BUENA PARK : Ex-Con Indicted in Bank Robbery

An ex-convict has been indicted in Pennsylvania in the robbery of a Buena Park bank last year, accused of strapping what he said were explosives around a teller’s waist and forcing her to help him take $190,000.

Ralph Stephen Gambin, 42, has also been indicted in a similar holdup last year in Torrance, where robbers got away with $410,000.

Gambin remains a suspect in other robberies in Torrance, San Francisco and Florida, said Jim Neilson, an FBI spokesman in Los Angeles. The robberies, most involving the abduction of a bank employee, have netted nearly $1 million since April, 1988.

Federal authorities arrested Gambin in Elgin, Ill., on June 2. He had been on parole since March, 1988, after serving 15 years in federal prison for a 1973 Iowa bank robbery and a failed escape attempt three years later in which he shot two U.S. marshals, one of whom was left paralyzed.

Since his arrest, he has been held in the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa. Arraignment in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles has not been scheduled.

Gambin’s alleged crime spree began one month after his release from prison, FBI officials say. On April 25, 1988, three men in disguises held a Wells Fargo Bank manager and her son in a Torrance home overnight and then forced the woman to open the bank’s vault before the branch opened.

On Aug. 28 last year, in a similar incident, Gambin and another man allegedly wore black wigs and beards and forced their way into the La Habra apartment of a Buena Park bank teller, holding the woman and three family members at gunpoint until morning.

They then forced the teller into a Security Pacific Bank branch, officials allege, after saddling her with a device that they claimed was a remote control bomb. It was fake and no one was injured, but the robbers got away with $190,000.

The FBI believes that from Orange County, Gambin moved to southern Florida and last Nov. 4 made an unsuccessful attempt to rob a bank in the town of Plantation. The robbery was aborted when police came to the scene of a serious car crash nearby. In Ft. 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.”

Gambin also is a suspect in a robbery attempt last May 5 at Security Pacific National Bank in Torrance. FBI officials said the robber told a bank employee that he was holding her children--but she had no children. He had apparently confused her house with a neighbor’s house where there were children.

In the most recent incident, Gambin allegedly robbed a Bank of America branch in San Mateo on May 12. 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 employee dragged a bag with $269,200 to the waiting car, and the bandits fled.