PORT HADLOCK — Robert Daniel Jones’ Wednesday arrest was quieter than his arrest in 2001.
In 2001, Jones was recognized as he was drinking and buying drinks for others at Kay’s Office Sport Pub on East First Street in Port Angeles.
Owner Bill Kay recognized him from a bank security camera photo of Jones that appeared in the Peninsula Daily News and called police.
On Aug. 3, 2001, Jones walked into the Bank of America in Port Hadlock with a BB gun and demanded money.
The $10,000 heist, as it turned out, aided Jones on a five-day drinking and gambling binge that ended with his arrest Aug. 8
In the days prior to his capture, Jones bought rounds of drinks for patrons he didn’t know with $100 bills, Kay said back in 2001, and paid for a room at the nearby Chinook Motel with large bills pulled from a paper bag.
“I’m not too surprised,” Kay said then about the arrest. “When someone starts buying rounds and showing big bills, you get curious.”
Jones also drank and gambled heavily at 7 Cedars Casino in Blyn in the days following the robbery, causing problems with security guards there, employees said.
Wearing a black cowboy hat — one shown in the 2001 surveillance photos of Jones — he spent hours at the 7 Cedars Casino drinking heavily and gambling.
“He made a scene all weekend — I couldn’t have missed him,” said Corey Moseley, who worked the Keno tables at the casino in 2001.
“There’s no telling what he spent in here.”
Casino workers interviewed soon after the arrest said they remembered seeing Jones at 7 Cedars before and after the bank robbery.
Jones repeatedly caused problems for casino security officers by disturbing other patrons and drunkenness, Moseley said.
At one point the security officers stopped Jones from buying any more beer, but two women who were with Jones bought it for him.