After playing a gig while on tour in Australia around 1980, John Oates and some of the band’s crew members went for a bite to eat at a local restaurant (via the Modern Rogue) when a man wearing a ski mask and toting a shotgun, walked into the place. Affectionately known by the Australian media as “The Rusty Gun Bandit,” the man demanded money from the restaurant’s patrons. Brandishing a gun that John Oates told Nicki Swift “probably wouldn’t have fired” the Rusty Gun Bandit went table to table looking for cash. At one point, Oates recalled the bandit “…reached into the lady’s pocketbook to take her money and the chef, or one of the other guys hit him in the face. Knocked them down and we charged him and stepped on his hands. Knocked him through a plate glass window. And by that time, the cooks in the back had called the cops … And so we captured this guy …” (via Nicki Swift)

According to the Modern Rogue it was actually Oates himself who took down the crook, tackling him through the glass plate window. The next day, the press was at their hotel, waiting to hear how Oates and his crew took down the Rusty Gun Bandit. And while the crook faced the full extent of Australian law, John Oates, surviving the incident, would go on to sell millions of more albums with Daryl Hall.