`Hollywood' Cohort Gets 21 Years

Less than an hour before convicted bank robber Mark John Biggins was to be sentenced, a telegram arrived at the federal courthouse in downtown Seattle from Biggins' parents in central Minnesota, pleading - once again - for leniency from U.S. District Judge William Dwyer.

The parents had earlier sent letters, and even videos. And so had other family members and friends.

That support, and the judge's recognition that Biggins had no significant prior criminal record, may have worked in his favor yesterday.

Biggins, 42, one of the two accomplices of the late serial bank robber known as "Hollywood," could have spent 24 years in a federal prison for his part in a $1 million bank heist in Seattle last November.

Instead, Dwyer sentenced the college-educated criminal to 21 years and three months, at the low end of the court's sentencing guideline, plus another five years of supervised release.

In the same hearing, the other accomplice, Steven Paul Meyers, 47, was given an identical sentence, which included an automatic 10 years for using semiautomatic assault weapons when firing upon police.

Both men had pleaded guilty in February to federal bank robbery charges.

Because they had admitted previous bank robberies, prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's office had asked for 24-year sentences.

Meyers, of New Orleans, and Biggins, from the Oxnard, Calif., area, both were wounded in a shootout with police after a Nov. 27

robbery of Seafirst Bank's Lake City branch. The stolen $1.08 million was recovered.

A third man sought in the robbery, William Scurlock of Olympia - whom the FBI nicknamed "Hollywood" because of his penchant for theatrical makeup and disguises - eluded police for 24 hours before police closed in on a camper where he had been hiding, and he shot himself in the head.