Desperate times, measures

As our economy is going bust, bank robberies are booming.

In just the first 44 days of 2008, there were 35 bank robberies in the Chicago area. “Extrapolate that to a year,” says Ross Rice of the FBI’s Chicago bureau, “and it could be another record high.” The current Chicagoland record—284 banks robbed—was set in 2006.

Not coincidentally, 2006 was also the year the country foundered into the subprime mortgage crisis—a fiasco that contributed to our current economic mess. “Bank robberies across the nation have fluctuated over the past 20 years and seem to go up when the economy heads south,” the American Bankers Association said in a December 2006 statement. “For instance, bank robberies peaked in 1992, declined, and spiked again during the recent economic downturn.”

“Chicago is ripe for [spikes in crime] like this,” says Traci Schlesinger, a DePaul University sociologist who studies the criminal justice system. “When the subprime crisis interacts with the structures that are already so embedded in Chicago—the residential segregation, particularly of race, and gaps in income—it hurts poor people not only first but most.”

Desperate times, says Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney Matt Fakhoury, sometimes inspire desperate measures. “When one is faced with losing his home or car,” Fakhoury says, “he may feel desperate and [could] resort to actions, sometimes criminal, that he probably would not have resorted to if his finances were secure.” Making matters worse is the proliferation of smaller bank branches, such as less-guarded grocery-store locations that Fakhoury says make a robbery look easier to pull off.

The interplay between a failing economy and bank robberies was never more clear than during the Great Depression, which engendered such iconic public enemies as Bonnie and Clyde, “Pretty Boy” Floyd and John “Jackrabbit” Dillinger.

Though not as prolific as the likes of those ’30s thieves, Chicago’s bandits, quirky nicknames and all, give the impression of depression-era scoundrels. The “Second-Hand Bandit” (tagged because of his “disguise” of vintage threads) and a robber dubbed the “Paint-by-Numbers Bandit” due to his paint-splattered coat are among the dozen serial bank robbers wanted by the FBI. Rice says the throwback nomenclature is a tool to generate media coverage.

“That’s how we caught the Kangol Bandit,” Rice says of the recently nabbed man suspected of robbing ten banks in the Chicago area and Northwest Indiana while sporting Samuel L. Jackson’s favorite brand of hat. “Someone recognized him from the news.”