbrella tops reaching toward starlight. Wet blades of grass shine with the reflection of a brilliant pale moon.
Mist rises from a nearby cornfield, where spent stalks lay flattened under a ragged path cut by tire treads.
That trail points to two men working on something in the dark. Their only beacon is the red ember of a lit cigarette.
Then, a sound that makes the earth tremble.
The ear-splitting rattling blasts through the field. The ground itself vibrates from manmade disruption, absorbing the shattering pulse of a gas-powered jackhammer.
It’s in the hands of 23-year-old Jeffrey Indellicati. Jeff braces himself as he stands astride a safe the size of a refrigerator. His brother Ben, 21, watches as Jeff barely controls the bucking and rattling of this monster piece of machinery. Jeff’s been at this for over an hour.
A sledgehammer and pry bar lay on the ground, tossed aside after proving useless against the safe's combination lock and four-inch-thick galvanized steel walls. Ben takes a long drag on the cigarette. His eyes are fixed firmly on the dented metal door.
The one-ton safe isn’t theirs. Until a few hours ago, it was in another place, belonged to someone else, held payroll and certificates of deposit. That was before it came crashing to the soft ground here, released from the rear of the brothers’ borrowed truck – the one that ripped a shortcut through the cornfield more than an hour ago. But the safe is theirs now by possession, even if it’s just a metallic hunk of iron pressing itself down on the damp grass under the stars.
Each blast of the jackhammer shoots through Jeff’s wrists and elbows, rattling his clenched jaw. He barely flinches, keeping the bit inside the tiny gap between the safe’s door and frame. Just a little more, a little more.
When the lock finally snaps, there’s a sudden rush of silence as the jackhammer rears up. Jeff tosses it to the side just before he loses control. The bit is stuck, but the force has busted the lock in half. Jeff grabs the forgotten pry bar. With what feels like no effort at all after more than an hour of trying to tame the jackhammer, the older brother gingerly pulls open the safe door.
The moment is otherworldly. In Jeff’s mind, it’s a feeling of pure accomplishment transmuted into the boldness of an acid trip. There are tens of thousands of dollars –wad after wad of cash – and millions worth of certificates inside of this safe. In his eyes, the money and papers pulse outward with a starburst of brightness and a collision of luminous hues. Like a color Jeff’s never seen before, an abundance of color.
The stuff dreams are made of.
“I am set,” Jeff thinks, as he gazes into the heart of his treasure. “I am free.”
Free from New Jersey. Free from over two decades of cops and warrants and fistfights and boredom. Free from the struggles of growing up separated from his birth mother. Free from foster parents and their expectations. Free from the mundane requirements society uses to restrain all those little, ordinary people who yearn to burst from their skin and become free. Free to finally be someone.
“I can do whatever I want,” he thinks.
The cracking open of that safe door was the starting gun for an epic run of hell-raising fueled by the cash inside.
These two brothers from Jersey blazed a hedonistic trail of excess across a continent, playing high roller and outlaw alike. They lived life at full tilt like there was no tomorrow.
In exclusive clubs in Texas, strip clubs in Puerto Rico, a boat in the Caribbean, in the dark corners and VIP rooms of North America, they fully indulged their unrelenting young appetites without abandon, grabbing as many drugs, guns and strippers as they could get their hands on.
They lived their wildest fantasies: anything they wanted, any time they wanted. But like death and taxes, consequences eventually came calling.
And today, fifteen years later, they are in exile, cast off and tossed aside by an offended society on the back roads of a small town in Alaska. Was it all worth it?
Until now, I’ve only known Jeff and Ben through my writing. I was a newspaper reporter in Trenton, New Jersey, working the police desk in May 2010 when an odd report came in: A safe in the middle of a clearing busted open. Tens of thousands of dollars were missing. Two smooth-talking brothers had been on the run of their lives across Alaska. A standoff at a lakeside cabin, where they were finally caught by a determined state trooper. A judge who threw the book at them, sentencing Jeff to state prison for more than 21 years, and his little brother Ben to more than 17.
But I only knew the story in pieces. I never knew what really happened that night in the clearing or what they did once they opened Pandora’s Box of trouble and fled into the night. I had no idea what their lives were like now, after prison. But at one point, we had all lived a handful of miles from each other in the Garden State. We were about the same age, sharing a generation that grew up with our own movie references and prank phone calls. Now, in our late 30s, I’m curious if they, like me, are wondering if life is about to slow us down.
Something Ben had said during a jailhouse interview had stayed with me for almost 15 years.
"It was all worth it," Ben told a local Alaska newspaper.
Was it?
The week before Halloween 2024, I flew into bitterly cold Fairbanks, just 140 air miles south of the Arctic Circle, to find the brothers.
Six inches of snow had fallen the week before. It won’t start melting until April. The town feels like it is already deep in winter’s grip. And it’s where I finally meet both Jeff and Ben, together again and trying to make up for lost time.
Fairbanks is big enough that it includes most of the amenities of the lower 48 states – a Walmart, Taco Bell, hotels, and a two-lane expressway. But it’s small enough that you notice what’s missing from it.
Take Club SkinRock, for example. It’s what the brothers call the “third-best” strip club in Fairbanks, Alaska, and it’s where I get to know them better on a Friday night while a dancer buries her face in Ben’s crotch.
