Welcome back, fellow conspiracy realist. We are returning to you with one of our favorite subjects of discussion. Heist. Did you guys hear recently guy got arrested in the United Kingdom for stealing three hundred and eighty nine thousand dollars worth of cheddar.
Oh man, we love a wacky heist. There was the one where someone like stole like change, I.
Think, or it was like pennies. I believe there's just some week books.
Yeah well wait, well that's right, the Bluey coins.
Maple syrup cartel. We've got an episode about why maple syrup heist are surprisingly profitable. Back in twenty nineteen, we started exploring the biggest heist in history, actual criminal conspiracies, you know, the kind of stuff that's cinematic and I don't know if you guys remember this one, but it was a rollicking good time. It was was one of those episodes where we had to take breath off air and remind ourselves that sometimes people did get shot, sometimes people did die.
Oh yeah, you know the one that we haven't covered that would be great for this is the one that Fight Night was based on. Right, wasn't that a kind of a heist.
Or a million dollar Well, it was a stick up at like a poker game that took place during the big Muhammad Ali comeback fight. But it was it was a heist of a type for sure.
It counts. Shaking something you're not supposed to take is a heist. Hey, I mean even if it's extra candy from the bowl at your dermatologist.
Oh, don't do that.
They'll get you. They always remember. Here we go from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radios House Stuff Works.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt Nol is not with us today.
Noel the bag Man Brown is indeed on adventures. They call me Ben. We are joined as always without our super producer, Paul, Mission Control DEC and AKA the Coordinator. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want 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, heist and fiction. I think are one of my favorite things.
Not in reality, right, it's there's this cool team up moment in a lot of heist films, right. And we we spoke about which we would ideally or realistically play in a heist, and Paul loved. I loved when Paul immediately replied, well, I guess I 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 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 two that spoke to you. Yeah.
I'm mostly thinking about it in context of this show. So I would go with the partner in crime. So not the master because I think 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 and 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 to to imply that mastermind position. I don't know, man, I always I always thought I would, I would function as a face, at least in my past experience. I tend to do this work a lot. But what we found was that we constructed the four of us a 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, And a lot of the examples we're going to get to today involve inside jobs with 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 and specializations and no small amount of internal tension band together.
For I don't know.
Sometimes it's the big one, capital B, capital O. 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 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, actual or at least loosely based on actual heights.
Inspired by true events.
Because all the time there are people and groups of people conspiring to rob banks and armored cars and various institutions and jewelry stores and everything museums. Yes, they're true and they're real, but the big question 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. Some of this research comes from an older and older piece that Paul and I did for a show called brain stuff. Oh I remember this, Yeah, which is available on YouTube. Yeah, I was nuts on this one. 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 twenty eleven in the United States,
let's focus on the US just for this part. In twenty eleven in the US, there were over five thousand bank robberies fourteen documented once. Most of these, oddly enough, happened during the day while the bank was open at some point.
Yeah, there are when there is a teller or a bank manager or someone on the scene.
Also multiple witnesses. People who just came to make a depositor 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 they there are two favorite days for bank robbers. Those days are Tuesdays and Fridays. Despite what feature films might have us believe, the majority of robbers are not experts. They are not professional bank robbers. They are rank amateurs. Eighty percent of individual bank robbers
have never been convicted of a bank robbery before. It's their first time out.
And may probably the numbers will show 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 Voltron esque kind of thing. Instead, eighty percent operate alone. And they also use predictable patterns. 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, that's that's a huge part of it. According to the Department of Justice, the FBI's clearance rate for bank robbery is a little under sixty percent 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 mean will get caught sometimes 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.
There was a Yeah, there's this excellent vice video called rap Monument, which has it's just a cavalcade of mostly amazing MC'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 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 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 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 if Ferrari or a mansion, or a Wendy's.
Franchise, A Wendy's franchise. Sure, I mean, that's when you've really made it, right.
Yeah.
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 realists. We often hear about millions of dollars billions of dollars in some cases disappearing, but life for the average bank robber is pretty hard scrabble and hard won. There was a study by several British economists
that examined just the nuts and bolts math this. So what they found is the average return on a bank heist in 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 mist.
