HEIST HAVEN

The customers at the Royal Bank at Hastings and Nanaimo were asking
for the usual things that Monday afternoon in mid-November-GICs, RRSPs
and the occasional order of foreign currency. A 20-year-old man
wearing a black track suit and a baseball cap, however, had a
different request. He walked up to the teller and handed her a note
demanding cash.

The teller did what all tellers are trained to do: she complied with
the robber's request as quickly as possible. She put a stack of bills
into a bag and gave it to the criminal, who headed out the door.
Outside, the robber was joined by an accomplice, a 26-year-old man,
and the two fled the area on foot.

The men were no strangers to bank robbing. In fact, they had robbed
the Bank of Montreal on East Hastings only two blocks away less than
three hours before.

Bank robberies-like this week's sensational robbery in Edmonton, where
the culprit took a child hostage-may be the stuff of Hollywood movies,
but they're also a daily reality for financial institutions in the
Lower Mainland.

In 2001, 167 banks or credit unions in the Lower Mainland were robbed,
either by people passing notes to tellers demanding cash and sometimes
threatening violence, or by groups or individuals taking over branches
with guns. In the last few months, the Canadian Western Bank at 13th
and Granville, VanCity Credit Union at 26th and Main and Toronto
Dominion Bank at 49th and Fraser have all been robbed.

In fact, Vancouver outranks Toronto and Montreal in terms of the
number of bank robberies.

"Vancouver is the bank robbery capital of Canada," said Paul Griffin,
regional director of the Canadian Bankers Association. "On a per
capita basis, we are definitely much higher than any other city."

But Vancouver's bank robberies are not nearly as glamourous as the
capers immortalized by Hollywood.

Most of these robbers aren't master criminals-they're drug addicts
looking for money for their next hit.

They rarely walk away with sacks of cash-most are lucky if they get
$1,000. And unlike in the movies, they almost always get caught.

The two culprits who robbed the Royal Bank at Hastings and Nanaimo
Nov. 18 are now in custody.

Police got descriptions from the bank staff, and several hours later,
police officers at Abbott and Pender spotted two men who matched them.

The cops' suspicions were confirmed when they found the men had "bait
bills" on them-money with serial numbers that had been recorded by the
bank staff.

One of the men had dye on his clothing from an exploding dye pack the
first teller had slipped in with the money.

The suspects were arrested and are being charged with
robbery.

The Hastings and Nanaimo scenario is one all too familiar for Janet
McMillan (not her real name; all tellers interviewed for this story
were too traumatized to have their names used).

In her 26-year career as a bank teller and manager, she was involved
in more than 10 robberies.

"During the first robbery, I was absolutely terrified," McMillan
recalls. "It didn't take me long to get over that. I didn't think it
would ever happen again. It wasn't until the third or fourth time that
I started to really feel affected."

The robbery she remembers most vividly took place around five years
ago in New Westminster.

McMillan was working at the side counter when young man came in
wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap.

McMillan asked the man to remove the glasses and cap, but he ignored
her.

Instead, he waited until the customer at the counter left, then turned
to McMillan.

He leaned towards her face and told her he had a gun. If she didn't
give him all the cash in the branch in a hurry, he said, he would kill
her.

The robber got his money and fled without hurting anyone, but it was a
scene McMillan couldn't forget.

"I was just a wreck," she says. "I sure as hell didn't want to return
to work. Every damn time the front door would open, I would jump or
drop something, expecting the person to be a robber."

Daniel Stone is one of the first people to arrive after a robbery-he's
often right behind police.

Stone, a counsellor who specializes in helping bank employees who've
been involved in bank robberies, has a contract with the Central
Credit Union of B.C. Besides conducting group debriefings and offering
one-on-one counseling, he teaches relaxation techniques to staff with
anxieties about returning to work.

"Often, people who've been in bank robberies have trouble
concentrating in the days and weeks following the incident," says
Stone, sitting in his office in North Vancouver.

"People will often tell me that when they're driving to work, their
chest tightens and they have trouble breathing. Their mind is racing
with thoughts of the robbery, the robber's face, some particular
aspect of the robbery. They pull into the parking lot and they're
upset. They're really scared about going into the branch. And this is
at the start of the day, even before they get in the door."

Stone says victims sometimes have to face the criminals in court,
which brings back memories of the crime.

It's also not uncommon for someone to be recovering from one robbery
when they're hit by another-sometimes by the same individual.

"Staff will be just beginning to settle down and heal from one robbery
when there's another one that comes right away, maybe a week later.
Many of the robberies are committed by the same people at exactly the
same branch, and that tends to makes people mad, that they can come
back at will, disrupt lives and just walk out with money. There's a
tendency to want to retaliate, but the staff still have to restrain
themselves."

Detective Les Yeo of the Vancouver Police Major Crimes Unit, has spent
five and a half years tracking down bank robbers.

It's not uncommon for Yeo to watch video surveillance footage of a
robbery and know immediately who's responsible.

He says Vancouver has a high number of bank robberies for the same
reason we have so many break-and-entry incidents and car
robberies-because of the city's massive drug problem.

"Ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of bank robberies are committed to
support a drug habit," says Yeo, in his office on the fourth floor of
the Main and Hastings police station.

"Sometimes, we come across someone doing it for financial gain and not
for drug purposes, but it's rare."

Yeo says he can observe robbers' drug habits progressing by monitoring
their crimes.

