The most interesting gang I've come across recently are the Pink Panthers. They specialize in jewelry and high-priced/luxury items.
Check out this Wikipedia summary:
>Named after The Pink Panther series of crime comedy films, Pink Panthers is the name given by Interpol to an international jewel thief network, composed mainly of ethnic Serbs, Montenegrins and Bosniaks, which is responsible for some of the most audacious thefts in criminal history.[2] They are responsible for what have been termed some of the most glamorous heists ever, and one criminologist even described their crimes as "artistry".[1] They have targeted several countries and continents, and include Japan's most successful robbery ever amongst their thefts. A film documentary based upon their thefts, Smash & Grab, was released in 2013.
>Some law enforcement agencies suspect that the group is responsible for over US$500 million in gold robberies in Dubai, Switzerland, Japan, France, Liechtenstein, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and Monaco. Law enforcement authorities suspect their involvement in the robbery of the jewelry store Harry Winston in Paris, on 9 December 2008. The thieves escaped with more than €80 million worth of jewelry.
At least 10% of the $61B of assistance the US sent to Iraq can't be accounted for [1]. Since it can't be accounted for it's hard to say conclusively that it was stolen, but someone (or more likely, many someones) somewhere has it...
This is the correct answer. That missing money went to fund black budgets of all sorts, including the extraordinary rendition sites and a variety of other intelligence/security activities.
The modern way to get untraceable money (according to [1]) is to set up (legitimate) small companies, then wildly overcharge the government for services.
Looks like your standard government incompetence and passing cash to well connected friends, and doesn't show up in any sort of government black budgets accounting.
The author estimates that one Western intelligence agency has over 2,000 such companies.
Fun fact: should one of these companies actually end up profitable in the course of its legitimate activities, it then gets overcharged by the unprofitable ones.
A tactic particularly well-loved by those with small government tendencies for everything except the military. Not only do you get to hide exactly how that money you keep giving to the military is being spent, but you then get to use the same budget as an argument when claiming how inefficient government is...
Is this true because there is evidence to suggest it or is it true because it's a really compelling narrative?
Because: the USG, particularly under the previous administration, being so incompetent that it could "lose" (or: lose track of) a percentage of an enormous allocation of money is also a pretty compelling narrative.
>Is this true because there is evidence to suggest it or is it true because it's a really compelling narrative?
It's in all likelihood true because of a long history of exposed similar BS going on, in Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe in the past 5-8 decades.
If you have 20 similar cases, you don't really need particular case-specific evidence for the 21st you encounter. You can take a (not so) wild guess.
The same way that people who witnessed the western support for Pinochet or the Contras in the 70/80s would not really be surprised to find out another regime was also supported with similar means where it was strategically favorable.
It's not like there are not millions of people who live on the other side, location wise, of those deals, and get to know these stories better than what the official US mainstream media would ever cover them.
Someone that just reads the mainstream news and the occasional history book from his comfortable sofa in California or NY or Utah is not really more informed compared to someone who had relatives gone missing by some dictatorship or himself beaten up in their own country and followed such stories as live history over several decades.
You are hoping that tax dollars were appropriately directed toward honest black site work. I suspect a significant portion found a more prosaic destiny, theft.
In anycase, I doubt the money was stolen in a "hiest" of the kind contemplated by the article. Rather the people who were managing projects funnelled it to themselves or their friends, and some of it was probably just "legitimacy" lost, in the sense that tracking spending in a recent war-zone with a weak central government and a host of overlapping international organizations and domestic factions is going to be a chaotic mess.
Some of it certainly was. A large quantity of cash in dollar bills was stolen from the central bank in Mosul when ISIS conquered it. That was a major source of ISIS funds in the early days.
I'm guessing a sizable amount of Saddam's various treasures might have gone missing as well. Not on anyone's balance sheet that was in a position to complain. Other than maybe anything Kuwait never recovered.
Much of those treasures were total fiction. A "gold bathroom sink" sounds like something, until you find that the gold plate is only a few atoms thick and worth a couple bucks at most.
$780M USD in cash for example, was found. The soldiers didn't grab all of it, but skimmed a significant amount.
"In all, 50 steel boxes were found by the five soldiers ...but only 47 were declared. It was a heist completed in an afternoon and worth $12.3 million." [1]
It was in Cannes, a city known for it's movie festival. The place is pretty rich, as you can imagine, because of the stars handing around and the fact it's in the south of France, on a sunny beach.
On that day, there was a Jewelry gallery called "Extraordinary Diamond" at the Carlton hotel and some guy arrived ALONE, with only a mask and a gun. He took 103 millions euros worth of goods, then went away. Nobody heard of him since.
