Bank robbery isn't just a crime.
Getting in, getting out, not getting caught afterwards,
it's also an act of imagination.
This is so much more than a heist, and you know it.
It’s an unfinished poem.
And while the mastermind behind
La Casa de Papel has said that the show
doesn't pull from any one real heist,
it's hard to imagine that the criminal creativity
shown by real robbers didn't inspire
some of the Professor's wild plans.
These are some of the most audacious
real bank heists ever,
all carried out using different,
and even creative, methods.
The Professor can seemingly find
any vehicle that the heist demands,
and he's actually not alone in that amongst bank robbers.
Perhaps the most creative vehicle usage happened in 2009,
in – and above – the Stockholm suburb of Vastberga.
Around 5 in the morning, a stolen civilian helicopter
landed on the roof of a cash depot –
owned by security company G4S –
and dropped off a squad of robbers,
armed with guns and explosives.
As they went to work inside, raiding the cages,
the airborne thieves (and their allies) also managed
to keep the responding police forces totally grounded.
First, they planted suspected explosives in the police
hangar, preventing any helicopters from taking off,
and then they cleared the roads around the depot,
using the ancient weapon of caltrops.
The thieves got away that day, and ditched the chopper,
but seven of the helicopter bandits
were convicted of the crime a year later.
The 5.3 million though?
Its location is largely still up in the air.
While an aerial assault certainly captures attention,
a skilled bank robber can get pretty far
with a solid ground game – an underground game.
You'll notice that the Professor
and co spend a lot of time digging.
It's actually hard to pick just one real tunnel heist
because they're all riveting.
But the robbery of the Banco Central – Brazil's central bank –
in the Northern city of Fortaleza stands out
for its sheer size and considerable creativity.
Beginning in March 2005, robbers tunneled 80 meters
from a rented property to the Central Bank's vault,
breaching it five months later, on a weekend in August
when staff was nowhere to be found.
The tunnel was lit and wood-paneled.
It even had rudimentary air conditioning.
Police later estimated it cost $200,000 to build.
And the thieves showed such attention to detail.
They set up a landscaping business offering “synthetic grass,”
complete with advertising and promotional baseball hats –
so that no one questioned all that dirt from the digging.
In only a few days, their tunnel allowed them to liberate
7,716 pounds of currency via a pulley system –
and it was untraceable, uninsured!
When the crime was finally noticed,
police found little but a white powder
that the gang had spread to foil fingerprinting.
The robbers scattered – 11 cars headed
in different directions across Brazil.
Some were arrested, a truly shocking number were kidnapped
and held for ransom by other criminals,
and some went on to other scores.
But maybe none of them reached the same heights...
as when they were underground.
But we're not quite done with Brazilians yet.
Because as the Professor demonstrates over and over again,
the same old robber can pull off a brand new heist –
they just need to dream up a new identity.
Which is exactly what happened on another August weekend
in Sao Paulo in 2011.
A group of twelve men easily passed
through a security checkpoint at a branch of Banco Itau,
located on Brazil's Wall Street.
They all wore the same gray uniform
and told the guards they were there to replace furniture –
which checked out.
Staff knew of the bank's ongoing renovations.
But once inside, the “movers” subdued the armed guard
on the main floor and forced him to both
turn off the alarms, and open the doors for a second team,
armed with industrial grade power tools
designed to get to the vault's security deposit boxes.
We don't know everything that was in them –
weirdly, only 5 out of the 120 victims
filed a police report –
but we know there were huge diamonds, bars of gold,
and a watch collection more expensive than an apartment.
After ten hours of casual looting – at some point,
they even ordered fast food – the costumed thieves escaped,
and only later did we learn their true identities.
They were some of the same old robbers
who hit Fortaleza six years earlier,
back for something new.
At only $400,000, and taking place in a tiny town
in Washington state,
one might wonder why
this heist deserves inclusion.
But imagine this: it was a crime so creative that
even the prosecutor commended the robber for planning it.
And a lot of that is due to its use of decoys.
The fakeout is also a staple
of the Professor's bank-robbing playbook.
Throughout his heists, he used decoy robbers,
decoy getaway cars, decoy government assassins,
he even builds a decoy wall at one point.
So, the Professor would probably be a fan of the Washington State bandit,
who, in September of 2008, posted an ad on Craigslist,
offering high hourly wages for landscapers
who should show up at a bank parking lot
wearing yellow vests, blue shirts,
safety goggles, and respirators.
At the appointed time, the robber showed up wearing
the exact same outfit – but he went straight
for an armored car security guard,
pepper spraying him and grabbing his bag of money.
With the multiple identical landscapers obscuring his crime,
the thief stripped off his Velcro-lined clothes,
and – this is not a joke – hopped on a waiting inner tube
to float to a getaway car.
But all of the robber’s decoys couldn't stop the police
from later identifying the DNA from his mask.
Still, cheers to creativity.
As a bank robber on the Professor's crew,
sometimes you need a lot of patience.
But at other times, you just need a lot of explosions.
In Beirut in 1976, one group of robbers dreamed up
a similar scheme, balancing composure on one hand
and explosive brute force on the other –
as they plundered the British Bank of the Middle East.
