Byron Chubbuck
Biography
Byron Shane Chubbuck — "Oso Blanco" (White Bear), of Cherokee descent — is an indigenous activist nicknamed "Robin the Hood" for telling bank tellers their money would fund the Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico. Arrested after a 1999 shootout with the FBI in Albuquerque, he was sentenced to 80 years, later reduced to 55. He remains imprisoned at USP Atwater in California.
Indigenous (Cherokee/Choctaw) anti-imperialist and Zapatista solidarity activist. Between 1998 and August 1999 Chubbuck robbed 13 banks and attempted a 14th across the U.S. Southwest, telling tellers he was expropriating funds for poor and Indigenous people fighting for autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico — earning the FBI nickname "Robin the Hood." Arrested August 13, 1999 in Albuquerque after a shootout with FBI agents (no one injured); originally sentenced to roughly 80 years federal. Approximately 25 years were vacated in 2016 following Johnson v. United States invalidating the ACCA residual clause. Continues to organize from inside in solidarity with Indigenous, Black, and Chicano liberation movements.
In a January 2026 review of Eric King’s book A Clean Hell, published under the name Oso Blanco, Chubbuck says he endured nine years in a Special Management Unit. He also describes assaults at USP Lee and USP Hazelton. These are his first-person accounts of historical custody conditions; the undated nine-year SMU period is not added as a separate consecutive term or used to infer admission and transfer dates.