So yeah, it's still possible to get away with a heist.
Managing to execute that heist is pretty amazing, but it's debatable whether they "got away" with it.
One alleged mastermind was kidnapped and murdered, even though his family paid the ransom. Another was arrested. Many other suspects were eventually kidnapped or arrested.
Also, I'm very skeptical about the reported figures for the recovered money, especially since part of it was found by the Military Police (which has a bad reputation for corruption in Brazil) instead of the Federal Police (which is relatively reliable).
I'd imagine that the guy who pulled it off must have been already rich, you can't quickly win that amount of money by betting tiny amounts (in Australia), you have to start off with something big. There have been no news since then so I assume they flew home and got away with it.
>Described by one source as a "whale" - a gambler who wins and loses huge amounts - he was hit with a withdrawal of licence notice, prohibiting him from entering the Southbank complex. It is believed he has since returned to his home country.
I think people constantly over estimate our generalized competence. Just because technology exists doesn't mean it is widely deployed or even used properly when done so. And even if it is, the humans behind it are often the weakest link and can be tricked or forced to defeat it.
So yes, there is a lot of room for heist in spite of technology. The hard part remains as it always is.. human element, political element for reaching "safety" or escaping easy identification/capture, etc.
Bitcoin is mentioned in the article, but only in the context of "thousands of tiny thefts from ordinary people".
That description doesn't match the bitcoin heists over the past few years. Mt Gox alone was $460M USD. I suspect some of the individual losses weren't uh, tiny.
The largest heist of all time was in 1990[1], which I consider pretty recent. The tools they needed to pull it off (impersonating the police mainly) seem like they could still work today.
>Something similar has happened in the USA, where they
> fell by 60 per cent between 2004 and 2014 [0]
I think it is bad form to state the British decline in 'heists' as absolute numbers and then the US decline as a percentage. It obscures the point.
Moreover, the headline article's calculated decline in US heists is 'fell by 60 per cent between 2004 and 2014'; however the article it references [1] states a reduction from 6822 to 3961, which I interpret as a 42% decline.
Or my reading comprehension skills are completely foobar'd this evening.
I don't know that it is entirely fair of me, but my tendency is to become more skeptical of the article overall when attention to smaller details like these are lacking.
In Chicago we had a rash of smash-and-grabs where the burglars would plow a stolen SUV into the front of a Coach or or Apple or Louis Vuitton store, grab everything in sight, and be gone within a minute.
One enterprising crew actually drove through the front doors of Northbrook Court Mall at 5 AM, drove through the mall to reach the Louis Vuitton store, and then completed the job.
Reminds me of construction equipment being used to pry ATM machines open. (construction crew apparently didn't really care because the machines were insured, iirc)
Why would anyone bust an Apple store!? Would you bust a GPS store? I've always assumed Apple had a custom IMEI-based remote deactivation service for all its stores.
My assumption is that the burglars are pretty unaware of remote tracking/disabling/serial number recording and/or the Apple demo devices on the tables aren't set up with an iCloud "Find My Device" profiles, especially the non-iPhone machines.
One Apple Store out in the suburbs has been hit multiple times. Three times in one year. Seems like the glass they damage is worth more than the machines they manage to steal:
I read somewhere once that physical cash robberies is declining in popularity is primarily due to inflation rate. Most robberies aim to do it just once and get away with as much money as possible but due to inflation, the amount you need to steal to make it worthwhile corresponds to huge amount of physical weight of that cash.
Case in point, lets assume that each bill weighs 1 gram. So in 1933, John Dillinger robbed the Central National Bank for $76,000 [1] which translates to about 160 pounds worth of cash. Easy enough to carry off with a few horses.
Now, accounting for inflation, that $76,000 will be roughly $1.2million in today's value. If JohnD were to pull off that same heist to get the same value in today's world, he will need to find a way to transport 2650 pounds or 1.3 tons of cash!
Then ask yourself, is $1.2 million enough to get you by today? Surely it will give you a comfortable life but won't guarantee that you will be set for life. So, lets put that value at a "small" $5million since you have a plan to live frugally with the stolen cash. Now you will have to find a way to transport 6.5 tons (13,000+ pounds) of cash and not to mention, find a place to hide it!
So yep, inflation is the cause of the traditional bank heist being not as popular as it once was.
What? Any denomination bill weighs 1 gram [1]. $76k only weighs 160 lbs if you get it all in singles.
If you get $1.2 million in $100s (presumably readily available in a bank!), that's only 26½ lbs. You can carry that in one arm, probably in a briefcase.
