Security Is Golden

Robbing banks is as American as apple pie.

The author of that statement is not a spiritual brother to H. Rap Brown ("Violence is as American as cherry pie"). Rather, he is a former FBI agent named William G. Barry, chief of Smith & Wesson Security Services, a year-old firm that advises bankers on how to frustrate the robbers. Barry argues that knocking over banks has always been a particularly popular crime in the U.S., the home of such anti-heroes as the James brothers, John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. Bank robberies in 1969 were running almost twice as high as four years before, and burglaries were also up. Together, they accounted for losses of $9,000,000 in 1969.

The typical stickup man is not a romantic pro but a debt-pressed amateur who works alone. He has become such a nuisance that it hardly pays the banks to buy insurance. The insurers have raised prices so much lately that they are well above the $2,300 taken in an average robbery. Nervous bankers are finding that the best policy is to buy more advanced protective equipment. As a result, the bank equipment suppliers are rushing to keep pace with demand.

Dial-a-Buclc. The most popular new gadget is the "television teller." As installed in Los Angeles' Surety National Bank, among others, it seems straight out of 1984. Customers enter the lobby and go up to television screens that show only the faces of tellers, who are safely locked away on the second floor. All transactions are conducted through an intercom and pneumatic tubes. One unit with tube attachments costs from $11,000 to $23,000. Pittsburgh's Mellon Bank is installing an expensive computer-controlled alarm network that connects all its branches with the central office and transmits different signals for a burglary or a holdup. Some bankers who want to stay open at night but are worried about robberies after dark get around the threat by installing automatic tellers on the walls of the vestibule--at a cost of $17,000 to $23,000 each. The customer inserts a special credit card, punches a secret number on a keyboard, and the machine dispenses cash. Other banks are putting in bulletproof tellers' cages (minimum price: $800 each).

All this has helped to bring a windfall to bank equipment firms. One company, LeFebure of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a division of Walter Kidde, almost tripled its volume between 1966 and 1969, when it posted sales of $19 million. Diebold, Inc., based in Canton, Ohio, increased its volume by more than 50% in the past three years, to an estimated $135 million in 1970.

Bankers' confusion about the myriad protective systems has started a market for at least one consulting firm, Manhattan-based Smith & Wesson Security Services, which sells nothing but advice. In its view one of the most effective deterrents against robbery is slow-motion video-tape cameras, which run continuously for up to 76 hours, taking photos of everything that happens within their range. They can cost $4,000 each but they greatly increase chances of arresting a bandit. In New York City and San Francisco, banking groups ran full-page newspaper ads and circulated posters showing bandits' pictures --captured on tape during holdups --and offered as much as $10,000 for tipoffs leading to their arrest and conviction. Soon after, several of the robbers were nabbed.

Burning Bars. The equipment companies have struck a particularly rich lode in protecting banks against burglars. "In the postwar era," says Philip Zenner, Mosler Safe Company's marketing vice president, "this country has developed by far the best-educated class of criminals we have ever had." Thus the companies are turning out ever more exotic defensive gadgets. For example, to cut alarms without the breaks being noticed, crafty cracksmen now tie in simulators that duplicate the all-safe signal. In a counterattack, both Diebold and Mosler have developed alarm attachments that transmit random signals similar to computer code, which no simulator has yet been able to imitate. Cost: $1,000.

Companies are also making thicker vaults. Chicago's First National Bank has put in vault doors that weigh 87 tons each, the world's heaviest. Doors that size carry a heavy price: $300,000. Most equipment men concede that given enough time a burglar can crack any safe. He has a superweapon: the burning bar. Developed for demolition work, it is a long pipe filled with a magnesium compound that cuts through almost anything.

All the effort to thwart conventional criminals does little to protect banks against the far costlier flimflams of employees. Embezzlement by bank workers cost more than $17 million in 1969, almost twice the losses from robbers and burglars.

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