By William Rehder & Gordon Dillow

Everybody Likes Eddie

The guy robbing the bank in Brentwood didn’t look at all like Eddie. He was old, for one thing, and gaunt, almost cadaverous, his skin graveyard pale and splotched with sores. He was dressed in a black T-shirt and a wool jacket, with long wisps of ginger–colored hair sticking out from under a black knit watch cap, and his dark sunglasses were perched low on his nose. The green eyes that peered over the glasses were heavy–lidded and rheumy–looking, and his hands were badly swollen. Even in the grainy image of a bank surveillance photo, it was pretty obvious that this guy was seriously sick.

It was 2:45 P.M. on April 9, 1999. Carrying a black leather bag on his right shoulder, and casually eating an apple, the robber walked into the California Federal Bank — a narrow, plush–carpeted branch bank tucked in between the jewelry stores and overpriced restaurants that line San Vicente Boulevard — and quietly took a place in the customer service line. He didn’t look like the usual sort of customer in this bank, in this kind of upscale neighborhood, but he didn’t set off any mental alarm bells in the other people waiting in line or working behind the teller counters. This was, after all, L.A.; he could have been a bum, or he could have been last year’s Academy Award’winning director. Or both. No one paid much attention to him.

The guy stood in line for a few moments, waiting his turn. Finally he went up to a young female bank teller at the counter and started chatting about the weather.

“God, it’s windy outside,” he said, friendly like, as he set the leather bag on the counter. Sure is, the teller agreed. Then the guy stuck his right hand in the half–opened bag and said, calmly, almost soothingly, “Actually, you know what? I have a gun. Please give me your cash.”

At first the teller wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. Was this guy serious? But then he nudged the leather bag a little, not especially menacingly, but enough to make the point. It was more strange than frightening, but the teller followed the standard drill, the one they’d taught her in orientation: A guy demands the money, you give him the money — and you also hit the button under the counter that sends out a two–eleven silent alarm (211 is the California Penal Code section dealing with robbery) and activates the bank surveillance cameras.

That’s exactly what the teller did. Thirty seconds later the robber walked out of the bank with $1,004 in cash, leaving behind no fingerprints, no physical evidence, just his image in the surveillance photos.

The next day, the photographs of him landed on my desk in the FBI bank squad offices on the sixteenth floor of the Westwood Federal Building in L.A. I tacked the best one up on the wall, along with all the others. This guy was no virgin; the Brentwood job was his sixth bank lick in a little over three months. His debut had come on the day after New Year’s, when he’d hit a Bank of America in Beverly Hills for $ 12,884 — a truly excellent score for a “one–on–one” robbery, in which one bandit robs one teller, usually without anyone else in the bank even knowing that a robbery is taking place. That had held him for six weeks, then he hit another Beverly Hills bank for $3,460. Two robberies under his belt made him a certified serial bank bandit, and had earned him — or rather, earned his bank surveillance photos — a spot in my rogues’ photo gallery, where I kept surveillance photos of all known serial bandits working in L.A. It had also earned him a nickname.

Nicknaming bank robbers, giving them their criminal “monikers,” was part of my job. As the FBI’s L.A. Bank Squad coordinator, I had to track serial bank bandits, to analyze their methods of operation (known in law enforcement as their “M.O.’s“), to get inside their heads and try to predict when and where they would strike next. Since at any given moment there might be thirty or forty unidentified serial bank robbers pulling jobs in L.A. — “unsubs” in FBI parlance, short for “unknown subjects” — I always gave them nicknames to keep them straight in my head, names based on some memorable aspect of their appearance or M.O. That guy who always disguised himself by wrapping surgical gauze around his head? I called him the “Mummy Bandit.” The one who for some reason always wore one glove during his robberies? He was the “Michael Jackson Bandit.” Two professional armed bank robbers who wore wigs and glasses and fake mustaches were the “Marx Brothers” — when we caught them, we found out they actually were brothers — while the guy who wore a skeleton mask was “Dr. Death.” A group of particularly violent and brutal robbers were the “Nasty Boys,” while their equally violent female counterparts were the “Nasty Girls.”

And so on. “Miss Piggy” was short and weighed about 300 pounds; “Large Marge” was tall and weighed about 300 pounds. The “Miss America Bandit” was an exceptionally attractive note bandit; she also turned out to be a former bank teller. A guy who yelled and waved a butcher knife during his robberies was the “Benihana Bandit,” like the Japanese restaurant, while the three–man takeover robbery team who dressed up like a biker, a cop, and a hard-hat construction worker naturally were immortalized as the “Village People.” The “Chevy Chase Bandit” was a clumsy robber who tripped over a doormat and fell face—down in the bank lobby — he turned out to be an attorney who needed some quick dough — while guys who bore a marked physical resemblance to celebrities and movie stars took on their names: the Robert DeNiro Bandit, the Karl Malden Bandit, the Johnny Cash Bandit.

(I never got any complaints from the celebrities, even after some of the names were publicized in the news media. But there was a beef, and the threat of a lawsuit, from the “Clearasil Bandit,” a robber with a bad case of acne. He claimed that the nickname had exposed him to ridicule and humiliation from prison guards and inmates after he went to the joint.)

With the battered–looking old guy who had robbed the banks in Beverly Hills and Brentwood, the nickname had come from the usual process. What captured the essence of this guy?

Well, the first two robberies had been in Beverly Hills. And it was clear from the photos that our boy was on the losing end of a drastic downward personal slide; his shabby clothing and diseased appearance told us that much. He was definitely a down–and–outer, and most likely a hype; no one else steals almost $13,000 and runs through it in six weeks without any noticeable upgrade in his apparel. And a few days earlier I had happened to catch a rerun of an old Nick Nolte movie on cable TV.

