- #CITY WITH ONE EYE AND A VERY BIG CLOCK PROFESSIONAL#
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Yet the department store robbery abortion wasn’t the only real-life Neil McCauley story to make it into Heat.
The iconic coffee house scene from Michael Mann’s Heat was based on an actual meeting between the real-life Neil McCauley and Chicago police officer Chuck Adamson. Neil McCauley’s Meeting With Chuck Adamson Over Coffee McCauley stares at the container, knowing something isn’t right, and aborts the job. A police officer decides to sit down in the corner, his equipment making a thump as it meets the container’s edge. Unbeknownst to De Niro’s McCauley, Al Pacino’s Detective Vincent Hanna and officers wait inside a shipping container watching the events from a live infrared surveillance feed. Those events translated into a pivotal scene from Heat: the police sting operation where Robert De Niro’s McCauley stands guard outside the warehouse, where inside, a member of his crew drills into a vault. He knew it took tremendous self-discipline to walk away. Now he knew the police were on to him.įor Chuck Adamson, it instilled admiration for McCauley’s professionalism. The sliding scale of risk versus reward had now tipped in someone else’s favor.įor Neil McCauley, all was not lost. McCauley had too many years of criminal experience to know that unknown sounds in a seemingly empty department store spelled trouble. McCauley heard the movement above and aborted the entire operation, a job he’d spent weeks planning and a considerable amount of money organizing. He got up and walked across the floor toward the toilet. Having been in position for five or six hours, one of the detectives could no longer wait. Neil McCauley’s mugshot, taken March 2, 1964, just three weeks before the heist that killed him.Ĭhuck Adamson had given the two detectives hiding inside the store specific instructions: do not move under any circumstances, no matter how many hours passed, according to an interview he gave in 2005. Soon, that surveillance paid off when Adamson got wind that McCauley had gathered a team of criminal associates to burglarize a Chicago department store. Then, after McCauley robbed a manufacturing plant of its diamond drill bits (a robbery also included in Heat), Adamson infiltrated his crew and placed McCauley under round-the-clock surveillance. He would continue doing what he does best: getting a crew together to take down scores. Prior to McCauley being released from prison in 1962, Detective Chuck Adamson from the city’s Major Crime Unit had a hunch about him, according to Film School Rejects.Īdamson knew Neil McCauley wouldn’t give up a life of crime when he exited the prison gates and landed in Chicago. He had spent eight years in Alcatraz, with four years in solitary confinement. By the time he was released from prison in 1962, he had already spent 25 years behind bars - more than half his life. Neil McCauley was born in Polk, Iowa, on February 2, 1914.
#CITY WITH ONE EYE AND A VERY BIG CLOCK PROFESSIONAL#
Neil McCauley Was A Consummate Professional Criminal
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Nor that his life story would later be turned into Michael Mann’s 1995 crime classic Heat.įeaturing criminal Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and the cop pursuing him, Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), Heat was inspired almost beat-by-beat by a series of actual events that unfolded between the real-life Neil McCauley and detective Chuck Adamson - right down to their epic meeting and a final, fatal shootout. He knew that McCauley and his crew planned to rob the store because it was the day the clerks were scheduled to receive a large cash delivery to exchange for checks.īut even though McCauley had already walked away from one job when he learned that Adamson was on to him, he had no idea how thoroughly surrounded he was. The police were led by a detective named Chuck Adamson, who’d recently met with McCauley over coffee and had infiltrated his gang.
On March 25, 1964, the Chicago police were in position outside a corner store on the city’s Southwest Side, ready to take down Neil McCauley, a career criminal who had been released from federal prison just two years earlier. Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary Prisoner Index Neil McCauley spent 25 years in state and federal penitentiaries, including eight years at Alcatraz.
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