25-year sentence for a botched armored truck robbery
By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff
A former Charlestown man was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison today for his role in an aborted daytime heist of an armored car carrying about $2 million in the North End.
Dennis Quirk, 39, was in a gang of robbers who toted loaded firearms, including an AK-47, and wore bulletproof vests during the aborted 2005 heist, authorities said.
US Chief District Judge Mark L. Wolf said Quirk's history of violence, including a manslaughter conviction for a slaying that occurred when Quirk was 17, necessitated imprisonment for a quarter-century, as recommended by federal prosecutors.
"You've demonstrated you're a dangerous person, and society needs to be protected from you,'' Wolf told Quirk, a burly man with a crew cut wearing a gray sweat shirt and green sweat pants. "Either you'll learn your lesson, or you won't.''
The mother of Quirk's two daughters gasped when she heard the prison sentence and then began to weep, causing Quirk to repeatedly shift his gaze from Wolf to the woman in the spectators' gallery. The sentence was six years longer than Quirk's lawyer, Elliot M. Weinstein, had requested.
Quirk apologized to the court and to his family, saying his daughters will have to grow up without him.
He was among three men who pleaded guilty a year ago to a variety of robbery and firearms charges for their roles in the attempted robbery of a Loomis, Fargo and Co. armored car on June 16, 2005, on Hanover Street.
Quirk was wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a fully automatic Cobray 9mm pistol loaded with 49 rounds, more than half of which were lethal hollow-point rounds, authorities said.
The robbers aborted the heist without taking money when one of the guards of the armored car ran to a nearby store and drew his weapon, said authorities.
Quirk faces separate charges in Norfolk Superior Court, including assault with intent to murder, in connection with the 2004 daytime holdup of an armored car in Quincy that left one security guard seriously wounded after a shootout.
