Man seemed unsure; police say that he had note ready for tellers

A man who made two self-aborted attempts to rob Meetinghouse Bank on Tuesday was arrested by Boston Police, who later found that the suspect had hidden a note demanding money in his underwear.

The series of events began in the morning when bank staff noticed a young man in his twenties “acting suspiciously,” according to Meetinghouse Bank president Anthony Paciulli, who has been pressed into action to chase down robbery suspects on more than one occasion.

“He was standing around in the lobby, looking all around, pretending to write out a deposit slip,” said Paciulli. “Then he turned around and walked out and left the bank – and came back again.”
Alarmed by his behavior, bank employees called the poloice, who came to the scene. But the young suspect was already long gone. Or so they thought.

Paciulli said that the same suspect – described as a white male, wearing jeans, sneakers and wearing a white baseball cap pulled down low on his face – showed up again about an hour later. When Paciulli approached him, the suspect claimed he wanted to take out an account, and sat down at a customer service desk to do so.

“He answered a couple of bullshit questions and that lasted about five seconds,” said Paciulli. “We’d already called the police, and we wanted to detain him, but he left.”

Police caught up with the suspect a few minutes later near the Baker Chocolate apartments. The unidentified man was taken into custody on the spot when police discovered that there were outstanding warrants in his name, according to Paciulli.

“They told me that they didn’t have anything showing that he intended to rob the bank, but they took him in on the warrants,” Paciulli told the Reporter. “But when they took him back to the station, they found the note in his underwear. The police called us back and said ‘it was your lucky day.’ The note showed that he was going to rob us.” According to Paciulli, the suspect lives in an apartment on nearby Washington Street in Lower Mills.

Meetinghouse Bank has been targeted multiple times in recent years by note-passers. Last August, Paciulli chased down and confronted a 28 year-old Chelsea man who robbed the bank and tried to escape on foot down nearby Richmond Street.