September 18, 2019 • 64 mins
Everyone loves a good heist film -- but how accurate are they? Join Ben and Matt as they delve into the stories of modern history's biggest heists, actual criminal conspiracies carried out across the world to steal millions of dollars' worth of loot. Who got caught? Who got shot? Perhaps most importantly... who got away free, and where might they be living today?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, Welcome
(00:25):
back to the show. My name is Matt. Noel is
not with us today. Noel the Bagman Brown is indeed
on adventures. They call me Ben. We are joined as
always with our super producer, Paul Mission Control Deconds a
k a. The Coordinator. Most importantly, you are you. You
are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want
(00:45):
you to know. Matt off Air, You and Paul and
I have been talking about some of our favorite things heist, right, Yeah,
heist movies, heist heisten fiction I think are one of
my favorite things not in reality. Right. It's there's this
(01:06):
cool team up moment in a lot of heist films, right.
And we we spoke about which roles we would ideally
or realistically play in a heist and and Paul I loved.
I loved when Paul immediately replied, well, I guess I
(01:29):
would be the coordinator in a heist. And if you
go on places like TV Tropes, you will see the
various categories, the common positions and roles in a lot
of heist. Paul, I have to be honest. I feel
like maybe you chose the coordinator just because it also
(01:53):
the category also says the coordinator functions as mission control. Yeah,
he found that and he went, that's it, That's what
I'm doing. You read the whole article, and Matt, you
had some interesting choices you had to that that spoke
to you. Yeah, I'm mostly thinking about it in context
of this show. So I I would go with the
partner in crime, So not the mastermind, because I think
(02:15):
we all know who the mastermind would be, especially in
the context of our crew and show Ben. But I
would be the partner in crime. I would be the
person who is second in command, who assists uh and
um maybe the only one this is a quote, maybe
the only one besides the mastermind who actually knows what's
going on. You know. That's that's flattering, uh too to
(02:40):
imply that mastermind position. I don't know, Man. I always
I always thought I would Uh. I would function as
a face, at least in my past experience. A tend
to hear just work a lot. But but what we
found was that we constructed the four of us a
(03:04):
fairly solid again fictional heist crew, and today we're we're
looking at heist. You know, heist when you think about it,
their conspiracies. People are conspiring to do something nefarious. Yeah, certainly,
(03:26):
And a lot of the examples we're gonna get to
today involve inside jobs, all things within that conspiracy loaded term,
loaded term there. But who does not love a good
heist film? You know, the formula is pretty solid at
this point. A team of specialists with some dubious gifts
(03:48):
and specializations and no small amount of internal tension banned
together for I don't know. Sometimes it's the big one,
capital b capital. Oh, sometimes it's one last job before
we go straight, you know, or before we retire to
some remote destination. There is one rule that always applies
(04:11):
to any heist film, no matter which country, culture, or
time period it comes from, and that one rule, that
one ever constant, ubiquitous rule, is things go wrong. Yeah,
the perfect plan isn't quite so perfect. But you know,
a lot of these movies are based on actual heists,
(04:34):
actual or at least loosely based on actual heist inspired
by events. Because all the time there are people in
groups of people conspiring to rob banks and armored cars
and various institutions and jewelry stores and everything museums. Yes,
they're they're true, and they're real. But the big question
(04:55):
today is how do they work? How do they function
in reality outside of those fictional worlds? Right? How do
real heist actually work? Here are the facts and let's
call this why you shouldn't rob a bank? Uh. Some
of this research comes from an older and older piece
(05:15):
that Paul and I did for a show called brain Stuff,
which is available on YouTube. Yeah, I was, I was
nuts on this one. Uh. If we want to get
a handle on real life heist, we can look at
the numbers. And the numbers may surprise some of us.
In two thousand eleven in the United States, let's focus
(05:37):
on the US just for this part. In two thousand eleven,
in the US, there were over five thousand bank robberies
five thousand and fourteen documented ones. Most of these, oddly enough,
happened during the day while the bank was open at
some point. Yeah, when there are when there is a
teller or a bank manager or someone on the scene.
(05:59):
All so multiple witnesses, people who just came to make
a deposit or get a money order, and we're probably
thinking about grabbing Chipotle after they were not planning for this. Also,
the all the data shows that there are two favorite
days for bank robbers. Those days are Tuesdays and Friday's.
(06:22):
Despite what feature films might have us believe, the majority
of robbers are not experts. They're not professional bank robbers.
They rank amateurs. Eight percent of individual bank robbers have
never been convicted of a bank robbery before. It's their
first time out and maybe probably the numbers will show
(06:46):
us the first time getting caught. Yes, yes, yes, that
is true. The criminals, also, contrary to what heist and
fiction would have us believe, are not teaming up in
some super swanky, awesome oceans eleven Avengers Vultron esque kind
of thing. Instead operate alone, and they also use predictable patterns.
(07:13):
They tend to if they survive the first one, if
they escape the first one, they tend to do the
same things, sort of franchise and repeat it. Yeah, or
you know, they're not experienced in how to manage the
money and the spoils once they've attained them right, and
then that will lead them to be to being caught. Yeah,
(07:35):
that's a that's a huge part of it. According to
the Department of Justice, the FBI's clearance rate for bank
robbery is little under sixty of those cleared robberies. Of
the crimes that are solved, about half of those are
solved within thirty days. And people will bank robbers, I
(07:59):
mean will get it, will get caught, sometimes not not
for anything directly related to the bank robbery, as you said, Matt,
they will get caught after the heist using you know,
bills with sequential serial numbers, using something that can be traced. Right.
(08:19):
There was a there's this excellent vice video called rap Monument,
which has it's just a cavalcade of mostly amazing m
c s. And there's a line in one of these,
in one of the verses where they say the bank
vaults don't talk, but the numbers read. And that is
(08:41):
that is directly alluding to the way that serial numbers
on bills, especially larger bills, can be traced. So if you,
if you happen to be sitting on a stack of
ill gotten cash, please be very aware that someone somewhere
(09:03):
knows the numbers of those bills and they're kind of
waiting for you to use them, yeah, absolutely, or especially
to use them to make a large bulk purchase of
an expensive thing, especially if you do it sequentially several
times of a large purchase such as a oh, I
don't know, a ferrari or a mansion or Wendy's franchise.
(09:28):
Wendy's franchise. Sure, I mean, that's when you've really made
it right. So, so we're talking a lot about how
people get caught using the money they've stolen, but we
haven't talked about how much money professional or lucky robbers
actually make. It is surprising conspiracy realist. We often hear
(09:55):
about millions of dollars billions of dollars in some cases disappearing,
but life for the average bank robber is pretty hard
scrabble and hard one. There was a study by several
British economists that examined just the nuts and bolts math
of this. So what they found is the average return
(10:19):
on a bank heist and the United Kingdom is nineteen thousand,
seven hundred dollars per person per heist. In the US
it's way worse. It's only a little bit over four
thousand dollars per heist. Yeah, and a lot of that.
(10:39):
You know, if you're looking at it on average, you're
talking about the loan actors. They walk into a bank,
hand a piece of paper over that says empty the register,
give me everything you have, I have a gun, and
then they walk out and that's it. They don't go
for the vault, they don't go for any of the
big ticket items, they don't go to the security deposit boxes.
They just go in, get that money and then leave.
(11:01):
So that's definitely swaying numbers there, right, And you're also
talking about the UK where weapons are like firearms are
much more difficult to come by, so it's it's a
whole other thing. Like if you walk into a bank
just wielding a knife or something, it changes the calculus
a little bit about what can go down and what
you can get right. Also, the UK is one of
the most closely surveiled areas of the world. We did
(11:26):
we did mention this in a previous episode, just the
density of cameras. Yeah, well, the the the interest thing
thing that these people also found. These economists that were
looking at the numbers, they found that if you increase
the number of people in your crew, you actually can
move those numbers a little bit, that's right. Yeah, every
additional member of a heist gang raises the value of
(11:52):
the robbery or the takeaway by in the UK it's
a little over nine thousand thirty three pounds. That translates
to a bit over fifteen grant, so that that feels
like a valuable contribution. But we have to keep in
mind the per person hall diminishes with every new member
(12:12):
added to the gang, and of course the likelihood of
something going wrong, someone squealing, someone making a rookie mistake
that rises exponentially. Oh yeah, but it definitely gets into
that thing where if you have but if you have
a crew like we were talking about in the beginning,
of people who are managing things, who have a specific task,
who are going to go in and get the money
(12:32):
and take the money and do all that, you can
see it working in there. Absolutely. So how does this
work out if any of our fellow listeners were professional
bank robbers, what would they have to do to make
it a genuine living right to not have to constantly
(12:54):
be hungry, homeless, etcetera, just to meet their basic needs.
Oh yeah, so let's look at just in the United States,
the poverty line and where these how these numbers match up.
So in the poverty threshold at least would be an
annual income of eleven thousand, four hundred and ninety dollars
(13:14):
per person. So for one single person, um eleven and
a half thousand dollars a year, that would be your income, right,
And this means that on average, if you were just
a professional bank robber, just all by your lonesome, you'd
have to rob three banks a year, and you'd have
to keep all the loot and not do anything with
it necessarily or at least, I don't know, you you'd
(13:38):
have to invest smartly or launder it correctly and smartly, uh,
just to stay out of the uh the poorhouse, I guess. Yeah. Yeah,
And the most recent number we could find for the
poverty threshold is from twelve thousand, four eighty six dollars,
(13:58):
so that still has it moved very much. But making
a living as a bank robber has become increasingly difficult. Yeah,
but hey, you think about it this way, that's only
three maybe four jobs a year, and that's it. That's
all you gotta do. I imagine there's a lot of
pre production that goes into that, maybe or who knows.
(14:19):
Maybe there's yeah, maybe they're they're just some people who
impulsively rob banks and keep getting away. There are so
many stories of daring, ambitious heist not just related to banks.
Banks we tend to have more information about because they're
(14:39):
one of the most common forms of this this sort
of crime. But here's the thing, not all heists are
created equal. Some high screws didn't just conspire to, you know,
rob a vault at a bank. They conspired to move massive,
gargantuan amounts of loot, some things that are objectively priceless
(15:04):
works of art that cannot have a value assigned, and
so on. And the most bizarre thing about it is
some of these crews got away. So let's let's explore this.
Let's look at some of the world's biggest heist. Let's
look at some of the folks who were caught, and
let's look at some of the folks who are still
(15:26):
out there today. And we'll do that right after a
word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. Thattt
what do you say, do you wanna do you want
to start off with some heist where the perpetrators were
(15:48):
ultimately apprehended. Oh yeah, absolutely. And let's okay, let's let's
first jump to September twelfth, nineteen. This is a story
about a bank robbery. Um. That feels like several major
motion pictures that I have seen or at least heard about. Um.
