A Born-Again Bank Robber

It wasn’t much of a movie. But there’s one scene in the 1992 religious comedy “De Lengua Me Como Un Plato” that Mexican police are probably wishing they had noticed.

Late in the film, a Mexico City detective thinks he has finally cornered a notorious bank robber. It was a throwaway scene except for one fact: The bit-part actor who played the detective was in real life Mexico’s most notorious fugitive, Alfredo Rios Galeana, a daring and violent serial bank robber who had escaped from prison three times.

After his last breakout, in 1986, he had seemed to disappear -- until earlier this month when he was arrested in South Gate, where he was living under the alias Arturo Montoya.

During his time in California, Montoya kept his past to himself, say friends, fellow church members and business associates. But he didn’t hide. He preached openly on street corners. He held Christian revivals in parks and apartment complexes, dressing as a mariachi and performing Christian songs. He raised a family. He built a successful janitorial business. And he grew into a devoted lay leader at a Baptist church.

His luck ended after an informant tipped an investigator with the California Department of Motor Vehicles that Montoya was really Rios Galeana, said Bill Branch, a DMV spokesman.

Investigators took the tip seriously enough that they sent to Mexico for Rios Galeana’s fingerprints, which matched those in DMV files, Branch said.

On July 11, investigators from the South Gate Police Department, the DMV and the Department of Homeland Security arrested Montoya outside his home, leaving those in his church wondering how to reconcile the hard-working and deeply religious family man they knew with the violent bank robber who was once Mexico’s “Public Enemy No. 1.”

Finds Jesus on the Run

The years immediately after Rios Galeana’s 1986 prison escape are sketchy. But this much is known: On the run in Mexico, he found Jesus Christ and Arturo Montoya. He took one as his savior, the other as his alias, and made his way to Southern California.

Once here, he bought a house in an immigrant suburb southeast of Los Angeles. And he went looking for a church.

Like many evangelical congregations, Ebenezer Baptist Church in Huntington Park cares more about a man’s present than his past. So when a trim fellow with a mustache showed up one day in 1993, no one asked a lot of questions.

Montoya told Ebenezer Baptist’s pastor, Melvin Acevedo, that he had been saved in Mexico. He said he lived two blocks away in South Gate and had a wife, three children and a growing janitorial business.

Acevedo said Montoya displayed a deep passion for God and for sharing his faith with others. He was the host of frequent church events at his house. In the last few years, he attended church four times a week and led four Bible study groups. He had a beautiful voice, which he used to perform Christian mariachi.

Montoya often referred to Corinthians II, 5:17: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.”

Friends say Montoya worked day and night to build his janitorial service, Genesis Loami Services Corp., which employed more than 40 people and provided daily cleaning to 10 Ross Dress for Less stores in southeast L.A. County and Orange County.

Ross officials declined to comment. But Ricardo Moreno, a spokesman for Support Services of America in Norwalk, said the company hired Montoya’s firm in 1997 to fulfill the Ross contract.

Montoya and his son, Luis, hired, oversaw and paid workers who cleaned the stores, Moreno said.

“He was a pretty good guy. When I heard the news [of his arrest], I was shocked,” said Moreno, who is Mexican. “I think I read about him [years ago] in Mexico. I never could have imagined meeting him in the U.S.”

Montoya appeared to have close relations with his wife and three children and with a growing pack of Chihuahuas the family bred.

Montoya’s church friend Americo Munguia, a 64-year-old former Salvadoran guerrilla, said he initially gave the family two Chihuahuas. They multiplied until the family was caring for 12 of the small dogs.

“They gave them so much love,” Munguia said. “He didn’t want to give them away.”

Montoya’s fellow church members have no doubt that he was sincere in his beliefs.

“You cannot imitate a Christian life for 12 or 13 years,” Acevedo said. “Jesus said, ‘You will know them by their fruit.’ The fruit he gave was serious. He was constant.”

People who knew him say Montoya told them about acting in the movies, but not how he landed his roles, which also included a bit part in a film called “El Chupes” (The Drunk). The film starred two of Mexico’s best-known actors: comic Rafael Inclan and Maria Rojo, a wellregarded actress who in the last decade also has served as a congresswoman and a borough president in the Mexico City government.

Paco Del Toro, owner of Armagedon, the film company that made the movies, declined to be interviewed.

Munguia often preached with Montoya in parks or on street corners. He said Montoya spoke little of his past.

“But he did tell me he had a tremendous past, and that salvation had opened a path in his life,” Munguia said. “ ‘One day, Americo,’ he said, ‘you’re going to be amazed at my testimony. I’m going to tell it one day.’ ”

Starting a Life of Crime

Montoya’s life in California was a far cry from that of Rios Galeana in Mexico.

