A Maine man agreed to plead guilty Tuesday to the home invasion and botched robbery of a New Britain, Connecticut, credit union last year during which a fake bomb was strapped to a company executive who was forced to go to the bank to get money.
Brian Witham appeared before a U.S. District Court judge in Knoxville, Tennessee, and plead guilty to two armed bank robberies in Tennessee. As part of the plea deal, he agreed to also plead guilty to the attempted robbery of the Achieve Financial Credit Union in New Britain, Connecticut, on Feb. 23, 2015, and other bank robbery attempts in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Under the agreement, Witham faces at least 42 years in prison.
Witham and Michael Benanti of Pennsylvania were indicted in December in Knoxville on 15 counts, including attempted armed bank extortion stemming from an investigation of three attempted bank robberies between April and October of last year in Tennessee.
Witham, 45 of Waterville, Maine, was secretly charged in the Connecticut case in U.S. District Court in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on Feb. 19, according to court records. He was facing one count of bank robbery by extortion for the aborted robbery. Court documents show he waived his right to be formally indicted on the charges.
In the Connecticut case, two masked men broke into the Bristol home of Achieve Financial Credit Union executive Matthew Yussman on Feb. 23, 2015. They tied his 70-year-old mother to her bed, and told her there was a bomb under it. They then strapped a fake bomb to Yussman and told him to drive to the New Britain credit union and take out money. They said if he didn’t cooperate they would set off the bombs.
Yussman contacted credit union officials as he was driving to the credit union. Police eventually removed the device from Yussman and determined it was fake.
Police tried to track the suspects through their cellphones but lost them as the men were driving through Farmington after leaving Yussman’s home, records indicate.
Court records released in Tennessee provide insight into how Witham and Benanti allegedly targeted Yussman. The records indicate they searched on cellphones for Connecticut bank executives or their family members who maintained a social media presence.
They targeted Yussman through such a search, the records say.
The men armed themselves with real guns and made devices to look like bombs and went to Yussman’s home, the records say. When Yussman arrived shortly before midnight on Feb. 22, one of the men pointed a gun at him and indicated he was a police officer, the records show.
The court records say the two men stayed with Yussman’s mother, Valerie, through the morning of Feb. 23 and instructed Yussman to drive to the credit union with the fake bomb strapped to him. They told him the bomb would detonate at 11 a.m. and that explosives were placed in his mother’s bedroom and would detonate if he failed to follow their instructions.
The men aborted the plan after Yussman left the house, the records indicate, and fled the home in a Honda CR-V, arriving in New York before setting the car on fire.
The men then fled to North Carolina, where Benanti was arrested after trying to stealing cars and then released, the records show.
Investigators initially focused on Yussman. They subpoenaed his bank records and bank records of several members of his extended family. They also interviewed his mother multiple times as well as the men he was playing ice hockey with on the night of the home invasion.
In each of the three Tennessee cases, a high-ranking employee of the bank or credit union, or a member of the family, was taken hostage at gunpoint, and the executive was forced to go to the bank to withdraw money. The suspects got money in only one case, according to federal documents.
Witham is expected to plead guilty to a 2014 bank robbery in Pennsylvania and at least one attempted bank robbery in Arden, NC.
Benanti’s case in Tennessee is pending.
At Witham’s initial court appearance in Tennessee, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Lewen described the relationship between the two men as he argued successfully to keep them held without bond.
Witham and Benanti met while serving federal prison sentences in a Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, facility. Lewen said that the two men were plotting an escape from the facility but were discovered before they could carry it out. Both men were then transferred to the federal supermax facility in Colorado.
Benanti was released from prison in 2008 and started a company called Prisoner Assistant, which he billed as a offering financial consulting for inmates by helping them to open bank accounts, among other things. When Witham was released, he went to work for Benanti.
The records released in Tennessee say the men stole $156,000 in a previous robbery and used the money to keep Prisoner Assistant going. When they were running out of money, they moved to Connecticut and considered robbing jewelry stores before deciding on kidnapping a bank executive, the plea agreement indicates.
But Lewen said in court that the company was a sham. Lewen said a search warrant issued for Benanti’s basement where he supposedly ran the business from, uncovered a bag containing tools and equipment used in the crimes, including rubber masks depicting human faces, temporary tattoos, wigs, and clothing bearing “FBI” and “NYPD” insignia.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.