(16:08):
The target, or let's just say the title of it
is the Dunbar Armored Robbery. That's like what we're gonna
call it here. And the target was Dunbar Armored Incorporated.
And they are an armored truck company. So what they
do is they move cash and valuables from one place
to another in a vehicle that is generally you know,
has a crew of people who are there to protect
(16:29):
the money. Uh, and they're all armed. Uh. It seems
like an extremely dangerous thing to attempt to rob, at
least on the surface. Right. But in Los Angeles, California,
a group of people, including a man named Alan Pace
the Third, got together and conspired to rob the Dunbar
(16:52):
Armored Ink Company. So instead of robbing a single one
of these cars, they went to the source of where
the the cars go back to the depot basically right. Um,
And this guy, Alan Pace the third was working at
Dunbar and he knew the ins and outs of the place.
It was in fact an inside job, and he had
(17:14):
a crew of people that came that came with him.
They tied up some security guards, they made off with
a whole bunch of money, and they also destroyed all
the security tapes. They didn't they didn't destroy the cameras
or anything. They took the the actual tapes, so there
was no real evidence. And it's kind of a weird
thing because for a long time they couldn't figure out
(17:38):
exactly what happened. But they realized it must have been
an inside job because somebody knew entirely too much about
the security where the cameras were, how those cameras were recording,
and where that stuff would be, and how much money
would be where at what time. Um. Anyway, it's a
really fascinating thing to look. It's also, I belief, still
(18:02):
the largest cash robbery to have occurred in the US,
right I think I think it's been estimated to be
that because it was around eighteen. It was around nineteen
million dollars in cash in nine seven, which would make
it closer to thirty million dollars today. This story is amazing,
(18:26):
but it doesn't end happily. For Mr Pace Oh no, no, no,
he he got caught as well as several other people. Um,
Alan Pace the third was considered the mastermind, you know,
if we're going to use those terms. H he was
the guy who came up with the idea because he
was the inside man. He knew the ins and outs.
(18:46):
But he also had some people working with him, like
Eric Damon Boyd one of the accomplices. Um there are
there were several people working with him that ended up
going to jail and getting getting arrested and you know,
going to trial and mm hmm ended up in the slammer. Yeah.
Eugene Lamar Hill I think was the was the weak
(19:07):
link there, or at least the first the slip up
is Lamar Hill, the guy that was was trying to
he got caught with the sequential bills with the original
rapper and everything. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. That tells you
how much this stack of money is worth. That's the thing,
because this this gang attempted to be pretty smart and
(19:29):
pretty strategic about how they would seem to legitimately have
created such wealth. They were buying real estate and then
I believe they were also starting business fronts, you know, right,
like a like a p O Box Corporation or LLC
(19:49):
stuff like that. But Eugene was talking to a real
estate broker and he I guess he felt too comfortable
or he got a little lax and he literally handed
this guy that stack of bills, like you said, that
(20:12):
could have just come from an armored truck. And his associate,
He's often referred to as Hill's friend, but I would
say maybe acquaintance is a better term, because his real
estate buddy notices this strap of cash and he goes
(20:34):
immediately to the police. And once Eugene Lamar Hill is arrested,
he confesses and he names all the members of the crew. Well, yeah,
and they also connected Hill up to this U haul
that the crew had rented, because they were bringing that
in to load all of the cash into this U
haul and it was Hill who actually had rented it.
(20:56):
And then I think there was a broken tail light
or something that was out on the scene of the robbery.
They connected that up to that specific U haul they
found Hill. They like, they connected all those pieces together,
and that's how they get most of the rest of
the crew with that confession. So justice is served mostly unfortunately,
(21:16):
the law enforcement agents were not able to recover all
of the money, some of which remains missing today. Yeah,
they only recovered about five million of that you know
at the time was nineteen million, so you know that
a lot of that just went into stuff those uh,
(21:37):
those front companies and the real estate and all that
other stuff. But they probably were able to get back
some of that real estate because you could actually tie
it to the being used by that money. Really really
cool case. I mean, it's it's messed up. Those guys
saw justice or experience justice are experiencing it um. But again,
(21:58):
I think a pretty good example of one of these
highly coordinated events. Yeah, and that's this is fascinating to
me because these people went to prison, right, But how
how does a person feel if they are in prison
(22:19):
for a crime they definitely committed, and they know that
they will not only get out at some point, but
they also know the money that they stole is somewhere
and they may be able to access it. It's got
to be pretty intense. You know. We're gonna get into
(22:39):
a similar thing to that a little bit later in
the episode where you just you buy you're biding your
time in jail because you know where the rest of
it is, let's go across the pond for the next one,
the Security US Depot heist. Yes, okay, so this one
jumps us forward to February one, two thousands six. This
(23:01):
time we're we're in Kent, southeast of London. If you're
looking at a map um and Securitas. Just like the
the old Dunbar group, they are, guess what, transferring tons
of money and valuables in armored cars, and this time
(23:22):
we're at a Securitas depot instead of a dumbbar depot.
Seem very very similar kind of thing, and this one
went down similarly with a couple of twists. The first
big twist is that these guys realized that uh, in
order to be successful, they were gonna need some leverage.
(23:42):
They went to the home of Colin Dixon, who was
the manager of this depot, and uh, he and his
family were kidnapped at gunpoint, and a crew or at
least one or two people stayed behind with that family
while Colin basically brought all of these robbers, these the
crew of people to the depot let them in. Those
(24:03):
guys then essentially kidnapped all of the workers who are
at the depot and um, they tied them all up
and they took just giant basically cages and palettes of
cash and valuables. They loaded them onto a giant truck
and took off and they ended up making making away
(24:24):
with fifty three million British pounds, which makes this the
largest cash robbery in UK history. Again, this is this
is ruthless work, but they do end up getting caught,
right they. I do want to stay just for a
(24:45):
second on their process here, because the way that they
got Colin Dixon was pretty devious. They impersonated police officers. Yeah,
they pulled him over and he was basically okay, well
this is fine, I'm gonna work all this stuff out.
And then they said, well sir, we need you get
out of your car. They took him to the back
(25:06):
of the car, basically locked him in the back of
the car, and then asked him a bunch of questions
that police officers generally wouldn't ask, and they put a
gun in his face. So after the robbery, Dixon and
his family survived thankfully. After the robbery, Security US offers
a reward of two million pounds, no real questions asked,
(25:31):
Just give us information that will lead to the arrest
of these assailants, and it works out because on February
like two days later, police have already arrested two people
and charged them with conspiracy to commit robbery. But they're
(25:55):
just people who were on the crew, right right, because
some of the main people that were involved with this,
or at least they were thought to be the masterminds,
had actually fled to Morocco. Uh smartly, I think on
on their part there, but they they fled and they
were I believe they're described in several places as cage
(26:16):
fighters or former cage fighters. There's a guy named Paul
Allen and another one named Lee Murray or Murray m
U r r A y um. So, so after these
guys are arrested, you're talking about ben two guys, and
then it ends up being five guys that get arrested.
It's basically the whole crew except for the masterminds and
(26:37):
these guys in Morocco. Then uh, finally Paul Allen gets
extradited from Morocco. He gets charged, but he keeps telling everybody, well,
know what, I wasn't the mastermind. I was just doing
what I was told. I was working for this guy
Lee Murray or Murray and Lee is already incarcerated in Morocco.
So it's like, I guess he was kind of using
(26:59):
Lee as the fall guy perhaps. Yeah. Yeah, Because while
they were in Morocco they did a number of things,
some of which were very clever, some of which are understandable,
and some of which are you know, sort of not
thought through. They went on a spending spree, as as
(27:20):
reported in The Guardian by Matthew Weaver and his associates.
They went on a spending spree. They were making it
rain in Morocco. They bought property. They bought jewelry, which
is you know, very very popular. Well we'll get to
the loose diamonds, don't worry, one of the sketchiest things
(27:42):
people can have. They also bought illegal things like drugs
and this this is something smart that they did. They
invested thousands of dollars or pounds rather in plastic surgery
for their associates. I've always been curious about whether that
(28:05):
kind of tactic works if someone is attempting to disappear.
You know, we hear about despots having plastic surgery. We
hear about, you know, people in drug cartels getting plastic surgery.
The thing. The thing about it is not to quote
Donald Rumsfeld directly, but it's it's an unknown, unknown right
(28:29):
if someone successfully has has used plastic surgery to evade
the long arm of the law, we'll never know about it. Yeah,
so maybe we only know about the people who got
caught with a bad nose job or something. Yeah, I
just got to look for all those tremendously rich people
with lots and lots of work done, start asking questions.
(28:51):
We may be conflating populations there. So what what we
see here is that they're they're caught because is despite
their best intentions, they went to a country that has
an extradition treaty with the United Kingdom. And in our
earlier conversations about pseudo side, we've we've learned right that
(29:17):
the only way people can fake their death and profit
from it, or the only way people can commit a
huge crime like this and survive without going to jail
is essentially to relocate to someplace that does not extradite. Yeah,
that's really the only way. And in the end they
(29:38):
recovered about twenty four million I think, I think million
pounds of the fifty something. Yeah, I wonder what happened
to that, right, because what we see here maybe it's
a little bit misleading, folks, because in both of the
heights we just talked about, the people got caught, but
the money didn't get caught. Yeah, not necessarily, it got
(30:00):
moved around in the market. Right. There we go, there
we go. We have another example from the United Kingdom
that has even higher stakes. Oh this one, we're going
back before either of the previous two. Back to seven
July twelve, great year for bank robberies. Oh yeah, oh yeah.
This is in knights Bridge, London. This is or it's
(30:22):
a part of London's in the UK. It's in the
city of Westminster, I believe. And the target here is
a thing, a place called knights Bridge Safe Deposit Center,
so less of a bank, more of a giant repository
of safety deposit boxes, a giant a collection of safety
(30:42):
deposit boxes. And there was a small crew of people
that went into there, including this gentleman named Valerio uh
v I C c e I cha vi vich. I
don't know how to say it, um, but Valeria, let's
call him. Uh. They walked in pretending like they were
(31:04):
just going to get a safety deposit box. And as
soon as they got into the secure area where the
deposit boxes were, they pulled out his crew pulled out pistols,
held everybody up. Then they put a closed temporarily closed
sign on the front of the safety deposit center. Then
they invited a couple other people in who were part
(31:24):
of their crew, dressed as security guards. Yes, and they
began basically just busting open all of these safety deposit boxes.
And they got away with a ton of money, a
huge amount of money, right, wasn't it around sixty million pounds?
It was over sixty million pounds, I believe, yes, But
(31:45):
again that's not cash, right, it's it's valuables, mostly valuable,
some cash um, probably bonds and all these other things.
But the safety deposit boxes were owned by millionaires in Lone,
didn't owned by famous people by sports, you know, they're
just famous peoples of all ilk, aristocrats, money royalty. Right.
