19-May-10 – Lance P. Dennie, the 44-year-old south-side man known for most of last year as the “Red Line Robber,” was sentenced Wednesday morning to 135 months in federal prison. It was the maximum recommended by sentencing guidelines.

(Left) Surveillance photo released in March 2009 of suspected Red Line Robber, who got the nickname because his robberies were near stops on the CTA Red Line.

Dennie was convicted for just three of the seven robberies he was charged with last September. It is believed he committed nine bank robberies total, including the Chase branch at Marina City, which he robbed twice. The other counts were dismissed as part of a plea agreement worked out between Dennie and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

He was arrested on August 29, a few days after the Chicago Police Department’s Crime Lab confirmed fingerprints left at the scene of a June 8 robbery of the Charter One bank at 33 West Grand were Dennie’s. Police recovered the prints off a newspaper that Dennie had brought into the bank and then tossed into a dumpster, and compared them with prints taken when he was arrested in 2008 on an unrelated charge.

On February 2, he plead guilty to the three counts of bank robbery, including one count in which he forced a bank employee to accompany him as he escaped. In each robbery, Dennie displayed what appeared to be a gun tucked into his waistband but is now believed to have been a real-looking toy gun.

His spree netted him about $45,000.

“I’m sorry. I’m ashamed for what I did. I was messed up,” he told Judge John W. Darrah at the Dirksen Courthouse on Dearborn Street, as Dennie wore an orange jumpsuit and leg restraints. “I did something wrong and I have to pay for it.”

Darrah listened as two different descriptions of Dennie were presented – one, the “warm, friendly, loving person” who got addicted to cocaine and fell behind in his bills and went from no criminal convictions to robbing banks. The other, a “cold, belligerent” man who “terrorized” people and was a threat to the community.

A pre-sentencing report told about Dennie’s drug problem and suggested he was “high” on cocaine when he robbed the banks. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Perconte, who described Dennie as lucid during the robberies and “bold enough to go into the same bank and rob it twice,” challenged that claim.

Teller recalls “a paralyzing fear”

Two bank tellers spoke to Judge Darrah before sentencing, including a young woman described as Teller A in Dennie’s plea agreement, who was used as a hostage as Dennie fled the Chase bank at 850 South Wabash on March 13, 2009.

She told how Dennie had screamed at her that he would “blow your f––king head off” and that he “seemed very calculated in his actions,” being careful not to touch any doors, for example. She described “a paralyzing fear,” causing her to wonder if she would see her family and fiancée again. The experience, she told Darrah, left her close to tears every day, needing medication and counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dennie had not just robbed a federally insured bank, she told Judge Darrah, but he had also “robbed me of my sense of security.”

“It is staggering to think this is a first-time offender,” said Dennie’s court-appointed attorney, Robert Seeder. He said Dennie had no history of violence and that “all of a sudden” he started robbing banks.

It was a path of drugs, alcohol, and debt that led Dennie to rob banks, said Seeder, but he is now remorseful and accepts responsibility. “He’s going to pay for that and he knows it.”

Seeder had wanted ten years for his client. Assistant U.S. Attorney Perconte told the judge that “lots of folks have bills to pay and are addicted to controlled substances but they don’t walk into banks and threaten to blow people’s heads off.”

Dennie questioned by police twice before arrest

At one time during the investigation, Dennie was apparently questioned by Chicago police but not arrested. He then, according to testimony, robbed three more banks. He had worked steadily since 1977 but was more recently fired from a job as a janitor for not getting treatment for substance abuse.

Darrah said it was clear that Dennie suffers from a drug dependency, a mental impairment, and that his childhood was “less than idyllic,” with his father leaving the family when Lance was seven years old. He noted that Dennie had been cooperative with the investigation and was remorseful.

But he “intentionally terrorized anyone who got in your way,” he told Dennie, and was an “ongoing serious threat to the well-being of people in the community.”

He recommended that Dennie be placed in a federal prison that offered mental health counseling, drug treatment, and job training.

In addition to the 135 months in prison – 11 years and three months – Dennie will have three years of supervised release. He must pay restitution of $31,290 to various financial institutions – plus $352 to the woman described as Teller A who, says Darrah, he “brutally terrorized.”

Noting that Dennie’s mother had told him he was “compassionate,” Judge Darrah urged Dennie to “try to return to that person your mother told me about.”

A $10,000 reward offered by the FBI in March 2009, when the Red Line Robber had struck just five banks, was not paid. Explains FBI Special Agent Royden Rice, Dennie “was arrested by local police following a robbery. No citizen involvement.”

 Related story: Red Line Robber pleads guilty