April 7, 2022 • 29 mins
The West Hartford Police Department springs into action after two Wells Fargo security guards reveal that a coworker, 25-year-old Victor Gerena, held them at gunpoint, drugged them, and drove off with more than $7 million in cash. Plus, a cryptic lead sends police to a local airport.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Somewhere tonight, a Wells Fargo guard and acts Wells Fargo
guard is on the run with seven million dollars in cash.
On the night of the robbery, I had chased a
burglar from Flatwish Avenue all around Charter rope Terrace and
was frustrated that he got away with like a bike
(00:22):
and maybe a VCR. It's September twelve. Jack Casey is
two years into a thirty year career with the West
Harford Police Department in central Connecticut. On this night, he's
looking for a robbery suspect and a local housing project
when he takes a call for a robbery in progress.
(00:44):
It comes in and then we gave the code for
a robbery, and then they gave the address, and I said, oh,
I'm right down the street. I'll be there within seconds.
So of course I jumped back in my cruiser. I
drive up the street. I'm probably here in half an it,
so I'm thinking, okay, I got a good shot of
getting these guys. Casey rolls up to what is an
(01:05):
unmarked Wells Fargo depot near the Hartford town line. To
an outsider, the one story building appears empty, no signs,
nobody around. When he arrives. There's no clear or obvious
indication of trouble either. The steel overhead garage doors are closed.
Everything appears to be quiet, But Casey is the first
(01:27):
officer on the scene and knows better than to go rogue. Plus,
he understands, if you've got the guts to rob a
secured warehouse full of money, chances are your arm to
the teeth. Telling them on the radio, hey have then
come out, they said, we're trying. By then a couple
of other officers started showing ups, and now we're setting
(01:49):
up a perimeter because as far as we're concerned as
the active robbery, and there's a lot of cash on
the line. Inside that nondescript window list building, there is
over thirty million dollars on any given day, a good
portion of which is brand new money banded bills consecutive
numbers wrapped in plastic fresh from the Federal reserve, ready
(02:12):
to be distributed into the population. Dispatch tells Casey to
make his way towards the building's rear entrance, so he does.
Then a door swings open to reveal a visibly shaken guard.
You can tell he had some marks on his face
from the tape or whatever. I think he had a
(02:33):
handcuffed angling off of them, and he was really really
upset and he saw I've been robbed. We've been robbed.
Turns out there were two security guards held hostage during
the robbery. One appears to have a swollen upper lip.
The other still has some tape stuck to his hair
from being tied up. Their clothes are ruffled, and then
(02:55):
they start telling me a story. The guard they worked
with put a gun to their head, retinum, hand coffed on,
tied them off, put him on the floor, loaded up
a bunch of money, and left. So I said how
much let He said five million? And I'm like, what now,
I'm aggravated because some guy just stole a bike. For
two hours, I can't find a guy, and at the
same time, this guy is stealing five million dollars. That
(03:19):
was the initial thought in a frenzy to report every
detail of the crime scene during those crucial first hours.
Early police reports listed the monetary loss at five million dollars,
but as it turns out, the amount of money was
far greater. The thief actually got away with a total
(03:40):
of seven million, seventeen thousand one hundred and fifty one dollars,
an amount equivalent today to nearly nineteen point six million.
At the time, it was one of the largest cash
heists in US history. But stealing seven million dollars, well,
that was just the beginning. My name is em William Phelps.
(04:06):
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 investigation spanning nearly four decades.
This is White Eagle. It was a Monday night in
(04:35):
mid September. Two Wells Fargo guards, twenty five year old
Victor Harraina and twenty one year old Tim Girard. We're
getting ready to call it a day. They were en
route from Bridgeport, Connecticut to the smugglers in a bar
and restaurant in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, the last stop of
their long day before heading back to the Wells Fargo
(04:56):
depot in West Harford, Connecticut and clocking out. It's a
repetitive job, with grueling hours on the road, driving to
various banks and businesses around Connecticut and Massachusetts to pick
up money and loaded into an armored vehicle, one stop
after another, pick up load, pick up load, and at
the end of the day the reverse unload count unload count.
(05:20):
Victor Harraine had been at it for a little over
a year, Tim Gerard just six months. Guards made just
four dollars and seventy five cents an hour, which was
about a dollar higher than minimum wage at the time,
but a fraction of the millions of dollars in cash
they collected and handled each day. For whatever reason, they
(05:41):
were shorthanded, probably because it was a lousy job and
Ed mahoney has been a reporter for thirty years, many
of which have been spent at the Hartford Current. He
was part of the team that want to pull a
Surprise in the late nineties for coverage of what was
at the time a rare occurrence, a shooting rampage in
(06:02):
which a Connecticut State Lottery employee killed four senior supervisors
and then himself. Mahoney's covered politics, local news and is
no stranger to complex investigative crime stories. He explains that
the two guards that night were in a rush to
get back to the depot Monday night football was on TV,
(06:23):
and their boss twenty five year old Jim McKean wanted
to go home and watch the San Diego Chargers play
the Kansas City Chiefs, but being understaffed, everything was already
behind schedule, and there was a half a ton of
cash that still needed to be counted and stacked. According
to police reports, when the guards got back to the
(06:44):
depot around nine o'clock, Victor offered to unload the money
by himself. His partner Tim refused because he'd gotten into
trouble in the past for leaving early. He decided to
stick her out, so Victor thought it would be he
and one of a person in the view pub. It
turns out it's Heat and two others. Boss Jim McKean
(07:05):
was waiting inside the dispatch office, sitting at a desk
to the left of the vault where the money collected
by the guards was to be kept. He had one
half of the vaults combination, Victor had the other. After
Victor helped open the vault, he went back to the
truck and began unloading the cash they'd collected that day.
