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62 year old man robbed 3 banks, life is so hard that robbing one bank wont cover his bills.
(hexbear.net)
Deputies said Sonny Tho Leu robbed the first bank in Temecula around 12 p.m. where he was reportedly wearing a black baseball cap, dark clothing and he was carrying an orange utility bag, according to the Murrieta Police Department.
The second robbery happened around 12:20 p.m. at a bank in the 40000 block of California Oaks Road. A bank employee reported the crime and gave a similar description of the suspect.
The third robbery was reported just before 1 p.m. at a bank in the 25000 block of Hancock Avenue, police said.
During all three robberies, Leu passed a note demanding money from the bank clerk and took off with an undisclosed amount of money.
As soon as you've passed the note you've, at the very least, "attempted" a robbery. Punishment is much the same. It doesn't matter what you do with the cash, it's the forceful taking of it with an implied threat if it is not handed over that's the crime.
Banks are actually insured against robbery and have all kinds of policies to minimize how much they can possibly lose anyway.
For one, there are pretty low cash limits in teller drawers. Anything above$2000, maybe, gets deposited into the safe or at least a second locked behind the counter drawer fairly quickly. If anyone comes and demands everything in your drawer you are specifically instructed to make no scene, but instead to calmly reach into your till and grab the entire cash sorting drawer and remove it/hand it over, while of course hitting the hidden panic button. If the robber instructs you to empty your bottom drawer too you do, but only if asked. Even then, they're probably not getting more than $5000, almost certainly not more than $8000. Again, cash should have been deposited into the safe earlier if someone came by with a large deposit.
Second, banks don't even keep that much cash on hand in the safe. There's generally only $25000-50000 in the safe at any given time. Secure delivery trucks make weekly or biweekly visits to pick up excess, and if customers want to withdraw a considerable quantity of cash they are expected to make the notice in writing ahead of time so banks can order more and pad the float. So even if a robber wanted to clear out all the serviceable cash in a (small retail) bank, they're going to get maybe $10,000 from the teller windows, another maybe $30,000 from the safe, and that's kind of on the high side. You might get lucky and there be more than usual in one place or another, but you might get unlucky too, and someone made an unexpectedly large withdrawal that the manager decided to honor because their next shipment was tomorrow or whatever.
The bank as an institution doesn't give a shit, not really, of the money being recovered. Again, they're insured to deal with these kinds of things. But the law more generally can't permit people to walk off with limitless cash so the police/government are the ones motivated to punish that behavior most. There is a sense in which banks don't want a reputation for being easy to rob or their insurance rates will go up and, obviously, business operations disrupted with repeated robberies. But this is why they have so many cash control and minimization policies. They're also motivated to see suspects caught to at least dissuade other people from trying it, so surveillance technology and training is a big part of the employees too. They'll cooperate fully with law enforcement purely from a business perspective, but again, the discrete sum taken during any single robbery is a wash in the grand scheme of things.
Fair point, forgot how little cash they keep.
I'm reminded of the Puerto Rican Macheteros' Wells Fargo heist that actually inspired a lot of modern retail bank security policies. They had foreknowledge of when the truck would come by to make deliveries and took the cash from the truck, then sent it back to the island by mail. The cash was used to fund revolutionary activities and was also distributed in poor neighborhoods. It was a pretty sizable amount of cash.
That being said it was by all means a fluke and definitely couldn't be recreated nowadays.