3 Robbers Grab $600,000 at Bank Processing Center

Authorities are looking for three thieves in the $600,000 robbery of a North Hollywood bank processing center, described Wednesday by one police detective as the largest bank robbery in recent city history.

The holdup occurred shortly before midnight Friday, when two men wearing dark ski masks and armed with handguns entered a second-floor office of the Security Pacific Bank processing center, which is used to process and verify cash deposits from outlying branches, Los Angeles police said.

Counting Money

Five center employees were counting money, Detective Jim Grayson said, and the gunmen ordered them to get down on the floor. The robbers then put the estimated $600,000 in cash into large bags and fled, he said. No one was injured.

Police released information about the robbery Wednesday in hopes of locating the robbers, the detective said.

Bank employees told investigators that one of the robbers had a walkie-talkie, which he used to converse with a third individual stationed elsewhere during the crime. The third person may have acted as a lookout or a getaway driver, but police are not certain the robbers had a car, Grayson said.

“Nobody saw them get away,” he said.

Grayson said the amount of cash taken was “the largest that I know of, and I’ve been here 25 years.”

A spokesman for the Los Angeles office of the FBI, which was also investigating the robbery, would neither confirm nor deny the claim.

Investigators on Wednesday were still trying to figure out how the robbers entered the building and how they knew bank employees were counting a large amount of cash at that hour.