(32:09):
They forced open hundred and fourteen boxes I think, yes,
what around two hours, so they were in the room
for a while. Yeah, but a hundred and fourteen boxes
full of whatever it was, and uh, they're yeah, thinking
about sixty million British pounds. But then okay, so these
guys make off with all this, they are they are
(32:30):
successful with these past three. The robbery itself goes off
pretty well, right in all three of these. They get in,
they get the spoils, and then they leave. The problems
are given enough time, you have enough people involved, somebody
slips up, and this is what occurred. There were several
(32:51):
several accomplices of Valerio who ended up getting caught. Yeah, yeah,
and let's let's spend a little bit of time in
Valerio because he is anomalous in the world of robberies.
Remember we said earlier at the top that are loaners,
(33:13):
our first time amateurs with this, not your buddy Valerio.
He came to England from Italy, where he was already
wanted on charges for something like fifty armed robberies. So
maybe not necessarily banks. But this guy was no stranger
(33:34):
to the hustle. No, he wasn't. And he also wasn't
the kind of guy that liked to lay low after
he's done a job or something and not spend a
lot of money, not have a lot of visibility. He
liked to be out there living, as is described by
several websites. We looked at lavishly. That's how he did
his thing, living Levita Loca. Yeah, yeah, Well, and then
(33:55):
that leads him down a pathway because he ends up,
Oh where did he go? He skipped the country to
South America. He went to South America right after this
large robbery, and he was doing really well, you know,
spending a ton of money. He's got a ton of
money now. But he ends up wanting to get a ferrari.
(34:16):
I think a tester rosa, I believe that's what it was.
And he goes back to the United Kingdom, just temporarily
flies back over there just to oversee the shipping of
this ferrari back to where he's living in South America,
and the authorities, of course, somehow noticed that he's there.
You can only assume he's using a passport that's not his. Well,
(34:40):
here's the thing. He was not aware that he was
already directly tied to this crime because of a single fingerprint,
a bloody fingerprint that belonged to him, that was found
on the scene. Also, I know we just mentioned blood,
but we should say no one was killed, right of
(35:02):
course of this, right, So so he goes this guy
is such a pill. He he goes back to England,
as he said, to get his testa Rosa shipped to
South America. Not the smartest move. And people who saw
him thought he was not an impressive person. They thought
(35:25):
he was a show off. They thought he was flexing
too hard, like he wanted people to see his rolex,
and he wanted to talk about how his love of
exotic cars. He was doing his best to not blend in.
So the cops set up a roadblock. That's how they
(35:45):
get him. They literally know where he's coming from and
where he's going, set up a roadblock. They take him
out of his car because they smashed a windshield of
his Ferrari right, which I think was sort of them
proving a point. You know, that's their version of showing
off their rolex. Yeah, there you go. And he is
(36:08):
sentenced to twenty two years in prison. But he ends
up I believe, being extradited to Italy. Yeah, he goes
back to Italy after after a little bit of jail time,
ends up spending more jail time in Italy. But he
ends him in this thing that's called a day prison,
or he's got like day privileges while he's at prison.
(36:31):
So he can actually leave for a certain amount of time.
He's got a company that he's running, and he ends
up getting into some dastardly stuff. Again, he I think
he's he's spotted by like a patrol vehicle or something
just kind of your standard police patrol vehicle in Italy,
and he's doing something weird. He ends up getting in
(36:53):
a shootout with an officer and dying. Right, So let's
let's connect some dots here, because he's in a shootout,
which means he has a firearm in Italy while he
is technically in prison, right. I think he's released, as
you said, during the day, and he has to be
(37:14):
back in his cell at ten thirty or something like that,
and he's acting suspiciously quote unquote acting suspiciously? What does
that mean? You know what I mean? And in this
country there are a lot of innocent people who have
been fatally shot for quote unquote acting suspiciously. In this
(37:35):
guy's case, I gotta say I believe law enforcement. Well, yeah,
it appears that he may have been waiting for literally
an armored truck or I mean again, there are some
rumors that I was reading about on there, but who knows.
In the end, of this huge heights, the sixty million
pounds worth of stuff. Authorities got ten million or they
(37:56):
recovered roughly ten million pounds worth of stuff and value tables,
but the rest of it was either spent or can't
be found. Um, so there you go kind of the
same ending there. Yeah. Yeah, he also he wasn't a
good person. Any loss of human life is a tragedy.
(38:18):
I don't want to make light of the fact that
this that this guy died. He was also by acting suspiciously.
In his case, he was sitting in a stolen car
was while he was waiting for the van. I would
say that is suspicious. Yeah, I was like, just because
(38:39):
a person is in a stolen car does not necessarily
mean they stole it. But it doesn't look good. Yeah,
you should at least check it out. And if they
have a weapon and they, you know, fire shots at
you as a police officer, I think that's how things
are going to go. There was a quote from his
time in court when he was originally sentenced for the
(39:01):
Night's Bridge robbery. I just want to see what you
what you think about this. I'm want to hear your
reaction to this. So one detective said this guy wanted
to be known as the mastermind of the world's biggest robbery,
and then continued to say he had an ego the
size of the Old Bailey. And then at the trial.
At the trial, this dude says to the judge, maybe
(39:24):
I'm a romantic lunatic, but money was the last thing
on my mind, you know, which is a very strange
way to plead your case. It's like, look, I just
it's just the excitement. Yeah, it's not about the money.
It's you're living a message. Yeah, you'llo sent a message. Well, yeah,
I mean, this is the kind of guy who watched
(39:45):
He reportedly watched Scarface almost sixty times and that was
just his favorite movie and he wanted to be Scarface.
He had a ring or something that. Yeah, he had
a key ring. There was golden and it was a shotgun. Yeah. Anyway,
but let I'm done talking about this valerious guy. Um
let's let's take a quick break from our sponsor and
(40:07):
we'll come back and talk about some of the heists
that went really well for the people who who perpetrated them,
or at least it didn't go well for the authorities
chasing down the perpetrators. And we're back. Let's talk about
(40:28):
some of the heist where the perpetrators got away Asterix,
asterick caveat at all. So just be clear about this
kind of situation we're talking about. There are quite a few,
(40:50):
a surprisingly vast number of enormous cases I don't necessarily
want to call them heist cases where we know money
disappeared and we know where it was last seen, but
we don't know what happened to it. The bread crumb
trail has disappeared, right, So we can laundry list some
(41:16):
of those, but some of them deserve their own episodes.
We decided to start with a couple of cases where
we do know the nuts and bolts of the crew
and we know a little bit of about how it worked. Yeah,
we at least know the best assumptions according to authorities
(41:37):
about uh, perhaps the groups that were involved here. So
let's jump to January nine seventies six, and let's go
to Lebanon, specifically Beirut, and there's let's see the target
here is the British Bank of the Middle East in Beirut,
and what occurred here on this day is it's believed
(42:01):
that uh, some crew of people officially unknown crew of
about eight soldiers, as well as a separate team of
individuals who were safe crackers. They gained access to the
vault of this bank, the British Bank in the Middle
Eastern Beirute, and they were able to empty the entire
contents of that vault, and it's estimated to be somewhere
(42:23):
between twenty million US and fifty million US worth of gold, bars,
Lebanese and other foreign currencies, as well as stocks, jewels,
and other valuables. And that money was worth about sixty
million UH somewhere between sixty million two fifty million in
two thousand, so really big takeaway. Yeah, and this also
(42:46):
touches on something that I think we were all somewhat
anticipating when we talked about successful heist. Like successful heist,
there was a state actor involved. These weren't just some
random amateurs. They were a group associated with the PLO,
(43:07):
the Palestine Liberation Organization under yasar Ara Fat. Because at
the time Lebanon is in the grips of a civil war,
they're able to break into this otherwise fairly fortified bank, Right, Yeah,
all the chaos is going on while there's so much
(43:27):
confusion and violence occurring they were just able to use
that opportunity essentially is cover to go in and take
this place. Yet and no one, not only has no
one involved in this heist been caught, no one has
been charged with the crime. You know what I mean.
This is not this is not a situation where someone
(43:47):
decides to uh skidaddle off to a country that won't extradite. Instead,
they disappear. They politicizer associated. Just to give you an
idea of what it looks like you're you think about
it this way, there are people with large, high powered
(44:07):
rifles that have grenade launchers attached to them, that are
wearing military fatigues that are unmarked, so it's not saying
that you're officially associated with any military. They they roll
up with their grenade launchers and it's it's pretty crazy
the way they did this, I mean, and that must
(44:28):
have been a very up like opposing force just to
see it coming, you know, Um, I don't know. It's
just very very strange because again it became a war
zone there at that bank. It wasn't like they just
walked in and took the money. There was firing, you know,
there was weapons being fired and assuming grenades being launched.
It's a pretty intense thing, absolutely, and this loot was
(44:50):
not just cash, right, We're talking gold, jewelry stocks. And
oddly enough, these guys ended up famous and anonymous because
the Guinness Book of World Records was inspired to cite
this as the quote biggest bank robbery in the world.
(45:13):
The crazy thing about this is that it is quite
possible someone listening to this episode today along with you,
may have been involved. They would be elderly now right,
or maybe they would be um, a family member, like
a sibling or a child of one of the what
(45:36):
we call them, well, we should call them criminals, but
I like heisters. Yeah, and let's remember that part. To me,
the most crucial part about this is that they were
very likely involved with a state actor. Yeah, they used
to see they used C four, the plastic explosive to
(45:58):
gain access to the vault, which you know, it generally
doesn't occur if you're a group of citizens, um getting
your hands on C four. While it may not be
as difficult as the world's authorities would like it to be,
but it is certainly not easy. No, No, it's not
something uh ideally, it's not something we want people to
(46:22):
be able to order from Amazon or eBay. Yeah, and
you know grenade launchers attached to your M sixteen. Yeah,
that's military hardware. So let's fast forward to two thousand four,
a few days before Christmas. Here we are in jolly
old Ireland, Yes, to Belfast. Uh so let's just let's
(46:45):
talk about the target here. It's a place called Belfast,
Northern Bank. And before we even get into who it
is or what occurred or anything like that, let's just
hit that number. Around twenty six and a half million
British pounds, as well as other additional court uh foreign
currencies were taken. Yeah. According to The Guardian, in total,
(47:11):
as of two thousand and eight, ten people have been
arrested and three have been charged for being somehow involved
with the conspiracy here. But they're all charged with being
somehow involved well, but also they've never officially been like, um,
(47:34):
charged with actually yeah yeah, it's like it's hard to
even wrap your head around the thing. They they were connected, right,
but they weren't the people they're doing the thing. Yeah. Yeah,
So the other currencies involved where US dollars and euros? Right?
