The Heist

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.