Be On The Lookout

A nationwide manhunt takes a turn after police recover the car used in the heist. Then, law enforcement learns what a key witness knows about Victor Gerena’s movements the morning of the robbery. This, as Phelps digs into the 25-year-old security guard’s background and uncovers a potential motive.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
With as much information as police had on Victor Harrana,
they were surprisingly little to go off of. An A
p B All points bulletin was put out on what
was believed to be the getaway car, a green seventy
three buick less Saber with Connecticut plates. Fortunately, that's all
they needed. A car matching the description of the vehicle

(00:37):
used in the robbery had been spotted outside a nearby airfield,
just five miles away from the Wells Fargo depot. It
was Victor's rented Buick backed into a parking spot outside
the Swiss Shell, a inn and now defunct two story
motel chain within walking distance to Brainard Airport. Federal agents

(00:58):
got a warrant to go inside the vehicle. The cash
was gone, of course, along with any traces of Victor.
Police reports show he had left the loaded thirty eight
caliber Smith and Wesson revolver and twelve gage pump shotgun
he used during the robbery in the car, fully visible
with the safeties off in the trunk. Transmission parts and

(01:23):
a black beret from a military equipment store in New
York City began to realize from there he had he
had away car there, like the clean car Victor Heraina
couldn't have picked a better place to dump the car.
In addition to being next to the airfield, the motel

(01:43):
was adjacent to Interstate which runs from Connecticut all the
way to Canada. Police recreating the drive said it would
have taken Victor just twelve minutes to get to the
motel from the Wells Fargo depot, and that's if he
was going to speed limit. Detective Ken O'Brien helped with
the investigation. There's some speculation about was there an airplane involved.

(02:08):
It's a state airport, but it's a private planes flying
and the towers wasn't always means at the time, and
you can lean it's, you know, in the twin engine
plane there easily, but there were no reports of Oh
my god, So the guy puts seven million dollars of
cash into a car and no one knows where he
is right, no no idea And it's fiance a Ledgers,

(02:30):
she has no idea wi she has any contact with him.
Between the two consecutive car hanks, the security guards heard
during the robbery presumed signal to someone waiting outside the depot,
and approximately one thousand pounds of cash that needed to
be transported. Police were working under the assumption that victor
had some help but from home. Now everything's going to

(02:52):
our minds that he has to rent a van, something
else the suspect was. He fled the area and another vehicle.
Now beginning to realize maybe he wasn't alone. Previously on
White Eagle, I said, getting her right away. We just

(03:14):
had a robbery at Wells Fargo and it's a huge robbery,
and it looks like he had everything with it. He
needed to restrain one person, but there were two people.
I knew that that car was important in the case
because it wasn't his and he could indicate a cole conspirator.

(03:35):
Why do you beat the horn? He's not saying goodbye
to these two guys. He's saying, I'm coming out. My
name is Zem William Phelps. I'm an investigative journalist and
author of more than forty true crime books. What you
were about to hear is the true story of a heist,
one that funded an international independence movement and sparked an

(03:57):
investigation spanning nearly four day gates. This is White Eagle.
The Wells Fargo depot robbery is arguably the most high

(04:18):
profile case to come across the West Harford Police Department
in Connecticut, an investigation ultimately involving the FBI's fifty nine
field offices, scores of agents, other government agencies, and the
Hartford and West Harford Police all putting in hundreds of
hours of work. It was the biggest robbery case we

(04:39):
ever had. We used all kind of manpower in this case.
During my research into the case, there were a number
of people I knew I needed to speak with to
get a better sense of how things operated among law enforcements.
Detective kennel'brien was one of them. His resume is impressive.
During his twenty eight years as a police officer with
the West hard For Police Department, Ken was also on

(05:02):
the Arson Task Force and studied forensics before being sworn
in as a special federal agent with the State's Attorney's Office.
Ken is now retired. He's originally from Boston, but his
ties to Connecticut run deep. He's lived there with his
wife of fifty four years since nineteen sixty seven. Thank

(05:23):
you for the coffee. We had been in communication for
months at this point, so he suggested we meet in
person and do our interview at his house. So I
have all the reports right here. Yeah, I have all
the reports from the case. Yeah. Kenn O'Brien is a
man of many words, sometimes too many when you get

(05:43):
him going. But it's impossible not to love the guy,
even when he screens his calls in the middle of
an interview. It's it's a depth of office. Somebody's got
one of us has a depth of appointment, So can
I talk to that? Go ahead? So then that doggedness