Can we just talk about the significance of this probably,
(47:56):
so we're in Belfast. Uh, there's a peace process going
on because of the tensions you know in Northern Ireland
as well as other parts of Ireland. The the IRA
and a couple other groups that were involved in tensions
over the years, again similar to state actors. Yeah, so,
so there's a very You're in a precarious position there already,
(48:17):
and then to have a violent act like this occur
where millions and millions of dollars are stolen of all
the people's money in the area. I mean that's people's money.
That's not just the bank sitting there. Although you know,
insurance through various UH state programs and everything still does.
It's a symbolic act. Sure, that's that's the idea, and
(48:39):
it almost crippled the ongoing peace process because there was
a lot of finger pointing. The police of Northern Ireland
as well as the British and Irish governments said that
the IRA had a hand in this. However, the i
ra A said, no, why would we do that. What
(49:01):
on earth are you talking about? That's the last thing
we want. Yeah, exactly. Now, let's talk about a little
bit of what happened. So similarly to what we saw
with one of the previous the Securre toss heist. Some
masked what they're being referred to in the Guardian as
um masked gang masked and armed gang members. These guys
(49:24):
show up at two homes, uh, two separate homes of
two separate bank managers there who work at the Northern Bank, right,
and they hold people hostage uh the specifically their families
at gunpoint. Uh. Then they get moved around a little bit.
They you know, they take some of the family members
to like forest. Apparently they're really spreading these people out there,
(49:47):
extremely organized on what they're gonna do. Then they get
one of these guys, one of these bank managers, to
go to work like it's just a regular old day,
pretend nothing's wrong, but because he knows that his families
at risk. Right. But then in the bank's closed that evening,
the bank, these gang members actually like we're let in
by this manager, let into the vaults and then they
(50:10):
just loaded up a van with all of the contents
and got away. That's that's the craziest thing again there.
The people who were arrested, the people who were charged
were not charged with actually carrying this out. I believe
currently as of two thousand nineteen, one person has been convicted.
(50:34):
They were convicted of money laundering. Yeah, so after the fact,
just using it, right, And the authorities consider this case ongoing,
so they haven't they haven't closed it. It remains unsolved. Again,
given the time frame here, it's even more likely that
(50:54):
someone involved is listening to this show. Now. When I
say more likely, I don't mean it's probable. Yes, but
if you're listening. No, we can't even say that, Matt.
We can say someone might be listening. And that's about
where we have to draw the line, I believe legally.
(51:15):
Is that correct? Yeah, And we at this point we
do know a very small portion of this money that
was stolen has been recovered, A very very small portion,
I think two million out of the UM two million
out of the sixty in the pounds I guess in
bank notes were discovered. And then there's another like a
hundred K and US bank notes and listen to this.
(51:38):
According to The Guardian, UH these U s bank notes
were found in the toilet of the Police Athletics Association's
New Forge country club. A hundred of thousand dollars of
the money that was still in there was found in
the police country club. Interesting. So this, this definitely has them.
This definitely has the aroma of an inside job, you
(52:01):
know what I mean. Yeah, oh yeah. But the I
think the authorities there, the official word was like, oh no,
this money was just planted there as a distraction. It
wasn't actually, you know, nobody involved with the police had
anything to do with that money. It was just put there. Okay, sure, alright, wink, yeah.
This let's continue to build on this. Let's let's look
(52:24):
at just a few quick laundry lists of unsolved conspiracies.
One thing that I believe stands out for a lot
of US residents and a lot of residents of the
Middle East would be the massive allegations of stolen money
(52:45):
in the course of the US is involvement in a
rock in the course of the US is involvement in Afghanistan.
So if we if we look at this, what we
find will be almost a thousand, almost a thousand cases
(53:06):
of alleged fraud committed not not by you know, not
by local militias or terrorists, but committed by contractors working
for Uncle Sam. As we know, you know, war is
a war is very fertile soil for corruption for profiteering.
(53:27):
In this case, U s Audit found that the occupying
force in in Iraq during the Iraq War lost track
of something around like nine billion dollars with a B. Yeah,
that's insane and right there by the way, Remember we're
(53:50):
talking about several associations, several groups, but one of the
main ones is our old pals Blackwater a k x E.
I think a A k A Academi well, which is
a our old house, Eric Prince, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a fascinating article about this that would recommend called
(54:13):
BBC uncovers Lost a Rock Billions by a journalist named
Jane Corbin. And this this came out in June of
two thousand and eight. So this is old news. This
is over ten years old now, but it's fascinating to
get to get this glimpse. I just want to share
(54:35):
some parts of this. So an investigation by the BBC
found that not just nine billion, that's the U s Audit.
The BBC found twenty three billion had been lost, stolen
or just maybe put in the wrong accounting line, which
I thought was very generous of them to phrase it
(54:56):
that way. Let me read this part. So the BBC
used US and Iraqi government sources to research how much
some private contractors have profited from the conflict in the
Rock and the subsequent rebuilding. A US gagging order is
(55:16):
preventing discussion of the allegations. What the order applies to
seventy court cases against some of the top US companies. WHOA,
that feels like a whole episode, right, Yeah, that I
think we need to do that. I agree, I agree completely.
(55:37):
When Henry Waxman commented on this during his time as
Chairman of the US House of Reps, he said, the
money that's gone into waste, fraud, and abuse under these
contracts is just so outrageous. He noted at the time
that it may turn out to be the largest case
of war profiteering in history, not US history, in human history.
(56:02):
Holy crap, that's a little hyperbolic. If we're being honest,
you know, it's it's tough to rank these things with
accuracy when we're talking about just how much money goes missing.
But we we have to admit billions of dollars vanished.
Yeah they did. Yeh man, I'll never forget. Was it Rumsfeld?
(56:25):
He was like, yeah, well, we don't know, just billions
of dollars that we can't account for in the in
the budgets. But you know, it speaks to the fog
of war, like we're talking about the cover that you
get when there's conflict like that. Because if we think
about or if we take ourselves back to two thousand
three when the United States was invading Iraq again, and
(56:49):
I believe Saddam at least the story goes that Saddam
Hussein ordered his son and a bunch of other men
in trucks to go to one of the largest Baghdad
banks and take out a billion dollars or as close
to a billion dollars as he could to basically procure
it and say, you know, we're about to be under
(57:10):
attack where at war, we need to make sure this
money isn't stolen by the opposing forces, right, But they
in turn essentially stole a billion dollars out of the bank.
Because it's I don't know, it's just such an odd
thing to think about it that way, and it makes
you wonder how often that kind of thing occurs where
moneys that are accrued from all these various places, but
(57:33):
you know, are thought to be the state's money, depending
on when a conflict is occurring and how it's occurring. Um,
I don't know. It makes you makes me wonder about
Fort Knox a little bit. Right again, what we see here,
the clear trend is that the most successful heist in
(57:54):
terms of escaping arrest and in terms of escaping arrest
with the money or with the loot, whatever that may be. Uh,
those successful heist tend to have state actors somehow involved.
Those are the inside jobs that carry the most weight
(58:14):
in the highest chance of success. In Afghanistan, we've got
what an estimated forty five billion dollars that went missing.
There's a report from the Fiscal Times in that talks
about how this came to be. And the big question
is whether these missing dollars vanished due to a purposeful,
(58:38):
intentional heist or whether it's just flawed accounting on the
part of the Pentagon, which has for the entirety of
most people's lives listening to this show, always had a
problem with accounting, always so weird. Those black budgets, they
just don't match up with the money that doesn't exist. Yeah.
(58:59):
As of twenty team, the Pentagon had data for about
fifty seven percent of the almost eight hundred million that
they spent on one program in this country between two
thousand two and two thousand thirteen. Again, that's not the
(59:19):
whole pie. It's just something called the commander's Emergency Response Program.
And this is something the Fiscal Times rightly criticizes because
it's very difficult to see where the money. You can
see where the money comes from, but you can't see
where it goes. It is a black bag, it's it's
a black budget. It's it's a mystery box, you know,
(59:44):
And such is the nature of military conflicts. I guess. Yeah, well,
here just for a peek behind the current without getting
two into the weeds on it. Under the Emergency Response program,
here commanders could spend money to respond to uh, sudden catastrophes,
immediate needs, you know, fires, floods, earthquakes. Theoretically that kind
(01:00:05):
of stuff, and any money they spend under half a
million dollars isn't treated as a defense contract and it
doesn't have to bear up to the same scrutiny or documentation.
So question, I don't know the answer to this, but
question how often or how rarely did someone request four
(01:00:32):
hundred thousand dollars seriously or just four. Yeah, yeah, you
don't want to be you don't want to show off.
You only need to test it rosa man. That's uh
sounds like petty cash in a way, but up to
you know, a couple under grand Wow, that's that's insane.
Now to be fair to Uncle Sam at this at
(01:00:56):
this point, currently they have discontinued that ambiguous process, that
kind of workflow for accounting. But I but I don't know.
There's just so much money on the table there that
it feels almost certain corruption must exist. Maybe it's mitigated,
(01:01:20):
maybe it's tamped down, but it has to be there.
We have a lot of people listening today who are
active or former military members, and I am certain that
some of us have seen really dodgy things happen in
the field, you know, really dodgy financial things. And uh,
(01:01:45):
why don't you go ahead and tell us what you
think about all of this that we've discussed today, and
especially if you've got personal experience that you would feel
comfortable sharing um as anonymously as you wish, Because we
talked about a whole bunch of different things. I definitely
want to cover at least a couple of these as
full episodes. Uh, it feels like there's plenty of meat
on those bones. And you know, we really just want
(01:02:08):
to find out what you think about about all of us,
So go ahead and find us on social media where
we are conspiracy stuff in most places, conspiracy stuff show
on Instagram, hang out with us on Facebook on our page.
Here's where it gets crazy, where you can discuss this
with all your fellow conspiracy realists. Uh what else? People
can find you on Instagram, right, that's correct, man. You
(01:02:31):
can find me at Ben Bolan on Instagram, at the
Bowling hsw on Twitter. You can also call us if
you don't feel like social media quite badge your badgers.
We have a dedicated number just for you. That's one
eight three three s T d W y t K.
(01:02:51):
Just leave a message. You get three minutes, do what
you gotta do with it. You can leave as many
as you want. So on behalf of our crew. Thank
you so much for joining us today. We do want
to end on this final note. Please please do not
commit heist. You know, not once, you're not once, not once,
(01:03:15):
not never. Your chances of success are cartoonishly low, and
the chances of someone dying, being injured, having their lives
Ruined is incredibly offensively high. There are other ways, right there,
There are other ways to spend your time, and they
(01:03:36):
will be maybe not maybe they won't have the promise
of being as financially rewarding, but you will feel much
better about yourself, you know what I mean. Learned to
play piano. There you go, go Ben Folds with it.
You'll you'll appreciate and everyone else will too. Yeah. That
was his main thing, was heist before. You know what.
