San Francisco Chef Arrested for Robbing 3 Banks in a Day

A San Francisco chef at a beloved Italian eatery has been arrested for demanding bread from bank tellers by robbing three different banks in a single day, police say.

Valentino Luchin, 62 — the former executive chef at beloved Italian restaurant Rose Pistola in San Francisco — struck three different banks across the city last week by passing handwritten notes to the tellers demanding money, police say.

In the first robbery, police said, Luchin pushed a note to a teller, who, “fearing for their safety,” complied and “provided the suspect with a bag of U.S. currency. The suspect then fled from the area with the money.” On the same day, two additional bank robberies were pulled off by a man with a “similar suspect description and modus operandi,” police said. Officers determined that the suspect who committed these robberies was Luchin and went to his apartment, where he was arrested without incident with bundles of cash.

In a recent post on Instagram, Luchin describes himself as a “gray wolf” and a “gangster,” which appears to be rooted in his history as a Canadian bank robber. The chef, who once owned acclaimed eatery Ottavio in Walnut Creek, robbed a bank in Orinda, Canada in 2018, two years after his restaurant closed.

After the Canadian robbery, the chef gave a jailhouse interview to the East Bay Times, saying that the gun he pulled on a teller wasn’t loaded. ‘I thought it was a good plan,” one he said was launched out of financial desperation, “but it was not.”