The club is a would-be Gothic haunt with vaulted ceilings and harsh red lighting. It’s the place where I see Jeff fully relax for the first time.
“They can do something I can’t do,” Jeff says. He watches with obvious admiration before tossing singles at the scallop-shaped stage. He’s aiming for a young stripper gyrating her hips, one leg wrapped flexibly around a dull pole as she engages her core, then turns herself upside down.
Jeff is two years Ben’s senior. Tall, muscular, and fiercely intelligent, Jeff claims to have read 1,200 books while in prison. He measures his words carefully nearly all the time. You get the sense he’s mapped out most conversations in advance and tries to stay three moves ahead.
Ben comes off as looser, much more of a good-time guy. With an untamed beard and an impish quality, Ben is impulsive but has a mischievous glint in his eye that makes him impossible to dislike. Ben is his own man, but clearly follows and looks up to his older brother as a leader. Jeff recognizes Ben’s vulnerabilities – women, weed, daredevil sports – but wants to try to make his brother come off as glowingly as possible. “I’m so proud of him,” Jeff says several times during the night, laying it on a bit thick, gesturing with an outstretched hand toward Ben.
“Fuck you,” Ben says, smiling but annoyed.
Ben is a quiet charmer, giving off devil-may-care vibes found enticing by no fewer than two girlfriends and one ex who doesn’t want to be an ex anymore.
Jeff’s also got an ex. She’s in Wasilla, where Jeff left her – along with his busted car – six days ago to move in with Ben. The car is scheduled to be fixed. The relationship isn’t. Jeff claims he still heads down to see her occasionally to make content for his OnlyFans page.
As the next dancer struts up to the pole to begin her act, Jeff leaves for a moment. I think he’s grabbing a smoke or getting a resupply from the ATM. But he’s whispering to the bouncer, lying that it’s Ben’s bachelor party. I’m not sure if this is a show for me or if it is some standard game between the brothers.
Within minutes, the strippers start paying extra attention to Ben. For a while, we’re the only patrons in the place. Three dudes sitting in armchairs in front of the stage, flinging dollar bills and sipping non-alcoholic cider since the club doesn’t sell booze. Topless girls cycle off and on the stage doing their routines to pop songs, bending over, staring back from between their legs while peeling off thongs. When they’re done, most of the girls hang out in chairs near the stage, staring vacant-eyed at their colleagues under the watchful eye of a bouncer with a ridiculous mohawk and a powerful Canadian accent.
As a topless girl with kitty cat ears grinds her face between Ben’s legs, Jeff whoops and hollers. He’s loving it.
“Here in Alaska, everything wants to kill you,” Jeff says. “The animals, the weather-“
“- the women,” Ben finishes.
Alaska has always been a refuge for outlaws, rascals, the broken-hearted, the lost boys of America who call it home. Broken lives and bourbon-fueled bad decisions stand out stark and stubborn against the harsh climate. Nearly everyone who wasn’t born and raised here has a tale of woe from a place they left behind and don’t want to go back to.
Jeff and Ben certainly have a story.
“Isn’t life just one big fucking story?” Jeff muses, sitting on the couch in Ben’s apartment, where he’s crashing these days. Glassy-eyed, chomping on a piece of seriously burnt frozen pizza, he adds between bites: “And aren’t we just characters in that story?”
Apologies to William Shakespeare.
To figure out how Jeff and Ben ended up in Alaska, it’s helpful to know where they came from. And not just the state of New Jersey.
Jeff and Ben may have lived like Hunter S. Thompson characters during their month-long run from the law, but their start in life could have been penned by Charles Dickens.
Their mother, Lisa Dawson, was not able to give her three children a secure upbringing. By the time the youngest, Ben, was born in 1988, Dawson was living in a homeless shelter with Jeff and her daughter Alexis.
I’ve hung onto a print-out of a 1988 Times of Trenton article about those days. The headline photo is of Dawson, pregnant with Ben, holding Alexis as an 18-month-old Jeff sits watching. It’s winter. Outside, it’s 29 degrees. They’re living at the Lower Bucks County emergency shelter in a temple in Bristol, Pennsylvania.
“It’s not good to move the kids around every couple of weeks,” Dawson told the newspaper, “But I have no choice.”
Dawson was in and out of shelters and addiction facilities in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Her three kids were all fostered by different families in Trenton and across the Delaware River in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Despite the poverty and dislocation, Ben remembers happy moments, like riding horses at the Kerr farm in rural Hopewell. And getting adopted into a loving family and finding a dedicated stepmother in Bambe Cross. But, at 10 years old, his adoptive mother was killed by a drunk driver. Bambe had been training for a bicycle race to raise money for teen runaways. Ben still remembers being in the courtroom when his mother’s killer was tried. He was confused and alone.
Predictably, both Ben and Jeff had trouble with authority and run-ins with the law, Ben especially. Classroom issues, fights, skipping school. Ben’s issues got him kicked into increasingly more restrictive school environments, from juvie to reform school to the Alfred C. Wagner Youth Correctional Facility in Bordentown – at the time, the state’s largest facility for non-violent youth offenders. After doing his time, Ben spent a year in Florida with his sister. There, Ben was busted for apartment break-ins and gun thefts at just 19 and was sentenced to two years probation.
Meanwhile, back in New Jersey, Jeff had been convicted of four felonies and was awarded a 200-day stint in the county workhouse. By the time Ben was 21 and Jeff was 23, the most permanent thing they had to their names were long rap sheets and bad reps.
