Connecting the Dots

IT'S A TUESDAY IN OCTOBER. The steeple of Winchester's First Congregational Church piercing the sky, and the early leaves strewn across the lawn. A young man wearing a dark polo shirt walks along, his baseball cap shading his eyes against the late-afternoon sun. He passes a trio of mailboxes and enters the Sovereign Bank at the corner of Church and Vine streets. The bank features a small glass foyer and an airy main space decorated with plastic ferns. There are no other customers when the slender, bespectacled man walks in. He makes his way to a credenza against the window, where he appears to fill out a deposit slip, then approaches a middle-aged gentleman, the only teller on duty.

He hands his note to the teller. Keep silent. I have a weapon. Give me all your money. The smile drops from the teller's face, and he looks across the lobby at the manager, who's busy on the telephone.

The teller passes the man a stack of bills and, when the young man asks for it, the note. The robber leafs through the money looking for dye packs -- security devices used to mark stolen cash -- then puts the wad in his pocket. Halfway to the door, he reaches for his wallet, places the note inside, and returns the wallet to his back pocket. He calmly exits the bank and disappears. The robbery, which nets more than $1,400, takes about a minute and a half.

OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS, the same bank robber engineered 10 more such heists, for a total of 12, taking nearly $20,000. According to the FBI, there were 185 bank robberies in the Boston area in 2005. But for this robber, the Sovereign Bank in Winchester turned out to be a poor choice of targets, since there, the baby-faced bandit caught the attention of Detective Lieutenant Jim Pierce.

At 57, Pierce is a scholarly looking fellow with salt-and-pepper hair, an enterprising cop who just can't stay in his car. In 1980, he exchanged gunfire with a bank robber on a Winchester street, apprehending the man after a lengthy foot-and-car chase. A few years later, he fired at the tires of a stolen dump truck that was bearing down on him and then jumped to safety. And in 1994, he received the Medal of Valor from the Massachusetts Association of Italian American Police Officers (Pierce is an associate member -- he's Irish-American) after firing at two serial car thieves, who ran him down then finally crashed.

The lieutenant detective says Winchester police have been involved in only a half-dozen incidents where a gun was fired in the past 50 years, and he's had a role in three of them. "The former chief said, 'Jesus, Jimmy, they didn't even know we had bullets in our guns until you got here,'" says Pierce.

More important than his ready gun hand is the fact that Pierce knows just about everyone in regional law enforcement and has a knack for bringing them together when a big case like this string of bank robberies comes along. A 31-year veteran of the Winchester force, since 1989 Pierce has directed the detective unit of the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council (NEMLEC), a cooperative group started in the 1960s that has grown to include peace officers from 46 communities. At monthly meetings, detectives collaborate on solving crimes that cross town and city lines.

After the Sovereign Bank robbery, Pierce and Winchester Police Detective Paul De Luca contacted their NEMLEC colleagues in neighboring towns as banks in those communities were hit. They also learned that several police departments and the FBI's Bank Robbery Task Force were conducting their own investigations.

Early in November, Pierce called a meeting that was attended by 17 area investigators and FBI Special Agents Kristin Koch and Bob Rice. "Everyone brought in their reports and photos so we could start connecting the dots," says Pierce. By the end of the meeting, it was evident that they were all chasing the same man.

Rivalries, infighting, and politics are as much a part of local law enforcement as they are every other institution in Greater Boston. Longstanding enmity between the Boston FBI and the Massachusetts State Police over the FBI's protection of murderous gangsters James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "the Rifleman" Flemmi in the 1980s and early 1990s has continued to affect individuals on both sides. Even within the State Police, there is still a divide between certain troopers who went to the State Police academy as rookies and those who were members of the Metropolitan District Commission Police; their agencies merged in 1992. Managing egos is key in law enforcement, where who gets credit for a "pinch" can interfere with getting bad guys off the street.

There has always been a core of professionals willing to put old turf battles aside to do the public's business. But recently, there has been a proliferation of these local and state cops and federal agents who, as police say, "get it," pushing Boston-area law enforcement into new, collaborative territory. Pierce and the other investigators who worked on this case, as well as the leadership at the FBI's Boston field office, are part of that vanguard.

