| Wild West banking >> Victim of Caisse’s
bulletproof branches by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR
That’s the corporation’s story. Claude Mailhot has his own viewpoint. On April 17, 1998, Mailhot entered the basement branch of the Caisse Desjardins near the Main and Chabanel to deposit $3,000 cash for the industrial heating company he worked for. Suddenly, a drug-addled Michael Fidanoglou entered the bank and demanded the cash. Rather than comply, tellers ignored his demands. So the gunman threatened to shoot the customers. Ho-hum. Mailhot instructed the teller to give the robber the money he just deposited. “She said, ‘We’re not authorized’ to give out the money,” says Mailhot. Fidanoglou then shot him in the back. “I took two steps and fell. I knew I would be paralyzed. He stood over me with the gun threatening to shoot me again. I called him every name in the book, I said don’t shoot me in the face.” The robber fled without any money. As Mailhot lay bleeding on the floor, he asked for an ambulance. “[The teller] said she couldn’t call because they had to wait for the police to arrive first,” says Mailhot from his East End apartment. “A teller came around and held me up and held my hand, but she was ordered to return to her spot.” Mailhot spent eight weeks in a coma and three more months in rehab, where he experienced paranoid delusions that the gunman had come to kill him. Today Mailhot is confined to a wheelchair, with no sensation from the middle of his ribcage down. He says he regularly experiences “something that feels like knives going through my body. It’s something I wouldn’t wish even on the guy who shot me.” His daily rituals include swallowing 50 pills a day and several unpleasant procedures to evacuate his bowels. He notes that the day after the tragic event, the Journal de Montréal reported that the shooting had occurred after Mailhot had refused to give up the money, a version Mailhot feels that the Caisse planted to shift blame onto the victim. Indeed, the next day the robber himself called the newspaper, leading the tabloid to run the correct version of events. So far, the president of the Caisse Desjardins, Alban D’Amour, has refused to meet with Mailhot, and the only compensation he has been offered is a “preferential rate on a mortgage,” reports Mailhot. Now Mailhot will embark on a tour of the province to inform potential clients about the health risks faced by customers of its branches equipped with bulletproof glass. “When there’s a robbery at the Caisse, tellers are cool, they’re protected. It’s the customers who are in the heat of the action,” says Mailhot. : |
Next
time you walk into a Caisse Desjardins, you might be interested in checking
if it’s one of the 75 branches out of the 1,500 in the province
in which the tellers work behind bulletproof glass. Unlike virtually
all other Canadian banks, employees at these branches are instructed
to refuse to cooperate with stickup artists, even if the irate gunman
has taken customers hostage.