Drug Addicts Behind Boom in County’s Bank Holdups : Crime: It’s not professional crooks but robbers supporting narcotics habits that pose a growing hazard to the public authorities say.

They called him the Mummy.

It was an appropriate moniker for the convicted thief who taped Band-Aids across his face to conceal his identity during a yearlong spree of 40 bank robberies throughout the Southland.

Jaime Reyes Torres, arrested by FBI agents March 27 during a holdup at a local Wells Fargo Bank, also had the look of a mummy--that all-too-familiar face of a strung-out heroin addict. His bloodshot eyes were sunk deeply into his skull, his cheeks were hollow and his mouth was halfway agape.

“His veins were so collapsed that he couldn’t shoot in his arms anymore,” recalled Special Agent James M. Donckels, who supervises the FBI office in Santa Ana. “It was awful.”

The gaunt-faced Mummy represents a type of bank robber who has increasingly thrived in the Southland, Donckels said: addict crooks driven by their drug habits.

Nine out of 10 local bank robbers are addicts, and they are largely responsible for this being the worst year ever for county bank robberies. The 1990-91 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, recorded 368 such robberies--almost double the number recorded the year earlier and 12 more than the previous record, set in 1987.

In October, the first month of the current fiscal year, 38 bank robberies were reported--more than one a day.

FBI agents solve about 85% of all such robberies, thanks to informants, evidence left at the scene or such high-tech gadgets as exploding dye packs and silent beepers hidden in money bags, which help authorities track a suspect’s movements.

As agents grapple with the unprecedented rise in robberies, they are also face a grim element in the profile of the bank robber of the ‘90s. Once bank robberies were crimes reserved for daring professionals--gun-toting men, usually loners, who would methodically stake out targets and move from state to state to stay one step ahead of the law.

The most frightening aspect of the current trend, officials say, is that addicts are usually more violent and aggressive than the old professionals.

FBI officials say banks and thrifts are easy targets for addicts. Many banks all over Southern California, often in strip malls or near freeways, offer quick getaways.

For criminals desperate for drug money, banks are also vastly more lucrative than convenience stores or gas stations, police say. And bank tellers are normally told to comply with robbers’ demands, even if no weapon is displayed.

“The robbers know this,” Donckels said.

The persistent recession does not appear to be responsible for the increase in bank robberies. In fact, Donckels said, statistics have traditionally shown that crime tends to decrease or stabilize during hard financial times.

What is known and offers the best explanation for the increase, FBI officials said, is that drug use seems to be growing among some segments of the population.

“The drug problem is one of the biggest problems we have in Orange County,” Donckels said.

Law enforcement officials worry about the rise in the number of addicts resorting to bank heists because such robbers are likely to make more mistakes and to be more clumsy than professionals, Donckels said.

And that sometimes proves fatal, as in the case of Samuel Borunda, 55, who had resorted to bank robberies to feed a growing drug habit. He committed the last of seven holdups in the county in 1989 at the Fidelity Federal Savings Bank in Stanton, authorities said.

After hurriedly stuffing handfuls of bills into a satchel, he turned from the teller’s window and began to trot out of the bank. As he walked away, he glanced back and noticed a stray bill crumpled on the floor near the teller’s window.

He quickly retrieved it, but that gave a bank security guard time to position himself for a confrontation. Seeing the armed guard, Borunda pulled a pistol out of his bag and pointed it. Seconds later, Borunda, who never got off a shot, was dead from a chest wound.

Borunda’s weapon turned out to be a BB gun.

Some ill-timed mistakes, which verge on the burlesque, can actually give law enforcement an edge. Jonathan Oechsle, 23, who earned his nickname of the Nerd because of the way he dressed, successfully held up 21 banks in the county.

But in March, 1989, he literally lived up to his moniker when he walked into a Gibraltar Savings Bank in Fullerton and handed the teller a message that was hastily scribbled on an envelope. “This is a hold up. This is no joke,” the note read.

But also appearing on the envelope, which he inadvertently left at the teller’s window, was his home address.

In the FBI’s Santa Ana office, a cramped room holds file cabinets stuffed with photographs and ledgers that track the dubious and sometimes hair-raising careers of bank robbers, many of them dressed in outlandish or ghoulish costumes or in dirty street clothes.

The hundreds of demand notes collected in a thick binder are rife with grammatical and spelling errors. One robber misspelled--and crossed out--the words “stick up” twice before he finally got it right.

Some robbers prefer to skip the notes and storm into a bank, firing weapons and barking orders.

One such robber is known as the Shootist, responsible for at least 33 holdups from Orange County to Texas since 1986.

Because of his prolific career, FBI agents consider the Shootist to be one of the wiliest and most dangerous bank robbers in the country. He typically orders everyone to the floor, fires his weapon into the ceiling and steals thousands of dollars in cash.

“Thank God, he hasn’t killed anyone yet,” Donckels said. “But the potential is very high that it will happen.”