Crafty crook in Santa suit robs bank during SantaCon

Amid the drunken debauchery at this year’s SantaCon, a red-and-white robed robber slipped into a bank in San Francisco’s Union Square to make an illegal withdrawal.

Just after 1 p.m. Saturday, the Saint Nick scoundrel, described as a 5-foot-11 white man in his 40s dressed in a Santa suit, handed a note to the teller at a bank on the 400 block of Sutter Street, police said.

The teller handed over an undisclosed amount of cash and the shady Santa split. It wasn’t known whether he disappeared into the crowd of similarly-dressed revelers out for the annual pub crawl.

SantaCon, which started in San Francisco in 1994, has spread across the globe. On Saturday, scores of merrymakers amassed in Union Square before swarming to the city’s Santa-friendly bars.

Authorities have made no arrests in the robbery.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky