(sirens blaring) (clock ticking)
If I was a criminal, what kind of criminal I'd be?
I'd be like that sexy Bond villain, hm, but also.
You know, I wanna be that guy in the background
that kind of like draws the map,
and then I wait in my lair for my minions to go out there
and handle the dangerous parts.
It would have something to do with accounting fraud.
(laughs) But not on purpose, just 'cause I'm bad at math.
I would pull up a heist that stole money
from the people who shouldn't have all the money.
But for me to be involved in a heist,
the jackpot would have to be astronomical.
(bombs blasting) (dramatic music)
Not every criminal can pull off a heist,
but they all know that the best crime pays big.
A heist is a high stakes robbery that uses an elaborate plan
for a lot of numbers in the pocketbook.
I've met people who said,
"I pulled off a heist, it was 500 bucks."
A heist to me is a couple of hundred thousand.
That's a lot dough for just a minute's work.
Million, 2 million and more.
Heist is not for your everyday
low level scumbag.
You have to have nerves of steel,
you have to have a brain that can plan something.
Nobody sees the others without a mask.
And you have to have good connections.
Heists are often ripping off
someone who's incredibly wealthy or a faceless bank.
That's why heists also popular
because everybody likes a good rogue.
With a combined total of over $275 million
in stolen loot,
these are five of the greatest heist in history,
from the earliest to the most recent.
Stories of who gets away with it, but mostly who doesn't.
Because if you succeed at a heist
we don't know who you are.
(upbeat dramatic music)
(locks clicking) (upbeat music)
(kids cheering)
We've really been indoctrinated from childhood
to have strong desires for wealth.
So it's not surprising that we'd be easily tempted
to get those things by whatever means possible.
Bruce Reynolds is the mastermind
of the Great Train robbery.
He is the most unlikely of masterminds.
The army rejected him
because of his weak eyesight.
He wanted to be a journalist,
but never got a chance to write.
He was a messenger for a while, and then a petty crook.
Bruce meets robber Ronnie Biggs in Wandsworth prison,
and decides to stop working alone,
because Bruce is tired of being a loser.
He wants to be a winner in the big numbers game.
(bright music)
Our earliest heist story starts in London, 1963.
Bank cards don't exist yet,
and credit cards have just been introduced.
Your options for stealing large sums of money
are places that house large sums of money,
but they have a ton of security.
Then Bruce gets a tip about a Royal Mail train,
and he hatches a plan.
There would be a big chunk of money in the mail bags
on that train.
That money was on its way to be destroyed down in England.
It was coming from Glasgow.
Therefore it meant that they were used notes
and untraceable notes.
Bruce's plan is to stop the train,
and remove the money without anyone taking notice.
It's deceptively simple, but it just might work.
They just need to focus on the number 30.
A heist is the most exciting thing in the criminal world,
as far as I'm concerned.
You walk away from it with a little bit of like an eff you
to like the powers that be.
A heist involves more planning than a typical robbery.
You have to have somebody who's the "mastermind."
Bruce decides that the train can be stopped
for 30 minutes before anyone gets suspicious.
So he gathers a team of 15 thieves, including Ronnie Biggs,
to haul out as many mail bags as they can with no violence.
The Great Train robbery,
it's like something out of a cowboy movie.
(dramatic music)
It begins in the dead of night,
on August 8th, 1963.
15 men are watching the clock.
These men will have just 30 minutes to try to pull off
the biggest train robbery in British history.
Just after 3:00 AM,
the driver of the Royal Mail express sees a red signal,
not knowing the green signal had been covered
by the robbers.
Onboard, come a bunch of the robbers.
They make it very clear to the people working on the train,
this is a robbery and that they shouldn't resist.
The only resistance they get is from Jack Mills,
who's the train driver.
And because he resists them, they whack him on the head.
So that was the first cock-up.
But time won't stop because you make a mistake.
The train has 12 carts,
but the gang are only interested in number two
behind the locomotive,
known as the high value packages coach.
Racing against the clock, they uncouple the other 10 carts,
and to avoid any witnesses,
Bruce has the move the train half a mile
to the designated unloading spot.
Let's get a move on, let's go.