Reuniting in the Trenton suburbs in 2010, the brothers both scored jobs at a safety gear and equipment company known as FallProof Network Systems, thanks to the company’s owner, Burke Sinclaire, who was Ben’s uncle via adoption. Inside the office at FallProof was a five-foot-tall steel safe.
To this day, neither brother will own up to who had the idea for the heist. But it’s clear the planning was all Jeff.
One look inside the safe flipped his switch. The way Jeff tells it, once he saw tens of thousands in cash and what was reported to be millions in bank certificates, his obsession with stealing the safe was born.
“It became the only topic of discussion,” he tells me.
Forget the fact that in targeting Sinclaire, they would essentially be stealing from family.
“Stuff happens,” Jeff says. “He shouldn’t have left the safe open for me to see that.”
But Ben reacts differently. “I really feel bad for him.”
In early April 2010, Jeff’s planning intensified.
“If you’re smart, and you’re a smart criminal, you probably have everything you need,” Jeff tells me.
Except help.
It just took five words from Jeff to get Ben to sign on: “I need you, little brother.”
Second Street in Hamilton was dark in the early hours of April 9, 2010. The brothers pulled into the facility in a borrowed truck, with company keys in hand. Once inside, they commandeered a forklift. With a few turns of the wheel, amid the high-pitched whine of the forklift’s hydraulics, they slowly deposited the one-ton safe into the bed of their waiting vehicle.
At least that’s the story the cops tell. Jeff claims he muscled the safe out himself.
“Have you seen me?” he asks, pushing out powerful shoulders and pecs. Ben has copped to being jealous of his physique at least once. Ben says nothing.
It’s unclear whether I will ever get the whole story about that night. Despite a slew of other charges leveled at them for criminal activity in Alaska, prosecutors in New Jersey never did indict them for the theft of the safe. The statute of limitations seems to have expired, but the brothers are still careful about what they say.
Did Jeff and Ben have any help the night they fled into the dark with the safe weighing down the truck’s chassis? Were there shadowy third parties who may or may not have been peripherally or deeply involved? Did other men hitch a ride on Jeff’s dream, hanging on for dear life, hands outstretched, to brace the safe as it lurched over potholes and onto a back road? Again, the cops say no. The brothers remain vague.
With the safe in the back of the borrowed truck, the brothers hightailed it to the remote wilderness preserve a few miles away to work on opening the prize undisturbed. It was 1:30 a.m. The brothers rigged up an anchor pull – attaching heavy-duty ties to a tree on one end and to the safe on the other. Then they gunned the truck engine. Like an illusionist whipping a tablecloth out from underneath a place setting of plates and silverware, the truck moved, and the safe stayed right where it was. A Roadrunner cartoon – a ton of galvanized steel hanging in the air for a nanosecond, then crashing to the ground.
“Country redneck ingenuity,” Jeff says.
But it didn’t force open the safe door or buckle the four-inch-thick metal walls. Over the next hour and 15 minutes, Jeff attacked the safe with pry bars, crowbars, and a sledgehammer. He finally resorted to the jackhammer – “a 95, a real jackhammer.” Standing on the safe, controlling the bucking jackhammer as it threatened to run wild, keeping its bit from straying outside the barely visible crack between the door and the wall, Jeff finally felt the bit get stuck against the locking mechanism and snap both.
They were young guys from New Jersey who had just pulled off a daring heist worth millions. They had their hands on more cash than they’d ever seen. The brothers-slash-best-friends were on a euphoric high that no drug could match. If you were them, where would you decide to go?
The Jersey Shore, of course. Within hours of the heist, Ben was partying in Seaside, a town infamous for hosting what’s felt like decades of summers featuring the “Jersey Shore” hooligans. Jeff, on the other hand, did not vary his routine, heading to work the next morning and behaving as if nothing had happened. His plan was to hide in plain sight.
“Unfortunately, the emotions of immediate family became too much to contain themselves,” Jeff says in a monotone. Ben looks down.
Jeff’s plan had several flaws. First, Sinclaire and the Hamilton police department connected the dots much more quickly than he had anticipated. Despite Jeff’s cocksure attitude that he’d committed an unsolvable crime, the cops quickly connected the missing safe to the two men with criminal records who worked at the company where the safe had been swiped from.
Once it became clear the cops were on to them and it was time to get the fuck out of town, they were faced with the dilemma: How do two guys transport what they claim was $700,000 in cash onto a plane without attracting the attention of the TSA?
“Hopping on a plane with more money than you’re supposed to have is not a great feeling,” Jeff says.
They broke up the stacks of bills, strapping them to their bodies with duct tape. Some were hidden in a laptop. Jeff decided that inside the brothers’ underwear was the safest place to avoid TSA detection.
Thirteen hours after the heist, Jeff and Ben boarded a plane to Florida with cash enough for salvation buried in their underpants.
“When you have cash, you can officially be anyone you want, anytime you want, because the cash says I am,” Jeff says.
He assumed a different name for every nightclub he hit with Ben, for every first-class cabin and pleasure den they swaggered into. He was John Cena’s nephew, Jim Carrey’s friend. He lived a new fantasy with each name he chose.
