It might be the sign that we really are in another depression: a “perfect storm” of frustration, desperate economic situations and the bold, almost revenge-based actions of those whose despair has metastasized into anger, or at least into the audacity of those with nothing left to lose. Bank robberies have increased in the Pioneer Valley over the past few years, and it’s hard not to wonder, after each television news report, if the upswing isn’t tied at least partially to a new wave of societal desperation.
Recent bank robberies in the area from 2008 to early 2011 have occurred in Chicopee, Springfield, Agawam, Holyoke, Feeding Hills, Longmeadow, Greenfield, Ludlow, East Longmeadow, Deerfield, South Hadley, Palmer, Westfield, Easthampton and Northampton. It’s unclear if the spike is also being experienced on a national level; some cities have reported big increases, but according to FBI statistics, bank robberies are actually down. National statistics, however, were only available for crimes committed through the third quarter of 2010. The state of Massachusetts had a spike in bank robberies in 2008 with 286, but in 2009 the figure was down to 180, and statistics for the first three quarters of 2010 show only 31 bank robberies in the state.
While that sounds encouraging statewide, it suggests a disturbingly disproportionate rise in the western part of the state, possibly because in this semi-rural area it’s a straight shot to high-speed escape routes such as Rtes. 91 and 90.
Sergeant John Delaney of the Springfield Police Department said that the Valley’s largest city reported 10 bank robberies in 2010, up from eight in 2009, though the noteworthy rise was in bank robberies committed with no actual weapons. While these numbers reflect a 25 percent increase, Delaney cautions that overall the numbers are small, so a change looks more dramatic when expressed in such a way. Such is certainly the case with Northampton, whose change from 2009 to 2010 is 100 percent, but that’s only because it went from zero to one. Still, when the incidence of bank robberies goes from zero to two, as was the change in Longmeadow from 2009 and 2010, the pattern is harder to ignore.
“There’s always a spike around the holidays,” Delaney notes, a reality that’s also in evidence nationally. He points out, however, that many of the recent bank robberies were likely committed by the same person or persons, referring to the so-called “Well-Dressed Bank Robber” and his possible cohort, who may be responsible for as many as eight of the region’s recent holdups in Springfield, Agawam, South Hadley, Chicopee, Ludlow, Feeding Hills and Northampton.
Two Connecticut men, 34-year-old Jesus Ashanti and 26-year-old Yannick Fanis, were arrested on December 31 after trying to rob the TD Bank on Chestnut Street in Springfield. During the arrest, officers found dye packs from the just-robbed Citizens’ Bank in Ludlow in the suspects’ vehicle, and witnesses have likened Ashanti’s appearance to that of the “Well-Dressed Robber.”
Whatever they leave unclear—whether, for example, there are more bank robbers or only a few people committing multiple robberies—available raw numbers seem to indicate a real regional increase. Banks robbed in 2010 in Holyoke numbered three, up from one per year in 2009 and 2008. Lieutenant Pronovost of the Chicopee Police Department reports that that city’s number of bank robberies stayed flat, with three in both 2009 and 2010, but the totals of Western Mass. bank robberies as a percentage of the state’s totals seems almost freakishly disproportionate to its percentage of Massachusetts’ population.
The Amherst, Pittsfield, Greenfield, Palmer and South Hadley police departments did not respond to inquiries, but online searches of news websites returned results indicating that a minimum of two dozen banks were robbed in Western Mass. within the last two years. Three banks in the Valley were robbed the week prior to February 10, in Holyoke, Greenfield and Easthampton.
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Is Poverty A Primary Motivator?
But is it truly economic distress that drives an increase in such high-risk felony crimes? Could a deepening of the current recession be breeding a new wave of bold criminals who have decided that morality is relative in an age of ubiquitous corruption, and that suffering penitently in quiet desperation just isn’t for them?
Northwest First Assistant District Attorney Steven E. Gagne says it’s too early in new DA David Sullivan’s administration’s watch to “spot any trends,” and that the DA’s office is “not aware of any statistical correlation between economic downturns and the occurrence of bank robberies.” Still, Gagne says that if an upswing is occurring, the DA’s office “encourages banks to always seek to modernize their surveillance equipment whenever possible.”
A metric that’s perhaps most indicative of desperate times is the rate of bank robberies committed by women. According to the FBI, bank robberies by women are steadily on the rise, accounting for 7.6 percent of all U.S. bank robberies in just the first three quarters of 2010, up from 6.2 percent in all of 2009 and 4.9 percent in 2002.
Analysts say women rob banks for different reasons than men; while men are usually out to support a drug or gambling habit or to otherwise live fast or extravagantly, women more typically rob banks to survive—to get money to put food on the table and diapers on their babies. At least two banks in the Valley have been hit by female robbers during the last year, including a Bank of Western Mass. in Deerfield on June 1, 2010 and a United Bank branch in East Longmeadow (that may have been robbed twice) during the month of August, 2010.
Criminals, Folk Heroes or Both?
The hope-starved 1930s spawned outlaws like John Dillinger, Lester Gillis (“Baby Face Nelson”) and Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, as well as the tragic couple Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who all lived slash-and-burn lifestyles and were dead by the age of 30 (31 in Dillinger’s case). Despite what’s arguably become a distorted, romanticized view of these people—who were often undeniably cold-blooded killers and perhaps dangerously anarchistic in their worldviews—decades later their legacies would transform them into quasi-populist legends, regarded as bold if reckless champions of the underclass. Banks, to the contrary, seem to have an uncanny knack for repeatedly engendering resentment in large populations of poor people.