With only 10 minutes left,
the gang form a human chain moving 120 bags of cash,
weighing an estimated 2.5 tons.
It's been 30 minutes and the coach isn't empty,
but wisely, they stick to Bruce's plan.
Eight bags are left behind.
They're so quick that the other 68 postal workers
in the 10 other coaches have no idea what's happened.
Quick, before the cops show up.
15 guys with an estimated £150,000 each,
equivalent to $3.8 million today.
At the time, the average yearly salary in Britain
is about £1000.
That means each crew member makes close to 150 years
worth of wages in the space of 30 minutes.
When we did a heist, we had a plan.
If we all got chased and we had to split up,
who are we gonna contact?
Where we going?
There had to be a safe house, maybe we'd meet.
The safe house is the place where Bruce planned
for the gang to divvy up their loot, confirm their alibis,
and make sure they cover their tracks.
Off they go to the farm that they have hired,
about half an hour away.
They feed the cat, they play a bit of monopoly.
Bruce and his gang have no plans
of going straight to jail.
But when the police go public
and comb a 30 mile radius from the robbery site,
the gang has to scramble.
They were looking for a hideout
within 30 miles of Cheddington,
and they found it here at this farmhouse.
And it was because it so completely fitted
the police description, that tip-off named this place.
As these police photographs show,
the farm was left in a state of disarray.
Fingerprints confirmed that Bruce and his band of crooks
are responsible for the robbery,
but they're nowhere to be found.
This is a team of 15 individuals
who then flee around the globe.
A manhunt takes place on a scale not witnessed before.
Within a month,
the gang's safe house becomes a tourist attraction.
The owner of the farm charges an entrance fee,
and the police embarrassed with the enormity of the crime,
double down on the hunt to capture the culprits.
They carry on searching
until they find almost all of them.
(cameras clicking) (crowd cheering)
Some members were never identified,
but 12 were convicted within a year of the heist.
The judge said it would be positively evil to show leniency
in the country's biggest robbery.
So he dishes out double penalties
for a total of 307 years of imprisonment.
Mastermind Bruce Reynolds,
manages to evade the law for five years.
He went to Mexico for awhile, then to Canada,
and then he came back to England
where he was eventually caught.
He spends 10 years in lockup
before being released in 1978.
But one convicted man
has no intention of serving his full term.
Ronnie Biggs and his tale of three continents,
one baby, and 35 years on the run.
Ronnie Biggs is perhaps the most famous
of all of the Great Train robbers.
(bright music)
Three weeks after the Great Train robbery,
Ronnie is arrested and sentenced to 30 years.
He serves 15 months back in Wandsworth
before scaling a prison wall,
and dropping onto a mattress
on the roof of a waiting removal van.
Woo hoo, freedom.
From there,
he begins his new life of living on the lam.
(tires screeching) (upbeat music)
He got plastic surgery in Paris
to change his appearance, he moved to Australia.
Then when the police were after him there,
he moved to Brazil.
He becomes a musician and a media darling,
who would talk about the heist to anyone who will listen.
The only happy issue from the train robbery
is the fact that semi-honest money has arisen.
When I say semi-honest,
I mean money that had been paid by newspapers
for our stories.
After 10 years living the high life in Rio,
Scotland Yard shows up and tries to arrest him.
But luckily Mr. Bigshot got his girlfriend pregnant.
Under Brazilian law,
if somebody has a child under the age of 21,
they can't be extradited to another country.
So the police, they knew where Ronnie Biggs was,
but they couldn't get him. (upbeat music)
He becomes an international celebrity,
and begins hosting tourists.
He lived this almost charmed life in Brazil,
inviting people to buy a ticket to his barbecues,
and he would tell stories of the Great Train robbery,
and you could have your photo taken with him.
He is perhaps the quintessential criminal celebrity.
In 1981,
a gang of ex soldiers kidnap him outside a restaurant,
and bundle him onto a yacht.
They want a reward for bringing him back to Britain,
but their yacht breaks down in Barbados.
(dramatic music)
Barbados authorities say that
he's been brought there illegally,
and they allow him to go back to Brazil.
(Ronnie cheering)
So Ronnie Biggs not only managed to escape from prison,
and evade the authorities by moving around the world,
he even managed to evade a kidnapping attempt.
