Even though most people dream of pulling a hundred million dollar heist and live happily for the rest of their lives, nobody actually goes through with it. In fact, for most of them robbing a bank and spending the rest of their lives worry free is nothing more than a fleeting though. However, some people decided to put their idea into practice and very few of them managed to get away with it. Well, at least temporarily. Perhaps the most surprising thing associated with the following robberies is the fact that they seem to bear the mark of a professional thief. And, even more surprising, nobody got killed during the robberies. Let’s elaborate.
1. The Central Bank of Iraq
This was by far the simplest way to steal from a bank: one day before the Coalition started bombarding Iraq, Saddam Hussein sent his son with a written hand note to the Central Bank of Iraq to withdraw one billion dollars. Interestingly enough the bank representatives did not suspect a thing, in spite of the fact that loading this large sum of cash took approximately five hours. The very next day war broke out. Furthermore, only 650 million dollars were recuperated by the Americans after Hussein got captured.
2. The Boston Museum
The robbery at the Gardner Museum in Boston will be remembered as the biggest art theft in history, although it happened more than a century ago. Contrary to the museum’s policy, the inexperienced guards allowed two burglars dressed as police officers on the premises. Even though they did not appear to be carrying any sort of weapon whatsoever, they managed to handcuff a guard in the basement and in less than 2 hours took off with 12 valuable pieces of art worth over 300 million dollars along with the museum’s surveillance tapes. The authors of the robbery were never found and currently there is a 5 million dollars ransom for any info regarding the heist.
3. John Goddard mugging
More often than not, mugging a person on the street will not land thieves more than a top-notch phone, credit cards and some cash. If they’re lucky! The last thing a thief would expect to find in a briefcase of a person is over 300 city bonds to the Bank of England Treasury, bills estimated to be worth around one million pounds each. This is precisely what happened to John Goddard, a messenger working for a famous London broker. Fortunately, with the help of the FBI, all but two bonds were recovered, while the low level thieves responsible were arrested and convicted.
4. Dar El Salaam bank
The forth most impressive robbery of all times took place in Baghdad, Iraq four years later after the Saddam Hussein heist. While it was not as simple and efficient, the mystery around this crime stems from the fact that the bank had a quarter billion dollars in US currency in there. Even though the authors are unknown, evidence suggests that the thieves were the guards of the bank who were working closely with the Iraqi militia to avoid detection at security checkpoints.
5. British Bank Of the Middle East
Even if the sum of cash stolen from the British Bank of the Middle East is estimated to be around 100 million dollars in today’s market, the reason why this robbery made it to this top consists of the methods that the thieves employed to get the cash. To summarize, they blasted off the wall of the bank connected to the Catholic Church in the area, opened the vaults with the help of an experienced Corsican locksmith and stole everything they found over the course of two days.
This robbery was carried out in December 2008 when out of four men, three were dressed like women entered a jewelry store and forced the working staff to rob it. They stole jewellery worth 108 million dollars.
Those diamonds that are uncut are made to go through a process that is carried out at the Antwerp Diamond Center. Leonardo Notarbartolo headed a gang which managed to empty out 123 deposit boxes out of 189. The gems they stole were worth 100 million dollars and were never found.
A group headed by Amil Dinsio robbed the United California Bank. They cleaned out the safe deposit vault and managed to remove about 30 million dollars. While this may not seem like too much after going through this list, fact is that this robbery took place in 1972 and this money will probably be worth over 100 million dollars today. Even though the details are not clear, one can safely say that it was a great robbery!
This diamond robbery is considered to be the largest of its kind as gems worth over 118 million dollars were stolen. While a majority of these robberies involved fantastic plans and remarkable execution, this one didn’t. Their basic plan was to smash, grab and run. Four men carried it out and several have been arrested on the grounds that they were associated with the crime.
In 1970, a terrorist group called PLO needed money so they decided to rob a number of banks and the most significant one was the British Bank of the Middle East. They stole gold, current and stocks worth over 25 million pounds which would be worth about 100 million dollars today.
