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A former Loomis employee is accused of stealing cash from a truck that was making deliveries to three banks on the island.
A former Loomis employee is accused of stealing cash from a truck that was making deliveries to three banks on the island.
It’s the sort of crime that you might see in a heist film. A long-time employee of a cash handling firm snatched nearly $400,000 from three banks whose money he was tasked to protect, then quit his job and disappeared.
This appears to be what happened on Kauaʻi on July 19, 2023, according to previously unreported documents from civil and criminal cases filed in the 5th Circuit Court.
It’s an unprecedented bank theft for the island, both in scale and approach. “I can’t think of any case like that on Kauaʻi,” said former Kauaʻi Police Department Assistant Chief Bryson Ponce. “Not at that magnitude.”
In September 2025, Kauaʻi prosecutors filed criminal theft charges against Kody Corbett, a former employee of the global cash-handling firm Loomis. Earlier that year, Loomis also filed a lawsuit against Corbett, which lays out how the alleged crime occurred, largely based on an affidavit from David Bailey, Loomis’s corporate risk manager.
Following the incident, Loomis reimbursed the three banks for the lost funds, but the money has not been recovered. Corbett’s whereabouts are also a mystery. A warrant was issued for his arrest this September — but a spokesperson for the Kauaʻi Police Department said the agency is still looking for him.
A Speedy Series Of Thefts
Corbett had worked for Loomis since 2011 and was transferred to the Kauaʻi branch in 2018, where he was employed as an operations supervisor, according to documents filed in the civil case. It was a role where he was sometimes tasked with picking up and delivering bills and coins to Loomis customers.
On July 19, 2023, Corbett received a shipment of cash from Loomis’s Honolulu office at the Līhuʻe airport, which he was supposed to distribute to ATMs across Kauaʻi, according to Loomis’s civil suit. Another employee, who was in training, accompanied him on the route.
At the Līhuʻe branch of Central Pacific Bank, he allegedly set aside $50,000 of this cash for himself before passing a smaller amount of money to the employee in training to replenish the ATM.
Then, the suit alleges, Corbett borrowed another employee’s keys to access a Loomis armored truck parked outside of Central Pacific Bank, where he stole another $200,000 in cash that had recently been picked up from the Bank of Hawaiʻi. As all this was happening, the employee in training was still servicing the ATM.
That same day, Corbett stole another $130,000 intended for American Savings Bank ATMs at the ʻEleʻele Shopping Center, according to documents in the civil case. Then, on July 20, Corbett resigned from his position at Loomis and moved to Massachusetts.
“Upon further investigation, it was learned that Corbett had purchased his family’s airline tickets approximately 2 weeks prior to the incident,” Bailey’s affidavit reads.
Corbett is alleged to have stolen at least $380,000. It’s a big sum for Kauaʻi, where, in all of 2020, just $224,686 in hard cash was stolen, according to KPD statistics. Such a crime is improbable because all large cash transfers are closely monitored, Ponce said.
“It’ll eventually catch up, with all of the audits and paperwork,” he said. “You can’t hide the fact that the money’s gone.”
While Loomis quickly learned that the funds were missing in this case, Corbett appears to have left the island fast enough that he was not apprehended. When a suspect is off island, which seems likely here, KPD has various databases at its disposal to track them down. For instance, police can check the suspect’s credit history and see whether they have applied for a new driver’s license.
It’s not clear what tactics the department is currently using, but once police narrow down a probable location, they can coordinate an arrest with local law enforcement. “The only way somebody can’t be found is if they’re 100 percent off-grid,” Ponce said. “For somebody to live like that is extremely rare.”
Corbett was not charged criminally until September due to the complexity of the investigation, according to Kauaʻi Prosecuting Attorney Rebecca Like.
The case involved “voluminous discovery, extensive follow-up investigation, and records from multiple financial institutions,” Like said. “That process took additional time but was necessary to ensure that any action taken was accurate, fair, and supported by the facts.”
According to the affidavit, nearly a year after Corbett allegedly stole the money, in June 2024, another nearly $98,000 in coins were discovered in a Līhuʻe Guardian storage locker under Corbett’s name. The affidavit does not clarify where these coins came from, but it says that they were held in Loomis-branded bags and wrappers. The coins were taken into the custody of the Kauaʻi Police Department and have since been returned to Loomis. Both KPD and Loomis declined to comment on the case.
Gaps In The ‘Guard Card’ Process?
Traditional bank robberies are rare on Kauaʻi, but not unheard of. Those that have occurred recently have been resolved quickly. In November 2023, a Hanalei man named Robert Monroy entered the Bank of Hawaiʻi in Līhuʻe and handed a note to a teller, claiming he had grenades on him and instructing them to hand over money. The teller gave him the cash, but police were called to the scene and apprehended him outside shortly thereafter. He was later sentenced to 10 years in prison. Another recent bank robbery — perpetrated by escaped Kauaʻi Community Correctional Facility inmate Walter Mills during a crime spree in 2016 — also ended in a same-day arrest.
For Ponce, the theft raises questions about the state’s licensing process for security guards. While police officers are required to pass extensive background and psychological checks to join the force, the process for obtaining a security guard license, or “guard card,” is much less rigorous, requiring only a background check, application paperwork, and 8 hours of classroom instruction.
State records show that Corbett received his license in 2013, and it expired in 2024. He has no prior criminal cases in the state’s court database.
Even if a background check does uncover a criminal history, security guard license applications are often still approved, said Ed Howard, a former law enforcement officer who runs a security consulting and training firm in Hawaiʻi. Decisions are made at the discretion of the Board of Private Detectives and Guards, who rarely reject applicants.
“If you put security guards through the same type of background check as police, you wouldn’t have any security guards,” said Howard, who pointed to the sizable gap in pay between the two roles.
In one recent example, Loomis posted an armed driver guard position on Kauaʻi, with a starting pay of $21.50 per hour.
“These guys are tasked with huge responsibility, and they’re getting paid peanuts,” Ponce said. “The temptation is there to do what this guy did.”