No one could touch him.
In our society, few of us have great wealth and power,
but we can relate to someone who has little,
but does a lot with it.
(bright dramatic music)
After 35 years of freedom,
72 is the number that sends him back to Britain.
Mr. Bigshot announces that he'll return to the UK.
People saw this figure arriving,
and barely able to function,
and I think people felt, why lock him up.
He's 72 years old and not in good health.
Ronnie is immediately arrested and sent back to the slammer.
Eight years and numerous health scares later,
he's released just before his 80th birthday.
He dies four years later.
(cameras clicking)
Most of the details about the Great Train robbery
have been uncovered,
but there's one detail that remains a little bit mysterious.
Who was the inside man?
99 out of a hundred heists, they have an inside guy.
People will come to you for all different reasons.
They get in credit card debt,
they get in over their heads with gambling,
maybe they route trucks and they say, "Hey,
at five o'clock this truck leaves this place and goes here."
It's like you work there for 20 years, you know everything.
Someone shared train schedules and contents
that were critical in the Great Train robbery.
And there's been many guesses about his identity.
One is supposedly somebody working in the post office
who tipped them off, but I think we will never know
who the missing character was.
And for our next heister,
working on the inside means he's practically invisible.
Have I stolen anything from work?
It's not stealing if you take a rim of paper,
this paper was gonna be used there anyway (laughs).
Have I ever stolen something from work?
Yes. All the time.
I steal toilet paper all the time from my work.
Yeah, that (beep) expensive.
More accurately, my (beep) are expensive (laughs).
Our second great heist
takes us 34 years forward to Los Angeles, 1997.
Allen Pace is a young American man from Compton.
He has a job that pays $25 an hour, which isn't bad,
but at work, it's like he doesn't even exist.
It's very tempting if you're working in a place
where you see hundreds of thousands of dollars
slipping through your fingers,
and you think what's that all about?
In 1997, Allen Pace is working for Dunbar Armored
as a sort of safety officer.
So he's looking after things like fire extinguishers,
those sorts of things.
Okay, that one works.
Allen in his job has been very busy for the last two years
gathering insider information.
He knows what the security guards are doing,
he knows where the security cameras are, and when they move.
Because he's invisible at work,
nobody there notices that Allen's casing the joint.
He's cool, calculating, and sets the pace for the heist.
Because he's gathering the information,
he's able to come up with a plan.
The pacemaker recruits five childhood friends,
and supplies them with detailed floor plans, ski masks,
pistols, a shotgun, and radio headsets.
But then disaster strikes, he suddenly gets noticed at work,
and is fired for something completely unrelated.
You're fired. -: Why me?
When he's fired out of the blue,
he has to pull his plans forwards rapidly.
(suspenseful music)
The next night,
the pacemaker and his gang go to a house party
to establish an alibi. (suspenseful music)
Creating this alibi, you know, that you have a party,
was smart on this particular occasion,
the level of planning and daring involved.
Then they slip out of the house,
and into their robber gear.
His key card still was valid,
so they get in to Dunbar Armored.
The employees are subdued with duct tape,
and the gang gets their money with no issue.
When I did a heist, I wanted the biggest gun there was,
I wanted a 357 with a six inch barrel,
or a nickel plated 45 that shines off the sun.
I wanted that person to be so scared
because I knew that if they didn't fight back,
there wouldn't be any injuries.
It wasn't like we wanted to hurt anybody.
After the heist, the pacemaker with his crew
take their $18.9 million bounty
into a 14 foot long safe space, and head back to the party.
It's one of the biggest cash heists in US history.
(upbeat music)
After the Dunbar heist,
LA cops and the FBI pull out all the stops.
Because he was just fired,
Allen's name comes up in the investigation.
They start running surveillance
but the pacemaker stays cool.
There's no flashy purchases, and he's living with his mom.
Sonny, dinner's ready.
The only thing the cops have
is part of a tail light recovered at the scene.
They run a forensic investigation
and determine it's from the getaway car.
I think the ideal getaway car
would actually be not like a nice car, like a Honda Accord.
My brain immediately is like Lamborghini,
but then people are probably gonna spot me.
