J.L. Rountree, 92, Oldest Bank Robber

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The New York Sun

J.L. Hunter “Red” Rountree, believed to be the oldest bank robber even in the United States, has died in federal custody at age 92.


Rountree gained national attention for a late-in-life crime spree that began in 1998. He was prosecuted for bank robberies in Mississippi, Florida and most recently in Abline, Tex.


The Abilene job was the last of three bank robberies Rountree began in 1998, when he was 86. In an interview with The Associated Press earlier this year, he said he walked slowly to a teller’s window, handed over an envelope indicating his intent, and was greeted with a surprised, “Are you kidding?”


The teller complied anyway, but Rountree was later caught and sentenced to 12 1 /2 years in prison – a death sentence for a man of his age.


He died October 12 at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Mo. The cause was not announced. “I think he was just getting old,” a prison spokesman said.


Born December 11, 1911, in the family farmhouse near Brownsville, Texas, Rountree once was a successful businessman who made his fortune in Houston by building Rountree Machinery Co., a relative said.


About a year after his wife’s death in 1986, Rountree, then 76, married a 31-year-old woman and spent $500,000 putting her through drug rehabilitation programs, he told The A.P.


In 1998, at age 86, Rountree robbed SouthTrust Bank in Biloxi, Miss., and was sentenced to three years’ probation, fined $260, and told to leave Mississippi.


A year later, he robbed a Nations-Bank in Pensacola, Fla., but this time he was sentenced to three years behind bars. He was released in 2002. Then came the Abilene robbery, his last.


In an AP interview, he offered a rationale for his late-blooming crime spree.


“You want to know why I rob banks?” Rountree said. “It’s fun. I feel good, awful good. I feel good for sometimes days, for sometimes hours.”


He told the Orlando Sentinel in 2001 that money and revenge were his motivation. A Corpus Christi bank that he’d done business with had forced him into bankruptcy, he told the newspaper, and he had not liked banks since then.


No family member claimed Rountree’s body, Quintero said. He is buried in a cemetery near the Springfield prison.


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