Charlestown bank robbery suspect has long record, was key witness in Newton murder-for-hire case

UPDATE: Ordered held in lieu of $50,000 bail, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports.

Boston Police report arresting Thomas Hickey, 49, of Charlestown, for a Nov. 30 bank robbery on Austin Street in which he allegedly pushed an elderly man who was in line before him out of the way at a teller window.

Police report arresting Hickey, who has numerous convictions for armed robbery and armed assault with intent to rob and who has spent most of his adult life in prison, around 12:30 p.m. yesterday after spotting him on Austin Street near the Citizens Bank branch he allegedly held up a week ago - and which he may have also robbed in 2006 during one of his brief interludes outside prison walls.

Police say Hickey was very impatient to rob the bank last Friday morning:

During the incident, a male suspect entered the bank, pushed aside an elderly customer who was waiting in line and pointed a firearm at a teller while demanding cash. The suspect then fled in an unknown direction with an undisclosed amount of cash.

Hickey was charged with armed bank robbery, assault and battery on an elderly person and assault by means of a dangerous weapon, police say.

The robbery came less than a year after Hickey got out of federal prison after an 8 1/4-year sentence for being an armed felon in possession of a firearm.

In 2006, Hickey was hauled into federal court in Maine on the charge after a Massachusetts state trooper followed him there during an investigation into several Boston-area robberies, including of the Charlestown Citizens branch, according to court documents. Early one morning, Maine State Police burst into the Presque Isle motel room he was sharing with his girlfriend and found, among other things, a loaded hand gun wrapped in a wool hat inside an athletic bag. He was turned over to the feds with a record that included ten convictions in Middlesex County on armed-robbery and gun charges.

In 2009, a federal judge sentenced him to 99 months after he pleaded guilty. He was released on Dec. 22, 2017.

Not long after he reported to federal prison, Hickey came back to a Massachusetts courtroom to testify against Scott Foxworth, charged with murdering a man in a Newton parking garage in exchange for payment from another man who suspected his wife was sleeping with the victim.

Foxworth and Hickey had shared a cell at the Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater for several months in 2005 and 2006, and Hickey helped convict Foxworth by testifying Foxworth had spilled his guts to him about the murder. Foxworth appealed his conviction, but the Supreme Judicial Court upheld his conviction.

Innocent, etc.