Victor Manuel Gerena
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Victor Manuel Gerena (born June 24, 1958) is a New York native of Puerto Rican descent who is linked by the FBI with the armed robbery of a Wells Fargo bank, in connection with the Los Macheteros group. Gerena is known to have lived in Cuba; his exact whereabouts and fate in that island are unknown.
Gerena and his family, composed by his mother, four brothers and one sister, moved to Hartford when Gerena was still a young kid. Gerena liked Wrestling and he proved extremely popular among girls in his high school. Gerena was also a good student, being named to the student council and recommended to Trinity College. As a wrestler, Gerena won many tournaments. He also participated in Football.
Gerena met Marion Delaney, a then clerk for the House of Representatives, who became his friend and tutor. Delaney inspired Gerena to attend her alma mater, the Annhurst College, a typically female-only college that had faced harsh economic times and was by then accepting male students. There were 200 women at Annhurst compared to 25 men, and Gerena liked the possibilities of some fun on the side there.
Gerena was met with dislike by the college's superiors, all Catholic nuns who accepted, but apparently did not like, the men on campus. After being literally slapped on the wrist a few times for such offenses as sneaking girls into his room, Gerena returned home, he got together with an old friend and they had one daughter.
Gerena then left his girlfriend to date another friend, Pamela Anderson (not the famous one). They married, joined the Army and had two daughters. Gerena disliked the Army ways, and he promptly left the military service, also getting divorced soon after.
Gerena then became a security guard at a Wells Fargo branch in Hartford, the same branch he would later help rob from.
In Puerto Rico, Machetero leaders Filiberto Ojeda Rios and Juan Segarra Palmer had heard of Gerena; Gerena's mother's background as a pro-independence advocate and his dislike of life at the Army made him, in Ojeda Rios and Segarra Palmer's eyes, a candidate to become a member of Los Macheteros. They flew to Hartford and convinced the fame starved Gerena to help them with their cause by participating in the heist.
On September 12, 1983, Gerena dropped off his new girlfriend at City Hall, where she was to get a marriage license for the couple. He went to work, spent the rest of the day with co-workers James McKeon and Timothy Girard, then took off McKeon's gun, tied up the pair and put $7 million dollars away in the trunk of a car, taking off with the money. At an unknown point, Gerena transferred to another vehicle and disappeared. Gerena might have been left with $2 million dollars for himself.
According to FBI investigations, Gerena was transported to Mexico, where he boarded a Cubana de Aviacion jet at Benito Juarez International Airport in Mexico City, arriving at Jose Marti International Airport in Havana.
Years later, a Gerena relative would accompany journalist Edmund Mahoney to Cuba to try to find his whereabouts, but they did not succeed in finding him. Mahoney did publish a story in 1999 named Chasing Gerena.
In 2000, Gerena and other Macheteros leaders were offered pardons by President Bill Clinton. However, he remained on the FBI's ten most wanted list.
Many theories abound about Gerena's fate, most of them girate around Cuban President Fidel Castro. It is said that Gerena could be living a rich man's life in Cuba after fleeting the United States, conversely, it is also said that Castro took the $2 million dollars Gerena was given and made Gerena live an extremely poor life in exchange for asylum, or that he was killed by Castro's men. Another theory has Gerena travelling to Florida and living there.