Yeah, and a lot of that, you know, if you're looking at it on average, you're talking about the loan actors that 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. 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 its whole other thing. Like if you walk into a bank just wielding a knife or something, change 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 surveilled areas of the world. We did mention this in a previous episode, just the density of cameras.
Yeah. Well, the interesting thing that these people also found, these economists that are 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 the robbery or the takeaway by in the UK it's a little over nine thirty three pounds. That translates to a bit over fifteen grand, So that feels like a valuable contribution. But we have to keep in mind the per person hall diminishes with every new member 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 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 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 be hungry, homeless, et cetera, 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 twenty thirteen, the poverty threshold at least would be an annual income of eleven four and ninety dollars per per So for one single person, eleven and a half thousand dollars a year, that'd be your income, right, And this means that on average, if you were just a professional bank robber or just all by your loansome, 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'd
have to invest smartly or launder it correctly and smartly just to stay out of the poorhouse, I guess.
Yeah. Yeah, And the most recent number we can find for the poverty threshold is from twenty sixteen. Yeah, two and eighty six dollars, So that still hasn't moved very much. But making a living as a bank robber has become increasingly difficult.
Yeah, but hey, 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, maybe there's yeah, maybe there there are 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 one of the most common forms of 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 conspire to move massive, gargantuan amounts of loot, some things that are objectively priceless 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 out there today.
And we'll do that right after a word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy, Matt, what do you say do you want to do? You want to start off with some heist where the perpetrators were ultimately apprehended.
Oh yeah, absolutely, And let's okay, let's first jump to September twelfth, nineteen ninety seven. This is a story about a bank robbery that feels like several major emotion pictures that I have seen or at least heard about. The target or let's just say, the title of it is the Dunbar Armored Robbery. That's like what we're going to 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 the money, and they're all armed. 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 Armored Inc. Company, So instead of robbing a single one of these cars, they went to the source of where the cars go back to the depot basically right. 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 a crew of
people that came with him. They tied up some security guards, they made off with a whole bunch of money, and they also destroyed all of the security tapes. They didn't they didn't destroy the cameras or anything. They took 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 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. Anyway, it's a really fascinating thing to look at.
It's also, I believe, still the largest cash robbery to have occurred in the US. Right.
I think it's been estimated to be that because it was around eighteen. It was around nineteen million dollars in cash.
In nineteen ninety seven, which would make it closer to thirty million dollars today. Yeah, this story is amazing, but it doesn't end happily for mister Pace.
Oh no, no, no, he got caught as well as several other people. Alan Pace the third was considered the mastermind, you know, if we're going to use those terms. He was the guy who came up with the idea because he was the inside man. He knew the ins and outs. But he also had some people working with him, like Eric Damon Boyd, one of the accomplices. There were several people working with him that ended up going to jail and getting arrested and you know, going to trial and ended up in the slammer.
Yeah. Eugene Lamar Hill, I think was the was the weak link there, or at least at 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 gang attempted to be pretty smart and 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 like a PO Box Corporation or
LLC 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 could have just come from an armor t rock 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 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. And then I think there was a broken taillight or something that was found 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, 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 those front companies in 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 messed up. Those guys saw
justice or experience justice, are experiencing it. But again, 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, Yeah, but how how does a person feel if they are in prison 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 going to get into a similar thing to that a little bit later in the episode, where you just 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 Securitas Depot heist.
Yes, okay, so this one jumps us forward to February twenty first, two thousand and six. This time we're in Kent, southeast of London. If you're looking at a map and secure TOAs just like the old Dunbar group, they guess what, transferring tons of money and valuables in armored cars, And this time we're at a Securitas depot instead of a dumbbar depot. Same 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 in order to be successful they were going to need some leverage. They went to the home of Colin Dixon, who was the manager of this depot, and 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 of this crew of people to the depot let them in.
