$ 1,000,000.00 por Victor Gerena

ROBO DE BANCO; HUIDA ILEGAL PARA EVITAR PROSECUCION - ROBO A MANO ARMADA; ROBO DE UN CARGAMENTO INTERESTATAL


VICTOR MANUEL GERENA



















Aliases:
Victor Ortiz, Victor M. Gerena Ortiz

DESCRIPCION





Fecha de nacimiento:
24 de junio de 1958
Pelo:
Castano

Lugar de nacimiento:
Nueva York, Nueva York
Ojos:
Verdes

Estatura:
5 pies 6 - 7 pulgadas
Tez:
Medio/Oscuro

Peso:
160 - 169 libras
Sexo:
Masculino

Fisico:
Mediano/Robusto
Raza:
Blanco (Hispano)

Oficios:
Maquinista, Guardia de Seguridad
Nacionalidad:
Estadounidense (de ascendencia puertorriquena)

Cicatrices y otras marcas:
Gerena tiene una cicatriz de una pulgada y un lunar en el omoplato derecho.

Comentarios:
Ningunos

ADVERTENCIA

SE BUSCA A VICTOR MANUEL GERENA CON RESPECTO AL ROBO A MANO ARMADA DE APROXIMADAMENTE $7 MILLONES DE DOLARES DE UNA COMPANIA DE SEGURIDAD DE CONNECTICUT EN 1983. SEGUN SE ALEGA, TOMO A DOS EMPLEADOS DE SEGURIDAD COMO REHENES A PUNTA DE PISTOLA, LES PUSO ESPOSAS, LOS ATO, Y LUEGO LES INJECTO UNA SUBSTANCIA DESCONOCIDA PARA INCAPACITARLOS AUN MAS.

DEBE SER CONSIDERADO ARMADO Y SUMAMENTE PELIGROSO

PERSONAS CON INFORMACION RELACIONADA A ESTE CASO DEBEN COMUNICARSE INMEDIATAMENTE CON LA OFICINA DEL FBI, LA EMBAJADA O EL CONSULADO DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS MAS CERCANO.

RECOMPENSA

Se ofrece una recompensa de un maximo de $1,000,000 por cualquier informacion que lleve directamente al arresto de Victor Manuel Gerena.

Mas de Victor Gerema, recuerden $1,000,000.00 por este

Hartford Courant
November 7, 1999
Puerto Rican Independence: The Cuban Connection

The Untold Tale Of Victor Gerena
By EDMUND MAHONY LAREDO, Texas -- For the glory of the Puerto Rican motherland, for the
approval of his mother, for an injection of meaning into his meaningless life,
Victor Gerena went and robbed $7.2 million from the Wells Fargo depot in
West Hartford -- more cash than anyone in U.S. history had ever stolen.
He handed it over to Los Macheteros, the violent Puerto Rican radicals hoping
to finance the revolution that would win their island's independence. In return,
certainly Gerena could expect a substantial reward.
He would be legend among Latin America's anti-imperialists. He would at long
last please his mother, Gloria, the ardent independentista who had been so
proud of her eldest son's early success and so disappointed by the
listlessness that followed.
Perhaps even Fidel Castro himself, whose Cuban government nurtured Los
Macheteros and helped pull off the robbery, would show his appreciation. Life
could be a Caribbean idyll -- sweet rum and sugary beaches.


But Gerena was so wrong. Days after his brazen September 1983 heist, he was lumbering south in a tired
old motor home -- south around New York City and along the Appalachians,
across the Mississippi River, south into Texas.
When the dusty border town of Laredo shimmered above the baked scrub,
Gerena found himself hiding in what would become a crude metaphor for the
rest of his life -- a coffin-like compartment behind a false wall, more than $2
million of his stolen cash stacked close around him like bricks.
It was inside this self-made tomb of money that Gerena was shuttled across
the new bridge connecting the United States with Mexico. Below, the Rio
Grande in early autumn was a muddy, yellow creek. Mexican customs officers
lounged in the shade and waved the boxy, white motor home on toward the
bucket-of-blood brothels that fill Nuevo Laredo.
When the camper stopped, finally, it was outside a private apartment in
Mexico City. There, the Cubans forged Gerena a set of Argentine identity
papers. A passport was hand-delivered by Jose Antonio Arbesu, a diplomat
and intelligence officer who would later lead the Cuban mission in Washington,
D.C.
Gerena boarded a commercial flight to Havana. Just over $2 million, the first
installment from the Wells Fargo robbery, flew in Cuba's ``diplomatic pouch.''
As far as the police hunting him around the world were concerned, Gerena
vanished into thin air.
In fact, he vanished into a prison of history and politics and personalities far
beyond his control. Less than a year after his escape, FBI tapes show,
Gerena was a lonely exile on an isolated, impoverished island, pining for the
girlfriend he left back home in Connecticut.
``For you and me, Cuba is an abstraction. For him it's not,'' a member of Los
Macheteros said, arguing to his comrades that Gerena's fiancee, Ana Soto,
should be allowed to join him. ``He knows 10 times better than you what's
involved because of the length of time he's been living there. . . . He knows
Cuba. You don't.''
Today, Soto is a vastly different woman from the one Gerena was supposed to
marry four days after the robbery 16 years ago. She's been in and out of prison
on drug charges. She never made it to Cuba, having failed to pass certain
``political and revolutionary tests'' required by the doctrinaire Macheteros.
Like Gerena's mother and former girlfriends in the Hartford area, she hasn't
spoken publicly of her exiled lover.
Indeed, Gerena, who is paradoxically the most and least important Machetero,
was largely forgotten by the press and public until last summer. That's when
President Clinton surprised just about everyone with an offer of early release
from prison to 16 members of violent Puerto Rican independence groups --
groups that have been killing, maiming and blowing up U.S. targets for 30
years.
The clemency became a predictable Washington controversy: It was a
shameful ploy to win Puerto Ricans to Hillary Rodham Clinton's U.S. Senate
campaign; or it was simply a reckless encouragement of potential terrorists.
Most of the imprisoned nationalists didn't wait to find out. They dropped any
pretense of indecision and snatched at the offer when it was threatened by
opposition in Congress and in law enforcement.
But no one, during all the discussion, has mentioned what has always been
the central element of the U.S. fight against the violent Puerto Rican
independence movement: Since Cuban President Fidel Castro took power, the
independentistas have operated as an adjunct of the Cuban
diplomatic-intelligence establishment.
Although the Wells Fargo robbery has been parenthetically referenced in the
clemency debate, nothing is ever said of the Cuban fingerprints on the crime.
Nor has anyone noted its role in Castro's revolutionary aspirations throughout
Latin America.
Interviews with law enforcement agents, and a review of the FBI tapes,
congressional hearing transcripts and other government documents, make it
abundantly clear: Los Macheteros were trained, supported and at least
minimally financed by the Cuban government.
After the robbery, an element within the FBI even argued for the indictment on
robbery-conspiracy charges of some of the same senior Cuban officials who
were guiding insurgencies in El Salvador, Nicaragua and elsewhere in Latin
America. For reasons that are unclear, the Cubans were not indicted.
The current clemency controversy, now the subject of a congressional hearing
in Washington, is just another echo of the United States' decades-old
wrangling with Cuba. And the Wells Fargo incident, seen through the prism of
time, is one more blip on a timeline of events going back to the radical Puerto
Rican nationalists' attempted assassination of President Truman in 1950.
In fact, the fresh details and historical context of the robbery story offer a
primer on left-wing, anti-colonialist, Cuban-instigated international intrigue in
the latter half of this century.