(01:03:58):
I like these ivories. If you don't care for phones,
if you don't care for social media, but you have
a story you wish to share, we would love to
hear it, and we have good news. You can always
send us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy
at i heart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want
(01:04:37):
you to know. As a production of I heart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, Welcome
(00:25):
back to the show. My name is Matt. Noel is
not with us today. Noel the Bagman Brown is indeed
on adventures. They call me Ben. We are joined as
always with our super producer, Paul Mission Control Deconds a
k a. The Coordinator. Most importantly, you are you. You
are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want
(00:45):
you to know. Matt off Air, You and Paul and
I have been talking about some of our favorite things heist, right, Yeah,
heist movies, heist heisten fiction I think are one of
my favorite things not in reality. Right. It's there's this
(01:06):
cool team up moment in a lot of heist films, right.
And we we spoke about which roles we would ideally
or realistically play in a heist and and Paul I loved.
I loved when Paul immediately replied, well, I guess I
(01:29):
would be the coordinator in a heist. And if you
go on places like TV Tropes, you will see the
various categories, the common positions and roles in a lot
of heist. Paul, I have to be honest. I feel
like maybe you chose the coordinator just because it also
(01:53):
the category also says the coordinator functions as mission control. Yeah,
he found that and he went, that's it, That's what
I'm doing. You read the whole article, and Matt, you
had some interesting choices you had to that that spoke
to you. Yeah, I'm mostly thinking about it in context
of this show. So I I would go with the
partner in crime, So not the mastermind, because I think
(02:15):
we all know who the mastermind would be, especially in
the context of our crew and show Ben. But I
would be the partner in crime. I would be the
person who is second in command, who assists uh and
um maybe the only one this is a quote, maybe
the only one besides the mastermind who actually knows what's
going on. You know. That's that's flattering, uh too to
(02:40):
imply that mastermind position. I don't know, Man. I always
I always thought I would Uh. I would function as
a face, at least in my past experience. A tend
to hear just work a lot. But but what we
found was that we constructed the four of us a
(03:04):
fairly solid again fictional heist crew, and today we're we're
looking at heist. You know, heist when you think about it,
their conspiracies. People are conspiring to do something nefarious. Yeah, certainly,
(03:26):
And a lot of the examples we're gonna get to
today involve inside jobs, all things within that conspiracy loaded term,
loaded term there. But who does not love a good
heist film? You know, the formula is pretty solid at
this point. A team of specialists with some dubious gifts
(03:48):
and specializations and no small amount of internal tension banned
together for I don't know. Sometimes it's the big one,
capital b capital. Oh, sometimes it's one last job before
we go straight, you know, or before we retire to
some remote destination. There is one rule that always applies
(04:11):
to any heist film, no matter which country, culture, or
time period it comes from, and that one rule, that
one ever constant, ubiquitous rule, is things go wrong. Yeah,
the perfect plan isn't quite so perfect. But you know,
a lot of these movies are based on actual heists,
(04:34):
actual or at least loosely based on actual heist inspired
by events. Because all the time there are people in
groups of people conspiring to rob banks and armored cars
and various institutions and jewelry stores and everything museums. Yes,
they're they're true, and they're real. But the big question
(04:55):
today is how do they work? How do they function
in reality outside of those fictional worlds? Right? How do
real heist actually work? Here are the facts and let's
call this why you shouldn't rob a bank? Uh. Some
of this research comes from an older and older piece
(05:15):
that Paul and I did for a show called brain Stuff,
which is available on YouTube. Yeah, I was, I was
nuts on this one. Uh. If we want to get
a handle on real life heist, we can look at
the numbers. And the numbers may surprise some of us.
In two thousand eleven in the United States, let's focus
(05:37):
on the US just for this part. In two thousand eleven,
in the US, there were over five thousand bank robberies
five thousand and fourteen documented ones. Most of these, oddly enough,
happened during the day while the bank was open at
some point. Yeah, when there are when there is a
teller or a bank manager or someone on the scene.
(05:59):
All so multiple witnesses, people who just came to make
a deposit or get a money order, and we're probably
thinking about grabbing Chipotle after they were not planning for this. Also,
the all the data shows that there are two favorite
days for bank robbers. Those days are Tuesdays and Friday's.
(06:22):
Despite what feature films might have us believe, the majority
of robbers are not experts. They're not professional bank robbers.
They rank amateurs. Eight percent of individual bank robbers have
never been convicted of a bank robbery before. It's their
first time out and maybe probably the numbers will show
(06:46):
us the first time getting caught. Yes, yes, yes, that
is true. The criminals, also, contrary to what heist and
fiction would have us believe, are not teaming up in
some super swanky, awesome oceans eleven Avengers Vultron esque kind
of thing. Instead operate alone, and they also use predictable patterns.
(07:13):
They tend to if they survive the first one, if
they escape the first one, they tend to do the
same things, sort of franchise and repeat it. Yeah, or
you know, they're not experienced in how to manage the
money and the spoils once they've attained them right, and
then that will lead them to be to being caught. Yeah,
(07:35):
that's a that's a huge part of it. According to
the Department of Justice, the FBI's clearance rate for bank
robbery is little under sixty of those cleared robberies. Of
the crimes that are solved, about half of those are
solved within thirty days. And people will bank robbers, I
(07:59):
mean will get it, will get caught, sometimes not not
for anything directly related to the bank robbery, as you said, Matt,
they will get caught after the heist using you know,
bills with sequential serial numbers, using something that can be traced. Right.
(08:19):
There was a there's this excellent vice video called rap Monument,
which has it's just a cavalcade of mostly amazing m
c s. And there's a line in one of these,
in one of the verses where they say the bank
vaults don't talk, but the numbers read. And that is
(08:41):
that is directly alluding to the way that serial numbers
on bills, especially larger bills, can be traced. So if you,
if you happen to be sitting on a stack of
ill gotten cash, please be very aware that someone somewhere
(09:03):
knows the numbers of those bills and they're kind of
waiting for you to use them, yeah, absolutely, or especially
to use them to make a large bulk purchase of
an expensive thing, especially if you do it sequentially several
times of a large purchase such as a oh, I
don't know, a ferrari or a mansion or Wendy's franchise.
(09:28):
Wendy's franchise. Sure, I mean, that's when you've really made
it right. So, so we're talking a lot about how
people get caught using the money they've stolen, but we
haven't talked about how much money professional or lucky robbers
actually make. It is surprising conspiracy realist. We often hear
(09:55):
about millions of dollars billions of dollars in some cases disappearing,
but life for the average bank robber is pretty hard
scrabble and hard one. There was a study by several
British economists that examined just the nuts and bolts math
of this. So what they found is the average return
(10:19):
on a bank heist and the United Kingdom is nineteen thousand,
seven hundred dollars per person per heist. In the US
it's way worse. It's only a little bit over four
thousand dollars per heist. Yeah, and a lot of that.
(10:39):
You know, if you're looking at it on average, you're
talking about the loan actors. They walk into a bank,
hand a piece of paper over that says empty the register,
give me everything you have, I have a gun, and
then they walk out and that's it. They don't go
for the vault, they don't go for any of the
big ticket items, they don't go to the security deposit boxes.
They just go in, get that money and then leave.
(11:01):
So that's definitely swaying numbers there, right, And you're also
talking about the UK where weapons are like firearms are
much more difficult to come by, so it's it's a
whole other thing. Like if you walk into a bank
just wielding a knife or something, it changes the calculus
a little bit about what can go down and what
you can get right. Also, the UK is one of
the most closely surveiled areas of the world. We did
(11:26):
we did mention this in a previous episode, just the
density of cameras. Yeah, well, the the the interest thing
thing that these people also found. These economists that were
looking at the numbers, they found that if you increase
the number of people in your crew, you actually can
move those numbers a little bit, that's right. Yeah, every
additional member of a heist gang raises the value of
(11:52):
the robbery or the takeaway by in the UK it's
a little over nine thousand thirty three pounds. That translates
to a bit over fifteen grant, so that that feels
like a valuable contribution. But we have to keep in
mind the per person hall diminishes with every new member
(12:12):
added to the gang, and of course the likelihood of
something going wrong, someone squealing, someone making a rookie mistake
that rises exponentially. Oh yeah, but it definitely gets into
that thing where if you have but if you have
a crew like we were talking about in the beginning,
of people who are managing things, who have a specific task,
who are going to go in and get the money
(12:32):
and take the money and do all that, you can
see it working in there. Absolutely. So how does this
work out if any of our fellow listeners were professional
bank robbers, what would they have to do to make
it a genuine living right to not have to constantly
(12:54):
be hungry, homeless, etcetera, just to meet their basic needs.
Oh yeah, so let's look at just in the United States,
the poverty line and where these how these numbers match up.
So in the poverty threshold at least would be an
annual income of eleven thousand, four hundred and ninety dollars
(13:14):
per person. So for one single person, um eleven and
a half thousand dollars a year, that would be your income, right,
And this means that on average, if you were just
a professional bank robber, just all by your lonesome, you'd
have to rob three banks a year, and you'd have
to keep all the loot and not do anything with
it necessarily or at least, I don't know, you you'd
(13:38):
have to invest smartly or launder it correctly and smartly, uh,
just to stay out of the uh the poorhouse, I guess. Yeah. Yeah,
And the most recent number we could find for the
poverty threshold is from twelve thousand, four eighty six dollars,
(13:58):
so that still has it moved very much. But making
a living as a bank robber has become increasingly difficult. Yeah,
but hey, you think about it this way, that's only
three maybe four jobs a year, and that's it. That's
all you gotta do. I imagine there's a lot of
pre production that goes into that, maybe or who knows.
(14:19):
Maybe there's yeah, maybe they're they're just some people who
impulsively rob banks and keep getting away. There are so
many stories of daring, ambitious heist not just related to banks.
Banks we tend to have more information about because they're
(14:39):
one of the most common forms of this this sort
of crime. But here's the thing, not all heists are
created equal. Some high screws didn't just conspire to, you know,
rob a vault at a bank. They conspired to move massive,
gargantuan amounts of loot, some things that are objectively priceless
(15:04):
works of art that cannot have a value assigned, and
so on. And the most bizarre thing about it is
some of these crews got away. So let's let's explore this.
Let's look at some of the world's biggest heist. Let's
look at some of the folks who were caught, and
let's look at some of the folks who are still
(15:26):
out there today. And we'll do that right after a
word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. Thattt
what do you say, do you wanna do you want
to start off with some heist where the perpetrators were
(15:48):
ultimately apprehended. Oh yeah, absolutely. And let's okay, let's let's
first jump to September twelfth, nineteen. This is a story
about a bank robbery. Um. That feels like several major
motion pictures that I have seen or at least heard about. Um.
(16:08):
The target, or let's just say the title of it
is the Dunbar Armored Robbery. That's like what we're gonna
call it here. And the target was Dunbar Armored Incorporated.