The Hatton Garden raid was meticulous in its planning, dazzling
in its complexity – yet still the burglars were caught.
I disagree with this premise. The Hatton Garden heist only made it as far
as it did because of a number of failings outside of the gangs control, that they didn't expect. The heist was doomed to fail from the start and only made it as far as it did because of a lot of good fortune on the gangs behalf.
> The Hatton Garden burglars were caught because they used one of their own cars within view of a security camera. And according to David Kelly, a former NYPD detective who now works for the private intelligence company K2, it’s CCTV which has changed things most.
A better plan is the white collar crime done by the bankers up to 2008. Being too big to jail and having good lobbyists is the 21st century way to get away with a heist.
It's an old joke at this point. If you're stupid and want to rob a bank, first you get a gun and a mask. If you're smart you get a banking license and a Federal Reserve account...
Technology has changed it so a physical heist is harder to pull off and get away with.
The people doing heists and getting away with it crack the security on a website and steal the database and sell the information in it. I think that electronic heists are easier to get away with than physical heists. Plus the company targeted will just use PR to try and cover up the fact that they got cracked or issue a warning to their users that someone accessed their information. Identity Theft is growing but the people who steal personal information sell it to others to raise the money they need so the people they sell it to get caught instead of themselves.
I wonder how much of the drop is due to simply having less physical cash lying around to steal, as most economic transactions move to electronic payment methods. I know pickpocketing has fallen off as lack of cash means thieves end up with quickly cancelled credit cards and hard to pawn smartphones instead of untraceable cash.
Obviously banks still need to keep some cash on hand, but I'd think that most smaller banks (which are presumably the easier ones to rob) would've abandoned keeping the classic "giant vault with stacks of cash". (the article brings this up briefly, but doesn't really quantify it). And as the number of places that do have big piles of cash decreases, the amount of resources that can be put into protecting each one increases, so you'd expect the difficulty of robbing them to increase faster then linerally with decreasing numbers sites.
Is it still possible to find a poorly defended target?
Yes.
The security at Hatton Garden was poor. Over that Easter weekend the vault was left completely unattended. When the burglars did set off the alarm the security guard did not check the vault, he checked whether the front door had been unlocked and left it at that.
There was nobody watching CCTV from inside the vault although the main building had CCTV the vault wasn't exactly protected that way.
One of the burglars did turn up at the scene of the crime in his own car, this was a bit stupid!!! That gave the Flying Squad all the information they needed to start investigating the gang.
So, in response to the question, it is perfectly possible to steal poorly defended valuables where poorly defended means no CCTV etc.
As for whether it is possible to escape through a built up area with the stolen goods, the stolen goods part is irrelevant, is it possible to go missing in a city? Yes!
There have been several high-profile bitcoin heists in the last few years, some of the larger ones yielding many millions of effectively untraceable cash.
Also, how much of this is due to parallel construction resulting from the collaboration between the intel agencies and their investigative counterparts?
Big heists don't happen as much mainly due to benefit denial. Banks and armored cars don't carry the kinds of cash they used to, so robbing them isn't worth the risk, however it still is worth robbing an airport or shipping docks if you have inside help so that crime persists.
Here most advanced criminals just get into money laundering or counterfeiting, like that guy who served exactly zero time in prison for being caught with 100s of millions worth of phony USD http://www.gq.com/long-form/the-great-paper-caper
At least for the Brussels one: the heist happened and was quite impressive, but the burglars didn't get away with it. They were caught pretty rapidly, weren't they?
I was particularly impressed by that guy who robbed banks, never got caught, turned himself in, and did an AMA. In his own words, he "studied and perfected the art of bank robbery".
Yes. I have a plugin that disables rendering of text in my browser, and all I could see were the images. How do web designers imagine they can get away with this?
I'm starting to be convinced of a genetic tie to how the Slavic peoples have a particular mental mutation that gives them +11 to intelligence/cunning in a wider offering than is generally distributed to the global population.
We have seen, consistently, over history their contributions and excelling behavior in whatever area...
There is something to say about this particular mutation that the Slavic DNA has.
Please do not equate what I am saying with any Arian bullshit that's not what I mean: I have met a TON of Slavic people that have prodigy level capabilities.
Tesla being my ultimate example of a Slavic person who has mental capacity beyond...
A best friend of mine has a five year old son who can speak three languages...
We need to determine how why this happens?
All peoples are awesome and amazing and beautiful, but the density of extreme-high-level-scientific contribution from a particular genetic group needs to be looked at.
I just find this to be statistically very weird and interesting!
