The Art of Getting Away Clean

The Art of Getting Away Clean is a masterfully crafted work of creative nonfiction that chronicles the life, legend, and mythology of William “Billy” Jackson—America’s most elegant outlaw, a man who outsmarted the FBI for over twenty-five years without ever firing a shot or breaking his code.

Told by his son, attorney and storyteller Shannon Meade, this book walks the razor’s edge between truth and folklore, drawing from family recollections, public records, and decades of whispered stories passed around kitchen tables. What emerges is not a confession, but a portrait: a locksmith who treated crime like calligraphy, a craftsman who believed silence was the highest form of art, and a gentleman thief whose legend traveled farther than his footprints.

Across storms, vaults, railcars, and decades, Billy’s rules guided him—never wake the house, take nothing that bleeds, exit by sunrise, return something someday. From Cape Cod to Los Angeles, from Montreal to the Pacific Northwest, his work became a philosophy as much as a career. As the FBI built thick case files and chased shadows, Billy perfected the clean getaway, leaving behind only symmetry, stillness, and the occasional marble glinting in the dark.

But this is more than a heist narrative. It is an intergenerational story about legacy, mythmaking, and the quiet mathematics of a life lived between light and shadow. As the author pieces together the truth behind a man who never admitted anything and never apologized for living on his own terms, the reader is invited into a world where locks are questions, silence is elegance, and the line between fact and folklore bends like light through glass.

Part memoir, part legend, and part love letter to a father whose life outgrew the paperwork written about him, The Art of Getting Away Clean is a rare and intimate exploration of craft, conscience, and the elusive beauty of a perfect exit.