Three friends, Aldyn Jones, Bill Wright, and Todd Bartlett, first brought together by re-formed criminal, Chuck O’Connor, set out fifteen years after Chuck's death to follow and fact-check the claims of his incredible life story, which has long divided an entire community that knew him.

When we first met Chuck O’Connor in the early/mid 1990’s the three of us had no idea how much Chuck would impact each of our lives.

He was an open book, yet still a mystery. His criminal claims were enormous, and a lot of the community he was involved with didn’t believe him one bit. Some of our own family members and best friends didn’t believe his story, or at least, were very skeptical about it, to say the least.

Where was the proof? The million-dollar question. Chuck never tried to push his story, and those who didn’t believe him he didn’t argue with. All Chuck had to go by was an old picture Chuck was in, supposedly with Pretty Boy Floyd, Ed Deafy Davis, and some of Floyd’s family members. He also had an old Xeroxed copy of a faint copy of his mugshot supposedly from Folsom State in 1927, when he claimed to be the youngest prisoner to enter Folsom up to that point. But that’s all he had of proof for all the claims to his story. All Chuck could give was his word.

The community was split on the honesty of Chuck, yet no proof to our knowledge was found. This was before the internet was the internet, and information not so easily accessible.

The three of us, on separate occasions, would have deep, honest discussions about his honesty, and Chuck would calmly give his word. We all believed him.

Chuck passed away in the year 2000 at the age of ninety-one, and his manuscript, with all of his detailed life, was lost until 2013. Once found, We decided to finally research his life and see if we could once and for all try and find out what was fact from fiction.

It started out with newspaper articles on his international drug busting arrest in Long Beach, California in 1948. Then we found his Oregon Penitentiary prison record from the Oregon State Archives. Then his two Folsom Prison records from the California archives. Then McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, the District of Columbia Jail, his FBI files from when he was an escaped federal prisoner. It kept pouring in. The old man was telling the truth after all.

But we didn’t stop there. Every event Chuck mentioned, criminal he associated with, infamous or not, was researched and found it all to be accurate. We were finally able to put faces with names we’d heard for so many years like Blackie Carroll, Scarface Murphy, Columbus Jimmy, and Nutless Johnson. We were able to put timelines together and see how accurate Chuck was with his stories.

We came to realize almost everything Chuck said seemed genuine for the most part.

We decided to set out to follow Chuck’s life to fill in the gaps of his extraordinary life, which, if some of his claims are true, could ultimately rewrite some of American crimes most infamous events.

Aldyn Jones

Aldyn Jones has a Business and Law degree from the University of Missouri, and studied International Law at University College, London. As an accomplished writer, he is the author of nine novels, one play, and over one thousand poems. Chuck O’Connor selected Aldyn out of 50 applicants to write his autobiography in the form of a novel, and the two worked together to complete the rough draft of Chuck’s life story, Thief on the Cross. Aldyn still considers Chuck to be the most interesting person he has ever met.

Bill Wright

Bill Wright is a Bay Area native from Lafayette, California, who has worked tirelessly for two decades to bring the screen version of Chuck O’Connor’s story to life. After attending the American Conservatory Theater and the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop, his screenplay for the film version of Chuck’s life, “O’Connor,” placed in the semi-finals of the Coppola/Zoetrope Screenplay Competition.

Todd Bartlett

Born and raised in Marin County, California, Todd Bartlett has fond memories of his teenage years - this is when he first met a sharp, eighty-year-old Chuck O’Connor. Todd holds a degree from UCLA’s Department of Theater, Film, and Television. He has spent the past several years documenting this incredible life story, in addition to hundreds of Chuck’s underworld associates. As part of this exhaustive research effort, he pieced together and verified Chuck’s criminal past via prison records, FBI files, newspaper articles, and in conversations with various crime historians.