Infamous America - [ENCORE] NORTH HOLLYWOOD ROBBERY Ep. 3 | “Tactical Alert”

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

When the robbery becomes frustrating, Larry Phillips begins the North Hollywood Shootout. Officers in multiple locations withstand gunfire from illegally modified fully automatic assault rifles and they struggle to fight back with the handguns and shotguns. Civilians and officers suffer injuries; the LAPD rushes to respond to the threat; and the robbers begin their getaway. Thanks to our sponsor, Quince! Use this link for Free Shipping and 365-day returns: Quince.com/infamousamerica Thanks to our sponsor, Rocket Money! Use this link to start saving today: RocketMoney.com/InfamousA Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.   On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By 924 on the morning of February 28, 1997, more than 30 police officers surrounded the Bank of America on Laurel Canyon Boulevard in North Hollywood. They had the entrances to both parking lots covered. Officers and detectives were positioned in the parking lot of the Valley Plaza Mall directly across the street. Laurel Canyon was completely blocked off from traffic. squad cars blocked the residential streets around the bank to stop civilians from entering the area and to stop a potential getaway by the robbers. The mobilization effort was huge, but the police knew very little detail about the circumstances. They knew there was a robbery in progress, and there were reports of shots fired. But officers didn't know the number of robbers, or the weaponry that was used,

or the full severity of the situation. Some of that changed at about 924 a.m. when Larry Phillips walked out of the bank. Phillips was a manipulative con man with an ingrained hatred of police. His partner, Emil Matasarano, was a depressed outcast who resented a world he couldn't find his place in. The pair wore body armor and bulletproof vests. They wore black ski masks over their faces, and they carried assault rifles that were the Chinese version of the recognizable A.K. K-47, but the robbers had illegally modified their weapons to be fully automatic. Phillips and Matasarano had started the robbery just seven minutes earlier.

It was a Friday, the last day of the month, and they thought the bank would be loaded with almost a million dollars, but it wasn't. They were enraged to discover that their haul would be only a little more than $300,000. They had assaulted three people in the bank and blasted holes in the ceiling, a plexiglass door, and a row of ATM cash machines. In previous robberies, they had demonstrated no fear of confrontation with the police and no hesitation to use violence.

Those traits were about to become painfully evident to everyone on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. When Larry Phillips stepped out of the bank and looked at an array of police officers who surrounded the building, he signaled that this robbery would not end like most of the others that the LAPD had handled. There wasn't going to be a long standoff with hours of negotiation. There was going to be a battle.

He focused his attention on the intersection of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Archwood Street, north of the bank. Two officers and three civilians stood near police cars that blocked the intersection. Phillips raised his rifle and began raking the cars with fully automatic gunfire. Even though a small army of officers was assembling to stop the robbery, those closest to the bank learned a horrifying fact at that moment. They were completely outgunned by two loaners from Pasadena. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America.

I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling the story of the North Hollywood robbery and the unprecedented battle between two gunmen and the Los Angeles Police Department. This is episode three, Tactical Alert. The two officers in the intersection of Archwood and Laurel Canyon were Sergeant Dean Haynes and Officer Martin Whitfield. Haynes was speaking with three civilians who had witnessed the beginning of the robbery.

He was relaying their information to radio dispatchers when Larry Phillips walked out of the bank. Phillips surveyed the scene around him and honed in on Haynes, Whitfield, and the civilians. When Phillips raised his rifle and squeezed the trigger, it took a hundredth of a second for his first volley of rounds to cover the roughly 200 feet, or 60s. meters between himself and the intersection. Sergeant Haynes' car was pointed directly at Phillips, and the rounds ripped through the hood and tore into the engine. Haines grabbed one of the civilians, Tracy Fisher, and pulled her to the ground. They scurried around to the back of the car so that the entire length of the vehicle was between them and the gunmen. It provided cover,

but as they soon learned, not much. The bullets shredded everything in their path. The windshield shattered. The red and blue lights on top of the car exploded. The rounds slammed into the asphalt of the street and sent chunks flying into the air. When the bullets hit the metal of the car, it sounded like a giant ball of hail hitting a ten roof, and the metal barely slowed them down. Next to the other car in the intersection, Officer Whitfield took cover and was about to return fire when Phillips saw him.

