Pair in Costa Mesa Bank Robbery Get Long Terms

Two half-brothers who used an arsenal of weapons to hold 11 employees hostage at a Bank of America branch in Costa Mesa were sentenced Monday to 20- and 30-year federal prison terms.

“You scared the living daylights out of these people,” U. S. District Judge Harry Hupp said as he sentenced Stanley Grant Lake, 36, of Norwalk to 30 years in prison. Lake’s half-brother, Alan Lawrence Alexander, 27, of Westminster, was sentenced to 20 years.

The sentencing of a third man involved in the July robbery, Roger Lee Frazier, 23, also of Westminster, was delayed until Wednesday morning, after Frazier’s attorney promised to provide Hupp with new information.

Eleven employees of the Bank of America branch at a shopping center at Harbor Boulevard and Adams Avenue attended the sentencing hearing. Two other hostages held by Lake and Alexander were custodians who were working at the bank when the pair arrived at about 2 a.m. dressed as sheriff’s deputies.

The pair, armed with automatic pistols, a stun gun and a grenade, tied up the custodians and waited inside the bank for employees to arrive, according to Assistant U. S. Atty. Jeffrey Modisett.

When the tellers arrived for work, several were forced to help the men remove about $200,000 from the automated-teller machines. But the tellers avoided opening the safe, which held thousands of dollars more, teller Denise Cole said.

The robbery, described by a Costa Mesa police investigator as “well-planned but bungled,” was foiled when a bank auditor arrived between 8 and 9 a.m. When no one responded to his knock on the door, he notified bank officials, who called the Costa Mesa police.

Cole and the other employees were held hostage at gunpoint for about three hours until Lake and Alexander surrendered to FBI agents. Frazier, who was waiting in a stolen van parked at a nearby gas station, was arrested as he tried to leave the scene, Modisett said.

According to Modisett, the government prosecutor, Lake and Alexander had threatened to place a bomb in one teller’s home, and told her the address to show that they knew where she lived.

The robbers told Cole that they had been staking out the bank for weeks and somehow knew that it had recently received cash receipts from the Orange County Fair, she said.

Lake and Alexander pleaded guilty. Before being sentenced, Lake told the judge that he was not like other bank robbers who approach people and start “jabbing them with guns.” He also argued that the grenade he carried was for training purposes and was as dangerous as a “firecracker.”

At the time of the robbery, Lake was on parole for a bank robbery in September, 1973, according to the FBI. Lake also is suspected of 15 bank robberies in the San Joaquin Valley, Orange County and Sacramento during that same year, according to an FBI investigator.

Alexander, who served 2 1/2 years in state prison for soliciting someone to commit a murder according to a probation report read in court, begged Hupp for leniency.

“I became impatient. I couldn’t hold out when my son came along. I wanted him to have better,” said Alexander, whose wife cried throughout the hearing. “I owed income taxes and traffic tickets.”

Alexander said he felt “remorse” for the hostages but added: “I don’t think I’m criminally minded.”

Cole said she has been on disability leave since the robbery. “My nine-year career (in banking) is down the tubes,” she said.

Another teller held hostage by the pair, Carol Rinderknecht, said: “Alexander told me he was proud that he had got to this point.”