In a white-walled interrogation room in a small Virginia police station last June, two detectives were trying to get Herson Torres to crack. Surveillance video tied him to two attempted bank robberies in the area during the past week. The skinny 21-year-old didn’t have a criminal record and seemed nervous, but he wasn’t talking. The detectives showed him pictures of his brother and father. They told Torres he could be sent to prison for as many as 25 years.“If I tell you, you’re not going to believe me,â€� Torres said. He was crying as he told them an incredible story about being recruited by the Defense Intelligence Agency to participate in a secret operation testing the security of Washington-area banks. He said he’d been assigned to rob a half-dozen banks over four days. And he told them about Theo, the man who hired him and gave all the orders—even though Torres had never met him.
Angry, his interrogators accused him of making up a ridiculous story. Still, Torres persuaded them to look at the text and e-mail messages on his cell phone; he also gave them the password to his Facebook (FB) account and urged them to retrieve a copy of the Defense Intelligence Agency immunity letter from his glove compartment. The police locked up Torres on a charge of attempted robbery and examined the evidence. By the end of the night, they weren’t sure what was going on, but they suspected Torres might be telling the truth.
Torres’s unlikely entry into the covert world of retail bank security testing had begun seven days earlier, he said. He had returned home from unloading trucks at Target (TGT) when his phone lit up with a text message from an old friend. “Hey, I got this job for you where you’re going to get paid 25K,â€� Carolina Villegas wrote. “Doing what?â€� Torres asked. “Robbing banks,â€� she texted.
Torres started laughing. “Is this a joke?â€� he wondered. Soon Villegas was on the phone explaining that it was a government job. And it was legal.
The thought of making $25,000 was seductive to Torres, who was earning $11 an hour at Target. Since graduating from high school in 2008, Torres, who goes by the nickname Geo, hadn’t changed much. He spent most of his time hanging out with friends, collecting Batman comic books, and working part-time jobs. Twenty-five thousand dollars would be enough to start community college and move out of his parents’ house.
