According to police, James Bruno Rocha, 56, pedaled a bicycle 25 miles from Santa Ana to the Wells Fargo on Rancho Santa Margarita this morning before lunch, cased the joint in one outfit and returned 10 minutes later dressed as a construction worker.
The robbery might have worked but a teller thought Rocha’s first visit was suspicious and put the bank on alert. Ten minutes later, police say, the bandit re-entered the bank, held up a teller and walked into the waiting arms of two Brinks armored truck guards.
Rocha had planned to escape with the loot on a bicycle.
Before deputies with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department arrived, Rocha wrote an apology note to the teller. He said he hoped he hadn’t frightened her. Touching.
Rocha is a fugitive on a felony theft case from June. In 2002, he was convicted of receiving stolen property, possession of narcotics and destorying evidence. He won a two-year prison sentence that apparently didn’t make a lasting impression. Using a different name, Gilbert Cervantes, Rocha also has drug convictions.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.