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He’s the bank-robbing bard.
A career crook and moonlighting crime novelist for a New York City publisher has been busted for allegedly continuing with his main source of income: robbing banks.
Dorian Sykes of Detroit made his latest getaway in a white Rolls Royce SUV, only to be nabbed at an MGM Grand Hotel — where he’d been living for free using vouchers, authorities said.
In a tale that could have been ripped from the pages of Detroit’s poet laureate of crime, Elmore Leonard, the 41-year-old Sykes was about to celebrate his latest novel’s release with Urban Books when he was pinched for the March 12 heist.
Sykes is accused of entering the Chase Bank in Lathrup Village, a suburb of Detroit, and handing a teller a withdrawal slip with the message, “Give me all the money, I have a gun…I will kill everyone in here” scrawled on it, according to the criminal complaint.
The terrified teller forked over $3,400 in cash, and Sykes was caught on video then fleeing with the dough — in the luxury Rolls, authorities said.
Sykes was still on parole after having been released from federal prison in February 2024 for another bank robbery he was convicted of in 2020.
FBI investigators soon found out from Sykes’ probation officer that he was living gratis at the hotel, staked him out and ended nabbing him in his Rolls.
Sykes was also charged with another robbery in nearby Sterling Heights that occurred six days earlier in which $10,169 in cash was stolen.
“Sykes’s history paints a troubling and unmistakable picture of a person who has a complete disregard for the law,” Assistant US Attorney Frances Carlson wrote in a sentencing memorandum in late 2020.
Sykes has published nine novels with Urban Books, a company out of the Big Apple run by New York Times best-selling author Carl Weber.
Weber told the Detroit News that he was vaguely familiar with Sykes and said each of his novels sold as many as 2,500 copies.
“He’s pretty small fry, to be honest,” Weber said. “He wouldn’t be in this situation if he was” a more successful author.
Sykes will now celebrate the release of his latest book “Born To Die” — due to come out next month — behind bars.
Its cover features a dapper gentleman decked out in gangster couture standing over a table with a pile of cocaine and a rolled up hundred dollar bill to snort it
The March 12 crime could provide him inspiration for his next book.
Sykes composes his novels behind bars, and his author biography on Barnes & Noble’s website says,
“Currently residing in Detroit, Mr. Sykes is constantly working to give the readers new hot material.”
His books are available on Amazon as audiobooks as well.
English (US)