Stolen Dreams

This story originally aired on March 15, 2008.

Stephen Trantel was a Wall Street insider who seemed to have it all: a beautiful family, a nice home in an upscale Long Island community, and fancy cars. But what those closest to him didn't know was that he was living a secret life.

And as correspondent Richard Schlesinger reports, that secret life began to unravel on one November day in 2003 after what was supposed to be just a day of fishing.

Jeanne's friends Brooke and Laura had been with her since earlier in the evening, hours after Stephen was due home. "We were going through a thousand different scenarios. If he was in a hospital, why had nobody called, if he was mugged, somebody stole his wallet, he was in an accident his body was in a ditch someplace," Laura remembers.

The news wasn't that bad, but it wasn't that good, either: Stephen was alive but was under arrest, charged with crimes that could put him away for the rest of his life. Police told Jeanne her husband was a bank robber, and that he didn't commit just one or two robberies - he committed ten.

Jeanne told police they had the wrong man.

To the people who knew Stephen, he was the least likely to rob a bank - for one, he was the son of a New York City cop. And because he was a trader in the big money world of commodities, he wouldn't have to steal anything.

The Trantels lived in a tony little town in the suburbs of Manhattan called Rockville Center. And Jeanne was living a nice life. Every month, Stephen handed her a wad of cash. He had always been generous, ever since they met when she was just 24.

After they married and he established himself as a trader, they drove nice cars, took nice vacations and Jeanne could stay home to raise their two sons, Stephen Jr. and his baby brother Ryan.

And when Stephen got home from his job, he got right down to work, helping with the upbringing of his sons. It was impossible to imagine this man robbing banks.

Yet there he was in police custody.

"He got on the phone and he was really scared. And I just kept saying 'Steve, what's going on? What's going on? What's going on?' And he said, 'It's okay, I'm innocent,'" Jeanne remembers.

Police had been confronting him with surveillance pictures from bank security cameras.

For Stephen, this day that ended in handcuffs began out on the water for a fishing trip. The only problem with the day so far was the tail light on Stephen's car: it was out.

But on his way home, police suddenly swooped in and surrounded his car. And he was a little bit of a wise guy. "I got to the stop sign and five cops surrounded me. They handcuffed me and put me in the car," he recalls. "And I'm like, 'Guys, all this for a tail light? Come on.'"

By the end of the night, Stephen was charged with bank robbery.

Stephen's lifelong friends, Laura, Bobby, Sarah, and Tommy knew this was a case of mistaken identity. Stephen was a little league coach, and played Santa Claus at their annual Christmas party. He also volunteered at soup kitchens and Habitat for Humanity.

In fact, his friends even doubted that Stephen had the guts to rob a bank. "He was like a nervous Nellie. Like I couldn't picture the calm it would take to walk into the bank," Laura says.

While Jeanne spent a sleepless night reeling from her husband's arrest, Detective James Skopek was methodically going through the evidence to make sure he had the right man.

It had been a maddening case. After the first few robberies, Skopek had a bunch of clothes that the robber had tossed away and a group of terrified tellers, but not much more.

Surveillance tapes showed a white man in his 30s. Aware of all the cameras, the robber pulled the brim of his baseball hat low to cover his eyes.

"You could see on some of the videotapes, he walked in, made sure that he was okay in there, make sure there was a minimal amount of customers, so we didn't have a lot of witnesses to help our case," Skopek says.

The few witnesses he did have recounted details that made Skopek very nervous. "He'd enter the bank and he would do an immediate surveillance. He would pick out that teller that he felt was the weakest one," he says. "He would tell them, 'Hey I have a gun. Hurry up,' and emphasized the fact that he had a gun. And you know, 'Don't fool around. No funny games. No alarm.' Very scary."

Skopek says he was worried things were going to escalate and get violent, and his bosses were also starting to worry that sooner or later someone was going to get hurt.

The first few banks the robber hit were all Fleet banks, now owned by Bank of America, all near one another on the South Shore of Long Island. He'd strike on a Thursday or Friday. Skopek thought that was information he could use.

Police set up surveillance of Fleet banks along the South Shore; instead, the bank robber went to Long Island's North Shore at a different time of day and a different day of the week.

The robberies continued. Every two weeks or so, Skopek would head to a scene, scour the area and find more discarded disguises but nothing to help him identify the bank robber

The criminal Skopek was looking for seemed to have thought of everything.

