Serial robber keeping Nevada No. 1

Karen Zekan

Wednesday, Oct. 7, 1998 | 11:16 a.m.

FBI agents are hopeful a serial bank robber will be tripped up by a publicity campaign featuring video of the man in sunglasses taken during four recent heists.

The arrest of the slender, Hispanic-looking man in his early 20s also could help authorities knock Nevada from its spot as the top bank robbery state in the nation.

Video footage released Tuesday from surveillance cameras shows the man holding up tellers on Oct. 1 inside a Bank of America branch on Warm Springs Road, on Sept. 29 at a Norwest Bank on Charleston Boulevard and at a Wells Fargo branch on Rainbow Boulevard and on Sept. 25 at a U.S. Bank on Decatur Boulevard.

The tape shows a man who is about 5 feet, 9 inches tall, with dark, close-cropped hair, brown eyes and an olive complexion. Sunglasses are his main disguise.

The man's folly in being captured on tape, however, has occurred in an apparent robbers' paradise. According to the most recent statistics released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Nevada ranked No. 1 in the nation for heists in 1996 with a total of 169 holdups tallied among its 335 federally insured banks.

That statistic leaves Nevada with a 50 percent bank-robbery rate. A spokesman fro the FBI said figures for the last two years are not available.

Arizona came in second, followed by Washington, D.C., California and Arizona. Vermont finished in last place without a single bank robbery that year.

Authorities estimate that robbers got away with more than $77 million in bank money in 1996. A breakdown on Las Vegas figures was not immediately available.

Why are Las Vegas banks victimized so often?

The city's seemingly endless rows of gaming tables and slot machines each year lure millions of tourists to a town equally attractive to a large volume of transients and those besieged with a growing methamphetamine problem.

The drug, which stimulates users into brain-wasting euphoria, is the most common substance abused by the bank robbers whom local FBI agents have taken into custody.

"It cooks their minds, literally," Special Agent Aurelio Flores said. "You see them with a buzz ... they can't see straight, they can't plan their getaway."

And there's another down side, Flores says: Meth makes its users violent.

Fortunately Nevada's bank robberies haven't turned as bloody as others have in bigger cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Las Vegas has had its share of "take-over" style robberies, during which a handful of thugs enter a bank and take it over by using weapons to threaten customers and employees into submission. Flores said several take-over heists have been linked to California gangs.

But most Las Vegas bank robbers are in their 20s or early 30s and go into the bank alone, Flores said, although it is not uncommon for them to have someone waiting in a getaway car.

"It could be a girlfriend or someone they just met within the last few days," he said.

Rarely is the getaway driver an unwitting participant in the crime -- someone, for example, who believed the robber's claims that he or she needed to stop at the bank to make an ATM withdrawal or a legal transaction at the counter.

Surveillance cameras have dramatically increased the FBI's success rate in nabbing bank bandits, as have other techniques such as the exploding dye containers that accompany the cash handed over by tellers.

Another successful strategy is the bureau's development of a team of agents dedicated exclusively to bank-robbery detail. That team has been credited with the Aug. 17 arrests of Hakim Muhammed Williams, 42, of Pomona, Calif.; Vincent George Parks, 37, of Pomona; and Ellis Lee Clarke, 40, of Las Vegas.

The three men were indicted by a federal grand jury in a violent robbery at Wells Fargo Bank, 801 N. Rancho Road, where tellers were held at gunpoint and forced to the ground. The men were tailed to a housing complex near Charleston and Honolulu Street where they were arrested a few hours later. Authorities believe they could have ties to as many as 42 robberies in California.

"They watch television, they think it's easy to rob a bank," Flores said.

"It's a roulette wheel -- they don't know if the bank they are going to rob has all the gadgets (such as surveillance cameras and dye packs) ... they're taking a chance that they don't."

Two types of robbers typically hit Las Vegas banks, FBI agents have learned: the down and out who, during background investigations, often turn out to have come from another city where they've knocked off banks; and the "glamour types" caught up in the romanticized robber image portrayed in TV and movies.

Among the second type was the man who held up a Wells Fargo branch at Cheyenne Avenue and Jones Boulevard on July 23 and sped off in his Corvette getaway car.

"He had a fast car, guts, courage; he thought he could get away with it," Flores said.

What he didn't have was criminal sophistication. While speeding along Cheyenne, he spotted a black and white patrol car coming the other way and, thinking the cop was after him, abruptly pulled a U-turn, lost control of his car and crashed into a Jeep Cherokee near Whispering Willow Road.

Flores said the Metro officer hadn't a clue that the Corvette's driver was wanted at the time, but his suspicions quickly grew when he saw the money that spilled out of the car and dye splattered on the Corvette's interior.