Italian police have caught up with a 'gentleman thief' who spoke softly so as not to scare staff and made sure children didn't witness his deeds.
Sicilian-born Carmelo Balzari, 33, ''never frightened'' clerks and would deliberately make small talk with staff until children had left the banks he was about to rob, Carabinieri said.
The ''sharply dressed and softly spoken'' bandit once gave up on a robbery when a bank manager reacted ''too sharply,'' police said.
''All right, I'll leave,'' Balzari is said to have murmured.
On another occasion he waited until a mother with a small child had left the premises before, seemingly reluctantly, telling a clerk: ''I really must carry out a raid''.
''He was a real gentleman, a kind you don't often see any more,'' a Carabinieri officer said.
Balzari staged ten bank robberies in two months before being nabbed at a high-class Milan hotel at the weekend.
