Navy Fed Manager Staged $300,000 Heist

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. – A former assistant manager at Navy FCU confessed to plotting a staged robbery at the credit union’s local branch last year when $300,000 in cash was taken from the vault.

Donnie Overton told police after they found him handcuffed inside the vault with the cash missing on Feb. 7, 2009 that he was forced by two men who had threatened his wife with violence to open the vault in an after-hours robbery.

Later, Overton told police that after closing the credit union with his boss, he went to a nearby ATM where he was held at gunpoint by a masked man and forced to reopen the branch and turn off the alarms, according to court records. While helping the purported robber place money in a bag, Overton slipped in a GPS tracker but later admitted to telling the purported robber about the device before he left the branch.

Overton's conflicting stories led law enforcement to suspect his involvement, according to the records. Investigators later learned that Overton had been studying the credit union's surveillance tapes for several weeks. He called an unknown person two days before the robbery and said $290,000 was in the vault and he had the combination.

He enlisted two accomplices, one of them an old Army buddy who served with him at Fort Bragg, to pose for the surveillance cameras as the robber, and the other as getaway car driver. The three split the proceeds of the heist, with the purported robber receiving $60,000, the getaway car driver $15,000 and Overton the rest.

Overton began cooperating with investigators in October. The day after his guilty plea, he identified one of his accomplices for investigators and agreed to record a conversation about the robbery and a new plan to rob a Navy Fed branch in Jacksonville, near the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base.

Sentencing is scheduled for January.

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