Phillips pivoted and took aim at Whitfield's position. Phillips unleashed another ear-splitting volley, and Whitfield immediately dropped to the ground to avoid getting cut to pieces. He made himself as small as possible while the rounds blasted his car. During the brief moment when the gunfire was directed at Whitfield, Sergeant Haynes screamed into his radio,

Stay down, rapid fire. They are panning the area with gunfire. All officers stay down. Shots are being fired from an AK-47. A dispatcher repeated the broadcast and added a new term, a code three. A code three in LAPD radio terminology meant a very urgent call. It meant officers should respond with lights and sirens and disregard traffic laws. It could also mean there was a serious crime in progress.

It could also mean there was a dangerous public hazard or that police needed immediate help. it could mean lives were at risk. In this case, it meant all of those things. In the LAPD at the time, only the SWAT teams and some special details carried semi-automatic rifles. The officers on the scene in North Hollywood mostly carried either Smith and Wesson

38 caliber revolvers, which held just six rounds, or Beretta 9mm pistols that held 15 rounds. Squad cars were mostly outfitted with pump-action shotguns, that were loaded with buckshot. The pistols and shotguns were adequate when the priority was short-range stopping power. But the officers were facing military-grade assault rifles that fired 762 by 39-millimeter rounds that could cover 2,000 feet per second.

They had an effective range equivalent to more than three American football fields, and they could shell out more than 500 rounds per minute. Larry Phillips was barely 200 feet. away. At that range, the metal of a car wasn't going to stop the bullets. Concrete walls weren't going to stop the bullets. And protective vests, if the officers were wearing them at all, sure as hell weren't going to stop the bullets. The woman who became the primary dispatcher during the ordeal was Twanya Bellard. She was stationed in the dispatch center four floors below City Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Her job was to take the frantic jumble of messages that were being shouted

by officers at the scene and translate them into proper police radio traffic. She needed to filter and relay the information in a calm, dispassionate voice. It was about to become the challenge of her career because she'd never heard anything like this. No one had. My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night with my mind racing from one thing to another, and then, of course, I have a brainstorm about something new. That lights the fire and then I'm in real trouble.

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At Mood.com, get 20% off your first order with our promo code, Infamous. Go to Mood.com and use the code infamous to get 20% off your first order. And they have a 100-day satisfaction guarantee. Mood.com promo code infamous. An average day for an LAPD dispatcher could mean handling as many as 500 calls, and Friday, February 28th, began like any other for Bellard and her peers. But Bellard's day vaulted from average to extreme just after 9 a.m. when a call came in from a woman at a bakery in the Valley Plaza Mall across the street from Bank of America. The woman

claimed the bank was being robbed by masked men with guns. As Bellard was relaying that tentative info, the call center received the transmission from Officer Lauren Farrell. Farrell and his partner had been driving past the bank and had seen the same thing as the woman from the bakery. A robbery was definitely in progress, and Bellard began coordinating a citywide response. Less than five minutes later, Sergeant Dean Haynes shouted that officers were taking fire from AK-47s. A moment later, Officer Martin Whitfield's voice cut through the radio traffic, and he announced that he'd been shot. The first officer was down, the first of many. Whitfield had been balled up behind the back of his vehicle, trying to keep as much of his body

behind one of the rear wheels as possible. He was already cut by glass and shrapnel, and then he was struck by a bullet, and then another. One round hit him in the butt, and another tore through his left arm. He called it in over the radio, Antoine Bellard told everyone, on the frequency that there was now an officer down. In the intersection, Officer Whitfield had no good choices. The gunman was pouring fire on his location, and the police car wasn't providing protection. Whitfield needed to move, but that would put him out in the open. Mercifully, at that moment, the gunman, Larry Phillips, shifted his fire.

Whitfield heard the rounds move away from his position, and he scooted over to Sergeant Haynes' vehicle. Haynes and the civilians were jammed together behind the front side of the car, hoping that the engine block would be thick enough to stop the bullets. But it wasn't. One civilian, Michael Horan, had been shot in the left side of his chest and in the arm. Another, Tracy Fisher, had been hit in the ankle by a round that had gone under the vehicle and skipped up off the concrete. As Officer Whitfield joined them, he reported to the sergeant that he had been shot.