Those guys then essentially kidnapped all of the workers who were at the depot and they tied them all up and they took just giant basically cages and pallets of cash and valuables. They loaded him onto a giant truck and took off and they ended up making away with fifty three million British pounds.
Which makes this the largest cash robbery in UK history. Again, this is ruthless work, but they do end up getting caught, right they I do want to stay just for a second on their process here. Yeah, because the way that they got Colin Dixon was pretty devious.
Yeah.
They impersonated police officers.
Yeah. They pulled him over and he was basically like, 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 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 survive Thankfully, after the robbery secured, US offers a reward of two million pounds, no real questions asked, Just give us information that will lead to the arrest of these assailants. And it works out because on February twenty third, two days later, police have already arrested two people and charged them with conspiracy to commit robbery.
But they're just people who were on the crew, right right, because some of the main people that were involved with this, or at least that were thought to be the masterminds, had actually fled to Morocco smartly I think on their part there, but they fled and they were I believe. They're justcribed in several places as cage fighters or former cage fighters. There's a guy named Paul Allen and another
one named Lee Murray or Murray m r Ay. 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 these guys in Morocco. Then finally Paul Allen gets extradited from Morocco. He gets charged, but he keeps telling everybody well, no, I wasn't the mastermind. I was just doing what I was told. I was working for this guy Lee Murra
or Murray, and Lee is already incarcerated in Morocco. So it's like, I guess he was kind of using 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 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. We'll get to the loose diamonds, don't worry, holds its value, one of the sketchiest things people can have. They also bought illegal things like drugs, and 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 kind of tactic works. If someone is attempting to
disappear you know, we hear about despots having plastics. Yeah, we hear about you know, people in drug cartels getting plastic surgery. The thing, the thing about it is not to quote Donald Rumswell directly, but it's it's an unknown unknown right. 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 nosed 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.
I'm sure we may be conflating populations there.
Don't do that.
So what we see here is that they're they're caught because, despite their best intentions, they went to a country that has an extradition treaty with the United Kingdom. And in our earlier conversations about pseudoside, we've learned right that 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 were covered about twenty four million I think, I think twenty four million pounds of the fifty something fifty.
Four 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 heightst we just talked about the people got caught, but the money didn't get caught.
Yeah, not necessarily, it got 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 nineteen eighty July.
Twelfth, great year for bank robberies.
Oh yeah, oh yeah. This is in Knightsbridge, London. This is or it's 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 Knightsbridge Safe Deposit Center, so less of a bank, more of a giant repository of safety deposit boxes, a giant a collection of safety deposit boxes. And there was a small crew of people that went into there, including this gentleman named Valerio Viiccei Vishay via Viccha. I don't know how to
say it, but Valerio, let's call him. They walked in pretending like they were 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 pistol, 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 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 again that's not cash, right, it's it's valuables, mostly valuables, some cash, probably bonds and all these other things. But the safety deposit boxes were owned by millionaires in London, owned by famous people like sports. They're just famous peoples of all.
Ilk aristocrats, yes, money royalty. Right. They forced open one hundred and fourteen boxes, I think, yes, what around two hours, so they were in the room for a while.
Yeah, but one hundred and fourteen box is 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 successful with these past three. The robbery itself goes off pretty well, right, right in all three of these, right, 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 several accomplices of Valerio who ended up getting caught. Yeah.
Yeah, and let's let's spend a little bit of time on Valerio because he is anomalous in the world of robberies. Remember we said earlier at the top that eighty percent are loaners, eighty percent are first time amate two with this not your buddy Valario. He came to England from Italy, where he was already wanted on charges for something like fifty armed robberies. Yeah so maybe not necessarily banks, but this guy was no stranger to the hustle.
No, he wasn't. 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 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 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 notice that he's there.
You can only assume he's using a passport that's not his.
Well, 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. Oh wow, that belonged to him, though was found on the scene. Also, I know we just mentioned blood, but we should say no one was killed, right, Oh, yes, of course, right. So he goes This guy is such a pill. He he goes back to England, as you said, to get his testosa ship to South America. Not the smartest move. And people who saw him thought he was
not an impressive person. They thought 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 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.
