LFP Archives: The mystery of the meticulous $450K bank heist

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This feature by reporter Kelly Pedro was first published on the front page of the Aug. 21, 2004 print editions of The London Free Press

It was supposed to be a normal Monday morning for the eight Bank of Montreal employees.

But Jan. 30, 1996, would be anything but normal – a team of professional bank robbers would change that.

Anyone walking by the bank on Wellington Road, just north of its intersection with Base Line Road, would have thought everything was fine. But, inside, a carefully crafted plan was unfolding, a plan that ran so smoothly bank employees didn’t even know – at first – they were being robbed.

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Within mere minutes, the robbers, disguised in theatrical makeup, carrying automatic weapons and using tiny headsets to communicate, would round up and handcuff the bank’s employees.

They would shut down the bank’s alarm system with silicone spray and empty the vault of its contents – $450,000 – the largest bank haul in the city’s history.

Police would say it was the most sophisticated robbery they’d seen. These guys, they would say, knew their stuff.

The bank would be hit again, about two months later on Easter weekend. The haul: $150,000 from the ATM. The culprits: possibly the same gang.

None of the money has been retrieved.

In both robberies, the thieves would use the most basic of tools to get into the bank. A door key.

* * *

For the bank’s employees, the work day was just beginning.

As some made their way to their work stations, others waited for a representative from Nesbitt Burns to arrive for a 9 a.m. meeting.

Among the employees was loan officer Cherie Laughlin, who was at her office desk. Two other female employees were opening the vault and another was stocking the ATM.

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Laughlin heard a commotion.

“Just when they had the vault open to get the money out for the day, that’s when these two guys came up from the basement,” Laughlin says, eight years later.

One, she recalls, was wearing a trench coat, a hat and wig. Both robbers were armed with guns.

“I looked up and the manager was standing at the door of his office, saying, ‘Don’t worry.’”

Laughlin at first thought he was consoling a crying colleague, who was having a difficult time. But when she got up to look outside her office, she saw a dishevelled man.

At first she thought he had slept in the bank’s front vestibule. She knew she was wrong when the man ordered a group of employees, including Laughlin, downstairs while another armed man stayed with the three women at the vault upstairs.

“When we were downstairs, we were all in the stationary room and he started handcuffing us to the . . . cabinets because they were all steel frame,” she says.

The man spoke to someone through a tiny headpiece.

He seemed apologetic when speaking to the employees.

“He just kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’re not going to hurt you,’” she says.

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The bank manager repeatedly told everyone to keep calm.

Upstairs, one of the robbers emptied the vault of its newly arrived shipment of cash from Brinks.

While the robbery likely seemed to take hours for the terrified employees, Det. Tom Allen, the lead investigator at the time, says it all happened in less than four minutes.

Quick. Quiet. In and out.

So low-key were the robbers that one employee didn’t realize at first the bank was being held up.

* * *

The woman was at the ATM when she was grabbed in a stranglehold from behind.

“She thought it was a joke,” Laughlin says. “But when they started dragging her off and she could see the gun, she knew it wasn’t any joke.”

When it was over, $450,000 had disappeared and police were probing what was one of the most sophisticated robberies they had ever seen.

“It wasn’t one of those typical ones where people were screaming. It was very low-key,” Allen says.

ROBBERS’ FEAT LEAVES COPS STUNNED

It was the representative from Nesbitt Burns, arriving at the bank for the 9 a.m. meeting, who noticed something was wrong and tipped off police.

Laughlin recalls the robbers suddenly called out they had to leave quickly because police were on the way.

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As they fled, one of the robbers threw the handcuff keys outside the room where Laughlin and others were held.

The thieves gone, an employee pushed an emergency button that automatically summons the bank’s security company.

But the security office never got that alarm – police discovered the bank’s security system had been disarmed with silicone spray.

Police still shake their heads at the robbers’ feat.

“I had worked robbery for three years and I hadn’t investigated a bank robbery to this sophistication,” Allen says.

THEY WAITED IN THE FURNACE ROOM

How did they pull it off?

It turns out the robbers had used a key, of all things, to slip into the bank undetected. They waited in the bank’s downstairs furnace room, where they could hear when the vault was being opened.

A few weeks before the robbery, some employees heard noises in a back downstairs hall of the bank.

They didn’t think anything of it until after the robbery.

“When we went into the furnace room (after the robbery) . . . there were chairs in there and stuff and they could hear everything that was going on in the vault,” Laughlin says.

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NEW SECURITY SYSTEM CAME UP SHORT

While police investigated – viewing security cameras, interviewing past and present employees, cleaners, contractors and the armoured car company – the bank poured money into overhauling its security system and changing its locks for the first time in 25 years.

But, as if to mock police and the bank, thieves struck again less than two months later, breaking in on Easter weekend and emptying an ATM of $150,000.

An employee discovered the break-in when she went to load the ATM that morning and noticed it was empty.

The robbers, Laughlin surmises, must have obtained the new keys to the bank.

They also must have known the keypad combination to open the ATM.

And, again, an alarm never sounded.

It was clear to police those responsible for the latest heist knew what they were doing.

“You have to know what you’re doing with an ATM machine,” Allen says. “These individuals did.”

* * *

At the time of the second robbery, the Canadian Bankers Association had already anted-up a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the three men responsible for the first robbery.

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Three weeks after the first robbery, London police thought they might have a break in the case.

Montreal police reported a Bank of Montreal in suburban Pointe Claire, Que., had been robbed.

The heist bore striking similarities to the London case.

In Pointe Claire, masked men also waited inside the bank for employees to arrive just before 9 a.m.

Employees reported the robbers appeared out of nowhere and locked up 10 terrified staffers. One woman had a gun waved in her face.

Montreal police said the three men cut a hole through a brick wall to gain access from a vacant store in a strip mall where the bank was located.

PROMISING LEAD BECOMES A DEAD END

The descriptions of two of the robbers also fit.

One is about six-foot-two and 250 pounds, another five-foot-eight with a slim build.

A third suspect in the Montreal robbery is five-foot-four. London police don’t have a description of their third suspect.

City police, believing the two cases were linked, began working with Montreal police.

But, eventually, all leads dried up – until about a year later, when police got one small new one.

A financial document stolen in the Montreal robbery was found in Winnipeg.

Because Allen believed the two robberies were linked, he was also interested in the information.

But it was a dead end.

“As quickly as it surfaced, it died off,” he says.

Stumped and without fresh leads, London police have marked the case unsolved.

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