Robber turned in by sons gets 40 years

CHICAGO – A former community leader whose shocking series of bank robberies ended when his police officer son helped tip off authorities was sentenced to 40 years and one month in prison Thursday.

William Alfred Ginglen, whose descent took him from Jaycees president, auxiliary police officer and zoning chairman to a cocaine-using desperado, wept at his sentencing in U.S. District Court in Springfield, Ill.

“He was so emotional that he was only able to say, `I want to apologize to everyone,’ ” Ginglen’s attorney, Ronald Hamm, said after the hearing, at which Ginglen also was ordered to pay $56,382 in restitution.

Ginglen, 64, a husband, father and grandfather, pleaded guilty in July to committing seven small-town bank robberies in central Illinois from November 2003 to July 2004 that netted him about $60,000.

Ginglen, who had lived in Lewistown, Ill., since he was about 3 years old, shocked the community with his arrest Aug. 20, 2004, outside the girlfriend’s home in Champaign, Ill.

That arrest came after one of Ginglen’s sons, Peoria, Ill., police officer Jared Ginglen, read a newspaper story about the bank robberies that prompted him to visit a sheriff’s Web site, where he saw bank surveillance camera photographs of the robber.

He then contacted his two brothers, and the three determined the man in the pictures was their father. They called authorities, who arrested William Ginglen the next morning.