Just how dumb and desperate are bank robbers, anyway?
It’s easy to find stories of stupid hold-up men. Google comes up with hundreds, like the guy a couple of years ago who slipped a robbery note to a teller at Mt. Washington bank in Dorchester, only to turn around and discover the man standing behind him was a uniformed cop.
Yet it’s the more grandiose tales that tend to capture the public’s imagination – the legend of John Dillinger looms large, and also fashionable when Johnny Depp portrays him as a Robin Hood figure. Ben Affleck turned Charlestown into “America’s Bank Robbery Capital” for his movie, The Town, in a bit of marketing hyperbole that didn’t have any claim to truthfulness. But it sure was fun watching that gritty heist plan come together.
At least it was on screen. In real life, of course, it’s a frightening experience for anyone on the teller line. Just ask the employees at Eastern Bank in Everett, where a man with a medium build in white hospital scrubs walked in last week and then walked out with a lot of cash that wasn’t his.
His information, along with dozens of others, is available at the website www.massmostwanted.org. This is a place where you’ll find lots of information and security camera snapshots of brazen bandits. The site was started, and remains funded, by the Massachusetts Bankers Association, which of course wants to see every one of these galoots end up like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – meaning completely disposed of.
The real question is, why do people still rob banks? Famed bank robber Willie Sutton once answered that question succinctly: “Because that’s where the money is.” But these days, there’s a lot more money to be had in cyber fraud.
Maybe people rob banks because they think they can get rich fast that way. If so, they should meet professors Barry Reilly, Neil Rickman and Robert Witt, economists at the University of Surrey and the University of Sussex in England. The trio decided to take a look at the economics of bank robberies in the United States and the United Kingdom. They just published their study in “Significance,” the magazine of both the American Statistical Society and the Royal Statistical Society.
Bank robbery, it turns out, isn’t very lucrative.
“Surprisingly, bank robbers have never had the benefit, if that is the right term, of independent econometric analysis of their activities,” the three economists write. “The return on an average bank robbery is, frankly, rubbish.”
A Low ROI
It’s not that crime doesn’t pay. It’s just that it doesn’t pay very well. Since these studies tend to take a long time to do, the conclusions of the trio are based on data from 2006 and 2007. Using that information, the average take for a U.S. bank robber was just $4,300.
If you’re Scott Niemec, who was arrested in April after leading police on a high-speed chase through Rhode Island and Massachusetts, maybe the math adds up. Niemec, it’s alleged, pretty much made robbing banks his full-time job. He’s charged with seven bank thefts in the Bay State and one in Providence. Still, using the average that the professors came up with, Niemec would only have made $34,400 for all that hard work. And that doesn’t count the gas he burned up trying to evade the cops.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation keeps a running tally of bank robberies, with the most current information through the third quarter of 2011. Nationally, there were about 1,100 robbers in that quarter, who made off with about $9.3 million in loot (I’m not just using florid prose here. That’s what the FBI actually calls the proceeds of the crime: “loot.”) A few keystrokes on the calculator, and bank thieves averaged about $8,500 in that time frame.
So, unlike the rest of us, bank robbers have seen their pay just about double in the last five years. But they’re working on a project basis, and sometimes they even have to give the money back. The FBI says about $2 million of the loot from that quarter was recovered. So, successful bank robbers – if successful means keeping or spending the money yourself, even if you do a little time in the pokey – averaged only about $6,700 a job.
“A single bank raid, even a successful one, is not going to keep our would-be robber in a life of luxury. It is not going to keep him long in a life of any kind,” write Reilly, Rickman and Witt.
Ah, you say, that’s because those individual bank robbers are stupid. They’re like the two guys in 2010 who called ahead to their local Peoples United Bank branch, and told them to get a big stack of bills together, so the money would be ready when they came in to rob it. When they got to the bank 10 minutes later, they were promptly arrested by the police.
It’s the bank robbery gangs that are smart. And according to our economists, that’s true. “The bigger the gang, the greater the take,” the economists write, explaining that the more experienced robbers work in teams. Unfortunately, while the average take goes up for gangs, if they split the loot equally, the average-per-person goes down.
No, truly smart robbers use computers, not guns. A recent study from Symantec, the anti-virus software manufacturer, estimates the cost of global cybercrime at $114 billion annually, significantly more than the annual global market for marijuana, cocaine and heroin combined.
Bank robbery, it seems, is becoming a niche for slackers and doofuses (albeit occasionally armed and dangerous ones). And if you want to stay away from such people, it’s best to avoid bank branches in business districts on Friday afternoons between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. The robbers, it seems, like to have a little cash on hand to party over the weekend. Very little.
“As a profitable occupation, bank robbery leaves a lot to be desired,” the professors summarized in their study. Years ago, readers and radio listeners were treated to the words of “The Shadow,” a cloaked and wide-brimmed crime fighter who brandished two pistols and the power to cloud men’s minds. His adventures always included his ominous creed. “The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay! The Shadow knows.”
It only took 70 years for economists to prove him right.
Vincent Valvo is CEO of Agility Resources Group LLC. He can be reached at vvalvo@agilityresourcesgroup.com
