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Heist Haven
the Vancouver Courier, December 2002
Photo: Dan Toulgoet
The customers at the Royal Bank at Hastings and Nanaimo were asking for the usual things that Monday afternoon in mid-November—GICs, RRSPs and the occasional order of foreign currency. A 20-year-old man wearing a black track suit and a baseball cap, however, had a different request. He walked up to the teller and handed her a note demanding cash.
The teller did what all tellers are trained to do: she complied with the robber's request as quickly as possible. She put a stack of bills into a bag and gave it to the criminal, who headed out the door. Outside, the robber was joined by an accomplice, a 26-year-old man, and the two fled the area on foot.
The men were no strangers to bank robbing. In fact, they had robbed the Bank of Montreal on East Hastings only two blocks away less than three hours before.
Bank robberies—like this week's sensational robbery in Edmonton, where the culprit took a child hostage-may be the stuff of Hollywood movies, but they're also a daily reality for financial institutions in the Lower Mainland.
In 2001, 167 banks or credit unions in the Lower Mainland were robbed, either by people passing notes to tellers demanding cash and sometimes threatening violence, or by groups or individuals taking over branches with guns. In the last few months, the Canadian Western Bank at 13th and Granville, VanCity Credit Union at 26th and Main and Toronto Dominion Bank at 49th and Fraser have all been robbed.
In fact, Vancouver outranks Toronto and Montreal in terms of the number of bank robberies.
"Vancouver is the bank robbery capital of Canada," said Paul Griffin, regional director of the Canadian Bankers Association. "On a per capita basis, we are definitely much higher than any other city."
But Vancouver's bank robberies are not nearly as glamourous as the capers immortalized by Hollywood.
Most of these robbers aren't master criminals—they're drug addicts looking for money for their next hit.
They rarely walk away with sacks of cash-most are lucky if they get $1,000. And unlike in the movies, they almost always get caught.
The two culprits who robbed the Royal Bank at Hastings and Nanaimo Nov. 18 are now in custody.
Police got descriptions from the bank staff, and several hours later, police officers at Abbott and Pender spotted two men who matched them.
The cops' suspicions were confirmed when they found the men had "bait bills" on them-money with serial numbers that had been recorded by the bank staff.
One of the men had dye on his clothing from an exploding dye pack the first teller had slipped in with the money.
The suspects were arrested and are being charged with robbery.
The Hastings and Nanaimo scenario is one all too familiar for Janet McMillan (not her real name; all tellers interviewed for this story were too traumatized to have their names used).
In her 26-year career as a bank teller and manager, she was involved in more than 10 robberies.
"During the first robbery, I was absolutely terrified," McMillan recalls. "It didn't take me long to get over that. I didn't think it would ever happen again. It wasn't until the third or fourth time that I started to really feel affected."
The robbery she remembers most vividly took place around five years ago in New Westminster.
McMillan was working at the side counter when young man came in wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap.
McMillan asked the man to remove the glasses and cap, but he ignored her.
Instead, he waited until the customer at the counter left, then turned to McMillan.
He leaned towards her face and told her he had a gun. If she didn't give him all the cash in the branch in a hurry, he said, he would kill her.
The robber got his money and fled without hurting anyone, but it was a scene McMillan couldn't forget.
"I was just a wreck," she says. "I sure as hell didn't want to return to work. Every damn time the front door would open, I would jump or drop something, expecting the person to be a robber."
Daniel Stone is one of the first people to arrive after a robbery—he's often right behind police.
Photo: Dan Toulgoet
Stone, a counsellor who specializes in helping bank employees who've been involved in bank robberies, has a contract with the Central Credit Union of B.C. Besides conducting group debriefings and offering one-on-one counseling, he teaches relaxation techniques to staff with anxieties about returning to work.
"Often, people who've been in bank robberies have trouble concentrating in the days and weeks following the incident," says Stone, sitting in his office in North Vancouver.
"People will often tell me that when they're driving to work, their chest tightens and they have trouble breathing. Their mind is racing with thoughts of the robbery, the robber's face, some particular aspect of the robbery. They pull into the parking lot and they're upset. They're really scared about going into the branch. And this is at the start of the day, even before they get in the door."
Stone says victims sometimes have to face the criminals in court, which brings back memories of the crime.
It's also not uncommon for someone to be recovering from one robbery when they're hit by another-sometimes by the same individual.
"Staff will be just beginning to settle down and heal from one robbery when there's another one that comes right away, maybe a week later. Many of the robberies are committed by the same people at exactly the same branch, and that tends to makes people mad, that they can come back at will, disrupt lives and just walk out with money. There's a tendency to want to retaliate, but the staff still have to restrain themselves."
Detective Les Yeo of the Vancouver Police Major Crimes Unit, has spent five and a half years tracking down bank robbers.
It's not uncommon for Yeo to watch video surveillance footage of a robbery and know immediately who's responsible.
He says Vancouver has a high number of bank robberies for the same reason we have so many break-and-entry incidents and car robberies-because of the city's massive drug problem.
"Ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of bank robberies are committed to support a drug habit," says Yeo, in his office on the fourth floor of the Main and Hastings police station.
"Sometimes, we come across someone doing it for financial gain and not for drug purposes, but it's rare."
Yeo says he can observe robbers' drug habits progressing by monitoring their crimes.