After Florida, the brothers flew first class to Texas, pulling up to the “sickest fucking strip club Houston had” in a super stretch limo. Whipping out a fat wad of cash, they told the driver to come back to take them to the airport in “six to eight hours…maybe 10.” In the back of the club was an “anything goes” VIP room. The cash and a little charm got them waved through.
Ben was wearing a sweatshirt with fake diamond studs, which labeled him “Jersey Royalty.”
Johnny Walker Red and Black flowed like nectar of the gods. There was bottle service with the best champagne. Shots of Patron and Jager bombs proffered by strippers. Did money change the way women treated them?
“They just get freakier,” Ben says.
From Houston, they made their way to Puerto Rico.
In San Juan, they strutted into a no-name club. Ben got drinks while Jeff went to use the bathroom. Ben bought two Jack and Cokes, two Coronas, and tipped the bouncer $150 to get into a VIP area.
“I had four different chicks butt-ass naked by the time he came back from the bathroom,” Ben said, grinning.
At that point, they considered smuggling themselves into the Dominican Republic, hiring a charter fishing boat to take them across the Caribbean Sea from Mayagüez on Puerto Rico’s western coast to an island south of Punta Cana. With their cash secured inside a backpack on Ben’s shoulders, they were about to dive out of the boat and swim for it. The plan was to eventually set up in Santo Domingo.
But they backed off at the last minute. According to Ben, the brothers worried about a surveillance blimp that monitors the islands for suspicious activity – smugglers, drug runners, traffickers, guys swimming with backpacks of cash. Jeff had a different reason.
“Too easy,” Jeff says. “Cause I could’ve just flown there. Why would I take a boat?”
Standing across from each other in San Juan’s airport, feeling the heat and wanting to get the fuck out of Puerto Rico, Jeff faced a moment of truth.
“Where are you going?” Jeff asked Ben.
“Wherever I don’t need a passport,” Ben said.
“You don’t have a passport?”
“No.”
“Fuck.”
In Jeff’s retelling, Ben is plaintive, wailing.
“Don’t leave me,” he says as they mull over their options before an electronic board lit up with a listing of departing flights. Ben insists he was more subdued.
However emotional the conversation, Jeff ultimately refuses to abandon Ben. He can’t leave his brother for a life of sun-soaked happiness in Australia or Tahiti while Ben is hunted, vulnerable, and alone. “Not an option,” he says.
“I love you, bro,” I hear Jeff tell Ben from the apartment couch. “It’ll never happen again.”
Puerto Rico had run its course. The U.S. Virgin Islands were also in the Caribbean, but they were too hot for comfort. The brothers couldn’t go back to the lower 48. Options? Alaska or Hawaii. Jeff chose Alaska.
He chose it for two reasons. First and most obvious, it has a long and well-deserved reputation as an escape for people who don’t want to be found.
“Why wouldn’t you get as remote as possible?” Jeff asks as if a sojourn to Alaska was the most logical decision.
The second reason?
“My knowledge of Alaska was based on the New Jersey public school system,” Jeff says, deadpan. “I’d say the education system in New Jersey was pretty shitty.”
You know, Inuits and igloos. That’s what he was expecting. Instead, he got Taco Bell and strip clubs.
They’re still there. Less than two years after being released from prison, Jeff and Ben have to remain in Alaska to be close to their parole officers.
There are no real explanations as to why the brothers chose destruction once they got to Alaska. What they agree about is that they landed in Anchorage completely unprepared for the state’s climate, literally and figuratively. Jeff was looking for log cabins, snowmachines and dog sleds. Instead, he saw tons of active-duty military personnel in the Anchorage airport, professionals and pilots who seemed too close to cops for his comfort, not to mention the fact that Anchorage is a city with half a million people.
Jeff and Ben needed something much more remote. They heard about a collection of luxurious hunting and fishing cabins on Fish Lakes Creek outside Skwentna, an area 65 miles north of Anchorage that is only accessible by air and water. In the early spring, they were told, it’s desolate.
“Pretty remote area,” Jeff says before the next deadpan. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t remote enough.”
On their way through Anchorage, the brothers allegedly went on an epic $3,000 shopping spree at Sportsman’s Warehouse, stocking up on backcountry clothing and gear. Ben bought new boots with a distinctive tread. The brothers posed as graduate students, nice young men looking for a quiet place to complete their research and studies. Jeff and Ben are nothing if not engaging conversationalists. Clean-cut and confident, their act worked on an older man named Buz, who agreed to rent them a cabin on Fish Lake Creek for 45 days for just $1,500. The deal done, the boys chartered a float plane, packing everything they thought they’d need into two duffels, including Tupperware containers holding their food.
Jeff stood on the edge of Fish Lake Creek and watched their transport plane take off, its twin keels skimming the lake water before it climbed in a wash of spray and ascended into the clouds. He thought they had finally found freedom.
The first thing he did was test his hypothesis.
“You can’t just go into your backyard and unload a full clip from your rifle in New Jersey,” Jeff tells me. But on Fish Lake Creek, with virtually no one around for 25 square miles, the brothers learned they could go hog wild, shooting “everything that moved,” Ben says.
“It was just euphoria,” Jeff says. “Just the freedom.”
“We’re a bunch of fucking dumb kids who got to play with guns for the first time,” he says.
Ben shouts out. “I’ve shot guns before,” he says, contradicting his brother’s narrative as he lies on the floor playing with his new puppy. His cat Bambe, named after his adoptive mother, wanders through the living room.
