All-American heist makes comeback

The "war on terror", financial hard times and even the fear of Sars are being linked to an upsurge in the most traditional of all American criminal activities: robbing banks.

Law enforcement officials have noted a rise in the robberies across the country, and in New York the rate has tripled, with 180 so far this year, compared with about 60 in the same period in 2002. The crime has been steadily coming back into fashion since 1999.

The trend took a tragic turn on Friday when two bank customers - a university professor and his wife - and a cashier were shot dead in a raid in the small town of Greer, South Carolina.

The branch was so small it was inside a caravan, and the cashier, Sylvia Holtzclaw, was working alone, something she had often told her family she found worrying.

Normally, Americans are phlegmatic about a crime which even the FBI admits it regards as almost victimless, and several recent cases have had a particularly bizarre, almost touching, tinge to them.

A Baptist minister has confessed to robbing six banks in Oklahoma, and in Pennsylvania a kindergarten teacher, Marc Lauer, was arrested after allegedly marching into a branch wearing a Halloween mask and stealing $2,500. His school principal, Joanne Boston, called him a "super-nice guy."

"The kids loved him and he did a beautiful job with them," she said.

Criminologists say the rise in New York crimes coincided with a big increase in local unemployment late last year, and they noted that the police were being stretched by anti-terrorism duties and cutbacks.

"Their plate is extremely full and all we do is give them more to do," Eli Silverman, of John Jay College, told the New York Daily News.

However, the city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, blamed the banks, saying they had concluded that the cost of increased security outweighed losses. The average takings in the New York raids have been less than $5,000. In one case they were $98. In March, a homeless man reportedly robbed a Manhattan bank to buy food.

The Sars connection emerged last Tuesday in Franklin, Tennessee, when a man wearing a business suit, a dust mask, baseball cap and white gloves stole an undisclosed sum from a bank. Unlike many of the robbers, this one definitely did have a gun rather than merely pretending. However, his menacing outfit failed to alarm passers-by.

"I thought it was a little weird, but thought maybe he was afraid of catching Sars or something," one witness, Miranda Nichols, told the local newspaper, the Tennessean.