NEW YORK – Police are looking for a well-dressed robbery suspect who walked out of a Manhattan courthouse after an officer apparently mistook him for a lawyer.
Ronald Tackman was wearing a business suit while waiting to appear before a judge Wednesday morning.
Authorities said Tackman slipped away from a prisoner holding area to a locked area behind a court room. That's where his attorney, Joseph Heinzmann, says a court officer spotted him and, thinking he was a lawyer, let him out.
Surveillance cameras recorded Tackman walking unnoticed out the courthouse's heavily guarded front door at around 9 a.m.
Tackman, who is 54 and has spent much of his adult life in prison, was convicted in the late 1980s of escape and pleaded guilty to possessing a weapon that authorities say he used in an escape attempt.
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