“I’m not a monster,” Jeff says. “I was hungry, and I was a dumb kid, and I’ve never seen shit like that before.”
To be fair to the brothers, their 16-day wilderness adventure was no walk in the park.
On the first day, Jeff broke their water filter. It took them a day and a half to figure out how to light their propane stove. After four days, they were out of food. Their toilet was a “honey bucket” – a five-gallon bucket with a lid on it. Flushing was courtesy of gravity.
The ground outside the cabin was still covered with three feet of snow in mid-April. So, moving around to scavenge for food involved leaping through areas underneath pine trees that had been mostly sheltered from snowfall. Walking that way burns tons of energy and calories. Sweat poured down their backs. Expelled breath fogged the air. They had to remember to stay hydrated.
Whether due to hunger, opportunity, boredom, or being under the influence of pills and pot – or all of the above – the brothers began shooting the locks off nearby cabin doors and raiding the places for supplies.
They say the break-ins started only to stock up on enough food, booze and ammo to last for their stay. But soon, the brothers’ targets were moving up the food chain and income bracket from locks to trees, to animals, to granite countertops in luxury kitchens.
The first cabin had what Ben called a “badass gun” that he immediately made his own. In another lodge, they found a 55-gallon drum of ammunition. Northwoods Lodge was fully stocked with enough liquor for at least 12 people. But perishable food was in short supply. A haul of four packs of beef jerky, discovered nearly a week in, was a godsend. Depending on how far a trip the cabins were from their rental, sometimes the brothers would spend the night inside, after they rifled through drawers and poked through dry storage.
One night, inside a stranger’s cabin and high on his Percocet pills, Ben threw up all over the guy’s mantle. When he looked up and saw a stuffed moose head staring down at him, he was startled and spooked. Afraid the thing was coming at him. Ben whipped out his gun and opened fire, shooting the dead moose in the face multiple times.
On another day, the brothers spent the night in a different cabin. When two men on snow machines pulled up the next morning, Jeff took one look outside and decided sticking around was not a good idea. The brothers high-tailed it out the back door. They say the men on the snow machines opened fire on them. Jeff and Ben tried to maneuver through snow drifts, hopping as fast as they could to safety as bullets exploded through tree branches next to their heads.
The escape did not feel complete. Throughout the rest of their stay at Fish Lake Creek, they say they periodically saw the snowmachine men accessing hillside trails, trying to gain a higher vantage point to close in on the criminals who had defaced their property.
Once Jeff and Ben were done ransacking a cabin, they wouldn’t stick around to repair the locks, which meant leaving the places open to the elements. Police say wild animals, including bears, were able to get inside, defecating on rugs and trashing the furniture. In some of them, it was impossible to tell which damage came from Jeff and Ben and which came from a grizzly.
Meanwhile, back in Anchorage, the open gunfire and extensive vandalism had attracted the attention of the law.
Sixteen days after landing on Fish Lake Creek, Jeff says he was bundled up with three coats, trying to stay warm and catch some sleep, absolutely freezing, hungry, and miserable, when Alaska State Troopers showed up outside the brothers’ cabin. The megaphone voice crashed through his dream with a thunderclap of finality.
The lawman who almost single-handedly apprehended two men armed with enough firearms to hold off a dozen troopers that day is not exactly what you’d expect. If you’re picturing some burly guy with a big hat you’d be way off. Instead, picture a medium height, medium build, quietly intelligent and inconspicuous type.
Terrence Shanigan is a native – he’s Italian on his dad’s side but Alaskan on his mother’s. Her family descended from the indigenous people who first settled the chain of islands that stick out like a spinal column between the U.S. and Russia. As a boy, Shanigan spent his summers in his family’s village of Ugashik – year-round population: four.
I meet Shanigan for breakfast in Anchorage. It’s 9 a.m., but the sun still hasn’t risen. We sit down in a greasy spoon diner where reindeer sausage is on the menu.
He strikes me as a guy who is perfect for undercover work. Average size, not physically imposing but not slight. The only thing that gives him away as former law enforcement is a close-cropped crew cut. But this ex-trooper has an MBA from Louisiana State University, attended Harvard Business School, and served on both his tribe’s corporate board and the Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies.
Being an Alaska State Trooper is nothing like policing in the lower 48. Shanigan often works solo, with backup sometimes hundreds of miles away. He has to draw on his wits and ingenuity while responding to calls.
“Sometimes, when it's a really nice day,” he says, chuckling, “you'll have the backup guy with you.”
And so, on the day the law came for Jeff and Ben, Shanigan had just one other guy with him – Alaska Wildlife Trooper Mark Agnew. But Jeff and Ben didn’t need to know that. Shanigan, standing outside the cabin on Fish Lake, started signaling to phantom backup, making it seem like he had an army of cops and snipers taking up stations in the underbrush and among the trees.
“I started letting them know they were surrounded, all corners of the cabin,” Shanigan tells me. “They yelled back, ‘We'll burn this thing down around us.’”
A few days earlier, in mid-April, Shanigan had first heard of the strange goings-on at Fish Lake. There had been 911 calls from people hearing gunshots. The calls made the area sound like a “military training camp,” he says. Then came reports of cabin break-ins with “malicious” levels of damage. Then, an upscale hunting lodge was vandalized – a lodge whose caretaker had a son in the State Troopers.
