Opinion ID: 52553
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Bank of America Robbery

Text: On November 10, 2003, around 11:00 a.m., three masked men entered a Bank of America in West Palm Beach, Florida and held it up for approximately $9,078. Security cameras recorded the robbery. The men entered the bank from the side entrance where a security guard sat with his back to the door and his eyes trained on the lobby. After the men disarmed the new security guard, they ordered everyone else to the floor at gunpoint. There were nine tellers, several other 3 employees, an outside contractor, and a half-dozen customers in the bank at the time. Witnesses recounted that the men were dressed in black from head to toe and wore gloves over their hands and face masks that obscured everything but their eyes and the bridges of their noses. The only way that witnesses could distinguish them was by their relative stature. One robber was tall, another was medium height and one was noticeably short in comparison to the other two. By all accounts, at least two of the men brandished long rifles. While the two armed men rounded up employees and customers and corralled them in the lobby, the third man attempted to get beyond the locked electronic doors that led into the teller area. Eventually his cohorts urged him to just jump over the counter and he did, landing alongside the work station of teller Sylvia Davis. At that point, he saw teller Sylvia Davis, crouching under her work station, and gestured for her to come out. When Davis crawled out from her hiding place, she saw another masked man on the opposite side of the counter with his rifle trained on a customer. Although both men were masked, Davis was able to tell that they were black from the skin that was exposed around their eyes and the bridges of their noses. Her coworker, Thomas De Stefano, who was crouching in the lobby, saw the man who 4 had vaulted over the counter train a gun on Davis’ head as she let him into her cash drawer. While the robbers were occupied at Davis’ work station, they failed to notice a Hewlett Packard technician, Edwin Vargas, who was kneeling behind the teller area, attaching cabling to the base of a new printer. He, however, noticed them, and from his vantage point, which was just alongside a plate glass window that looked out on the parking area, he saw them escape minutes later. One man exited from the doors on the south side of the bank and entered a white van that had its doors open. The van was parked alongside Vargas’ repair van. The other men followed a minute later. Vargas got in his van and pursued the men out of the parking lot. He saw them turn behind the plaza and head down the street of an adjoining housing development. When he got to the end of that street, he saw it was a dead-end. The white van was parked at the end of the street with its doors open and a black pickup truck with an extended cab was pulling away from the opposite side of the street. He called 911 to report what was happening. Officer Robert Rowe of the West Palm Beach Police Department proceeded to the housing complex where Vargas had seen the getaway car. When Rowe arrived he saw a white Dodge Caravan with its doors open. The car was still running, but no keys were inside. He noted that the right passenger seat was 5 stained with red dye and several loose bills rested on the floor of the van. He ran the tags on the vehicle and learned that it was stolen. The black pickup seen leaving the area matched the description of another stolen car. Police in Riviera Beach, which is just north of West Palm Beach, recovered the other getaway car, the black pickup truck, in a housing complex later that day. Meanwhile, Laura Downs, the senior teller coach for the Bank of America, and Belinda Garcia, the bank’s customer service manager, blocked off access to the teller area of the bank and performed an audit of Davis’ cash drawer. Downs determined that the robbers escaped with $9,078.90. Their take included some rarely seen two dollar notes, several twenty dollar “bait bills” and a dye package of twenty dollar notes. The dye package was designed to release a red dye shortly after the notes were removed from the bank. The bank had recorded the serial numbers on the stack of bait bills so they could trace them in the event of a robbery. Downs closed the bank, which would normally have remained open until 4:00 p.m. so that Bank of America security personnel and law enforcement official could conduct investigations. Law enforcement officers with the West Palm Beach Police Department checked the interior surfaces of the recovered getaway cars for latent fingerprints that might help them identify the robbers, but failed to recover anything. The 6 police had no leads at this point, apart from the descriptions of the eyewitnesses and the videotaped images captured on the bank security cameras. Nearly one month later, however, on December 10th, 2003, robbers employing a similar modus operandus (“m.o.”) held up a Wachovia Bank in West Palm Beach. Although police arrested an individual two days after the Wachovia robbery who turned out to have currency on him that was traceable to the robbery, they had no other evidence to link him to the crimes. They interviewed the individual, Ahmad Adams, who went by the nickname “Dugey.” They also interviewed a passenger who was traveling with Adams’ car when police pulled Adams over. The passenger’s name was Juan Bannister. Although Bannister agreed to speak with Detective Houston of the West Palm Beach violent crimes division about recent bank robberies, he told the detective that he wasn’t doing banks. Bannister suggested the detective approach him again if and when he could produce a picture of him inside a bank. Detective Houston was unable to get any further leads on the Bank America robbery for several months. Then, on March 27, 2004, Houston learned that an individual, who had just been brought into jail for drug and firearm offenses, had some information on bank robberies. Accordingly, Detective Houston interviewed the individual, Albert Minus, a convicted felon who had been on supervised 7 release from an earlier drug and firearm sentence when police found him violating probation. Minus told Houston that he overheard Juan Bannister refer to a bank robbery at 45th Street and Military Trail in West Palm Beach in which the robbers had disarmed a security guard. Minus was at Bannister’s apartment at the time along with a number of other people. Minus had been dating Bannister’s sister, Tanisha, but he also said he knew Bannister because Bannister had been close friends with Minus’ older brother, who was now deceased. According to Minus, Bannister said something to the effect that you should have seen the look on the security guard’s face when “Dugey” took his gun away from him as the guard was attempting to draw it on “MG,” who was also known as Mike Lewis. Detective Houston was familiar with “Dugey” or Ahmad Adams because officers had found him with currency that was traceable to an armed robbery at a Wachovia bank several months earlier. Minus said he had the impression that Bannister was recounting something he heard from the other participants in the robbery because he didn’t think that Bannister went inside the bank himself. Detective Houston had already concluded that Bannister did not participate in the robberies on the inside because he walked with a profound limp, which would have been readily visible to eyewitnesses and would have been caught on the security cameras. 8 Minus revealed other facts that indicated Bannister might have some connection to the robberies, however. For example, Minus recounted that he had seen currency with red dye on it when Bannister’s sister Tanisha came to visit him at a half-way house where he was staying. According to Minus, he saw Tanisha reach in her purse and he spied several two dollar bills. He hadn’t seen that denomination before so it caught his attention. Tanisha, who was unemployed at the time, offered him some money, but Minus declined noticing that the bills had red dye on them. On a subsequent visit, Tanisha told Minus that the money had come from a “lick” or robbery, but she didn’t offer any more details. Detective Houston noted that two dollar bills were rare, although several had been taken in the Bank of America robbery. Police did not release this sort of information to the public, which led Houston to conclude Minus’ information was credible. Minus told Detective Houston that Bannister was staying in his girlfriend’s third-floor apartment at 2100 Australian Avenue in West Palm Beach, and gave him his cell phone number. Minus also told Houston that Bannister spent time at a friend’s apartment on the fourth floor of the same complex, and gave police an address for Mike Lewis. The police were not aware that Bannister had moved and was living with his girlfriend and did not have any information on Mike Lewis prior to this. 9 In addition to providing Houston with information on bank robberies, Minus also disclosed facts about other violent crimes which Houston considered reliable. Houston did not offer Minus any sort of deal in exchange for this information. Detective Houston indicated, however, that Minus’ continued cooperation might convince prosecutors to ask for a lighter sentence when the time came for Minus’ hearing on the drug and firearm charges.