Original subtitles

This was clearly different than every bank robbery

that I've ever worked.

Then it happened again. And again.

In each of these cases, what we were left with was

a bank employee on their own attempting to rob the bank.

If the perpetrators are not getting their money,

the bomb was set to go off.

I said, "I need you to open the vault

"and get out $200,000.

Do what we ask you to, and nobody's gonna get hurt."

She said, "It's my job on the line."

And I said, "I don't care about your job."

This was going to end in tragedy.

I'm retired FBI Special Agent Mick Nocera.

I'm retired FBI Special Agent Jeff Blanton.

When serious crimes strikes,

the special agents of the FBI answer the call.

Fidelity, bravery, integrity.

This...

is "FEDS."

New Britain is a small, tight knit community.

There's some larger cities in Connecticut that have

much more crime than we do.

I think, relatively, we're a very safe community.

Matthew Yussman was the chief financial officer

for the Achieve Financial Credit Union

in New Britain, Connecticut.

Matt was my rock,

and he and I lived together.

I relied on Matt a lot, maybe more than he liked me to.

Mr. Yussman was a very friendly, outgoing individual.

He did his job extremely well.

It was the start of a work week,

typical Monday morning. And the phone rang.

Matthew Yussman called.

And the first words out of his mouth were,

"This is no joke."

What he described to me was that he was sitting in his car

with a bomb strapped to him.

He was being held hostage, and he had two perpetrators

that were holding his mom inside the house,

who also had a bomb strapped to her bed.

He was being instructed

to clear out all the cash from the vault,

or the perpetrators would kill him.

And his instructions to me were that it was his life.

Please do not call the cops.

I called the cops.

The first couple seconds,

I definitely thought it was a joke.

It's not something that I've ever heard before.

The executive told us that Matthew Yussman was en route

to the New Britain branch.

Bank robberies are violations of federal law.

This was clearly going to be an FBI investigation.

Ninety percent of the bank robberies

that we investigate are very impulsive.

They're not well planned.

When the executive told us that Matthew had a bomb strapped

to his chest, that takes it to a different level.

The call is so serious that everybody

in the city was dispatched.

There's no situation that I've experienced like this.

One sniper was in an apartment building,

another was up on the highway.

So we pulled in, parked, and a few seconds later,

Mr. Yussman pulled in in his red car.

We started yelling to him, asking him,

"Did he have a bomb strapped to him?"

He acknowledged that he did.

We notified the bomb squad, but it would take

significant time for them to arrive on scene.

Matthew told me that if the perpetrators

are not getting their money, the bomb was set to go off

at 11 o'clock.

I had him kneel down on the ground, lift his shirt

so we could see the bomb.

It looked like a device underneath a bunch of layers

of duct tape.

In the midst of everything that was happening, I thought about

the case that happened down in Pennsylvania.

There were similarities between the pizza bomber,

Brian Wells, and Matthew Yussman.

Brian Wells went into a bank, he had a bomb strapped to him,

demanded the money, and unfortunately, that ended

tragically when the bomb did explode outside the bank,

and Wells was killed.

Was this a copycat of the pizza bomber?

It was very much real that there was a potential

for this to detonate.

We went from clearing apartment buildings

to shutting down a part of the highway.

As it got closer to 11 AM,

I was worried that it could be the last few minutes

of Matthew Yussman's life.

30 minutes before the bomb was set to go off,

the bomb squad arrived.

The bomb squad told me that they couldn't

remove the bomb before 11 o'clock.

That hit me in the gut.

We didn't know if that would be the end of him.

At 10:59, we just waited.

The clock was ticking.

Fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven,

fifty-eight, fifty-nine.

Nothing.

It didn't detonate.

One of the bomb squad officers approached Matthew.

They were able to determine that the bomb was not real.

Matthew Yussman had said he and his mother

had been kidnapped,

and then him forced to go and rob his bank.

We immediately sent officers over to his house.

I looked outside, and our whole front yard

was full of policemen.

And I waved to them, and I said,

"I'm all right, I'm all right.

It's OK. There's no one here but me."

You want to explore any option

that could have happened.

And one of those things was that Mr. Yussman was involved

in this bank robbery.

Matthew said that the suspects left him there,

and they told him to wait 15 minutes after they left

and then continue with the plan.

