Borrowing Trouble : Bank Heists: Unorthodox Withdrawal
A bank robber in San Diego, aware that he would be photographed by the bank’s surveillance cameras, disguised himself by dressing in drag, including heavy makeup.
But he was so anxious about getting away quickly that he ran face-first into a glass door he thought was open. Weeks later, he became the only criminal the FBI has positively identified by lip print.
When a robber in Swansea, Mass., demanded money from a teller, the teller said she didn’t have any and pressed the alarm button. The robber fainted and was still unconscious when police arrived.
A robber in Panorama City, Calif., handed a note to a teller warning: “I have a gun. Give me all your 20s in this envelope.”
“All I’ve got is two 20s,” the teller said. The robber took them and left, apparently satisfied.
Used Bad Form
Another bandit in Memphis, Tenn., scribbled his note on the back of a withdrawal slip, then handed it to a teller. The teller read it and told him he had written his note on the wrong form. The robber left empty-handed.
Another note: “Give me all your money or I’ll start shooting”--got only sympathy for a bank robber in Anaheim. “I’m sorry, sir, we are not a bank anymore,” he was told. Federal agents had taken over the insolvent bank two months earlier.
According to the FBI, the skilled, sophisticated bank robber still exists, and some are brutal and murderous.
But in general, “present-day bank robbers are frequently young, from low social and income levels and are less sophisticated and more impulsive than other criminals,” observed San Diego State University researcher Alan E. Omens in an article for the Magazine of Bank Administration. “The average bank robber is generally not considered a professional in the sense of having a well-planned, successful and highly skilled approach to crime and bank robbery.”
Drug Addiction Factor
In Southern California, the bank robbery capital of the world, an added factor is drug addiction. In 1983, nearly one of every three U.S. bank robberies was committed in the Los Angeles region, more than the next four areas--New York, San Francisco, Portland, Ore., and Sacramento--combined. Los Angeles was averaging five bank robberies a day, and the FBI estimates that then, as now, 80% to 85% of those robbers were drug users who stole to feed their habits.
“They are either strung out or high when they do it,” said William J. Rehder, the FBI’s bank robbery investigation coordinator in Los Angeles. “They may not be operating on all cylinders. They’re taking a chance in the first place, they want to get in and out as quickly as possible, and they’re going to make mistakes.”
Some mistakes are basic miscalculations in planning. It apparently didn’t occur to one robber, a one-legged former basketball player, that his chosen method of escape--carrying his crutches in one hand, the loot in the other, and hopping down the street--was likely to attract attention. An unbroken chain of witnesses led FBI agents roughly 15 miles from the holdup to the robber’s house in South-Central Los Angeles.
A San Diego bank bandit planned everything according to convention but bungled his choice of bank branches. As he was running out the door, he encountered his mother, who was there to do some banking. She turned him in.
Chose Wrong Line
Another robber simply chose the wrong line at an Upland, Calif., savings and loan branch. He presented his demand note to the teller, and almost immediately the man next in line wrestled him to the floor and sat on him until police arrived. It was the teller’s father, who didn’t like people pestering his daughter.
Some mistakes are just bad luck. A man who robbed an Anaheim bank made it back to his motel safe and sound--except that the monthly meeting of the Orange County Robbery Investigators Assn. was scheduled there that day, and seven of the membership recognized the robber’s car. The arrest was immediate.
“These guys are built up to a real fever pitch by the time they go in there,” Rehder said. “And when something doesn’t go exactly right, they will panic occasionally.”
Joseph A. Chefalo, chief of one of the FBI’s two bank robbery squads in Los Angeles, remembers a pair of panicky, first-time bank robbers in East Los Angeles whose plan went wrong at every turn.
According to Chefalo, the robber who went inside got his money from the teller without difficulty, “but for some reason, the customers took after the guy. He was beating it out the door just ahead of the customers who were chasing him.”
Driver Takes Off
His driver, waiting in the idling car, saw the approaching horde and took off. The robber was just able to get hold of the door handle--and be dragged through the parking lot--before the car rammed head-on into a van backing out of a parking space.
The collision sent the robber sprawling, but it gave him time to get up and into the car before his driver roared away again, Chefalo said.
Still there was no escape. A motorcyclist buying gas across the street saw what was happening and gave chase. After miles of weaving through Los Angeles streets, the robbers still could not shake him.
Chefalo: “The driver’s saying, ‘What are we gonna do?’ The bad guy says, ‘Hey, man, stop the car right now. I’ll take care of this.’
“So the driver stops the car, the bad guy gets out and stands in the middle of the road (with his pistol leveled in firing position). He’s going to confront this kid on the bike.
Chain Mark on Chest
“Well, the kid on the bike just guns it and--boom!--runs straight over him. . . . When we finally got him, he had a chain mark right up his chest.”
You get this sort of unskilled robber in Southern California because of the nature of the territory, Chefalo said.
“You have a bank on every corner, you have an extensive freeway system which makes it very easy to come and go, and you have an abnormally high percentage of hypes (drug addicts) out here,” Chefalo said. “It’s an easy way to get money, and they talk about it.”
Even bank security officers admit that it is easy to rob a Southern California bank. All the people in the bank want is for the robber to go away without a fuss.
“My job is to protect bank assets, but assets are not always currency and negotiables,” said Cal Drake, a member of the California Bankers Assn. crime deterrent committee.
Most Expensive Asset
“One of the most expensive assets we have are people, and to have either an employee or customer injured or killed in a bank robbery is going to be a hell of a lot more expensive and traumatic than the robbery itself.
“I’d rather see the money go out the door. The industry and banks have done a good job of cutting down the (tellers’) drawer limits and keeping down the amount that goes out,” Drake said. The FBI says the average take in Southern California is slightly more than $2,000.
