Guitar teacher owed money to loan sharks, court hears
A talented guitarist who robbed a dozen Montreal-area banks in six months says he committed the crimes to pay off loan sharks.
Quebec Court Judge Nathalie Fafard was provided with plenty of details on the motive behind Mark Steven Vandendool’s crime spree — from September 2015 to March 2016 — during his sentence hearing on Friday. The judge was also presented with two very different sentence recommendations as Vandendool’s lawyer, Pierre Poupart, asked that his client be sentenced to no more than five years, while prosecutor Marie-France Drolet asked for an overall 12-year sentence. Fafard is expected to deliver her decision in July.
In April, Vandendool, 35, pleaded guilty to 25 charges related to the 12 holdups he carried out using a fake gun and a series of disguises. He was arrested by Montreal police on March 1, 2016 while leaving a Bank of Montreal branch on Côte-des-Neiges Road, where he had just carried out his last robbery.
Near the end of his sentence hearing on Friday, Vandendool told the court he was “lucky to be alive” and thanked the police officer who arrested him for having “spared my life at that crucial moment” when he exited the bank holding a fake firearm.
Poupart criticized his own client and said Vandendool chose a “stupid way to solve his problems.”
A pre-sentencing report prepared for Fafard details how Vandendool’s problems dated back more than a decade. He suffered from attention deficit disorder and had trouble in school. While in his early 20s, his only goal was to study music at McGill University, but his life was in such disorder that seemed impossible.
In interviews conducted for the report, Vandendool told forensic psychologist Tiziana Costi that he borrowed thousands of dollars from loan sharks to purchase a large quantity of marijuana he planned to resell.
That plan fell through, when most of the money he borrowed was stolen. Months later, in 2006, Vandendool decided to rob two banks in Ontario, where he lived at the time.
He was arrested in 2006 and told a judge back then that he carried out the robberies in order to pay for his tuition at McGill’s Schulich School of Music. He admits that version was a mix of the truth as he also hoped to pay back the loan sharks. He served a three-year sentence for the robberies carried out in Ontario and, with the support of his parents, managed to study at McGill. During the sentence hearing on Friday, Vandendool’s father, Orval, said his son had pieced his life together after having graduated from the music school with a 3.8 GPA. He said his son was doing well teaching guitar lessons in Montreal and had started a company (with 13 employees) developing a software program based on a unique method to teach music. But near the end of the summer of 2015, Vandendool’s past caught up to him.
His father said that someone Vandendool knew from his shady past in Ontario recognized him as they passed on a street in downtown Montreal. Based on what Orval Vandendool told Fafard, his son believes the person from Ontario told the loan sharks in that province that he was living in Montreal and they tracked him down through advertisements for his guitar lessons.
According to Costi’s report, Vandendool claims he was forced into a car and held against his will while three men threatened him with a knife. They informed him that his decade-old debt had ballooned to $30,000 and demanded he pay it in two weeks. When he missed the deadline the men returned with a photo of his fiancé, a Montreal lawyer, and assaulted him. That is why he decided to carry out the bank robberies, Costi told Fafard on Friday.
Vandendool’s father testified that his son managed to pay back the loan sharks $29,000 using the money he stole from the banks. He said his son was assaulted twice at the Montreal Detention Centre because he still owed $1,000. The father said the assaults came to an end after he agreed to pay his son’s outstanding debt, through a Western Union wire transfer to a person he never met.