Luis Aranda, a commandant with Mexico City’s Judicial Police, said Rios Galeana was an Army sergeant who later became a member of Barapem, a notoriously brutal police squad. After Barapem was dissolved in 1978, he committed his first bank robbery.

Aranda, who interviewed Rios Galeana extensively after his 1985 arrest, said the outlaw told him he got the idea for robbing banks one day while cashing his paycheck. He noticed people coming out of the bank with large amounts of money and, with his meager police salary, yearned for the cash.

He formed a gang and began his life of crime. “He told me that he’d rob a house one day before robbing a bank,” Aranda said. “This was to see how his partners acted under pressure and to calm his nerves.”

As a bank robber, Rios Galeana was creative, once gaining entry to a bank office by posing as a deliveryman. He was daring, often looking straight into the bank’s surveillance cameras. And he was ruthless, shooting at whoever got in his way.

When he last escaped from prison, he was facing murder charges involving six people killed during 26 robberies allegedly committed by his gang, Aranda said.

In 1981, Rios Galeana was arrested while leaving his house. A year later, he escaped from prison, presumably with help from inside. In 1983, he was recaptured during a bank robbery. Again, he escaped from prison.

At the height of his infamy as a bank robber, Rios Galeana lived a quiet life in plain view of the authorities, Aranda said.

He posed as a middle-class engineer named Luis Fernando Verber and rented apartments with his wife and children in middle-class neighborhoods of Mexico City.

He loved parties, fine clothes and food. His hands were soft and manicured, Aranda said.

Possessing a fine tenor voice, Rios Galeana, living as Verber, began a promising career as a mariachi, Aranda said. He made a record and in 1984 was named New Ranchero Artist of the Year by entertainment journalists.

By then, Aranda had discovered that Verber was actually Rios Galeana. He and his officers attended the awards banquet, but the singer didn’t show.

As time went on, Aranda became obsessed with the hunt. He had a daughter and named her Luisa Fernanda -- after Rios Galeana’s alias, Luis Fernando Verber -- so he would never forget his quarry.

Finally, in 1985, in an almost cinematic climax, Aranda’s squad found a house where Rios Galeana was expected to arrive. For several days, some 20 officers waited, hiding themselves inside and outside the house, Aranda said.

When he finally arrived, Rios Galeana opened fire at police, then commandeered a private car, telling the driver he was being chased by robbers, Aranda said. The officers pursued him for several miles, then arrested him when Rios Galeana’s driver stopped near a police station.

“When he called his wife, he began crying,” Aranda said. “He said, ‘They caught me.’ ” “He was a very bloody guy, but at the same time a very good father, and very emotional.”

Rios Galeana gave Aranda a copy of his mariachi record and signed it “With respect and admiration, your friend Alfredo Rios Galeana.”

A year after that arrest, Rios Galeana escaped from prison once again. He had help, Aranda said, from men armed with guns and grenades, who blew a hole in the wall of a courthouse attached to the prison while Rios Galeana was at a hearing.

His exploits inspired a corrido -- or ballad -- by the norteno group Los Invasores de Nuevo Leon: “How are they going to catch him, If he’s smart and brave,” the song went, “If he doesn’t fear the devil, Nor prison bars nor death?”

In the years that followed, a task force formed to find the fugitive but failed and disbanded. With that, Rios Galeana seemed to have receded into the realm of near-legend.

Back in Prison

Today, Rios Galeana is held in a maximum-security prison near Mexico City. His attorney, Ernesto Corona, said he faces the same charges as when he escaped from prison in 1986. They could carry a sentence of 50 years.

Corona expressed confidence that Rios Galeana would prevail. “The charges are written very poorly and not substantiated,” Corona said, “and we’ll get them dropped.”

In Huntington Park, the congregation of Ebenezer Baptist is still shocked by the revelations about the man they knew as Arturo Montoya. But church members say that his faith was sincere, that the man of many faces showed his truest face last.

“I believe deeply in his genuineness,” said Fabian Garcia, Ebenezer’s assistant pastor. “I think that’s what’s going to sustain him now.”

Aranda, the Mexico City police official, said he was elated and wistful at the news. Rios Galeana had been his first big case, and from it he had learned about criminals.

“It was ... [also] when I began to know myself,” Aranda said. “It was where I realized how much I loved my work -- when you’re proud of doing something well, possibly obsessed with it.”

Since the capture, Aranda has studied new pictures of the man he pursued for so long, lingering over Rios Galeana’s hands. The once-manicured hands are now calloused, Aranda noticed, a sign of the hard work he must have put in building his cleaning business.

“Time ages some people. Others it matures,” he said. “I think he matured.”

Even so, Aranda remains the skeptical cop. “He says that Jesus has forgiven him,” Aranda said. “We’ll have to investigate to see if it’s true.”