Fingerprint led agents to ‘shaky’ robbery suspect

By Monday, FBI special agents believed they knew the identity of the “Shaky Bandit.”

Thanks to a fingerprint left on a violently worded note passed to a bank teller, agents suspected that Brandon Michael Venditti, 22, of Weston, was responsible for the three-week-long spree of 12 bank robberies committed by a man with trembling hands across three counties.

They just needed to find him and arrest him.

This is how they did it — with help from deputies in Collier County.

According to charging documents released Wednesday, Venditti and his driver, Walter Roberts, 29, of Fort Lauderdale, met their downfall after deciding to rob a Wells Fargo branch on Tamiami Trail in Naples on Tuesday.

Two Collier County sheriff’s deputies were patrolling the eastern part of the city when word of the robbery came over their dispatch radio. It was about 5:20 p.m.

By that point the FBI had already been getting the word out to other law enforcement agencies to be on the lookout for a dark gray Mazda 3 hatchback with a Florida license plate number determined to be registered to Venditti’s father, authorities said.

The car was believed to have been involved in a spate of bank robberies, they said.

The two Collier deputies heard on their radio that the possible getaway car in the Wells Fargo robbery was that same gray hatchback.

So they decided to pull over and wait at Davis and Collier boulevards, the last intersection before the I-75 interchange.

The deputies spotted the car and followed it onto I-75. By this point another patrol car was behind the deputies, and farther up on I-75 were some marked patrol cars.

A chase ensued on Alligator Alley.

By the 97 Mile Marker, three patrol vehicles were behind the gray Mazda and a Collier sheriff ’s helicopter was in the air above.

Near the 96 Mile Marker, deputies deployed stop sticks, a device used to deflate a car’s tires, but the gray car veered out of the way and missed them.

By the 94 Mile Marker the chase was reaching speeds of 120 mph. Two other deputies had another set of stop sticks on the road and this time they worked. The chase continued for another two miles as the Mazda’s tires deflated slowly.

At one point, the Mazda suddenly veered across a median and came to stop in the westbound lanes.

The driver, later identified as Roberts, climbed a 15-foot barbwire-topped fence, which separates Alligator Alley from its namesake alligators in the Everglades.

Roberts made climbing the fence look easy.

“The fence has several lawyers of barbed wire on the very top of it. However, the driver climbed the fence with no problem,” the deputy noted in the report.

Roberts dove into a canal head first, swimming across to an embankment on the other side.

Roberts didn’t know that a few patrol units had driven onto the dirt road on the other side of the canal. They stopped him.

Venditti, the backseat passenger, also was taken into custody.

The chase for Venditti had been going on long before the Tuesday afternoon takedown on Alligator Alley, authorities say.

According to a federal criminal complaint filed after Venditti’s arrest, special agents found themselves on Venditti’s trail — though they didn’t know it yet — when they responded to the Sept. 27 robbery of a Citibank at 3101 North Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale.

The robber had passed a note that read, “This is a Robbery You have 30 seconds to fill this bag NO ALARM No Bull s--- OR I will Shoot you in the F----Face.”

“I have no choice but to do this,” the robber allegedly said to the teller. “I have a family.”

The teller gave him $2,183 in cash and the robber, later identified as Venditti, according to court records, left the bank and was gone.

The demand note left by Venditti was processed for fingerprints and one was found. In the federal criminal complaint filed by FBI special agents, investigators found that the print matched up with a male they identified in the documents only as W.R.