Baltimore Bank

Louis A. Leitz, a retired bank teller and former Brooklyn Park resident, died of heart failure Jan. 26 at a nursing home in Colorado Springs, Colo. He was 96. Born in Baltimore and raised on Arsan Avenue, he was a graduate of city public schools. He was a bank teller for many years at the old American National Building and Loan Association until retiring in the 1970s. Mr. Leitz was a former longtime member of St. John Lutheran Church in Brooklyn Park, where he sang with the choir. He moved to Colorado Springs in 2000.

A pair of bank robberies, one involving an intensive search through quiet, residential Rodgers Forge, and a teen-ager speeding through Towson's busiest intersection in a stolen car kept Baltimore County police hopping yesterday.The Rodgers Forge search did not yield any suspects but three men were arrested several hours later in Baltimore.The three incidents in the York Road corridor occurred within three hours, starting with two bank robberies a few minutes apart.About 10 a.m., two men wearing pullover knit masks and surgical gloves and armed with semiautomatic Tech-9 handguns entered the Maryland National Bank branch at 6700 York Road, police said.

Samuel P. SislerCoast Guard workerSamuel P. Sisler, a retired department supervisor at the Coast Guard Yard at Curtis Bay, died Feb. 5 of pneumonia at the Old Court Nursing Center in Pikesville.The 90-year-old Randallstown resident retired in 1968 after 29 years at the Coast Guard Yard.He had come to Baltimore in the early 1930s and operated his own painting contracting company for a time. The Connellsville, Pa., native graduated from Fair Chance (Pa.) High School. He was a member of the Liberty Lodge of the Masons, the Baltimore Forest of the Tall Cedars of Lebanon and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.

When two men entered the Maryland National Bank branch i Owings Mills yesterday with a note demanding cash and stating they had a weapon, it was the fourth bank holdup in Baltimore County in less than 24 hours."

Provident Bankshares Corp., which has been aggressively expanding in the Washington suburbs, has launched a $500,000 television campaign aimed largely at attracting new customers in that area. The Baltimore banking company said the TV push - part of a $2.2 million media campaign - is its first in nine years. Provident, with $5.3 billion in assets and 98 branches, spent $1.5 million on media advertising last year. This year it will direct 90 percent of its television ads at the Washington metropolitan area, said Lillian S. Kilroy, managing director of marketing at Provident, the state's second-largest independent banking company, Kilroy said.

Expanding its base in Central Maryland, Mason-Dixon Bancshares Inc. of Westminster said yesterday that it will acquire Sterling Bancorp, the parent company of Sterling Bank and Trust Co., for $10.3 million in cash.Sterling, a Baltimore bank with four branches and $70 million in assets, will be merged into Mason-Dixon's Bank of Maryland subsidiary.Sterling's Pikesville and downtown Baltimore branches will be closed, but the Timonium and Annapolis branches will be retained. Mason-Dixon expects the consolidation to bring savings of about $2 million, or 66 percent of Sterling's 1998 projected general and administrative expenses.

Baltimore's economy will tie itself ever more closely to foreign investment and trade, and disinflation and deflation likely will persist further into the 1990s, panelists told a forum at the Hyatt Inner Harbor Hotel yesterday."

With its shiny golden spire, the 1929 art deco skyscraper at 10 Light St. is considered one of the most prominent peaks in Baltimore's skyline. But 34 floors below, it is the building's ornate entryways that have focused attention on the subtle tensions between preserving historic places and ensuring that they are handicapped accessible. A federal judge finished hearing evidence yesterday in a case in which a Bank of America customer contends that the banking giant put preservation ahead of access at the branch offices in the Light Street building - and violated the decade-old Americans with Disabilities Act - by failing to add a wheelchair ramp or make other structural changes.

Wachovia Corp. publicly apologized yesterday for two predecessor institutions that owned slaves or allowed them to be used as collateral, and it revealed that two of Baltimore's oldest banks profited indirectly from slavery. The nation's fourth-largest bank disclosed its ties to the slave trade in a 111-page report to comply with a Chicago ordinance requiring companies that do business with the city to determine whether they had profited from slavery, which was abolished by the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865.

In a dimly lit underground vault a block from Camden Yards, the Federal Reserve is holding millions of dollars in cash that nobody wants. The money - stored in cloth and plastic sacks piled high on metal shelving units - is in the unloved form of dollar coins, some of them never used. But a 2005 law requires the reserve bank to keep ordering coins regardless of its stockpile, and so vaults in Baltimore and around the country are filling up. "This is just a small portion of what there is nationwide," Dave Beck, senior vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and regional executive for the Baltimore branch, said as he stood inside a small warehouse filled with money bags, each containing 2,000 coins.