“They found five weapons and several hundred rounds of ammunition. We found disguises, mustaches, forehead, Halloween masks.”
“That’s when I said, ‘I know who this guy is.'”
“If there was any type of action made toward him, he would physically retaliate. With all the yelling and the screaming, and it was very frightening.”
“I remember thinking, ‘I can’t move, I can’t move.'”
“You just want to get to him in any way you can because you want to stop him, but he’s like a ghost.”
“Inside they found smaller PVC tubes and they were about 3ft in length and probably about 6 inches in diameter.”
“They opened it up and they saw some documents in there that they thought were quite alarming, and they didn’t know what they have. It was way beyond their comprehension of what it could be used for.”
“Once cleared, investigators proceed to unearth what appears to be a paramilitary stockpile.”
“They found five weapons and several rounds of ammunition along with medical equipment, some MREs, some magazines, and some additional documents.”
“It’s very unusual to recover something of that nature in this area, especially. So we really didn’t know what we had at the time.”
“Then investigators discover something even more alarming: the handguns had the serial numbers obliterated. They were ground off. This was not just scraped off; this is taking a grinding machine and grinding the serial number off.”
“When we saw the weapons which had their serial numbers obliterated, we started to become concerned.”
“Whoever was involved in this, obviously was trying to protect their identity, if it was one person or many people.”
“I called our bomb guy and our evidence team and I had a bomb dog come up just to do a cursory search to look for more ammunition, more explosives.”
“We spent the whole day there and then we took everything into custody. We still didn’t know what we had.”
“There was a stack of paper probably 3 or 4 inches thick that basically they were maps that had coded names to them, coded directions to them. Then there were lists of what were stored in various sites, and there must have been like maybe 10 different locations.”
“I knew what it was right away. I recognized the shape of it as the shape of my parking lot on my game lands.”
“We pulled one rock out to verify it and there was the corner of a 20mm ammo can staring back at us. So we knew we had the sight. That was like finding lost gold to me.”
“There were rifles, you had AR-15s, an Uzi, M14 rifle. They were stored in PVC pipes with caps on the end.”
“In total, the team unearths 44 firearms and more proof that this new discovery is connected to the one in Radner.”
“The shoulder weapons had the serial numbers ground off, just as they did in Radner Township.”
“We found probably 5,000 rounds of .223 ammunition. We found disguises, mustaches, forehead, Halloween masks.”
“Well, we’re wondering why would a person go to all that trouble to store these items up in the mountains?”
“That was the thought process when they first found the bunker. The local authorities was the fact that they were dealing with some terrorist group, some supremacist group.”
“The question now is what sort of attack are they planning?”
“My initial impression was whoever did this was somebody who was in a preparation stage, who was gathering data and hadn’t acted yet.”
“There was about 600 documents and these documents included topographical maps. There was a list of banks, 180 banks with surveillance of these banks.”
“It’s clear that whoever stocked the bunker has been keeping very close tabs on numerous banking institutions from Connecticut to Virginia.”
“There were times the banks were open, the hours dictating who came into the bank first, who left the bank, who the last one was out of the bank.”
“You could tell based upon the documents, the writing was all very, very similar. It seemed as though it was someone’s personal records that were actually buried in there.”
“As the pieces of the puzzle come together, it dawns on agents that they may be dealing with something far more ordinary than a terrorist plot.”
“A criminal who is obliterating serial numbers on weapons, who is hiding disguises—hats, masks, bags—in that information there was also newspaper articles about bank robberies. All of those things led us to believe that was a bank robber who had those things stored there.”
“There was no question that whoever was responsible for the bunker was a bank robber. The question was who was it and what banks did he rob?”
“As investigators dig deeper, they quickly learn that several of the banks on the list have already been hit.”
“That’s when I said, ‘I know who this guy is.'”
“And a couple of the guys in there said, ‘Who?’ and I said, ‘This is the Friday Night Bank Robber that we’ve been looking for since 1988.'”
“Put money in the bag!”
