Bradley Urges $25,000 Reward in Bingo Game Robbery

Mayor Tom Bradley recommended Thursday that the City Council approve a $25,000 reward for the capture of bandits who terrorized a bingo game at a Boyle Heights high school, wounding three people, stealing up to $1,500 in cash and briefly taking the game manager hostage before making their getaway.

Councilman Richard Alatorre, joining the mayor at a press conference, said he will ask the council today to approve posting the reward for information leading to the arrest of the masked robbers who burst into the Salesian High School gym Wednesday night, ordering the hundreds of people inside to lie on the floor before making off with the game’s proceeds.

This was “a high school gymnasium, a place where people have played bingo for many years,” Bradley said. “For these bandits to come in carrying an automatic rifle I think is something the whole public ought to feel outraged about.”

Police initially believed that four men, in their late teens to early 20s, took part in the robbery. However, Los Angeles Police Detective Frank Garcia said that they are now focusing on the “three that were actually seen committing the robbery.”

A fourth person may have been waiting in the white four-door station wagon used for the getaway, he added, but so far “we can’t substantiate that.”

Three people were wounded when the men, one of them armed with a semiautomatic rifle, stormed in during the sixth bingo game of the evening and made off with two metal boxes filled with an estimated $1,500 in cash and three purses near the table holding the prize money, Garcia said.

One of the men temporarily took the game manager hostage, holding him by the neck and at gunpoint until the bandits were out of the gym, Garcia said. The manager was not injured.

Those shot were a 34-year-old off-duty reserve Maywood police officer, volunteering as a security guard, who was shot in the foot; a 42-year-old man and an 84-year-old woman. Police would not identify the victims, but said the woman had been released from County-USC Medical Center and both men were in good condition.

Wednesday’s robbery was the first during a bingo game at a church or school in the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese, said Father Gregory Coiro. He said the games, an important fund-raiser and social activity for many of the archdiocese’s high schools and elementary schools, will continue, unless the police advise otherwise.

“Part of the shock of it is we’d like to think churches and schools are places that are safe from violent elements,” Coiro said. “This shows the violent society we live in encroaches on all aspects of our lives.”