Serial Bank Robber Gets 6 Years In Prison For East Haven Hold-Up

EAST HAVEN, CT — A bank robber with a sting of convictions going back decades was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison for two hold-ups, one in East Haven, federal prosecutors said.

Gary W. Bornman, 59, of New Haven, pleaded guilty in the summer of 2020 to an October 2019 bank robbery in East Haven, the other was a January 2020 bank hold-up in Windsor Locks, both were committed while he was on federal supervised release for previous bank robberies.

Tuesday he was sentenced in federal court. The case was investigated by the FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, East Haven Police Department and Windsor Locks Police Department.

Bornman, who spent part of his youth in Branford, has a criminal record stretches back decades. He served more than 20 years in federal prison for bank robberies in Guilford, Stamford, and Bridgeport as well as for bank robberies in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York.

In 1999, Bornman, then 37, was locked up in California's Lompoc Federal Penitentiary for bank robbery when he sent a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times where he wrote that upon his release, he'd "commit murder, perhaps even mass murder." He claimed he was mentally ill and had he gotten the care he needed, he might not have "spent the better part of my life in and out of penal institutions, beginning at age 9..."

In 2013, while in a Connecticut prison, he wrote another letter, that time to the Hartford Courant which headlined his OpEd, 'Felon Thanks The NRA.' In it he thanked the National Rifle Association for, "...protecting my ability to easily obtain (guns) through its opposition to universal background checks."

Bornman was released from prison in October 2018 and was on parole when he committed the most recent two bank robberies, prosecutors said.

In the East Haven fall of 2019 robbery, police and court records show, Bornman waited in a car outside the Foxon Boulevard Citizens Bank, while a female went into the bank wearing a disguise and a red wig, approached a teller, and demanded money. The teller handed over approximately $1,003.

In the Windsor case, on Jan. 27, 2020, he drove a male accomplice to the People's United Bank located at 20 Main Street in East Windsor, prosecutors said. Again, while Bornman waited outside, the accomplice went into the bank and up to a teller window, and showed a note demanding money. The teller gave him $1,056, prosecutors said. Bornman's car was captured on surveillance video from a nearby business.

Bornman is the son of William H. Bornman, who was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list in 1968 and died in a shootout with agents in Kentucky.