“This is the type of organized individual that we’ve been looking for.”
“Back away.”
“Cunning, professional, and prolific. The Friday Night Bank Robber is one of the most notorious characters in the FBI’s file of unsolved crimes.”
“We’re talking about an individual who robbed more banks than John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, perhaps combined.”
“It was game on as soon as he went in, you knew you were being robbed and he was in charge.”
“He was pointing guns at people, he vaulted the counter, ordered the tellers to open the drawers, and he took the money from the counter.”
“In less than 2 minutes he’s gone with several thousand and given the speed of the assault and the mask, no one can even describe what he looked like.”
“Everybody says, ‘Well, what I saw was a gun barrel.’ And basically that’s what they saw. They saw that there was a disguise, but really could not tell us exactly what the disguise was.”
“A couple people were able to see the back of his neck where they could tell he was white and maybe had black hair, but other than that, he was very well concealed.”
“At no time did anyone outside the bank see him entering before he was inside and once he got out of the bank he was gone. There were no witnesses, there was no evidence left behind.”
“His MO suggests that they’re dealing with a highly intelligent, well-trained adversary, and it was evident once he got inside the bank, he went right to where he needed to go in order to obtain what he wanted to obtain.”
“The physicality that he demonstrated was remarkable, leaping from a standstill while he was in front of the counter.”
“Nobody move!”
“He knew exactly what he was doing, he knew exactly who he had to control.”
“Most bank robbers who get away with it the first time will likely strike again.”
“He burst through the outer door. As soon as he hit the outer door, the tellers inside saw him, they set the alarm off. He continued on in through the second door of the bank to his right and the bank manager’s desk was there, and when he saw the masked gunman come in he just instinctively leaned forward, and I think the robber took that as a threat.”
“The Friday Night Bank Robber did not hesitate. He shot and hit the bank manager right center of mass above his navel and very, very severely wounded the bank manager.”
“We felt that this guy must have like ice water in his veins because after he shot the manager, it didn’t phase him at all. He just continued about with his business. He was on a mission and he carried that mission out double time.”
“He displayed that if there was any type of action made toward him that he would physically retaliate.”
“He left no evidence outside, he left no evidence inside. There were no cars abandoned in the area.”
“He would confront others, he would not stop still for being confronted himself. And it made us in law enforcement realize his potential for violence.”
“He would physically assaulted some of the male tellers, pistol-whip one. He was very vulgar and violent in his tone, which was enough to subdue the female tellers.”
“I remember thinking, ‘I can’t move, I can’t move,’ and I just stood there as he was, you know, shouting, ‘Get up! Get up!'”
“And at that point, you know, reality, or whatever kind of struck, and I hit my alarm under my desk and that’s when he jumped over the teller counters.”
“Point somebody puts a gun in your face and just that, that fear, you know, really that he brought with him that night, he left with all of us.”
“You never can tell what an individual will do when they come in armed with a gun, or if you believe they’re armed with the gun. From a victim’s perspective, uh, it can be life-altering.”
“You just want to get to him in any way you can because you want to stop him, but he’s, he’s like a ghost.”
“We’re talking about an individual who robbed more than 27 banks.”
“You just want to get to him in any way you can because you want to stop him, but he’s, he’s like a ghost.”
“The FBI has 150 evidence response teams or ERTs distributed across its field offices nationwide.”
“They use cutting-edge equipment like latent print fuming chambers and high magnification fiber optic imagers to assist them in investigations.”
“Is the most disciplined adversary that the police, to the FBI had, because of his professionalism as a criminal.”
“Why would a person go to all that trouble to store these items up in the mountains? What purpose is it serving?”
“We discussed various things, but we couldn’t really come up with an idea or a reason why anyone would do that.”
“We knew that we had somebody who was most unusual doing this and I never had any doubt that it was our Friday Night Bank Robber.”