"He used to go in the front of the bank, take a cup of coffee and put it on the mailbox and walk into the bank to commit the robbery," says Michelle DiPaolo, the assistant district attorney assigned to the case. "After he committed the robbery he would pick up the cup of coffee off the mailbox and continue down the street. Who would suspect someone who's walking around with a cup of coffee of committing a bank robbery?"

He even thought about the notes demanding money. So far, there had not a fingerprint on them - the robber must have worn gloves when he wrote them. He sometimes left the notes with the tellers and sometimes took them back

The authorities tried to learn as much as they could from the traumatized tellers.

Paul DeStefano is in charge of security at the State Bank of Long Island, the ninth bank the robber attacked. The day the bank was hit, the teller on duty was a woman with a baby at home.

"This is not an ATM withdrawal where there's a mindless entity that you're removing money from. It's a living breathing person," DeStefano says.

When the robber came into the bank, he handed the teller a note threatening her with a gun if she didn't hand over the money. As frightened as she was, she still she had the presence of mind to hold on to that note. Police say her decision changed everything for them. Because unlike all the other notes the robber had passed, this one held a vital clue to the robber's identity: the note was written on a piece of paper simply torn from a notebook.

"I immediately stated to think that for someone to rip the page out of a spiral notebook, he would have to grab it pretty good and pull it from the book," says Det. Skopek. "I thought fingerprints."

Veteran Detective Charlie Costello was working in the fingerprint lab that day. He sprayed the note with a chemical that can bring out hidden prints; heat from a regular iron activates the chemical. He examined the note using a machine called a "crime scope."

Costello ran his results through the FBI database. There was no hit. Then he ran the prints through the local Long Island database and to his surprise, a name popped up from almost 20 years ago.

In 1984, a teenager had been arrested for drinking and driving, and was fingerprinted. And now, those prints matched the prints of the bank robber.

But Det. Skopek was still in for a surprise - the man he had been looking for, the robber who committed ten bank robberies, was a happily married Wall Street trader, the son of a cop, who lived in one of the finest neighborhoods in the area.

But with that matching fingerprint, Det. Skopek was sure he had the right guy handcuffed to the table.

Skopek showed Stephen the surveillance photos capturing the bank robber threatening tellers. "I laid them out for him and asked, 'Who's that?' And he said, 'I don't know,'" the detective recalls. "He acted as if he didn't know why he was here."

Skopek had chased the bank robber for four months and was determined to find more evidence against Stephen. The police tore through Stephen's SUV, looking for anything that would tie him to the robberies

In the truck were lots of hats and sunglasses, the kind the bank robber wore. And then in the back of the truck, police made a discovery in Stephen's son's backpack that surprised even the veteran detectives: latex gloves, just like the ones used in the bank robberies.

Asked if it hurt to see his son's backpack, Stephen tells Schlesinger, "Yeah. At that point I knew they had me, you know."

He couldn't deny it any longer. Stephen Trantel, the adoring husband, and pillar of the community, was a serial bank robber, and the whole world was about to find out.

The hardest part of all would be telling his wife. "I was worried about Jeanne 'cause I knew it would kill her," he says.

But Stephen had no choice: he had to tell her that for months on end he'd been lying to her about who he was and what he'd done.

"I was like, 'Who is this guy? Who is this man that I love and who I married, who I trusted, who I had children, with who I slept with every night?'" Jeanne remembers. "It broke my heart. It crumbled my heart. I've never felt such pain in my whole life."

Nobody ever had a clue that Stephen, of all people, could fall so far.

It wasn't that long ago that Stephen was on top of the world. Stephen had worked for a trading company but was now self-employed, betting his own money, on the future price of oil.

Stephen says in his best year he made about $300,000 and thought he could finally afford to buy Jeanne the house of her dreams. "Bought the bigger nicer house in Rockville Centre and we were on our way you know. Just didn't plan enough ahead," he admits.

Their mortgage tripled, and so did their other expenses. There were fancy cars, private pre-school, and Stephen was struggling to keep up.

"A lot of people fall into the 'Keeping up with the Joneses' trap," says Michael Mawhinny, Stephen's co-worker and close friend. He could see what few others did: the pressure on Stephen was immense and building.

"I would say to him, 'Okay, if you're up this amount of money. Just go home. Just leave and go home,'" Mawhinny says.

