The prolific Florida bank robber who is now accused in Canada

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In the early 1990s, Jeffrey Shuman lived in a Miami waterfront condo and described himself as land developer. A dual French-American national, he was well-travelled, had worked in mortgages and banking.

He was also a serial bank robber.

FBI investigators called him the Reebok Bandit because he wore tennis shoes during his heists. But there was another distinctive feature: Working solo and hiding his face under a baseball cap, he would leap over the counter to grab cash from the tellers.

Six years after Mr. Shuman went missing in the United States, a man with a baseball cap and beige parka entered a Royal Bank branch at a strip mall north of Toronto one winter morning and jumped over the counter to get to the money.

The suspect, whom police later dubbed the Vaulter, became one of Canada's most prolific bank robbers, hitting 21 branches from Calgary to Ottawa during a five-year span.

Canadian authorities allege the Vaulter is Mr. Shuman, who now sits in a cell in Geneva while he fights in Swiss court a bid to extradite him. Investigators here suspected for years that the Vaulter had previous experience holding up banks.

"We're dealing with somebody here who's probably pretty familiar with banking environments. He's been involved with robberies in the past. … I don't think this is new to him," York Region Detective Sergeant Mike Fleischaker told reporters in 2011.

At the same time, his profile was not typical of career criminals.

"It was a very unusual case. He was this good-looking, fully professional-looking kind of guy," a U.S. legal source familiar with the 1990s robberies said.

Neither Mr. Shuman's lawyer nor York Regional Police, the lead investigative agency in the Canadian heists, would comment on his case.

But the U.S. Marshals Service confirmed that the suspect in custody in Switzerland is the same man who was involved in the U.S. holdups.

A key to Mr. Shuman's past is found in his Florida court file, now in archival storage in Atlanta. Among the documents is a diplomat's letter confirming he was born in Los Angeles County in 1962 and was registered with the French consulate-general.

He acquired his French citizenship from his maternal grandmother, a war bride who left Southern France and sailed to New York with her two-year-old daughter in the fall of 1946.

After finishing high school, Mr. Shuman served in the U.S. Navy and studied fashion merchandising at a vocational school. From 1985 to 1987, he worked in the mortgage and banking field, his defence lawyer, Simon Steckel, once told a court hearing.

Mr. Steckel said his client then moved to Miami and was self-employed as a land developer.

The prosecution said Mr. Shuman had not sold anything for three years and had no visible means to support his "rather expensive lifestyle."

That lifestyle included travel to England and the Bahamas, and renting a $2,200-a-month furnished apartment at the Grand, a condominium tower overlooking a marina on Biscayne Bay, for which he had prepaid $8,000 in cash.

By his own admission, over seven months, he robbed more than a dozen banks in Florida and Tennessee.

On Feb. 5, 1993, for example, he went to the Harbor Federal Savings and Loan branch in Vero Beach, Fla., vaulted the counter and emptied the cash drawers into a bag, running away with nearly $20,000.

That July, he targeted the Leader Federal Bank of Brentwood, a suburb of Nashville. But as he fled, a dye-bomb exploded and he had to abandon the money.

Ten days later, Mr. Shuman was driving across rural Alabama, when he was stopped for speeding. Officers looked into the trunk of his rental Plymouth Acclaim and found, under the spare tire, a trash bag with a police radio scanner, an air pistol, plastic gloves, maps of Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee, and several baseball caps.

He received only a traffic citation, but within days a warrant was issued for bank robbery and the FBI arrested him in Miami.

While he waited in pretrial detention, he petitioned the courts to allow him to wed his fiancée, Claudia Jostmann. They were married in May, 1994, while he was in custody at the Indian River County Jail.

The next spring, he pleaded guilty to 14 bank robberies and made an act of contrition, saying he always felt bad about frightening the tellers and now realized the loss to the banks. He received a 12-year sentence and was held at a penitentiary in Georgia, then at a low-security institution in Florida. Citing his dual citizenship, he tried in vain to get transferred to a French prison.

He left the penitentiary in March, 2004, on a supervised release. But he failed to report to his probation officer and an arrest warrant was issued in April.

Mr. Shuman was not seen in public for six years.

Then, the Vaulter began robbing banks in Canada. Between February and September of 2010, there were 10 heists in Markham, Vaughan, Mississauga, Hamilton and Richmond Hill, Ont. Each time, a man with a handgun would clamber over the counter and demand money.

The Vaulter kept quiet for four months, then popped up in Calgary, where four Bank of Nova Scotia branches were robbed in a week. In the spring, he reappeared in Eastern Canada, unveiling a bolder tactic: He waited for employees to open the branch in the morning, then forced them at gunpoint to the vault.

As late as last spring, Canadian police still made public appeals to help them identify the Vaulter. That was after a May 8 robbery at a TD Canada Trust branch in Mississauga.

During the summer, Canadian police identified him as a suspect and discovered that Mr. Shuman, now 53, was living in France.

In September, acting on a Canadian warrant, Geneva cantonal police put Mr. Shuman under surveillance after he arrived in Switzerland.

A week ago, the Swiss Federal Office of Justice approved Mr. Shuman's extradition to Canada. He immediately indicated he would appeal the decision before the Swiss federal penal court, justice office spokesman Raphael Frei said.

With a report from Rick Cash