Think of it as a bank robbery without a bank.
Three men in a white S.U.V. pull up in front of a Queens grocery store in the overnight darkness. One waits outside while the other two disable the surveillance cameras on the front of the building and break open the security gate and door.
An alarm goes off. The burglars ignore it. Inside, they approach their target: a slim, gray A.T.M. wedged in between shelves of pita bread, potato chips and laundry detergent.
The men wear gaiter-style masks, gloves and hoodies. No fingerprints; no faces captured on video. They wrestle the machine loose from the floor, hustle its 200-plus pounds outside to the getaway vehicle and speed off, dangling wires and scattered snacks in their wake.
These kinds of brute-force heists last maybe five minutes. The take? Next to nothing or perhaps as much as $60,000 — enough for a blowout weekend in Las Vegas.
The burglary, at 75 St. Super Bazaar in East Elmhurst two days before Christmas, was one of more than three dozen by the same three-man crew from September through January, the police suspect. Investigators were examining 16 similar break-ins last summer as possibly linked.
Played for slapstick laughs in “Barbershop” and gory shock value in “Breaking Bad,” A.T.M. theft has soared nationally since the coronavirus pandemic began, industry data shows, and New York has felt the effects.
There are more high-tech ways of stealing the money in a cash machine. But for low-tech criminals with some muscle and planning skills, grabbing and smashing the device itself can be lucrative, and there are tens of thousands of them in the city.
They are a staple of daily life, in bodegas and delis; laundromats and beauty salons; bars, diners, dollar stores, legal cannabis dispensaries and illegal smoke shops. Awnings, door signs and red neon beckon: “A.T.M. Inside.”
In a world of digital wallets and tap-to-pay shopping, cash is increasingly rare. Even the penny is calling it quits. But some merchants still prefer cash. So do some customers, especially those who have little or no relationship to a U.S. banking system that, at the local level, keeps contracting. The cash machine is their lifeline.
But to some eyes, each A.T.M. sign is instead an invitation to a kind of larceny that is costly to those who are robbed but mostly invisible to the public — even as, police estimates suggest, one busy crew may have made off with more than half a million dollars in under six months.
How It’s Done
The rash of heists that included the East Elmhurst store, across police precincts in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens, followed a pattern that Deputy Chief John Mastronardi described in an interview.
Two or three members of the crew would bring two vehicles to the target address. One had been stolen specifically for the burglary. An A.T.M. could fit in the back.
On the rear of the stolen car is a license plate taken from the front of a similar car, to help evade cameras and license-plate readers. The burglars swipe front plates because most drivers do not notice when they are gone to report them as missing, Chief Mastronardi said.
The break-ins themselves are straightforward. The burglars force their way into businesses using bolt cutters, crowbars, screwdrivers, electric saws, hammers and drills. The A.T.M., usually just steps from the door, can often be ripped from the floor with less than a minute of back-and-forth rocking. Then it is simply lift — or, sometimes, drag — and go.
Chief Mastronardi declined to estimate the total amount stolen in the burglary spree. The A.T.M. generally does not belong to a store’s owner but to a company that effectively rents space, paying a cut of the transaction fees that come in.
He put what he called a “generic” value of $15,000 on how much is stolen in an A.T.M. burglary. Multiplied by the 39 in the spree, that comes to $585,000.
“They know their profession,” the chief said of the burglars.
One step that those in the industry believe would cut down on A.T.M. burglaries is treating them as federal crimes like bank robberies, which can yield prison terms of 20 years. A bill to authorize such a change to the federal bank robbery statute is pending in Congress.
‘Where Cash Is Still King’
Take the L train to the end of the line in Brooklyn, and walk through Canarsie and Brownsville along Rockaway Parkway and Rockaway Avenue. A sign on a wing joint touts an A.T.M. fee of “only” $1.25. At a 99¢ & Up store, the fee is, fittingly, 99 cents. The availability of small bills — fives and 10s — is also a selling point.
The number of bank branches in New York City dropped nearly 20 percent from 2015 to 2024, according to the New Economy Project, an advocacy group. In 2018, as the drop was underway, neighborhoods with largely Black and Hispanic residents averaged just one branch per 10,000 people, according to the group. Parts of central Brooklyn, like Brownsville, Southeast Queens and the South Bronx had fewer. Some ZIP codes had none.
“The unfortunate piece of the business today is that’s where cash is still king,” said Jon Weilbaker, who, with his wife, Patricia Tuz, runs New York ATM, which operates about 1,000 machines in and around the city. “Because the banks are not there, because the people can’t qualify for credit cards.”
Many people who use A.T.M.s do so to get their government benefits — cash assistance and federal disability, veterans’ and Social Security benefits — using prepaid cards.
