Would-be bank bandits beware: A new sheriff has pulled into Norton and Whalley.
Well, a lieutenant, not technically a sheriff. His name’s Leo Bombalicki.
Monday he moved into the Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hills (WEB) police substation to take command as district manager — the neighborhood’s fourth top cop in a year.
The substation sits catty-corner from two bank branches, a Wachovia and a Citizens, that have seen their share of hold-ups.
Bombalicki, a 30-year police veteran, has caught his share of bank robbers. Two of them, a team by the name of McNellis and Flinter, had the FBI chasing them until they had the misfortune of stepping into Bombalicki’s sights. That was the end of their spree, not to mention their lives outside of jail.
“I don’t like criminals,” Bombalicki, who’s 53, declared as he sprayed Quality Care Lemon Furniture Polish on his new office’s furniture Monday before unleashing Lysol disinfectant wipes on the squad cars. “If I can catch ‘em, I like catching ‘em.”
He likes hunting all kinds of crooks, he said. Crooks, and bear and deer.
2 1/2‑Day Hunt
Bombalicki hunts the latter prey on his time off. He and some buddies from the force trek up near the Canadian border, to the Skowhegen preserve in Jackman, Maine. A lifelong member of the NRA (“I shoot vintage military”), Bombalicki targets the bear and deer there with a .44 Magnum.
The group relies on local farmers to alert them to potential prey roaming the area. A few years ago Bombalicki & co. learned of an “exceptional deer” — as in, really, really large.
They spotted the deer’s tracks. But not the deer.
For more than two days the hunters traced the tracks, hid out, looked for clues. The patient work paid off. “We finally figured out he was in a center swamp area,” Bombalicki recalled.
They found him. They killed him. They removed his guts, some 30 pounds worth. Two hundred and ten pounds of meat remained.
As usual, the team delivered the meat to an impoverished elderly man living on a nearby mountain. “He’s blind in one eye. He’s very proud,” Bombalicki said. “But without us, he would have trouble.” The “exceptional deer” meat was enough to feed the man for a year.
“I take a couple of steaks. I won’t lie to you,” Bombalicki said. “But he gets 99 percent of the meat.
“Want a piece? It’s very dry meat. Good meat. No fat. It’s like chicken.”
Bombalicki compared the deer hunt to drug cases he developed over his years in the narcotics unit.
“Sometimes it takes that long to catch a criminal,” he said. “It can take weeks, or months. It takes patience, intelligence, silence.
“When you got ‘em, you got ‘em. I don’t like doing the same work twice.”
Bella Vista Bust
Other times, the hunt begins and ends in a matter of minutes. Like the time, in the 1980s, Bombalicki and then-partner George Hill were working an undercover drug stakeout in the Bella Vista elderly housing complex.
A separate drama unfolded 100 yards away from their stakeout.
Two men, McNellis and Finter (“I don’t remember their first names”), stopped into the complex’s bank branch. They went in and pulled a heist. They left their getaway car running.
A maintenance man saw what was happening, hopped in their car, drove away.
“They came out of the bank and started blasting at the getaway car,” Bombalicki recalled. He and Hill rushed to the scene. They identified themselves as cops. McNellis and Flinter fled into the surrounding woods.
Big mistake. Bombalicki grew up nearby, on Grand Avenue. He spent endless hours in those woods rabbit-hunting. He also played linebacker and defensive end on Notre Dame High School’s football team. The stepson and nephew of cops, he knew by then that he wanted to wear the badge, and studied criminal justice at University of New Haven.
“That was my old neighborhood. They [McNellis and Flinter] weren’t going too far.”
Five minutes after entering the woods, the men were in custody. So was a duffel bag stuffed with some $75,000 in blue-dyed bills, Bombalicki recalled. The FBI, which had wanted the bank robbers for a string of previous jobs, gave Bombalicki a director’s citation.
Getting Oriented
Once he’s done scrubbing the walls of his new Whalley Avenue office, Bombalicki said, that citation, along with many others, will go up.
Meanwhile, he began meeting Monday with his beat cops for a sense of what issues are pressing in the WEB district. He plans to meet soon with neighborhood activists too.
In the past year the neighborhood has pressed for more foot and bike patrols.
Bombalicki plans to speak about the issue with department administrators, check out his budget, and “define the problems in the neighborhood” before making any commitments.
“Maybe bicycle patrols. But as far as walking beats, I don’t foresee it at this point,” Bombalicki said Monday.
Bombalicki plans to keep an eye on the banks in his district — even the NewAlliance branch in Westville Village, a particularly popular target of robbers.
That bank is technically past the WEB district line, which is at Fitch Street. If the hunt is on, Bombalicki doesn’t plan to let that boundary get in the way. “I’m very unorthodox,” he said.