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Armando Martinez
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Miami Herald, The (FL)
February 2, 1996
POLICE BAG THREE SUSPECTS IN 20 HOLDUPS
Author: ARNOLD MARKOWITZ Herald Staff Writer
To keep up with the Burger King Gang, specialists in fast holdups of fast-food restaurants, it was
necessary to get up early and stay up late. To catch them, it took a gang three or four times the
size of theirs.
Miami police said they did that and declared the triumph worth the trouble Thursday, when they
showed off the handcuffed suspects:
* Dwight Harris Jr., 22, of South Miami Heights.
* Clifton Mann, 20, of South Miami Heights.
* Cory Mills, 20, of Leisure City.
The three robbed 20 Burger King and McDonald's outlets starting Oct. 19 and ending on
Monday, said Lt. Armando Martinez, who headed the investigation by the robbery squad's
crime-suppression team.
All the suspects have arrest records. Harris has convictions for auto theft, Mills for drug
possession and burglary, and Mann for burglary, grand theft, criminal mischief, kidnapping and
armed robbery.
The hamburger holdups were so much alike that police figured the same crooks must have done
them.
There was a standard operating procedure: Smash the glass in the locked door, stick up the staff,
take off. The robbers took turns driving and robbing. On average, they got away with $2,000 to
$3,000 each time.
Sometimes they pushed victims around, but did not injure anyone. At first, they wore masks.
Later they didn't bother.
"We started a coordinated surveillance of potential targets," Martinez said.
"These were stores that we thought were the most prominent ones because of location, the
amount of times they'd been robbed and so on. As these robberies went on and on, we started
seeing a sequence, a pattern."
The beef called for a stakeout. Miami got the help of Metro and Florida state agents who have a
task force for that sort of thing.
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