September 30th, 2022. 3:15 in the afternoon. TD Bank, Union Street, downtown Boston. A man in his late 50s walks in. No mask, no gun in his hand, no getaway driver waiting at the curb. He approaches the teller, leans in, and says six words that would put him back in federal prison for the rest of his useful life.
Give me all the hundreds. Then he says nine more. Give me all the money before I blow your brains out. The teller stuffs cash into a bag. The man walks out into the afternoon crowd on foot. Just walks. No car, no accompllices, no plan beyond the next block. The whole job takes less than 90 seconds. 4 days earlier, he had hit a citizen’s bank inside a stop and shop on Rodman Street in Fall River.
The day after that, a send tender on Berkeley Street. The day after that, an MNT on Boilston. By the time the FBI surveillance team grabbed him on October 5th at a citizens branch on Boilston Street in Back Bay, William Sakiraa had robbed four banks in 5 days and attempted a fifth. He was 59 years old.
He had spent 37 of his 42 adult years behind bars. And he was about to be tied to something that would make this whole arrest go viral. He was the real Doug McRae. He was the man Ben Affleck played in the town. This wasn’t just another desperate junkie hitting tellers for grocery money. According to Sequera, he had robbed more than 100 banks across New England.
He claimed he once had half a million dollars in cash stuffed inside milk cartons in his refrigerator. He claimed he was the centerpiece of the largest police chase in Rhode Island history. And in 2020, two years before this final spree, he had walked into a Providence traffic court, told all of this to Judge Frank Caprio on the YouTube show Caught in Providence, and walked out a folk hero.
Millions of views, sympathetic comments, a second chance, and then he threw it all away for a couple thousand dollars in 20s and hundreds. This is the story of William Squera, the man who claims he inspired one of the most famous bank robber characters in Hollywood history. It’s the story of Charles Town, the one square mile of Boston that produced more bank and armored car robbers than any other neighborhood in the world.
It’s the story of the no-name crew, the FBI task force that hunted them, and the code of silence that protected them. And it’s the story of how a movie called The Town, based on a novel called Prince of Thieves, became so deeply tangled with real criminals that real criminals started claiming to be the fictional characters.
But here’s the thing you need to understand before we go any further. There was no single Doug McCrae. There was a whole generation of them. And the question isn’t whether William Squera inspired Ben Affleck. The question is who was telling the truth and who was telling a story? Let’s go back. New Bedford, Massachusetts, 1962. William Squera is born the youngest of four in a workingclass Portuguese American family.
His father owns a small business installing garage doors. By every account, this is a normal kid and a normal family in a normal Miltown. Then, when William is 8 years old, his father is killed in a car accident. According to court documents filed by his own attorney decades later, the boy never recovered. By adolescence, he was drinking whiskey and smoking marijuana every day. By 16, he was using cocaine.
By 17, he was committing crimes serious enough to land him in juvenile custody. By the time he was 20, the pattern that would define the next 40 years of his life was already set. steal, get caught, go to prison, come out, steal again. He would later be reported to have spent roughly 37 of his first 42 adult years behind bars.
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That’s not a criminal career. That’s a life sentence served on installment. His big federal conviction came out of a bank robbery in Cranston, Rhode Island in the late 1990s. Prosecuted in the District of Rhode Island, the sentence ran to more than 26 years. He didn’t serve all of it. In 2015, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision called Johnson v.
United States that effectively gutted the residual clause of the Armed Career Criminal Act. Sequa’s lawyers used it to win him a resentencing to time served. After roughly two decades on that sentence, he walked out of federal prison in January of 2018 at the age of 55 with no money, no skills, no job history, and no family support waiting on the other side.
According to his own statements, he had half a million dollars stashed somewhere from his old robbery days. Whether that was true or just a story, nobody ever proved. What he did have was a sense of humor and a survivor’s gift for telling his own legend. He got a job driving a delivery truck for a produce company in Fall River. He showed up to work.
He paid taxes. And in 2020, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, he ended up in front of Judge Frank Caprio’s bench in Providence Municipal Court over a stack of unpaid traffic tickets. Caprio’s courtroom by then was an international phenomenon. Caught in Providence had become one of the most watched legal shows on the internet.
