Willie Sutton once said, “You can’t rob a bank on charm and personality.” A “gentleman” bandit with a taste for high-end clothing (a tip by a New York tailor is what eventually led to his arrest), Sutton relied on a pistol and an array of elaborate impersonations to pull off his bank heists in the 1930s and ’40s. Today, the bank robber’s modus operandi is far cruder: all that’s needed is paper and a pen.
Just ask Troy Evans, an Arizona-based bank robber-turned-author who now consults for banking trade groups. In 1992, Evans ran a crime spree circuit, from Nebraska and Colorado to Arizona, casing banks, pulling heists, never staying long in one place. For Evans, a demand note — slid coolly across the teller counter — was all it ever took.
“No dye packs. No tracking devices. Give me hundreds, fifties and twenties.”
The clerks invariably gave him the money. And Evans, sporting a hat, sunglasses, and an unloaded .25-caliber gun tucked under his shirt in his waistband — would take the cash and walk out the door. Casually: like any other customer. Transaction completed. No one would glance at him twice.
Sure, it wasn’t easy. “I can’t tell you the number of times I’d get to the counter and lose my nerve,” says Evans, who reports netting about $2000 per robbery. “I’d hand the teller a 10 [dollar bill], ask for a roll of quarters and just walk out.” After all, bank robbing is a federal crime: slip up on the job and you can land in a federal maximum-security prison for up to 25 years, with $250,000 in fines.
But then again, it wasn’t that hard either.
Get in. Give the teller a note. Get out.
In 1971, such so-called “note-jobs” made up barely one-third of all bank robberies. Today, more than 95 percent of the time, the robber simply walks up to the teller window and passes a demand note, with no weapon ever being used.
Not a thinking man’s crime
Tellers deal with robbers’ demands quickly, quietly. Over the course of his time working at Citizens Bank on Academy Avenue in Providence, banker David Giacomini says he was present during two hold-ups, both note jobs. “The customers didn’t even know it was happening,” he says.
The rise in note jobs is attributed to how tellers are told to do one thing — cooperate — when faced with a robber’s demands. “Our bottom line is safety first, for tellers and customers,” says the American Bankers Association’s Mohsberg. That, of course, means handing over the cash. The last thing bankers want is a shootout. This strategy has been successful: last year, only 13 deaths (10 of which were those of the perpetrators) occurred nationally in connection with bank robberies — the lowest number in eight years.
So, for the would-be robber, banks offer a near-guaranteed haul — loot is taken in 92 percent of all bank robberies — and no hassles (other than the prospect of getting caught and put away, of course). “I could go into a 7-Eleven and maybe get only $100 from the register,” says Evans, “or I could go to a pawn shop or liquor store and have the owner behind the counter pull a shotgun on me.” He did the math. Bank robbing, it seemed, was a “no-brainer.”
The relative ease of committing a bank robbery is one major reason why these crimes fluctuate in number, Evans says, but never entirely go away.
Yet even as banks have become better targets, they have armed themselves to foil bank robbers. Over the past two decades, banks have invested millions in developing enhanced technology to help law enforcement agencies identify and capture thieves: digital camera systems; dye packs (timed devices hidden among stacks of bills that catch thieves “red-handed” by exploding a cloud of colored ink); bait money (bills marked with specific serial numbers); teller alarms; and silent tracking devices.
Nevertheless, such efforts are about apprehension, not deterrence. “We’re always going to have robberies if the opportunities are there,” says Robert McCrie, a professor of security management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Among banks robbed last year nationwide, more than 98 percent maintained surveillance and alarm systems. Today, more bank robbers may be getting caught, but that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped coming.
And not many project the kind of cool intelligence of George Clooney’s character in Out of Sight (1998), to name just one film with a bank robber protagonist.
“Bank robbing isn’t exactly a thinking man’s crime,” says Rick Porello, an Ohio police lieutenant and the author of Superthief: A Master Burglar, the Mafia, and the Biggest Bank Heist in US History (Next Hat Press, 2005), which chronicles a 1972 Orange County heist of roughly $30 million. “Almost anyone can put on a mask and go in and hold up a bank. There’s really nothing to it.”