“I was like, oh, this is personal,” Shanigan says.
As April came to a close and snowpacks began to melt, Shanigan took a police helicopter up to Fish Lake to check out the damage himself and maybe collect some potential evidence.
At the scenes of several of what eventually were determined to be 27 cabin break-ins (yes, 27,) the vandals had left behind cigarette butts: Camel and Marlboro Menthol lights. One of the suspects was wearing a mismatched pair of boots that left a distinctive tread in the snow. Though there aren’t many full-time residents at the lake in late spring, a handful of caretakers are around. Someone had reported seeing a shiny silver float plane land on the lake the week before, around the time the shooting started.
Shanigan matched the plane to Rust Flying Service in Anchorage. He scoped out the charter plane field, conducting a plain view search of a parked van – a “Scooby-Doo van,” as Shanigan describes it. Blue, built in the 1980s. It looked like the ride of choice for crooks up to no good.
“It was a suspect van if I’ve ever seen one,” Shanigan says.
Through the windows, something caught his attention.
“Camel cigarettes and Marlboro menthol lights,” he tells me. As he relates the story, his eyes light up – the high of cracking a good case flashes before him in an instant.
The investigation found the van was registered to Jeff - he had bought it with cash when he and Ben arrived in Alaska. The brothers didn’t know it yet, but the noose was tightening.
“These are the guys,” Shanigan thought. Now, he had to go back to Fish Lake to get them.
A floatplane landing right on the lake would be a tempting target for any gunman, not to mention killing the element of surprise. Shanigan opted for stealth instead. The wildlife trooper was also a pilot, so they decided to fly a small, State Trooper fixed-wing plane over the cabin as high as they could to scope out the area. Then, they landed at a nearby gravel airstrip in Skwentna along the Iditarod Trail. An Alaska State Trooper helicopter and a SWAT team were on standby if needed.
But getting from the airstrip to the cabin meant a 45-minute hike in snowshoes, crossing bush and wilderness covered with three feet of rapidly melting snow. And the seasonal melt meant that trek was 45 minutes of slipping and falling, even with snowshoes. Radio communication and satellite phone reception slipped in and out without warning.
When the ground became impassable, Shanigan and Agnew retrieved a canoe left behind for them by a friendly homeowner. They slid the canoe across the snow, pushing and paddling and portaging themselves and their equipment for 45 more minutes over three-foot-wide gaps where freezing cold water cracked up from underneath the snow and ice. Then, a final 45-minute hike through more deep, slushy snow before they had the cabin in their sights.
Once the troopers reached the cabin, they knew they had the right place. A radius of utter destruction emanated from beneath the elevated cabin’s six-foot stilts. A dead and disemboweled moose was splayed out in the front yard. It had been eviscerated, bones sticking up, tatters of fur moving in the breeze, with a ripped open rib cage with the meat removed. Hundreds of spent shell casings littered the ground. Empty, twelve-gauge shotgun shells lay near feathers and wings of ducks and magpies that had been blasted out of the air, bits of their bodies strewn over tiny tufts of grass beginning to appear through the liquefying snow.
“Every tree was shot until it falls [sic] over,” Shanigan says. He estimates twenty trees had been obliterated by bullets, ripped to shreds by gunmen with seemingly unlimited ammo. The tiny windows of the cabin were partially blocked by propped-up mattresses, making it seem like a barricade situation in the making.
Hoping the men weren’t keeping a watchful eye outside their refuge, Shanigan took position about 40 feet from the cabin. Clutching a sniper rifle and binoculars, Agnew took the high ground. Shanigan ducked behind a birch tree, hoping it would be enough to protect him. He and Agnew had set a crossfire with a kill zone aimed at the cabin’s front door.
The radios went out again. A half an hour of attempts to reach dispatch went unanswered. Finally, around 1 p.m., the radio crackled back to life, a sergeant back at headquarters on the other end.
“Are we still a go?” Shanigan asked.
The order came through: “Go ahead and make contact.”
Shanigan looked at Agnew.
“Yeah,” he said, “let’s do it.”
At the moment of confrontation, time lost its grip. The men could feel their heartbeats surging in their ears. Their pupils dilated, senses crested, fueling a pulsing intensity that narrowed their vision to nothing but the anticipated threat likely to emerge from the cabin door. Not fear, but focus on what was going to happen. Bracing in anticipation of the unknown.
“Hey!” Shanigan shouted. “Hey you in the cabin! It’s Alaska State Troopers!”
The cabin responded with cold, eerie silence. Absolute quiet. No one moved.
“Come out of the cabin,” Shanigan hollered. “Do not bring any weapons with you.”
From his spot behind a tree, Shanigan said he saw the kitchen window opening. It was Ben, waving a pistol.
“These guys are ready to shoot,” Shanigan thought. All his training and experience told him a shootout was a given. It was imminent.
“You’ve heard of Bonnie and Clyde, we’re Clyde and Clyde!” one of the brothers shouted from inside the cabin – the first indication there were only two men inside.
“Come out with your hands up!” shouted Shanigan.
“Fuck you!”
The standoff lasted 90 minutes, the brothers shouting bizarre remarks and lobbing disjointed bravado – they wanted a cell phone and weed; they wanted the cops to wait for them to have whiskey and a cigarette. There was no negotiating. Just demands. The two lawmen stood firm. No one backed down.