(07:27):
Bags of coins which stayed unload later, and twenty six
bags of currency, which was brought into the vault on
a wheeled cart. There are two ways to enter the
building's dispatch office. The main way is via a keypad
entrance through double steel doors and an observation port. The
(07:48):
other is through a bolted door that opens into the
garage area, though it can only be unlocked from inside
the dispatch office. Basically, the only way to gain access
to all that cash was to already be inside. They're
sitting there and they're counting these millions of dollars and
stacking it up and making notes and writing up paperwork
(08:09):
and running it through adding machines and stuff like that,
and Victor kind of manivorous himself behind this boss is
sitting at the table and slips out the boss's pistol
province holster and says, okay, guys, I'm not fooling around.
I'm gonna shoot you if you don't do what i'm
gonna tell you to do. He slapped the other card
and said, hey, this is no joke. And they hear
(08:32):
him loading a shotgun and a handgun. So you know
what you're thinking in your mind, you're gonna be executed.
Boss Jim McKean would later tell police that he thought
he was going to be killed. Quote all I said
was Vic, and he said, Jim, I've got nothing against you.
I'm just tired of working for other people. It looks
(08:54):
like he had everything with him. He needed to restrain
one person, but there were two people, so for example,
had one pair of handcuffs, so he had to, you know,
use the handcuffs and conversation with some tape and some
rope and stuff like that. Both men were gagged in
order to lie on the floor. Jim McKeon's hands were
(09:18):
handcuffed behind his back. Tim Gerard was hog tied with
white adhesive tape and nylon twine. Police Chief Francis Reynolds
spoke to reporters the following day. Coach were then placed
over their heads, at which time Greena advised the men
that he was going to give them a shot that
(09:39):
would put him to sleep. It looks like he injected
them both, but neither one of them got knocked out,
So maybe it's because he divided at those for one
person among two people. That solution doctors would later analyze
through tests was allegedly a mixture of aspirin and water.
(09:59):
The two guards later told police Victor appeared highly agitated.
He turned on the intercom to hear if anyone was outside.
Tim Gerard said, when he started to wriggle around, Victor
hit him a few times and warned both men that
they had accidentally choked themselves if they tried to break
free their incapacity of their tape. They're tied up to
(10:20):
their light on the ground, and they just hear him
going back and forth, and they hear zippers like somebody's
filling up great big, huge gym bags or sleeping bags
with cash. It's actually hard to believe someone pulled it off.
Victor Haraina emptied the steel vault of all currency with
the exception of one and two dollar bills. He then
(10:42):
loaded approximately between nine hundred and twelve pounds of cash
into a buic less saber parked in one of the
deposed loading bays, conveniently out of public view. All this
within just ninety minutes. What he was doing was he
was loading up the cash into bags and stuffing it
into the car, and it got to the point where
(11:04):
there is so much I mean, there was barely off
room for him to get into the car. There was
so much cash in it. So much. In fact, Victor
not only had to take out the car, spare tire
and bumper jack to make room for the money. He
also left behind a few currency bags worth hundreds of
thousands of dollars. Victor then got into the buick, beat
(11:27):
the horn twice, and drove out of the Deepot parking lot.
Of course, there's a national alert again Jack Casey, that
goes out all across the country. So when we enter it,
we say, you know, arm robbery, West Hartford seven million,
that's going to catch the eye of most police departments,
especially along the corridor. By that point, Victor Harraina already
(11:50):
had a solid lead ahead of law enforcement, we thought
that night because they're heat accustomed tight up. He probably
figured he's got a lot of time because he's thinking,
all these guys are probably gonna get found in the morning.
So the fact that they were able to wiggle free.
(12:10):
Did the alarm have helped yet there? But we figured, okay,
that he doesn't have as much time as he thought.
He's not that far ahead of us now. But as
it turns out, he was far enough ahead to get away.
(12:32):
The search for Victor Harraina began almost immediately after police
responded to the scene. Today, they might have found him
within hours, but in it was far easier to vanish.
GPS tracking wasn't available to civilians yet three nine eleven,
people traveled more freely and could pay with cash, and
(12:52):
it would be another twenty years before the majority of
the population carried cell phones in their pockets. Was also
a chaotic time in the nation. Less than two weeks
before the robbery, the Soviet Union shot down a Korean
Airlines flight, killing everyone on board, including a U. S congressman.
At the time, there was concern about what it all
(13:15):
meant for the US and whether the Cold War would
heat back up. President Reagan called the attack barbaric. Our
first emotions are angered, disbelief and profound sadness. While events
in Afghanistan and elsewhere have left few illusions about the
willingness of the Soviet Union to advance its interest through
(13:37):
violence and intimidation, all of us had hoped that certain
irreducible standards of civilized behavior nonetheless obtained. In West Harford,
police were busy and rattled. The town had recently been
terrorized by a serial arsonist who had been sending fires
to local synagogues. We're having a series so arson's in
(14:01):
town that appeared to be targeting the Jewish neighborhood. They
were high profile cases. We were getting a lot of
heat with them, and it was a lot of hours
beginning put into it. We were flat out. Steve Luby
was a detective with the West Tarford Police Department. He
worked in the Special Investigations Division, a small team mainly
(14:22):
focused on narcotics cases, internal affairs, and arson's the ladder
of which wholly occupied Luby's time that summer. He says,
up until then, West Tarford was a fairly quiet place
to work. It was primarily a sleepier suburb of Harvard.
