Mark Steven Vandendool has been given more time to focus on running choir practice.
The classical-guitar-playing bank robber was sentenced to an overall eight-year prison term on Thursday for having carried out a dozen heists in the West Island, Montreal and Longueuil over a six-month period in 2015 and 2016. He managed to make off with more than $33,000 in total, armed only with a fake firearm while sporting a fake beard as a disguise.
Vandendool, 35, has already served time in a federal penitentiary (as part of a three-year sentence) for having robbed two banks in Ontario a decade ago.
While in the federal penitentiary, he organized and ran choir practice in the penitentiary chapel.
“The accused is not a first offender. This time he cannot plead a youthful mistake. As a fact, the first sentence he received 10 years ago seemed not to have had an effect sufficient to deter him from reoffending,” said Quebec Court Judge Nathalie Fafard. “Today the accused is back to Square One and the key to his future is now in his hands. This is not a case where the accused addressed his problems and tried to solve them after his first sentence. Even though he is willing to start therapy (for an attention deficit disorder), he is at the very first step of his rehabilitation.”
Prosecutor Marie-France Drolet had asked that Vandendool receive a 12-year sentence and defence lawyer Pierre Poupart suggested five years would be more appropriate.
With time served factored into the sentence he received Thursday, Vandendool is left with six years to serve.
After he was arrested for the robberies in Ontario, Vandendool said his motive was to steal enough money to enroll in a music program with McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. He managed to attend the school after serving his first sentence and graduated. He was teaching guitar lessons, from an apartment near Dawson College, when he began robbing banks again in 2015.
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During the sentencing hearing in May, Fafard was told that Vandendool decided to rob banks again because he was threatened by loan sharks. He said he borrowed a significant amount of money — before he robbed the banks in Ontario in 2006 — with the goal of purchasing several kilograms of marijuana that he hoped to resell for a profit. The plans were dashed after someone broke into his apartment and stole the pot before he could resell it, he said.
Vandendool was arrested and convicted for the Ontario bank robberies while he was still in debt to the loan sharks. He said someone who knew the loan sharks in Ontario spotted him in Montreal in 2015. Days later he was forced into a car, assaulted and warned that his girlfriend would be killed if he didn’t pay the loan sharks $30,000.
“This odd version of incidents was never reported to (the police who investigated the bank robberies). Therefore it is neither challenged nor confirmed,” Fafard said.
