Palmdale Man Arrested, Linked to 32 L.A.-Area Bank Robberies

A Palmdale man arrested on bank robbery charges in Bakersfield is also suspected of holding up 32 Los Angeles-area banks, including 26 in the San Fernando Valley and one in Saugus, the FBI said Thursday.

Phillip Vaughn Foote, 33, robbed the banks of about $60,000 between July of last year and May 10, when he was arrested in Bakersfield after robbing two banks in less than an hour, FBI spokeswoman Karen Gardner said.

A bank employee chased Foote when he left the second bank and two bystanders helped subdue Foote until police arrived, the FBI said.

Foote had no weapon, authorities said.

Foote came under suspicion for the Valley robberies because the techniques were similar to those used in Bakersfield.

Investigators then identified Foote in photographs of the Valley robberies, Gardner said.

Gardner said Foote was in federal custody, but she did not know where.

Neither the Bakersfield cases nor the Valley cases were “take-down” robberies, in which an individual or group of robbers holds up all of the tellers, she said.

Instead, all the robberies were “note jobs,” in which a robber stands in line and then presents a note demanding money to a single teller.

Note-job robbers claim that they have a weapon but rarely display one, Gardner said, and because they usually rob only one teller, they get less money from each bank.

Only a few hundred dollars were taken in the Bakersfield robberies, she said.

Foote is the second Palmdale resident accused recently of robbing Valley banks.

James Wayne Jackson, 40, was arrested June 21 on suspicion of robbing 18 San Fernando Valley banks in a two-month period.

Jackson was nicknamed the “date-book robber,” because he pulled the notes he gave tellers from a large date book, Gardner said.

Authorities declined to say if there was any connection between the two men.

“This is the bank robbery capital of the world in Los Angeles and there’s a lot of these people out there,” Gardner said.

Bank holdups and all types of robberies have increased dramatically in the Valley this year, Los Angeles police said.

Bank robberies increased 28.6% in the first four months of this year compared with the same period last year, and robberies of all types were up 29%, police said.

Although all statistics have not been compiled, Gardner said she expected “1991 to be a record-breaking year” for bank robberies throughout Los Angeles.