Desperate times, desperate measures
During the Great Depression, America maintained a fascination with larger-than-life bank robbers like John “Jackrab¬bit” Dillinger, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde. And small wonder. With a catastrophic drought sweeping the Midwest and farm foreclosures across the country, bank robbers seemed to be among the few actually living the American Dream: boot-strapping their way, with the barrel of a gun.
These days, bank robberies are driven by something far more mundane: drug addiction. According to Major Campbell of the Providence police, of the 48 bank robberies in the city since 2003, every single perpetrator arrested has had a drug problem — and usually a patchwork of previous criminal convictions.
Bank robbing is a serial crime, says Gail Marcinkiewicz, a Boston-based spokeswoman for the FBI. “A bank robber’s going to continue robbing till he’s caught,” she says. Among convicted bank robbers nationwide, 20 percent have a history as veteran bank thieves.
“These guys are no Cary Grants,” Providence Police Chief Dean Esserman says dryly. “I wish they were. It’d make [catching them] a challenge.”
When it comes to bank robbing, Rhode Island has seen its share of on-the-job buffoonery. Last year, one benighted bank robber in Providence presented the teller with a note demanding “$50s, $30s [sic] and $20s.”
Another, in Swansea, Massachusetts, upon being told that the teller had no cash, promptly passed out in shock. (He was still unconscious when the police arrived.) In Cranston, one robber was quickly apprehended after holding up a local bank, wearing a mechanic’s shirt with his own name embroidered on the breast pocket. Meanwhile, in Providence, one armored-car robber’s attempt to make a hasty getaway was foiled when he found that his loot was four bags of money containing $3200 — in pennies.
Yet while big-time heists may be the exception these days, they still dazzle the imagination.
Take Craig Pritchert and Nova Guthrie, for example. The couple pulled off a stunning 16-month streak of takeover robberies across the southwestern US, netting half a million dollars from 1997 to 1999.
Like a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde, the lovers lived lavishly on the lam for six years, skiing in British Columbia and snorkeling in Belize, before being apprehended. Closer to home, there’s Rhode Island’s 1975 Bonded Vault case — a brazen stunt in which nine masked men entered a Providence security company in broad daylight and held several employees at gunpoint before escaping with roughly $3 million in cash and valuables.
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So perhaps the average Joe could be forgiven for wanting to jump in on the game. Consider some of the unusual suspects that have grabbed national headlines in recent years: the “Barbie Bandits,” a pair of blonde 19-year-old women who sported ponytails and movie-star sunglasses as they robbed a bank in Atlanta last September. Or the “Grandpa Bandit,” a 91-year-old Texan man who tried to hold up his local bank in 2004.
Rhode Island has been home to its own distinctive cast of bank robbers, some with their own idiosyncratic monikers: the “Lunchtime Bandit,” a disgruntled McDonald’s employee who was convicted of stealing thousands from his local credit union in Scituate during his lunch break; the “Tie Rob Bandit,” a well-dressed East Providence bank robber who passed demand notes that were both curt and courteous: “Give me $3000. I have a gun. Have a nice day.”
Some have been just opportunistic bystanders. In 1995, an armored-car driver parked at a gas station in Cranston and went inside for cigarettes. When he returned, he found that someone had driven away the car — and with it, the $350,000 inside.
But such windfalls are aberrations. “Note-jobs are like playing a slot machine,” says Duane Swierczynski, author of This Here’s a Stickup: The Big Bad Book of American Bank Robbers (Alpha, 2002), a historical look at American bank robberies. “If you get lucky, you might get away with a couple hundred or a couple thousand dollars, or you might just end up getting caught. I’d rather go to Atlantic City and spend my quarters there.”
This happens to be just what many bank robbers end up doing. “I don’t know anyone who’s [robbing banks] to put their kids through school or paying their rent,” says Major Campbell. “It’s all about gambling and going to Foxwoods — money and drugs and girls.”
This combination sounds like the makings of your standard bank-heist flick. Yet as robber-turned-author Troy Evans looks back over his bank-robbing career, it didn’t add up to anything nearly so thrilling. For one, the payoff wasn’t great. For another, he ended up in prison.
“Hollywood tries to glamorize,” he says. “Their bank robbers are living the high style: beautiful hotels, girls all over them. Me, I was staying in seedy places in the seediest parts of the city, with drugs and prostitutes.” And while bank robbing has a reputation for being a “victimless crime,” Evans is penitent, saying he never realized how many tellers he traumatized along the way.
“It wasn’t worth it,” he concludes.