A lot of people would work in Harford that lived there,
(14:43):
and they would commute back and forth. We had some
murders periodically, not not nothing like Hartford, you know, the
arson cases that became like national news overnight. Within one week,
the arsonists torched two local synagogues, and less than a
month later, a state representatives house was set on fire
as she and her family slept. Thankfully, no one was hurt,
(15:07):
and the cops eventually caught the guy who did it,
a seventeen year old kid who was a member of
the first synagogue. Targeted everyone I've spoken to from the area,
has said it was a terrifying few months with lots
of national attention. By the time the Wells Fargo Heights happened,
law enforcement was spent. I was home in bed, trying
(15:29):
to catch up on some sleep. I got a call
from dispatch indicating that they wanted me to return to duty.
When the phone rang, I figured it was another arson
fire or something that I was going in for. And
who recalled me? I asked him, you know, what's what's
this all about? They said, getting her right away. We
just had a robbery at Wells Fargo and it's a
(15:52):
huge robbery. You want to address these things earlier she can,
because you're losing information the longer you go. So we
have really a sitdown. Was more or less you do this,
you go here, you do that. Police had a slight advantage.
Unlike most cases, they already had a suspect, Victor Manuel
(16:12):
Harrena a five ft six sixty pounds, brown hair, green eyes.
They had a description of the car he drove away in,
a green three four door Buick Le Saber, and he
knew where he lived Warner Street, downtown Hartford, just a
(16:33):
fifteen minute drive from the Wells Fargo depot, plus they
learned one critical piece of information about his personal life.
Victor Harrana was due to get married four days At
(17:04):
approximately twelve fifteen am, nearly an hour after the Wells
Fargo guards freed themselves and called for help, law enforcement
approached the multi family building in Hartford where Victor Harraina
shared an apartment with his fiance. An armed robber in
possession of seven million dollars in cash was on the lamp.
(17:24):
There was no risk too small to take. The police
were armed in the perimeter of the building secured. Jack
Casey was among those present. We're outside, saying, hey, we
could steel and get a search warrant if you want
to consent to a search. Save everybody, about of time.
If he's not in there, it'll be quick. We'll go in,
we'll get out. Victor's fiancee, Anna Soto, poked her head
(17:48):
out from the third floor porch. She seemed upset, but
also cooperative. According to police reports, She allowed the officers
inside to search the home. I remember the shotgun and
I was searching the room, and I think it was
a dover started coming and growling, and I leveled the
gun and I said, hey, you have to get the
(18:10):
get the dog, and she said okay, okay, which turns
out later on it's like she felt threatened by the
shotgun or whatever. But in any event, at that time
I opened the closet and nurse big, huge duffle bag.
So in my mind I'm thinking, wow, it's here. Here's
the money. So now I'm thinking, okay, he's in here somewhere.
So now we're looking for him, looking for him because
(18:31):
we're thinking that's the money. Eventually, after we clear the house,
we unzipped the baggage shoes, it shoots. The search for
Victor proof fruitless. Neither he nor the money was inside
that apartment, though the police did seize a number of
Victor's belongings, including his bank book and telephone records, an
(18:55):
address book with directions written inside, a letter written in Spanish,
a road map, a postcard, and most importantly, his passport,
leaving Victor with even less of a chance a flee
in the country. His fiance, Anna, said she didn't know
where he was. She agreed to go to the station,
(19:17):
even riding in the passenger seat of one of the
patrol cars, to voluntarily give a statement. Regarding Victor and
what she knew. Back at the station, Detective Steve Luby
was waiting for her arrival. I got a sign to
see if I could talk her into a written statement
and find out what she knew. Luby was tasked to
(19:39):
follow up on their two biggest leads at the time,
what if anything Victor herain A's fiance might know about
the robbery, and how police could find a getaway car
with Victor and the seven million in cash tucked away inside.
She was a personal kid. She was scared before he
even got into the background stuff. Guy remember her saying
(20:00):
she was freezing cold and the office was cold at
the time, But oftentimes when people are nervous, they kind
of come across really cold too. So I tried to
manipulate the heat in the office by putting the paper
clip in the thermostat and driving it up and got
her got herself. I wanted to get her comfortable with
me and see if I could get her relax a little.
(20:21):
Before he even started his statement, Luby took his time,
hoping to of course, went over her trust. I don't
go right to paper. I sit down trying to have
a conversation because she was frightened, and when you look
at someone being frightened, you don't often know are they
frightened because they're part of this? Are they just frightened
(20:41):
to be now in the police station addressing a crime
that either they were a victim of or a witness
to try to get that report on and and I,
I think I was pretty good at getting her comfortable.
She seemed comfortable, and she calmed down. She greeted a statement.
Luby knew how how important Anna could be within the
(21:02):
scope of the investigation. He needed to know if she
was telling the truth, and says after a while he
got the impression that she wasn't being up front, so
he took a more aggressive approach. And I told her
he's got he's got guns. He's out there now. Every
cop in New England, it's going out over the country
has his description. If you love him, you don't want
(21:23):
him to get stopped in the middle of the night,
some dark corner, some cop panics, he goes for a gun,
The cop goes for a gun, and in your boyfriend
ends up getting killed. You know, I tried to use
that angle to have her be more concerned about, you know,
not so much protecting him but getting him safe and
(21:43):
making sure he didn't get hurt when he got apprehended.
