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Real-life heists read like a movie script In the last few years, true crime entertainment has skyrocketed in popularity thanks to hit series such as Netflix’s Making a Murderer, the Casefile True Crime podcast, Buzzfeed Unsolved: True Crime and others. by Patrick Felts
Here are some of the most thrilling real-life heists in history:
The Gardner Museum Heist
One of the most infamous art thefts took place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 in Boston, Massachusetts. In the early hours of March 18, two men disguised themselves as police officers and were let into the museum by a security guard to investigate a “noise complaint.” When the two men entered, there was no investigation of a noise complaint, and both security guards were tied up in the museum’s basement while the thieves stole 13 pieces of art worth a combined value of $500 million in under two hours. Some of the works stolen included one-of-a-kind pieces from iconic artists such as Manet and Rembrandt. To this day, the case remains unsolved and the missing artwork has never been found. Stewart Gardner Museum The museum still offers a $10 million reward to anyone with information leading to the recovery of the works.
The Mysterious Case of D.B. Cooper
Thanksgiving week travel can be a nightmare, and it certainly was for passengers and crew on Northwest Airlines flight #305, but in a much different way than expected. After the flight from Portland to Seattle took off on the day before Thanksgiving 1971, a man in an all-black suit who went by the alias of D.B. Cooper showed a flight attendant what he claimed was a bomb in his briefcase, and Cooper proceeded to hijack the plane. After landing in Seattle, Cooper demanded $200,000, four parachutes and food for the crew before the plane went south by his demand. Local Air Force jets and helicopters followed the plane out of Seattle, and once the plane was a few miles north of Portland again, Cooper sent the flight attendant to the cockpit while he used two of his parachutes to jump out of the plane with the money. Cooper jumped into the night sky and was never heard from again. Nine years later, a young boy found $5,800 buried under the sand north of Portland, and the FBI said that the serial numbers on the money matched those of Cooper’s. The case of D.B. Cooper remains unsolved.
The Millenium Dome Raid At the turn of the millennium, thieves in London attempted one of the most high-stakes and daring diamond robberies of all time. In November 2000, a massive De Beers diamond exhibition was being displayed at the Millennium Dome in London, the perfect target for a local gang. The four gang members broke down the fence surrounding the building with a stolen earthmover from a construction site. The plan was for the robbery to move quickly and to escape on a speedboat on the River Thames before entering a getaway car. Three of the robbers entered the vault equipped with sledgehammers, smoke bombs and gas masks. However, their plans were foiled by the Flying Squad of the Metropolitan Police Service. The gang members were already under surveillance for The De Beers Diamond other failed robberies. Had they been successful, the theft would have been worth a massive £350 million, or around $450 million.
The French Bank Vault Tunnelers
In 1976, criminals in Nice, France pulled off what reporters at the time called “the heist of the century” when they robbed a branch of the Société Générale bank through a series of elaborate tunnels. The criminals spent months preparing and used rafts to surf through the sewers in order to dig the tunnels. They broke into the vault from underground and got away with 46 million francs, the equivalent today of roughly $32 million. In the immediate aftermath of the robbery, police found the tunnels, reinforced with concrete walls, along with cigarettes, wine bottles, food and pictures of scantily clad women. Only one person was arrested for the crime in the months following the incident, Albert Spaggiari, until Jaques Cassandri admitted his involvement in a 2010 book under the false belief that the crime was too old for him to be prosecuted under French law. Cassandri was put on trial in 2018, and no other suspects nor the stolen money have been found.
The Västberga Helicopter Robbery
In 2009, a raid of a cash depot in Stockholm, Sweden went down like a scene from a Hollywood blockbuster. A group of thieves landed their stolen helicopter on the roof of the G4S cash depot in the Västberga area of Stockholm, then detonated three large explosives and lowered themselves in on ropes and stole bags of cash from the depot and got away. The robbery was thoroughly planned, as the criminals had used metal rods to block off nearby roads, planted a bag marked “bomb” at the police station and decided to execute the heist just days before Sweden received their monthly salary so the depot would be full with money. The thieves stole the equivalent of about $5 million, and ten men involved with the incident were charged in 2010. In 2018, Deadline reported that Netflix was making a movie about the robbery called The Helicopter Heist, written by Stephen Knight and starring Jake Gylenhall. design by C. Hubert | 7