Then he saw blood coming out of Haynes' arm, and the sergeant replied, me too. Haynes called in that he was hit, but it was not life-threatening. Then the officers realized that the gunman's attention was back on them. They told the civilians to stay put and stay down. Haynes and Whitfield moved to hopefully draw the attention away from the civilians. Haynes went first. He hustled up Laurel Canyon Boulevard and dove behind a tree. then Whitfield moved, but the gunman locked onto him.

Whitfield hobbled up the street while firing his pistol behind him, but at that range, the 9-millimeter handgun was all but useless. Larry Phillips shot Martin Whitfield two more times, again in the arm and once in the upper leg. The bullet shattered Whitfield's femur. Whitfield stumbled onto a grassy spot next to the sidewalk and collapsed behind a skinny tree that provided only the slimmest cover.

But luckily for Whitfield, he was about to get another reprieve. Phillips again turned his attention away from the intersection and toward his second target, the Valley Plaza Mall. Officer Whitfield didn't know it, but the earlier pause in the gunfire that had allowed him to hurry from his car to Sergeant Haynes' car happened because Larry Phillips discovered four officers in the Valley Plaza parking lot

directly across the street from the bank. He had discovered them because one of them had shot him. Phillips had briefly blasted their position before shifting to the intersection just in time to catch Whitfield as the officer broke cover and hobbled toward the tree. But even though Phillips was focused on Officer Whitfield, it didn't mean that the officers in the parking lot were out of danger. Rookie James Aboravan and his training officer Stuart Guy,

along with Detective Tracy Angelus and her partner John Krulak, would quickly feel the full force of Emil Matasarano's Narenko Type 56 assault rifle. The two officers and the two detectives had been stationed by the kiosk that made keys in the center of the parking lot. They had watched as Phillips tore into the police cars in the intersection to the north. From Phillips' position, he had his back to the team in the parking lot. Zaboravan had the Ithaca Model 37 shotgun that was the standard for the LAPD for nearly 4.4.4.5. years. It was accurate and effective at up to about 130 feet. Gunman Larry Phillips was more than 200 feet away. But Zaborvan needed to do something. Phillips was dealing an overwhelming amount of

fire at the officers and civilians in the intersection. The bullets were hitting the cars with such ferocity that the cars were shaking. Zaboravan moved out from behind the kiosk just enough to give himself a clear line of sight. He pumped the shotgun, changed, chambered a shell and fired. He ejected the shell, chambered another, and fired again. The shotgun was well out of its effective range, but some of the pellets hit their mark. Phillips stopped shooting and buckled at the waist just slightly.

When Phillips turned towards Zaboravan, it gave Officer Whitfield the chance to hurry to Sergeant Haynes' location. Zborvan had successfully relieved the pressure on Whitfield and Haynes, but only by bringing it on himself. Larry Phillips sent a barrage toward the kiosk. The thin walls provided even less protection than the police cars in the intersection. The bullets sliced through the walls and drove detectives Angeles and Kruelak to the ground. As Officer Guy pancaked on the pavement, Zaboravan dove on top of the detectives who had no vests or body armor.

In the blink of an eye, two rounds hit Zaboravan. One hit the meat of his thigh and the other found. its way under his body armor and cut a gash on his back. He didn't realize the severity of the wound, and when Phillips went back to shooting at the intersection, Zaboravan told the detectives and his partner that he could move. Officer Guy fired five rounds as cover for the group, and they crept deeper into the parking lot. Over the radio, dispatcher Twanya Bellard relayed the news that Martin Whitfield had been hit. She didn't know that Sergeant Haynes was also hit, and she was trying to get a handle on the chaos.

She broadcasted that SWAT was on the way, and then she asked, does any unit know how many officers are down? I have one. And Zaboravann shouted into his radio, more than one, more than one. Bellard started getting calls about an injured officer somewhere southwest of the bank,

and one who had taken shelter in the family market in the Valley Plaza Mall. There were at least four officers and two civilians injured, and the gunfight was probably less than five minutes old. The single shooter, Larry Phillips, had sprayed nearly 100 rounds outside the Bank of America, and the situation was about to get worse for all the officers and detectives at the scene. Emil Matasaranu was on his way out of the bank to join the fight. He walked out the south doors and looked at the situation.

At first he seemed confused. This was the first moment that he realized they were surrounded. If they wanted to get away, they would have to shoot their way out. Like Phillips, Mada Seranu proved he had no problem with that. Phillips was directing his fire to the north at officers Haynes and Whitfield, so Mada Seranu fired south down Laurel Canyon Boulevard and directly across the street at the parking lot of the Valley Plaza Mall. In the lot, the officers and detectives scrambled as far away from the shooters as they could.