It was the closing of a Chase branch near their Upper West Side home in the late 1990s that got Mr. Weilbaker and Ms. Tuz into the A.T.M. business. He persuaded the pharmacist at the drugstore next door to install one, and things grew from there, he said.
The theft of machines has not been a problem for most of the couple’s time in the business, but it has become more common in the past five years, Mr. Weilbaker said.
Certain people, he said, had realized that stealing an A.T.M. was relatively easy, especially given modern power-tool technology; that often the penalties for being caught were not severe; and that the crime was not the police’s highest priority.
“I don’t think there was anything magical,” he said. “The average person is under the impression that they’re a lot more secure and heavier than they really are.”
Covid Crime Wave
While the crew being sought in the 39-heist spree remained at large, members of another A.T.M. burglary ring were beginning prison terms handed down this spring in a case prosecuted by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.
The case involved 14 machines stolen in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens from June 2022 to January 2023. In May, the man identified as the ringleader, Alexander Torres, was sentenced to six to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to two burglary counts.
The 52-year-old Mr. Torres, known as Chacho, and associates with the nicknames Fusion, Capone, Pucci, Cholo and Chris the Greek, used police scanners to monitor whether officers were approaching during the heists, prosecutors said.
Video of one break-in shows two men in dark hoodies breaking into a store in Bushwick on a rainy November night. A third man, apparently a lookout, stands by twirling a gray Nautica umbrella overhead. Thirty seconds after gaining entry, the men lug an A.T.M. out.
A second video shows one man, accompanied by two others, dragging a cash machine out of another Bushwick business at 6 a.m. The guts of the device trail behind like a dead animal’s innards.
The ring’s run ended after four of the men burglarized a bodega in South Richmond Hill, Queens, led the authorities on a high-speed chase past Kennedy Airport and then crashed their Ford van into a barrier at LaGuardia Airport.
“We hit pay dirt,” said Lt. John Tennant, the chief investigator in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.
Some of the stolen devices belonged to ATM World Corp., which controls about 5,000 machines in and around New York City. Youssef Mubarez, the chief operating officer, said the company had experienced thefts of its machines for years and that the most serious spike had come amid the pandemic.
“We get emails all the time, every two weeks, about a new robbery,” he said.
Savvy burglars, he said, watch a store to get an idea of when its A.T.M. will be restocked with cash, often by an armored carrier that may deliver “a heavy load” — $30,000 to $50,000 or more.
“They’ll wait and they’ll get the schedule and then they’ll go that night,” Mr. Mubarez said, adding: “If you time it wrong, you go through all this trouble and end up with, you know, three or four hundred dollars.”
He knows how much burglars have stolen because ATM World has access to real-time balance information for its machines.
“Every time a machine is stolen, the police say, ‘What was the cash balance?’ And I send it to them,” he said.
“These kinds of cases, it’s not something they care about,” he continued. “A lot of times, when the machines get robbed, they would show up, take the information, take photos and say, ‘Here’s your police report,’ and that’s it. We file an insurance claim. Nothing ever happens.”
Chief Mastronardi said the Police Department takes the burglaries seriously and has a specialized unit, the financial crimes task force, dedicated to investigating them.
The Real Cost
Ali Ali, who operates the All Natural Market & Deli on Bainbridge Street in Brooklyn, knows exactly how much was in the A.T.M. stolen from the store last summer because, he said, the device’s owner told him: $11,700.
The burglary was unusual because it happened at about 8 p.m., while the deli was open and two workers were there. Mr. Ali had taken over the store only three days earlier and had inherited the cash machine, which the previous owner left behind.
He said three men had participated in the burglary. Two entered the store. One had a gun but did not brandish it. They walked over to the A.T.M., which was not bolted down, picked it up and carried it outside while the third man held the door.
Despite the burglary, Mr. Ali soon acquired another A.T.M. The financial benefit of having it in the store is minimal; his cut of the transaction fees is about $200 a month. But it is convenient for customers, and some of what they take out, they spend at the deli.
“If we don’t have the A.T.M., they go to a different corner,” he said.
Joyce Boodhoo, who owns 75 St. Super Bazaar, said she would not replace the one that was stolen before Christmas, which she also kept as a convenience for customers coming in to play the lottery or drifting in from the bar next door.
But the $75 to $100 a month she received for hosting it could not offset what she said was the $3,000 in damage done by the burglars.
Pointing out the holes in the floor where the machine had been, Ms. Boodhoo expressed a grudging respect for the thieves’ abilities. “They’re really good,” she said.
Ed Shanahan is a rewrite reporter and editor covering breaking news and general assignments on the Metro desk.
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