It was getting later, and colder. Light snow started to fall. Sunset was approaching. Worse, Shanigan got word from dispatch that all Alaska State Trooper aviation resources were being redirected. A search and rescue plane had crashed elsewhere in the state while on a call. No helicopter. No backup.
Like many cops, Shanigan is trained in what’s called verbal judo, essentially using a suspect’s words to undermine his own arguments for refusing to surrender. But part of that judo is known as “escalate to de-escalate.” After getting nowhere with the brothers for an hour and a half, Shanigan decided to press them. Cop-speak for upping the ante. He motioned to those imaginary fellow cops, and shifted position forward to get a better bead on his target. He moved from cover behind the birch to a sturdier spruce, his AR-15 trained firmly on the cabin’s front porch.
Finally, Jeff came out with his hands up. The big man was almost meek, bravado long gone.
For his part, Shanigan was surprised at the easy acquiescence after a scenario that had all the hallmarks of a bad shootout.
And that’s when the cheaply made porch railing snapped, and Jeff fell six feet off the elevated cabin deck, headfirst.
“You shot my brother!” Ben screamed at the black-clad troopers. But the cops hadn’t fired a shot.
Jeff had spent most of the 90-minute standoff downing Jameson whiskey from the bottle and chain-smoking Marlboro cigarettes. By the time he came out, he was completely fucked up – from drinking, smoking, two weeks’ lack of food, sleep deprivation, and bone-chilling cold.
The cabin’s porch railing split under his weight, and Jeff tumbled face-first, ass-over-elbows to the ground, hitting the grass with a spine-jarring crunch. Shaningan and Agnew had their rifles trained on him the whole time, safeties off.
Laying on his back in the snow, Jeff thought, “My neck just snapped.”
Gazing up at the endless gray sky, not sure how badly he was hurt, Jeff gently turned his head and looked into the woods.
And there, staring Jeff Indellicati down with a curious gaze, was a snow-white ermine, an Alaskan rodent the size of a mink.
A fucking ermine.
The little, long-necked, wilderness version of a weasel, was at the center of his sightline. The animal still had its full, brilliant, white winter coat – like it had stayed too late at the party and forgotten to change back into street clothes – even though it was late April.
Standing still amid human chaos, the ermine stared at Jeff as if memorizing the scene. A tiny reminder of the absurdity of trying to run away from all the rules. Seasons and spring change on their own time, without your permission. Don’t get caught in the wrong getup.
Jeff’s immediate reaction was that this was unbelievably hilarious. When Jeff was eventually handcuffed, he was laughing so hard he was gasping for air, roaring with his head reared up at the Alaskan sky. Turns out his neck was fine.
That’s when Shanigan saw the ermine, too, poking its head up near a shattered stump, looking onto a field of magpie and duck corpses and the dead moose. The lakeside was finally safe, and the ermine was reclaiming it for the animal kingdom.
“Those animals came out because they were not afraid anymore,” Shanigan says.
Once Ben calmed down, he, too, surrendered, walking out of the cabin unarmed. The two brothers were cuffed, including leg irons, laid out on their stomachs on dry patches of grass. Another two trophies for the lawn.
Through it all, Jeff and Ben seemed not to appreciate the gravity of the situation. Looking up at their captors, they kept mouthing off with the bravado of Garden State gangsters.
“Nothing’s going to get us,” Shanigan reports they said. “We get through anything together.”
Shanigan and Agnew decided to play along, maybe fuck with the brothers a little. Watch out, they said, that ermine is like a weasel, it’ll go up your pant leg.
The brothers bragged about the birds they had killed for food, “Man, that one bird was greasy.”
“You may have Beaver Fever,” Shanigan said, goading them into thinking they might have some water-borne, parasitic disease.
“Am I gonna live?” Ben earnestly asked the cops.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” Jeff said.
The helicopter had finally been cleared from the other scene but was still en route. Jeff had to go. Now. Shanigan used the leg irons to cuff one of Jeff’s wrists to his ankle, then dangled Jeff over a six-foot embankment, Jeff on his knees, so he could pee but not escape.
Arrested and about to be charged with 40 felonies, on his knees, pissing in the Alaskan bush, with a State Trooper’s leg irons around his wrist, Jeff still tried to hustle.
“They're telling us they've got $700,000 hidden in the woods in a bag and they buried it and no one's ever gonna find it no, no one's ever gonna find it,” Shanigan tells me. “And then they say, ‘well if you let us go, we'll cut you in on part of the money.’”
Shanigan loaded the brothers into the helicopter, both still talkative and joking – as if this all wasn’t really that big of a deal.
“And these guys start saying, ‘hey I'll tell you where the bodies are,’” Shanigan tells me. “‘We committed murders.’”
Shanigan and other investigators doubted it. They had a sense they weren’t dealing with a couple of mastermind murderers.
It’s a Saturday morning in 2024 at the Fairbanks OfficeMax and Ben and Jeff are looking to advertise. They’ve done their time.
After all, their story didn’t end at the lakeside cabin where they got caught. It didn’t end during their trial, or the 17-year and 21-year prison sentences they got when a judge threw the book at them. Not during the nights in prison solitary where Ben felt piss raining down on him from the upstairs cells through cracks in the walls. Not when they wound up on supervised release in Fairbanks - Ben re-entering society in the area closest to where he’d served his time, Jeff eventually making his way up to the harsh, remote area to be side by side again with his little brother.
