BIGGEST BANK
ROBBERY IN FRANCE
G'day folks,
Albert Spaggiari, the mastermind behind the biggest-ever bank robbery in France, died leaving no clue as to the whereabouts of the stolen millions.
Spaggiari, born in 1932, was a tearaway, constantly in trouble for
stealing. His father died when he was three and his mother, who ran a
lingerie shop, quickly remarried, but the boy hated his stepfather. He
left home at 17 to join the Parachute Regiment, which was fighting Ho Chi Minh’s communist army in Indochina.
Spaggiari was a tough soldier, wounded twice and decorated for bravery.
But his old weakness resurfaced and in 1953 he was arrested after
breaking into a milk bar in Hanoi to steal the takings. He was sent back
in irons to France and jailed.
By the late 1960s Spaggiari seemed to have turned over a new leaf,
married a nurse and moved to the South of France where he opened a
photography shop in Nice. His charm and talent soon put him in
increasing demand for society and other weddings.
But he longed for action and he had itchy fingers. And when he learned
that the sewers of Nice ran close to the walls of the Société Générale
bank, plans for a daring robbery began to form in his mind.
First, as a precaution, he rented a safety box in the bank's vault and
planted in it a loud alarm clock set to go off at midnight. Spaggiari
wanted to make sure there were no acoustic or seismic detection alarms
to spoil his plans.
He need not have worried. Like the owners of the Titanic, who thought
the ship unsinkable, the bank thought its vault was impregnable.
Next he recruited a gang of villains from Marseilles who headed into the
sewers. For two months in the summer of 1976 they waded each night
through human waste, digging an eight-meter tunnel which Spaggiari
demanded was shored up as well as a mine shaft.
On the Friday night of the three-day Bastille Day weekend they broke
through into the vault, sealed its door shut from the inside with a
welding gun, and broke open 371 safety deposit boxes before leaving on
Monday morning.
The bank did not know what was in the boxes, so the value of the haul
would never be known. Estimates ranged from 30 million to 100 million
francs in cash and jewels.
When locksmiths brought in by the astonished bank managed to open the
door they found deposit boxes scattered across the floor, the remains of
meals eaten by the gang, and a message painted on the wall: “Sans
Armes, ni Violence, ni Haine” (without weapons, violence or hate).
A few weeks later, acting on a tip-off, the police arrested one of the
thieves who named the entire gang, including Spaggiari. He was on a trip
to the Far East accompanying the Mayor of Nice as a photographer and
was arrested when the returning plane touched down.
At his trial, Spaggiari asked to see the judge in his chambers. There,
he suddenly ran to a window, flung it open and jumped out. “Au revoir,”
he shouted with a wave, then roared away sitting on the back of an
accomplice’s motor cycle. The French police never saw him again.
In his absence the judge gave him a life sentence. Spaggiari spent the
rest of his days drifting between South America and Europe and is
believed to have returned to France occasionally to see his wife. When
he died of lung cancer in 1989 he had been living in Italy under a false
name for a number of years.
In 2008 a French biopic of Spaggiari, "Sans arme, ni haine, ni
violence", was released in the cinemas. It portrayed him as part comic
fantasist and part daring thief, marooned by a hotel pool in Argentina.
Spaggiari wrote a book about the robbery in 1977, translated into
English as “Sewers of Gold.” Another book, “The Heist of the Century” by
French journalists René-Louis Maurice and Jean-Claude Simoën was given a
partial re-write by English thriller author Ken Follett.
Clancy's comment: Mm ... I wonder where the money went?
I'm ...
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