Got it: the “Down and Out in Beverly Hills Bandit” — or the Down–and–Outer for short.

Now, with the addition of the Brentwood robbery surveillance photo, there were a half dozen bank surveillance pictures of the Down–and–Outer hanging on my wall.

And he was just starting to get annoying.

You might think that a guy who had robbed six banks would be at the top of everybody’s Most Wanted list, that squads of FBI agents and SWAT guys would be lacking up suspects and kicking in doors all the way from Simi Valley to San Clemente to run this bandit to ground. But in L.A., at least, you’d be wrong. Because L.A. is the undisputed bank robbery capital of the world — and if you’re going to shine as a bank bandit in that arena, you’re going to have to do better than a lousy half dozen bank licks.

Consider the numbers. The hard stats go up and down, but year in, year out, over the past thirty or forty years, roughly one in every four bank robberies in America has taken place in the L.A. area. Let me repeat that: Of all the bank robberies in the nation over the past three or four decades, at least 25 percent of them have gone down within commuting distance of the soaring white spire of L.A. City Hall. In some years the L.A. FBI Bank Squad would handle an astonishing 2,600 bank robberies — which works out to some 10 a day, an average of one every forty–five minutes between opening time and closing time.

There are various reasons for it. The easy mobility of the freeway, loose state banking regulations that allow a branch bank or a savings and loan or a credit union on nearly every corner — almost 3,500 of them in the L.A. area by the latest count — the laid–back attitude that discourage banks from installing bullet–resistant Plexiglas bandit barriers or access control doors.

And then of course there’s the sheer, almost unimaginable size of the place. From Ventura County in the northwest to Orange County in the southeast, from the mansions of Bel Air and Malibu to the sea of tract homes in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, the L.A. megalopolis sprawls a hundred miles across and sixty miles deep. The L.A. field office covers seven counties, and encompasses hundreds of cities and towns, of which the City of L.A. is the largest. In that geographical area there are over 1,000 miles of freeways, 100,000 named streets, and people by the millions — some 17 million of them at last count, although it’s hard to say for sure, because the city keeps spreading, metastasizing, so fast that it’s difficult to draw a line where the megalopolis ends and the rest of the world begins.

Obviously, in any human concentration of that magnitude, there’s going to be a lot of crime, of all descriptions. And yet, for all the ubiquity of crime in the L.A. megalopolis, with one exception it’s never been a leader among major American cities in any particular crime field. Its crimes may sometimes be more sensational, may be more likely to involve movie stars or ex–football legends, but in crimes–per–thousand residents, Los Angeles never surpassed the murder body count of, say, Detroit or Washington, D.C., never outperformed New York City in muggings and robberies, or outshone Miami in the pervasiveness of the drug trade.

No, only in bank robberies has Los Angeles consistently led the nation and the world. In 1999, when the Down–and–Outer arrived on the scene, there were more than six hundred bank robberies in the city and environs — way down from some previous years’ highs, but still about three every business day, most of them the simple “I have a gun, give me the money” type that didn’t rate so much as a line in the next day’s newspapers. A guy with just six of those under his belt wasn’t going to turn any heads in L.A. — especially since in years past we’d had bandits who had done thirty, forty, even fifty bank jobs before their luck ran out. One particularly prolific bank robber in the early 1980s, a guy I had called the “Yankee Bandit,“ wasn’t caught until his sixty–fourth bank lick — an all–time world record.

By those standards, the Down–and–Outer was a stone rookie.

Of course, a bank squad agent and local police still rolled out on every bank robbery, interviewing witnesses and the victim teller, dusting the counter for liftable prints, ideally flashing the surveillance photo, if we had a good one, on the street and at police roll calls. It was all SOP. But it wasn’t like the old days in Cleveland, or even the old days in L.A., when three, four, or five bank squad agents would respond to every bank job and work it until the guy was hooked up. In 1999, there were just too many bank robberies, and too few bodies on the bank squad. So unless there was overt violence involved, or an unusually big score, you did what you could and then moved on to the next bank lick.

That was the reality that governed our search for the Down–and–Outer: If you rob one bank and don’t hurt anybody, hey, it’s L.A., nobody’s going to get too excited. Rob three or four or seven and, yeah, we’ll be looking for you a little harder, but we aren’t going to toss and turn all night worrying about you. Rob twenty and, well, okay, you’re starting to piss us off. But we’ll still sleep soundly in the certain knowledge that sooner or later, one way or another, you’re going to get caught — if not on this bank robbery then the next, or the one after that.

Sure, anyone with the IQ of a sprinklerhead and a minimum supply of luck can rob a bank or two and stand a good chance of getting away with it. But the more you rob — and you’re always going to rob more, because like I said, bank robbery is an addiction — the more likely it is that something’s going to go wrong. Maybe a patrol unit just happens to be passing in front of the bank as the two–eleven call comes in and they snag you on your way out. Maybe a bystander gets a plate number from your getaway car, which you have unwisely registered in your own name. It could be that a teller will manage to slip an exploding dye pack into the toot and you’ll turn into a human smoke bomb on your way to the getaway car, or maybe some eager young cop just thinks you took hinky, so he dreams up some probable cause to jack you up and then starts to wonder how it is that you’ve got fresh tracks on your arms and no fixed address and $4,000 in crisp strapped bills stuffed down your pants. Or maybe you’ve made such an obnoxious pain in the ass of yourself that we in the FBI bank squad have finally gotten fed up, and you walk into one of our stakeouts.

It can be anything. But eventually your number’s going to come up.