winterbadger | bank robbery, an old story

So, I mentioned in a community the story of the time I was involved in a bank robbery, and I was told I couldn't just make a throwaway comment like that and not explain. So here's the story (as I recall it;

redactrice may remember things I don't.

I used to manage a bookstore in Boston (see pages on it here, here, and here). It was in a great old downtown Boston corner building that had beena publishing company, a nationally recognized bookstore, and a branch office for the Boston Globe newspaper. There was a card and gift store next to us (source of the famous Riley the Bunny), and a bank, and then a couple of shops and a small plaza where the old city hall stood, a wonderful Second Empire building that had been turned into a great restaurant. The buildings in the block (except for the old city hall) were all run into each other, and the walls above street level were not necessarily where the street-level buildings separated. Our stock room was over the card shop, and there was a back door upstairs that let out onto an "alley" between the rooves of the different buildings of the block. Between our stock room, a couple of upstairs offices that belonged to the Boston Globe, our bookkeeper's and president's offices, and the bank there was a common hallway, with a door sealing off the bank's part of the row, with alarms and so on.

I started out as receiver, then became assistant manager, then store manager. While I was asst. mgr., I had the unenviable pleasure of working on Sundays (not a full eight-hour-plus of Saturday, but still five hours plus opening and closing). Chris came in once or twice and worked with me (that was when we established that we should never be on the same job :-), and there were usually one or two other people in; it was quiet, but worth having the store open.

One Monday I came in to work, and the place was swarming with police. The bank had been robbed! I got interviewed by the police about the "back door" to the roof; did I check it when I closed up the store regularly, had I heard any odd sounds on Sunday, had I worked Friday (yes) and Saturday (no) too? Then newspaper reporters showed up and wanted to hear everything all over again.

It turned out that the robbers had been either cooler headed or simply more brash than anyone would have guessed. They had decided that the loose cash in the vault was not going to be enough for them; they wanted the safe deposit boxes too. So sometime Saturday night they had broken in through our "back door", gone downstairs into the basement, disabled the alarms for the entire block (which all ran to a junction box in our basement and then out to the alarm company on one wire), then gone back upstairs, through the door into the upper level of the bank, and proceeded to spend the weekend diggin through the ceiling into the bank vault, emptying out all its contents and drilling out all the safe deposit boxes, and looting all the bank's offices as well (stole a couople of handguns the bank president had in his office and some booze he had in his desk). The police said that from what had been left behind, the guys had been in there all day Sunday, eating, drinking, and looting. ALL THE TIME WE WERE WORKING RIGHT NEXT DOOR! We had probably tidied up any clues of their entry when we opened up the shop for business on Sunday.

As soon as the police remarked on the robbers having disabled the alarm, two of us remembered a "fire inspector" who had come through checking out the building who had seemed particularly interested in the basement. He had showed us some sort of license, but it was really the old "if ou have a clipboard and act like you know what you're doing, you can go almost anywhere" thing. And, sure enough, when they checked with the Fire Marshal's office, they hadn't had an inspector in our neighborhood of some time. We gave them a description, but in Boston "Medium height white male, 40s, stocky build, red hair, clean shaven, in a blue workman's overall" describes, oh, only a few tens of thousands of inhabitants.

So, we had our brush with fame. I got my picture in the paper (the Herald, *not* the Globe). And that's the story of how I was involved in a bank robbey.