It seemed like a scare tactic. But I'm not sure
that's what Loubi thought. He says, Anna didn't know what
she was stepping into because remember, Victor was dangerous. The
guy was on the run with two loaded guns and
millions of dollars. I wanted to put down on paper
(22:04):
that they lived together and that they were engaged to
be married. And I think the day before she had
actually gotten the marriage license certificate or something to get
married or whatever it was from city hall. This was true.
The couple had planned to marry days after the heist,
her first marriage Victor's third. It's unclear whether Victor intended
(22:26):
to go through with the wedding. Still, as far as
Detective Luby was concerned, Anna Soto had been under the
impression that they would be married by the end of
that weekend. He used to call her before he get home.
They'd be in voice contact a lot during the night,
you know, like two love birds there. You know, he
was on the phone, she was on the phone, and
she didn't hear from him. That night. Apparently, according to her,
(22:50):
we were over relatives of his that, uh, you know,
he's Apparently, according to her, he was very devoted to
his mother, who lived in a aim general area in
the south end of Harvard. He had some brothers that
were not local that he was not close to. So
the statement was basically a chance to get get information
(23:11):
on the family, his routines, any close friends. Surprisingly, she
he didn't, according to her, didn't have a lot of
male friends or friends even on the job. He didn't
get warm with people on job. They didn't go out
socialize with people that much. And so I'm thinking, my
cynical minds, thinking that she's covering for some friend that
(23:32):
might be involved by telling me he doesn't have a
lot of friends. So it went from me feeling that
she was probably the fiance that's all upset, that knows
nothing about this, And now as I went on with her,
I'm thinking, she's not giving me everything here he was right.
For the record, here's what Anna said in her statements
(23:52):
during the first few days of the investigation that on
the day of the robbery, Victor left home between ten
fifteen and ten thirty in the morning and caught the
bus to work. She said, she went with her cousin
to get the marriage license at city hall, took her
dogs to the park, and then went home alone. One
specific detail Louby took note of was that Annac claim
(24:15):
she had never seen the green Buick Victor used in
the robbery, and that Victor didn't have any friends who
owned that type of car. At some point I asked
her does he drive a Buick at all? This described
the car involved, and she said absolutely no. We knew
Victor had used that night, had driven a car that
(24:36):
was not normally his car. The car itself, the Buick,
It was linked back to the Ugly Duckling or a
rental wreckt or one of those used car beat up
rental places, and you know we were. They were searching
everywhere for the car. Victor in fact, had driven several
different rental cars over the past few weeks, all of
(24:59):
which were from the nearby Ugly Duckling rent a car
and now defunct rental car company that was once considered
competition to brands like Budget and Hurts. In August, two
weeks before the robbery, Victor deposited two cash for a
nineteen seventy seven Chevy Malibu, only to return it the
(25:19):
following morning because his quote plans hadn't worked out. Ten
days later, Victor called Ugly Duckling to reserve another full
size car for the following Monday, the day of the robbery,
but he was told the only way he'd be guaranteed
a car on that day would be to rent it
over the weekend. That second rental, a nineteen seventy eight
(25:42):
Mercury Marquis, was again returned the following day due to
the engine catching fire. As a replacement, Victor was given
a nineteen seventy three buick Less Saber, the roomy sedand
that police were now desperate to find. For Detective Luby,
there was one more piece to the history besides finding
that car. I knew that that car was important in
(26:05):
the case because it wasn't his and it could indicate
a co conspirator or someone else involved. The guards at
at Wells Fargo had indicated that they thought there was
more than one person involved in this because they could
hear even though they were restrained and they were away
from it, they could hear some kind of conversation in
the background of the depot. There could Victor Harrena been
(26:29):
working with someone else to pull off the robbery. It's
completely plausible, and in fact, even more believable looking back
and closer at the detailed accounts of what happened. There
was one more thing the guards heard as they lay
wide awake on the floor while Victor made several trips
to and from the car. One hank could arguably be
(26:53):
the result of Victor in a hurry to escape with
the currency backs. But two consecutive hanks, now that's intentional.
Why do you beat the horn? He's not saying goodbye
to these two guys, He's saying, I'm coming out. And
then there's this. The West Tarford Police got word that
a car matching the description of the one used in
(27:14):
the heist had been located just outside a local airport.
It was empty, and of course then the first thing. Second,
you can get a plane in and out. There's no
tower there, there's no need to report when you land there.
After hours this season on White Eagle and the money
(27:43):
shows up. That was traceable money, And I'm thinking myself,
your son, I think is something that's organized here? If
she knew she's a great actress, because she was devastated
the FBI and Connecticut never woke up to this thing.
It was the FBI in Puerto Rico that put all together.
They were of folks who wanted Puerto Rico to be
part of the United States, but other folks felt that
(28:04):
that was not what they wanted and they wanted to
be their own nation. Things we could bloat up quite
a bit, and the FBI decided that they were sick
and tired of this business. The fact that Puerto Rico
still being a call on he kind of chose you
that they didn't get the support that they wanted. I
was ready to engage in gunfire if it had to be,
(28:26):
to protect my comrades from from getting caught. This whole
issue is ignited a firestorm of controversy. What we want
to know is why did the President make this decision?
(28:51):
White Eagle has written an executive produced by me Em
William Phelps and Diheart executive producer Christina Everett. Additional writing
by Our Supervisor as In producer Julia Weaver. Our associate
producer and script supervisor is Darby Masters, Audio editing and
mixing by Jackie Huntington's Our series theme forms Regal or
(29:12):
Grand is written by Aaron Kaufman and special thanks to
Arlene Santana and Will Pearson at I heart Radio. For
more podcast from my heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows,
Somewhere tonight, a Wells Fargo guard and acts Wells Fargo
guard is on the run with seven million dollars in cash.
