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Robbing a bank ain’t what it used to be

Get rich in america
So perhaps the average Joe could be forgiven for wanting to jump in on the game. Consider some of the unusual suspects that have grabbed national headlines in recent years: the “Barbie Bandits,” a pair of blonde 19-year-old women who sported ponytails and movie-star sunglasses as they robbed a bank in Atlanta last September. Or the “Grandpa Bandit,” a 91-year-old Texan man who tried to hold up his local bank in 2004.
 
Rhode Island has been home to its own distinctive cast of bank robbers, some with their own idiosyncratic monikers: the “Lunchtime Bandit,” a disgruntled McDonald’s employee who was convicted of stealing thousands from his local credit union in Scituate during his lunch break; the “Tie Rob Bandit,” a well-dressed East Providence bank robber who passed demand notes that were both curt and courteous: “Give me $3000. I have a gun. Have a nice day.”
 
Some have been just opportunistic bystanders. In 1995, an armored-car driver parked at a gas station in Cranston and went inside for cigarettes. When he returned, he found that someone had driven away the car — and with it, the $350,000 inside.
 
But such windfalls are aberrations. “Note-jobs are like playing a slot machine,” says Duane Swierczynski, author of This Here’s a Stickup: The Big Bad Book of American Bank Robbers (Alpha, 2002), a historical look at American bank robberies. “If you get lucky, you might get away with a couple hundred or a couple thousand dollars, or you might just end up getting caught. I’d rather go to Atlantic City and spend my quarters there.”
 
This happens to be just what many bank robbers end up doing. “I don’t know anyone who’s [robbing banks] to put their kids through school or paying their rent,” says Major Campbell. “It’s all about gambling and going to Foxwoods — money and drugs and girls.”
 
This combination sounds like the makings of your standard bank-heist flick. Yet as robber-turned-author Troy Evans looks back over his bank-robbing career, it didn’t add up to anything nearly so thrilling. For one, the payoff wasn’t great. For another, he ended up in prison.
 
“Hollywood tries to glamorize,” he says. “Their bank robbers are living the high style: beautiful hotels, girls all over them. Me, I was staying in seedy places in the seediest parts of the city, with drugs and prostitutes.” And while bank robbing has a reputation for being a “victimless crime,” Evans is penitent, saying he never realized how many tellers he traumatized along the way.
 
“It wasn’t worth it,” he concludes.

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