IN THE WINCHESTER HEIST, surveillance video depicted a clean-cut white male in his mid-20s who made little attempt to hide his face. The robber was so ordinary that the group dubbed him the "Average Joe bandit." What Pierce and his colleagues learned by speaking to other investigators was that the Average Joe bandit always used a handwritten note saying that he had a gun, took the note back from the teller, and struck within Middlesex County, except for two hits in Essex County.

Without much to go on, these street cops applied a little common sense. To figure out the bank robber's height, Pierce, who is 5 feet 10 inches tall, walked out through the Sovereign bank's front door while De Luca watched on the closed-circuit monitor. He noted where the top of Pierce's head reached on the bank's logo on the door, then compared it with footage of the robber's exit. The robber and Pierce were roughly the same height. That piece of information went into his file.

But despite ample surveillance video and multiple eyewitnesses, FBI, state, and local investigators were unable to identify the Average Joe bandit. Sending video stills to suburban newspapers turned up nothing. On November 16, after the robber struck three more banks in less than a week, Pierce convened another meeting, attracting 29 investigators from 17 communities. In every robbery, they determined, the bandit had entered the bank within an hour of closing time. Nearly all the banks were located in highly populated suburbs with easy highway access.

The investigation became a joint effort between the NEMLEC detectives and members of the FBI Bank Robbery Task Force, including agents Koch and Rice, Cambridge Police Detective Charlie Linehan, and State Police Lieutenant Alan Zani. A core group of about ten investigators sorted through dozens of leads on tall, skinny, white male bank robbers and went back to each of the victim banks to confirm all of the facts. Altogether, the team logged more than 100 hours staking out likely targets and going to prisons in Massachusetts and New Hampshire to see if the Average Joe's photos were familiar to guards or officials. Investigators also shared intelligence with campus police at Harvard University, Tufts University, and Boston University. Maybe the Average Joe was actually Phi Beta Kappa.

He was smart enough to stay ahead of the law. The elusive robber hit a bank in Somerville on November 28, netting more than $4,000, his biggest score so far. The next day, Pierce reached out to the family and acquaintances of the Average Joe bandit through the broadcast media, appearing on so many newscasts that a friend joked that he should host his own show. But Pierce had talked to frightened employees and customers at victim banks, men and women whose hearts thumped and whose throats clamped shut when this dead-eyed young man had stood in front of them, saying he had a gun. If they didn't grab him pretty soon, somebody was going to get hurt.

KNOWING WHAT TYPE OF PEOPLE rob banks and why they do it often helps in catching them, says Kevin James Kline, assistant special agent in charge of the Boston FBI field office. "They range from drug- or gambling-addicted individuals who need quick money to organized groups that, the more violent they get," he says, "the more they gravitate toward armored cars and commercial establishments, where there's even more money."

Operating from FBI offices at One Center Plaza, the Bank Robbery Task Force (known since January as the Violent Crimes Task Force) of eight federal agents, two State Police officers, and detectives from the Boston, Malden and Cambridge police departments is supervised by Special Agent Larry Travaglia. Like its name, the group's mission has grown from a focus on bank and armored car robberies in Greater Boston. Today, its investigations include so-called violent incident crimes (including bank robberies, extortion, and kidnapping), crimes against children, and the identification and arrest of fugitives.

The task force has also grown more proactive. Instead of waiting for federal crimes to happen, task force members now canvass police departments in 15 local communities to identify -- and watch -- the worst criminals. It also works with groups like NEMLEC to cultivate informants and has paired up some of the young agents with the older, seasoned police detectives.

Kline is one of those square-jawed FBI types from out of town -- Buffalo, in his case -- that local cops like to poke fun at. But his respect for those same cops is helping to introduce a new era in local law enforcement. When Kline graduated from the FBI Academy in 1990 and was cutting his teeth on gang murders in New Haven, a salty old police lieutenant told him something he would never forget: "You're not worth the pimples on a good cop's ass."

"And he was right," says Kline. "Even a rookie cop makes more arrests in a year than an FBI agent makes in his or her career. My agents learn how to work the street from these guys."

