The Greatest Heists of All Time
Heists happen every day in the world. Whether you are glancing at the newspaper or watching your favorite news station, you may have come across a report on the latest heist in your area. Below are considered to be the top ten heists of all time, well at least so far:
1. Mona Lisa - On August 21, 1911, former workman VIncenzo Peruggia stole the tiny painting which was then valued at one-million dollars. He did this by ripping it from the wall and stuffing it in his shirt. The painting was recovered two years later and VIncenzo was captured by a honest art dealer whom VIncenzo was trying to pawn the painting to. The painting today is worth over six-hundred million dollars and has a high-security room all to itself.
2. Brinks Inc. Headquarters - On January 17, 1950, over two-million dollars was stolen from the world’s popular security company. The job was pulled off by eleven Boston natives. The robbery even shocked J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI back at the time, who was sure that the job had to of been by the mob or Communists. The case was cracked six years later by one of the bandits who decided to speak out when he was put in jail on weapons and parole violations. He spilled everything, including the eighteen months of planning, the specially-made keys, and even the costumes they wore. The men were indicted just four days before the Massachusetts statute of limitations expired. Half the loot remains at large.
3. The Great Train Robbery - On August 8, 1963, Royal Mail train conductor Jack Mills stopped the train when he had noticed a red signal ahead. When he went to investigate, he was confronted by fifteen men in ski masks and helmets. Fifteen minutes later, the robbers took away 124 mail sacks that carried $7,145,600 in bank notes. 120 miles away from the crime scene stood the robber’s hideaway, where they counted the loot and even used it to play a game of Monopoly. Failing to torch the farmhouse, the police found every-one’s fingerprints, including some that were found on the Monopoly board itself.
4. The British Bank of the Middle East - A group associated with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) on January 20, 1976 broke into the British Bank of the Middle East in Beirut. They used brute force, blasting through a wall that was shared with a Catholic Church. With help from Corsican locksmiths, they cracked the vault and took its contents, valued at twenty to fifty millions dollars worth of gold bars, stocks, jewels, and foreign currency. The loot is today worth more than three times what it was back in 1976.
5. JFK Airport - Six million dollars of untraceable U.S. bills, one million dollars worth of jewels, and a huge jackpot of foreign currency were stolen by a team of masked gunmen at 3:05 AM on December 11, 1978. A busy foreman had decided to hold the Manhattan-bound, German-sent cargo over the weekend. The robbers, who were described as middle-aged white men with Brooklyn accents, were never found, despite finding the getaway car a few weeks later. There was an empty envelope addressed “John F. Kennedy Airport” carefully placed on the inside. Police believe the robbery to be an inside job planned by mobster “Jimmy the Gent” Burke, who was played by actor Robert De Niro in the 1990 film, Goodfellas.
6. Boston’s Gardner Museum - Two men dressed as police officers stole more than three-hundred million dollars worth of art from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum by ductaping two guards and cutting the paintings from their frames. Despite the five-million dollar reward and the assigning of thirty FBI agents to the case, the art is still missing.
7. Stopwatch Gang - A trio of Canadian natives moved to California to get rich. They earned the nickname “The Stopwatch Gang” by robbing about one-hundred banks during the 1970s and 1980s. One of them kept a stopwatch at each robbery, making sure it only took two minutes to complete the robbery. They wore presidential Halloween masks and accumulated fifteen-million dollars of stolen cash. They were captured in the late-1980s. One managed to escape from prison twice. Two of them went off to write books about their own experiences and one is currently in jail serving an eighteen-year sentence for a bank robbery he plead guilty to in 1999.
8. Antwerp’s Diamond Center - In February 2003, thieves cleared out 123/160 maximum-security vaults in Belgium’s Diamond Center, making it the biggest diamond heist in the country’s history. The stolen diamonds are said to be worth around one-hundred million euros. They are yet to be recovered.
9. Central Bank of Iraq - As U.S. soldiers started bombing Baghdad and looters began plundering the country’s museums, almost one-billion dollars disappeared from the Central Bank of Iraq. Authorities knew right away that it was Qusay Hussein, son of former dictator Saddam Hussein. Qusay was killed during a three-hour gunfight with U.S. soldiers. Authorities found hundreds of thousands of dollars in the walls of Hussein’s palace. The rest of the money is yet to be found.
10. Brazil’s Banco Central - After three months of digging a 656-foot-long tunnel from a nearby farmhouse, a group of Brazilian robbers crawled two city-blocks to the bank and blasted their way through a meter of steel-reinforced concrete during the weekend of August 6-7, 2005. Nearly sixty-five million dollars was stolen from the vaults. Two months after the burglary, the body of one of the suspected masterminds was found on the side of an isolated road two-hundred miles west of Rio de Janeiro.
Good read, that photo of Mona Lisa looks good.
Cool list. I seriously doubt though, that all the great art masterpieces displayed in museums around the world are the actual works of art themselves – they must be copies. Curators of museums are not that stupid to put billions of dollars worth of paintings on display.