Suspect Held Over 12 Bank Robberies

An FBI special weapons team flushed a heavily armed Los Angeles man suspected of robbing a dozen California banks from an Oxnard motel room early Thursday and arrested him without incident, FBI officials said.

The suspect, Jaime Enrique Wheelock, 60, had been the target of an 18-month manhunt. He is suspected of holding up banks from Orange County to San Francisco, each time wielding weapons during the heists.

“We had a tip he was in the Oxnard area” and the information was relayed to Oxnard police, said Mark Llewellyn, a Los Angeles-based FBI supervisory special agent in charge of SWAT operations.

At 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, at the Oxnard Lodge Motel, Oxnard Police Sgt. Gene Thayer spotted a lime-green Datsun 280Z that fit a description of a vehicle Wheelock used during a robbery last month of a Wells Fargo Bank in Seal Beach, Lt. Robert Kelley said.

Thayer notified Gary G. Auer, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Ventura office. Auer then contacted Llewellyn.

“Oxnard police carried the ball” in terms of surveillance until the SWAT team was assembled, Auer said.

At 5:40 a.m. Thursday, 10 members of the FBI’s SWAT team and four other agents, plus a few Oxnard police officers, were in place at the motel on Oxnard Boulevard, Llewellyn said.

“He (Wheelock) had used a shotgun and an automatic weapon” during nine bank robberies in Southern California and three in San Francisco, Llewellyn said in explaining the presence of numerous law enforcement personnel.

“He wore a ski mask (during the robberies) so he was a kind of real bad guy,” he said.

Initially, Llewellyn said, the FBI thought that Wheelock had an accomplice in the room, but the information proved to be wrong.

At 5:45 a.m., he said, an FBI agent telephoned Wheelock and ordered him outside. “You guys are good,” Wheelock told FBI agents as he walked out of his room and allowed himself to be arrested, Llewellyn said.

Inside, agents found two shotguns and a .45-caliber automatic handgun, he said.

Wheelock was brought before a U.S. magistrate in Santa Barbara and transported to the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles. If convicted, he could be sentenced to a maximum 25 years in prison and fined up to $10,000 on each robbery charge.

None of the robberies that Wheelock is suspected of committing occurred in Ventura County, which has been the site of a recent spate of bank robberies.

Auer said there were 41 bank robberies in Ventura County this year, contrasted with 44 for all of 1990. But 20 of these have occurred since the end of October, he said.

The figures include the robbery of a Wells Fargo Bank on Chestnut Street Wednesday afternoon in Ventura. The robber, a man in his mid-30s, gave a teller a note demanding cash, authorities said. With the money in hand, he ran outside and escaped.

Auer said there is no way to logically analyze the rash of robberies.

“Anyone who is saying that (bank) robberies are going up in Ventura County because of Christmas, the economy or the moon is in a different phase is not correct,” he said.

“The overwhelming reason (for robbing a bank) is narcotics use,” he said, referring to the need to find cash to pay for illicit drugs.

The high-water mark for bank robberies in Ventura County in recent years occurred in 1989, when 76 robberies occurred, according to FBI figures.