Wells Fargo Offers $50,000 Reward : Crime: The action is one of several taken by the bank after an official was terrorized at home.

Wells Fargo Bank on Monday offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the man who took a branch manager and his family hostage in their Granada Hills home earlier this month.

The reward offer is one of several measures bank officials said they are taking to deter similar extortion attempts and to cut down the record bank robbery rate in Southern California.

The reward, described as unprecedented in Wells Fargo history, was announced in full-page ads published Monday in the Los Angeles Times and Daily News.

A detective investigating the April 14 attack on banker Alan R. Butts, his wife, Mercedes, and their three children said the ads generated more than a dozen calls before noon Monday, providing potential leads in a case that has so far remained unsolved.

The family escaped unharmed after a 4 1/2-hour ordeal that began when a man forced his way into their home and strapped what he said were explosives to Butts and his wife.

“It is one thing to take money. It’s another to threaten an employee and his family in their home, and the company just thought enough was enough,” said Kathleen Shilkret, a bank spokeswoman.

“We want to avoid anyone copycatting this crime,” Shilkret said.

Although the Los Angeles area has earned a reputation as the bank robbery capital of the world, an attack on a bank employee and relatives is still rare, according to Shilkret, other bank officials and police. The Butts incident was unprecedented because of the would-be extortionist’s use of purported explosives to threaten Butts and his wife, those sources said.

Butts, 45, was leaving his neatly landscaped home to take his 16-year-old daughter to school when he was approached by a man in a blue blazer claiming to be a federal Treasury agent conducting an investigation. Once he tricked his way into the house, the man rounded up the rest of the family in the living room, strapped what turned out to be fake explosives to Butts and his wife, and threatened to blow them up if Butts did not go to the bank and return home with a briefcase full of cash, police and bank officials said.

Butts, a vice president and manager of the Wells Fargo branch in West Hills’ Fallbrook Mall, drove to the branch as ordered but, once there, contacted police. His family was freed unharmed after bomb squad experts determined that the pager-like device strapped to Butts’ arm was a fake and that the extortionist fled shortly after Butts left, apparently realizing that his scheme would not work. The device strapped to Mercedes Butts was also harmless, police said.

Monday’s newspaper ads carried a large composite drawing of the extortionist and described him as a white man in his early 40s, 5 feet, 11 inches tall and weighing 300 pounds, and having reddish mutton-chop sideburns and a mustache.

In the FBI’s seven-county Los Angeles district, 2,355 bank robberies were reported last year, a record high and a 40% increase over 1990, according to figures released by Shilkret. So far this year, bank robberies are running 20% higher than last year, Shilkret’s figures show. She said more than 60% of Wells Fargo’s robberies last year occurred in metropolitan Los Angeles.

Wells Fargo’s security director, Bill Wipprecht, said the Butts incident, coupled with the record number of bank robberies, prompted the bank to tighten security. Wipprecht, chairman of the California Bankers Assn.’s security committee, said he expects other banks to take similar precautions.

Wells Fargo bank vaults, traditionally kept open during business hours, are now being closed and access is available only to a few employees, Shilkret and Wipprecht said. Although Wipprecht acknowledged that an armed robber could still threaten an employee into opening a closed vault, he said the time it would take to do so would be a deterrent to thieves in a hurry to make their escape.

“Most robberies take 90 to 120 seconds, so we want to do everything we can to slow them down if we can’t keep them out,” Wipprecht said.

Wells Fargo is also adding unarmed but uniformed security guards at most of its branches in Southern California and is installing “bandit barriers” or bulletproof shields in front of tellers, Wipprecht said.

He said the bulletproof shields, popular in East Coast cities, represent a departure from California’s “warm and huggy, touchy-feely” approach to customer relations.

“But we feel the situation in the Los Angeles area has deteriorated so much,” Wipprecht said, “that for the safety of our customers and our own tellers, we’re putting up the bandit barriers.”