When Matt left in the morning with a bomb strapped to him,

I laid in bed praying that things would go well.

"Please, please, God, don't let anything happen."

Matt is a very smart fellow.

He's very strong willed, and he's very convincing.

He said that when he came home the night before,

all of a sudden there was a masked individual

that came up from behind and ordered him to the ground.

There was another individual that came dressed the same way.

They then duct taped the headphones and a hat

over his eyes.

He said that everything sounded kind of digitized.

Matthew said that they strapped one of the pieces

of C-4 onto his, like, stomach area.

They were gonna take two pieces of C-4 explosive

and put it by his mom's bed.

At no time during the night had they ever put anything under

my bed, so I was not aware of that.

The entire story seemed movie-like.

Something just didn't sound right.

It was unusual for someone to go through all that trauma

and just act so stoic and unfazed.

It seemed to be so strange.

I did think that someone that Mr. Yussman knew had

to be involved.

Did Mr. Yussman concoct this story to get money

from the credit union for his own needs?

I can't believe that the first words out of their mouth

was, "We know you did it."

How could they think such a thing for such a good man?

And they said, "You don't know what people would do

when they're desperate."

Desperate people do desperate things.

I was asked to do a polygraph exam,

a lie detector test on Matthew.

The regret that I had sitting there was, could I have stopped

this before it got to this point?

He failed the test.

There was no reaction at all.

He then said that although he was truthful about

the actual home invasion, he knew that the bomb was fake.

He looked at me

and there was a pause, and all of a sudden,

he just said, "I want a lawyer."

As far as the evidence collected in his home,

none of it led us to believe that anyone else was involved.

Because we couldn't corroborate any of his story, it appeared

that Matthew Yussman had been the one that concocted

this scheme to rob his own bank.

I was a special agent with the FBI here

in Knoxville, Tennessee, on the Violent Crime Squad.

Two months after the Matthew Yussman event

in Connecticut, I received a call of an attempted

bank robbery in Oak Ridge, Knoxville.

I drove over there and started the investigation.

The bank was the headquarters building

of the Y-12 Federal Credit Union.

On the surveillance video, we saw Mark Ziegler,

who was the CEO, enter the building

and make his way to the vault room

carrying a duffel bag.

We see various employees gathered around Mr. Ziegler.

We see them open the vault, and Mr. Ziegler

then begins putting stacks of money

into this big duffel bag,

$283,000.

After Mr. Ziegler comes out of the bank

with the money, the police responded.

Mark Ziegler told us, as he was leaving for work that morning,

he was approached by two armed males.

His wife and his son, they were handcuffed together.

He told us that there was a white male

and then a Black male.

And then at one point, the white male left,

and then a white female had come in through the back door

and asked for milk for the baby.

You would not think that would be part of a home invasion.

It sounded bizarre.

He told us that he was given instructions on exactly

how this bank robbery was gonna be committed in exchange

for his wife and child.

We could find zero physical evidence,

no video of any other subjects involved.

There was nothing that supported Mr. Ziegler's account

that someone had come into his house.

This robbery was clearly different

than every bank robbery that I've ever worked.

Then it happened again.

Tanner Harris, an employee of the SmartBank in Knoxville,

walked into his branch carrying a bag,

and told the employees there that his wife and child

were being held hostage in the car

and that he needed money from the vault.

He obtained $195,000 and Tanner Harris left the bank

with that money.

The Harrises told us that morning

when his wife Abigail was leaving the house,

she saw two males standing in her garage.

She ran upstairs to where her husband and baby were.

And the robbers knocked down that door and kidnapped them.

All we had was that they were white males wearing ski masks,

both armed, one thin built and one heavier set.

Now we've had two bank extortions in Knoxville

in the span of three months.

A bank robbery where employees are kidnapped or families

are held for ransom are incredibly rare.

And we're asking ourselves, was this a copycat crime?

The same law enforcement descended upon the Harris house

and the SmartBank,

combing it for any kind of forensic evidence.

No forensic evidence was found.

No hairs, no fibers, no fingerprints.

In each of these cases, all we were left with was

a bank employee going into their bank on their own,

attempting to rob the bank.

The FBI have always treated bank robberies

as a serious threat.

