Pod Insights Infamous America [ENCORE] NORTH HOLLYWOOD ROBBERY Ep. 1 | “High Incident Bandits” About this episode In the 1990s, Los Angeles was the reigning bank robbery capital of the world. As two young men from Pasadena became increasingly disgruntled, they gravitated toward armed robbery. One wanted wealth and status. The other wanted a sense of belonging. They found a fast road to national infamy.
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Transcript 0:12 Speaker 00 The lobby of the North Hollywood branch of Bank of America was packed on the morning of February 28, 1997. It was the last day of the month, and it was a Friday, which meant it was payday. By 9:15 a.m., there were already a few dozen customers in the bank. The branch was on Laurel Canyon Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. The Valley, as it's referred to in L.A., is the sprawling network of connected cities that lie north of the famous areas of downtown L.A., Hollywood, and Santa Monica. The Valley is the more quiet, residential, family-oriented part of the greater Los Angeles area, at least relative to the continual chaos of tourism, movie premieres, and general
0:56 Speaker 00 mayhem of the rest of the city. On that morning in February of 1997, the North Hollywood branch of Bank of America was missing a teller, so the line was long. There was a woman in her 70s, a man with his teenage son, people cashing paychecks, couples applying for home loans. But none of them were prepared when a customer walked out of the doors on the north side of the bank at roughly 9:20 a.m. and was thrown back inside and pushed to the floor. The customers weren't prepared for the two men who stalked inside. They wore ski masks, combat gear from head to toe, and tactical vests strapped with ammunition.
1:41 Speaker 00 They carried automatic rifles that most of the customers had only seen in action movies. The customers still hadn't processed what was about to happen when one of the men shouted for everyone to get on the ground and to shut their eyes. The other man fired a volley from his assault rifle into the ceiling. Dust and debris rained down on the customers. The sound was deafening in the confined space. The noise echoed off the protective plexiglass that separated the customers from the tellers. It was so loud it could be heard outside and across the street, even above the clamor of morning traffic. The bank was being robbed and the robbers meant business.
2:23 Speaker 00 But even then, no one inside the bank or out on the street could have envisioned the scene that unfolded over the next hour. No one could have envisioned the war zone that the 6,600 block of Laurel Canyon Boulevard was about to become. Until that time, such a scene was the province of Hollywood. But in North Hollywood, in February of 1997, it was real. And much of it played out on live TV. No one had ever seen anything like the North Hollywood robbery.
3:03 Speaker 00 From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling the story of the North Hollywood robbery and the unprecedented battle between two gunmen and the Los Angeles Police Department. This is episode one, High Incident Bandits.
3:24 Speaker 00 By the mid 1990s, it had become a cliche on the nightly news and in the columns of the LA Times. But cliche or not, it was accurate. Los Angeles was the bank robbery capital of the world. The trend began in the 1970s. By the end of the 1980s, the commonly held belief was that there was a bank robbery every business hour somewhere in greater Los Angeles. And there were numbers to back it up. Over 2,600 robberies happened in LA in 1992 alone. That was one out of every four robberies nationwide. The FBI had a special branch in LA to work with local law enforcement because the region had more bank heists than the next four regions combined.
4:16 Speaker 00 Law enforcement attributed the huge numbers to a variety of challenges. It was a sprawling region with a massive population. 8.8 million people lived in 4,000 square miles. The most recent numbers show that Los Angeles County, which is essentially the city of LA and all its communities, is home to more than 10 million people. That's double the size of the next most populated county in America, Cook County in Illinois, the home of Chicago. Policing that many people over such a vast area was daunting. And then there was the freeway system. 1,000 miles of freeways crisscrossed LA County. Many times, banks, like gas stations,
5:00 Speaker 00 were built near freeway on-ramps and off-ramps that seemed to be everywhere. That was convenient for customers and wonderfully convenient for robbers. Robbers could hit a bank, jump on a freeway, and be miles away before the police could even begin to mobilize. In response to the growing number of robberies, the banking community realized that security measures needed to evolve. Banks installed multiple silent alarms. They placed dye packs in stacks of bills. They expanded and enhanced closed-circuit TV monitoring systems inside and outside the buildings. High-target banks added double sets of locking doors at the entrance,
5:44 Speaker 00 sometimes known as "mantraps." And banks began installing what were called "bandit barriers," thick plexiglass walls that ran from the countertop to the ceiling in front of the tellers. Bank employees would now be completely separated from the customers. The barriers prevented the classic tradition of Old West outlaws and gangsters like John Dillinger, who leapt over the counter and put guns in the faces of the employees. Dillinger was so quick and agile that he was nicknamed "The Jack Rabbit." But that old-school tactic was impossible with the Bandit Barriers. It was more difficult for someone to walk into a bank and simply slide a note to the teller
6:27 Speaker 00 and then make off with a paper bag full of money. Some of the barriers were designed to withstand small arms fire, and all the combined security measures paid dividends. While LA retained its dubious title in the 1990s, the incidents began to tick down as the decade went on, and the arrest rate slowly ticked up. But there was a consequence. Law enforcement categorizes different types of bank robberies, and the one that is probably the scariest is called a takeover robbery. Armed individuals or groups storm the bank, use fear and the threat of violence to subdue the employees and the customers, and then carry out the robbery.
