Ex-bank officer ends sea cruise in the brig.

• Position: Henry Wilkinson - Statistical Data Included

For a felon repaying his debt to society, life doesn't get much better than it was for Henry Wilkinson. Pleading guilty in October to obtaining property under false pretenses in Lee County -- he had forged his wife's signature to get a loan -- he was sentenced to five years' intensive probation and allowed to serve it under house arrest at a rented duplex on Ocracoke.

He got a job managing the Silver Lake Motel lounge, and, locals say, always had plenty of cash to spread around. Allowed to leave the house during the day and work nights, Wilkinson, 50, wore a transmitter strapped to his ankle. It sent signals to a receiver in his phone, which alerted authorities to his whereabouts. Not the best way to enjoy the Outer Banks, but, as an island prison, Ocracoke is no Alcatraz.

All that was about to change. In late October, a grand jury in Moore County indicted him on two counts of embezzlement. According to the State Bureau of Investigation, Wilkinson, a director and secretary/treasurer of Centennial Bank in Southern Pines, transferred $200,000 from Centennial's account to his own in late 1999, a few months before the bank was chartered. If convicted, he could go to prison for three and a half years on each count.

A week after the indictments -- less than a week before he was to turn himself in -- he joined four Ocracokers on the Aussie Cat, a 33-foot catamaran bound for the Bahamas or Bermuda, depending on who's telling the story.

After stopping in Beaufort to refuel, his slow slosh to freedom headed into international waters. At some point, investigators don't know when, he deep-sixed his transmitter. When he missed his 1 a.m. curfew and didn't answer his phone, probation officers in Swan Quarter, two hours away on the mainland, alerted Hyde County deputies on the island. They figured out where he was heading and notified the Coast Guard, which caught up to the Aussie Cat. The captain was persuaded to turn back. "They did not know that he was wanted," says Ensign Kevin Morgan, public-affairs officer of the Coast Guard's Fort Macon Group. "They just knew him from the local bar."

Wilkinson's nautical naughtiness landed him in the Hyde, then the Moore, county jail, where he was being held without bond, facing even more charges.

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