These are some of the faces of people robbing banks in and around Baltimore and Washington:
A middle-age, balding man with a sand-colored beard wearing spectacles and a striped polo shirt, holding a demand note while leaning across the teller counter.
A young man wearing a Detroit Tigers cap, a T-shirt with an easily identifiable slogan, chatting on his cell phone.
A man wearing a construction-site hard hat adorned with the American flag and clad in an orange safety vest.
A man in a hooded sweat shirt carrying an umbrella under his right arm.
A man disguised with a white surgical mask.
Digital images from the Baltimore field office of the FBI, posted on the Internet site bankbandits.org, offer a virtual portrait gallery of people being sought and people caught on surveillance cameras robbing a bank.
Authorities tell me there is no "typical profile," other than that most holdup men are indeed that - men - and most threaten tellers with misspelled notes instead of bullet-filled guns. Most get away with, at best, a few thousand dollars of sequentially numbered bills containing a tracking device or a dye pack that explodes in their face and renders the money useless. Most are eventually caught.
FBI Special Agent Jeff Cisar, assigned to the Baltimore field office, launched this Web site three years ago with the help of the trade group Maryland Association for Bank Security. He amassed a collection of 211 pictures of robbery suspects in various forms of dress, armed with various weapons or notes, and displaying various expressions. Some appear perfectly nonchalant as they pull off their robberies; others appear desperate and agitated.
Just 13 of the 211 tried to hide their faces with sunglasses, small masks or bandannas, while 13 others managed to fully conceal their identities. Only four of the 211 had guns, making the others look like Average Joes talking with a teller. In many cases, customers have no idea the bank is being robbed. Most holdup men do not appear to be, to put it kindly, professionals, an observation backed by the state's federal prosecutor.
"Almost all bank robbers fall into one of two general categories: very stupid and moderately stupid," Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein said in an e-mail. "The very stupid robbers seem not to realize that banks have surveillance cameras. The moderately stupid bank robbers make some effort to disguise themselves. ... Only rarely do we run across an intelligent bank robber."