Yeah, because they smash 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 sentenced to twenty two years in prison, but I believe being extradited to Italy.
Yeah, he goes back to Italy after a little bit of jail time, ends up spending more jail time in Italy, but he ends him this thing that's called a day prison, or he's got like day privileges while he's at prison, 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, 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 a shootout with an officer and dying.
Right, So 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 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? In this country, there are a lot of innocent people who
have been fatally shot for quote unquote acting suspiciously. In this 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's some rumors that I was reading about on there, but who knows. In the end of this huge heist, the sixty million pounds worth of stuff, authorities got ten million or they were covered roughly ten million pounds worth of stuff and valuables, but the rest of it was either spent or can't be found. 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. I don't want to make light of the fact that this guy died. He was also by acting suspiciously. In his case, he was sitting in a stolen car, that's what it was, while he was waiting for the van. I would say that is suspicious. Yeah, I was like, just because 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 it was originally sentenced for the Knightsbridge robbery. I just want to see what you think about this. I 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 continuing 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 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 loading a message.
Yeah, you'll send a message. Well, yeah, I mean, this is the kind of guy who watched 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 that was golden and it was a shotgun. Yeah. Anyway,
I'm done talking about this Valerio guy. Let's take a quick break from our sponsor and we'll come back and talk about some of the heists that went really well for the people 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 some of the heists where the perpetrators got away asterisk asterisk caveat at all. So, just to be clear about this kind of situation we're talking about, there are quite a few, 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 scene, but we don't know
what happened to it. The breadcrumb trail has disappeared, right, So we can laundry lists some of those, but some of them deserved 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 about how it worked.
Yeah, we at least know the best assumptions, according to authorities,
about perhaps the groups that were involved here. So let's jump to January twentieth, nineteen seventy 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 that 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 of the Middle East in Beirut, and they were able to empty the entire contents of that vault and it's estimated to be somewhere 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, somewhere between sixty million to one hundred and fifty million in twenty ten. So a really big takeaway.
Yeah, And this also touches on something that I think we were all somewhat anticipating when we talked about successful heist, like one hundred percent successful heist, there was a state actor involved. These weren't just some random amateurs. They were a group associated with the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasara Arafat. Because at the time Lebanon is in the grips of a civil war exactly. They're able to break into this otherwise fairly fortified bank, right.
Yeah, while the chaos is going on, while there's so much confusion and violence occurring, they were just able to use that opportunity essentially as cover to go in and take this place.
Yet and no one, not only has no one involved in this hest 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 decides to skidaddle off to a country that won't extradite. Instead, they disappear, they pull akizer.
So say, yeah, just to give you an idea of what it looks like, you're if you think about it this way, there are people with large, high powered rifles that have grenade launchers attached to them, that are wearing military fatigues that are unmarked, so it's not that you're officially associated with any military. They roll up with their grenade launchers, and it's pretty crazy the way they did this, I mean, and that must have been a very up
like opposing force just to see it coming. You 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 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. 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 a family member, like a sibling or a child of one of the what which we call them, well, we should call them criminals, but I like histers. 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 They used C four, the plastic explosive to gain access to the vault, which you know, it generally doesn't occur if you are a group of citizens 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 ideally, it's not something we want people to be able to order from Amazon or eBay.
Yeah, and you know grenade launcher is attached to your sixteens.
Yeah, that's military hardware. So let's fast forward to two thousand and four, a few days before Christmas. Here we are in jolly old Ireland.
Yes, to Belfast. So let's 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 foreign currencies were taken.
Yeah. According to The Guardian, in total, as of two thousand and eight, ten people have been arrested 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.
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 were us dollars and euros, right.
Can we just talk about the significance of this robbery. 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 IRA and a couple other groups that were involved in tensions over the years.
Again similar to state actors.
Yeah, so they're very you're in a precarious position, they're already 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 state programs and everything. Still it's a symbolic act.