And they are an armored truck company. So what they
do is they move cash and valuables from one place
to another in a vehicle that is generally you know,
has a crew of people who are there to protect
(16:29):
the money. Uh, and they're all armed. Uh. It seems
like an extremely dangerous thing to attempt to rob, at
least on the surface. Right. But in Los Angeles, California,
a group of people, including a man named Alan Pace
the Third, got together and conspired to rob the Dunbar
(16:52):
Armored Ink Company. So instead of robbing a single one
of these cars, they went to the source of where
the the cars go back to the depot basically right. Um,
And this guy, Alan Pace the third was working at
Dunbar and he knew the ins and outs of the place.
It was in fact an inside job, and he had
(17:14):
a crew of people that came that came with him.
They tied up some security guards, they made off with
a whole bunch of money, and they also destroyed all
the security tapes. They didn't they didn't destroy the cameras
or anything. They took the the actual tapes, so there
was no real evidence. And it's kind of a weird
thing because for a long time they couldn't figure out
(17:38):
exactly what happened. But they realized it must have been
an inside job because somebody knew entirely too much about
the security where the cameras were, how those cameras were recording,
and where that stuff would be, and how much money
would be where at what time. Um. Anyway, it's a
really fascinating thing to look. It's also, I belief, still
(18:02):
the largest cash robbery to have occurred in the US,
right I think I think it's been estimated to be
that because it was around eighteen. It was around nineteen
million dollars in cash in nine seven, which would make
it closer to thirty million dollars today. This story is amazing,
(18:26):
but it doesn't end happily. For Mr Pace Oh no, no, no,
he he got caught as well as several other people. Um,
Alan Pace the third was considered the mastermind, you know,
if we're going to use those terms. H he was
the guy who came up with the idea because he
was the inside man. He knew the ins and outs.
(18:46):
But he also had some people working with him, like
Eric Damon Boyd one of the accomplices. Um there are
there were several people working with him that ended up
going to jail and getting getting arrested and you know,
going to trial and mm hmm ended up in the slammer. Yeah.
Eugene Lamar Hill I think was the was the weak
(19:07):
link there, or at least the first the slip up
is Lamar Hill, the guy that was was trying to
he got caught with the sequential bills with the original
rapper and everything. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. That tells you
how much this stack of money is worth. That's the thing,
because this this gang attempted to be pretty smart and
(19:29):
pretty strategic about how they would seem to legitimately have
created such wealth. They were buying real estate and then
I believe they were also starting business fronts, you know, right,
like a like a p O Box Corporation or LLC
(19:49):
stuff like that. But Eugene was talking to a real
estate broker and he I guess he felt too comfortable
or he got a little lax and he literally handed
this guy that stack of bills, like you said, that
(20:12):
could have just come from an armored truck. And his associate,
He's often referred to as Hill's friend, but I would
say maybe acquaintance is a better term, because his real
estate buddy notices this strap of cash and he goes
(20:34):
immediately to the police. And once Eugene Lamar Hill is arrested,
he confesses and he names all the members of the crew. Well, yeah,
and they also connected Hill up to this U haul
that the crew had rented, because they were bringing that
in to load all of the cash into this U
haul and it was Hill who actually had rented it.
(20:56):
And then I think there was a broken tail light
or something that was out on the scene of the robbery.
They connected that up to that specific U haul they
found Hill. They like, they connected all those pieces together,
and that's how they get most of the rest of
the crew with that confession. So justice is served mostly unfortunately,
(21:16):
the law enforcement agents were not able to recover all
of the money, some of which remains missing today. Yeah,
they only recovered about five million of that you know
at the time was nineteen million, so you know that
a lot of that just went into stuff those uh,
(21:37):
those front companies and the real estate and all that
other stuff. But they probably were able to get back
some of that real estate because you could actually tie
it to the being used by that money. Really really
cool case. I mean, it's it's messed up. Those guys
saw justice or experience justice are experiencing it um. But again,
(21:58):
I think a pretty good example of one of these
highly coordinated events. Yeah, and that's this is fascinating to
me because these people went to prison, right, But how
how does a person feel if they are in prison
(22:19):
for a crime they definitely committed, and they know that
they will not only get out at some point, but
they also know the money that they stole is somewhere
and they may be able to access it. It's got
to be pretty intense. You know. We're gonna get into
(22:39):
a similar thing to that a little bit later in
the episode where you just you buy you're biding your
time in jail because you know where the rest of
it is, let's go across the pond for the next one,
the Security US Depot heist. Yes, okay, so this one
jumps us forward to February one, two thousands six. This
(23:01):
time we're we're in Kent, southeast of London. If you're
looking at a map um and Securitas. Just like the
the old Dunbar group, they are, guess what, transferring tons
of money and valuables in armored cars, and this time
(23:22):
we're at a Securitas depot instead of a dumbbar depot.
Seem very very similar kind of thing, and this one
went down similarly with a couple of twists. The first
big twist is that these guys realized that uh, in
order to be successful, they were gonna need some leverage.
(23:42):
They went to the home of Colin Dixon, who was
the manager of this depot, and uh, he and his
family were kidnapped at gunpoint, and a crew or at
least one or two people stayed behind with that family
while Colin basically brought all of these robbers, these the
crew of people to the depot let them in. Those
(24:03):
guys then essentially kidnapped all of the workers who are
at the depot and um, they tied them all up
and they took just giant basically cages and palettes of
cash and valuables. They loaded them onto a giant truck
and took off and they ended up making making away
(24:24):
with fifty three million British pounds, which makes this the
largest cash robbery in UK history. Again, this is this
is ruthless work, but they do end up getting caught,
right they. I do want to stay just for a
(24:45):
second on their process here, because the way that they
got Colin Dixon was pretty devious. They impersonated police officers. Yeah,
they pulled him over and he was basically okay, well
this is fine, I'm gonna work all this stuff out.
And then they said, well sir, we need you get
out of your car. They took him to the back
(25:06):
of the car, basically locked him in the back of
the car, and then asked him a bunch of questions
that police officers generally wouldn't ask, and they put a
gun in his face. So after the robbery, Dixon and
his family survived thankfully. After the robbery, Security US offers
a reward of two million pounds, no real questions asked,
(25:31):
Just give us information that will lead to the arrest
of these assailants, and it works out because on February
like two days later, police have already arrested two people
and charged them with conspiracy to commit robbery. But they're
(25:55):
just people who were on the crew, right right, because
some of the main people that were involved with this,
or at least they were thought to be the masterminds,
had actually fled to Morocco. Uh smartly, I think on
on their part there, but they they fled and they
were I believe they're described in several places as cage
(26:16):
fighters or former cage fighters. There's a guy named Paul
Allen and another one named Lee Murray or Murray m
U r r A y um. So, so after these
guys are arrested, you're talking about ben two guys, and
then it ends up being five guys that get arrested.
It's basically the whole crew except for the masterminds and
(26:37):
these guys in Morocco. Then uh, finally Paul Allen gets
extradited from Morocco. He gets charged, but he keeps telling everybody, well,
know what, I wasn't the mastermind. I was just doing
what I was told. I was working for this guy
Lee Murray or Murray and Lee is already incarcerated in Morocco.
So it's like, I guess he was kind of using
(26:59):
Lee as the fall guy perhaps. Yeah. Yeah, Because while
they were in Morocco they did a number of things,
some of which were very clever, some of which are understandable,
and some of which are you know, sort of not
thought through. They went on a spending spree, as as
(27:20):
reported in The Guardian by Matthew Weaver and his associates.
They went on a spending spree. They were making it
rain in Morocco. They bought property. They bought jewelry, which
is you know, very very popular. Well we'll get to
the loose diamonds, don't worry, one of the sketchiest things
(27:42):
people can have. They also bought illegal things like drugs
and this this is something smart that they did. They
invested thousands of dollars or pounds rather in plastic surgery
for their associates. I've always been curious about whether that
(28:05):
kind of tactic works if someone is attempting to disappear.
You know, we hear about despots having plastic surgery. We
hear about, you know, people in drug cartels getting plastic surgery.
The thing. The thing about it is not to quote
Donald Rumsfeld directly, but it's it's an unknown, unknown right
(28:29):
if someone successfully has has used plastic surgery to evade
the long arm of the law, we'll never know about it. Yeah,
so maybe we only know about the people who got
caught with a bad nose job or something. Yeah, I
just got to look for all those tremendously rich people
with lots and lots of work done, start asking questions.
(28:51):
We may be conflating populations there. So what what we
see here is that they're they're caught because is despite
their best intentions, they went to a country that has
an extradition treaty with the United Kingdom. And in our
earlier conversations about pseudo side, we've we've learned right that
(29:17):
the only way people can fake their death and profit
from it, or the only way people can commit a
huge crime like this and survive without going to jail
is essentially to relocate to someplace that does not extradite. Yeah,
that's really the only way. And in the end they
(29:38):
recovered about twenty four million I think, I think million
pounds of the fifty something. Yeah, I wonder what happened
to that, right, because what we see here maybe it's
a little bit misleading, folks, because in both of the
heights we just talked about, the people got caught, but
the money didn't get caught. Yeah, not necessarily, it got
(30:00):
moved around in the market. Right. There we go, there
we go. We have another example from the United Kingdom
that has even higher stakes. Oh this one, we're going
back before either of the previous two. Back to seven
July twelve, great year for bank robberies. Oh yeah, oh yeah.
This is in knights Bridge, London. This is or it's
(30:22):
a part of London's in the UK. It's in the
city of Westminster, I believe. And the target here is
a thing, a place called knights Bridge Safe Deposit Center,
so less of a bank, more of a giant repository
of safety deposit boxes, a giant a collection of safety
(30:42):
deposit boxes. And there was a small crew of people
that went into there, including this gentleman named Valerio uh
v I C c e I cha vi vich. I
don't know how to say it, um, but Valeria, let's
call him. Uh. They walked in pretending like they were
(31:04):
just going to get a safety deposit box. And as
soon as they got into the secure area where the
deposit boxes were, they pulled out his crew pulled out pistols,
held everybody up. Then they put a closed temporarily closed
sign on the front of the safety deposit center. Then
they invited a couple other people in who were part
(31:24):
of their crew, dressed as security guards. Yes, and they
began basically just busting open all of these safety deposit boxes.
And they got away with a ton of money, a
huge amount of money, right, wasn't it around sixty million pounds?
It was over sixty million pounds, I believe, yes, But
(31:45):
again that's not cash, right, it's it's valuables, mostly valuable,
some cash um, probably bonds and all these other things.
But the safety deposit boxes were owned by millionaires in Lone,
didn't owned by famous people by sports, you know, they're
just famous peoples of all ilk, aristocrats, money royalty. Right.