Officer Zaboravan ended up with Detective Krulak, and Officer Guy ended up with Detective Angelus. The two mismatched pairs were separated and couldn't reconnect while Mada Seranu's onslaught eviscerated the parked cars around them. The only brief lulls in the gunfire came when Mada Seranu occasionally walked back into the bank. Several times he ripped off a burst of gunfire and then went into the bank. Then he came back out and repeated the process. Maybe he was checking on the customers, or maybe the Fino Barbatol had done its job too well, and he could no longer process what was going on. Whatever the reason, assistant manager John Villagrana

noticed the routine. Inside the bank, he took charge of the safety of the customers and employees and made his move. Villagrana tried to ignore his throbbing head. He'd been hit by the metal shrapnel that had sliced off the backs of the ATM machines when moderated. Sondasarano shot them. The people in the bank were spread out, and Villagrana feared what would happen if police tried to enter and shoot it out with the gunmen. Phillips had been outside for several minutes firing at the police, and at the moment, Madasurano was out there too. Viagrana quickly gathered the customers and the employees and moved them to the safest place he could think of, the vault. Dozens of terrified people heard it inside. They kicked aside shell casings from the bullet, Mattisaranu fired at a locker full of money and trampled on that money, which now looked

more like confetti. The steel walls of the vault were a foot thick, and the door was three and a half feet thick. It was about the only thing in the area that was strong enough to resist bullets, and it would be a sanctuary for the next hour. In the next few minutes, the robbers must have noticed that all the employees and customers had disappeared from the lobby. But were those people in the vault and cut off from the action, and with the other factors that will become apparent later, will never know how Phillips and Mada Seranu reacted when they discovered that everyone was gone. If the robbers knew that the civilians were in the vault, they didn't do anything about it. By that time, the robbers were more concerned with the growing army of police

outside and the waning possibility of escape. On one of Mada Seraanu's trips into the bank, He came back out with the duffel bag full of money. He let out several bursts of gunfire and walked back into the bank. Larry Phillips went back into the north entrance of the bank, possibly to reload. And it was the first time the two men were inside together since Phillips started the firefight. They found themselves in the exact scenario that had made them come so heavily armed. They were surrounded and outnumbered, but definitely not outgunned. No one knows what they said to each other, but the result became obvious moments later.

They decided it was time to make their getaway. In the Valley Plaza parking lot across the street from the bank, Detective Krulak and Officer Zaboravan were hunkered down behind a minivan. The minivan was shot to hell by the gunmen, and the lawmen would meet the owner of the minivan very soon, but for now it was a place of shelter for Kruak and Zaboravan. Even so, the officers couldn't stay there for long. The minivan provided only marginally more protection than the kiosk.

Zaboravan was bleeding from bullet wounds to the leg and back, and Kruelak was bleeding from the ankle where a piece of shrapnel from the kiosk had embedded itself into his skin and tissue. Nearby, hiding in a different row of parked cars, Detective Angelus and Officer Guy were also in bad shape. They were relatively close to each other, but still separated by about 20 feet. During the most recent barrage of gunfire, Officer Guy had been hit in the leg. The wound was severe, and he was trying to fashion a tourniquet. Detective Angelus needed to get to him, but covering just that short distance could be a life or death proposition. Zaboravan and Cruelak's position had taken steady fire from Phillips and then Matasaranu before the gun.

gunmen had retreated into the bank to regroup. No matter what the gunmen were doing or planning, Krulak and Zaborvan needed to get out of the parking lot and into the safety of the Valley Plaza Mall. This was a surreal experience for Zaboravan, but Detective Krulak knew it all too well. He was a Vietnam veteran, and he knew what it was like to be pinned down,

taking heavy enemy fire, and wondering if reinforcements would arrive in time. For the moment, the two detectives and the two officers were stranded in the parking lot. But that was about to change. Less than half a mile from the Bank of America near the intersection of Victory Boulevard and Laurel Canyon Boulevard. The police were hastily constructing a field command control center

to coordinate the enormous response that was underway. Squad cars were arriving from all over the San Fernando Valley. Every officer with a radio was hearing the calls about officers down. Fire trucks and ambulances were stacking up at the command center, but no one could get into the combat zone. The gunmen still controlled the area around the bank, and none of the emergency vehicles or police cars had armor that could withstand full-auto gunfire. If anyone drove into the area, they would be easy targets and would probably make the situation worse instead of better. And while the police response force mobilized south of the bank, Sergeant Dean Haynes and