(06:06):
to finish the story is part of what made Ken
such a great detective all those years. It's been nearly
four decades and he still has a vivid memory of
what happened after the robbery. He says, the gravity of
the situation became utterly apparent when the FBI rolled into
town just hours after the heist. By four am, the

(06:30):
West Harford Police Station was ground zero. They come in
with a team. I bet you that had to be
a half dozen agents came in and we had a
conference room. Well we all gathered together and it's like
a briefing of his what we know, and everybody drew
in a little bit of information they had, what they
had done that night before to bring them off the

(06:50):
speed By then Victor Haraina's photo was everywhere. I can
remember as a six year old kid myself growing up
in the area seeing that image of Victor's head shot
from his Wells Fargo I D badge running across all
the TV stations and printed above the fold in the

(07:11):
newspapers day after day. You just could not avoid it.
Since much of the stolen currency was Federal reserve money,
the FBI took the lead. Whoever in the charge of
the agents looked around and said where are the phones?
And there was only one phone in the conference room
sitting on a window sill, and he said, that's one phone.

(07:31):
That's not our phone. We'll get more phones, I guarantee.
Within a few hours there was like six or eight phones.
Then they just make a call boom. I had six
or eight phone, didn't no kidding, Yeah, unbelievable. They come
in and they like the statue they have that's for me.
It's committee town committee with him you know here' even

(07:55):
message goes on and on. How was that relationship between
the two apartments. We had a real good relationship with
the agents. In fact, we had behind the police station
was the old now it's called the town hall, but
it was the old high school and had a track
and the agents would come and go jogging on that track.
And we had a locker room and lockers, the amend

(08:18):
and woman agents male and female, and we had a
gym and the Remember the FBI actually paid for a
couple of pieces of equipment so they could use it.
The FBI working alongside the West Harford Police Department wasn't unusual.

(08:39):
The Bureau would routinely assist officers and state and local
cases investigating organized crime, drug trafficking, or in this case,
the theft and transport of seven million dollars in cash,
but the manpower in this case was different. The FBI
had even sent in profile is up from its headquarters

(09:01):
in Quantico, Virginia. A state arrest warrant plus two federal
arrest warrants were signed, charging Victor Hereina with a number
of offenses, theft from an interstate shipment of funds belonging
to Federal Reserve member banks, theft of those funds, and
using a weapon in the process of the crime, an

(09:21):
unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. If Caughton convicted, victor was
likely looking at decades behind bars in a federal prison.
For Detective Kenn O'Brien, every little detail mattered. Take up
five thousand piece puzzle and dumping on a table, and
now I'm started to try to put pieces together. To

(09:41):
each team, we'd go out, then at the end of
the day we'd meet again at the Detective Division and
there'd be exchange of information. Each day we put another
piece at a puzzle together. They'd go out in teams
the West Hartford PD, driving federal aigents around town serving
as backup. They also looked into local leads, friends of Victor,

(10:03):
former co workers, his excess, as well as his bride
to be, twenty year old Anna Soda. I don't think
he told any of his family what he was going
to do, and she was devastated. I don't think she
knew if she knew, she's a great actress, because she
was devastated that night. During the first few days after

(10:30):
the robbery, Anna Soda wavered between witness and suspect. She
was engaged to Victor Harina. She had lived with him
for two years. Could she have had some knowledge of
his movements? Was he contacting her? Victor's bride to be
said she had no idea where he was or why

(10:51):
he'd robbed the depot in the first place. He was
very nice, quite uh nervous, very nervous, but sto naive
as Anna seemed. Investigators quickly learned she was hiding crucial
details about Victor's getaway car. She claimed to have no
knowledge of the rented Buick, but neighbors and friends they

(11:13):
told a different story. One witness reported seeing Victor with
the buick on Saturday the tenth, the same day he
got it from the rental agency. She said he used
it to pick up a pizza for dinner and even
parked it on the street outside of his apartment, also
enjoying the car's perks, Anna Soda. Others close to the

(11:34):
couple told police Anna was seen riding in the car
that weekend, and Victor even drove her somewhere the morning
of the robbery. When police found the buick, they noted
that Victor had put eighty seven miles on the car
in just two and a half days, meaning he'd driven
it a hell of a lot. She's the greatest flying

