Banking Law

It used to be that bank tellers with their wits about them would, when staring down the barrel of a gun and slipping wads of cash into a bank robber's sack, slip in an exploding die pack. Of course, that would often result in the robber becoming explosively coated with die at the most inopportune time, perhaps while speeding down an expressway, and could result in carnage on the highway and an unpleasant "fouling of the footpaths" with body parts and defaced currency of the realm. In addition, in these politically correct times, one must select a die color that won't offend the professionally aggrieved, and even blue might cause those seven-foot tall Na'vi from Pandora to go all violently atavistic, so it's been obvious for some time now that a better way of marking and tracking bank robbers simply had to be found.

Hand it to those folks at Bank of America: they might not be able to foreclose on the right house, but when it comes to employing space-age technological solutions to defeat modern-day Dillingers, America's largest bank takes a back seat to no nerd.

On Friday afternoon, police say a woman stuck up the Bank Of America branch on East Delavan Avenue in Buffalo.

The alleged robber, 24 year old Angelique Guillory of Buffalo, walked out of the bank with $2,500, and something else: a GPS device, probably about the size of a credit card that was hidden in the money.

Once the bank notified Buffalo police of both the robbery, and the existence of the GPS device, police were able to track her and found her shortly thereafter, hiding in a garbage tote just a few blocks away.

Angelique doesn't sound like a rocket scientist, and hiding in a garage tote doesn't sound like she actually put the police through a maze-like course of misdirection. Although the report doesn't mention what type of garage tote in which she might have been attempting to conceal her body, it wouldn't surprise me if it was a clear plastic one from The Container Store. Nevertheless, you have to admit that "LoJacking" Angelique's stack of cash is pretty slick.

In typical big-bank/-government/-NFL executive fashion, a BofA spokesman refused to confirm or deny to the reporter that BofA is using GPS devices. I guess the bank assumes that the average bank robber who reads the newspaper or watches television news on a regular basis (we assume this is not a large number) would understand that when the police confirm that the bank conceals a GPS device in its money stacks, that doesn't mean a thing unless the bank also confirms its use. If I were the bank, I'd tell the reporter that sometimes the bank uses a GPS device, sometimes a howler monkey in heat, and sometimes a vial of Ebola virus. "Keep 'Em Really Guessing," that's my motto.

As for die packs, I'm afraid we'll have to bring in singer Toni Braxton to sing you a final farewell seranade:

Say, you, you are so yesterday
Wont let you rain on my parade
Dont wanna hear a thing you say
So yesterday