HOLDUPS:Dumb Robbers

Great robbery, except that the money tray was quite empty.

At the Richmond VA Metropolitan Auth downtown toll plaza they tell of the pair in a pickup truck – a gunman and his driver – who got about $25 in a holdup at a toll booth. Instead of roaring off with the money, the wheelman stalled the truck, and was unable to restart the engine. The gunman dropped his gun on the pavement to concentrate on pushing the vehicle to get it going. The push-start succeeded in bringing the engine back to life, and the gunman jumped in.

But he forgot to pick up his gun. When the police arrived they had a $400 gun with beautiful fingerprints, descriptions of the robbers and the vehicle from about ten collectors on duty at the time, plus a great video. They were nailed within an hour.

Down in Atlanta GA, last year, on the GA-400 toll road a pair of robbers jumped out of a car in the toll lane, taking a toll booth on either side. In each case they got money trays. The robbers came equipped with black plastic garbage bags, and proceeded to pour the money from the trays into the bags.

But under the weight of the coinage, the bags burst and coins were soon rolling all over the pavement in the toll lanes.

Sylvester the Mechanic

The Chicago Skyway to its credit did draw a smarter robber last fall than that sprinter with the empty tray, Richmond’s engine-stallers, or Atlanta’s trash baggers. Now in jail awaiting trial, he is Victor Sylvester, 48, who lived only a few blocks from the Skyway he is a big bear of a black man. He kept hitting the toll plaza at different times of the day and night, and each time in a different car. He did eight armed holdups at the Skyway between August 99 and Feb 3 this year. Most were performed with such finesse that only the robbed toll collector seemed to notice the robbery as it occurred, and one of those didn’t get around to reporting the robbery until she was unable to explain the lack of a money tray. It took three different teams of undercover cops staked out at the toll plaza, plus a dramatic car chase out from the 87th St off-ramp into southside Chicago streets to finally capture Sylvester.

The Skyway’s director Robert Erkenswick, a hands-on guy if ever there was, personally took after the chase in the Skyway’s large white Ford Expedition, official lights flashing, to be on the scene of the arrest!

It turns out that Sylvester, a genial talkative type, and officially a local mechanic by profession, was quite proud of his tradecraft. He was a longtime career robber and holdup man. He did trial runs of the Skyway, worked out a random pattern of timings, planned different getaway routes. The booths he hit were those most remote from the supervisor’s surveillance. Sylvester borrowed customers cars from his garage shop for the Skyway hits. And he had a way of concealing his gun in his arm as he raised it up into the toll booth from his car

Sylvester was only charged with 7 of 8 robberies of the Skyway, but was believed by officials to have committed several unsolved hits on the toll plaza that abruptly ended in 1987 – at which time he began an 12-year jail term for a non-toll-related holdup. Last year he hit the Skyway again not long after getting out of jail. (Contact Skyway 773 933 6872)