On the night of the robbery, I had chased a
burglar from Flatwish Avenue all around Charter rope Terrace and
was frustrated that he got away with like a bike
(00:22):
and maybe a VCR. It's September twelve. Jack Casey is
two years into a thirty year career with the West
Harford Police Department in central Connecticut. On this night, he's
looking for a robbery suspect and a local housing project
when he takes a call for a robbery in progress.
(00:44):
It comes in and then we gave the code for
a robbery, and then they gave the address, and I said, oh,
I'm right down the street. I'll be there within seconds.
So of course I jumped back in my cruiser. I
drive up the street. I'm probably here in half an it,
so I'm thinking, okay, I got a good shot of
getting these guys. Casey rolls up to what is an
(01:05):
unmarked Wells Fargo depot near the Hartford town line. To
an outsider, the one story building appears empty, no signs,
nobody around. When he arrives. There's no clear or obvious
indication of trouble either. The steel overhead garage doors are closed.
Everything appears to be quiet, But Casey is the first
(01:27):
officer on the scene and knows better than to go rogue. Plus,
he understands, if you've got the guts to rob a
secured warehouse full of money, chances are your arm to
the teeth. Telling them on the radio, hey have then
come out, they said, we're trying. By then a couple
of other officers started showing ups, and now we're setting
(01:49):
up a perimeter because as far as we're concerned as
the active robbery, and there's a lot of cash on
the line. Inside that nondescript window list building, there is
over thirty million dollars on any given day, a good
portion of which is brand new money banded bills consecutive
numbers wrapped in plastic fresh from the Federal reserve, ready
(02:12):
to be distributed into the population. Dispatch tells Casey to
make his way towards the building's rear entrance, so he does.
Then a door swings open to reveal a visibly shaken guard.
You can tell he had some marks on his face
from the tape or whatever. I think he had a
(02:33):
handcuffed angling off of them, and he was really really
upset and he saw I've been robbed. We've been robbed.
Turns out there were two security guards held hostage during
the robbery. One appears to have a swollen upper lip.
The other still has some tape stuck to his hair
from being tied up. Their clothes are ruffled, and then
(02:55):
they start telling me a story. The guard they worked
with put a gun to their head, retinum, hand coffed on,
tied them off, put him on the floor, loaded up
a bunch of money, and left. So I said how
much let He said five million? And I'm like, what now,
I'm aggravated because some guy just stole a bike. For
two hours, I can't find a guy, and at the
same time, this guy is stealing five million dollars. That
(03:19):
was the initial thought in a frenzy to report every
detail of the crime scene during those crucial first hours.
Early police reports listed the monetary loss at five million dollars,
but as it turns out, the amount of money was
far greater. The thief actually got away with a total
(03:40):
of seven million, seventeen thousand one hundred and fifty one dollars,
an amount equivalent today to nearly nineteen point six million.
At the time, it was one of the largest cash
heists in US history. But stealing seven million dollars, well,
that was just the beginning. My name is em William Phelps.
(04:06):
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 investigation spanning nearly four decades.
This is White Eagle. It was a Monday night in
(04:35):
mid September. Two Wells Fargo guards, twenty five year old
Victor Harraina and twenty one year old Tim Girard. We're
getting ready to call it a day. They were en
route from Bridgeport, Connecticut to the smugglers in a bar
and restaurant in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, the last stop of
their long day before heading back to the Wells Fargo
(04:56):
depot in West Harford, Connecticut and clocking out. It's a
repetitive job, with grueling hours on the road, driving to
various banks and businesses around Connecticut and Massachusetts to pick
up money and loaded into an armored vehicle, one stop
after another, pick up load, pick up load, and at
the end of the day the reverse unload count unload count.
(05:20):
Victor Harraine had been at it for a little over
a year, Tim Gerard just six months. Guards made just
four dollars and seventy five cents an hour, which was
about a dollar higher than minimum wage at the time,
but a fraction of the millions of dollars in cash
they collected and handled each day. For whatever reason, they
(05:41):
were shorthanded, probably because it was a lousy job and
Ed mahoney has been a reporter for thirty years, many
of which have been spent at the Hartford Current. He
was part of the team that want to pull a
Surprise in the late nineties for coverage of what was
at the time a rare occurrence, a shooting rampage in
(06:02):
which a Connecticut State Lottery employee killed four senior supervisors
and then himself. Mahoney's covered politics, local news and is
no stranger to complex investigative crime stories. He explains that
the two guards that night were in a rush to
get back to the depot Monday night football was on TV,
(06:23):
and their boss twenty five year old Jim McKean wanted
to go home and watch the San Diego Chargers play
the Kansas City Chiefs, but being understaffed, everything was already
behind schedule, and there was a half a ton of
cash that still needed to be counted and stacked. According
to police reports, when the guards got back to the
(06:44):
depot around nine o'clock, Victor offered to unload the money
by himself. His partner Tim refused because he'd gotten into
trouble in the past for leaving early. He decided to
stick her out, so Victor thought it would be he
and one of a person in the view pub. It
turns out it's Heat and two others. Boss Jim McKean
(07:05):
was waiting inside the dispatch office, sitting at a desk
to the left of the vault where the money collected
by the guards was to be kept. He had one
half of the vaults combination, Victor had the other. After
Victor helped open the vault, he went back to the
truck and began unloading the cash they'd collected that day.
