Police Officer Charged In N.Y., Pa. Bank Heists

A rookie New York City police officer accused of orchestrating heists in Pennsylvania and New York walked into a Manhattan bank last June and passed a teller a note threatening to "start shooting" if the employee didn't "empty both drawers," prosecutors said yesterday.

About five months later, the officer, Christian Torres, returned to the same Sovereign Bank as employees were opening the branch, and forced them to unlock the door, prosecutors said.

When one employee refused, Mr. Torres threatened to kill the worker and pulled back his suit jacket to show a gun tucked in his waistband, according to a complaint filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan by federal prosecutors.

Also yesterday, federal prosecutors took over Mr. Torres's case from local Pennsylvania authorities, who had charged him last week with forcing the employees of another Sovereign Bank, this one in Muhlenberg Township, Pa., into a vault at gunpoint.

Mr. Torres, a cadet at the time of the first Manhattan robbery on June 8, 2007, got away with $16,305; he made off with about $102,000 from the second one on November 16, 2007, prosecutors said.

Last Thursday, at the Pennsylvania bank, Mr. Torres, now 21, got away with $113,000, an FBI affidavit filed yesterday said. Mr. Torres was caught after employees identified him to police who were responding to the bank's silent alarm, the affidavit said.

"It certainly is not every day that a police officer is charged with robbing a bank, but that really doesn't enter into our decision-making process," a chief of violent crime in the U.S. attorney's office in Philadelphia, David Webb, said of the decision to charge Mr. Torres.

Mr. Torres, a Queens resident who joined the New York Police Department's transit division in January, remained in jail in Pennsylvania on $1 million bail.