Takeover heist 55th bank robbery

Keith Paul

Friday, April 20, 2001 | 10:39 a.m.

A group of armed men stormed into a Las Vegas bank Thursday and made off with an undisclosed amount of cash, marking the 55th bank holdup this year and putting the Las Vegas Valley ahead of last year's record-setting number of bank heists.

Five men pulled off the robbery of the Bank of America branch in the 4200 block of South Rainbow Boulevard near Spring Valley Parkway Thursday about 9:45 a.m., said Special Agent Daron W. Borst of the Las Vegas FBI office.

"FBI and Metro Police have been following up on leads attempting to identify the suspects and determining if they may be responsible for other similar robberies committed this year," he said.

No one was injured and no shots were fired during Thursday's robbery.

Borst said the 55 bank robberies so far this year is ahead of the pace of 2000, when there was a record high of 161 bank robberies. There were 114 bank robberies in 1999 and 100 in 1998.

Thursday's holdup was a takeover style, which means that a group of armed robbers storm into a bank, point guns at customers and employees and bark orders in an attempt to get cash.

Many robberies are known as "note jobs," meaning that a person enters a bank and goes to an individual teller with a note demanding money. In those holdups most customers don't know a robbery has occurred until after the robber has left the bank.

In the Las Vegas Valley, several of the recent robberies have been blamed on repeat felons. On Tuesday Mark Edward Baker was charged in connection with five bank robberies this year. He was recently released from federal prison after serving time for a 1995 conviction related to a bank robbery, Borst said.

"He was identified when a parole officer recognized a picture of a suspect that ran in the newspaper," Borst said.