Despite respectable chunks of their budgets that are spent on PR campaigns and advertising slogans to make them appear friendly, locally integral and involved in positive community development, banks rarely fit our typical image of victims. In a period wherein many businesses are struggling for survival—in many cases due to the dubious banking practices that became widespread as lawmakers deregulated the banking, financial services and insurance industries—what business owner would feel much pain on a bank’s behalf? As long as no one is injured and a bank is insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), many people may regard bank robberies as inherently “victimless crimes” (excluding taxpayers who ultimately pick up the FDIC’s tab) and find themselves secretly rooting for the robbers.
Such a rationale is not wholly unwarranted, given the recent behavior of large banks and other financial institutions. Credit card issuers (typically large banks) profit, legally, from struggling working-class people by charging obscene interest rates. Machiavellian derivatives schemes and credit default swap mazes made an elite few billions of dollars while millions of Americans suddenly found themselves drowning in ballooning debt or already evicted from homes whose mortgages had been foreclosed on. And in the wake of all this, the government bailed out these institutions—which were widely seen as legally sanctioned crooks—for even more billions of taxpayer dollars.
Some might argue defiantly that robbing a bank these days is just taking back our tax dollars by the only means left available to us, and that it often seems that there are two standards of justice for criminals—one for those who steal a hundred dollars with a gun and another for those who steal a hundred million with the stroke of a pen or the click of a mouse.
These public perceptions do not go without notice, or consequence. If the authorities are seen as not having sufficiently punished these entities for their own criminal (or at least morally reprehensible) actions, an already jaded society may respond apathetically when those entities find their own livelihoods or profits threatened. In the comments section of a local TV news website that reported a recent robbery, one poster asked “How’s it feel, Bank of America?”
Bank robbers themselves sometimes help to advance sympathy for their ilk as well, often committing their crimes in masks or costumes that bear some political or cultural significance, such as the bandit who robbed a Long Island bank in July, 2010 wearing a Darth Vader mask, or the robber who sported a George W. Bush mask in at least two Texas robberies this past November. The latter heist, in Austin, marked that city’s 30th bank robbery of the year, signaling something of an epidemic for that locale. “Colorful” Valley bank robbers in the past few years have included the “Baseball Cap Bandit,” known for his Red Sox (but also Yankees) caps, and most recently the aforementioned “Well-Dressed Robber.”
Hollywood may not be helping. As the cult of the bank robber rises and the bank becomes more and more vilified, movies about bank robbers become hot. 1991’s Point Break, which starred Keanu Reeves and the late Patrick Swayze, painted its bank robbers as free-spirited adventurers who jumped out of planes as skydivers and surfed huge California waves when they weren’t sticking up bank branches in rubber masks of U.S. presidents. The film, perhaps meaningfully, also coincided with a lingering recession caused primarily by the collapse of junk bonds. 1994 followed with Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, which modernized the Bonnie and Clyde legend by making it visually grittier and its characters more palpably sociopathic.
More recently, films like Public Enemies and The Town depict bank robbers as sexy outlaws whose daring, maverick behavior characterizes them as uncrushable spirits that the system can’t keep down, even if they come from humble working-class backgrounds. Some even portray their protagonists as modern-day Robin Hoods, and are careful to include scenes wherein they spread their ill-gotten wealth around or clandestinely funnel it to morally superior causes. Such shows of random generosity are even sometimes echoed in reality, maybe because the crooks are paying attention to Hollywood, too. Anthony M. Carleo, the man just arrested for stealing $1.5 million in poker chips from the famous Bellagio casino in Las Vegas, allegedly dropped a $25,000 chip into the pocket of a Salvation Army bell ringer.
Historically, just the fact that some famous robbers came from humble origins gave them credibility—even tacit approval—in the eyes of the equally destitute masses. Clyde Barrow was raised by a desperately poor family of tenant farmers who were resettled in an urban shantytown. Girlfriend Bonnie Parker was employed in Dallas as a waitress, turned to a life of crime after that business fell victim to the Great Depression, and in fact never would have met Barrow had the caf? remained in business.
Even so, as we analyze the socioeconomic phenomenon of outlaw worship, we may well see that the bulk of society isn’t so much cheering on the Robin Hoods per se, but rather rooting against the Sheriffs of Nottingham.
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With economic hope still little more than a pale apparition to many families in Massachusetts and across the nation, and with the income gap between the rich and the poor having grown vastly wider in the past decade, maybe it’s not such a wonder that people could again begin to idolize and even emulate bank robbers. Placed side by side with many of today’s banking and investment executives—people who essentially robbed thousands without ever having to even look them in the eye—men like Willie Sutton, who robbed over 100 banks with a reputedly unloaded Thompson submachine gun and never killed anyone, can come off looking relatively courageous and straightforward. Sutton was described as a consummate gentleman: witty, nonviolent and always well dressed, he allegedly never robbed a bank when a woman screamed or a baby cried. His famous response (which he probably never really uttered) to a reporter’s question, “Why do you rob banks?” seems even more perversely apropos in a time when wealth has pooled at the top and more and more legitimate sources of income seem to have dried up: “Because that’s where the money is.”
Nina Schwartzman contributed research for this story.
