FBI, local law enforcement collaboration helped catch Ocean County serial robber

MaryAnn Spoto

The Star-Ledger

Monday March 16, 2009, 6:47 PM

Peter A. Bielecke was indicted Thursday for six bank robberies in Monmouth, Middlesex and Ocean counties.

When Wall Township Police Officer Doug Borst spotted the white 1991 Mercury Grand Marquis on Route 34, he jotted down the license plate number and he relayed the information to police, providing the final piece of information authorities needed to nab a suspect wanted in connection with a string of bank robberies.

As a result, an hour after Borst spotted the Marquis on March 5 -- just a few hours after the latest heist -- the man police claim was responsible for six robberies in Middlesex, Monmouth and Ocean counties was in custody.

The collaborative efforts between federal, state and local authorities had paid off. On Thursday, 40-year-old Peter Bielecke of Brick, a convicted felon who served prison time for attempted kidnapping, was indicted on federal bank robbery charges for those heists.

"He did six (robberies) in six weeks," said Frank O'Neill, supervisor of the violent crime squad of the FBI's Red Bank office. "He would still be doing them if we hadn't have (collaborated). We were able to cut his bank robbery career short because of the outstanding cooperation we had."

"We are solving a lot of bank robberies and the way we're doing it is a collaborative, coordinated effort between the FBI and the local agencies," O'Neill said.

The FBI is called in on every bank robbery, providing another set of eyes and ears to help local police and county prosecutors.

In this case, it wasn't long into the investigation authorities knew they had a serial robber on their hands, O'Neill said.

The first heist occurred Jan. 29 at a Provident Bank branch in Brick. The second was Feb. 5 at an Investors Savings Bank, also in Brick. Witnesses in both robberies gave similar descriptions of the bandit and said he passed a note to tellers saying he had a gun.

Beyond that, O'Neill would not reveal what other information led police to believe the same man had committed both jobs.

"After those two banks, we knew based on factors that we looked at that we had a serial robber and that there were some things we could hang our hat on to allow us to go out and be proactive and try to maybe catch him in the act," O'Neill said.

Law enforcement agencies also knew police weren't getting solid leads from the public. From images taken from surveillance cameras, police were having a difficult time discerning specific physical features of the culprit, O'Neill said.

Authorities tried to guess where the bandit would strike next, but were foiled each time. They set up surveillance in Brick; he hit a bank in neighboring Toms River as his third job. They set up more surveillance but the bandit struck a week later, in Lakewood.

From the beginning, police throughout the area were put on alert. The FBI recruited manpower from as many as 10 local police departments as the bandit struck further from his first targets, O'Neill said. Officers, aided only by images taken from surveillance photos, were instructed to be on the look-out for a man fitting those descriptions.

"They (investigators) gave the cops good descriptions, good directions, and the officers were on the ball," Brick Police Chief Nils Bergquist said.

On Feb. 26, an FBI agent spotted a man fitting the bandit's description near a bank and for the first time, investigators got a description of a car: a white Mercury Marquis. The information was then disseminated to police agencies.

The next day, the bandit struck again, at a Community Savings Bank in Howell. From witness descriptions, police knew it was the same man.

Then Borst, the Wall Township officer, spotted the Marquis on March 5, two hours after a Synergy Bank in Old Bridge was robbed. He followed the car into Brick, where he lost sight of it.

Brick police officer Jason Matthews spotted it a short time later, parked on a local street, in front of a house. Detectives kept the car under surveillance until Bielecke came out of the house and drove to a nearby shopping center where he was arrested.

Bielecke was indicted by a federal grand jury on Thursday on six counts of bank robbery.

"By giving the street officer the information - that was the key - the officer equipped with that information is able to be on the lookout and that's what happened in this case," said Toms River Police Chief Michael Mastronardy.