An accomplished musician who robbed banks in Montreal while he taught guitar lessons carried out his crimes, in part, because he was under a great deal of stress, a Quebec Court judge was told Friday morning.
The comment was made by Tiziana Costi, a forensic psychologist who evaluated Mark Steven Vandendool, 35, for his sentence hearing. The Crown has requested that he be sentenced to a 12-year prison term for the 12 armed robberies he carried out in 2015 and 2016 in municipalities like Kirkland, Pointe-Claire and Westmount.
In April, Vandendool, who studied classical music at McGill University, pleaded guilty to a total of 25 charges.
On Friday, the psychologist told Quebec Court Judge Nathalie Fafard that Vandendool was under a great deal of stress during the period he carried out the robberies because he owed money to someone tied to a criminal organization. She said Vandendool owed $30,000 and told the court that Vandendool was assaulted twice at the Montreal Detention Centre because of the debt.
Police handout photo of Mark Steven Vandendool leaving the scene of a bank robbery.
When prosecutor Marie-France Drolet asked the psychologist to identify the criminal organization she was unable to.
The psychologist said Vandendool is a low risk of reoffending but has problems he needs to work on while incarcerated.
“He knows he has to pay for what he did,” Costi said. “Even if he wasn’t using a real gun (for the robberies) he knows that it had consequences on the victim.”
Vandendool looked like an investment banker while he sat in the prisoner’s dock. His head was shaved almost completely bald and he wore a dark blue suit, pristine white dress shirt and a silver tie.
This is not the first time Vandendool has been sentenced for robbery. He committed similar crimes, while living in Ontario, and later told an Ontario judge that he robbed because he needed to pay his tuition to attend McGill University.
Vandendool’s father, Orval, testified during the sentence hearing, saying his son appeared to be headed on a good path after he finished his first sentence for robbery in 2008.
He said his son had a 3.8 GPA at McGill and that he later developed a unique technique, while he taught guitar lessons, that helped students learn faster.
“We’d hear students say they learned more in one hour (with Vandendool) than in 10 (previous) years,” the father said while adding he, his son and an investor started a company to market the technique.
To support what he was saying, Orval Vandendool brought a patent that his son had obtained in the U.S. for a software program he developed to teach guitar.
The father said he learned that his son robbed banks to pay off a debt that started at $6,000 and ballooned to $30.000. He said his son told him he was assaulted twice while detained because of the debt.
“So what happened?” defence lawyer Pierre Poupart asked.
“We paid it,” the father said.
The father said that when he paid off the debt, by a Western Union wire transfer, there was only $1,000 outstanding. He said he believes his son paid off the rest from the money he stole from the banks he held up. The debt originated before Vandendool robbed his first bank in Ontario in 2006.
The elder Vandendool told Fafard that he recently learned his son borrowed the money from criminals to purchase a large quantity of marijuana that he planned to sell. Someone stole the money before the marijuana was purchased and Vandendool had no way to pay it back.
His father told Fafard that while his son was getting his life back together in Montreal someone from his past in Ontario recognized him on the street. He said his son figures the criminals he owed money to in Ontario then tracked him down by ads Vandendool used to promote the guitar lessons he was giving in Montreal.
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