Tens of millions of viewers, soft-hearted rulings, real human stories. And on that day, Squera told Caprio his real human story. 37 years in federal prison, more than 100 bank robberies, half a million dollars in milk jugs, the biggest police chase in Rhode Island history. He told Caprio that Ben Affleck’s character in the town, the bank robber Doug Mray, was based on him. The clip exploded.
>> You ever seen the movie The Town? >> I have not. >> Well, that movie is about me that watched the movie. Ben Affleck plays me in the movie. >> Caprio gave him a break on the tickets. The internet gave him a second life. For about two years, William Sequera was Boston Billy, the reformed robber, the viral grandpa, the man Hollywood couldn’t help but love.
Then, in September of 2022, the world found out he was still the man he had always been. Here’s the question that matters. Was any of it true? Did Ben Affleck actually base Doug McCrae on William Squera? The answer requires us to step away from one man and look at an entire neighborhood. Because to understand the town, you have to understand Charles Town, Boston.
And to understand Charles Town, you have to understand a crew that William Squera was never actually part of. The no-name crew, Anthony Sheay, and the most prolific armored car robbery spree in modern American history. Charles Town is one square mile of triple- decker houses, narrow streets, and shipyards squeezed onto a peninsula north of downtown Boston.
Working class, Irishamean, insular, quiet. For most of the late 20th century, it was also the bank robbery capital of the world. That isn’t internet folklore. That is the documented assessment of the FBI’s Boston field office, which by the early 1990s had established a permanent bank robbery task force specifically to monitor one neighborhood.
Between 1975 and 1992, there were 49 murders inside that single square mile of Boston. 33 of them went unsolved. Not because the police didn’t know who did it, because nobody would talk. The code of silence in Charles Town wasn’t a metaphor. It was a survival mechanism. You didn’t rat. You didn’t squeal.
If you did, you became one of the unsolved. 33. Inside that code, an entire economy was built. Bank and armored car robbery wasn’t just a crime in Charles Town. It was a family business passed down. Fathers to sons, uncles to nephews, cousins to cousins. There were specialist getaway drivers who could navigate the rabbit warren of alleys behind Bunker Hill.
There were spotters whose entire job was learning the irregular schedules of Brinks and Lumis Fargo trucks. There were guys whose only function was renting safe houses and burning evidence. The neighborhood produced robbers the way Detroit produced cars. And at the top of that pyramid in the early 1990s stood Anthony Sheay.
Sheay grew up in the Charles Town projects. By the time he was in his late 20s, federal investigators considered him one of the most successful armed robbers on the East Coast. His crew had no formal name. The press eventually called them the no-name crew or the Minutemen. Five core members, Anthony Sheay, Patrick McGonagal, Michael O’Halerin, Steven Burke, Matthew Macdonald.
They didn’t rob mom and pop banks for spending money. They hit armored cars. They hit bank vaults during business hours. They wore body armor. They carried automatic weapons. They studied roots for weeks. And when something went wrong, they killed. On August 25th, 1994, an armored truck pulled up outside the National Federal Savings Bank on Lowel Road in Hudson, New Hampshire around 9:30 in the morning.
It was a small town, a sleepy bank on a sleepy morning. Three masked gunmen in gray jumpsuits came in fast. They didn’t rob the truck where it sat. They hijacked it and kidnapped the two guards at gunpoint. Ronald Normando, 52, and Lawrence Johnson, 57. They drove the men to a wooded area about a mile away and shot them both execution style.
Ronald Dormundo and Lawrence Johnson, both dead. The crew escaped back to Massachusetts with more than $400,000. The investigation that followed would last years and would eventually bring down the entire no-name organization. Here is how their schemes actually worked. The opportunity was geography. New England in the early 1990s had hundreds of small bank branches, regional armored car routes, and rural police departments with limited resources.
The inside connection was the Charles Town network itself. Cousins who worked at security companies, drivers who knew the schedules, friends of friends who could spot when a vault was loaded and when it was empty. The execution was military. Two-minute entries, pre-cut escape routes, switch cars staged at predetermined points, bleach to destroy forensics.