“He’s not your typical bank robber. Your typical bank robber that you’re used to seeing is someone that’s local, someone that’s usually involved in drugs, someone that works with many other people. This individual is working alone. This individual planned his offenses and every bank was located near a wooded area, so that he used that wooded area to be able to effectuate or be able to get away.”
“We started conducting stakeouts every Friday night along the whole eastern Pennsylvania and into New York.”
“The likely banks were ones that fit the description of the banks he had previously robbed and also some of the banks that he had robbed in the past because there were several banks that he had robbed twice.”
“We were never successful in being at the same bank at the same time.”
“How he manages to continually elude detection has the FBI and local law enforcement baffled.”
“At times it seems as if he could actually be toying with them, purposely luring authorities into a strange game of cat and mouse.”
“On at least one occasion we had a surveillance team on a bank during a night that it was not robbed. Following Friday night, that bank was robbed.”
“Anybody move!”
“He removed all the money from the safe and then fled out through the front doors. He got in excess of $120,000 at the time of the robbery, which is well more than any other robbery that we had investigated to date in that area.”
“We went through the wood lines trying to find physical evidence. We went door to door talking to citizens to see if anybody had seen anything at the time of the robbery.”
“But once again, the Friday Night Bank Robber seems to have vanished into thin air.”
“Well, it’s quite frustrating. You want to resolve the issues. You want to work and try and come up with a game plan that we could successfully find the individual who’s responsible, but it, it’s frustrating. You have nothing to work with.”
“There’s a guy that’s been robbing banks since like 1988 and we have no idea who this guy is.”
“In putting all this information together and reading, I have a real good feel of what type of individual that we’re looking for.”
“It was a white male. We figured it was anywhere between 5’4″ and 5’8″. He stayed to himself. He most likely had military training. He was most likely into exercising some type of physical activity such as martial arts. He had a very good working knowledge of weapons. He had a very good working knowledge of the areas that he was in.”
“He was very formidable in what he did. He made things difficult for law enforcement for many, many, many years because of his propensity to plan and because of his intelligence. He was smart.”
“But after the discovery of the military-style bunkers in Pennsylvania, investigators have a whole new set of questions.”
“Why the huge cache of weapons? Could the Friday Night Bank Robber be planning something even bigger?”
“The concern now was someone going to get hurt again. We were trying to prevent that from happening.”
“We had a large meeting and leads were distributed to all the different agencies and all the different entities that were at the meeting in order to help this thing move forward.”
“Inside of that first bunker was a list of books and all these books were statistics books. So I’m thinking either he really likes math or he works in that area.”
“The list also references the Camp Hill Juvenile Detention Facility and a middle school in the town of Lower Merion, both in Pennsylvania.”
“One of the things they came across was karate videos and underneath the karate videos it had Dilman plaques.”
“What is that?”
“So a friend of mine decides to Google Dilman and he comes up with Dilman Karate.”
“But as investigators soon discover, Dilman Karate is a huge national chain with franchises in more than a 100 cities.”
“We told him the type of individual we’re looking for. We said he’s anywhere between 5’4″ and 5’8″, he’s kind of stayed himself, he likes weapons, maybe prior military experience.”
“Look, I have 430 dojos in this country. That could be just about anybody.”
“I’m going to send leads out to all these dojos throughout the country, see what we get, at least start in the areas where the banks have been robbed.”
“But before we do that, there’s three of these dojos that are affiliated with Dilman Karate right here in the Philadelphia area.”
“Ray Carr was able to develop one that was 5 or 10 miles at the most from where the bunker was discovered in Radner.”
“We were going to go in there and say, ‘Hey, is there a short guy in here who’s very into math, who doesn’t talk too much about his personal life?'”
“When we went into the karate studio, the first guy we met was rather short.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a school teacher.”
“High school teacher, okay. What do you teach?”
“Chemistry.”
“What high school you teach at?”
“I immediately became suspicious. He could be the Friday Night Robber.”
“He was the same height, you know, the interest in math, he’s in the karate studio we’re talking about, and that’s just was the red flags for me.”
