The Almost Great Bank Robbery
When a lovestruck cop and his teller girlfriend pulled of f the biggest bank heist in San Antonio history, it seemed like the perfect crime. If only they hadn’t made one small mistake.
Brian says: Even some 18 years later, it's hard for me to believe that this is the same Lisa Silvas that I used to give rides to school to, and let her keep her books in my locker. This article describes her pretty well, even though when I knew her, she was a freshman in high school. (January 6th, 2009 at 3:30pm)
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“Bert was really good to Lisa,” says Rockie McMillan, a high school classmate who moved into their apartment complex after graduation. “But I think Lisa got to point where she was greedy, and Bert wasn’t giving her everything she wanted. She would always complain that they didn’t’ have enough money to go out and eat, that they couldn’t’ do anything special because they always had to make payments either for Bert’s school or for their car. . . . She was tired of Bert. She wanted to go live somewhere else and not have to worry about the money problems.”
Lisa said she wanted to dump Bert for an entirely different reason. When she saw Bert kissing another girl at a party, she says, “I said, ‘Whoa,’ got real upset, and said, ‘This is it.’”
In any event, when Lisa met Jack Nealy, she was ready for another boyfriend. Bert was devastated. “Jack could totally pay for all the bills,” Bert recalls, neatly summarizing the end of teenage love. “He had a better apartment. I drove a clunker of a car.” Not long after the breakup, Jack, driving through his own apartment complex to look for burglars, found Bert behind a tree, spying on Lisa.
The newly separated Jack certainly had to be feeling lonely, and it showed in the way he courted Lisa. On her first visits to his apartment, he would have the lights off and a candle it. He rubbed her feet with lotion. He took her to dinner at her favorite restaurant, the Alamo Café. He sent flowers to her at the bank. “I thought he was the perfect boyfriend,” says Kelly McGinnis, Lisa’s fellow teller. “He was always giving her everything she wanted. She would call him from the bank and say, ‘Jack, I’m hungry,’ and he’d be there in ten minutes with something to eat. He just spoiled her rotten.”
From a certain perspective, Jack’s love for Lisa seemed to border on obsession. In letters he sent to her, he called her “the most beautiful woman in the world,” “a sexual goddess in my eyes.” “You are the only TRUE woman I’ve ever been with,” he wrote. “You are totally ‘Texas Beauty.’ Please be mine forever, if not physically, then spiritually.” It was as if the slightly oafish Jack was overwhelmed that such an attractive girl would want to be with him — and similarly worried that she might suddenly decide to leave him. When Lisa would tell Jack that she and Kelly were going shopping, Jack would show up at the store to see if Lisa was really there. If she want to a movie when Jack was working, he’s cruise the parking lot to check for her car.
Kelly says Lisa loved the attention. Clearly Lisa encouraged Jack to treat her like a princess. On one occasion she packed her bags and threatened to move out of the apartment after he spanked her beloved golden cocker spaniel, Max, for shedding on his living room couch. Lisa would hint that if things didn’t improve between them, she might just go back to Bert. Once, when Jack went to Miami to visit his children, Lisa — thinking Jack might be trying to renew his relationship with his ex-wife — slept with Bert. Then she promptly told Jack, knowing it would make him even more jealous. At night, Jack would watch for Bert driving to or from work, pull him over, threaten to give him a ticket, and tell him to stay away from Lisa. When Bert got a new girlfriend, Jack gave her tickets for an expired license plate and inspection sticker. “He was a cop with an attitude,” says Bert. “He liked to use his power like any rookie cop does.”
Yet Lisa was attracted to that kind of person. “Lisa always loved power,” Bert says. “She loved to play with power. I think she was in awe of an older policeman who had some kind of standing in society.”
“It was exciting for me to tell people I was dating a police officer,” Lisa says. She was thrilled when he would take her for rides in his patrol car, cutting corners at high speeds and making the tires squeal. He once took her down a lonely back road and turned on both the siren and the flashing lights. Lisa says she would listen, enthralled, to Jack’s stories about his high-speed chases, about the time he ran after a thief and knocked him out by slamming the man’s head against his knee. She loved how Jack could go to certain restaurants in town and eat for half price, how he would drive through stop signs and red lights, knowing he would not get a ticket.
