$600,000 Holdup of Bank Center Labeled a Record

Authorities said Wednesday they were looking for three robbers in the $600,000 holdup of a North Hollywood bank processing center, described by one Los Angeles police detective as the largest cash robbery in city history.

Shortly before midnight Friday, two men wearing dark ski masks and armed with handguns entered a second-floor office of the Security Pacific Bank processing center in the 5000 block of Lankershim Boulevard, said Detective Jim Grayson of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Robbery-Homicide Division. The center is used to process and verify cash deposits from outlying branches, he said.

Five employees of the center were counting money, Grayson said. The robbers ordered the three women and two men onto the floor. They put the estimated $600,000 into large bags and fled, he said.

No one was injured, Grayson said. Police released information about the holdup Wednesday in hopes of locating the robbers, he said.

Bank employees told detectives that one of the robbers had a walkie-talkie, which he used to converse with a third person stationed elsewhere. The third person may have acted as a lookout or a getaway driver, although Grayson said police were not certain the robbers had a car. “Nobody saw them get away,” Grayson said.

‘Largest I Know of’

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 Federal Bureau of Investigation, which also investigates bank robberies, would neither confirm nor deny that the amount taken was a record.

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.

“There was no sign of forced entry,” Grayson said. “They may have gained entry into the place with a pass key. Whether someone gave them the key, we don’t know.”

The two gunmen were described as white males, about 5 feet, 10 inches to 6 feet tall, and weighing 160 to 175 pounds. They are believed to be in their late 20s or early 30s, Grayson said.