I don't think I'd get away.
A Nissan Cube because not a single person is gonna be like
that person is a criminal.
A Nissan cube says like dad going through a midlife crisis,
and shows very wrong.
We ain't going in there with a GTO
with the engine ticking out of the hood,
and that's for the movies.
You just need to get away.
(dramatic music) (tires screeching)
The getaway car was immortalized
by US bank robber, John Dillinger,
when he wrote a letter to Henry Ford,
thanking him for making such a fast car.
John Dillinger's Ford model A
was put up for auction in 2010, and sold for $165,000.
Bonnie and Clyde used a Ford V8 Deluxe
during their final crime spree.
At the time, it was the fastest car on the road,
despite the 160 bullet holes,
and costs about 50% of the average person's annual income.
Allen Pace's getaway car is a humble 14 foot long U-Haul,
you can rent for about 50 bucks a day.
It helped him evade the law for more than two years,
but then his friend, Eugene, pays someone in cash
and leaves the Dunbar straps on the bundle.
It's a stupid mistake, and it gets reported.
It seems to be that we have some amazing heisters,
but one of the heisters is a rubbish businessmen
at the other end.
The cops run Eugene's name,
and discover he rented a 14 foot long U-Haul
the day before the crime.
That 14 feet may have helped Allen carry out the heist,
but it also ended up being his downfall,
because Eugene becomes a snitch.
(sirens blaring) (dramatic music)
When the law finally caught off with us,
it wasn't on account of any mistakes we had made
during a robbery.
It was on account of a rat, you know, dice snitches,
and you can't control that.
I would never do that. Like what the (beep)?
(dramatic music)
14 Feet and 18.9 million,
get Allen Pace 24 years in lockup.
I can relate to Allen Pace's story. I live in Los Angeles.
(upbeat music)
You're constantly being exposed
to what a wealthy lifestyle looks like.
That's gonna create a temptation to obtain these things
by any means necessary.
There's never been a time when the gap between the richest
and the poorest has been as great.
(upbeat music)
The average American makes about
$50,000 a year.
Meanwhile, Tesla founder, Elon Musk,
once made 11 billion in a year.
Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos' base salary
is 82 million a year,
but with a net worth of approximately 200 billion,
he's the richest man in the world.
(upbeat music)
The 50 richest Americans are worth as much
as the poorest 165 million Americans.
It's no wonder we like to root for the little guy.
The reason we root for the little guy
is because we are the little guy.
Nobody wants to see Goliath crushing David,
that's not fun.
It's like the Robin Hood effect,
even though technically what they're doing isn't great,
you still want that person to win versus you know,
the corporation with the evil man up top.
Boy, do we love to stick it to the man.
In a society where there's a lot of inequality,
there's going to be resentment bred.
(upbeat music)
Allen Pace was able to take advantage
of being a faceless employee.
Even now no image of him can be found,
and he's out of prison.
Anonymity and patience is key when planning your next heist,
especially if you're planning the most complicated heist
in history.
If I was presented with a lock
with a hundred million combinations,
I would give up after three.
I would try six combinations,
and if I didn't get it in that, I'm hiring Charlize Theron.
If a lock had a hundred million combinations,
I would give up immediately,
unless my cat was behind that door, and I had to save him,
then I would never give up.
(dramatic music)
Imagine a lock with 100 million
possible combinations.
If you punch in a new number every 10 seconds,
that lock could take almost 32 years,
but 100 million combinations don't scare our next heister,
because his diamond heist has been 40 years in the planet.
(birds chirping) (suspenseful music)
This is Leonardo Notarbartolo.
He was born in Palermo, Italy,
and he was destined to be a thief.
As a child, he sent out by his mother to buy milk.
[Child Hm, milk. (Shopkeeper Snores)
Leonardo finds the shopkeeper asleep,
and takes the 5,000 Lira or the equivalent of about $8
from the till.
It will get him in trouble with his mother,
(child cries)
but he's discovered his calling.
He has his sights set on jewels.
(upbeat music)
40 Years later,
Leo's plan to steal diamonds is in full swing.
He moves to the diamond district in Antwerp, Belgium,
and poses as a gem importer.
