Notorious ‘Vaulter’ bandit sentenced to 15 years in prison

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Known as the Vaulter, one of Canada's most prolific bank robbers was caught because he left a binder behind in the vault where he had locked employees during a 2015 heist near Toronto.

Jeffrey Shuman, the notorious serial bank robber who also was known to American detectives as the Reebok Bandit, was sentenced Tuesday to a 15-year term for a string of robberies across Canada. His jail sentence will be reduced by 34 months to credit time served since he was arrested in 2015.

He was also ordered to pay more than $400,000 in restitution, the amount he acknowledged having robbed from the banks.

Just days before he was to go to trial last month, Mr. Shuman had agreed to plead guilty to seven counts of armed robbery with a firearm.

Related: Canada's Vaulter robber might also have been U.S. Reebok Bandit

He had been the suspect in 21 solo bank heists in Ontario and Alberta but the plea avoided the need for a trial and spared witnesses from having to testify, said York Regional Police Detective David Noseworthy, the lead investigator in the case.

Mr. Shuman was accused of robbing Canadian banks during a five-year span. It ended in the spring of May, 2015, when, disguised as a construction worker, he entered a TD Canada Trust branch just as it opened, pulled out a handgun, locked the three employees into the vault and made off with cash.

Det. Noseworthy said Mr. Shuman had used a binder to conceal his firearm. He left it behind and investigators found a fingerprint on it. There was also a pen in the binder that had been chewed and yielded a DNA sample.

The evidence didn't match anyone in Canadian police databases, but when it was submitted to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it led to the identification of Mr. Shuman.

In the 1990s, he had committed a dozen bank robberies in the United States, mostly in Florida.

Mr. Shuman was born in Los Angeles County, but holds dual U.S.-French citizenship because his maternal grandmother was a war bride.

He served in the U.S. Navy, worked in the banking and mortgage sector, then moved to Miami where, by his own admission, he pretended to be a land developer but was robbing banks.

The American robberies ended after he was stopped for speeding on a rural Alabama road and officers found in his car trunk a police radio scanner, an air pistol, plastic gloves and maps.

He received a 12-year sentence and was on supervised release when he failed to report to his probation officer in Miami and disappeared in 2004.

Six years later, a suspect began robbing banks in Canada. Investigators nicknamed him the Vaulter because he would leap over the counter to grab cash from the tellers.

Since Mr. Shuman was still wanted in the United States for breaching his parole, Det. Noseworthy said Canadian investigators suspected that he was in Europe, thanks to his French nationality.

With help from French authorities and by tracking his passport and credit-card use, police confirmed that Mr. Shulman was living in France.

Because extraditing a French citizen from France would be hard, investigators waited until Mr. Shuman went to Switzerland in the fall of 2015 for a vacation. He was arrested in Geneva and extradited to Canada in February, 2016.

As the Air Canada flight carrying him flew over French airspace, Mr. Shuman complained of chest pains, in what police suspect was a bid to force the plane to land in France. However, the pilot landed instead in London, where doctors cleared Mr. Shulman to fly again, on his way to face the Canadian courts.