(11:55):
in the world, and she's telling the truth despite the deception.
To this a. Both detectives Ken O'Brien and Steve Luby
describe Anna Soto as a nice person and think Victor
left her in the dark. I didn't know it at
the time, but other things were true about the marriage application,
that you know, we're living together, all the other background

(12:16):
stuff she gave me it was true. But the car
became important because her lying about the car made us
think that she obviously knew more about the case. Was
determined that I would arrest her for hindering prosecution and
giving a false statement. Uh and maybe use that as
a chance to get more out of her. Anna Soto
was arrested on September fift becoming the first arrest connected

(12:40):
to the Wells Fargo robbery. Detective Luby says they were
hoping the threat of jail time would convince Anna to
offer more information, anything that might lead them to Victor.
It didn't work. Anna Soto lawyered up and stop talking.
He had an attorney, Mike Graham. Mike was a character.

(13:04):
He was how can I say it nicely, He's a
little slick. He was making early threats. You know, from
the defense attorney's standpoint, they're good threats to be made,
that we were harassing her, that we there was talk
about how they took her out that night, out of
her apartment and a nightgown at gunpoint to search the apartment.

(13:26):
So Mike was threatening lossuit for all of us involved. Obviously,
you're going to clear the house if he isn't there.
We know he's armed if he isn't there, So I
don't care if she was completely naked. She's coming out
quick and we're going in. Anna was released on bond
shortly after midnight. A little more than a month later,

(13:47):
a state prosecutor dropped the charges, telling reporters at the
time he was concerned it would hinder the federal investigation.
I've reached out to Anna to see if she would
be willing to share her story on the podcast, but
I never heard back. She was young when she was

(14:07):
engaged to Victor, just twenty and studying to be a beautician.
Like Victor, she was deeply connected to her Puerto Rican roots.
Anna had lived there for a time with relatives and
returned to the States a few years before the heist.
At first, it seemed as though Anna's relationship to Victor
made her a major player in this story, but within

(14:28):
days she turned into nothing more than a witness. With
very little information upon In an elaborate chess game, the
FEDS were still trying to win, and Victor Harraina seemed
to be one step ahead. Unlike his amateurish work restraining
the two security guards at the depot, Victor's moves now

(14:49):
felt more professional and calculated, far more than the West
Hartford police and FBI would have ever anticipated, promising leads
would f allowed into nothing. Police reports detailed countless sightings
of Victor, and yet none of them ever panned out.
In all likelihood, was just someone who looked like the guy.

(15:12):
There was an alleged sighting in Boston of a man
fitting Victor's description. He was said to be high on
drugs and sleeping on a park bench days after the robbery.
Another weeks later from a man claiming Victor asked him
for a ride to a West Harford apartment complex. One
man even came forward and said he was good friends
with Victor, speculating that he probably fled the country, maybe

(15:36):
to Argentina. And another so called acquaintance who happened to
rent a single engine airplane the night of the robbery
and flew from Brainard Airport to Boston and back I
believe the FBI followed up on that checking to see
if the plane because they would have to do something,
you know, before they could use the airport, they'd have

(15:58):
to check in or do something a plane, and it
would be some record of a plane coming to going,
and soon they found nothing. There were several leads, however,
that got law enforcements attention. Take for instance, an envelope
that arrived in November that year, postmark from Buffalo, New
York and sent to Victor's lawyer's office in Hartford. Inside

(16:21):
were three letters purportedly from Victor to his attorney Mike Graham,
fiance Anna Soto, and Victor's mother Gloria. In one, Victor
thanks Graham for representing his fiance and others. He says
he's fine and apologizes for any of the trouble the
robbery may have caused. His mother and Anna. Graham told

(16:43):
police the letters contents made Victor's family doubt he'd written them,
but they did say the handwriting looked like his. Well.
The FBI agreed. A handwriting analysis and other lap tests
confirmed that Victor Harraina was the author of the letters,
yet there was no way to tell when the letters

(17:06):
were actually written, which now raises the question was Victor
even still alive, and even if he was, why in
the world would he risk getting caught. Because of this,
law enforcement stepped up at search at least twenty FBI

(17:29):
agents who are assigned to Canvas Buffalo's Latino neighborhoods. The
Bureau even asked Canadian authorities for help. They agreed and
promised to search the area as far north as Toronto.
From the outside, it doesn't make much sense, really. A
twenty five year old who is engaged to be married
overcomes two of his coworkers, steal seven million dollars in