(07:27):
Bags of coins which stayed unload later, and twenty six
bags of currency, which was brought into the vault on
a wheeled cart. There are two ways to enter the
building's dispatch office. The main way is via a keypad
entrance through double steel doors and an observation port. The
(07:48):
other is through a bolted door that opens into the
garage area, though it can only be unlocked from inside
the dispatch office. Basically, the only way to gain access
to all that cash was to already be inside. They're
sitting there and they're counting these millions of dollars and
stacking it up and making notes and writing up paperwork
(08:09):
and running it through adding machines and stuff like that,
and Victor kind of manivorous himself behind this boss is
sitting at the table and slips out the boss's pistol
province holster and says, okay, guys, I'm not fooling around.
I'm gonna shoot you if you don't do what i'm
gonna tell you to do. He slapped the other card
and said, hey, this is no joke. And they hear
(08:32):
him loading a shotgun and a handgun. So you know
what you're thinking in your mind, you're gonna be executed.
Boss Jim McKean would later tell police that he thought
he was going to be killed. Quote all I said
was Vic, and he said, Jim, I've got nothing against you.
I'm just tired of working for other people. It looks
(08:54):
like he had everything with him. He needed to restrain
one person, but there were two people, so for example,
had one pair of handcuffs, so he had to, you know,
use the handcuffs and conversation with some tape and some
rope and stuff like that. Both men were gagged in
order to lie on the floor. Jim McKeon's hands were
(09:18):
handcuffed behind his back. Tim Gerard was hog tied with
white adhesive tape and nylon twine. Police Chief Francis Reynolds
spoke to reporters the following day. Coach were then placed
over their heads, at which time Greena advised the men
that he was going to give them a shot that
(09:39):
would put him to sleep. It looks like he injected
them both, but neither one of them got knocked out,
So maybe it's because he divided at those for one
person among two people. That solution doctors would later analyze
through tests was allegedly a mixture of aspirin and water.
(09:59):
The two guards later told police Victor appeared highly agitated.
He turned on the intercom to hear if anyone was outside.
Tim Gerard said, when he started to wriggle around, Victor
hit him a few times and warned both men that
they had accidentally choked themselves if they tried to break
free their incapacity of their tape. They're tied up to
(10:20):
their light on the ground, and they just hear him
going back and forth, and they hear zippers like somebody's
filling up great big, huge gym bags or sleeping bags
with cash. It's actually hard to believe someone pulled it off.
Victor Haraina emptied the steel vault of all currency with
the exception of one and two dollar bills. He then
(10:42):
loaded approximately between nine hundred and twelve pounds of cash
into a buic less saber parked in one of the
deposed loading bays, conveniently out of public view. All this
within just ninety minutes. What he was doing was he
was loading up the cash into bags and stuffing it
into the car, and it got to the point where
(11:04):
there is so much I mean, there was barely off
room for him to get into the car. There was
so much cash in it. So much. In fact, Victor
not only had to take out the car, spare tire
and bumper jack to make room for the money. He
also left behind a few currency bags worth hundreds of
thousands of dollars. Victor then got into the buick, beat
(11:27):
the horn twice, and drove out of the Deepot parking lot.
Of course, there's a national alert again Jack Casey, that
goes out all across the country. So when we enter it,
we say, you know, arm robbery, West Hartford seven million,
that's going to catch the eye of most police departments,
especially along the corridor. By that point, Victor Harraina already
(11:50):
had a solid lead ahead of law enforcement, we thought
that night because they're heat accustomed tight up. He probably
figured he's got a lot of time because he's thinking,
all these guys are probably gonna get found in the morning.
So the fact that they were able to wiggle free.
(12:10):
Did the alarm have helped yet there? But we figured, okay,
that he doesn't have as much time as he thought.
He's not that far ahead of us now. But as
it turns out, he was far enough ahead to get away.
(12:32):
The search for Victor Harraina began almost immediately after police
responded to the scene. Today, they might have found him
within hours, but in it was far easier to vanish.
GPS tracking wasn't available to civilians yet three nine eleven,
people traveled more freely and could pay with cash, and
(12:52):
it would be another twenty years before the majority of
the population carried cell phones in their pockets. Was also
a chaotic time in the nation. Less than two weeks
before the robbery, the Soviet Union shot down a Korean
Airlines flight, killing everyone on board, including a U. S congressman.
At the time, there was concern about what it all
(13:15):
meant for the US and whether the Cold War would
heat back up. President Reagan called the attack barbaric. Our
first emotions are angered, disbelief and profound sadness. While events
in Afghanistan and elsewhere have left few illusions about the
willingness of the Soviet Union to advance its interest through
(13:37):
violence and intimidation, all of us had hoped that certain
irreducible standards of civilized behavior nonetheless obtained. In West Harford,
police were busy and rattled. The town had recently been
terrorized by a serial arsonist who had been sending fires
to local synagogues. We're having a series so arson's in
(14:01):
town that appeared to be targeting the Jewish neighborhood. They
were high profile cases. We were getting a lot of
heat with them, and it was a lot of hours
beginning put into it. We were flat out. Steve Luby
was a detective with the West Tarford Police Department. He
worked in the Special Investigations Division, a small team mainly
(14:22):
focused on narcotics cases, internal affairs, and arson's the ladder
of which wholly occupied Luby's time that summer. He says,
up until then, West Tarford was a fairly quiet place
to work. It was primarily a sleepier suburb of Harvard.
