PORTLAND, Maine — Two men arrested Saturday in connection with a bank robbery in Lewiston had recently been released from federal prison after serving sentences for separate bank robberies, according to court documents.
Joseph Richards, 46, of Manchester, New Hampshire, and Neil West Sr., 64, of Portland made their first court appearances Monday in U.S. District Court. The men were arrested in Saco after a high-speed chase with police, according to a previously published report. The TD Bank on Lisbon Street in Lewiston was robbed at gunpoint about 8:45 a.m. Saturday, according to police.
Richards was charged with bank robbery. West was charged with being an accessory after the fact. Petitions to revoke their federal supervised release are pending in federal court in Portland.
How the two men know each other was not included in court documents. Information about where each man served his prison term was not available Monday.
Richards was released from federal prison in March, according to information obtained from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons’ Inmate Locator website. He was sentenced in April 2003 in U.S. District Court in Concord, New Hampshire, to 12½ years for a bank robbery the previous year. Information about that crime was not available through the court’s electronic case filing system because the case is more than a decade old.
West was released in May after being sentenced to 41 months in prison for being an accessory after the fact to a robbery of a bank in Wells nearly four years ago, according to court documents.
In that case, West admitted that he borrowed a car from his employer and drove Bernie Subocz, then 45, and his then 34-year-old girlfriend, Christie R. Hendrix, from New Hampshire to Maine so that Subocz could rob a bank on the morning of Nov. 19, 2011.
Subocz was sentenced in May 2013 to 15 years and eight months in federal prison to be followed by three years of supervised release and ordered to pay more than $15,000 in restitution on charges related to the Wells bank heist and a bank robbery in York, also in November 2011, according to reports previously published by the Bangor Daily News.
He had pleaded guilty in October to two counts of bank robbery and one count each of interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle and aiding and abetting the same, and interstate transportation of stolen money and aiding and abetting the same.
Hendrix, who was repeatedly beaten by Subocz, including on the day of the second robbery, was sentenced in August to 22 months in prison. She pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting bank robbery in connection with the York bank robbery. She was not charged with the Wells bank robbery.
Subocz is incarcerated at a federal prison in Mendota, California.
Hendrix was released in May 2014.
If convicted in connection with Saturday’s robbery, Richards faces up to 20 years in federal prison and a fine of up to $250,000. West faces up to 10 years and a fine of up to $125,000 if convicted on the new charge.