In Conversation: How an opioid addiction drove one engineer to rob banks

When Tony Hathaway was arrested outside of a KeyBank in Seattle, police and the FBI had been looking for him for months. Hathaway had robbed 30 banks in a single year. Before he became a notorious bank robber, Hathaway was a top design engineer at Boeing; he fit the profile of a loving family man, he made six figures, and flew around the world in business class. That all unraveled when he was prescribed OxyContin for a back injury and developed an addiction to opioids.

Journalist Josh Dean wrote an article for Bloomberg Businessweek about Hathaway in 2019. His reporting is the basis of a new podcast series from Apple TV+, called Hooked. Apple News Today host Shumita Basu spoke with Dean about Hathaway’s story.