These are the top 10 unsolved heists in history, ranked by the value of the goods stolen adjusted
for inflation to 2014 US dollars.
The largest unsolved bank robbery in the history of the UK - or all of Europe for that matter
- went down in December, 2004 in Belfast, Ireland.
On a Sunday night, groups of armed men dressed as police officers entered the homes of two
Northern Bank officials and held their families hostage.
The two bank employees were told to go to work the next day as if nothing was wrong,
or their families would be killed.
Fearing for their safety, the workers did what they were told and helped the criminals
gain access to the bank’s vault, allowing the gang to make off with a haul equivalent
to $53m in today’s dollars.
Although one person was convicted of money laundering, despite the high profile of the
case, no one has been brought to justice for committing the actual crime.
In August 1994, three gunman burst into the jewelry store of the famous InterContinental
Carlton Cannes luxury hotel on the French Riviera firing automatic weapons and quickly
making off with jewelry and precious stones worth nearly $50 million.
The investigation revealed no bullet holes, meaning the guns were filled with blanks.
No arrests were ever made.
Interestingly, the hotel was the main filming location for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 jewelry
heist themed “To Catch a Thief” starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.
For several months in 2005, criminals working from a rented commercial property two blocks
away from the Fortaleza branch of Brazil’s Central Bank, dug a tunnel several hundred
feet long that came up right underneath the bank’s vault.
Over the course of a weekend, they successfully disarmed various sensors and alarms and removed
five large containers of cash totaling more than R$164 million Brazilian real.
The sophisticated heist wasn’t discovered until Monday morning, when the bank reopened
and the bills weren’t numbered sequentially, allowing the robbers plenty of time to escape
with cash that would be nearly impossible to trace.
Several people involved with the crime have been caught in the years since, but the majority
of the 25 suspects remain at large.
In a strange twist, 6 of the robbers have been kidnapped after the incident and held
for large ransom payments which their families - presumably using the money stolen in the
robbery - paid.
One of these was an alleged mastermind in the case who was found shot to death on an
isolated road with handcuff marks on his wrists.
There’s evidence that dirty police and security officials may have helped carry out the heist.
One morning in 2005 a group of heavily armed men dressed as KLM airline employees stormed
a cargo area at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam in broad daylight and stole an armored truck
filled with diamonds and other valuables.
The precious, uncut stones were on their way to Antwerp, Belgium - the diamond capital
of Europe.
The abandoned truck was later recovered, empty, of course.
No suspects have ever been apprehended despite the many witnesses at the scene.
Antwerp is exactly where we head for the 6th most successful heist in history back in 2003,
another $100m diamond job in the center of the city’s gem district.
Leonardo Notarbartolo started rented an office in the Antwerp Diamond Center building nearly
three full years beforehand in order to credibly pose as a diamond merchant, gain access to
the building, learn how it was secured, and carefully plan the operation.
When the time was right, Notarbartolo and his five-man team sprung into action, gaining
access to the vault and more than 123 of its 160 safe-deposit boxes.
After doing a poor job of dispensing of the evidence linking him to the crime, Notarbartolo
was apprehended and found guilty of orchestrating the heist.
Sentenced to just ten years in prison though, he was freed early.
None of his accomplices or the diamonds, were ever found.
The biggest diamond heist ever was over in a flash as you can see from this security
footage of a man armed with a handgun carrying out a 30- second raid of a jewelry showcase
at a French Riviera hotel.
The unarmed guards were not willing to give their lives to protect the inventory allowing
the man to get exactly what he came for: a sack of 72 jewels in a suitcase that was part
of a display put on by the Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev.
Despite a $1.3m reward, no arrests have been made.
Nineteen years earlier, this same hotel was the one robbed by the armed men wielding blank-shooting
automatic weapons that I told you about earlier in this video.
On January 20, 1976, as Lebanon was embroiled in a bloody civil war, the Palestinian Liberation
Organization took full advantage of the chaos and robbed one of the biggest banks in the
country.
They started by blasting through a wall from an adjacent church, but they couldn’t break
into the vault.
Instead of giving up, they just called in more fighters and took complete control of
the surrounding streets.
Because of the war engulfing Beirut, the security situation in the country was so out of control,
the gang were able to hold the area - not for a few minutes or a few hours - but for
two entire days while they waited for the arrival of locksmiths employed by French mobsters.
Once inside, they took two more days to clean out all the currency, gold, bonds, jewelry
and rare coins from the vault; making off with a haul worth around $150m in today’s
money.
After paying the mobsters for their services, they chartered planes and flew the loot to
places like Switzerland, where much of it disappeared into the abyss that is the land
of the secret, tax-free bank account.
In 2008, three men wearing ski masks strolled into a small, private art museum in Zurich
right before it closed on a Sunday afternoon and - while forcing terrified staff and visitors
at gunpoint to lie facedown on the ground, snatched four paintings off the walls of one
of the rooms, threw them into the back of their van, and sped off in broad daylight,
never to be seen again.
The four works stolen were a Cézanne, a Degas, a van Gogh, and a Monet, together worth an
estimated $163 million.
Each year, the F.B.I.
says losses from cultural property crime like this can total as high as $6 billion globally.
Just like in Beirut thirty years earlier, war torn Baghdad’s banks were extremely
susceptible after the 2003 US-led invasion completely destabilized the security of Iraq.
Except instead of bursting through the bank from the outside, one night in 2007, three
guards whose job it was to guard the Dar Es Salaam bank, decided that a better idea would
be to just go ahead and rob it.
And man did they rob it.
In the biggest bank heist in history, the men made off with $282m in US bills.
Since it would have been difficult to get through the city’s many checkpoints with
that much cash, they almost certainly had help from the militias...or maybe they were
forced to do it by the militias who may have helped themselves to the money.
However it went down - even though - as bank employees - their identities were well known
- they were never caught.
At 1:24 a.m. on the morning of St Patrick’s Day 1990 in Boston, two men wearing police
uniforms tricked the two security guards inside the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum into thinking
there had been a disturbance, and were buzzed into the building.
These fake cops then placed the security guards under arrest.
When one of the guards asked why they were being handcuffed, the robbers responded, “you’re
not being arrested, this is a robbery, don’t give us any problems and you won’t get hurt.”
The intruders then took the guards down to the basement and handcuffed them to a pipe.
For over 81 minutes, the thieves worked their way through the museum, making two trips to
their car to load it up with over 13 pieces of art, including works by Manet, Degas, Vermeer
and Rembrandt.
It was the largest private property theft ever, valued at over $500m.
The crime remains unsolved and the items are all still missing.