(17:52):
cash and drives away no guarantee of contact with his
loved ones ever again without going to prison. Who was
this person? He was clean. Whiston was perfect guy for
the drop. It should come as no surprise that news

(18:28):
of the Wells Fargo depot heist was everywhere. The thief
had so much money to steal from here that he
couldn't even haul it all away. Police estimate that he
left about a million dollars behind. Everyone, including law enforcement,
was baffled. A tabloid in Boston called the robbery the
Big Sleep Heist, a reference to Victor Harain has failed

(18:49):
attempt to drug his co workers. It was huge news.
I mean it was all over the front page of
every place in the world. Ed mahoney is the harf
for Current Reporter. You heard in the last st episode.
Everybody figured that they knew that Victor Herain, it was
the inside man, and everybody was waiting for his body
to pop up someplace because they figured Weber pulled this

(19:11):
thing off Houston and he would prove to be expendable.
Years before Ed began investigating Victor Haraina's role in the
Wells Fargo robbery, he helped expose one of America's most
notorious violent organized crime figures, James Whitey Boulger. Whitey was
under investigation for a million years in Boston to kill

(19:32):
all kinds of people when he was responsible for all
kinds of mayhem and violence and law enforcement corruption. But
I think one of the things that really put him
on the national map was his involvement in the murder
of two or three figures associated with a company called
World Highlight. The World Highlight murders would end up being
one of the stories that defined Ed Mahoney's career. Victor

(19:56):
Haraina was another, and for anyone who thought they knew
Victor Haraina, a broader picture was beginning to emerge. Victor was,
you know. He was from the Brooks in New York,
and for whatever reason, his mother moved the family from

(20:17):
the Bronx two Hartford, presumably in search of a more tranquil,
better safer life. They ended up in UH one of
the housing projects, and Victor ended up being a good kid.
Victor attended Buckley High School in Hartford. He was popular

(20:39):
and well liked, a fairly good student. If you met
him in the early seventies, you'd probably see him as
a kind of guy who was going places. He played
varsity football and was captain of the wrestling team. He
was a trained peer counselor and a member of the
Human Relations Club. He had little interest in politics, but
was a member of the student council. He was a

(21:01):
kid from a very very immodest background in a touch life,
and he was making something in it himself. Victor's junior year,
he was selected to participate in Upward Bound, a federally
funded youth advancement program that allowed him to take an
intensive curriculum of courses at nearby Trinity college. By senior year,
he was awarded a thousand dollar scholarship and was chosen

(21:24):
to be a legislative intern at the General Assembly. He
get a job as some kind of an intern at
the state capitol with a woman who was kind of
a famous figure in the democratic politics. That woman was
Maryan Delaney, a strong willed figure in politics who for

(21:45):
twenty seven years helped run the clerk's office at the
Connecticut House of Representatives. According to Ed Mahoney, Delaney took
to Victor and advised him on everything from what he
wore to how he spoke. Took him under a wing,
and that was what went wrong. Victor had his choice

(22:05):
of colleges to attend. He was reportedly considering the University
of Connecticut and Trinity College, but Marion Delaney became a
powerful influence over Victor and convinced him to go to
her alma mater. She got him into this kind of
really weird, strict Catholic college in Woodstock, Connecticut called Annehurst College,

(22:29):
you know, which was run by a bunch of nuns
and was on the verge of bankruptcy. The former all
women's college was in such financial despair that they had
recently expanded the student body to include men. In the
fall of nineteen seventy six, Victor was one of two
dozen male students among two hundred female classmates. A quarterly

(22:50):
con kid from inner city Hartford just didn't fin in
a place like this. Woodstock, Connecticut is only a forty
five minute drive from Harvard, yet for a kid from
the pro objects, it might as well be a world away.
Woodstock is rural with rolling green hills, large estates, and wineries.
And there's Victor, you know, penniless, stuck out in the

(23:11):
middle of nowhere in the woods, with no money, no car,
no nothing, and it just kind of fell apart. Victor
left Annhurst without finishing his freshman year, and from that
point on things took a turn. He jumped from one
job to the next. Police reports show he worked at
the state capitol, where he had interned as a student,

(23:34):
before finding work as a roofer, a special education counselor
at the Harford Board of Education, an apprentice at a
local aerospace company, and at one point he even joined
the National Guard. There were a series of relationships as well.
In Victor left his longtime girlfriend Maggie not long before