He starts to shadow jewelers
to see what their mannerisms are.
He sets himself up as this suave charming jeweler.
How you doing?
He is a real gentleman.
People trusted him and didn't suspect him
because they saw him going in and out of the building
every single day.
Apart from his carats,
Leonardo's greatest assets are his good looks,
his charm, and his million dollar smile.
Unlike Allen Pace who was an inside man,
Leonardo has to become an inside man,
to break into one of the most sophisticated volts
on the planet, holding over 125 million in diamonds.
He was able to gain access
to the place where the diamonds were stored,
and not create suspicion.
He rents a safety deposit box
in the same vault as the diamonds.
It's just one of 189,
but it gives him the opportunity
to launch a painstaking surveillance mission,
using a digital camera, hidden in a pen.
He gathers all the information he needs
to mastermind this plan.
18 Months and hundreds of photos later,
Leonardo is ready to strike.
(bright upbeat music)
Antwerp is home to the world's only specialized
diamond police force, dubbed the diamond squad.
It's got 60 surveillance cameras
within its three square block area,
and at its heart is a volt, two stories underground,
and with 10 layers of security.
About 80% of the world's rough diamonds pass through here.
And $3 billion worth of sales happen annually.
If you're gonna try the ultimate diamond heist,
this is the place.
When I sought to put a team together,
I put guys together that know what they're doing.
I got guys who knew how to bypass alarms,
I got guys who know how to use a blow torch,
I got guys who know how to cut a hole in the ceiling.
To break into the vault
with 100 million combinations,
100 Million Leo put together a team of Italian thieves.
The Genius, an alarm specialist,
The King of Keys, a wizened locksmith,
The Monster, a skilled electrician,
and the muscle of the crew,
and Speedy, a friend who will remain outside
in the getaway car with Leo, listening to police scanners.
The guys that you take on a heist
have to have big, big cojones.
These guys aren't afraid of anything.
Somebody nervous makes mistakes.
You got live weapons, we're not trained.
We learnt how to use guns in our basement
by shooting at telephone books.
(guns firing) (dramatic music)
After more than 40 years of learning the craft,
and two and a half years of surveillance,
Leonardo sends his team in on a Saturday night.
They make it undetected into the antechamber of the volt.
Now, they've got to defeat 10 layers of security.
The massive steel door weighs in at three tons,
and the first layer of security
is a closed circuit security camera that guards.
(suspenseful music)
They manage to disable the CCTV,
and insert archive footage in there instead.
(locks clicking)
The next layer,
the vault doors combination dial
has 100 million possible combinations.
Thanks to Leo's pen camera footage,
the team knows the right one,
but they still need a one of a kind one foot long key,
that's security layer three.
There were then seismic alarms.
And these are silent alarms,
so you don't even know if you set them off or not.
They used a kind of hairspray to damage the sensor,
which would set off an alarm if there was any movement.
(suspenseful music)
After they managed to open the door,
they use an aluminum device to deceive a magnetic sensor.
Then they break through a locked steel grade
and disable another camera.
They then are faced by thermal sensors,
sensing their body heat.
They also have to overcome light sensors,
so everything has to be done in darkness.
They only flick on flashlights for a second
or two at a time. (clock ticking)
To the final layer, Leo gave them the code for a key pad
that controls the internal alarms.
Against all odds, the team defeats 10 layers of security
and enter the volt.
So they have to use a custom made drill
to get in to the various security boxes,
and they manage to empty 109 out of 189 boxes.
Believe it or not,
100 Million Leo steals $100 million worth of diamonds.
That's a successful heist.
Notarbartolo spent years
both figuring out how to break into the safe,
but also ingratiating himself within the community
so that no one would suspect him.
He really had a long game.
The long game is when a criminal takes
a long time to plan a heist,
with the expectation of a long payout.
(suspenseful music) (camera clicks)
The Antwerp diamond heist isn't detected
until Monday morning, when the vault is opened.
You did it, you pulled it off, you've got it.
Then you bring yourself back down and you try to think,
is everybody all right?
Did anybody leave anything behind?
For all of 100 Million Leo's genius,
he's undone by $5.
Bags of garbage left in the woods, tie him to the heist.