(32:09):
They forced open hundred and fourteen boxes I think, yes,
what around two hours, so they were in the room
for a while. Yeah, but a hundred and fourteen boxes
full of whatever it was, and uh, they're yeah, thinking
about sixty million British pounds. But then okay, so these
guys make off with all this, they are they are
(32:30):
successful with these past three. The robbery itself goes off
pretty well, right in all three of these. They get in,
they get the spoils, and then they leave. The problems
are given enough time, you have enough people involved, somebody
slips up, and this is what occurred. There were several
(32:51):
several accomplices of Valerio who ended up getting caught. Yeah, yeah,
and let's let's spend a little bit of time in
Valerio because he is anomalous in the world of robberies.
Remember we said earlier at the top that are loaners,
(33:13):
our first time amateurs with this, not your buddy Valerio.
He came to England from Italy, where he was already
wanted on charges for something like fifty armed robberies. So
maybe not necessarily banks. But this guy was no stranger
(33:34):
to the hustle. No, he wasn't. And he also wasn't
the kind of guy that liked to lay low after
he's done a job or something and not spend a
lot of money, not have a lot of visibility. He
liked to be out there living, as is described by
several websites. We looked at lavishly. That's how he did
his thing, living Levita Loca. Yeah, yeah, Well, and then
(33:55):
that leads him down a pathway because he ends up,
Oh where did he go? He skipped the country to
South America. He went to South America right after this
large robbery, and he was doing really well, you know,
spending a ton of money. He's got a ton of
money now. But he ends up wanting to get a ferrari.
(34:16):
I think a tester rosa, I believe that's what it was.
And he goes back to the United Kingdom, just temporarily
flies back over there just to oversee the shipping of
this ferrari back to where he's living in South America,
and the authorities, of course, somehow noticed that he's there.
You can only assume he's using a passport that's not his. Well,
(34:40):
here's the thing. He was not aware that he was
already directly tied to this crime because of a single fingerprint,
a bloody fingerprint that belonged to him, that was found
on the scene. Also, I know we just mentioned blood,
but we should say no one was killed, right of
(35:02):
course of this, right, So so he goes this guy
is such a pill. He he goes back to England,
as he said, to get his testa Rosa shipped to
South America. Not the smartest move. And people who saw
him thought he was not an impressive person. They thought
(35:25):
he was a show off. They thought he was flexing
too hard, like he wanted people to see his rolex,
and he wanted to talk about how his love of
exotic cars. He was doing his best to not blend in.
So the cops set up a roadblock. That's how they
(35:45):
get him. They literally know where he's coming from and
where he's going, set up a roadblock. They take him
out of his car because they smashed a windshield of
his Ferrari right, which I think was sort of them
proving a point. You know, that's their version of showing
off their rolex. Yeah, there you go. And he is
(36:08):
sentenced to twenty two years in prison. But he ends
up I believe, being extradited to Italy. Yeah, he goes
back to Italy after after a little bit of jail time,
ends up spending more jail time in Italy. But he
ends him in this thing that's called a day prison,
or he's got like day privileges while he's at prison.
(36:31):
So he can actually leave for a certain amount of time.
He's got a company that he's running, and he ends
up getting into some dastardly stuff. Again, he I think
he's he's spotted by like a patrol vehicle or something
just kind of your standard police patrol vehicle in Italy,
and he's doing something weird. He ends up getting in
(36:53):
a shootout with an officer and dying. Right, So let's
let's connect some dots here, because he's in a shootout,
which means he has a firearm in Italy while he
is technically in prison, right. I think he's released, as
you said, during the day, and he has to be
(37:14):
back in his cell at ten thirty or something like that,
and he's acting suspiciously quote unquote acting suspiciously? What does
that mean? You know what I mean? And in this
country there are a lot of innocent people who have
been fatally shot for quote unquote acting suspiciously. In this
(37:35):
guy's case, I gotta say I believe law enforcement. Well, yeah,
it appears that he may have been waiting for literally
an armored truck or I mean again, there are some
rumors that I was reading about on there, but who knows.
In the end, of this huge heights, the sixty million
pounds worth of stuff. Authorities got ten million or they
(37:56):
recovered roughly ten million pounds worth of stuff and value tables,
but the rest of it was either spent or can't
be found. Um, so there you go kind of the
same ending there. Yeah. Yeah, he also he wasn't a
good person. Any loss of human life is a tragedy.
(38:18):
I don't want to make light of the fact that
this that this guy died. He was also by acting suspiciously.
In his case, he was sitting in a stolen car
was while he was waiting for the van. I would
say that is suspicious. Yeah, I was like, just because
(38:39):
a person is in a stolen car does not necessarily
mean they stole it. But it doesn't look good. Yeah,
you should at least check it out. And if they
have a weapon and they, you know, fire shots at
you as a police officer, I think that's how things
are going to go. There was a quote from his
time in court when he was originally sentenced for the
(39:01):
Night's Bridge robbery. I just want to see what you
what you think about this. I'm want to hear your
reaction to this. So one detective said this guy wanted
to be known as the mastermind of the world's biggest robbery,
and then continued to say he had an ego the
size of the Old Bailey. And then at the trial.
At the trial, this dude says to the judge, maybe
(39:24):
I'm a romantic lunatic, but money was the last thing
on my mind, you know, which is a very strange
way to plead your case. It's like, look, I just
it's just the excitement. Yeah, it's not about the money.
It's you're living a message. Yeah, you'llo sent a message. Well, yeah,
I mean, this is the kind of guy who watched
(39:45):
He reportedly watched Scarface almost sixty times and that was
just his favorite movie and he wanted to be Scarface.
He had a ring or something that. Yeah, he had
a key ring. There was golden and it was a shotgun. Yeah. Anyway,
but let I'm done talking about this valerious guy. Um
let's let's take a quick break from our sponsor and
(40:07):
we'll come back and talk about some of the heists
that went really well for the people who who perpetrated them,
or at least it didn't go well for the authorities
chasing down the perpetrators. And we're back. Let's talk about
(40:28):
some of the heist where the perpetrators got away Asterix,
asterick caveat at all. So just be clear about this
kind of situation we're talking about. There are quite a few,
(40:50):
a surprisingly vast number of enormous cases I don't necessarily
want to call them heist cases where we know money
disappeared and we know where it was last seen, but
we don't know what happened to it. The bread crumb
trail has disappeared, right, So we can laundry list some
(41:16):
of those, but some of them deserve their own episodes.
We decided to start with a couple of cases where
we do know the nuts and bolts of the crew
and we know a little bit of about how it worked. Yeah,
we at least know the best assumptions according to authorities
(41:37):
about uh, perhaps the groups that were involved here. So
let's jump to January nine seventies six, and let's go
to Lebanon, specifically Beirut, and there's let's see the target
here is the British Bank of the Middle East in Beirut,
and what occurred here on this day is it's believed
(42:01):
that uh, some crew of people officially unknown crew of
about eight soldiers, as well as a separate team of
individuals who were safe crackers. They gained access to the
vault of this bank, the British Bank in the Middle
Eastern Beirute, and they were able to empty the entire
contents of that vault, and it's estimated to be somewhere
(42:23):
between twenty million US and fifty million US worth of gold, bars,
Lebanese and other foreign currencies, as well as stocks, jewels,
and other valuables. And that money was worth about sixty
million UH somewhere between sixty million two fifty million in
two thousand, so really big takeaway. Yeah, and this also
(42:46):
touches on something that I think we were all somewhat
anticipating when we talked about successful heist. Like successful heist,
there was a state actor involved. These weren't just some
random amateurs. They were a group associated with the PLO,
(43:07):
the Palestine Liberation Organization under yasar Ara Fat. Because at
the time Lebanon is in the grips of a civil war,
they're able to break into this otherwise fairly fortified bank, Right, Yeah,
all the chaos is going on while there's so much
(43:27):
confusion and violence occurring they were just able to use
that opportunity essentially is cover to go in and take
this place. Yet and no one, not only has no
one involved in this heist been caught, no one has
been charged with the crime. You know what I mean.
This is not this is not a situation where someone
(43:47):
decides to uh skidaddle off to a country that won't extradite. Instead,
they disappear. They politicizer associated. Just to give you an
idea of what it looks like you're you think about
it this way, there are people with large, high powered
(44:07):
rifles that have grenade launchers attached to them, that are
wearing military fatigues that are unmarked, so it's not saying
that you're officially associated with any military. They they roll
up with their grenade launchers and it's it's pretty crazy
the way they did this, I mean, and that must
(44:28):
have been a very up like opposing force just to
see it coming, you know, Um, I don't know. It's
just very very strange because again it became a war
zone there at that bank. It wasn't like they just
walked in and took the money. There was firing, you know,
there was weapons being fired and assuming grenades being launched.
It's a pretty intense thing, absolutely, and this loot was
(44:50):
not just cash, right, We're talking gold, jewelry stocks. And
oddly enough, these guys ended up famous and anonymous because
the Guinness Book of World Records was inspired to cite
this as the quote biggest bank robbery in the world.
(45:13):
The crazy thing about this is that it is quite
possible someone listening to this episode today along with you,
may have been involved. They would be elderly now right,
or maybe they would be um, a family member, like
a sibling or a child of one of the what
(45:36):
we call them, well, we should call them criminals, but
I like heisters. Yeah, and let's remember that part. To me,
the most crucial part about this is that they were
very likely involved with a state actor. Yeah, they used
to see they used C four, the plastic explosive to
(45:58):
gain access to the vault, which you know, it generally
doesn't occur if you're a group of citizens, um getting
your hands on C four. While it may not be
as difficult as the world's authorities would like it to be,
but it is certainly not easy. No, No, it's not
something uh ideally, it's not something we want people to
(46:22):
be able to order from Amazon or eBay. Yeah, and
you know grenade launchers attached to your M sixteen. Yeah,
that's military hardware. So let's fast forward to two thousand four,
a few days before Christmas. Here we are in jolly
old Ireland, Yes, to Belfast. Uh so let's just let's
(46:45):
talk about the target here. It's a place called Belfast,
Northern Bank. And before we even get into who it
is or what occurred or anything like that, let's just
hit that number. Around twenty six and a half million
British pounds, as well as other additional court uh foreign
currencies were taken. Yeah. According to The Guardian, in total,
(47:11):
as of two thousand and eight, ten people have been
arrested and three have been charged for being somehow involved
with the conspiracy here. But they're all charged with being
somehow involved well, but also they've never officially been like, um,
(47:34):
charged with actually yeah yeah, it's like it's hard to
even wrap your head around the thing. They they were connected, right,
but they weren't the people they're doing the thing. Yeah. Yeah,
So the other currencies involved where US dollars and euros? Right?
Can we just talk about the significance of this probably,
(47:56):
so we're in Belfast. Uh, there's a peace process going
on because of the tensions you know in Northern Ireland
as well as other parts of Ireland. The the IRA
and a couple other groups that were involved in tensions
over the years, again similar to state actors. Yeah, so,
so there's a very You're in a precarious position there already,
(48:17):
and then to have a violent act like this occur
where millions and millions of dollars are stolen of all
the people's money in the area. I mean that's people's money.