Everyone who knew Jack and Lisa says they were desperately in love. It was the kind of love that can happen to young people, that all-consuming feeling that can lead someone to call his girlfriend a dozen times a day to talk about how in love they are. In May 1991 Jack took Lisa to the Magic Time Machine to eat shrimp and drink strawberry daiquiris. (Lisa always kept a couple of fake IDs in her purse in case she got carded.) Then he drove her downtown to the Alamo, where he pulled a ring out of his pocket, got down on his knees, and proposed.
Despite everything that happened to her, Lisa today is still able to think dreamily of that moment when Jack asked her to be his bride. “I was the happiest girl alive that night,” she says, pausing a moment to look at a prison window crisscrossed with bars.
Trapped inside a motor bank, it’s difficult for tellers to act like strangers, and Lisa Silvas and Kelly McGinnis told one another just about everything. They took great interest in each other’s love lives, swapping stories about their boyfriends and sharing their dreams. Lisa asked Kelly and another teller, Edith Chavez, to be bridesmaids at her wedding.
One of the things the young women say they would often talk about was the lack of security at the motor bank. (Texas Commerce Bank officials in San Antonio declined to be interviewed for this story.) The tellers asked for security guards, but bank executives refused. Because no customers could ever get inside the bank, the chance of robbery was remote. This branch of the bank, in fact, had never been robbed. The executives didn’t even feel it was necessary to equip the teller drawers with a common bank security device: dye packs that explode during a robbery and permanently stain the money.
There is no doubt that Jack was aware of the bank’s security problems. Lisa admits she and Jack discussed the subject. At one point, according to Lisa, Jack even said the bank would be robbed one day but that bank officials would have no reason to complain, because they hadn’t provided enough security. Jack had also said that he wished the bank would hire him as a part-time security guard.
Actually, Jack could have used a second job. Although he was making $1,600 a month as an officer and staying in an apartment rent-free in return for some apartment security work, he was struggling financially. He didn’t have a car at the time he met Lisa (his ex-wife had taken it to Miami), and he was paying $250 a month in child support. Because his credit was poor, he couldn’t get a loan or a credit car. He owed at least $700 to Juan Morales, his friend from the police academy. “Jack would agonize over money, saying, ‘God, I’ve got to pay this and this,’” says Juan, “and sometimes he’d only have twenty dollars left to do what he had to do.” But Juan says he never asked Jack about the loans, “So I didn’t see him robbing a bank to pay me back.”
Nevertheless, such small events do have the power to rearrange someone’s world and send him in a stunningly different direction. One police officer, a friend of Jack’s, suggests that Jack’s position as a law enforcement officer ironically could have make him vulnerable to crime. “Being a cop,” he says, “you see guys getting away with a lot of things. Maybe Jack thought he could get away with this robbery.”
It might also be significant that Jack had a love for televised cops-and-robbers shows. Before going to work, he would watch Cops, America’s Most Wanted, and FBI: Untold Stories. Lisa casually told me that one movie Jack took her to see was Point Break, about a group of young men who rob banks, disguising themselves with big, fleshy masks that cover their faces and heads — just like the robber did at Texas Commerce Bank. In the movie, a rookie FBI agent finds the robbers but nearly gets seduced into a life of crime. “Why be a servant to the law,” the leader of the robbers asks the agent, “when you can be its master?”
If Jack and Lisa were planning a robbery, they certainly didn’t act like it. Nobody can remember the couple dong anything unusual. Yet nine days before the robbery, Jack and Lisa secretly went to the Bexar County courthouse and paid $25 to get an informal marriage certificate. Lisa and Jack claim they got married so that Lisa, as Jack’s wife, could qualify for health insurance through Jack’s police department insurance program. They told no one about the informal marriage, they say, because they didn’t want to spoil their big wedding plans.
Several weeks later, however, after finally learning of the marriage, FBI agents would suggest that Jack and Lisa had a more nefarious motive. By law, once they got married, Jack and Lisa could not be forced to testify against one another in case either of them ever committed a crime.
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