7:09 Speaker 00 The new security measures began to reduce the number of less violent robberies, but takeover robberies were on the rise. For many years, takeovers had accounted for less than 5% of robberies in Los Angeles. By 1992, that number had shot up to 30%. For a certain class of robber, the safety measures simply didn't matter. If they wanted to rob a bank, they were going to do it no matter what. And in the 1990s, in the San Fernando Valley, there were two lost young men who took the takeover robbery to the most extreme and dangerous level. Like most criminals, they started small and worked their way up to the terrifying events of February 28, 1997.
7:55 Speaker 00 But for these two, the escalation happened really quickly.
8:03 Speaker 00 Emil Madasaranu first stepped foot on American soil at the age of 10. He and his father immigrated from their native Romania in 1977, but Emil's mother arrived first. Valerie was an opera singer, and three years earlier, she had defected while her company was on tour in Italy. She made her way to the United States and settled in Pasadena, California, a city in the San Gabriel Mountains, 10 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.
8:33 Speaker 00 Emil was overweight as a boy and struggled to make friends in his new home. He was teased for his weight and for his poor English. Emil was enamored with the new culture around him, but he couldn't find his place in it. By the time he was thirteen, most of his time was split between school and working for his mother. They had moved to a larger house in nearby Altadena, and Valerie had been granted a license by the state to run an in-home care facility for developmentally disabled adults. She called it Valerie's Villa. She could receive up to $4,000 a month for each of the six adults in her care, but the family always seemed to be struggling financially.
9:20 Speaker 00 Emil's social life failed to improve when he got to high school. He didn't play sports, he didn't join clubs, and he was bullied constantly. While he might have had a few friends, he was never what anyone would consider popular. After high school, Emil, who had always been good with computers, got a degree in programming from DeVry Institute. A neighbor recalled that Valerie threw him a graduation party, but if Emil had any friends, they didn't show up. According to the neighbor, no one did. Now in his early twenties, Emil tried to start a computer programming business, but it floundered. He continued to live with his mother at Valerie's Villa. By that point, his parents had separated,
10:05 Speaker 00 and Emil felt bound to his mother and his struggling business. Resentment began to build inside him. Stuck there with few prospects in front of him, he sought solace in hobbies that represented freedom and self-reliance, and helped him forget his powerlessness. One of those hobbies was motorcycles. He spent time and money upgrading a used Kawasaki sport bike. He also got into bodybuilding. It was a well-established pursuit for young men in image-obsessed Southern California, but for Emil it took on greater meaning. Lifting weights and shedding pounds were ways to achieve the transformation he so desperately wanted in his life.
10:47 Speaker 00 But more than anything, Emil liked guns. By most accounts, he owned several weapons by the early 1990s. He avidly read articles in Soldier of Fortune magazine about cleaning and modifying weapons.
11:02 Speaker 00 At his mother's business, Valerie's Villa, new troubles arose. Valerie and Emil ran afoul of state inspectors. The facility was cited repeatedly for not providing adequate care, and for failing to maintain a clean and safe environment. There had even been a citation for firearms not being properly secured around their live-in patients. Emil and his mother saw the citations as harassment. Emil viewed them as another form of bullying. It was more evidence that the world was out to get him. In 1990, Emil visited his extended family in Romania, and he returned home with a new bride named Cristina.