They bought a sandwich nearby,
and I think one of them still had the receipt.
Who would have thought a discarded sandwich
was enough to get the police onto you?
A $5 sandwich gets 100 Million Leo,
a 10 year prison sentence,
but he gets out four years early for good behavior.
Good behavior and a long game
can be what separates masterminds from thugs.
And they transform a French thief into a media darling.
If I was gonna steal a famous work of art,
it would probably be a Vincent van Gogh's "Irises."
I could probably look at that every single day of my life.
If I was gonna steal a famous work of art,
it would be that banana,
'cause people would expect it the least.
Make sure the laser grids up for "The Mona Lisa,"
but like, don't worry about "The banana."
I would steal the statue of David,
'cause if you've seen his genitalia
it would make me feel better about myself.
(bright music)
Parisian born Vjeran Tomic,
claims his devious tendencies started when he was a kid.
His parents sent him to live with his grandmother in Bosnia
for a few years.
And he became skilled at scaling Mostar's stone bridges,
and then dropping into the water below, just for kicks.
(water splashes)
(playful music)
At the age of 10, Vjeran does this first heist,
climbing 10 feet through the open window of a library.
He steals two beautiful and very expensive antique books,
which a disapproving friend later returns,
but Vjeran his hooked.
When he moves back to Paris,
he wants to surround himself with beautiful,
and expensive things.
At an art gallery,
he is blown away by the beauty of the art that he sees
as a teenager.
He was fascinated by Renoir, and wanted to be a painter.
And his father told him nobody makes a living as a painter.
Teen rebellion kicks in.
He starts going with friends to Pere Lachaise,
the huge cemetery in Paris,
where he develops his acrobatic skills,
jumping from mausoleum to mausoleum.
From the age of 16,
he's scaling the facades of multi-story buildings in Paris.
He's seen leaping between rooftops,
and uses crossbows and carabiners,
to crawl into apartments while the occupants are asleep.
He's given the nickname of L'araignee or the Spider-Man.
He really enjoys the finer things in life.
Fine cheeses and wines, and this extends into artwork.
One night, he has a dream
that he steals five masterpieces from a museum.
He takes it as a sign that he's about to do something great.
(upbeat music)
In 2017, "Salvator Mundi" by Leonardo da Vinci
sold for $450.3 million.
Every year, an estimated 6 billion worth of art is stolen.
Art theft is comparable in dollar value to arms dealing,
drug trafficking, and money laundering.
People love art.
Sold to you.
And so do thieves.
They steal it either because it's been ordered by somebody
or in order to sell it,
but there are some people who steal paintings
because they just enjoy having an extraordinary painting
in their possession.
Lots of crimes are described as victimless crimes.
In the case of heists,
there there's no one individual that walks away hurt
because of insurance.
So they're not hurt in the long-term by what occurs.
It's 2010, Harrison's museum of modern art
is home to more than 15,000 masterpieces,
and a destination for 800,000 tourists each year.
Only Spider-Man isn't a tourist, he's on a scouting mission.
Scouting missions are absolutely essential
if you're going to carry out a proper heist,
you have to do your homework.
Outside, he notices one window is blocked
from the security cameras by a parapet.
Oh la la, those are some nice statues.
Which during the day,
is used by local skateboarders.
Inside he sees motion sensors that flip from green to red
whenever anyone passes by, but many are stuck on green.
Full of fearlessness and daring,
Spider-Man starts to weave his web of deception.
There are things that happened in your life
that maybe drain you of certain fears.
One guy climbs a mountain, another woman goes skydiving,
you know, those are to overcome certain fears,
same thing when it came to a heist,
it becomes part of your life.
Your life is a crime in progress.
(bright music)
Paris, the city of light,
but if you wanna steal art, you need darkness.
It's midnight on May 14th, 2010,
the Spider-Man is on the hunt for his prey,
and the number eight, looms large.
Out of sight of the security cameras,
Spider-Man dabs the window frame with paint-stripping acid.
It's taken him eight nights,
but he's finally able to pull out the screws.
He uses suction cups to remove the glass,
and he has bolt cutters to cut through
the metal grate inside.
He climbs inside,
then climbs straight back out.
