People always have and always will try to get money without any work. And sometimes they decide not to obey the law and steal money from other people. We have picked up the greatest heist and robberies in history.
Boston Museum: $ 300 million
On the night of March 18, 1990, two men in police uniforms entered the Boston Museum. They talked to the security guards for a while and attacked them. The robbers were able to tie the guards, shut down the security system and steal eleven rare paintings, including works by Rembrandt van Rijn or Jan Vermeer.
The biggest painting heist in history, which cost $ 300 million, lasted less than an hour and a half. Experts believe that the robbers were amateurs because they did not try to minimize damage to the paintings and left behind more valuable pieces of art.
A $ 5 million reward was announced to catch the robbers or find paintings and thirty detectives were deployed without success. Empty frames after stolen paintings hang in the museum until today.
Knightsbridge Bank: $ 111 million
At first, everything seemed like a regular visit. The two men entered the bank in Knightsbridge in central London on July 12, 1987, and wanted to rent a safe deposit box. However, as soon as they found themselves in the bank’s basement, they pulled out weapons and neutralized the manager and security.
They had a lot of time to do this because they hung a warning sign at the door that the bank was temporarily closed. One hour after the robbers left, one of the guards managed to break free of the handcuffs and set off the alarm.
The police managed to distinguish a fingerprint and identify Valeria Vicceie. After a lengthy investigation, he and his accomplices were convicted. Viccei wrote a successful book about the robbery in prison.
Tonbridge Bank: $ 92.5 million
When police officers stopped Colin Dixon on the way home from work on February 21, 2006, he believed this was a routine check. Without protesting, he went into the police van where fake police officers tie him up, kidnap him, and took to an abandoned farm in western Kent.
They also managed to lure there Dixon’s wife with his eight-year-old son and blackmailed the manager with the threat of killing his family.
The next day, with Dixon’s help, they got into a bank in Tonbridge, southern England, using the family as a hostage. The funny thing is the robbers had to leave more than $ 266 in the vault because they brought a small car. The whole heist took about 60 minutes.
Two years later, five men were convicted for taking part in the robbery and sentenced from fifteen to life in prison. The sixth accomplice was caught in 2009, but the police believe that one of the main criminals is still escaping with most of the money.
The Great Train Heist: $ 74 million
A truly legendary robbery was committed by a total of fifteen men on August 8, 1963. That morning, the group of robbers suddenly stopped a train carrying money from Scottish banks. During the heist, the criminals stole the whole locomotive and wagon with more than one hundred and twenty money bags.
Fortunately, the robbers left a lot of prints on the crime scene, so the police soon managed to catch the whole band. Its members were sentenced in April 1964 to a total of three hundred and seven years in prison, but that was not the end of the case.
One of the convicted robbers, Ronnie Biggs, fled and spent the following years in Australia and Brazil and did not return to England until 2001. He was imprisoned and released only eight years later for health reasons.
Another member fled to Canada but was captured and imprisoned in 1968. He was released ten years later. In 1990 he was found shot in his villa in Spain.
Brazilian Central Bank: $ 69.8 million
A truly unique masterpiece made Brazilian robbers who dug a two-hundred-meter-long tunnel under two house blocks and broke into the central bank of the country in 2005.
Because the criminals and cheaters avoided all security sensors, nobody was aware of the robbery until the next day. The tunnel was four meters deep, and the robbers, estimated to be between ten and twenty people, dug it from the rented house.
The cherry on top was, the bank did no insure the money. According to the bank, the risk of theft was utterly negligible. Two months later the police caught part of the band.