The Good Guys and the Satisfying Nature of Bank Robberies

ON A RAINY FRIDAY MORNING 14 STORIES ABOVE THE BANK ROBBERY Capital of the Nation, FBI agents John McEachern and Dan Bodony are talking lovingly of their work. A dispatcher’s voice erupts from the office intercom.

“We have a two-man takeover. In custody. A car. Fifteen to 20 witnesses.”

McEachern, an affable 46-year-old Alabamian, smiles, pushes up from his desk and excuses himself to attend to the matter at hand.

Which, it turns out, is this:

About 20 minutes earlier, a couple of young geniuses had come in the back door of the Wells Fargo branch at Balboa Boulevard and Devonshire Street in Northridge and announced a holdup. Armed and masked, they’d commanded bank employees to let them through the bulletproof bandit barrier, and one of them had jacked a round into the chamber of his 12-gauge shotgun to show they meant business. They’d looted several tellers’ positions, stuffed the money into a backpack and hied to the parking lot, where they’d climbed into a gray Nissan to escape.

Or, rather, to try. According to Nathan Farrou, a Wells Fargo vice president for security, “they couldn’t figure out how to get out of the parking lot. They made four right-hand turns, and that didn’t get them out. They were still circling the bank when somebody pointed them out to the police, and that’s how they were arrested.”

Given opponents of such intellectual wattage, it’s a wonder McEachern and Bodony aren’t bored with their work. It’s like a chess match between a grand master and some yahoo just up from checkers. Bank-robbery solution rates are among the highest for all crimes, at about 75%. “You see the fruits of your labors,” says McEachern, who is acting supervisor of the 10-agent L.A. bank robbery squad, based in the Federal Building in Westwood.

Last year, 694 bank robberies occurred here, a puny number compared with that for 1992, when the seven-county Los Angeles region produced 2,641, but still enough to maintain our generation-long streak as No. 1 in the land. (Fortunately, bank robbery rarely involves the loss of innocent life. No bank employees or customers have been killed in one since 1997, when two died.)

The reasons for L.A.’s distinction range from the ready escape provided by an extensive freeway system to the ever-expanding number and business hours of branch banks to the estimated quarter-of-a-million gangbangers who call this place home.

Bank robbers see what they do as low-risk. Bank employees aren’t armed, after all, and are trained to comply with a bandit’s demands, even when he merely slips a note to a teller (“note jobs,” as contrasted with “takeovers,” made up almost 80% of local heists lasts year). Yet, bandits are inevitably memorialized in flagrante by ever more sophisticated surveillance cameras.

“You might get in and get out, but what you leave behind is what’s going to get you caught,” Bodony says. “A high percentage of cases involve serial robbers. If they do one, they’re going to do two. They feel good about themselves because they got away with the first one. But they don’t get away with many.”

Neither do they get away with much. Although the FBI and the banks don’t discuss figures, the average bank heist is thought to run to only a couple thousand dollars, probably less. Hardly a reasonable incentive for risking three to six years in federally striped sunlight on a first offense.

Bank robbers, however, tend not to be exactly future-oriented. Almost half are drug addicts. A lot of others are gangbangers, in many cases robbing as part of their gang initiation, Bodony says.

Bodony, a 33-year-old Illinoisan as grave of mien as McEachern is cordial, is the FBI’s bank robbery coordinator in the L.A. region. In his office he keeps a large bulletin board filled with prison identification photos of every bank robber released from incarceration into the L.A. region since July 1999 (on looks alone, you wouldn’t mistake them for the faculty at UCLA). Earlier photographs, dating back almost two decades, are kept in the office files.

Alongside the first board is another crowded with in-the-act photographs of unsolved robberies. Sometimes Bodony stands at the two boards and just lets his eyes drift from one to the other and back.

Bank robbers are notorious recidivists. A recent uptick in robberies here is partly explained by the fact that a crop of bank robbers sent to prison a decade ago with new, longer sentences is starting to get out. “They sit around in jail and talk about refining their techniques,” Bodony says. “Their mentality is, they’re going to get away with it.”

This optimism is so inexplicable that it’s almost admirable. It might not pay off for the optimists in much high living or for very long, but it keeps the gratification quotient in the feds’ 14th-floor aerie good and high. “I love bank robbery,” says McEachern, with a smile. “I’ll stay in it till I retire, if I can.”