COURT ATM HEIST
A fired armoured car guard and his friend, who stole $178,260 from an Eighth Street ATM, will either face prison time or community service.
After Kyle Andrew Legge lost his job with an armoured car company in Saskatoon, he and a friend came up with a plan to use Legge’s knowledge of ATM codes to steal a large amount of cash. It worked — temporarily. Legge broke into the Conexus Credit Union on Eighth Street East on May 11, 2012, while his friend Eric John Langhorst kept lookout. The two 20-year-olds stole $178,260, plus the computer hard drive that contained the security footage of their crime.
Police interviewed Legge the next day — after learning he’d been fired by the G4S armoured car company on April 30 — but he denied being involved. He said he’d gone to a movie the night before with a friend, Langhorst, and then they drove around drinking beer. Police interviewed Langhorst, who told a similar story, Crown prosecutor Bryce Pashovitz said Thursday in Saskatoon Court of Queen’s Bench.
Police kept tabs on them, though, and noticed some suspicious spending habits over the next few months.
Legge bought a 2008 Ford F350 super crew cab for $36,750, paying for it with $29,000 in cash — mainly $20 bills — and a bank draft for the rest. He was also observed by a casino dealer acting suspiciously, buying chips and then cashing them in without ever gambling.
On July 1, 2012, Legge and Langhorst both signed a three-year rental agreement for an acreage outside the city, paying $7,000 in cash with $20 bills.
In October 2012, police arrested them and brought them in for more questioning, focused on their spending habits. Both men confessed. They also told police about other crimes — including an unsuccessful attempt to break into an armoured car by sawing off a door handle on Aug. 23, 2012, and an occasion when they spray painted security cameras at a bank on Sept. 3, 2012.
Both men pleaded guilty earlier this year to break and enter and theft over $5,000, plus conspiring to commit the other two crimes. None of the cash from the ATM heist was recovered, but police seized Legge’s truck, as well as furniture and stereo equipment bought during the summer of 2012.
On Thursday, the Crown and defence proposed vastly differing sentences: Pashovitz argued for penitentiary time of two years for Langhorst and three years for Legge, while defence lawyers Nicholas Stooshinoff and Morris Bodnar argued their clients should serve community-based sentences of less than two years.
The planning was so deliberate, and the amount of money stolen so large, time behind bars is called for, Pashovitz said.
“The money was stolen for no other purpose than greed,” Pashovitz said.
The men’s lawyers said that wasn’t the case. It was more a matter of Legge and Langhorst living in a fantasy world, they argued.
“I think it’s two young guys who lived a video game in real life,” Stooshinoff said.
Legge had serious, unresolved psychological issues that led to long periods of sleeplessness and drug and alcohol addiction, Stooshinoff said.
As for Langhorst, he’s a hard-working young man who was “influenced” to commit the break-in, and if he goes to prison he’ll just have a couple hundred people negatively influencing him there, Bodnar said.
Both young men were using alcohol and cocaine on the night of the break-in, but since their arrest they’ve been sober and fully complied with their court-ordered conditions after they were released from custody, the defence lawyers said.
Chief Justice Martel Popescul is expected to give his sentencing decision Friday.