As his troubles and his debts mounted, Stephen decided not to tell Jeanne or anyone else how bad things had become. On top of that, his mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness.

Stephen's attention was divided, and he began to lose big money. He says he probably lost well over $200,000.

He had to do something and he joined a prayer group.

"Stephen would be at the prayer group every week," remembers family friend Pat Reynolds. "He eventually stopped coming and I wondered why. And I asked him and he said every time he would come on a Tuesday and pray for financial success he would go to work Wednesday and get crushed. He would lose more money than ever."

As their financial situation got tighter and tighter, companies started calling. "Washington Mutual called about our mortgage and I would say to Stephen 'You know today I got a phone call.' And he would say 'Ignore it,' or 'I'll call them not to worry,'" Jeanne remembers.

That's the way it always was: Stephen worried about the money and he paid the bills. Except that now he couldn't. By his own admission, he was broke.

"I borrowed money from my dad. I borrowed money from my sister. I couldn't just keep borrowing money," he says.

Stephen even tried getting money from the bank by borrowing it. He got a job selling real estate, and tried to start a donut business.

But nothing was working. Stephen was losing so much money that the commodities exchange eventually barred him from the floor. "I didn't have money to trade and then you can't trade," he says. "I was no longer a commodities trader."

But Stephen didn't share the news with his wife and family. Instead, he'd take a shower in the morning and pretend to go to work.

He had nowhere to go. On one warm summer morning he sat in the parking lot of the local library. "I was just sitting in my truck looking out the window. And I'm like, 'You know what I can do? What can I do where nobody's gonna get hurt and I need money? I need money right now'" Stephen says. "The bottom line is, I just came to this epiphany that there's no other way. If I wanna hold on to everything, then I got to steal money."

First though, he would need a really good plan. After some research he came up with one. It was simple and it worked.

On a hot summer day in 2003, Stephen walked into the local library with a peculiar research project. He needed to know everything there was to know about robbing a bank. "I realized that if I'm gonna get away with this, I have to do this right," he says.

"I researched how people get caught. That's where I started," he recalls.

Stephen says he researched bank robbery every day for two or three weeks. He even studied past bank robberies. "I saw a statistic that 80 percent of the people who rob banks get caught from their getaway car, so I'll take that out of the equation," Stephen says.

Asked what else he had learned, Stephen says, "I didn't wanna go to a bank where there was a guard, you know, so that couldn't be in the equation."

Once he had a plan, he needed a target. He zeroed in on a bank, at the time a Fleet Bank, and watched who came in.

"Most cops will try to cash their checks I think it was like a Wednesday, so I wouldn't go there on a Wednesday," Stephen explains. "Most blue collar guys, they're gonna be ones to be the heroes. Right? So I gotta wait till they're all out of the bank."

"My next job was for the next few days was to work out a whole escape route. I wanted to be able to disappear as quickly as possible," he says.

The bank was close to the parkway. And across the street, behind a row of stores, there were dumpsters - the perfect place to change into a disguise.

Stephen had added up his debts and knew how much he needed to get back on his feet. "And that was $20,000, I had in my head," he says. "I'm like, 'How bad could it be to get 20,000?' It's no big thing."

"Your father was a police officer, for goodness sake. How does this occur to you? What happens to a man to make that seem like a good idea?" Schlesinger asks.

"I guess just desperation. I was Steve Trantel, the family man. I wanted everything to be great and I wanted to keep it all great," Stephen says.

After weeks of reconnaissance, Stephen was just about ready to move. "It was right before July 4th. I had no money. We had bills to pay. I was choking," he recalls.

So Stephen got ready to go into the bank. The teller read the note, and to his surprise, she handed him cash. "It was the easiest thing. She just gave me a bunch of money," he remembers.

He got almost $11,000 in a robbery that he estimates took about 30 seconds.

Stephen paid the mortgage and some other bills and gave his wife Jeanne her allowance. Jeanne says she had no idea anything was different except that her husband seemed stressed.

And Jeanne believed his excuse that the stress was work related - after all, she knew Stephen's Wall Street job was high-pressure. "I was used to this, Richard. This is my life…it would be up and down all the time," she says.

Stephen says he hit the next bank about two weeks later.

"What happened to I'm just gonna do this once and get out of this line of work?" Schlesinger asks.

"I had paid a bunch of bills and then I had no money again. Nothing had changed," he says.