They run a side business dedicated to clearing snow from roofs. In a state where snow quickly hardens to ice on roofs during a long winter, clearing a roof is a safety issue and, therefore, a profitable venture. Their tentative slogan: “Make the Snow Your Bitch.” You should put that on the mailer, I egg them on.
Ben’s full-time job is as a mechanic. Jeff is a union man who works on the Alaska Pipeline on the North Slope, piecing together industrial components in one of the most remote locations on earth, where polar bears eyeball him from behind the metal guardrails erected to keep them at bay.
The brothers started out working for someone else. A roofing company, where they made 90 cents a square foot. It added up to about $30 an hour and they believed they were being robbed. So, once again, they took matters into their own hands, deciding to go into business for themselves.
After all, in a world that seems stacked against them, they’ve always had each other’s backs.
“How many times have I shot at you?” Jeff asks later in the truck.
“Thousands,” Ben says.
“In your general direction…?” Jeff adds, to show he meant no harm.
Ben shrugs.
The brothers are clearly all each other’s got.
“All my friends are dead,” Jeff said to me once, almost off-handedly.
After his release from prison, Jeff went back to New Jersey for ten days, but he felt his old life haunting him. His reputation was a millstone around his neck. After just one dread-tinged greeting from a former friend in the Hamilton ShopRite, he felt himself transported back to the neighborhood hooligan, feared and avoided by good people.
It’s not like that in Alaska. Thirteen years behind bars is a long time – long enough to meet a lot of men who were guests of the state penal system.
“Here, I know who to stay away from,” he says. “Because I probably did time with them.”
I think about something Jeff’s court-appointed lawyer told me.
“We all have a dark side,” attorney Rex Lamont Butler said. “And I would suppose that one could say the ‘dark side’ of Jeffrey Indellicati was the side that did this pillaging” – the orgy of destruction at the cabins on Fish Lake.
I didn’t really know what Butler was talking about. Jeff seemed so laid back. Ben seemed like more of a wild card.
But as we ran errands that Saturday morning, I saw Jeff’s dark side come into focus. Unsmiling, head lowered, he tackled the task of creating the mailer in OfficeMax with deep concentration. His intensity deepened during the next errand at Walmart. Without speaking, Jeff barreled down the aisles, throwing first body wash, then toothpaste, then napkins into the cart as Ben and I tagged behind. If anyone was in his way, he simply brushed past, uncaring. He didn’t care if he nearly knocked over a mother or a small child.
Back in the truck, Jeff talks about going to an MMA gym and sparring. Says his mouth is “salivating” at the idea of messing up some other guy. Says he liked fighting in prison.
Ben is much more contemplative. All he wants to do is get high with me.
“Ben, why do you want me to smoke pot with you?” I ask.
“Want to make sure you aren’t a cop,” he says.
It’s 1:17 a.m. in Fairbanks, and Club Skin Rock is nearly empty.
The pulsing music and red lighting pours down on the stage.
A woman in a Thor costume slips out of a skimpy black top, flings her bra aside and bends over backward, her nipples brushing the air.
“Do you know what you want to do with your life?” I ask Ben.
“No,” he says, surprised by the question. “Does anybody?”
Some people do, I say.
“I just want to experience different things in life,” he says.
Later, during a cigarette break, Jeff lays out his plans. Like his heist and escape planning, they are precise and detailed. A 6,000 square foot house on five acres. Guest quarters. Alaska-proof everything so the water lines don’t freeze up in sub-zero weather.
“I hope you come back to visit me in the summer of 2026,” he says in his measured, deliberate way. “When I get my house. I think that would be a good follow-up.”
Ben’s truck, making a hairpin turn from a narrow road in the darkened pine forest, skids its way into a snow-crusted apartment complex parking lot. It’s negative two degrees outside.
I stumble out of the back seat of Ben’s truck, stepping gingerly into the snow.
“Look up,” Ben says.
I do.
Nothing prepares me for the infinity of an Alaskan night sky. It’s pitch black with jewels studding the sky from horizon to horizon. Millions of stars you’ve never seen before pepper the blackness. The constellations you know are woven into a richer, more textured tapestry.
“That’s the North Star,” Ben says.
“No, that’s Venus,” I say.
“Is it?”
Ben scrolls through his iPhone, where he has a stargazing app. Neck craning back to take in the endless vista, Ben points his phone upward.
The app selects and identifies constellations, connecting the dots on the touch screen to highlight the figures seen by ancient mythmakers. The app plays magisterial, atmospheric music that swells in the frigid air.
Cassiopeia, the Dippers, Orion. The music lofts on the hunter. Ben and I take in the massive bowl of sky. Just for a moment, we stargaze.
Many men have gone to Alaska to escape, only to find their demons were already there, waiting for them. Jeff and Ben are on close terms with those demons. But now, tasting their freedom with every bite of crisp night air, they seem hopeful this wild country is also a place where demons can give way to dreams.
Alex Zdan is an award-winning investigative journalist, writer, TV newscaster and is a frequent commentator News Nation, Sky News, and CNN. He has written news articles, op-eds and features for the Times of Trenton, the Star-Ledger, Insider NJ and more. He spent nearly 20 years as an investigative reporter and TV newscaster in the New York metro area, where his investigative work successfully prompted the removal of public officials, instigated policy changes, and contributed to the enactment of new state laws.