"A guy will have a $200-a-day habit, which of course, like all habits,
progresses to be bigger and bigger and very quickly and you'll see him
rob a bank every five days, then all the sudden every four days.
Often, we've identified him, but we just can't find him. Then it's
every four days. Then it's every three days. Then, before you know it,
he's doing a bank every day, or even two in the same day. That's how
quickly the drug problem has progressed in his life."

Yeo says he can also see changes in robbers' physical appearance on
video surveillance footage.

"Often he kind of looks healthy in the first robbery and within a
month or two, he's lost 50 pounds and he's skinny and gaunt and you
know [that] as fast as he can get the money out of the bank, he's
getting drugs."

He says bank robbers are often high when they commit their crimes,
trying to get the money to pay their dealers for the drugs already in
their systems.

He's even dealt with cases where the robber has called his dealer to
order drugs while still inside the bank.

Yeo estimates 80 per cent of the crimes involve the passing of a note,
containing direct or implied threats of violence, and the rest are
takeovers by bandits, who often display weapons and wear masks and
gloves.

Because tellers are instructed to comply, bank robbers almost always
get their hands on some quick cash.

However, since new banking techniques limit the amount of money
available to each teller, the criminals usually only get away with
between $300 and $1,000.

And they leave a trail of witnesses, video surveillance footage,
fingerprints and forensic evidence, which means they almost always get
caught. Vancouver Police have an 85 per cent solve rate for bank robberies.

As a case in point, on Nov. 19, a police officer noticed a suspicious
man pacing in front of the Canadian Western Bank at 13th and Granville.

As the officer watched, the man put a stocking over his head, entered
the bank and pointed a black handgun, which later turned out to be a
realistic replica, at the teller.

Although the teller handed over about $1,800, the man continued to
point the gun at her and an adjacent teller, demanding American money
and travellers' cheques.

When the teller told him the cash drawer was on a timer and the money
couldn't be retrieved immediately, the man fled the building and was
promptly tackled by several officers, who wanted to avoid a shoot-out
on the busy street.

The 46-year-old man arrested already had 25 robbery convictions, and
had walked away from Ferndale minimum security facility a few days
before the incident.

"Sometimes banks are perceived as easy money, but actually it's the
exact opposite," says Yeo. "Odds are you're going to get caught."

He adds criminals who rob banks are unlikely to be the same ones
involved in auto theft or break-and-enters.

"Bank robbers tend to stay as bank robbers. There's this type of
prestige associated with it. And when they go to the federal
penitentiary, they'll brag to people that they robbed a bank."

Bank heists have long captured the minds of movie makers and the
general public.

The 1967 classic Bonnie and Clyde describes the romantic adventures of
the Barrow bank-robbing gang.

Two years later, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid told the tale of
two witty bank robbers on a crime spree.

More recently, moviegoers saw Richard Linklater's tale of the sibling
bank robbers, The Newton Boys, and Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton
starred as quirky bank kidnappers in Bandits.

Even Bollywood has followed the trend with the 2002 movie Aankhen,
where three blind men managed to rob a bank.

B.C.'s most sensational real-life bank robbery in recent years
occurred in 1999 and resulted in the arrest of Stephen Reid, husband
of well-known writer Susan Musgrave. Reid was known in his own right
for penning the novel Jackrabbit Parole, based on his experiences
robbing more than 100 banks as part of the Stopwatch Gang.

After a decade of fame as a writer, Reid once again succumbed to his
heroin addiction and committed a violent bank robbery in Victoria. At
the time, many people wrote letters to the newspapers complaining
about the barrage of press coverage devoted to Reid.

"Pop culture and Hollywood have glorified bank robberies," says Paul
Griffin from the Canadian Bankers Association. "I suspect it's
something to do with the idea that banks have a lot of money and
nobody really gets hurt-the people just get a little bit of a scare."

He feels many of these criminals receive too-lenient sentences, and
are soon out robbing banks again.

Sentences range from time in the community to an automatic four years
in jail if it can be proved the perpetrator had a firearm.

"There isn't a huge group of people committing these crimes," says
Griffin. "It's a small group of characters who are doing this over and
over again. They're prosecuted in court and basically given a slap on
the wrist and let go. Courts have tended to look at bank robberies as
a crime against a bank. But somehow, they've missed the real victims
in this. It's not the money in the bank. It's the tellers, the staff."

Janet McMillan is still feeling the impact of the bank robberies she
was involved in.

She no longer works in a bank, but still suffers from anxiety and
stress related to the robberies.

She spent two years in counseling dealing with the aftermath, and
blames the bank she worked for for not being supportive.

"The bank was two-faced about it," she says. "They had a policy in
place saying if you had been robbed, they would provide counseling and
you could be off work without anybody pointing any fingers at you. But
the real attitude was, if you're a trooper, you can take it."

McMillan says she wouldn't work for a bank again-even if she was
starving-and can't imagine the problem of bank robberies disappearing
any time soon.

The statistics back her up: while the number of bank robberies in
Montreal and Toronto has declined sharply over the past six years, the
rate in Vancouver remains high.

Montreal used to be considered the bank robbery capital of North
America, but now the city police force is planning to eliminate its
specialized holdup squad because the number of bank heists has dropped
so drastically.

For many criminals, new banking techniques that have reduced the
amount of cash available to tellers mean bank robbery isn't worth the
gamble.

But even though a bank robbery may only net the criminal a few hundred
bucks and almost always leads to jail time, these crimes continue to
attract addicts desperate for their next hit, and bank tellers like
McMillan have to live with the consequences.