What criminals do is they see if the alarm goes off,
and that's exactly what Tomic did.
He wandered by the scene just to see if anybody appeared.
He waits 15 minutes, when no police turn up,
and the motion sensors are still on green,
he goes back in and sets his sights on the priceless art.
He had been commissioned to steal a Leger.
He stole it, and while he was in there he noticed,
oh, a Modigliani, a Matisse, a Picasso, and Braque,
and took five paintings while he was inside.
He then leaves with this bundle of artwork,
and drives away.
When the police arrive the next morning,
they find five empty pitcher frames.
Worth an estimated total of €104 million,
or about $112 million,
there hasn't been an art heist of this magnitude
in a decade.
The great problem with art crimes
is that there's no way of putting it on the open market
and selling it.
That means even an art thief working alone
needs accomplices.
You got to have a fence.
You may as well steal nothing, if you don't have a fence.
The fence is a person who takes the stolen loot
off the hands of the robber,
stashes it until everything cools down,
and then resells it to individual buyers.
I would go to my fence and say,
"What would you give me on this?"
And he might tell me, "I give you 20 cents on the dollar."
Maybe I'll try to get them up to 30 cents,
and we'll negotiate to a quarter,
but whatever it is, we made that deal before I robbed it.
So that I know as soon as it's done, I can take it to him.
(dramatic music)
The public wants to know
who stole the five paintings.
Most expensive work taken
appears to be this Picasso, worth an estimated $28 million.
And one year later, they get their answer.
This wasn't a big team of art thieves.
No, this is the French Spider-Man.
(camera shutters)
The Spider-Man is working with antiques dealer,
Jean Michel Corvez, to hide the paintings,
and sell at a later date.
Spider-Man seems safe, but he can't keep his mouth shut.
He started boasting at a party about his successful heist.
I just did the most amazing thing.
As a result, he got reported,
and ultimately he confessed to the police.
If you're planning a big heist,
you better hope you also have the personality trait
of being good at keeping a secret.
(suspenseful music)
The prosecutor proclaims that
Vjeran stole masterpieces from all of humanity.
(speaks in a foreign language)
But the press thrilled by his acrobatic prowess,
catapult him to superhero status.
I think people are sympathetic to the fact that
he's carried out this extraordinary crime,
and therefore not to upset,
the only sentence he gets is eight years.
An eight day job gets Vjeran eight years,
which is surprisingly lenient for our eight-legged thief.
The trial was in 2017, which means he gets out in 2025.
The stolen paintings were never found.
So it's possible, they will be sold for millions
once Vjeran and his accomplice, get out of jail.
But if you're playing the long game,
like 100 Million Leo, and the Spider-Man,
how old is too old for that one last job?
What do I think the average age of a heister is?
I bet like 22.
The average age of a heister would be about 45.
I feel like being a heister is like a young man's game,
right, because you gotta be able to like be flexible,
and avoid those lasers and stuff.
(cameras shutter)
What's the difference between a perfect heist
and a total disaster?
275 years and a couple of pints.
(dramatic music)
(cameras shutter)
This hole is what the Hatton Garden safe deposit staff
first saw when they opened the vault
in London's Diamond District, on April 7th, 2015.
But the cops have a lead,
the security video shows two men disguised as gas workers
scoping the outside of the volts.
A white van pulls up, additional crew members unload gear.
This is all the police had to go on,
and all the heisters had was 7%.
Let's say you're doing a business, or a bank,
or something that's closed for a three-day holiday weekend.
You get in there and you got the whole weekend.
It's April 3rd, 2015.
Good Friday of Easter weekend.
After a successful scouting mission the day before,
an alarm inside the volt is triggered,
and the Hatton Garden robbers spring into action.
They had an alarm specialist
who was known only to them as Basil,
which stood for the best alarms specialist in London.
He got them into the building.
(alarm beeping)
The alarm sends out an emergency text,
a security guard arrives at the scene.
He checks the front doors,
and sees that they are still locked.
False alarms happen all the time,
so they're quite used to it, off he goes.
The guard is unaware that beneath his feet,
burglars are currently drilling through the concrete wall
of the vault.
They create a hole that is 20 inches deep, 18 inches wide,
and 10 inches high.