One lesson that young FBI agents such as Koch and Rice absorb from accompanying old pros on their rounds is that law enforcement is driven by both personality and information -- it's who-you-know meets what-you-know. For instance, if investigators had simply e-mailed the Average Joe surveillance photo to the Billerica House of Corrections, maybe one or two officers there would have looked at it. By appearing in person, they were able to share intelligence with 20 or 30 people as well as build a rapport for future cases.

On the evening of November 29, after the Average Joe bandit's photograph ran on television and in the newspapers, Pierce got a telephone call from the alleged bank robber's father. He didn't want his son, a heroin addict, to get hurt, or to hurt anyone else, the man said. They agreed on a time and a place for the robber to give himself up the next day, but he didn't show. In the meantime, the FBI met with their own source, the alleged robber's close friend.

NOW THE INVESTIGATION moves swiftly. The FBI learns from its source that the alleged robber, Joseph Hart, has plans to buy heroin in Charlestown that afternoon. At the time, Pierce and Koch are in Winchester, preparing a warrant for Hart's arrest for the Winchester heist. Minutes later, they are part of a cortege of four unmarked cars, running without lights or sirens, winding around the rotary beside the Schrafft's building near Route 93 and turning up Bunker Hill Street. Pierce feels conspicuous; he knows he is being "made" -- identified as a cop -- as they drive along. In Charlestown, where too much happens and not enough is said about it, pedestrians glare as the cops go by. On the sidewalk, teenagers in baggy clothing whisper: Five-o. It's the feds.

The cars speed up and over the apex of the hill, past the Murphy and Turnbull Funeral Home and the dark, fortresslike Church of St. Francis de Sales. "You could feel the water pressure drop as all the drug dealers flushed their stashes down the toilet," Pierce says later.

On the other side of the hill, the cars slow down; all eyes are on the street. The tipster had indicated that the suspect and his girlfriend would be driving a small red Mazda that's believed to have been the getaway car in the robberies. Investigators proceed cautiously, because Hart is considered armed and dangerous.

At the foot of Concord Street, one of the investigators spots Hart and Jennifer Sheehan sitting in her parked car. Zani of the State Police, the FBI's Rice, and other task force agents box the Mazda in, pull out their weapons, and rush toward the suspects. Hart emerges from the passenger side with his hands in the air. He drops to his knees and is handcuffed by Zani and two colleagues.

Later, at a press conference, Pierce is asked if Hart will still be called the Average Joe bandit, and the old street cop shakes his head. "We're calling him the 'Average Inmate.'"

A MONTH LATER, ON DECEMBER 30, the usual collection of defense lawyers, disgruntled perps, and anguished relatives is scattered across the gallery of the Woburn District Court; collectively, they give off an odor of cigarettes, aftershave, and dread. Precisely at 12:09 p.m., Joseph Hart, 24, of Somerville, is led, shackled, into the courtroom. His alleged accomplice, Jennifer Sheehan, 20, also of Somerville, is with him, a black jacket tied around her head like a shroud, hiding her face.

Hart and Sheehan are appearing in state court for a pretrial hearing to review the bail amounts and set the trial dates. Incarcerated for the last month, Hart appears heavier and healthier than he does in the surveillance photos; apparently, court-ordered drug rehabilitation has agreed with him. Dressed in a gray T-shirt, he stands in the prisoner's dock with a faraway expression on his face. He looks very young.

Presiding Justice Phyllis J. Broker has a reassuring manner as she listens to the attorneys. After a brief discussion, she notes that her court will not be the ultimate venue for this case. (In January, Hart was indicted on federal charges of armed robbery and conspiracy.)

Broker sets bail amounts at $500,000 for Hart and $15,000 for Sheehan. Hart's attorney, a ruddy, white-haired man with a tattered law book under his arm, bows and says, "Thank you, your honor."

A court officer motions to Hart, and he is escorted out of the room and back to jail. The appearance has lasted less than two minutes, about as long as one of the bank robberies.

Jay Atkinson's newest book is Legends of Winter Hill: Cops, Con Men, and Joe McCain, the Last Real Detective. E-mail comments to magazine@globe.com.