Thanks - I know that I may have poorly articulated my thought - I was not trying to sound racist or anything of that nature - so apologies if it came across that way... I am just genuinely interested in why it may seem, apparently only to me, that so many really smart people seem to come from a small area of the world.
First of all a HUGE selection bias wrt who would actually have gotten to migrate to the US; which is where I'm assuming you're from.
The second thing is that Eastern European cultures have WAY more focus on technical and theoretical/intellectual achievement. Whereas US culture is obsessed with finance and entrepreneurship, Eastern European culture is so with STEM and intellectual achievement.
Thirdly; stay away from racial stereotyping. It's almost always damaging, even when positive, and it's virtually always oversimplification due to an incomplete understanding of the culture and conditions of said race.
The second thing is that Eastern European cultures have WAY more focus on technical and theoretical/intellectual achievement. Whereas US culture is obsessed with finance and entrepreneurship, Eastern European culture is so with STEM and intellectual achievement.
No, it was never possible to get away with a heist, and it never will be.
The question of the authorities catching you is actually the least interesting part of the question. Suppose you weren't caught by the police following your heist:
How would you have any confidence in yourself in your ability to make it on your own? How could you help but wonder if you'd be able to live by way of producing or providing something of value the way honest people do?
What would happen to your curiosity about the world? There would be whole swaths of things that would be mentally off-limits, lest they remind you of anything to do with the danger of being caught for the heist you pulled. (Think all of the things that fall under forensic or other evidence!)
As a secondary consideration, your relations with other people would also be terrible. Where are you going to go where you won't have to weave a web of lies about where you got your money from? How happy will you be living a life where you are constantly in fear of getting caught? What kind of life is it to know that your continued existence depends on others not knowing certain facts about the world? (Facts that they have every right to know about you...) If someone wrongs you, or does something unjust to someone or some thing you care about, how could you work up the courage to rectify that? Your own hypocrisy would likely stifle any such impulse, before you ever spoke a word of it.
First, I didn't say the act of theft was impossible (this interpretation of my comment is possible only if you stop reading my comment after the first sentence, ignoring completely the words that follow it.)
With regard to your comments on sociopaths, please see my reply to ryandrake immediately below.
So many people are not morally honest. No, they don't wake up , and break laws, but they will bend laws, take advantage of those they can. So many people believe, "Hay, it's legal?". I'll take a honest sociopath over these scumbags. I have run across sociopaths with strong moral compasses.
Very few people really produce someting of value, or add to society. America has become a selfish mess. Most of us just work for for the slightly corrupt Man.
As you age; you will be dissalusioned by so many people, and professions. The truth is ugly. It leaves a distaste on my mouth even thinking about the frauds I run across daily. Most wear suits, and have perfect credit.
I think you are putting the cart before the horse, in that the heist somehow will negatively change the mindset of the criminal. But I'd guess people who do heists are of a certain mindset already and that doing the heist won't lose them anything mentally or spiritually. But they may get away with some serious cash to spend.
The risk for the criminal is even with all the money in the world the thrill of doing it and winning will be a lure to try again and alas get caught.
Let's assume I have no moral compass and managed to steal $100MM.
>How would you have any confidence in yourself in your ability to make it on your own?
Doesn't matter. I don't need to make it on my own. I have $100MM.
> How could you help but wonder if you'd be able to live by way of producing or providing something of value the way honest people do?
Doesn't matter. I will never have to produce something or provide value. See above.
> What would happen to your curiosity about the world? There would be whole swaths of things that would be mentally off-limits, lest they remind you of anything to do with the danger of being caught for the heist you pulled.
I don't think there's much of the world that's off-limits with a stack of money $100MM tall.
> Where are you going to go where you won't have to weave a web of lies about where you got your money from?
Assuming I got away with the heist, I don't have to explain my wealth to anyone. I can tell nosey people that I got it as an inheritance and that's that.
> How happy will you be living a life where you are constantly in fear of getting caught?
This is probably the most difficult problem you face with $100MM of ill-gotten gains. You can probably mitigate much of the risk by moving somewhere physically that does not have extradition agreements with wherever you got away with the heist. Of course with that much money, you'd have the means to move anywhere on earth.
> What kind of life is it to know that your continued existence depends on others not knowing certain facts about the world? (Facts that they have every right to know about you...) If someone wrongs you, or does something unjust to someone or some thing you care about, how could you work up the courage to rectify that? Your own hypocrisy would likely stifle any such impulse, before you ever spoke a word of it.
All of these problems are solved by having a sufficiently sociopathic disposition.
A momentary rush is not comparable to the emotional rewards of true success, or real achievement. Robbing a bank and landing on the moon don't result from or lead to lives that are comparable in any way, emotionally, morally, practically or otherwise.