11:46 Speaker 00 But married life didn't exactly suit him, and his personality grew increasingly volatile. He threatened a neighbor with a chainsaw when the neighbor's dog ran onto his lawn and physically assaulted a patient in his mother's care. Emil, who was now six feet one inches tall and weighed 300 pounds, longed to escape from his mother, his failing business, and his stagnant life. He moved through the world daydreaming of faster bikes, bigger biceps, and more powerful guns. But for once, he wasn't alone. And no, his companion wasn't his wife. Emil Matasaranu thought he had made a friend, or maybe more of a comrade, a brother in arms.
12:30 Speaker 00 His new friend also liked bodybuilding and guns, and he also had a difficult family background. When Emil met Larry Phillips Jr., it took just four years for the weightlifting buddies to transform themselves into heavily armed bank robbers.
12:50 Speaker 00 Larry Phillips Jr.'s family life was the perfect breeding ground for a career of crime. His mother used more than half a dozen different names throughout her life. Until Larry was a teenager, the only job she was known to have had was as a prostitute. Allegedly, she served prison time for a drug charge and was rumored to have assaulted a guard with a jailhouse shiv.
13:15 Speaker 00 Larry's father had already had more than a few run-ins with the law by the time Larry was born in 1970. Larry Senior's rap sheet ran from "Undistinguished," a gas station holed up near Denver, to utterly bizarre and macabre, "Desecration of a Grave." While they claimed it was merely a drunken prank, Larry Senior and some high school friends had exhumed a corpse and attempted to cut off its head. That had earned him just under a year in the state reformatory. After he got out, the gas station robbery earned him another ten. After being transferred to a state-run mental institution, Larry Senior was somehow able to escape.
13:57 Speaker 00 He and his then-girlfriend were on the run and operating under the last name Warful. The couple ran to the west coast, where their son Larry Junior was born in downtown Los Angeles. Larry Phillips was Larry Warful on his birth certificate. He lived under an alias for more than half his life. The family was able to elude the search for Larry Senior for several years, but while living south of Denver in 1976, federal agents caught up with them. At a birthday party for Larry Junior, federal agents stormed the house and took Larry Senior into custody.
14:38 Speaker 00 Instead of blowing out his candles, the birthday boy watched the police handcuff his father and haul him away. The event was burned into Larry Junior's memory, and it was the beginning of his hatred of law enforcement. Larry Junior's parents divorced in 1980, and though he still saw his father, Larry Junior lived with his mother in Los Angeles. He would make it to the end of ninth grade, but that was it. He became obsessed with weightlifting and dreamed of becoming a bodybuilder. Although it was on the other side of LA from his Pasadena home, Phillips joined Gold's Gym in Venice. It was advertised as the Mecca of bodybuilding,
15:19 Speaker 00 and Larry hoped to rub shoulders with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno, and maybe follow in their footsteps. But getting bigger and stronger wasn't Larry's only dream. The glamour of Los Angeles infected him, and he became obsessed with wealth. He pored over car magazines, and imagined being behind the wheel of a Ferrari or Lamborghini. He talked about wanting to have his own jet and live in a mansion. Years later, Larry's half-brother told police that Larry idolized the wrong people, people like Mike Milliken. Mike Milliken went to prison for violating federal securities trading laws, but made billions before he got caught.
16:02 Speaker 00 New York mobster Jimmy Burke was also on the list of idols. Jimmy the Gent spearheaded the infamous Lufthansa heist, and got away with nearly $6 million in cash and jewelry, and never served a day in prison for it. And Larry almost certainly knew about Jimmy because of the iconic movie Goodfellas that came out in 1990. But for at least a time, Larry tried to join the ranks of the wealthy through legitimate means. He earned a provisional real estate license, but while waiting to take the final exams, a shoplifting arrest from his past showed up on a background check, and he was banned from selling real estate. That was the quick end of Larry's brief attempt to make legitimate money.
16:48 Speaker 00 Then he decided to pursue the world of real estate illegally. He formed a phony company and began selling second mortgages under the noses of oblivious property owners. He got caught when he tried to sell the same second mortgage to the same broker twice while using two different names. A couple months later, he was busted for suspicion of selling fake deeds. He was arrested with a forged bank check for $25,000 and a 9mm Browning pistol.
