Holdups Climbing as Robbers Take Aim on Armored Trucks

Item: An armored truck guard was robbed of $19,000 Tuesday when he was confronted by a gunman in a downtown Los Angeles shopping mall elevator.

Item: An armored truck guard was robbed of $166,000 Saturday when confronted by two gunmen in the lobby of a movie theater in Universal City.

Item: An armored truck guard was killed execution-style Oct. 14 when he walked into a Monterey Park bank. The bandit took off with the money bag and an undisclosed amount of loot.

So far this year, by Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block’s count, there have been 12 armored truck heists in Southern California. Investigators are looking into whether the robberies are related, he said. It has left him, other lawmen and armored car industry executives shaking their heads in frustration.

Worrisome Problem

“People ask me how do I sleep at night, and I say, ‘Sometimes, not very well,’ ” said James Dunbar, owner and president of Baltimore-based Federal Armored Express, whose guards were hit twice last week in Los Angeles, in the elevator and in the theater lobby.

“I can’t think of a time when there have been as many holdups in one area as there have been recently in Los Angeles,” said Dunbar, whose company--with underwriting from Lloyd’s of London, which provides catastrophic insurance for the entire armored truck industry--is held responsible for every dollar of loss.

Dunbar and others say they have resigned themselves that no matter what measures they take to protect the billions of dollars in cold cash they transport daily, their guards will be targets of stick-ups, their prominent mobile money vaults holding a strong allure for criminals who generally are better armed than the guards and who take advantage of the element of surprise.

“Armored cars have a commodity that the bad guys want,” said Dennis Casteel, safety director for Brinks Inc. in Los Angeles, the largest of Brinks’ 150 branches worldwide. “If a guy is considering robbing a liquor store to get $200 or $300, I’d have to think that, from a criminal point of view, he assumes that if he’s going to take a risk at all, he might as well go for something bigger.”

No Statistics

The FBI keeps no statistics on the number of armored car robberies nationwide, but industry executives guess that there are perhaps 100 heists a year in the United States. By contrast, Great Britain--where guards are unarmed--experiences about 400 armored truck heists a year, most of them in London. Armored truck companies are reluctant to disclose the amount of money stolen--it’s a matter for them and their insurance companies--but one company executive said $11 million was lost industrywide through armored car thefts two or three years ago in a particularly bad year.

Despite the recent rash of stick-ups in the Southland, robbing an armored truck guard has never been more difficult, industry representatives contend:

- The trucks are armored as never before, with steel sides and glass windows that are virtually impenetrable to large-caliber, high-velocity gunfire. Some trucks have hidden video cameras to record incidents.

- The guards undergo careful background checks, are given polygraph tests where state law permits it--as California law does--and undergo thorough weapons training. On the job, they wear bulletproof vests, and guards who carry money are instructed to always keep their gun hands free. And while there are instances of guards being injured or killed, there are also accounts of guards firing back and hitting--and sometimes killing--the bandits.

- The guard with the money and the guard remaining in the truck are in communication with one another, either by radio or subtle visual code.

- Depending on the amount of money being delivered or picked up, the site is first visited by an unmarked unit that will scan the area for suspicious or loitering people. If something doesn’t look or feel right, the advance unit will radio the police or simply cancel the delivery.

- The armored vehicle, again depending on the type of delivery, is followed by another, unmarked, vehicle with other armed guards.

- And depending on the size of the cash haul, three or more guards may be in the truck--one, remaining inside and two or more others accompanying the money.

Some law enforcement officers suggest that three-person crews should be the rule of thumb, affording additional protection when the guards are most vulnerable: on foot, between the truck and at the customer’s vault.

But three-guard teams might not be the answer, Dunbar said. “We’ve had more holdups with three-man crews than two-man. That’s true in the industry. And there have been more people hurt when there have been three-man crews than two-man, because the bad guys always bring more people along. If you bring four, they’ll bring six. You bring six, they’ll bring eight.”

Brinks’ Casteel said, “Even if some guards are going to 9-millimeter (semiautomatic pistols), the bad guys will always out-arm you.”

Or simply get the drop on a guard, whether it’s in an elevator or a lobby or along the sidewalk.

Some robberies are odd. In Baltimore last June, an entire armored truck was stolen, apparently because its doors did not automatically lock when its crew left it to pick up money and deliberately left the keys in the ignition.

And of course there’s always the inside job--as was suspected earlier this year in Los Angeles when an armored truck was loaded with about $3 million in cash and checks. When it got to its destination, the money was missing. Investigators believe the loot was taken out of the truck while it was parked in an alley just outside the company’s guarded lot.

Mel Bailet, executive director of the National Armored Car Assn., said it’s not surprising that some stickups are successful, but the losses, he said, are “infinitesimal” considering how much cash is carried by the nation’s estimated 6,000 armored cars.

“The difference between the good guys and the bad guys is that the good guys think about security periodically, and the bad guys think about breaking the system 24 hours a day. They concentrate their energies on a single objective, to beat us.”