“When you do what myself and other agents have done for years and years, you can tell when someone is lying to you. Doesn’t take much, you know right away when someone’s lying.”
“As a matter of fact, he’s one of the top karate guys within the dojo.”
“What does he do for a living?”
“He’s a self-employed statistician.”
“Really?”
“He indicated that Carl was one of his closest friends.”
“Do you know if Carl’s married?”
“Gee, I don’t know.”
“I think everybody in the room realized that there might be more going on with him than we originally thought.”
“We go back to the barracks and we run him up, Gagasian, and we come up with a criminal history.”
“He’s shot when he’s 15 years old in a buttock committing a burglary of a candy store in Haverford Township and he spends a year in Camp Hill, Camp Hill Juvenile Detention Center.”
“Gagasian’s prints are immediately sent to the FBI lab for comparison against any prints technicians can find on the bunker materials.”
“He graduates from Villanova and goes into the military just during the Vietnam War, yet he doesn’t get deployed.”
“He leaves the military and winds up at University of Penn for his master’s degree in electrical engineering, and then he goes on to Penn State and does postgraduate work in statistics.”
“Oh my God, he lives directly across the street in the apartment complex from where the first bunker was found.”
“He’s CIA, right?”
“No.”
“Then he’s got to be in the witness protection program.”
“No. Why do you say that?”
“Because he’s weird.”
“Why is he weird?”
“Because he runs a lot.”
“Well, I run too. I don’t see that why that’s weird.”
“Yeah, but he runs fully clothed with a backpack.”
“He was out getting into shape, he was out physically conditioning himself and doing so, running in his regular street clothing.”
“We also found out that he didn’t have a job that he went to every day and that he presented himself as being an unemployed statistician.”
“I’m sure that he either saw the FBI recovering the stuff that night or a little check he did when he walked through the area, he saw that his stuff was disturbed and at that point he knew he had a problem.”
“It wasn’t 24/7 on him, so it was intermittent as we were looking for things to try and put more together on him.”
“This is one of the largest sites that we found.”
“They’re an exact match for Carl Gagasian.”
“We linked him to the bunkers and we believed he was linked to the banks as well.”
“There wasn’t a smoking gun or any direct physical evidence against him in reference to the banks, but there was a lot of circumstantial evidence against him.”
“He worked out a lot. He went to the Philadelphia Free Public Library. He would do some banking, didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, just a regular guy.”
“9/11 occurred and as a result everything in the FBI stopped and our energies and focus was directed towards terrorism. Bank robberies were not as important.”
“The Gagasian case took a backseat.”
“Same way, same MO.”
“The guy went in just prior to closing, vaulted teller counter, was wearing a Halloween-type mask with a gun in his hand, baggy clothing, same height and weight as Gagasian.”
“After a three-year hiatus, the Friday Night Bank Robber seems to be back in business.”
“And the more active he is, the greater the chance of someone getting hurt again or even killed.”
“We felt as though we could not jeopardize the employees of those banks. We could not jeopardize the civilians in that area, the law enforcement officers in that area. If we had him identified, we needed to arrest him.”
“The arrest was initially going to take place at his residence, at his apartment, but we were very concerned because we knew Carl had military experience, had Special Forces training. We knew that he had a propensity, and he was very familiar with weapons, so we were concerned about the safety of the agents doing the arrest.”
“Go, go, go!”
“You’re not so scary anymore now that you don’t have the mask on and you don’t have the gun in your hand. You’re really just kind of a sad, older guy.”
“We had a completely circumstantial case, but the way that we tied it together inferentially was through linking numerous bank robberies, and linking those bank robberies to information that was found in the bunker, which in fact was linked to Carl Gagasian.”
“They had us go down to take a look at the masks, the guns, to look at what they had been able to recover at that point to see if we recognized any of it. And at that point, it was probably 6 years after it had taken place, after time, things get a little bit fuzzy.”
“Yes, that looks like the mask.”
“And if the tellers can identify the mask, that’s going to help you a lot. That’s going to go a long way.”
