To hear Fall River’s William Sequeira — who has been sentenced yet again to federal prison on his latest string of bank robberies — tell it, the bank robbing life chose him.
“Ever seen the movie ‘The Town’? Well, that movie’s about me. Watch the movie, Ben Affleck plays me in the movie. That’s a true story,” Sequeira said on the show “Caught in Providence,” which shows the proceedings of Providence, R.I., municipal judge Frank Caprio. “It’s about guys outta Charlestown, Boston who rob banks and armored trucks.”
At that same November 2020 hearing over parking tickets, which the Herald reported on when Sequeira was initially charged with a string of bank robberies over the course of nine days last year, Sequeira estimated he had spent “over 37 years” of his life behind bars, between a 7-year stint in state courts and a 30-year stay in a federal pen for his monetary escapades.
That number will climb to more than 40 years for Sequeira, 60. On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Patti B. Saris sentenced him to 54 months — 4 ½ years — in federal prison for the string of robberies that began just before 2 p.m. on Sept. 26, 2022, in the Citizens Bank extension at the Stop and Shop grocery store in Fall River.
“Listen, this is what’s gonna happen,” Sequeira purportedly told the clerk, according to the prosecution’s sentencing memo, “I have a gun and I’ll put it against your forehead.”
That earned Sequeira $88, and would have gotten him more if he didn’t flee the scene before the teller could gather more of the cash, according to the prosecution’s memo
A little after 2:35 p.m. the next day, it was a similar story and a similar line: “Give me a $100 bill or I’ll put a bullet in your head,” Sequeira is said to have told the teller at the Santander Bank on located on Berkley Street in Boston. The teller handed him a stack of five $100s and another stack of smaller bills making up $80 — but Sequeira left those and fled with the $500 only.
Sequeira continued the next day, this time at M&T Bank on Boylston Street in Boston at 4 p.m., with a line almost exactly the same as at the bank the day before. Sequeira flipped through the three stacks of bills the teller gave him and then discarded a stack of $20s that included a tracking device, according to court documents, leaving with $468.
He took one day off before taking on the TD Bank on Union Street in Boston a little after 3 p.m., where he offered the teller a choice: “Give me all the $100s in the drawer before I blow your brains out.” He took of with $854.
The next hit was to be that Oct. 5, the Citizens Bank branch on Boylston Street in Boston, where he once again threatened to put a new hole in the teller’s head if they didn’t give him $100s. But the fuzz had been following him, and an apparent customer was actually a BPD detective who tackled him.
It was a moment he had worried about during his encore appearance on Caught in Providence.
“You gotta worry about cops,” he said of his career. “We always had a stopwatch. I’d clock it, you’ve got 60 seconds to walk in the door because as soon as you’d walk in with guns and masks they’re hitting the alarms … It’s on; the cops are coming. You gotta go, grab, get out — that’s how you’ve gotta do it.”