According to investigators and later reporting, the no-name crew committed more than 100 robberies across multiple states. The money authorities at trial estimated the total take in the millions. Cash, bearer bonds, coin, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single armored car hit, including a $600,000 score in Lynn and 300,000 in Seabbrook, New Hampshire.
And the problem, the thing that always brought down crews like this was DNA. Blood left at a botched job in London Derry, New Hampshire. Sheay cut his hand. He left a sample. That sample sat in evidence for years. When DNA technology caught up, it matched him. On August 11th, 1995, FBI agents arrested Anthony Sheay and two associates as they prepared to rob the Wakefield Savings Bank in Wakefield, Massachusetts.
They had weapons. They had ski masks. They had a getaway plan. They didn’t have a chance. At his arrest, Sheay still had fresh stitches in his hand. The arrest and the blood evidence that tied him to the London Dairy job began the unraveling of the whole crew. Sheay was convicted in 1997 and sentenced to multiple life terms in 1998.
Patrick McGonagal, Michael O’Halerin, Steven Burke, Matthew Macdonald, all convicted, all sent away. The Charlestown bank robbery era effectively ended that summer. But the legend didn’t end. In 2004, a novelist named Chuck Hogan published a book called Prince of Thieves. It was a fictional story set in Charles Town about a four-man crew of childhood friends who rob banks and armored cars.
The lead character, Doug McCrae, was a thoughtful, conflicted thief raised by a towny family. The supporting characters were a hotthead named Jem, a getaway driver named Glunzy, and an alarm man called Dez, who could beat any system in Boston. The book wasn’t about any one real person. It was about an entire neighborhood. It was about the no-name crew and the crews before them and the crews before those, all distilled into four fictional men.
In 2010, Ben Affleck adapted the novel into the movie The Town. Affleck did not pull Doug McCrae from a single source. According to multiple interviews Affleck gave during the press tour and during production, he spent months in Charletown. He walked the streets. He sat in bars. He talked to retired robbers, current cops, former FBI agents, and people in the neighborhood who refuse to give their last names.
He has said the real robbers’s habit of using bleach to destroy DNA evidence became the basis for the bleach scene in the film. He has never publicly identified William Sakara as a source. He has never publicly identified anyone as the single Doug McCrae. That’s because there wasn’t one. There was a whole generation of them.
And William Saka in the strict sense wasn’t even from Charles Town. He was from New Bedford, 60 mi south. His federal convictions were filed in Rhode Island, not Massachusetts. He wasn’t a no-name guy. He wasn’t a McDonald or a Sheay or a McGonagal. He was a serial bank robber working alone, hitting tellers with verbal threats.
No body armor, no crew, no military planning. What he had in common with Doug McCrae was the city, the era, and the obsession. So when Squira sat across from Judge Frank Caprio in 2020 and said Ben Affleck played me, he was making a claim that nobody could fully verify and nobody could fully disprove. Maybe Affleck heard his name during research.
Maybe Sakira’s case files were in a folder somebody passed around. Or maybe Sakira, after 37 years inside, simply latched onto a story that made his life mean something. that made the hundred robberies into a movie instead of a tragedy. Here’s the thing about lifers who finally come home. They need a reason. They need a frame. They need somebody to have noticed.
For 2 years after that courtroom appearance, Sakiraa tried to live straight. He showed up to the produce job in Fall River. He paid rent in Providence. He gave interviews. He posed for photos. He told the same stories. And then in the late summer of 2022, something broke. According to court filings by his own defense attorney, the produce job was paying less than the rent.
His knees were failing. He needed surgery he couldn’t afford. He was developing diabetes. He was 59 years old and he had no savings, no pension, no family money, no plan. He had the only skill he had ever monetized. On September 26th, 2022, at 1:52 in the afternoon, William Sakara walked into a stop-in shop on Rodman Street in Fall River.
There was a citizen’s bank counter inside. He approached it and told the teller in his exact recorded words, “Listen, this is what’s going to happen. I have a gun and I’ll put it against your forehead.” He didn’t have a gun. He had a story. He walked out with cash. The next day, September 27th, at 2:35 in the afternoon, he was in Boston.
