The State - News from Jan. 19, 1987

Six people arrested as suspects in the theft of eight artillery shells from a railroad boxcar near Port Chicago may have planned to use them to rob a bank, a federal investigator believes. “My gut feeling,” said Treasury Department Agent James F. Crowell III, “is they were planning to do a bank.” Blueprints to a San Francisco bank were found in a workshop where pipe bombs were being made from the 40-pound, 105-millimeter howitzer shells, according to a federal court affidavit filed in San Francisco. The shells were stolen May 27, 1985, from an Army facility on the Suisun Bay about 35 miles east of San Francisco. The five men and one woman arrested face up to 15 charges, including theft of explosives and manufacture of explosive devices.