Obviously I'm playing devil's advocate here, but no heist of major proportions is momentary; it requires months of careful planning. I guess it's comparable to an achievement in sports - the actual event doesn't last long, but getting there does.
For someone who sees law as essentially a social, artificial construct (who hasn't internalized this notion), every career is about outsmarting others anyway, in one way or another.
every career is about outsmarting others anyway, in one way or another
I'm a person with a career, and I don't waste my time trying to figure out how to outsmart other people. (I don't think I could anyway.) I don't know about you, but solving the actual problems I encounter at work (problems which are obviously not attributable to people) are enough for me!
Well, let's spin it around. How can you have self esteem when you simply accept a pay packet to solve someone else's problems on their behalf, while they reap the full reward?
(Obviously I don't know the nature of your job exactly - this is from the perspective of a typical tech employee).
People gain self-esteem in many different ways. Sad as it is, the teacher's last ditch warning to the uncaught cheater "you are only fooling yourself" does not necessarily work on the type of person who is inclined to cheat. It's quite possible the Hatton garden thieves, having liberated a lot of property from what they would consider the underserving rich, felt absolutely GREAT about themselves. They were caught due to boasting about the crime after all.
The earlier tends "to participate in schemes and take calculated risks to minimize evidence or exposure," while the latter tends "to leave clues and act on impulse." While psychopaths are without conscience, sociopaths have one (albeit weaker.)
Are you operating under the assumption that people living with either of these mental disorders are happy?
What does happiness mean to you? I bet it doesn't mean this:
No matter if you have a mental disorder or not, crime will not make you happy, nor will it get you any closer to being whole again -- not if your standard is a virtuous (good, long, just, prosperous) life.
I don't think there's much of the world that's off-limits with a stack of money $100MM tall.
Except for self-esteem, a successful romantic partnership, freedom from boredom punctuated by bouts of extreme fear?
Assuming I got away with the heist, I don't have to explain my wealth to anyone. I can tell nosey [sic] people that I got it as an inheritance and that's that.
Where is this fantasy island where you can live without talking to anyone? Do you really think that no one would bother to ask questions about a stranger that just moved in next door? Or that they wouldn't do a Google search? Even if they didn't, their friends, neighbors or children might.
Let's take an alternate example, where there's no crime committed: I win $100MM in the lottery. That I can speak to without playing devil's advocate. You can see my answers are roughly the same:
> How would you have any confidence in yourself in your ability to make it on your own?
Doesn't matter. I don't need to make it on my own. I have $100MM. Having to "make it on your own" is a bummer. A sudden $100MM gives you the freedom to choose not to have to make it on your own.
> How could you help but wonder if you'd be able to live by way of producing or providing something of value the way honest people do?
Doesn't matter. I will never have to produce something or provide value. See above. If I wanted to, as a fun side project, try to produce something of value, I now have the freedom to try and risk failure, so I'm in a much better position than I was before.
> What would happen to your curiosity about the world? There would be whole swaths of things that would be mentally off-limits
I don't think there's much of the world that's off-limits with a stack of money $100MM tall.
> Where are you going to go where you won't have to weave a web of lies about where you got your money from?
I don't have to explain my wealth to anyone. I can tell nosey people that I won the lottery and that's that. Or I am free to tell them to mind their own business. Or I can tell them that I have a 9-5 job at the phone company.
The article itself contradicts your first statement. It lists:
- two heists were the perpetrators were not caught and the money not recovered
- five were some or all of the money was not recovered
Check out this Wikipedia summary:
>Named after The Pink Panther series of crime comedy films, Pink Panthers is the name given by Interpol to an international jewel thief network, composed mainly of ethnic Serbs, Montenegrins and Bosniaks, which is responsible for some of the most audacious thefts in criminal history.[2] They are responsible for what have been termed some of the most glamorous heists ever, and one criminologist even described their crimes as "artistry".[1] They have targeted several countries and continents, and include Japan's most successful robbery ever amongst their thefts. A film documentary based upon their thefts, Smash & Grab, was released in 2013.
>Some law enforcement agencies suspect that the group is responsible for over US$500 million in gold robberies in Dubai, Switzerland, Japan, France, Liechtenstein, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and Monaco. Law enforcement authorities suspect their involvement in the robbery of the jewelry store Harry Winston in Paris, on 9 December 2008. The thieves escaped with more than €80 million worth of jewelry.
Fascinating!
Rest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Panthers
So to answer that rhetorical question whether "it is still possible to get away with a heist"... well, yes, if you are are really, really good at it.