Sure, that's that's the idea, and 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 IRA said, no, why would we do that. What 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 Securitas heist, some masked what they're being referred to in the Guardian as masked gang, masked and armed gang members. These guys show up at two homes, two separate homes of two separate bank managers there who work at the Northern Bank, right, and they hold people hostage, specifically their families, at gunpoint. Then they get moved around
a little bit. They you know, they take some of the family members to like a forest. Apparently they're really spreading these people out. They're 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 he because he knows that his family's at risk.
Right.
But then when the banks close that evening, the bank, these gang members actually like were let in by this manager, let into the vaults and then they just loaded up a van with all of the contents.
And got away. That's the craziest thing. Again, the people who were arrested, the people who were charged, were not charged with actually carrying this out. I believe currently as of twenty nineteen, one person has been convicted. 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 someone involved is listening to this show. Now. When I say more likely, I still don't mean it's probable. Yes, but if you're listening, No, we can't even say that, Matt. You can say someone might be listening. And that's about where we have to draw the line. I believe legal 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 two million, out of the sixty pounds I guess in banknotes were discovered. And then there's another like one hundred k and US banknotes and listen to this. According to the Guardian, these US banknotes were found in the toilet of the Police Athletics Association's New
Forge country club. One hundred thousand dollars of the money that was still in there was found in the police country club.
Interesting, so this definitely has the This definitely has the aroma of an inside job, you know what I mean?
Yeah, oh yeah, but the I think the the authority is 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 did anything to do with that money. It was just put there.
Okay, sure, all right, wink, yeah, this let's continue to build on this. Let's let's look at just a few quick laundry lists, okay, sure 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 in the course of the US's involvement in Iraq, in the course
of the US's involvement in Afghanistan. So if we look at this, what we find will be almost a thousand, almost a thousand cases of alleged fraud committed not not by you know, not by local militias or terrorists, but committed by contractors working from Uncle Sam. As we know, you know, war is a war is very fertile soil
for corruption, for profiteering. In this case, a US audit found that the occupying force 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 talking about several associations, several groups, but one of the main ones is our old pals Blackwater aka XE I think aaka Academi. Well, which is our old pals, Eric Prince.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. There's a fascinating article about this that I would recommend called BBC uncovers Law Iraq Billions by a journalist named Jane Corbin, and 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 some parts of this. So an investigation by the BBC found that not just nine billion that's the US 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 that way. Wow, let me read this part too. So the BBC used US and Iraqi government sources to research how much some private contractors have profited from the conflict in Iraq and the subsequent rebuilding.
A US gagging order is 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, I think we need to do that.
I agree, I agree completely. 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 in US history, in human history. 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. Oh man, I'll never forget. Was it Rumsfeld? He was like, yeah, we don't know, just billions of dollars that we can't account for 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 and three when the United States was invading Iraq again, and 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 attack, we're at war.
We need to make sure this money isn't stolen by the opposing for horses, 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 moneies that are accrued from all these various places, but you know, are thought to be the state's money. Depending on when a conflict is occurring and how it's occurring, I don't know.
It 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 terms of escaping arrest and in terms of escaping arrest with the money or with the loot, whatever that may be, those successful heist tend to have state actors somehow involved. Those are the inside jobs that carry the most weight in 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 twenty fifteen that talks about how this came to be. And the big question is whether these missing dollars vanished due to a purposeful, 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. It's so weird. Those black budgets, they just don't match up with the money that doesn't exist.
Yeah, As of twenty fifteen, 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 and two and twenty thirteen. Again, that's not the 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 a black budget. It's a mystery box, you know.
And such as the nature of military conflicts.
I guess, yeah, well, here just for a peak behind the current without getting too into the weeds on it. Under the Emergency Response program, here commanders could spend money to respond to sudden catastrophes, immediate needs, you know, fires, floods, earthquakes. Theoretically that kind 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 fourth one hundred ninety nine thousand.
Dollars seriously or just four hundred and fifty thousand.
Yeah, yeah, you don't want to be you don't want to show off. You don't need to test EUROSA.
Man. That 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 this point, currently they have discontinued that ambiguous process and 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, 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. Yeah, and that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts. It's right, let us know what you think. You can reach.
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