There was a lot of pressure to get this solved.

Then I received a call from Special Agent Jeff Blanton

in Johnson City.

There had been an attempted bank robbery that occurred

at Northeast Community Credit Union in Elizabethton

by a young lady, Brooke Lyons,

who worked at the bank as a teller.

Elizabethton is a suburb of Johnson City.

Things like that just don't happen in small towns.

She had come in, claimed that someone had kidnapped her

and she needed the contents of the safe.

But we didn't have anything to corroborate

what she had told us.

This was a bank employee who knew the place,

coming in with an amazing outlandish story.

Local law enforcement were going to

charge her for trying to rob her bank.

But I wanted to get into a little bit more detail.

My name is Brooke Lyons.

I was a teller at Northeast Community Credit Union.

The morning that everything happened was

just another ordinary day.

I had a little boy, Carson,

who was three at the time,

a thriving little three-year-old boy, wild as he can be.

And I can remember walking out of the house,

and I got Carson in the car seat,

and I heard leaves crunch behind me,

which caused me to turn around.

And there was a slender, shorter-built man

in a ski mask.

And at that point, I fall back into the car,

and at that point, I see another man standing

on the other side of the door

who was much larger, heavier as that man.

I actually ended up kicking the skinny one in the chest

to try to get him away from me,

and that's when he pulled the gun out.

They'd taken the gun and just pressed it

into the side of my head

and said, "No, get in your car now.

You're gonna rob your bank today."

So we're driving, and Carson had started crying.

And I just remember holding him.

And he would just...

He would pat my chest. Like, "It's OK, Mom.

We're gonna be OK."

When we got to the Credit Union,

they handed me a black duffel bag

and said that I needed to get $200,000 out of the vault.

And I begged,

and pleaded for them, "Please just let me take

"him inside. I'll do what you want me to do.

"Please just let me take him inside.

"No, he has to stay here with us.

Just do what we ask you to, and nobody's gonna get hurt."

And...

that was the hardest decision...

I think I ever had to make,

because my biggest fear was--

this is the last time I'm gonna see my baby.

I remember going into the Credit Union.

The girl that I worked with at the time was actually

supposed to be a personal friend of mine.

I said, "I need you to open the vault.

"They have Carson in the car with a gun to his head.

I need you to unlock the vault."

And she just...

looked at me and said, "It's my job on the line."

And I said, "I don't care about your job.

That's my baby."

And I begged and pleaded.

And the only thing I can remember is grabbing the bag

and turning around and looking up and said,

"You just killed us both."

Walking out of the bank with that bag empty,

I thought I was gonna have to watch my child die.

I'm never gonna see him again.

And he's my whole world.

I opened the door, just begging,

begging, and pleading,

"I done what you asked, please don't kill us.

"Please don't kill us. I did try.

I did try. No one would open it."

And I will never forget the words he said to me.

"No harm, no foul. No one saw our faces."

After they dropped us off, I just remember sitting

and squeezing him, and I didn't want to let him go.

Like, I wanted to physically hold him,

to know he's right here.

We get down to the police station,

and they just interrogated me.

It was like they did not believe anything that was

coming out of my mouth.

This was a case for the FBI to handle

because you have serious, violent violations

of federal law occurring in numerous places.

And all I can remember is Detective Blanton

coming through the door.

He said, "That is enough. We're done."

I can't describe in words the fear that I saw on her face

when I first walked into the room.

I saw someone who had just been broken.

At least two men held a three-year-old helpless,

defenseless child at gunpoint, threatening his life.

I can't think of the type of evil that it requires

to do something like that.

She was still terrified about her son,

she was terrified about his safety and his well being.

I know she was not a suspect,

but I had no idea who the suspects were.

However, there were two robberies with similar MO's

earlier in Knoxville.

We were really almost out of investigative leads

and were struggling to piece together who did this.

The only thing that we had, knew was a video of the car

from the Harris bank surveillance.

We see Mr. Harris walk out of the bank,

and he goes to a single car.

We see him hand the bag to a person sitting

in the front seat,

and the car speeds out of the parking lot.

There's a tussle over the bag 'cause he doesn't want to give

the money and then see his wife and child drive off.

And you can see that Tanner's just defeated.

