Cocaine Cowboys
Moments earlier, a light-colored Pontiac Bonneville pulled up to the back of the bank. Two Caucasian men got out and walked along the side of the building to the front. With their faces covered, they entered the bank through the front door, surveillance cameras capturing their every move.
One of the men is carrying a sawed-off shotgun, the other a revolver.
The men order the five or so bank employees to freeze. The man with the handgun leaps over the counter. Waving his gun around, he orders the frightened tellers to empty their drawers into his bag; forgoing the vault, the bandits exit as quickly as they came.
The armed robbers flee northbound on Route 202 into neighboring Westfield, Massachusetts, with an undisclosed amount of money - later determined to be $31,732. When they reach the intersection of Southwick and Tannery roads, they abandon the vehicle in a nearby parking lot, where police find it some 90 minutes later.
Unsure if they have the right vehicle, police have it towed to Southwick, where they secure it overnight until fingerprinting experts can process it to see if it was connected to the bank heist, as the Bonneville's owner reported it stolen from Springfield, Massachusetts, shortly after noon.
The next day, Officer Robert A. Laughlin of the Southwick Police Department provided the community with an update on the status of the investigation, which was taking place at the local, state, and federal levels - the F.B.I. got involved because the financial institution was a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), an organization created by the United States Congress to insure bank depositors.
Officer Laughlin informed the community through local news outlets that authorities lifted several partial fingerprints from the getaway car. Because the hit on the bank seemed so professional, Officer Laughlin said his department sent broadcasts to other law enforcement agencies requesting any information on similar cases.
Detectives had still shots of the suspects taken from video from the bank's surveillance cameras, but before releasing them to the general public, they sent them to the F.B.I. crime lab in Washington, D.C., to see if they could be enhanced.
The Crime Prevention Unit of the Massachusetts State Police released a description of the robbers. They said the man with the handgun had dark hair, and they believed him to be in his mid-20s, about 5'8" and 5'10" tall, and weighing between 175 and 190 pounds. At the time of the heist, he wore a hoodie and a brown leather jacket. They described the other man as being in his early 30s, six feet tall, with dark hair, and weighing 180 to 200 pounds. During the heist, he wore sunglasses and a light tan trench coat.
The case appeared to grow cold, that is, until shortly after 4 p.m. on March 24, 1988, when a car pulled up to the Community Savings Bank located at 1325 Springfield Street in the Feeding Hills section of Agawam, Massachusetts.
Roughly 40 minutes before, two men approached an unidentified elderly man from Granby, Connecticut, who was waiting for his wife in his car in the parking lot of the Big Y Supermarket in Southwick. One of the men entered from the passenger side; a struggle ensued.
The men forcibly removed him and stole his car, a late-model Plymouth Horizon. They drove the stolen car to Grist Mill Plaza, where they scoped out the Southwick branch of Woronoco Savings Bank. For reasons unknown, they quickly ditched their plan to rob it, opting to knock over a bank in Feeding Hills instead, but they abandoned that plan too, after seeing two children standing by the bank's front door. They then decided to head across the street to the Community Savings Bank.
The men attempted to conceal their identities by wearing bandanas and hoodies. The bank's security cameras picked up the masked men as they entered the branch and pulled out their weapons: a shotgun or rifle and a handgun.
One of the men vaults himself over the counter and begins stuffing cash from the visually shaken tellers' drawers into his bag while the other man guards the customer entrance. In less than 15 minutes, the bandits are gone with what bank auditors later determine to be $20,430. (Community Savings Bank delayed releasing the amount taken at the advice of their insurance company.)
Police located the stolen Plymouth within five minutes of the daring heist; they found it about 200 feet from the bank at the Carriage House Apartments.
Although they saw no immediate connection, authorities noticed striking similarities between the Southwick bank heist and this one. And the question became, not if, but when will the robbers strike again?
That day came on April 22, 1988, when two men wearing ski masks entered the Bassdale Plaza branch of the Connecticut Bank & Trust Co. in East Windsor, Connecticut, at about 11:10 a.m.
The armed men walked through the front door, ordering the five customers and four tellers to freeze. The man with the shotgun guarded the entrance while the other jumped over the counter and emptied each teller's drawer, including the drive-thru. Once again, they skipped the vault.
The masked bandits escaped in a yellow car with an undisclosed amount of cash, believed to be somewhere around $9,000. Not far from the bank, they turned down an isolated road and abandoned the vehicle, where the East Windsor Police Department found it stripped of tags and other identifying markers. Detectives figured the crooks had a separate getaway car waiting for them, as in the Southwick and Feeding Hills robberies.
F.B.I. agents and Massachusetts State Police raided an apartment in Springfield at around 4:00 p.m. on either May 3 or 4, 1988. They arrested twenty-eight-year-old John Roberson and twenty-two-year-old Richard Bolduc. (Bolduc raised flags when, within mere hours of the holdup, he paid his landlord $800 in cash for two months of back rent.)