A lot of people would work in Harford that lived there,
(14:43):
and they would commute back and forth. We had some
murders periodically, not not nothing like Hartford, you know, the
arson cases that became like national news overnight. Within one week,
the arsonists torched two local synagogues, and less than a
month later, a state representatives house was set on fire
as she and her family slept. Thankfully, no one was hurt,
(15:07):
and the cops eventually caught the guy who did it,
a seventeen year old kid who was a member of
the first synagogue. Targeted everyone I've spoken to from the area,
has said it was a terrifying few months with lots
of national attention. By the time the Wells Fargo Heights happened,
law enforcement was spent. I was home in bed, trying
(15:29):
to catch up on some sleep. I got a call
from dispatch indicating that they wanted me to return to duty.
When the phone rang, I figured it was another arson
fire or something that I was going in for. And
who recalled me? I asked him, you know, what's what's
this all about? They said, getting her right away. We
just had a robbery at Wells Fargo and it's a
(15:52):
huge robbery. You want to address these things earlier she can,
because you're losing information the longer you go. So we
have really a sitdown. Was more or less you do this,
you go here, you do that. Police had a slight advantage.
Unlike most cases, they already had a suspect, Victor Manuel
(16:12):
Harrena a five ft six sixty pounds, brown hair, green eyes.
They had a description of the car he drove away in,
a green three four door Buick Le Saber, and he
knew where he lived Warner Street, downtown Hartford, just a
(16:33):
fifteen minute drive from the Wells Fargo depot, plus they
learned one critical piece of information about his personal life.
Victor Harrana was due to get married four days At
(17:04):
approximately twelve fifteen am, nearly an hour after the Wells
Fargo guards freed themselves and called for help, law enforcement
approached the multi family building in Hartford where Victor Harraina
shared an apartment with his fiance. An armed robber in
possession of seven million dollars in cash was on the lamp.
(17:24):
There was no risk too small to take. The police
were armed in the perimeter of the building secured. Jack
Casey was among those present. We're outside, saying, hey, we
could steel and get a search warrant if you want
to consent to a search. Save everybody, about of time.
If he's not in there, it'll be quick. We'll go in,
we'll get out. Victor's fiancee, Anna Soto, poked her head
(17:48):
out from the third floor porch. She seemed upset, but
also cooperative. According to police reports, She allowed the officers
inside to search the home. I remember the shotgun and
I was searching the room, and I think it was
a dover started coming and growling, and I leveled the
gun and I said, hey, you have to get the
(18:10):
get the dog, and she said okay, okay, which turns
out later on it's like she felt threatened by the
shotgun or whatever. But in any event, at that time
I opened the closet and nurse big, huge duffle bag.
So in my mind I'm thinking, wow, it's here. Here's
the money. So now I'm thinking, okay, he's in here somewhere.
So now we're looking for him, looking for him because
(18:31):
we're thinking that's the money. Eventually, after we clear the house,
we unzipped the baggage shoes, it shoots. The search for
Victor proof fruitless. Neither he nor the money was inside
that apartment, though the police did seize a number of
Victor's belongings, including his bank book and telephone records, an
(18:55):
address book with directions written inside, a letter written in Spanish,
a road map, a postcard, and most importantly, his passport,
leaving Victor with even less of a chance a flee
in the country. His fiance, Anna, said she didn't know
where he was. She agreed to go to the station,
(19:17):
even riding in the passenger seat of one of the
patrol cars, to voluntarily give a statement. Regarding Victor and
what she knew. Back at the station, Detective Steve Luby
was waiting for her arrival. I got a sign to
see if I could talk her into a written statement
and find out what she knew. Luby was tasked to
(19:39):
follow up on their two biggest leads at the time,
what if anything Victor herain A's fiance might know about
the robbery, and how police could find a getaway car
with Victor and the seven million in cash tucked away inside.
She was a personal kid. She was scared before he
even got into the background stuff. Guy remember her saying
(20:00):
she was freezing cold and the office was cold at
the time, But oftentimes when people are nervous, they kind
of come across really cold too. So I tried to
manipulate the heat in the office by putting the paper
clip in the thermostat and driving it up and got
her got herself. I wanted to get her comfortable with
me and see if I could get her relax a little.
(20:21):
Before he even started his statement, Luby took his time,
hoping to of course, went over her trust. I don't
go right to paper. I sit down trying to have
a conversation because she was frightened, and when you look
at someone being frightened, you don't often know are they
frightened because they're part of this? Are they just frightened
(20:41):
to be now in the police station addressing a crime
that either they were a victim of or a witness
to try to get that report on and and I,
I think I was pretty good at getting her comfortable.
She seemed comfortable, and she calmed down. She greeted a statement.
Luby knew how how important Anna could be within the
(21:02):
scope of the investigation. He needed to know if she
was telling the truth, and says after a while he
got the impression that she wasn't being up front, so
he took a more aggressive approach. And I told her
he's got he's got guns. He's out there now. Every
cop in New England, it's going out over the country
has his description. If you love him, you don't want
(21:23):
him to get stopped in the middle of the night,
some dark corner, some cop panics, he goes for a gun,
The cop goes for a gun, and in your boyfriend
ends up getting killed. You know, I tried to use
that angle to have her be more concerned about, you know,
not so much protecting him but getting him safe and
(21:43):
making sure he didn't get hurt when he got apprehended.