17:20 Speaker 00 Criminal charges didn't stick, but he lost a civil lawsuit and was ordered to pay $140,000 in restitution and court fees. Larry Phillips was just 22 years old at that point. He was a high school dropout who now had real responsibilities. He had married a longtime girlfriend and they had a child. But his obsession with a lifestyle that was so far out of reach couldn't be abated. His father told reporters much later, Larry loved material things, and he would go about getting them any way he possibly could. The son would soon prove the father's words to be all too true.
18:05 Speaker 00 Emil met Larry at Gold's Gym in Venice, California, just blocks from the world famous Muscle Beach. They bonded over weightlifting and bodybuilding, but must have looked like an odd pairing. Larry was 5'10" tall and struggled to get his mass over 200 pounds. Emil was four years older, was 6'1", and sometimes weighed over 325 pounds. Later, journalists described their relationship as lopsided. The manipulative Larry Phillips controlled the massive but passive Emil Madassaranu, who had few friends. Emil's mother always saw the relationship as one-sided, with the untrustworthy Larry
18:49 Speaker 00 Phillips bending her son to his will and keeping secrets. But outwardly, the two appeared to be friends. And sometime between 1989 and early 1993, the two wannabe bodybuilders who liked to go to shooting ranges with Emil's growing gun collection turned to a life of crime.
19:12 Speaker 00 A 1993 armored car robbery in Littleton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, is thought to be the first crime they committed. They grabbed the man at gunpoint who was delivering money to a bank, but they made a rookie mistake. They grabbed him while he was on his way out of the bank. On his way in, he carried a bag that contained nearly $200,000 in brand-new bills. On his way out, he carried less than $25,000 in torn and tattered bills that were scheduled to be destroyed. The hall was certainly weak and underwhelming, but the two young robbers had to be pleased with their execution. The delivery man couldn't provide detailed descriptions of the robbers, and Larry and
19:57 Speaker 00 Emil had escaped without a confrontation. But plans for any additional heists were going to be put on hold. In October of that year, Emil and Larry were back in the San Fernando Valley. They had rented a Ford Thunderbird, and with Larry driving, they peeled out of the lot of a Valero gas station. They didn't know that an undercover cop was also there. The officer rolled out of the lot behind them and tracked them for about a mile before he flipped on his lights and pulled them over. Right away, Larry was combative with the officer. He didn't want to give a name and claimed that his wallet was at home. When the officer asked about the ownership of the car, and Emil chimed in and said
20:41 Speaker 00 it belonged to his mother, the officer knew they were lying. He had already run the license plate and knew it was a rental. The officer instructed Larry to get out of the car. The officer patted Larry down while keeping an eye on the bigger man in the passenger seat. When the officer discovered a 9mm handgun in Larry's waistband, he called for backup. This wasn't going to be a routine traffic stop.
21:08 Speaker 00 With Larry and Emil out of the car and in handcuffs, the Glendale police officers searched the vehicle and found an arsenal: two semi-automatic rifles, two .45 caliber pistols, smoke bombs and improvised explosive devices, a gas mask, sunglasses, and ski masks, radios and multiple California license plates, and more than 3,000 rounds of ammunition, some loaded into clips that were taped together for easier reloading, and some loaded into Chinese-made ammo drums that were capable of holding up to 75 rounds each. The police called it "a bank robbery kit" in their reports.
21:50 Speaker 00 Larry and Emil were both charged with conspiracy to commit bank robbery, unlawful activity, and carrying loaded and concealed weapons. Additionally, Larry was charged with felony perjury. Larry, who was still wanted in Colorado, could face up to eight years in jail if convicted. Prosecutors in Denver didn't extradite Larry so that the Glendale police could pursue the more serious felony gun charges. At trial, the two men received plea deals. Two months after the traffic stop, Emil was sentenced to 71 days for misdemeanor and felony weapons charges. Larry received a 99-day sentence for misdemeanor weapons possession
22:33 Speaker 00 and a felony charge of false impersonation. The short stints in prison might have put their lives on pause, but jail time wouldn't come close to scaring either man straight.
22:50 Speaker 00 The sentences that each man received came with 36 months of probation, and details of their relationship during probation are few. It's known that the financial troubles of Emil and his mother grew in the early part of 1995. They borrowed a lot of money and used Valerie's villa as collateral. But then, the state rescinded their adult care license due to multiple citations.