It happened during the chaos of Lebanon's civil war.
So, even today, rumors still swirl about the culprits.
The PLO is considered the main suspect,
but a rival Lebanese Christian political party,
and even the Corsican Mafia, have been implicated as well.
It's a strange mix.
But the plan itself was pretty straightforward.
First, the robbers blasted into the building.
According to one colorful account,
they secured an empty lobby with grenade launchers,
under the cover of mortar fire –
but most just say they blew a hole
through the wall of a neighboring church,
right into the heart of the bank.
Then – possibly with the help of the Mafia safecrackers –
they blasted into the vaults themselves.
So, lots of explosions.
But then, the robbers patiently spent
at least two days in the bank
loading three trucks with their loot,
protected by both their guns
and the din of civil war around them.
So if you ever thought La Casa de Papel was unrealistic,
just remember: all those explosions over all that time,
and we've still never caught those
who blasted their way out of a Beirut bank
with $210 million.
But maybe you don't want to use all that messy force.
For discerning bank robbing masterminds,
the inside man has a certain grace.
Recruiting one can mean valuable information
about the scene, or even the potential for quiet sabotage,
which is why the Professor does it,
and why the gang responsible for one of the biggest
peacetime cash heists did it, too.
It happened in a small town in Kent, England,
the county just southeast of London,
at a Securitas cash depot, a kind of unassuming warehouse
for cash from banks and retailers.
The thieves, allegedly led by an actual mixed martial arts contender,
first seduced an underappreciated inside man to their side
who videotaped every inch of the depot
using a tiny camera affixed to his belt.
So, they knew they had to take elaborate steps
to disguise themselves from the many cameras inside,
even hiring a makeup artist to fashion
prosthetic noses and chins.
They also knew they couldn't get in without a pass,
so they kidnapped the depot manager (and his wife and child)
and forced him to let them in.
The Professor is not above threatening a family man, either.
We can place it anywhere you’d imagine.
Boom.
With the employees restrained at gunpoint,
the robbers filled a truck with cash
and made of with the loot after only an hour.
It was pure precision – the kind you can only get
with someone on the inside,
according to both cops and robbers.
From a robber's point of view, this was a good inside man.
But, in many cases, the inside man turns out to be
the crew's weakest link.
Cops look for them on big bank jobs.
It didn't happen in Kent, because the robbers basically
left all kinds of clues around their homes,
including a fingerprint smudged floor plan of the depot.
But an inside man famously crumbled under police pressure
and named names in the 1983 London Brinks Mat robbery.
So, inside men: they may be a dream in the beginning,
but it's a dream that might
turn into a nightmare by the end.
Futuristic gadgetry. It's something you expect
out of a sophisticated bank heist.
But – as the Professor's crew demonstrates –
sometimes the low-tech solution has value, too.
Both low and high were on display in Antwerp in 2003,
in what commentators called “the heist of the century.”
The target was the “Diamond Center”
in the city's Diamond District –
a notoriously secure location,
but one with a mouthwatering turnover
of $54 billion per year.
Enter the alleged Italian mastermind.
Like any good bank robber, he first did reconnaissance,
renting a security deposit box that allowed him
regular access to the vault.
And he concluded that it was impossible.
The vault was too well defended.
So, how did it happen that a guard later
walked into a vault one Monday to find it robbed
of at least $100 million in diamonds?
The answer is that, in the intervening months
the robber and his crew got extremely tech savvy.
On the high tech side, they placed a fingertip sized camera
on a wall, which fed its signal to electronics
housed in a working fire extinguisher nearby,
all to record guards as they entered
in a combination to the vault.
That same camera picked up the location
of a second physical key to the door, too.
But the low tech side is even better.
Maybe the most diabolical system the vault had
was its magnetic alarm: two fastened magnets
that sent a signal to the police if their attraction
was ever broken by someone opening the vault door.
The crew defeated it with a simple slab of aluminum.
It affixed to the magnets and prevented them from detaching,
so that the robbers could unbolt the alarm,
and slide it out of the way.
Once inside the vault, there was more:
heat sensors that could spell doom for the diamond thieves.
But once again, they had a response.
The day before the heist, the main robber coated the sensor
with hairspray, which prevented it from detecting
the temperature changes that would trigger it.
All in all, there were at least eight such devices
that the thieves successfully countered –
many using low-tech solutions, like tape and styrofoam.
So, bank robberies aren't all just James Bond gadgets.
Sometimes, a James Bond hair product will do.
Whether it's from the air or the ground,
with high-tech or low, via a disguise or a decoy,
or brute force or an insider advantage,
real life proves there's no shortage
of ways to pull off a heist –
if you're just a little creative.
After watching the show, we wondered:
has there ever been a scuba diving heist?
The answer is, well, not quite, but kinda close?
Thieves in Belgium used diving tanks
to get through narrow sewer pipes up to a vault,
and a bank robber in Washington state grabbed scuba gear
to make an aquatic getaway, before being tackled by police.
Clearly, there's something in the water in Washington state.