See all in News Features

Sallie Mae not

News Features

Robbing a bank ain’t what it used to be

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.”