23:16 Speaker 00 Whether or not Emil's mounting debt drove them to it isn't certain, but he and Larry were back in the robbery game in June of 1995, and this time with deadly results. At lunchtime on June 14, Herman Cook exited the rear of a Bank of America near the corner of Winnetka and Roscoe Boulevards in the Winnetka neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. He was a 51-year-old Texan who worked for Brink's Armored Cars. He was pushing an empty cart back to the vehicle after making a cash delivery to the bank, when he was shot three times in the abdomen.
23:56 Speaker 00 Cook fell to his knees, but the shooting continued. He dragged himself around to the other side of the truck to use it for cover. It's not clear if he was wearing a protective vest, but an LAPD official said later that it wouldn't have mattered. Two gunmen had stationed themselves behind a short wall about 20 feet from the armored car. They were using high-powered rifles at close range, and a vest would have offered little protection. One of the gunmen wore a mask, and he fired a volley at the vehicle near the driver's door. The second gunman waved his rifle at the people who walked out of the adjacent gas station, and they scrambled behind cars and dumpsters. Then the gunman jumped over the wall and hurried to the truck.
24:41 Speaker 00 The armored car driver fired just two shots from the pistol portal in the door, but he was sure he had hit the approaching gunman center mass with one of his rounds. The bullet seemed to have no effect. The gunman grabbed a bag out of the open side door of the truck. Then both gunmen fled on foot to a nearby car and drove away. The rounds fired at the truck by the man thought to be Emil Madassaranu pierced the door and the windshield and struck the driver four times. He survived, but Herman Cook did not. The bag of money that had been grabbed, probably by Larry Phillips, contained $122,000.
25:24 Speaker 00 The police launched an investigation. Bank of America and Brink's offered rewards that totaled $100,000 for information that led to arrests. Eyewitnesses gave descriptions of the gunman who didn't wear a mask. Investigators knew the make and model of the getaway car, a 1985 blue Chevy Celebrity. They also knew the men had automatic weapons, ammo to spare, and may have been equipped with bulletproof vests or body armor. And finally, they knew the robbers had no problem killing someone in a uniform. But the investigation led nowhere. Even the $100,000 reward didn't lead to any helpful information.
26:05 Speaker 00 Phillips and Matasaranu were in the wind, and they stayed gone for nearly a year. Then in March of 1996, there was a failed robbery of another Brink's truck where a driver was again injured by rounds from an automatic weapon. Shell casings matched those at the scene of the previous robbery, but this time the driver was able to escape with the truck. The robbery attempt put the LAPD back on high alert. But there was a problem that was reminiscent of the 1930s, when robbers could quickly flee across state lines and the authorities had trouble coordinating a response. Los Angeles looks and feels like one gigantic city, but it's actually a collection of separate
26:48 Speaker 00 cities that all bleed into each other. Glendale, Pasadena, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Venice, Anaheim, just to name a few, are all separate cities with their own police departments. In the mid-1990s, communications between departments in different cities were not as fluid or immediate as they are today. A far-reaching, detailed case-file system that allowed officers to share information between departments didn't exist. It's important to remember that this was the early days of the Internet. The average person accessed the World Wide Web by using a telephone line and an AOL CD. The officers who investigated the armored car robberies didn't know that the police
27:32 Speaker 00 department in the city of Glendale had files on guys named Larry Phillips and Emil Matasaranu. The officers didn't know that those two guys had been arrested in Glendale with a small arsenal of weapons and what was described as a bank robbery kit. That information was written on old paper files and probably stuffed into a cabinet. If the information had been accessible with a few quick taps on a computer keyboard, that might have been the end of the careers of Larry Phillips and Emil Matasaranu. But the cops wouldn't have to wait very long to put it all together. This time, the robbers didn't take a hiatus after the failed robbery.
28:12 Speaker 00 They quickly decided they were done with armored cars and they were moving on to banks. Next time on Infamous America, Larry Phillips and Emil Matasaranu developed their formula by robbing two Bank of America locations in the San Fernando Valley. But the next time they target a Bank of America, it leads to one of the most shocking days that American law enforcement has ever seen. That's next week on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes.
28:54 Speaker 00 They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships begin at just $5 per month. This season was researched and written by Jamie Lico. Original music by Rob Valier. Copy editing by me, Chris Wimmer, and I'm your host and producer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram, and B Barrel Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. This show is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network.
29:38 Speaker 00 Please visit airwavemedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin's World, History of the Great War, and many more. Thanks for listening.
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