When I heard about the Brooke Lyons robbery,

it clearly matched what had happened with the Harrises.

The Harrises both stated that, as they were driving away

from the bank, these subjects had donned Halloween masks

that looked like old men.

And they had a yellow-tipped crowbar.

They both had on ski masks.

But when I took my blindfold off to go into the Credit Union,

they had on old men Halloween masks.

And I noticed that there was a yellow-tipped crowbar

laying on the console.

The Harris and the Lyons were clearly the same crew.

They had struck again.

The MO of this crew and what they did

was very similar to the Ziegler's account.

But the description was a little bit different.

There was not a Black male,

and there was not a white female.

So it seems like there may be two crews involved,

or there was a copycat crew.

The level of intimidation and violence

that these subjects used was concerning to us.

There was a tremendous amount of fear in the community

that this was going to happen again.

We were dealing with a very sophisticated, organized crew

that are evil criminal geniuses.

They're not leaving evidence behind.

Brooke Lyons and the Harrises really never saw their faces.

From the descriptions that the Zieglers provided us,

we had a thin-built Black male, bald,

with a orange sunburst-type tattoo on his neck.

A heavyset white male,

and we had a white female with big red lips.

We knew that these were hardened criminals.

They were not going to stop, and that if we didn't get them,

this was going to end in tragedy.

We were throwing a lot of resources at this case,

reviewing hundreds and hundreds of hours of CCTV.

We were looking at photographs of tattoos

from past bank robbery subjects.

But these bank robbers, they were like phantoms.

I was hoping to get lucky, and during the search

of Brooke's residence, Agent Brian O'Hare,

he said, "Hey, last month, his son-in-law was involved

in a vehicle chase."

This was so random and such a unique circumstance.

My son-in-law was driving from North Carolina to Tennessee

and said someone wrecked him and the people who ran

from police were carrying black duffel bags.

I wondered if those two individuals might be

associated with this.

There were multiple dash cams in this particular pursuit.

As I was driving along, I saw two cop cars

with their lights on behind this SUV in the distance.

All of a sudden, that SUV was on me.

And they were just swerving left and right behind me.

I felt like they were trying to hit me.

The final swipe is when they clipped

the back of my car.

They went around me, and that's when

they hit another vehicle.

Two gentlemen in the vehicle jumped out,

and they had these black duffel bags, and they sprinted.

They just ran. They jumped over,

you know, the concrete barrier on the interstate.

They're running from the police with something important enough

to take with them when they leave the car.

This was more than just a vehicle pursuit.

This video made me want to find out

who these two men were.

They got away into the mountains.

It's not safe to pursue them up into there.

The driver was tall and slender,

and the passenger short and fat.

I had enough to ask, were these our guys?

The Highway Patrol in North Carolina had recovered

several items of evidence--

there was a global positioning satellite

that had been left in the vehicle.

The Highway Patrol told me they had already tried to retrieve

the data, and there was nothing there,

that it had been erased or it was blank.

This is the GPS that was recovered

from the crashed vehicle in North Carolina.

I've turned it over to one of our computer experts.

He was able to write a computer program

that went through the memory of the GPS system.

It was discovered there were journeys that had been deleted

from the device.

It indicated that the two people who ran

from the Highway Patrol had driven from North Carolina

to Knoxville to appear to have cased out a bank.

I actually called agent Nocera, and I informed him--

"I don't know who it is yet,

"but I think I've identified our bank robbers,

and I feel pretty good about it."

Stop!

One of the addresses on the GPS

was a rental cabin in North Carolina,

in the Smoky Mountains.

Now I had a potential location of where our suspects

could be hiding out.

I reached out to the property management company

and found out that there were two men that had been staying

in that cabin.

She describes them as some of her best tenants,

very quiet, paid in cash.

We had to get surveillance on this cabin

as soon as possible.

Those rental cabins, they're extremely remote.

We're located over a mile away

from where this cabin was located.

We're trying to keep these guys under surveillance

and trying to learn who they are and what they're doing.

We're primarily using binoculars to see any activity

in and around the cabin.

Suddenly, they left the cabin, got in the vehicle,

and pulled away.

At this point, it was game on.

We didn't know how this was gonna go.

It was an extremely dangerous situation.