“He wanted to speak with me and that I was probably going to get one shot to talk to him.”
“It was very fascinating when you think of a bank robber, you think of someone that’s very violent in nature. When you meet him, as soon as you sit down and talk to him, you’re going to be turned off, there’s going to be a barrier.”
“Well, I sat down with Carl and I was almost immediately, immediately disarmed.”
“He preferred to do hostile takeover robberies of the banks because he actually didn’t get along very well with people. He was a shy person, so his thought was that if he gained control of the people in the bank, there would be less opportunity or less confrontation with the people in the bank at the time, and he could get in and out with the least amount of confrontation that he could.”
“Not only does Gagasian admit to being the Friday Night Bank Robber, he tells investigators exactly how and why it all began.”
“During one of Carl Gagasian’s first robbery attempts at age 15, he got caught in the act. When he got out of Camp Hill, he went back to high school and one of the things that the counselor told him was, ‘This is going to hurt you and you’ll probably never be able to get a job.'”
“So despite a stellar academic record, Gagasian ultimately decides the military is his only option.”
“He put in for a certain position that needed top-secret clearance. When he didn’t get that position, he thought it was his background that prevented him from getting that position.”
“So he decided, ‘You know, I’m never going to be able to get a job. So I got to find some way to make money.’ And he read an article in the paper about a guy that robbed a bank and the guy got $80,000. They thought, ‘I can do this,’ and that’s when he decided to enter his career in bank robbery.”
“That was his job.”
“So he had been robbing banks for 16 years before we even knew he was robbing banks.”
“He had this van, box van, and in the back of the box van there was a motorcycle or off-road dirt bike.”
“He would drive that van to within 8 or 10 miles of the target bank. He would then jump on this off-road dirt bike, ride it down the road and then through the woods till he was anywhere from 3 to 4 miles from the bank.”
“Then he would hike through the woods to the surface of the bank which was usually backed up to a wooded area.”
“He would rob the bank, exit the bank, and go back into the woods.”
“He would stash the money and his equipment in an area, and jump on his dirt bike, go back to his van, and then leave. And he’d come back a couple days later and pick up the money and his gun and his clothing.”
“I personally was surprised when he said he’s going to plead to the charges. I felt he was a intelligent individual. I didn’t think he would give up that easily.”
“In exchange for a 17-and-a-half-year prison term, Gagasian agrees to share all of his secrets with the FBI.”
“He provided a training tape. He talks about his life, robbing banks, some of the things that banks can do to protect themselves against the typical bank robber, and we use this to go out and provide training to local, federal, and state law enforcement agencies throughout the country.”
“But several mysteries remain. Why the elaborate bunker system? Why the arsenal of weaponry? And what did he do with all that money?”
“A lot of these things that were in the bunkers tied him to these bank robberies. He did not want these things to be in his home. He figured if it’s not here then they can’t charge me with it. If it’s somewhere else it could be anybody’s.”
“Over the 30-year period, Carl probably amassed more than $2 million from the theft of these banks.”
“He was a gambler and he spent all of his time, it seems to me, either gambling, preparing to gamble, recovering from gambling, or preparing to rob banks.”
“Carl said, ‘You know, I looked at bank robbery as a victimless crime. With you right now, why should they be concerned about it? I’m not taking their money, it belongs to the bank.'”
“Carl, you got to go through those people to get that money, and what you did to do that, uh, terrified those people.”
“Where’s the…”
“When he starts pointing that gun and starts yelling and screaming at you, what he takes from you is your sense of security.”
“He took something from me that does make me angry, that he just thought that he could just come in and take this money and nobody would be affected by it.”
“But despite all his brazen acts, Carl Gagasian would have likely remained a ghost forever had it not been for a random discovery in the Radner woods.”
“He was someone who arguably could have been successful in many other types of endeavors, but in fact elected to become an infamous bank robber, perhaps the most successful bank robber that this country has ever seen.”
“What you got here is a con man who’s also a serial killer. You know, I’m not sure which came first.”