More arrests followed, including that of fifty-one-year-old Henri Morin, charged with being a fugitive from justice from Connecticut. Police fingered the tall, tanned man with graying hair and a mustache as the ringleader. He was held on a $100,000 bond as he awaited extradition to the Nutmeg State on charges of first-degree robbery and second-degree larceny for the Connecticut Bank & Trust Co. heist. (Connecticut prosecutors believe Bolduc and Roberson participated in the Feeding Hills and Southwick holdups but not the East Windsor one.)
At the time of Morin's arrest, police found a loaded sawed-off shotgun. However, they believe he carried the revolver, having found a Ruger .41-caliber Magnum inside a car owned by his ex-girlfriend, twenty-six-year-old Dawn Gaunt. Officers also found cocaine on her person, resulting in her arrest and drug charges for the former couple. Investigators believed that the firearms they confiscated were the ones used in the robberies. (The arrests came as Morin and Gaunt were transferring items from one vehicle to another.)
Massachusetts State Police arrested twenty-five-year-old George L. Rios of Springfield. They turned him over to the Connecticut State Police's Central District Major Crime Squad in July, who charged him with first-degree robbery and first-degree larceny and held him on a $100,000 bond.
The reason the men gave for robbing the banks was that they needed money to fund their crack cocaine habit. None of the cash was recovered.
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Edited Out/Author's Additional Research Notes
They also charged Roberson for receiving a stolen vehicle. Authorities, having lifted his fingerprint from a car tied to robberies, believed that he was the getaway driver.
Witnesses positively identified Roberson and Bolduc as the holdup men in the Feeding Hills and Southwick heists; Roberson carried the sawed-off shotgun. The men appeared in Springfield District Court for arraignment on May 5. Facing possible life sentences on charges of armed robbery while masked and disguised, a judge set Roberson and Bolduc's bail at $100,000 and $300,000, respectively.
Detectives believed the three robberies were related, but no one was charged with the Southwick one.
Regarding the Agawam heist, Morin and Bolduc pleaded not guilty at their June 9 arraignment in Hampden County Superior Court. A judge set Morin's bail at $150,000 and Bolduc's at $100,000.
Jurors toured the Bank of New England - West branch in Southwick on June 27, 1989. Bolduc and Gaunt testified against Morin, who was later acquitted.
In Hampden County Superior Court, the judge put Morin's bond at $500,000 for the Southwick and Agawam robberies. His lawyer asked the judge to lower the bond, claiming his client could not afford it because he was an artist.
Then there was Gerald Bouchard (25) of West Springfield and William Bredenbeck (no age or address).
Authorities charged Bouchard and Bredenbeck (sometimes spelt Brendenback) with being accessories. Bouchard admitted he burned the money wrappers and either burned or hid the clothes Bolduc was wearing. Implicated in the East Windsor holdup, Bouchard faced a maximum sentence of 21 years on three counts of being an accessory after the fact to armed robbery.
Bolduc ended up pleading guilty to two counts each of armed robbery while masked and disguised and assault by means of a dangerous weapon. Police also charged him with carrying a firearm without authority.
He pleaded guilty to a single count of armed robbery while masked and disguised, a single count of assault by means of a dangerous weapon, and a single count of carrying a firearm without authority.
After a jury in Hamden County Superior Court found Morin guilty on January 28, 1989, of being the mastermind and ringleader behind the robberies, a judge sentenced him to 25 to 30 years for the Agawam holdup. He was also sentenced to five-to-seven years for assault by means of a dangerous weapon.
The robbers were efficient and polite, as one witness told the jury of nine women and three men; they were in and out in less than 15 minutes, and one of the robbers said, "Thank you. Have a nice day," upon exiting the bank.
Henri Donat Morin: May 13, 1936 - April 18, 2012. He did not have a permanent address at the time of his arrest. (Morin and some others robbed a Mechanics Savings Bank branch in Hartford, Conn., on September 3, 1964. Morin broke out of a Massachusetts prison camp in October 1964 - but was later recaptured in Miami, Fla.)
A number of bank robberies plagued authorities throughout New England in the late 1980s. In the majority of the cases, the armed robbers avoided the vault.
Several small regional banks overextended themselves, resulting in their failure when customers couldn't repay the loans. Many banks closed; larger financial institutions absorbed others.
It's hard to determine why they changed their mind about robbing the Woronoco Savings Bank in Southwick.
Roberson admitted to driving the getaway car in the Agawam robbery.
George Rios may or may not have been killed in a car accident in 2015.
Richard Bolduc was arrested again in 1994. This time for robbing the Bristol, Connecticut branch of Fleet Bank. His employer immediately fired him. An anonymous caller had told police that he recognized the man in a photo they released from bank's security cameras as Bolduc. The caller was mistaken.
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