“The industry has spent a tremendous amount of money on security equipment--billions, not millions,” Drake said. “None of that equipment, or very little, has prevented any crime. It is there basically to warn someone or take a picture of someone after a crime, and from that point of view it has helped.”
It has helped tremendously, Rehder of the FBI said. Surveillance cameras, which shoot about two pictures per second, usually provide good-quality photographs of bank robbers in the act and have contributed much toward the high arrest rate for bank robberies in Southern California--consistently around 80%, he said.
FBI agents carry photographs of current robbers and routinely show them to tellers who have been held up. Identifications are frequent and sometimes surprising.
Spotted a Picture
“I remember we were doing a robbery in L.A., a one-teller robbery, and we showed her some pictures,” said Frank Calley, a former bank robbery supervisor in Los Angeles who now heads the FBI’s office in Santa Ana.
“We’re just throwing her the ones we think might be her robber, and the ones we don’t, we’re just kind of flipping them off to the side.
“Well, one of the ones we flipped off to the side, she looked at it and laughed at it. She said, ‘He’s robbing a bank, eh? You want him?’
“It was her estranged husband. So she got him for us.”
The presence of the camera--which was mandated by federal regulation in 1969--changed the look of bank robbery. Disguises became important--and sometimes ludicrous.
Rehder’s favorite example is the Mercury Bandit, a well-dressed man whose surveillance photographs came out spectacularly clear and led to an easy arrest. It looked as if makeup was accentuating his features, Rehder said.
‘Invisible Man’
In effect, that turned out to be true, Rehder said. The robber had been told by fellow inmates in prison that if he spread an ointment containing mercury on his face, he would be invisible to the camera. “He thought he was going to be the Invisible Man,” Rehder said. “He thought he was going to have a hat and a suit (on camera) and nothing else.”
On record are disguises ranging from tuxedos to clown suits complete with funny hats and green wigs. A San Francisco bank was held up by a woman in a nun’s habit. One is Evansville, Ind., was held up during the Christmas holiday season by a bandit in a Santa Claus suit and high heels.
A 16-year-old girl in Los Angeles helped hold up a series of banks while wearing a see-through blouse and no bra, apparently an attempt to divert attention away from her face. It didn’t work, and she was arrested.
The disguises of three holdup men in Oakland were their undoing. They robbed a savings and loan branch while in full Samurai warrior costume, but their appearance was so bizarre that it prompted a passer-by to take down their car license number as they were departing.
Leave Calling Cards
Disguises are useless, however, if you leave your calling card behind. According to the FBI, there have been cases of a robber writing his holdup note on his own personalized deposit slip, on a summons that included his name and address, and, in one case, on the results of his wife’s Pap smear test. Others have simply dropped their wallets while leaving.
One robber in Maywood however, left the ultimate ID when, in his rush to leave, he lunged for the glass door and drove his hand through it. He left his thumb behind, which, of course, yielded a perfect print, Rehder said. He was arrested soon afterward in a hospital emergency room.
Still, the real danger to bank robbers is the police. In 1983, fewer than half of the bank robbers displayed a weapon, but some robberies erupted into violence. When they did, nearly two-thirds of the 23 people killed were the robbers themselves.
Those who survive face a high probability of capture and severe penalties. Federal law specifies up to 20 years in prison for an unarmed bank robbery, as long as 25 years if the robber is armed. If he displays a firearm, new law mandates that he receive an additional five-year term without possibility of probation or parole, and that term increases to 10 years if it is a second conviction.
Robberies Multiply
Yet despite the risks, bank robberies continue to multiply. According to the FBI, there were only 100 bank robberies in the nation in 1950, and by 1960 the number had risen to only 458. But robberies mushroomed to 2,331 in 1970, then to 6,515 in 1980.
Bank robbery was becoming so inevitable that in 1981, when an Asheboro, N.C., branch advertised its grand opening, the first person through the door tied up three employees and emptied the vault.
In 1983, bank robberies in the Los Angeles area peaked at 1,833. The number declined 21% during the security-intense Olympics, but since then the robbery rate has spiraled in neighboring Orange County. The FBI’s Santa Ana office recorded 20 robberies in the first 22 days of 1985, far above its usual rate.
With such intense activity, it is not that unusual for a Southern California bank branch to be held up twice in the same day, Rehder said. A downtown Los Angeles bank was robbed a second time as an FBI agent was combing the neighborhood for witnesses to the first robbery. The second robber even tried to steal the agent’s car. “It was locked, luckily,” Chefalo said.
Hanging on Chefalo’s wall is a surveillance photograph showing two robbers, each unaware of the other’s presence, simultaneously robbing the same bank branch in Hollywood.
Banks Fight Back
Banks have fought back in some ways. Some have specially prepared bundles of money called “dye packs” and slip them into a robber’s loot. Once outside the bank, the packs are supposed to explode and spray dye and tear gas over the robber. They are designed to mark the bandit with dye and force him to drop the money, thus allowing the bank to recover its loss.
Sometimes they work, sometimes not, according to Chefalo. Sometimes the explosion scatters the money on the street, setting off a fiscal feeding frenzy among passers-by. Sometimes the bandit tucks the money into his pocket--or, in one case, into his crotch. The low-blast but high-heat explosion has caused severe burns.
Bank officials in Southern California are beginning to experiment with “bandit barriers”--bulletproof glass or plastic panels that separate tellers from customers. The barriers were installed in virtually every bank, savings-and-loan and credit union branch in Detroit in the mid-1970s, and the number of robberies soon fell from 154 a year to 15. The FBI says, however, that the barriers did not eliminate robbery but merely diverted bandits to out-of-town targets.
