About midsemester, when students got antsy, I enjoyed taking a half-hour out of my banking courses to teach them how to steal from a bank.
I would, of course, cover modern techniques such as breaking the electronic code and shifting the funds to some exotic locale where it would be impossible to get the legal system to force its return.
They liked the lowdown on how to steal from an inactive deposit account and hide the scam with bogus monthly statements. If the account holder wakes up and wants to withdraw more than is left, the banker siphons the shortfall from some other sleeper account. The Holy Grail here is a rich account so neglected that it’s safe to drain and close it, because one would notice the suspension of monthly statements.
This scam, I would explain, is one reason that banks ask people who close accounts why they did. Often the bank is really asking, “Did you close your account, or did one of our officers close it and take the cash?”
It is also one reason that bank officers must take two consecutive weeks of vacation a year — so they are not around to cover up.
By the way, such thefts, though tougher to pull off than they used to be, are still possible.
In the midsemester doldrums I would also teach my students about kiting checks. They especially liked this.
My theoretical thief would be a student with $100 and enough small change to pay for several trips on the PATH train under the Hudson River. The plan: to kite checks between a Newark bank and a New York bank about 20 minutes away.
He would open an account with the $100 at one bank, cross the river, and write a $1,000 check on that account to open one at the other bank. Then he’d repeat the process over and over, crossing and recrossing the river, each time depositing bigger bad checks.
After moving deposits back and forth a couple of times to get a track record as an in-and-out depositor, he would start asking for a couple of hundred back, in cash, on each trip. Because check clearance took overnight, this would work beautifully — if the banks would let you draw on uncollected funds.
I don’t know if any students tried this, but I did tell them about a former branch manager who took my class after having been suckered by a kiting scheme that cost his bank millions. (He was fired and never got a banking job again.)
But the cases my students liked best were “stick ’em up — I have a gun here ” stories.
They liked to learn about the special drawer that would ring an alarm when its cash was removed, and the exploding cash that would cover the robbers with paint during the getaway.
They also liked my story of the platform officer I knew who told a gun-toting thief: “You don’t want me. You want the tellers — they have the cash.” The robbers went across the lobby and left him alone.
I scored best with three stories of bank robbers whose stupidity or bad luck ended their capers.
Hard-luck story 1: The perp cased the joint the Friday before the planned robbery. He decided to dive over the low counter, take the cash from the till, and dive back. Unfortunately for him, over the weekend the bank installed a Plexiglas barrier. The robber banged his head so hard that he was lying on the floor when the police arrived.
Hard-luck story 2: A gang that robbed a midwestern bank used a purple-and-yellow convertible as the getaway car. Their capture must have been measured in nanoseconds.
Hard-luck story 3. Several robbers went into a downtown New York branch at noon on a Friday and yelled, “This is a stickup!” Suddenly, all around them there was laughter — and about 10 people with guns pointed their way. The branch was right across the street from an FBI office; several agents had come in to cash their paychecks.
Bankers have their bad days too.
A student of my father’s at NYU, an employee of a bank in Perth Amboy, N.J., disappeared one day with an amount equal to half its capital and was never seen again.
The bank called its president, who was vacationing in Paris.
“Do you think I should come home?” he asked.
