One morning last fall, a man entered a Cambridge branch of East Boston Savings Bank, brandished a pistol at the tellers and threatened “Who wants to die today?” before robbing the branch, two bankers told a Massachusetts House committee last fall while testifying in support of a bill that would increase the penalties for convicted bank robbers in the commonwealth.
The bill – H.3246, or An Act Relative to Bank Robberies and Collection of Fraudulent Checks – is currently pending before the state legislature in the year ahead. Essentially, the bill would impose a 30-month mandatory minimum for a first-time bank robbery, which would increase to a five-year minimum if the robber used a disguise, carried a weapon or threatened a weapon.
A second component of the bill relates to the prosecution of fraudulent check passing, said David Floreen, a senior vice president at the Massachusetts Bankers Association. This component of the bill would allow banks to present evidence of fraudulent check activity across multiple jurisdictions and help the court establish a pattern in the culprit’s behavior.
Currently, a district court considering a case of check fraud would look only at the activity that took place within its specific jurisdiction, meaning that a single, low-dollar case of check fraud could be treated with low priority, even if it is part of a broader pattern.
“It’s designed to facilitate prosecution and to hopefully show the complete picture,” Floreen said. “That just seems to make so much more sense from a prosecution standpoint and a fraud reduction perspective … Any time you can cut down fraud, the public benefits.”
Bank Robberies On The Rise
If you feel like you’ve been reading a lot of bank robbery stories lately, know that it’s not a figment of your imagination. Joseph Mancini, Security Officer at East Boston Savings Bank, and Charles E. Samour, Security Officer at Cambridge Trust Co., told the House Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security that bank robberies in Massachusetts increased significantly after Sept. 11, 2001. While bankers and law enforcement have coordinated on several efforts to help cut down on that number, the Bay State still averages between 150 and 200 bank robberies per year, or about one robbery every other day, they testified in support of the bill.
While bank robberies may have once been largely the province of sophisticated criminals, those practical-minded crooks have turned elsewhere to carry out their heists. Today, your typical bank robber is most likely a drug addict looking for some quick cash and an easy fix, law enforcement officials say. And it’s not unreasonable, either, to think that perhaps the decreasing volume of traffic in the branch enables crooks who’d rather not be identified.
“Most robberies here in the Greater Boston area are note jobs,” Norwood Police Chief Bill Brooks said.
As the name would imply, a “note job” is a bank robbery in which the criminal passes a note to the teller demanding money, sometimes implying that he is armed and sometimes demanding the teller not include a dye pack. That scenario is much more common than the “take over,” wherein two or more armed bank robbers will hold up the branch, Brooks said.
Brooks is one of a handful of law enforcement officials who have teamed up with the Massachusetts Bankers Association on the Bank Robbery Working Group.
Current Efforts
Though police have not yet caught the suspect mentioned at the outset of this story, their combined efforts with bankers have yielded multiple arrests in recent years. Something as simple as requiring all customers to remove hats, hoods or sunglasses before entering the bank branch has proved remarkably effective in cutting down on bank robberies and helping law enforcement identify those who disregard the warning and proceed anyway.
Some branch managers have trained their tellers to better notice particular details of their customers by randomly asking them to write down a description of the last person served at their window, Brooks said.
He is also particularly proud of MassMostWanted.org, a joint effort between the Massachusetts Bankers Association and the Metropolitan Law Enforcement Council. The no-advertising, no-frills website displays photos of violent criminals – bank robbers included – along with brief or detailed descriptions of the accompanying crime. Tipsters can report information to law enforcement anonymously, if they wish.
Brooks also brought a local Fox affiliate into the loop, and a local crime reporter now features a few cases culled from the website on a Saturday night spot called “New England’s Unsolved.”
“A lot of cases have been solved because people have seen the case featured on Fox 25 news,” he said.
Email: lalix@thewarrengroup.com
