NEW YORK - A rookie New York City police officer accused of orchestrating heists in Pennsylvania and New York walked into a Manhattan bank last June and passed a teller a note threatening to “start shooting” if the employee didn't “empty both drawers,” prosecutors said Monday.

About five months later, the officer, Christian Torres, returned to the same Sovereign Bank as employees were opening the branch, and forced them to unlock the door, prosecutors said.

When one employee refused, Torres threatened to kill the worker and pulled back his suit jacket to show a gun tucked in his waistband, according to a complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan by federal prosecutors.

Also Monday, federal prosecutors took over Torres' case from local Pennsylvania authorities, who had charged him last week with forcing the employees of another Sovereign Bank, this one in Muhlenberg Township, Pa., into a vault at gunpoint.

Torres, a cadet at the time of the first Manhattan robbery on June 8, 2007, got away with $16,305; he made off with about $102,000 from the second one on Nov. 16, 2007, prosecutors said.

Last Thursday, at the Pennsylvania bank, Torres, now 21, got away with $113,000, an FBI affidavit filed Monday said. Torres was caught after employees identified him to police who were responding to the bank's silent alarm, the affidavit said.

“It certainly is not every day that a police officer is charged with robbing a bank, but that really doesn't enter into our decision-making process,” David Webb, chief of violent crime in the U.S. attorney's office in Philadelphia, said of the decision to charge Torres.

Torres, a Queens resident who joined the New York Police Department's transit division in January, remained in jail in Pennsylvania on $1 million bail. The NYPD said he had been suspended without pay.

“He's looking forward to his day in court,” Torres' attorney, Paul Missan, said Monday evening. “He appreciates the support of all his friends and family.”

In the robbery last November in Manhattan, Torres ordered an employee to tie another employee's legs with rope, prosecutors said. Also during that robbery, he forced employees into the vault, where he ordered them to stay for 10 minutes, and took their keys, they said. He told them that “if one of them looked at him funny, he would be back,” according to prosecutors.

If convicted of the most serious robbery charges, Torres could be sentenced to a maximum 25 years in prison, federal prosecutors said.