Heist

Even as a kid Luke Elliott Sommer showed a talent for leadership. And by the time he finished U.S. Army Ranger School his mind had become a precision weapon capable of planning strategic attacks on buildings in enemy territory. Then he came home.

By James Ross Gardner

Sommer’s mug shot.

"Go North Hollywood,” was a reference to the 1997 shootout in North Hollywood, California, in which two heavily armed bank robbers, sheathed in body armor, blasted away at the LAPD for nearly 45 minutes, injuring 10 officers and seven civilians. A SWAT team eventually killed the two bandits.

Sommer and Robertson also texted plans for using the proceeds from the casino heist to start a crime family to take on the Hell’s Angels, who they believed ran the drug trade in Kelowna.

Then Sommer, in a capricious moment that only his mother could likely explain, talked himself out of the casino plot and into another: Bank of America, the same financial institution in the North Hollywood shootout. There was a branch two miles north of the base.

Alex Blum drove Sommer to the bank on Thursday, August 3, 2006, for what the two Rangers referred to as “close tactical recon.” Sommer scoped his target, where he had a checking account. At the teller counter he withdrew $50 and surreptitiously used his ATM card to measure the thickness of the bandit barrier’s bulletproof glass. To buy more recon time, he faked concern about his account activity and asked the teller for a printout of his account history. While the five-foot, five-inch teller with curly brown hair, brown eyes, and dramatic brows like lines in a Picasso headed for the printer on the other side of the lobby, he surveyed the room. And then he spotted it, the chink in the bank’s armor: a two-foot space between the top of the bandit barrier and the ceiling.

Back at the barracks he mapped out distances to and from the bank using Google Earth and spent hours studying news articles about robberies, learning from the mistakes of less-careful schemers. By Sunday, August 6, Robertson and Dunmall had arrived by bus from Canada. Sommer led them, along with Ranger Chad Palmer, to Noble Hill, the 400-foot mountain that rises behind the Ranger barracks and is used as a training ground for soldiers.

He laid out sandbags and stuck sticks into the dirt to mark the bank’s floor plan and the building’s exact distance from the alley where Blum, who’d agreed to be the driver, would park his car. Then the four men ran the distance in full gear—armor, weapons. A dress rehearsal.

“The fastest person and the slowest person—we averaged their speed,” Sommer would later recall. “So then we calculated how much time it would take for us to secure the bank”—before anyone had a chance to set off the alarm. “We calculated that to be 4.3 seconds.” The crew decided to set a time limit on the robbery: one minute, 30 seconds—enough to pull off the heist before the cops showed.

They rehearsed every step again and again. Who would stand where and for how long. Sommer’s squad was ready for tomorrow’s mission. But one last thing: Nathan Dunmall, the only member of the crew without military training, had never held an AK-47, a fully automatic rifle capable of spraying 600 rounds a minute. Sommer walked Dunmall through the weapon’s features, and, without actually pulling the trigger, showed him how to fire it.


NEXT: The robbery.

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Published: September 2009