The Basque basketball brothers and the botched bank raid

It was about 2.10pm on Friday, October 7 when the telephone rang in the office of Iñaki Gastón, 53, manager of a branch of the savings bank Caja Vital in Vitoria in the Basque Country. A little nervous, the chief took the phone and heard one of the employees ask whether there was any problem, since two minutes earlier a suspicious individual with a baseball cap, wig, beard, mustache and false teeth had been seen entering his office with an object wrapped in a supermarket bag - which was later found to have been a replica pistol.

Iñaki played dumb, omitting to explain that the man in disguise was his elder brother, Luis Antonio Gastón, 60. He told the other man that all was well, and hung up. It was then that Luis Antonio, who had slept only a few hours - having emerged at 7am from his job as night watchman at the Provincial Archive of Araba - explained that he wanted to cancel the bank robbery they had been planning for months.

This is going to turn out badly, I have enough problems already, we are still in time to drop it, said Luis Antonio, before going out the door of the bank branch at 2.12pm. Hours later at the police station, they ended by admitting a fiasco in which they have been the big losers: the police accuse them of attempted robbery with intimidation, and both have been preventively removed from their respective jobs.

A witness saw Luis Antonio Gastón putting on the disguise in a car that turned out to belong to his brother, followed him, and called the police. Little good came of the manager's first explanations to the law: he said that the disguised man merely inquired about a financial product. Later, at the police station, the two confessed that the idea was to lock everyone in the office, without hurting anyone, and take 20,000 euros to solve the dilemma created by the manager's second separation. Iñaki Gastón needed a place to live - his ex-wife had kept the flat - and did not wish to throw out his elder brother, who had been living in the flat together with his wife, his two children and his daughter-in-law. They have no criminal record.

The two brothers, sons of a former head of the Basque Basketball Federation, Koldo Gastón, were two sides of the same coin. Iñaki, an extrovert with 134 friends on Facebook and a good salary - a manager makes about 3,000 euros a month - was well known as a trainer of local basketball teams. Last season he took Electro Alavesa near to the quarter-finals of the Spanish championship, losing 37-70 to Estudiantes. "A friend cheated me and now I'm training a junior women's team. Between one thing and another I have no time for anything else, and my wife is furious," he said in March 2010 on his Facebook profile, which abounds in references to his liking for salsa dancing and paddle-ball.

The elder brother is shy, reserved. As a night watchman in the archive, he made about 1,500 euros a month. On the job he never spoke of his private life, and his main amusement there was to put on earphones and listen to the day's basketball matches. In his confession, Iñaki affirms that the two of them agreed on the robbery plan. Luis Antonio, meanwhile, says that it was his younger brother's idea. Since then, Iñaki's circle have laid the blame on the night watchman.

On Thursday Luis Antonio, with glasses, abundant gray hair and polite manner, opened the door of the modest flat where he lives, not far from the bank branch, when the journalist rang. He did not care to make any statements, or say which lawyer will handle his defense.

"But it isn't a crime to go into a bank in disguise," said a waitress in a bar nearby. It remains to be seen whether the judge will be so sympathetic.