It seemed like a scare tactic. But I'm not sure
that's what Loubi thought. He says, Anna didn't know what
she was stepping into because remember, Victor was dangerous. The
guy was on the run with two loaded guns and
millions of dollars. I wanted to put down on paper
(22:04):
that they lived together and that they were engaged to
be married. And I think the day before she had
actually gotten the marriage license certificate or something to get
married or whatever it was from city hall. This was true.
The couple had planned to marry days after the heist,
her first marriage Victor's third. It's unclear whether Victor intended
(22:26):
to go through with the wedding. Still, as far as
Detective Luby was concerned, Anna Soto had been under the
impression that they would be married by the end of
that weekend. He used to call her before he get home.
They'd be in voice contact a lot during the night,
you know, like two love birds there. You know, he
was on the phone, she was on the phone, and
she didn't hear from him. That night. Apparently, according to her,
(22:50):
we were over relatives of his that, uh, you know,
he's Apparently, according to her, he was very devoted to
his mother, who lived in a aim general area in
the south end of Harvard. He had some brothers that
were not local that he was not close to. So
the statement was basically a chance to get get information
(23:11):
on the family, his routines, any close friends. Surprisingly, she
he didn't, according to her, didn't have a lot of
male friends or friends even on the job. He didn't
get warm with people on job. They didn't go out
socialize with people that much. And so I'm thinking, my
cynical minds, thinking that she's covering for some friend that
(23:32):
might be involved by telling me he doesn't have a
lot of friends. So it went from me feeling that
she was probably the fiance that's all upset, that knows
nothing about this, And now as I went on with her,
I'm thinking, she's not giving me everything here he was right.
For the record, here's what Anna said in her statements
(23:52):
during the first few days of the investigation that on
the day of the robbery, Victor left home between ten
fifteen and ten thirty in the morning and caught the
bus to work. She said, she went with her cousin
to get the marriage license at city hall, took her
dogs to the park, and then went home alone. One
specific detail Louby took note of was that Annac claim
(24:15):
she had never seen the green Buick Victor used in
the robbery, and that Victor didn't have any friends who
owned that type of car. At some point I asked
her does he drive a Buick at all? This described
the car involved, and she said absolutely no. We knew
Victor had used that night, had driven a car that
(24:36):
was not normally his car. The car itself, the Buick,
It was linked back to the Ugly Duckling or a
rental wreckt or one of those used car beat up
rental places, and you know we were. They were searching
everywhere for the car. Victor in fact, had driven several
different rental cars over the past few weeks, all of
(24:59):
which were from the nearby Ugly Duckling rent a car
and now defunct rental car company that was once considered
competition to brands like Budget and Hurts. In August, two
weeks before the robbery, Victor deposited two cash for a
nineteen seventy seven Chevy Malibu, only to return it the
(25:19):
following morning because his quote plans hadn't worked out. Ten
days later, Victor called Ugly Duckling to reserve another full
size car for the following Monday, the day of the robbery,
but he was told the only way he'd be guaranteed
a car on that day would be to rent it
over the weekend. That second rental, a nineteen seventy eight
(25:42):
Mercury Marquis, was again returned the following day due to
the engine catching fire. As a replacement, Victor was given
a nineteen seventy three buick Less Saber, the roomy sedand
that police were now desperate to find. For Detective Luby,
there was one more piece to the history besides finding
that car. I knew that that car was important in
(26:05):
the case because it wasn't his and it could indicate
a co conspirator or someone else involved. The guards at
at Wells Fargo had indicated that they thought there was
more than one person involved in this because they could
hear even though they were restrained and they were away
from it, they could hear some kind of conversation in
the background of the depot. There could Victor Harrena been
(26:29):
working with someone else to pull off the robbery. It's
completely plausible, and in fact, even more believable looking back
and closer at the detailed accounts of what happened. There
was one more thing the guards heard as they lay
wide awake on the floor while Victor made several trips
to and from the car. One hank could arguably be
(26:53):
the result of Victor in a hurry to escape with
the currency backs. But two consecutive hanks, now that's intentional.
Why do you beat the horn? He's not saying goodbye
to these two guys, He's saying, I'm coming out. And
then there's this. The West Tarford Police got word that
a car matching the description of the one used in
(27:14):
the heist had been located just outside a local airport.
It was empty, and of course then the first thing. Second,
you can get a plane in and out. There's no
tower there, there's no need to report when you land there.
After hours this season on White Eagle and the money
(27:43):
shows up. That was traceable money, And I'm thinking myself,
your son, I think is something that's organized here? If
she knew she's a great actress, because she was devastated
the FBI and Connecticut never woke up to this thing.
It was the FBI in Puerto Rico that put all together.
They were of folks who wanted Puerto Rico to be
part of the United States, but other folks felt that
(28:04):
that was not what they wanted and they wanted to
be their own nation. Things we could bloat up quite
a bit, and the FBI decided that they were sick
and tired of this business. The fact that Puerto Rico
still being a call on he kind of chose you
that they didn't get the support that they wanted. I
was ready to engage in gunfire if it had to be,
(28:26):
to protect my comrades from from getting caught. This whole
issue is ignited a firestorm of controversy. What we want
to know is why did the President make this decision?
(28:51):
White Eagle has written an executive produced by me Em
William Phelps and Diheart executive producer Christina Everett. Additional writing
by Our Supervisor as In producer Julia Weaver. Our associate
producer and script supervisor is Darby Masters, Audio editing and
mixing by Jackie Huntington's Our series theme forms Regal or
(29:12):
Grand is written by Aaron Kaufman and special thanks to
Arlene Santana and Will Pearson at I heart Radio. For
more podcast from my heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows,
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