The vehicle pulls over to the side

of the emergency lane, and a heavyset guy

from the passenger seat gets out,

raises his hands, and surrenders to law enforcement.

The driver takes off.

The Highway Patrol pursue and ultimately arrest him.

The driver of the vehicle was identified as Brian Witham.

He was slender and was taken into custody as well.

I attempted to interview the heavyset guy who was

identified as Michael Benanti.

His story was that he was just hitchhiking.

He got a ride.

He doesn't know what's going on

or doesn't know what's happening.

Mr. Benanti had been in jail for robberies

and for trying to kill a police officer.

He thought he was the smartest person

in whatever room he was in, extremely arrogant.

But after the troopers searched Michael Benanti,

he had a piece of paper that he tried to hide.

And on that piece of paper were the names,

addresses, identification of several bank employees

and several banks.

So we felt really good now.

We had enough for a search warrant

to search that cabin.

When we entered that cabin,

I'd never seen anything like it.

As I walked through this cabin, it was amazing

the amount of evidence that we were able to recover.

We found weapons

and a treasure trove of surveillance equipment.

They even had fake FBI ID's.

Then we discovered a black crowbar

with a yellow tip.

Now I've got a black crowbar with a yellow tip

at a bank robbery in Knoxville.

I've got one at Brooke Lyons and I've got one

at the rental cabin where these two men just left.

Then we found a collection of masks.

That was freaking awesome.

They were pulling those out.

We found the old man Halloween masks.

Then we hit the jackpot.

The Black male.

Michael Benanti's DNA was found on the bald Black male's mask.

And...

white female.

Brian Witham's DNA was found on the white female's mask.

There were, like, Hollywood quality masks that led

the Zieglers to identify them as real people.

The masks were used purposely to make law enforcement

believe that there were multiple people involved

in these bank robberies and not simply two men.

That sunburst tattoo, they were just fake tattoos,

just to throw us off.

The layers of deception and tradecraft that Benanti

and Witham used was unlike anything that I had come across

in my career.

We now had the subjects that did

the Zieglers, the Harrises, and the Lyons.

We also found targeting packs of potential other victims.

They spent their entire days setting out video cameras,

scouring the internet, collecting information

on family, and putting that together in packages

to determine who their next victims were going to be.

There was a briefcase that had Brooke Lyons in it.

She had been surveilled for a period of time.

Brian Witham initially did not want to cooperate,

but when we presented what was seized from the cabin,

he decided to cooperate with law enforcement.

Brian Witham told us that they crossed paths while in prison,

and when they got out,

they furthered their criminal activity.

He then told us about a robbery

that was committed in Connecticut,

where the victim was strapped with a fake bomb

and forced to go try to rob his own bank.

Matt Yussman was 100% a victim of Michael Benanti

and Brian Witham.

After nine months of being under police scrutiny,

I was exonerated.

To this day, it is something that still haunts me.

This was the highest level of criminality in preparation,

thinking through how to do these crimes,

execute maximum trauma on the victims.

For months, I would sit in a chair

with a gun in my lap in silence

for hours on end.

I called Brooke Lyons, and I told her that

we had two suspects in custody.

And I remember she broke down on the phone

and just cried and cried and cried because she was

so relieved. You could actually hear...

the relief in her voice over the phone.

That was the most satisfying part

of this whole investigation.

The Federal District Court sentenced Michael Benanti

to four consecutive life sentences plus 155 years.

As a result of his cooperation, Brian Witham received

a 30-year federal sentence.

I am 110% sure if it was not for the FBI,

I would be sitting in jail right now.

I haven't seen Agent Blanton since the trial.

- Hey. - Hey, Brooke.

- How are you-- look at you. - I'm so good.

You were the first person to show me that kindness

and that validation.

And I'll never be able to tell you how grateful I am.

Seeing you here today, that's what we want,

people like you to have successful lives.

Agent Blanton means everything.

To have that one person in your corner

that constantly fought for you to give you the justice

that you needed, the closure that you needed.

He is my real life hero.

Next time on FEDS...

We don't know who is causing all of this violence

but they have torn up the community.

My friend died for nothing.

He died for nothing.

Brutal murders, drive-by shootings

random shootings.

This case is my life.

I will not stop.

I want who did this to my son to pay for it.