By Dan WhitcombLOS ANGELES (Reuters) - After 17 years on the run, a man who allegedly drove the getaway car in one of this city's most infamous bank robberies has surrendered to FBI agents hot on his heels, authorities said on Monday.
Derrick Alan Stevens, 48, was wanted in connection with a 1983 hold-up at the Family Savings and Loan Association, which netted four masked men, including one in a Richard Nixon mask, $228,000 -- at the time the biggest bank robbery in Los Angeles history. One person was killed in the robbery.
Laura Bosley, a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said Stevens surrendered on Friday at the FBI office in Los Angeles and was expected in court late Monday afternoon.
``He knew he was being sought pretty aggressively by our agents,'' Bosley said to explain why Stevens gave himself up.
Bosley said the fugitive had been ``pretty much on the run'' since last October, when police in Maryland spotted him in Princess Anne County. She said Stevens was working as director of dining services at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, under the name ``Derrick Anderson'' at the time.
Bosley said Stevens, an Ohio native who may have spent time in Florida, Georgia and Canada while on the run, eluded capture but may have felt pressure to surrender from friends and family members who had been contacted by the FBI.
The 1983 bank robbery garnered considerable media attention in Los Angeles -- often labeled the ``bank robbery capital of the world'' by the FBI -- because of the record haul.
The robbers wore U.S. Army style jumpsuits, gloves and Halloween masks, one depicting former president Nixon, and carried automatic handguns, rifles, sawed-off shotguns and other weapons. One of them fired a shot at the ceiling as he vaulted a counter and briefly took a teller hostage. That teller was later identified by authorities as part of the bank robbery team.
Their getaway vehicle was a van stolen from a Vietnamese immigrant, Tuong Truong, who had been murdered and whose body was found buried under trash in a downtown alley.
Three of the four robbers, identified as Norman Morace Ward, Kevin Lamar Jackson and Gregory Lewis, were eventually caught, convicted and sent to prison.
``This case stands as another example of the FBI conducting a long-term investigation regarding a relatively cold case,'' FBI spokesman James DeSarno said.
``As in the case of the arrest of Kathleen Soliah, if you're a fugitive from the FBI, keep an eye on the grass at the side of the road, because eventually we'll be there.''
DeSarno was referring to the arrest last year of Symbionese Liberation Army fugitive turned soccer mom Kathleen Soliah, who spent a quarter-century on the run from charges that she planted bombs under police cars in Los Angeles.
Soliah was found living in an ivy-covered home in suburban St. Paul, Minn., as Sara Jane Olson, the wife of an emergency room physician and mother of three daughters.
