Heists

Dec. 19, 2011

Bridego Bridge just after the robbery

In August of 1963, 15 men pulled off “The Great Train Robbery,” at Sears Crossing in Buckinghamshire in southeast England, netting the equivalent of $68.5 million in today’s dollars.  Of the £2,631,684 stolen, less than £400,000 was ever recovered.

The mastermind, known as “the Ulsterman,” would never be identified.  One of the robbers, Ronnie Biggs, became an international celebrity after escaping from prison.   

by Mark Pulham

The train didn’t seem to be anything special. It had a single diesel locomotive at the front, pulling a number of coaches, 12 in all, through the night, heading for its final destination, Euston Station in London. The only difference was that the coaches didn’t have windows. This was the overnight mail train from Scotland to London.

The train, known as the “Up Special” made the same journey every night, and had been doing so for 125 years. There had never been any major incidents.

But all that was about to change.

In 1963, there were many events which would be considered significant or noteworthy. In the United States, the year began with George Wallace taking over as the governor of Alabama after a landslide victory the previous November. In his inaugural speech he spoke the line for which he will always be remembered, “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Later on in the year, he would stand in the doorway of the University of Alabama to stop the enrollment of black students, only stepping aside when confronted by federal marshals, the deputy attorney general, and the Alabama National Guard.

The end of the year came with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

In between those two events, Alcatraz closed as a penitentiary, the first James Bond film, Dr. No, had its North American premiere, and Martin Luther King gave his 17-minute “I Have A Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

In Great Britain, it was the swinging sixties. Heavy snow dominated the beginning of the year, with snow remaining on the ground in many places right into April. It was the worst winter in 16 years. The end of the year would see the police in Ashton-under-Lyne begin a fruitless search for a missing 12-year-old boy named John Kilbride.

Kim Philby, a high ranking member of British Intelligence, would turn out to be a double agent spying for the Russians. He would disappear and resurface later in Moscow. It was an embarrassment for the Conservative Government. One of Philby’s fellow double agents, Guy Burgess would die later in the year.

In Gorton, Manchester, 16-year-old Pauline Reade went missing, the first victim of the Moors Murderers, Brady and Hindley.

Harold Wilson became the leader of the Labour Party after the sudden death of Hugh Gaitskill; The Beatles released their first album “Please, Please Me” which went to number one and sparked Beatlemania. The album would remain at the top for 30 weeks until finally being toppled by their second album.

Following the Philby spy humiliation, the Conservative Government was hit by a second scandal, when 48-year-old John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, resigned after admitting that he had been having a “secret” affair with a 21-year-old woman named Christine Keeler, a call girl. The problem was that Profumo wasn’t the only one having an affair with Keeler. Also sharing her bed was Yevgeny Ivanov, a senior naval attaché, and spy, at the Soviet Embassy in London. When Keeler was interviewed, she used the term “nuclear payload,” a term not used by the general public at the time. It was clear that John Profumo liked to talk in bed. The Profumo Affair would eventually bring down the Government.

In other news, Pope John XXIII died, and in the Soviet Union Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.

And in the middle of it all, in August, 15 men, plus a few accomplices, would commit a crime so audacious that it would go down in history as one of the greatest robberies of all time, one that all others would be compared to: The Great Train Robbery.

May 2, 2011

An excerpt from Dane Batty’s new book: Wanted: Gentleman Bank Robber: The True Story of Leslie Ibsen Rogge, One of the FBI’s Most Elusive Criminals (Nish Publishing, 2011)

by Dane Batty

My partner, Bo, and I were pretty successful. So much so that we bought a condo in the Houston area, furnished it and had a car in the garage for an emergency getaway. We sat around night after night getting stoned and trying to come up with original ideas to make money. Since Bo was broke, we decided that we would do two banks, one after the other, and use the distraction of the first to reduce the police presence at the second. We also wanted a natural barrier between the banks, some type of separation that would slow down the response from the first bank to the second. The simplest would be mountains or a river, something natural. It was in the fall, so we wanted to stay in the South and didn’t want to go more than a day and a night away. We planned on taking my motor home and leaving my wife, Linda, and the car. We would be gone a week, max. Linda had no idea.

After scattering maps all over the floor, we came up with two possibilities. The first was East and West Memphis with the Mississippi River in between the two. The second was Baton Rouge with the same barrier. We ruled Memphis number two and turned our attention to Baton Rouge. The big city was on the east of the river, and little Baton Rouge on the west side was on the way home back to Houston. Things were coming together, and we took off going east on I-10.

