PLATTE CITY, MO. ? For police trying to track down the “Bicycle Bandit,” it was a dollar bill worth much more than a buck. For the bandit, it’s $1 that cost him life in prison.

Miguel M. Vaca, 45, of Kansas City, Mo., who prosecutors said wrote a description of his first robbery on a stolen $1 bill, was sentenced Thursday to life plus 102 years in prison.

“I came in the door and told them to give me some money,” the note read in part. “It was my first robbery and it felt great.”

Vaca was convicted in December of a string of armed robberies in northern Kansas City in late 2002. In a note on a $1 bill found by detectives at his home, Vaca bragged about robbing a nail salon, adding that one of the women inside was attractive.

Prosecutor Eric Zahnd said the bill, taken during Vaca’s first robbery, was key evidence.

“It is rare for a criminal to create this kind of souvenir directly tying him to a crime,” Zahnd said. “This evidence was uncovered because of the keen observation of a Kansas City detective who sorted through thousands of dollars in cash found during an extensive search of Vaca’s residence.”

Vaca’s first two robberies took place at adjacent businesses in a shopping center. The third was an invasion of a 13-year-old girl’s birthday party at an apartment complex, where prosecutors said he hit the girl’s mother with a pistol, briefly took her prisoner and shot at a would-be rescuer.

Because witnesses described seeing a masked man fleeing the first two robberies on a mountain bike, Vaca was dubbed the “Bicycle Bandit.”

The jury recommended life for one of the three robbery convictions and 102 years for the other two robbery convictions and four other criminal counts. Platte County Circuit Judge Owens Lee Hull Jr. ordered the sentences to run consecutively.