He walked into the Santandere Bank on Berkeley Street. He told the teller, “Give me a $100 bill or I’ll put a bullet in your head.” He walked out with cash. September 28th, 4:01 in the afternoon, Mnt Bank on Boilston Street. I’m going to put a gun to your head if you don’t give me the $100 bills. Cash. September 30th, 3:15 in the afternoon.
TD Bank on Union Street. Give me all the money before I blow your brains out. Cash, four banks, five days, no mask, no gun, no accomplice, no getaway car. He was riding the train in and out of Boston. He was walking up to tellers in broad daylight. He was using the same verbal threat formula every time. He was by any professional bank robber standard committing suicide by federal indictment.
The FBI Boston division was watching. They had identified him from surveillance footage and interviews within days. On October 5th, 2022, a federal task force was waiting in Backbay. They had been tipped that Squera was on a train into Boston. They had surveillance teams on Boilston Street. When he walked into the Citizens Bank branch and approached the teller and said, “Give me hundreds.
” Agents moved. He was arrested on the sidewalk. He didn’t run. He was 59 years old. His knees wouldn’t have let him run anyway. He sat down with detectives that same day. He admitted to all of it. Every robbery, every threat, every dollar, he didn’t fight the case. On June 22nd, 2023, he pleaded guilty in federal court in Boston to four counts of bank robbery and one count of attempted bank robbery.
Each count carried up to 20 years. He could have been looking at a century. The defense and government jointly recommended 54 months. On September 15th, 2023, Judge Patty B. Saras of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, sentenced William Sequera, by then 60 years old, to 54 months in federal prison and 3 years of supervised release, 4 and a2 years.
The defense asked that he be sent to a federal medical facility because of his knee and his diabetes risk. For a man who had already done more than two decades on his last sentence, 54 more was in the bleak mathematics of his life almost a gift. So what happened to everyone else in this story? Anthony Sheay is still in federal prison.
He was resentenced on appeal in 2024 to a slightly reduced term, but he is not coming out. Michael O’Halerin, Steven Burke, and Matthew Macdonald are all serving life sentences. Patrick McGunnigal died in prison. The FBI task force machinery that took the crew down has since been folded into broader violent crime units.
Charles Town itself has changed. Gentrification, condo development, and an enormous influx of tech and finance money have transformed the neighborhood in ways the old-timers can barely recognize. The Rabbit Warren is now a tourist district. The triple deckers are luxury rentals. The code of silence still exists in pockets, but it isn’t what it was.
Ben Affleck has gone on to direct other films. The town has settled into status as one of the great American crime movies of the 21st century. Chuck Hogan’s novel remains in print. And the question of who really inspired Doug McCree has become its own small piece of folklore. Some say it was Anthony Sheay. Some say it was the entire no-name crew.
Some say it was a robber Boston police knew well. And some, when you ask them, will tell you it was William Sakiraa, the old man from New Bedford, who told the story so often that the story finally became the truth. Here is what this case actually reveals. Charles Town was never about one Doug Mray. It was about an economy. A neighborhood where the highest paying job available to a poor kid with no education and the wrong last name was robbing a bank.
where the most successful men on the block were the ones who had done the most federal time. Where children grew up watching their fathers come home in handcuffs and decided by age 12 that they would never speak to a cop. The town the movie wasn’t fiction. It was a documentary in a costume. And William Squera, whether he ever met Ben Affleck or not, was telling a deeper truth than he probably knew.
There were men like Doug McCrae in Boston. He was one of them. So were a hundred others. The difference is that Squera lived long enough to tell the story. Most of them didn’t. William Squera spent 37 of his first 42 adult years in federal prison. He got out. He became famous. He got a second chance from a kind-hearted judge on a viral YouTube show.
He had two years on the outside, a job, a city he loved, and the attention of the entire internet. He traded it all for less than $2,000 in cash and four and a half more years inside. That’s the real story behind the town. Not the glory, not the romance, not the perfect heists, just an old man with bad knees walking into a TD Bank on Union Street, telling a teller he had a gun he didn’t have and walking out into the last sunset of his free life.
If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob and true crime documentary every week. Drop a comment. Who do you think really inspired Doug McCrae in the town? Was it William Squera, Anthony Sheay, the entire no-name crew, or someone we still don’t know about? Let us know below.
