The rancid smell of wet carpet greeted employees of Angel’s on the Bay Evaluation Center in Howard Beach Monday morning. Like their neighboring tenants, Sovereign Bank, the workers discovered water, debris and a large hole in the concrete wall separating the businesses.A crew of three to four thieves left the mess after smashing its way into the bank’s vault over Easter weekend, making off with more than $100,000 in cash and approximately $300,000 in loot from customers’ safety deposit boxes.
“It seems like some more planning went into this than most (typical) burglaries,” said FBI spokesman Matthew Bertron.
There is also speculation about the similarities between this heist and those of certain movies, including “The Bank Job.”
Police believe the crooks used a secretly copied key to enter the evaluation center, located at 162-30 Cross Bay Blvd., where they drilled through a cement and steel wall and flooded a sink — possibly short-circuting the bank’s alarms — in order to cover up their tracks.
In the film, the robbers rented an office space two doors from a bank, dug a tunnel leading into the bank so they could gain entry from the inside.
In the Sovereign Bank heist, once the crooks were inside the bank, they broke through a second wall to reach the vault and 400 safety deposit boxes, about 25 percent of which were compromised, according to Sovereign Bank spokesman Michael Armstrong.
“To the best of our knowledge, there is no reason to believe there has been any impact on customer accounts at the branch,” he added. But there was concern about locating the safety deposit box owners and determining what and how much was stolen. Bank officials spent most of Tuesday doing outreach to customers, Armstrong said.
Carol Verdi, who manages the evaluation center for HeartShare Human Services of New York, cannot even begin to estimate how much damage the center incurred. It was grave enough that the FBI brought in special evidence recovery crews to collect forensic evidence jeopardized by the flooding.
“Our office is pretty much decimated,” Verdi said. Sitting in three inches of water, confidential files, toys, carpets, furniture and thousands of dollars worth of expensive psychological testing kits were destroyed.
“You know what the real sin here is?” she asked. “The whole history of the agency is destroyed.” Hundreds of pictures, slides, documents and other historical items, stored in Verdi’s office, were ruined. The sentimental value is especially painful for Verdi, who spent 26 years collecting and gathering mementos, now reduced to relics in trash bags.
The crew caused further destruction in the center’s conference room, which it sprayed with fire extinguishers, hoping the foam would conceal any traces they left behind.
With both the front and rear doors of the center open to air out the dank office, employees wearing masks and gloves began the arduous task of cleaning up and sorting through debris. Workers, hired by the bank and the building’s landlord, K & P Operating Corp., milled about with noisy tools used to soak up water and rip out carpets.
They also patched up the destroyed wall, located inside two adjoining closets, one of which held goods for the center’s May fund-raiser. Verdi said the thieves emptied the closets, dumping the contents into a hallway, removed the shelves and drilled through the wall.
Cops believe the thieves had sledgehammers, crowbars and heavy-duty drills, and spent about a day and a half pulling off the Hollywood-style heist. The center was closed for the holiday from March 19 until Monday, March 24 and the bank closed for the weekend at 1 p.m. on Saturday.
It is possible that the caper began as early as March 17, when one of the center’s window panels was punched out, according to published reports. Initally, cops credited St. Patrick’s Day vandals with the broken window, but now believe it was the crew of crooks that broke in to steal and copy the center’s key, which it later returned.
The center will remain closed indefinitely, causing a major setback for the agency, which performs between 12 and 15 evaluations each week. “We just can’t function without an office,” Verdi said.
Employees have had to cancel appointments or relocate students to the agency’s other locations. They are waiting for insurance workers to examine and evaluate the damage, which Verdi fears will include mold.
The bank was expected to reopen on March 26 and return to business as usual.
As part of the investigation, police are trying to determine whether there is a connection between this robbery and another that occurred Monday in Long Island City, where a crook stole $26,000 from Telemundial Inc, according to published reports. Cops arrested one suspect in that robbery.
The FBI-NYPD Joint Bank Robbery Task Force is still investigating.
