Facts about Jack Foley
Jack Foley Biography
Jack Foley is the bank-robbing hero of Elmore Leonard‘s novels Out of Sight (1996) and Road Dogs (2009). Foley is a career bank robber who claims to have robbed over 150 banks in his life, between stints in various local, state and federal lockups. Foley is smart, charming and not particularly violent — he never carries a gun when robbing banks — and Leonard presents him as a funny, likable guy in a not-so-likable profession. Out of Sight had Foley escaping from Glades Correctional Institution in Florida and dallying with a beautiful U.S. Marshall named Karen Sisco while plotting a heist in Detroit. Foley and Sisco were played by George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in the 1998 film Out of Sight, directed by Steven Soderbergh. (Karen Sisco, a short-lived 2003 TV series based on the character, starred Carla Gugino as Sisco. Foley didn’t appear in that series.) Leonard brought Foley back in a 2009 novel, Road Dogs, with Foley leaving prison in Florida for crime and hijinks in Southern California.
Extra credit
Jack Foley is also the name of an American poet (b. 1940) and of the sound effects artist (1891-1967) who developed the art of adding background sounds like footsteps and door creaks to films during post-production… Glades Correctional Institution is a real-life prison near the town of Belle Glade in Palm Beach County, Florida… Near the end of Road Dogs, Foley tells an investigator that he has robbed 176 banks in 25 years… Foley is a movie fan; early in Out of Sight, he and Sisco discuss the film Three Days of the Condor while locked in the trunk of a car.