FBI Seizes Fugitive Sought in Bank Robberies

One of the nation’s most-wanted fugitives, a suspect in four California holdups--including a dramatic kidnaping-bank robbery last summer in Buena Park--was arrested Friday by FBI agents in Chicago.

Ralph Stephen Gambin, 42, was captured without incident in Elgin, Ill., according to FBI Agent Bob Long.

In the California robberies and two others in Florida over the past year, Gambin allegedly netted nearly $1 million, often by kidnaping a teller whom he would send into the bank with an apparent explosive device wired to the waist.

Also arrested Friday was his wife, Julieta Flores Marquez, 38. Marquez, a disbarred San Antonio attorney, is charged with aiding Gambin in avoiding arrest and is also a suspect in the Buena Park holdup.

A search of the suspects’ home in Elgin yielded a suitcase and two purses filled with money, two semiautomatic pistols, a semiautomatic shotgun, wigs, makeup kits, phony identifications and handcuffs, Long said.

The two suspects are scheduled for arraignment before a federal magistrate today at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago.

FBI officials say Gambin’s most recent bank holdup occurred in the San Francisco Bay Area on May 12. Gambin is charged with robbing a Bank of America in San Mateo. FBI officials say Gambin and an accomplice took a bank employee and her husband hostage at gunpoint and then ordered her to loot the vault. The victim’s husband was threatened with death if the instructions were not followed. The employee dragged a bag filled with $269,200 to the waiting car, and the bandits fled.

Gambin, a former California Interscholastic Federation wrestling champ at Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach, has attended college for three years in the Chicago area, FBI officials said. His mother told FBI agents that when he was in college, Gambin dreamed of building a home for disabled people in Mexico.

Gambin had been on the U.S. Marshal’s Top 15 Fugitives list. Before being paroled in March, 1988, Gambin served 15 years in federal prison for a 1973 Iowa kidnaping-bank robbery and a failed escape three years later in which he shot two U.S. marshals, paralyzing one.

Gambin’s suspected crime spree began only a month after his release from prison, federal authorities said.

On April 25, 1988, three men in disguises entered the Torrance home of a Wells Fargo Bank manager and her son and held them hostage overnight, then forced the woman to unlock the bank’s vault before the branch opened the next morning.

On Aug. 28, 1988, in a similar scenario, two men wearing black wigs and beards forced their way into the La Habra apartment of the Buena Park bank teller, holding the woman, her husband and her son at gunpoint until morning. Gambin allegedly forced the teller to enter a Security Pacific Bank branch after strapping to her waist a device they claimed was a remote-controlled bomb. Before anyone realized that the bomb was a fake, the bandits fled with $190,000. According to the complaint, Gambin and the unknown accomplice communicated with a female accomplice called “Momma” via walkie-talkie.

FBI agents allege that Gambin’s preferred method is to wait outside the bank and listen to radio-scanner frequencies for any indication that police are approaching. Wylie B. (Bucky) Cox, head of the FBI’s bank robbery unit in Orange County, said the Buena Park heist was the only time Gambin actually went into a bank along with his hostage. He said Gambin directed bank employees to put money into a pickup that was waiting outside and then fled.

The FBI believes that from Orange County, Gambin moved to southern Florida, where last Nov. 4 he allegedly made an unsuccessful attempt to rob a bank in the town of Plantation. Gambin aborted the robbery when a serious car crash occurred nearby and brought police too close for comfort, the FBI said. In Fort Lauderdale on Dec. 20, Gambin allegedly accosted an employee outside a bank and sent her inside to loot the safe, telling her, “By the way, we have your children,” an FBI spokesman said.

Gambin is also a suspect in a May 5 attempted robbery at a Security Pacific National Bank in Torrance. FBI officials said Gambin told the woman he was holding her children--but the woman had no children. FBI agents theorized that Gambin confused her house with a neighbor’s where there were children.