That's not just the bank sitting there. Although you know,
insurance through various UH state programs and everything still does.
It's a symbolic act. Sure, that's that's the idea, and
(48:39):
it almost crippled the ongoing peace process because there was
a lot of finger pointing. The police of Northern Ireland
as well as the British and Irish governments said that
the IRA had a hand in this. However, the i
ra A said, no, why would we do that. What
(49:01):
on earth are you talking about? That's the last thing
we want. Yeah, exactly. Now, let's talk about a little
bit of what happened. So similarly to what we saw
with one of the previous the Securre toss heist. Some
masked what they're being referred to in the Guardian as
um masked gang masked and armed gang members. These guys
(49:24):
show up at two homes, uh, two separate homes of
two separate bank managers there who work at the Northern Bank, right,
and they hold people hostage uh the specifically their families
at gunpoint. Uh. Then they get moved around a little bit.
They you know, they take some of the family members
to like forest. Apparently they're really spreading these people out there,
(49:47):
extremely organized on what they're gonna do. Then they get
one of these guys, one of these bank managers, to
go to work like it's just a regular old day,
pretend nothing's wrong, but because he knows that his families
at risk. Right. But then in the bank's closed that evening,
the bank, these gang members actually like we're let in
by this manager, let into the vaults and then they
(50:10):
just loaded up a van with all of the contents
and got away. That's that's the craziest thing again there.
The people who were arrested, the people who were charged
were not charged with actually carrying this out. I believe
currently as of two thousand nineteen, one person has been convicted.
(50:34):
They were convicted of money laundering. Yeah, so after the fact,
just using it, right, And the authorities consider this case ongoing,
so they haven't they haven't closed it. It remains unsolved. Again,
given the time frame here, it's even more likely that
(50:54):
someone involved is listening to this show. Now. When I
say more likely, I don't mean it's probable. Yes, but
if you're listening. No, we can't even say that, Matt.
We can say someone might be listening. And that's about
where we have to draw the line, I believe legally.
(51:15):
Is that correct? Yeah, And we at this point we
do know a very small portion of this money that
was stolen has been recovered, A very very small portion,
I think two million out of the UM two million
out of the sixty in the pounds I guess in
bank notes were discovered. And then there's another like a
hundred K and US bank notes and listen to this.
(51:38):
According to The Guardian, UH these U s bank notes
were found in the toilet of the Police Athletics Association's
New Forge country club. A hundred of thousand dollars of
the money that was still in there was found in
the police country club. Interesting. So this, this definitely has them.
This definitely has the aroma of an inside job, you
(52:01):
know what I mean. Yeah, oh yeah. But the I
think the authorities there, the official word was like, oh no,
this money was just planted there as a distraction. It
wasn't actually, you know, nobody involved with the police had
anything to do with that money. It was just put there. Okay, sure, alright, wink, yeah.
This let's continue to build on this. Let's let's look
(52:24):
at just a few quick laundry lists of unsolved conspiracies.
One thing that I believe stands out for a lot
of US residents and a lot of residents of the
Middle East would be the massive allegations of stolen money
(52:45):
in the course of the US is involvement in a
rock in the course of the US is involvement in Afghanistan.
So if we if we look at this, what we
find will be almost a thousand, almost a thousand cases
(53:06):
of alleged fraud committed not not by you know, not
by local militias or terrorists, but committed by contractors working
for Uncle Sam. As we know, you know, war is
a war is very fertile soil for corruption for profiteering.
(53:27):
In this case, U s Audit found that the occupying
force in in Iraq during the Iraq War lost track
of something around like nine billion dollars with a B. Yeah,
that's insane and right there by the way, Remember we're
(53:50):
talking about several associations, several groups, but one of the
main ones is our old pals Blackwater a k x E.
I think a A k A Academi well, which is
a our old house, Eric Prince, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a fascinating article about this that would recommend called
(54:13):
BBC uncovers Lost a Rock Billions by a journalist named
Jane Corbin. And this this came out in June of
two thousand and eight. So this is old news. This
is over ten years old now, but it's fascinating to
get to get this glimpse. I just want to share
(54:35):
some parts of this. So an investigation by the BBC
found that not just nine billion, that's the U s Audit.
The BBC found twenty three billion had been lost, stolen
or just maybe put in the wrong accounting line, which
I thought was very generous of them to phrase it
(54:56):
that way. Let me read this part. So the BBC
used US and Iraqi government sources to research how much
some private contractors have profited from the conflict in the
Rock and the subsequent rebuilding. A US gagging order is
(55:16):
preventing discussion of the allegations. What the order applies to
seventy court cases against some of the top US companies. WHOA,
that feels like a whole episode, right, Yeah, that I
think we need to do that. I agree, I agree completely.
(55:37):
When Henry Waxman commented on this during his time as
Chairman of the US House of Reps, he said, the
money that's gone into waste, fraud, and abuse under these
contracts is just so outrageous. He noted at the time
that it may turn out to be the largest case
of war profiteering in history, not US history, in human history.
(56:02):
Holy crap, that's a little hyperbolic. If we're being honest,
you know, it's it's tough to rank these things with
accuracy when we're talking about just how much money goes missing.
But we we have to admit billions of dollars vanished.
Yeah they did. Yeh man, I'll never forget. Was it Rumsfeld?
(56:25):
He was like, yeah, well, we don't know, just billions
of dollars that we can't account for in the in
the budgets. But you know, it speaks to the fog
of war, like we're talking about the cover that you
get when there's conflict like that. Because if we think
about or if we take ourselves back to two thousand
three when the United States was invading Iraq again, and
(56:49):
I believe Saddam at least the story goes that Saddam
Hussein ordered his son and a bunch of other men
in trucks to go to one of the largest Baghdad
banks and take out a billion dollars or as close
to a billion dollars as he could to basically procure
it and say, you know, we're about to be under
(57:10):
attack where at war, we need to make sure this
money isn't stolen by the opposing forces, right, But they
in turn essentially stole a billion dollars out of the bank.
Because it's I don't know, it's just such an odd
thing to think about it that way, and it makes
you wonder how often that kind of thing occurs where
moneys that are accrued from all these various places, but
(57:33):
you know, are thought to be the state's money, depending
on when a conflict is occurring and how it's occurring. Um,
I don't know. It makes you makes me wonder about
Fort Knox a little bit. Right again, what we see here,
the clear trend is that the most successful heist in
(57:54):
terms of escaping arrest and in terms of escaping arrest
with the money or with the loot, whatever that may be. Uh,
those successful heist tend to have state actors somehow involved.
Those are the inside jobs that carry the most weight
(58:14):
in the highest chance of success. In Afghanistan, we've got
what an estimated forty five billion dollars that went missing.
There's a report from the Fiscal Times in that talks
about how this came to be. And the big question
is whether these missing dollars vanished due to a purposeful,
(58:38):
intentional heist or whether it's just flawed accounting on the
part of the Pentagon, which has for the entirety of
most people's lives listening to this show, always had a
problem with accounting, always so weird. Those black budgets, they
just don't match up with the money that doesn't exist. Yeah.
(58:59):
As of twenty team, the Pentagon had data for about
fifty seven percent of the almost eight hundred million that
they spent on one program in this country between two
thousand two and two thousand thirteen. Again, that's not the
(59:19):
whole pie. It's just something called the commander's Emergency Response Program.
And this is something the Fiscal Times rightly criticizes because
it's very difficult to see where the money. You can
see where the money comes from, but you can't see
where it goes. It is a black bag, it's it's
a black budget. It's it's a mystery box, you know,
(59:44):
And such is the nature of military conflicts. I guess. Yeah, well,
here just for a peek behind the current without getting
two into the weeds on it. Under the Emergency Response program,
here commanders could spend money to respond to uh, sudden catastrophes,
immediate needs, you know, fires, floods, earthquakes. Theoretically that kind
(01:00:05):
of stuff, and any money they spend under half a
million dollars isn't treated as a defense contract and it
doesn't have to bear up to the same scrutiny or documentation.
So question, I don't know the answer to this, but
question how often or how rarely did someone request four
(01:00:32):
hundred thousand dollars seriously or just four. Yeah, yeah, you
don't want to be you don't want to show off.
You only need to test it rosa man. That's uh
sounds like petty cash in a way, but up to
you know, a couple under grand Wow, that's that's insane.
Now to be fair to Uncle Sam at this at
(01:00:56):
this point, currently they have discontinued that ambiguous process, that
kind of workflow for accounting. But I but I don't know.
There's just so much money on the table there that
it feels almost certain corruption must exist. Maybe it's mitigated,
(01:01:20):
maybe it's tamped down, but it has to be there.
We have a lot of people listening today who are
active or former military members, and I am certain that
some of us have seen really dodgy things happen in
the field, you know, really dodgy financial things. And uh,
(01:01:45):
why don't you go ahead and tell us what you
think about all of this that we've discussed today, and
especially if you've got personal experience that you would feel
comfortable sharing um as anonymously as you wish, Because we
talked about a whole bunch of different things. I definitely
want to cover at least a couple of these as
full episodes. Uh, it feels like there's plenty of meat
on those bones. And you know, we really just want
(01:02:08):
to find out what you think about about all of us,
So go ahead and find us on social media where
we are conspiracy stuff in most places, conspiracy stuff show
on Instagram, hang out with us on Facebook on our page.
Here's where it gets crazy, where you can discuss this
with all your fellow conspiracy realists. Uh what else? People
can find you on Instagram, right, that's correct, man. You
(01:02:31):
can find me at Ben Bolan on Instagram, at the
Bowling hsw on Twitter. You can also call us if
you don't feel like social media quite badge your badgers.
We have a dedicated number just for you. That's one
eight three three s T d W y t K.
(01:02:51):
Just leave a message. You get three minutes, do what
you gotta do with it. You can leave as many
as you want. So on behalf of our crew. Thank
you so much for joining us today. We do want
to end on this final note. Please please do not
commit heist. You know, not once, you're not once, not once,
(01:03:15):
not never. Your chances of success are cartoonishly low, and
the chances of someone dying, being injured, having their lives
Ruined is incredibly offensively high. There are other ways, right there,
There are other ways to spend your time, and they
(01:03:36):
will be maybe not maybe they won't have the promise
of being as financially rewarding, but you will feel much
better about yourself, you know what I mean. Learned to
play piano. There you go, go Ben Folds with it.
You'll you'll appreciate and everyone else will too. Yeah. That
was his main thing, was heist before. You know what.
(01:03:58):
I like these ivories. If you don't care for phones,
if you don't care for social media, but you have
a story you wish to share, we would love to
hear it, and we have good news. You can always
send us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy
at i heart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want
(01:04:37):
you to know. As a production of I heart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com