"A guy will have a $200-a-day habit, which of course, like all habits, progresses to be bigger and bigger and very quickly and you'll see him rob a bank every five days, then all the sudden every four days. Often, we've identified him, but we just can't find him. Then it's every four days. Then it's every three days. Then, before you know it, he's doing a bank every day, or even two in the same day. That's how quickly the drug problem has progressed in his life."
Yeo says he can also see changes in robbers' physical appearance on video surveillance footage.
"Often he kind of looks healthy in the first robbery and within a month or two, he's lost 50 pounds and he's skinny and gaunt and you know [that] as fast as he can get the money out of the bank, he's getting drugs."
He says bank robbers are often high when they commit their crimes, trying to get the money to pay their dealers for the drugs already in their systems.
He's even dealt with cases where the robber has called his dealer to order drugs while still inside the bank.
Yeo estimates 80 per cent of the crimes involve the passing of a note, containing direct or implied threats of violence, and the rest are takeovers by bandits, who often display weapons and wear masks and gloves.
Because tellers are instructed to comply, bank robbers almost always get their hands on some quick cash.
However, since new banking techniques limit the amount of money available to each teller, the criminals usually only get away with between $300 and $1,000.
And they leave a trail of witnesses, video surveillance footage, fingerprints and forensic evidence, which means they almost always get caught. Vancouver Police have an 85 per cent solve rate for bank robberies.
As a case in point, on Nov. 19, a police officer noticed a suspicious man pacing in front of the Canadian Western Bank at 13th and Granville.
As the officer watched, the man put a stocking over his head, entered the bank and pointed a black handgun, which later turned out to be a realistic replica, at the teller.
Although the teller handed over about $1,800, the man continued to point the gun at her and an adjacent teller, demanding American money and travellers' cheques.
When the teller told him the cash drawer was on a timer and the money couldn't be retrieved immediately, the man fled the building and was promptly tackled by several officers, who wanted to avoid a shoot-out on the busy street.
The 46-year-old man arrested already had 25 robbery convictions, and had walked away from Ferndale minimum security facility a few days before the incident.
"Sometimes banks are perceived as easy money, but actually it's the exact opposite," says Yeo. "Odds are you're going to get caught."
He adds criminals who rob banks are unlikely to be the same ones involved in auto theft or break-and-enters.
"Bank robbers tend to stay as bank robbers. There's this type of prestige associated with it. And when they go to the federal penitentiary, they'll brag to people that they robbed a bank."
Bank heists have long captured the minds of movie makers and the general public.
The 1967 classic Bonnie and Clyde describes the romantic adventures of the Barrow bank-robbing gang.
Two years later, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid told the tale of two witty bank robbers on a crime spree.
More recently, moviegoers saw Richard Linklater's tale of the sibling bank robbers, The Newton Boys, and Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton starred as quirky bank kidnappers in Bandits.
Even Bollywood has followed the trend with the 2002 movie Aankhen, where three blind men managed to rob a bank.
B.C.'s most sensational real-life bank robbery in recent years occurred in 1999 and resulted in the arrest of Stephen Reid, husband of well-known writer Susan Musgrave. Reid was known in his own right for penning the novel Jackrabbit Parole, based on his experiences robbing more than 100 banks as part of the Stopwatch Gang.
After a decade of fame as a writer, Reid once again succumbed to his heroin addiction and committed a violent bank robbery in Victoria. At the time, many people wrote letters to the newspapers complaining about the barrage of press coverage devoted to Reid.
"Pop culture and Hollywood have glorified bank robberies," says Paul Griffin from the Canadian Bankers Association. "I suspect it's something to do with the idea that banks have a lot of money and nobody really gets hurt-the people just get a little bit of a scare."
He feels many of these criminals receive too-lenient sentences, and are soon out robbing banks again.
Sentences range from time in the community to an automatic four years in jail if it can be proved the perpetrator had a firearm.
"There isn't a huge group of people committing these crimes," says Griffin. "It's a small group of characters who are doing this over and over again. They're prosecuted in court and basically given a slap on the wrist and let go. Courts have tended to look at bank robberies as a crime against a bank. But somehow, they've missed the real victims in this. It's not the money in the bank. It's the tellers, the staff."
Janet McMillan is still feeling the impact of the bank robberies she was involved in.
She no longer works in a bank, but still suffers from anxiety and stress related to the robberies.
She spent two years in counseling dealing with the aftermath, and blames the bank she worked for for not being supportive.
"The bank was two-faced about it," she says. "They had a policy in place saying if you had been robbed, they would provide counseling and you could be off work without anybody pointing any fingers at you. But the real attitude was, if you're a trooper, you can take it."
McMillan says she wouldn't work for a bank again—even if she was starving—and can't imagine the problem of bank robberies disappearing any time soon.
The statistics back her up: while the number of bank robberies in Montreal and Toronto has declined sharply over the past six years, the rate in Vancouver remains high.
Montreal used to be considered the bank robbery capital of North America, but now the city police force is planning to eliminate its specialized holdup squad because the number of bank heists has dropped so drastically.
For many criminals, new banking techniques that have reduced the amount of cash available to tellers mean bank robbery isn't worth the gamble.
But even though a bank robbery may only net the criminal a few hundred bucks and almost always leads to jail time, these crimes continue to attract addicts desperate for their next hit, and bank tellers like McMillan have to live with the consequences.