Print This List    Email to a Friend  

Forget Ocean's 13, Here Are 13 REAL-LIFE HEISTS  
INTERESTING 

Tags: heists, real, robbery, conspiracy, crime, criminal, money

The antics of Danny Ocean and his crew in the Ocean's movies are pretty cool, but here are a group who pulled it off in real life.

1.	September of 1992 Bill Brennan, a cashier at the Stardust's sports book, casually left for lunch after a shift with over $500,000 in cash and chips inside a bag draped over his shoulder -- the biggest theft from a Las Vegas casino in history. There have been no signs of Brennan. Some believe he worked with an accomplice who later killed him for his half of the money, though others are convinced he worked alone and fled the country.
2.	October of 1993 Heather Tallchief, 21, and accomplice Roberto Solis, 48, made off with a Loomis Armored truck filled with $2.5 million outside of Circus Circus. The two escaped the United States via the Cayman Islands and St. Martin, though Solis later left, leaving her with only $1,000 to her name and a kid to raise alone. After running from the law for over 12 years, Heather Tallchief finally surrendered in September of 2005. Her sentence: 63 months in prison.
3.	August of 2005, Brazil saw its largest bank robbery to date, a heist that netted its masterminds $65 million. Police estimate that at least 20 members spent three months tunneling 80 meters underground from a nearby house and carted out over 20,000 pounds of money without as much as an alarm going off. Two suspects have since been caught, though only $500,000 has been found. It turns out their insurance only covered theft during transportation, not while it sat in the vault.
4.	February of 1994. Oslo, Norway, Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream was stolen from a lower level gallery in the National Gallery of Norway. Two men, a ladder, some wire cutters, and 50 seconds is all it took to wander off with Norway's most famous and valuable painting. A few months later the thieves offered the painting back in exchange for a $1 million ransom, but the offer was refused. A sting operation held in May 1994 successfully recovered the unharmed painting and returned it to its owners. Four men were convicted and sentenced for the theft in 1996. In August of 2004, nearly 10 years after the first theft, The Scream, along with Munch's Madonna, was stolen again -- this time at gun point at the Munch Museum. The paintings were once again recovered, and in much better condition than expected.
5.	Remember "Goodfellas"? The character, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), is responsible for the Air France Robbery of 1967 in which Hill and crew simply walked into the Air France cargo terminal at JFK and left with $420,000. It really happened. Working on a tip from cargo supervisor Robert McMahon, the team used a woman to seduce a security guard into getting a copy of a key that locked the main security door separating the criminals from the money. Keys replaced unnoticed, Hill and Tommy DeSimone (Joe Pesci) walked in, unlocked the door, and walked out with the bags without as much as a peep from an alarm or question from a guard.
6.	November of 2005, a farmer at Smithburg, Maryland's Stonewood Acres had ventured to Pennsylvania to visit relatives. When he returned to the farm, he noticed a 70-pound tank filled with $75,000 worth of bull semen had been opened up, with sixty-five "straws" containing the sperm of nearly 50 bulls missing.
7.	The Securitas depot robbery of 2006 is the single most profitable crime in Britain's history. The depot manager, Colin Dixon, was heading home. Posed as a policeman, one of the robbers pulled Dixon over and forced him into their car, where he was handcuffed and driven to a nearby farm. Meanwhile, Dixon's wife and kid were also abducted and driven to the same farm, where the family were bounded together and driven to the Securitas depot. Fourteen depot employees were also restrained while £53 million in used bills ($92.5 million USD) was loaded into a truck.
8.	The Robert Zemelsky Musky Heist, or the Day That Everything Changed. 1963, Robert Zemelsky, a fisherman, reeled in a world record 70-pound muskellunge and hauled it into the Department of Natural Resources to have it weighed and measured. He failed to take any pictures of the gigantic fish, and the employees at the department immediately seized the fish and kicked him out. Hayward has the largest "musky" on record, and the Department of Natural Resources couldn't bare seeing someone from a rival town capturing anything larger than their hometown pride. So they stole it.
9.	D.B. Cooper is one of America's most notorious hijackers, one that is still at large after 35 years. November 24, 1971 "Dan Cooper" hijacked Northwest Orient Airlines flight 305 with a briefcase "bomb." He handed a flight attendant a note saying The flight attendant alerted the pilot who then relayed details of the situation to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The pilot was instructed by radio control to comply with Cooper's requests: four parachutes and $200,000. Allegedly he requested the extra three parachutes for the pilot, co-pilot, and flight attendant as a way to insure they were not fake. Passengers were dropped off at the Seattle-Tacoma airport, in exchange for the parachutes and cash. Loot in hand, Cooper instructed the pilot to take to the skies again, this time headed for Mex
10.	The Isabella Gardner Museum heist of 1990 is called "the biggest art heist in history," and the culprits, after 17 years, are still unknown. Just a few hours after Boston's St. Patrick's Day festivities ended, two men dressed as policemen knocked on the side security door at the Isabella Gardner Museum, where they were greeted by two museum guards. They were handcuffed, duct taped and dragged into the basement. The con men cut three Rembrandt's from their frames and "The Concert" by Johannes Vermeer, "Landscape with an Obelisk" by Govert Flinck, and other various sketches. The paintings have never been found, and the museum never reimbursed.
11.	March of 2003, a gang broke into the Central Bank of Iraq and filled up three tractor trailers with cash totaling $1 billion. Over half of that was later found hidden in the walls of Saddam Hussein's palace, yet the rest still remains unaccounted for.
12.	August of 1963, fifteen gun-less men wearing ski masks and helmets jumped on a stopped Royal Mail traveling post office train running from Glasgow to London, stealing £2.3 million in used bank notes (today nearly £40 million). Bruce Reynolds was the mastermind behind the heist, and after his capture and subsequent prison time, was treated as a celebrity. There are numerous books, films, and musical tributes devoted to telling the story of the Great Train Robbery.
13.	November 2006 heist on the Island of Penang. 2 box trailers entered the MASKargo Complex under the charade that they were there to sniff out illegal workers. The customs officials let them into the facility without as much as a search of the trailer. Once inside, 20 men armed with parangs jumped out and rounded up workers in the area. "To neutralise the threat of a fight-back, the robbers plied their captives with chloroform. Some were forced to drink a white solution which caused them to vomit. Anyone still standing was beaten with sticks." They made off with 585 cartons and 18 pallets of microchips and motherboards, a heist worth roughly $12 million.

Lister: ListAfterList Wiki Contributors
Source: Gadling

Other lists of interest:

OJ's Bail $78,000 Breakdown JUST THE FACTS  (0)

Tips on How to Win on "The Price is Right"... Guaranteed HOW TO  (0)

Famous Criminals From Tacoma, WA INFORMATIVE  (0)

The Easiest Way to Get Rich HOW TO  (1)

10 Questions to Ask Your Mortgage Lender TOP #  (0)

This list not rated yet – be the first to rate it 

There are no comments for this list. Be the first to post!