Over the next four months, staged nine more robberies, and got his system down pat - get in, get the money and get out within seconds.

By the time Stephen was finally caught, he had stolen more than $60,000. Asked where all the money was going, Stephen says, "It was going for everything. I look back, too, and wonder 'Where is all the money going?'"

There are sources close to the case who believe at least some of the money was going to support a drug habit. It's a charge Stephen denies.

Stephen robbed his eighth bank, as Halloween was approaching. When he came home one night, Jeanne showed him the matching costumes she bought for them: jailbird costumes.

The costumes were more than ironic, they were prophetic: Stephen wore the wig one more time to a robbery. But just three weeks and two bank robberies later, Stephen knew it was all over when he saw his picture in the newspaper.

Some 48 hours later, police arrested him, and slapped him with enough charges to put him away for the rest of his life.

Jeanne's entire world was crumbling around her. Her husband was facing decades in prison, and she was facing harsh questions. How could he stage ten bank robberies? And how could she not have known?

Stephen was close to rock bottom in order to get out of jail to await his trial. He had to get bail money from his father, the retired police officer, and tell him what he had done.

But Stephen still had to face a judge, jury and prosecutor Michelle DiPaolo.

DiPaolo could tie Stephen to at least three of the robberies, but she wanted to solve all the cases. So she offered a deal: less time for more information. Stephen would have to admit his guilt and reveal how he did it. He took the deal and got nine years. It was a bargain, considering he robbed ten banks.

"I felt bad for his children. You either take their father away but now how great is it for them to be raised by a guy who's robbed ten banks and had no regard for anybody other than himself?" DiPaolo asks.

Jeanne would have to learn how to provide for the children. But first, she and Stephen had to tell them about their father. "I had to tell them that I was leaving. And I had to tell them that this person that they thought was this everything type of guy was just a criminal. Like a no good criminal," Stephen remembers.

A few months later the day came when Stephen had to surrender and begin doing his time. "It was horrible. Very emotional and you know it was hard for me because I'm trying to be strong for them," he says,

Jeanne, who had never paid a bill in her married life, was suddenly alone with two kids. "I was very scared. How was I gonna make it on my own and how was I gonna pay the bills?" she says.

Jeanne asked her friend Beth, who coached her through the tough times, to talk to 48 Hours. "The cars were getting towed away, the phone was getting shut off. She was petrified," Beth explains.

Jeanne was also humiliated. "I had a lot of shame," she says. "I didn't take the kids for school for quite some time."

What did people say?

"Oh come on, she couldn't have known? She didn't know? Come on. A lot of doubt. A lot of sarcasm," Beth says.

"How could you have not have known though?" Schlesinger asks Jeanne.

"Who would think so? Any wife, who would think? That is the last thing on my mind that I would think my husband was out robbing banks," she says.

But she was forced to acknowledge that she might have unknowingly played a role in what happened. "If I knew more about how much money was coming in and out and how much it cost to actually run our household, this never would have happened," Jeanne says.

She says she didn't have a clue how much things cost. "Honestly, I didn't really care," she says. "I did have my head in the sand. I'm admitting it now on camera."

Her parents had to pay the mortgage, her in-laws helped take care of the kids, and Jeanne managed to go back to school. She's working two jobs now as a real estate agent and a massage therapist.

And slowly she was able to face the world again. "She began showing her face and I think it supported her to lead with her story, 'Hi, I'm Jeanne, you might've heard about my husband,'" Beth says.

Jeanne's now telling everyone by writing a book. And shortly after Stephen started doing time she made a big decision: she divorced him. "There's a point in a woman's life where she has to draw the line. I never asked for it. I deserve to be free," she says.

It's been more than five years since Stephen was arrested and Jeanne's learned to take care of herself and their children. "My older son was in the car and I said, 'You know, I'm so sorry that mama has to work so much. And I'm so sorry that this really happen,' And my oldest son said to me, and I had tears in my eyes when he said it, he said, 'You know mama, if this never happened you would never know what a strong girl you are and what you've done with your life,'" she says.

But Stephen is left to wonder why he did what he did with his life. "How could I be so stupid to like throw that all away and you know I mean lose everything. You know? The wife, the house, all of that?" he says.

He has about three years left in prison to figure it all out.

Stephen Trantel is scheduled to be released from prison in 2021. The Trantel children visit their father often.

Produced By Patti Aronofsky