Majority of bank robbers end up in handcuffs

John Michael Keane had a lot of bills he couldn't pay - $1,100 a month to his estranged wife, plus debts for phone-sex lines and strip clubs. So, he decided to rob the same bank three times in seven months.

After all, a famous bank robber once supposedly said, that's where the money is. But it's also where the high-definition cameras are - and the dye packs, and lots of eyewitnesses.

The former Chesapeake sheriff's deputy and father of two got only roughly $10,000 for his efforts, and then he got 20 years in prison after police arrested him.

Keane's mini-crime wave is not that unusual. Statistics show that robbing a bank isn't very dangerous, but getting away with it is unlikely.

Only killings are solved more often than this high-profile crime glamorized in movies and news accounts.

Robbers stole $45.8 million in cash in some 6,000 bank robberies in 2009, the FBI reports.

The average take - one teller, one robber - is about $2,000, said William Rehder, a retired FBI agent who investigated bank robberies for 31 years.

Take-overs yield more than 12 times that, he said. These gangs of bandits will often steal from vaults and multiple tellers.

Statistics show that about 60 percent of bank robbers will be caught; authorities will nab fewer than 25 percent of their run-of-the-mill criminal counterparts.

Odds are stacked against bank robbers from the start, said James Hawdon, a sociology professor at Virginia Tech. Surveillance video can produce images as clear as a family snapshot.

There are multiple witnesses. Money is marked. Dye packs give away perpetrators.

"We certainly devote a lot of resources to solve them," Hawdon said. "Much more than if you or I were walking down the street" and were robbed.

The latter rarely makes the news. Bank robberies can garner national attention.

That was the case last month with the Granddad Bandit.

Authorities say Michael Francis Mara - a balding and bespectac led fellow wanted on probation violation in Chesapeake - held up at least 25 banks in 13 states, including Virginia, over the past two years.

Surveillance images went up on billboards across the country; Mara was arrested a week later when someone recognized him and called law enforcement.

Bank robbers rarely resort to violence. They displayed weapons only about a quarter of the time, the FBI's 2009 statistics show. They slipped demand notes to tellers twice as often.

Forty-three percent implied they were carrying weapons. Guns were fired in only 75 incidents.

Twenty-one people died. All were the perpetrators.

The rarity of violence adds to the idea that bank robbers are criminals of a different variety, Hawdon said. They steal from institutions, not individuals.

"It is certainly perceived as being more victimless than robbing some poor guy who comes walking out of work at 11 o'clock and is just trying to get home to see his family," he said.

John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde became big-screen heroes.

Their bank robberies and shoot-outs fascinated their contemporaries. Banks had shut down. The stock market had crashed.

"Banks had been demonized," said Rehder, the retired FBI agent. "Those who robbed them, there was a certain amount of romance to that."

Bank robbers maintain their folk-hero status among fellow prisoners, he said. "We've just gone through this tremendous recession. Banks have taken their share of the blame for this, particularly the larger banks. It's like looking at them from a Depression-era point of view."

Now, there's a Facebook fan page devoted to the Geezer Bandit, who has robbed banks in California. His photo is a surveillance image of a fragile-looking man with sagg ing jowls and a turkey neck.

"Step it up and hit the vault," one fan wrote.

Another posting: "The banks r insured & living it up w/the bail out $$--have no empathy--Go Geeze!"

Hawdon said sociologists call this deviance admiration.

Rehder calls it nonsense. "You have to rob the individual in the bank. There's a personal aspect to this. The teller and the customers are victimized just as if they were robbed on the street. There are injuries and there are fatalities every year."

In May, a man in a black mask walked into the Metropolitan Church Federal Credit Union in Suffolk with a gun. When he demanded money, the teller ran. The man fired a shot and left. No one was injured.

In 2004, two security guards were shot in separate robberies at two Norfolk banks. One died.

The bank tellers present during at least one of Keane's three robberies at the same Chesapeake BB&T branch wrote letters to the court detailing their lingering fear. The former sheriff's deputy wore a gun on his hip in at least two of the hold-ups and carried a police radio.

"I now feel unsafe and jumpy when clients enter our branch," wrote Latasha Manley, a teller supervisor.

The robberies have left Lina Clark leery of law enforcement. Keane had sworn to protect people, she wrote, but he hurt them instead.

Kristin Davis, (757) 222-5208, kristin.davis@pilotonline.com