Officer Martin Whitfield were north of the bank, still on their own and trapped behind trees near the intersection of Laurel Canyon and Archwood. Haines screamed into his radio and implored someone to send help for Officer Whitfield. Whitfield had been shot multiple times and was fading fast. Right now, at this moment, it seemed like the best time to get him help. For the first time since Larry Phillips opened fire on Haynes and Whitfield, both gunmen were in the bank. But no one knew when they would come back out and start shooting again. It didn't take long to find out. Phillips and Matasaranu were only in the bank for a short period of time,

and then they came out blasting. Phillips concentrated his fire on the intersection north of the bank near Haynes and Whitfield. Matasarano carried the duffel bag with $300,000 and concentrated his fire on the Valley Plaza parking lot across the street, and that was terrible news for the four officers in the lot. Detective Angelus was trying to move across the 20 feet of space between herself and Officer Guy. Matasaranu opened fire and Angelus was hit twice, once in the leg, and once when a bullet grazed her torso. Neither was life-threatening, but she had no idea how long it would be before help arrived or the shooting stopped.

Even with the gunmen laying down heavy fire, the officers returned fire with their handguns. The distance between them reduced the effectiveness of the handguns, but at least one officer was positive that he'd hit one of the robbers almost dead center in the chest. It was shortly after that, the dispatcher Twanya Bellard began hearing messages that the gunmen were wearing body armor, and the 9mm rounds were just bouncing off them. At that point, the robbers seemed unstoppable. They seemed to have an unlimited amount of heavy-duty firepower, and they were impervious to bullets.

Unless a SWAT team or someone with more powerful weapons arrived, the robbers might be able to walk to their car and drive away. That appeared to be their plan as they slowly moved away from the bank and toward their car in the parking lot. Across the street at the Valley Plaza Mall, Kru Lack and Zaborvan didn't have time to wait and see how the getaway might play out. The minivan they were crouched behind was being torn apart, but as they would learn later, it was understandably parked near a doorway that led to an office on the second floor.

Krulak couldn't make out all the words that were written on the glass door or the awning above it, but he could read one word, dentist. He asked Zaborvan if he could run. The wounded rookie said yes. So, during a rare break in the gunfire, the two men stood up. Prulak shoved Zaboravan out in front of him to put himself between the gunmen and the gunmen and the officer and pushed Zaboravan toward the door. They didn't pause to open it.

They just smashed right through it. Zaboravan crashed through the glass like he was in a Hollywood movie and tumbled into the narrow entryway. Krulak plowed through the door right behind him, and they nearly knocked it off its hinges. In front of them was a staircase that led up to the second floor. Zaboravan and Kruelak began to climb the stairs as the shooting ramped up outside. The men collapsed at the top of the stairs and took a brief moment to catch their breath.

But Kruelak was up quickly and aiming his shotgun down the staircase at the door. As the boaravan laid on the floor, a door opened next to him. He looked up to find a wide-eyed, middle-aged man in a dentist's coat peeking out of the office door. The man in the coat didn't have to ask if the officers were hurt. He knew they were. He had watched the entire scene from his second-story office window. It was his minivan that provided shelter for Krulak and Zbora van, and which now looked like a metal ball of Swiss cheese. Dr. Jorge Montez, his wife, and their dental assistants, were about to become battlefield medics for the second half of the North Hollywood shootout.

Next time on Infamous America, if it didn't feel like it already, the robbery becomes an all-out war as Larry Phillips and Emil Matasarano tried to escape. Officers put their lives on the line to rescue the wounded. The first SWAT officers arrive, and the first news helicopter appears overhead to broadcast the entire thing live to the nation in real time. If you didn't think it could get crazier, it does. Next week on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program

don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus. episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships begin at just $5 per month. This season was researched and written by Jamie Lyko, original music by Rob Valier. Copy editing by me, Chris Wimmer, and I'm your host and producer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrell Media on Twitter. And you can

stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for infamous America podcast. This show is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Please visit airwavemedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin's World, History of the Great War, and many more. Thanks for listening.