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1934 – THE PRESENT
The law: every case in this section after 1930 was prosecuted under a statute that did not exist when the Broadway State Bank was robbed. The federal bank robbery act — the ancestor of today's 18 U.S.C. § 2113 — was enacted in May 1934, in the anti-crime legislation of the Dillinger spring, and it is the charge on Parker's indictment in 1958, on Perez's in 1965, and on the federal cases of the present century. State robbery law had always reached the act; what 1934 added was the federal government, its bureau, and its prisons — Alcatraz among them, which is how a Fort Wayne branch robbery of 1957 ends in the last escape attempt in that prison's history.
The method: the banks' own countermeasures — the time-locked vault that defeated no one in 1994 only because a vault teller could be made to open it, the silent alarm that brought two detectives to the Saint Joe Road lot while the robbery was still in progress — run through the cases above as the record gives them. The investigative answer, as the released 1994–95 file shows it, was paper and laboratory work: file numbers bound across three states, getaway-car purchases traced to a private seller and seven hundred-dollar bills, and cartridge cases sent across the country to be compared against recovered rifles. By the 2010s the answer had an institution's name, the Northeast Indiana Federal Bank Robbery Task Force, standing in the Justice Department's releases beside the FBI and the city police — the permanent form of the hunt that in 1925 was one police captain watching a suspect's girlfriend's house, and in 1965 was a confession taken in a tuberculosis hospital.
Sources:
- 18 U.S.C. § 2113 and its 1934 enactment (Act of May 18, 1934) — the charge in Parker, Indictment No. 1701 (1958), and United States v. Perez, 398 F.2d 658 (1968).
- FBI FOIA release "Midwest Bank Robberies" (BOMBROB), 1994–95 documents — the alarm, the vault teller, the car-purchase trace, the laboratory comparison of cartridge cases.
- U.S. Attorney's Office, Northern District of Indiana, releases of 2013–2015 (justice.gov) — the Northeast Indiana (Federal) Bank Robbery Task Force named as the investigating body in Fort Wayne bank robbery prosecutions.