We found a trailer court on Baton Rouge’s east side that was real low-key. Very easily, we acquired all the frequencies for the scanner. In town, we found very detailed maps of the entire community and fire department maps showing the grids that sometimes made a big difference as to how the police react to major crimes.

It was time to go to work and find every bank in the area and put them on our maps including cop shops, sub-stations, highway patrol and county sheriff stations. The biggest part of the city, about 400 thousand people, was separated by the river from the 20 thousand on the west, so it seemed logical that we would hit one on the east, come west and hit number two, then leave on the freeway west. Baton Rouge-proper was a big challenge. It is a southern town, with mostly blacks, with a medium to high crime rate—that meant a lot of police. Our frequency director books showed how many cop cars and radios, how many hand-helds (street cops) and how many repeaters, and the same research went into the highway trooper and parish cops. Most of the time, we listened to the scanners main net for crimes and how they were handled. Although by law all the radio transmitting in the U.S. must have a license from the FCC, the cops would use a few other frequencies for their top crimes that they for sure didn’t want people to listen to. If a crime happened, the dispatcher might say, “All detectives to Tac Number One.” People don’t know about the frequency, so they didn’t get to listen. When this happened, I would turn my scanner to scan and try to find the frequency they were on. After a few nights and a weekend, I could begin to figure out their methods of operation, including where their “eyes in the skies” were and their hours as well. It was information that could make or break a good robbery.

Jan. 20, 2010 Updated May 21, 2010

Tony Musulin

 It’s always about the money – but was it this time? No one had heard of security van driver Tony Musulin until he drove off with $16.7 million – France’s biggest robbery ever – without having even uttered one threatening word.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

As any French cop will tell you, the weeks before a great festive occasion – Christmas, Easter, Mothers’ Day – robbers are active people.  They target any place where there ought to be large amounts of cash – supermarkets, jewelry stores, gold bullion dealers, post offices, banks, and security vans. Always, they use guns as a means of persuasion – from ordinary hand-held pistols to Russian AK47s or Israeli Uzis, but when it comes to security vans, their favorite way of getting to the money is to blast their way through the armored steel with rocket-propelled grenades; the latter are easily obtained these days from former Communist Bloc countries.

Thursday, November 5, Christmas little over a month away, television and radio newsrooms in France hastily prepared a Breaking News item. A Loomis security van had disappeared.  So too one of the van’s three guards: The driver.

The daring $6.5 million robbery of a British Airways van in February at Heathrow Airport had all the markings of an inside job, according to former mobster Henry Hill. At JFK, Hill took Air France for $480,000 in 1968 and Lufthansa for a record $6 million in 1978.

by Jon Tait

Former New York gangster Henry Hill is convinced that the daring $6.5 million dawn heist at Heathrow Airport on Feb. 11 – described by British police as the "perfect crime" -- was an inside job.

At 6.30 a.m. two men dressed in British Airways uniforms stopped a BA security van in the cargo hold at Terminal Four and bound the driver with zip cords. They transferred eight red cash boxes - containing used notes bound for New York's JFK from Bahrain - into their own van and drove off. The van was later discovered burnt-out in the residential area of Feltham in West London.

Hill knows something about airport heists. He walked out of the John F. Kennedy Airport with a suitcase packed with $480,000 in cash after raiding Air France in April 1968. And he was part of the Jimmy 'The Gent' Burke gang that masterminded and carried out the notorious Lufthansa robbery, which netted over $6 million in cash and jewels, at JFK 10 years later.

At the time, the Brinks heist in Boston was called "the crime of the century." The take of over $2.7 million was the largest in U.S. history, but it was the cold, calculating efficiency of the robbery that so stunned and intrigued the nation.

by J.J. Maloney

On January 17, 1950, at 7:30 p.m., a group of armed robbers walked away from the Brinks Building, at 165 Prince Street in Boston, with $1,218,211.19 in cash and more than $1.5-million in checks, money orders and other securities.

It was a textbook robbery – the largest in U.S. history at the time. There had been seven robbers – all wearing Navy P-coats, gloves and caps, and Halloween masks. They wore rubbers and crepe-soled shoes.

The robbers said little and knew exactly what they were doing. They'd come through a series of locked doors to reach the second floor, where Brinks employees were counting and storing money.

The only evidence was a chauffeur's cap one of the robbers left behind, and the tape and rope they'd used to gag and tie up the employees. They also took four revolvers from the employees.