For the past 20 years the CIA has operated a secret anti-terror squad in Athens. They are known as The Invisibles, a crack team of 15 Greek and American intelligence officers tasked with smoking out terrorists and “special case criminals”.

In 2009, Vassilis Paleokostas became their number one target.

From a fake business address near the five-star Divani Caravel Hotel in central Athens, the Invisibles helped the Greek police close the net, with American cash footing the bill. His days were surely numbered.

On 31 March 2009, at 14:03, there was a highly unusual bank robbery in Trikala, Paleokostas’s home town. Three robbers - two men and one woman - burst into the Alpha Bank. Armed with pistols and a short-barrelled shotgun, the robbers wore tights over their faces and motorcycle helmets as they yelled: "Robbery! All hands up!"

The unlikely trio held up seven employees and 15 customers, emptying the safe of 250,000 euros, before fleeing on three stolen motorbikes.

In a news report headlined “Robbery… with perfume!” one Greek newspaper reported that police were considering the robbers to be “the fugitive Vassilis Paleokostas, Alket Rizai and their female accomplice, a ‘blonde Lara Croft’.”

Shortly afterwards, Rizai and his girlfriend were arrested. Mitropia was convicted of hijacking the helicopter, and accused of being the mysterious blonde with the machine gun in the helicopter – though she still fiercely denies it was her.

Yet Paleokostas continues to evade the Invisibles. Epic manhunts have seen heavily armed cops scour the countryside with heat-seeking helicopters, flying over the mountains where Vassilis rustled cattle as a child, and where families of peasants still eke out an existence from the rocky soil.

Five years since his dramatic escape, Vassilis Paleokostas, now 48, remains on the run, and the bank heists persist.

Only once has his hiding place been compromised - when he tried to rent movies from a local video store.

On 14 April 2009 at 20:00, a team of 15 undercover police in three unmarked cars chased him along the coastal road of Alepohori in southern Greece.

Cornering the fugitive, they pointed their automatic weapons at him and prepared to shoot. “So I let it rip,” wrote Paleokostas in his open letter to the media:

 I sped down an alley to escape, and bullets were dancing inside my car’s cabin. These guys opened fire and shot more than 150 bullets in 15 seconds.”

By contrast, he said, in all his years as a robber and a fugitive, he had never fired a gun at a human. He signed off the letter with a clear fingerprint in blue ink.

A few months after he sent the letter, on 24 June 2010, the authorities say they found Paleokostas’s fingerprint on a letter bomb sent to assassinate Public Order Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis.

It exploded in the hands of his aide George Vassilakis, 52, killing him instantly. Paleokostas was quickly branded a terrorist and a killer, with a 1.4-million-euro bounty placed on his head.

His supporters, such as George Ras, 23, from the Athens suburb of Exarcheia, smelled a set-up:

 How do you find a fingerprint on a bomb that destroyed a man, and blew down walls?”

Since the financial crisis in 2010, and the riots, hardship and unemployment that have followed, the ranks of anarchists and militant anti-capitalists have swelled. Exarcheia is their stronghold, and pro-Paleokostas posters and graffiti on its walls emphasise the local support for his raids on the banks.

The bandit has become a symbol of a troubled time, like John Dillinger during America’s Great Depression, or Jesse James during the outbreak of the US Civil War in 1861.

Late last year, police believed they had Paleokostas cornered again inside a farm in the mountain regions of Kozani, some way north of Trikala.

After a full-scale search of the property, all that was found were banknotes with serial numbers matching his ransoms and bank robberies, suggesting that he is very much at large today, doling out gifts to farmers.

Rumours in the villages say Paleokostas has a foreign girlfriend, and a newborn baby boy. Everyone in Greece has a theory about where he lives today, and, like a Greek Elvis, there are regular “sightings”.

Many Greeks believe the outlaw is protected by monks, living in the mountain monasteries that sit like fairytale castles on those snow-capped peaks.

In October 2010, during the last robbery spree, a man resembling Paleokostas was spotted on surveillance cameras at a petrol station. If it was him, it would appear that he’d had plastic surgery.

Wigs and makeup found in one hideout suggest Vassilis could even transform himself into a woman, at a pinch.

The press have recently started calling him The Phantom, while locals just call him King of the Mountains.

The petrol station footage was shown to me in a cafe in Trikala by Dimitrios Gravanis, the retired detective. He told me: