AN ARMED robber who wore a red dress and a wig when he held two female bank staff captive has been sentenced to 12 years in prison by Judge Tony Hunt for his role in a €700,000 bank robbery.
Danny Hamill (49), Clanmaurice Road, Donnycarney, Dublin and an accomplice were caught by gardaí minutes after they left the Allied Irish Bank branch in Crumlin on June 3rd, 2006.
Hamill, originally from Co Armagh, pointed a loaded pistol at a garda after ignoring him shouting out “armed gardaí, halt and put your arms up in the air, armed gardaí”.
His six previous convictions included robbery and assault causing actual bodily harm to a garda that were both dealt with in the Special Criminal Court and resulted in prison terms of five and two years respectively.
A set of keys for the front door of the bank, two 9mm loaded semi-automatic pistols, 34 rounds of live ammunition, a radio scanner tuned to Garda frequencies and a bag of cash from the raid, were recovered by gardaí who arrested Hamill and his accomplice before they got away. Hamill changed his plea to guilty earlier this week on the second day of his trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.
Judge Hunt said that in imposing a significant prison sentence there was always going to be “collateral damage” and in this case, it meant that Hamill’s terminally ill mother and sick wife would not have his support, but “at the end of the day, he is the only one to blame for this”.
He suspended the last two years of the sentence having taken into account Hamill’s plea.
Judge Hunt yesterday said he wanted to particularly pay tribute to the Garda Robert Reilly who approached the men bravely and courageously.
He also paid tribute to the two bank officials who dealt with the two raiders and then had the courage to come to court and give evidence and the member of the public who had “the presence of mind” to alert gardaí to the two raiders entering the bank.
He said it was “quite clear” that what happened that day “had the hallmarks of a premeditated, carefully planned and well-resourced operation” that began with interference of the ATM on the Friday which the robbers knew would bring the staff in on the Saturday morning to attend to it.
Judge Hunt said there was still “a lingering mystery” as to how the men got the front door keys of the bank and said they were very “comprehensively disguised”.
He said the “joint must have been cased” because they knew exactly where the CCTV cameras were positioned in the building.
Det Insp Brian Sutton who led the investigation, told Judge Hunt that gardaí were never able to ascertain how the two men came to get the keys for the bank.
He agreed that it could have possibly been either a system failure with the bank’s security system or “through voluntary or involuntary assistance from the staff”, but reiterated that gardaí were never able to confirm how this happened.
Det Insp Sutton told Dominic McGinn, prosecuting, that the ATM outside the bank had been jammed the night before the raid, which led to the two female staff members going to the building at 11.30am that Saturday.
Both men were armed with semi-automatic pistols and they marshalled the two women around the bank for 30 minutes.
They robbed money from various safes, the ATM and the foreign exchange desk. Hamill also disconnected the “mother unit” of the CCTV system and took the hard-drive of the system with him.
A member of the public had alerted gardaí after he spotted the men going into the bank. Garda Reilly and Garda Katherina Joyce were in a patrol car at the front door of the bank when they saw the two men coming out and struggling to carry a large bag.
Hamill ignored the garda’s request to put up his hands and got out of the passenger door of a vehicle, stood within three to four metres of Garda Reilly, pointed the pistol at him and threatened him. The gun was later found to have a bullet in the breech.
Garda Reilly ran for cover but later discharged a shot after he saw that Hamill was still pointing the gun at him.
The men eventually surrendered when two Garda patrol cars arrived at the bank.