(23:56):
she was due to give birth to their daughter for
an old friend from high school named Pamela. The two
married and split up that same year, when Pamela was
three months pregnant with Victor's second child. Pamela told police
the marriage ended because it was clear he still had
feelings for Maggie. For the next few years, Victor went

(24:17):
back and forth between the two women. They eventually joined
forces to get him to pay child support, and by
two he was paying them and planning a new life
with Anna Soda. Both exes described Victor as a loving father,
though not always present. They said he was traditional. He

(24:41):
liked to be the breadwinner, even though he had trouble
holding down a job. Even the Wells Fargo depot job
wasn't a given. Victor's brother told police Victor had actually
been suspended for a month earlier that summer over an
issue involving some missing money. Detective Steve Luby says police

(25:02):
thought Victor saw an opportunity and seized on it. You know,
some local kids saw this money. He's dealing with this
money every day, figures this is gonna be an easy heist.
These armored car people, they were notorious for being careless
with money. I mean, we had reports in the past
of five thousand dollars dropping off the rear bumper in
a bag and these things when the guys drove off
and forgot to put it in the truck. You know,

(25:24):
they handled large amount of moneys. But the security, if
you look back at the security, it was not that
good at a lot of these companies. Pamela, Victor's ex
wife and the mother of his second child, said she
never understood why he went through with the robbery, but
didn't think he could have pulled it off alone. She
said she wouldn't be surprised if he wound up dead

(25:44):
somewhere and maybe, just maybe he'd gotten in over his head.
She also told pal Lae something that stuck with me,
a potential motive even She said Victor had a tendency
to run. He left mag when she was nine months pregnant,
He left her when she was three months pregnant, and
now it seems he ran out on Anna before they

(26:06):
got married. The big question at the time, where would
Victor run too? And all the stuff are getting early
on him. It was like a longe wolf. He he
would He was never involved in much of anything that
we could determine. It's like, all of a sudden, this
guy just existed and there wasn't a lot of background,

(26:29):
a bottom to be had. Police thought Victor saw an
opportunity and he took it. They didn't think for one
minute was some kind of mastermind criminal. Then about six
months after the heist, police got a lead they could
not ignore. We got a cough from Massachusetts State Police
and some d OT Massachusetts Primate Transportation workers cleaning a

(26:55):
rest area, the first one right off of four couple
of miles up from this at the border, and they
were cleaning up there and they found a wallet and
identification and with Victor Nu's So first of all, now
we know two things. He's heading to Boston. And also
in your mind at the same time is if the

(27:17):
wallace there is your body remains nearby. Mass State police
were there, the FBI think went up there too. Sure,
finding Victor's I D near Boston was a solid lead,
but it also can't be ruled out that anyone could
have planted that wallet to throw police off Victor sent
so to speak, that is, if he was even still alive.

(27:40):
The FBI and State police didn't get much information from
the wallet discovery, giving them really little to nothing to
go on. After that, leads slowed to a trickle. The
Wells Fargo Armored Service Corporation, which had initially offered a
three fifty thousand dollar reward for information, bumped it up
to half a million dollars. It was the largest reward

(28:03):
ever offered for a single crime in the United States.
Even that didn't work. But just when the FBI thought
all roads to Victor lead nowhere, the unthinkable happened. Victor
went public. On September twel exactly one year after the heist,

(28:24):
three handwritten postcards arrived at various news outlets around the country.
One to the Harvard Current in Connecticut, had an image
of the Statue of Liberty on the front. It arrived
inside an envelope postmarked from New York City. FBI forensic
experts confirmed the postcards were written by Victor, yet once

(28:45):
again there was no indication when they were actually written. Still,
based on what he wrote, Victor not only wanted to
set the record straight about the robbery, he also wanted
to send a message quote, I will clear up any
confusion that still exists about me or what happened to
the money. Shortly, be on the lookout. Next time I'm

(29:13):
White Eagle and the money shows up. That was traceable money.
It's sounded to think of something organized here, we follow
the money. White Eagle has written in executive produced by
me Em William Phelps and Diheart Executive producer Christina Everett.
Additional writing by our supervising producer Julia Weaver. Our associate

(29:35):
producer and script supervisor is Darby Masters, Audio editing and
mixing by Jackie Huntington's. Our series theme forms Regal or
Grand is written by Aaron Kaufman, and special thanks to
Arlene Santana and Will Pearson at I Heeart Radio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart

(29:56):
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.