Philadelphia Weekly

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A city basketball legend from a deeply religious family gets charged with sticking up ATM patrons with a fake gun.

But before we go any further, let's dispatch with all the cliches about unfulfilled potential, dizzying heights, hellish lows, overcoming adversity and succumbing to temptation. To rely on any of them would be to marginalize his story, and that might prove just as criminal as the acts he stands accused of today.

Let's also admit that there will be no simple answers. Some will make easy excuses, but explanations will be few.

How can any of us be expected to understand? And even if we pretend to comprehend, how can we explain why the subject of this story would commit the same felony at least five times?

Do we write it off to addiction, utter frustration, lost hope? Or do we just say it's impossible to take the 'hood out of the boy?

Give us something.

Those who love this troubled hoopster want nothing to do with uneducated answers and theories. They put them in the same junk pile as the cliches.

There are only two things they wonder about.

If Harry Moore hadn't been a state champion basketball star, would anyone have spent a second thinking about him? And how about his childhood friends, the ones who garnered national fame while he careened toward a future behind bars? Do they care what happened to him?

Police officers in Philadelphia, Lower Merion and Chelten-ham Township spent much of the spring investigating a rash of cash-machine robberies. They simply didn't seem random.

On February 25, an unusually tall robber walked up to a 58-year-old Mount Airy man outside a Germantown Avenue bank, brandished a gun and told him to add $500 to his $75 withdrawal.

On April 5, a 22-year-old Villanova coed told Lower Merion police she went to a drive-up ATM on Lancaster Avenue in Rosemont to get $60. As the money spun out of the machine, a stranger reached into her car and turned the ignition off. When she saw his weapon, she obeyed his demand to withdraw another $500.

A week later, a college-age male was held up at the same machine. But there wasn't a half-grand in his account. So the gunman waited until his victim emptied the final $120 from his account.

"Two robberies a week apart had us concerned," says Lower Merion Police Captain Michael McGrath. "So the next day we sent plainclothes officers out for surveillance. Remember we had no idea the gun wasn't real. We took a chance thinking it might happen again. Even criminals are creatures of habit."

As the Main Line cops kept watch on a First Union ATM, a report made its way to Philadelphia's Northwest Detective bureau. This time, a 35-year-old neighborhood woman was hit for $550. After yet another clean getaway, police were left to figure whether the robberies--including four that took place in Cheltenham Township during the same six-week period--were connected.

They didn't have to wonder long.

Just before 9 on the evening of April 19, they watched a man they now claim was Harry Moore run up to a 23-year-old woman using the Rosemont ATM. He grabbed the woman's money, stuck it in his pocket and ran a couple blocks to his car. He started the engine but got only two blocks away before lights flashed behind him.

"He immediately stopped and surrendered," says McGrath. "He didn't put up a fight."