But the hole opens up to a heavy cabinet,
they have to come back the next day with a battering ram,
(ram banging)
and are able to knock the cabinet over.
(suspenseful music) (cameras clicking)
They ransack just 7% of the volt,
opening 73 of the 999 safe deposit boxes.
In this case, 7% isn't such a meager number.
It equates to an estimated $20 million worth of diamonds,
gold, and jewelry.
(suspenseful music)
It's the biggest heist in British history.
Diamond traders in this famous street
were stunned.
People, obviously who probably aren't insured
have lost everything.
The investigation is led by the flying squad,
an elite unit within London's metropolitan
police departments.
It's organized, it's sophisticated,
it's people who have planned it,
and they know how they were gonna go about
to commit this crime.
(cameras shutter) (suspenseful music)
But the police have little or nothing to go on.
There are no fingerprints, no forensic traces,
and on the CCTV outside,
the thieves were careful not to show their faces.
Once you got what you went in for,
that's the first time when you feel like you got away clean,
the excitement levels like is up there.
But that excitement doesn't last long,
the diamonds are gone,
but the heisters can be found in the numbers.
In this case, automatic numberplate recognition.
They committed the perfect theft,
but everything that happened after that was a disaster.
(dramatic music)
The thieves may have disabled the CCTV cameras
inside the vault,
but they didn't disable the 160 security cameras
that monitor the streets outside.
CCTV in London is really very extensive.
An average Londoner can expect to be captured on CCTV
300 times in a single day.
There are well over half a million cameras
scattered through London.
It's said that for every 12 person,
there's one CCTV camera.
It's very difficult to go anywhere without being identified.
These cameras capture the image
of a distinctive white Mercedes with a black roof,
and black alloy wheels,
making repeat trips to the Hatton Garden area.
As a result,
the license plate is matched to a Kenny Collins.
So the police track him down.
The police attach a tracking device
to the Mercedes,
which leads them to two other career criminals,
Brian Reader, and Terry Perkins.
They track their mobile phones across London,
which leads to the three of them being filmed by the police
inside The Castle pub.
They hear these heisters boasting about the fact that
they have committed the greatest,
the biggest, effing robbery of all time.
They are really proud of themselves.
But loose lips are nothing to be proud of.
In fact, for the Hatton Garden heisters,
they're full of regret.
Have I ever revealed too much after a few drinks?
Uh, yeah (laughs). Hasn't everybody?
I have 100% revealed too much after drinking many drinks.
That's why apple flavored vodka is an big no from me.
If you wanna plan a heist,
you should select guys for your team that are teetotalers.
(dramatic music)
This morning,
12 addresses have been raided across London and Kent area.
While searching the homes
of the Hatton Garden suspects,
the police find a copy of "Forensic For Dummies,"
and on a computer,
a series of Google searches on industrial drills.
But what shocks the world is the discovery that
the perpetrators are no spring chickens.
The Hatton Garden heisters
were largely in their seventies.
This was an elderly team.
Well done.
Once you retire, you have to find a hobby,
so if it's sealing $20 million worth of jewelry,
good on them.
Just thinking about my grandpa who's also 70,
he seriously hurt himself trying to go pee the other day.
So... (playful music)
One of them had diabetes,
and had to have injections
during the course of the burglary,
others had urinary problems. (water splashes)
But despite their infirmaries,
they still managed to bust their way into the volts.
When the arrests started being made,
they became known as the Diamond Wheezers,
'cause they were elderly,
the French papers called them the Grandads' Gang,
Gang du Papys.
The Diamond Geezers
really are in a league of their own.
Research shows that those who heist,
typically have a solid decade of experience
above and beyond the common thief.
Typical robbers and thieves
are between the ages of 24 and 27,
whereas the average age of a heister 36.1 years.
But the Diamond Geezers blow those numbers out of the water
with an average age of 69 years.
Has anybody seen my walker?
And a combined age of 275 years.
But all that potential wisdom doesn't balance out
their ignorance of modern surveillance technology.
The judge told them that they were seen as
analog criminals in the digital age,
because they were unaware of some of the ways
that they might be traced.
£14 Million pounds is stolen
from Hatton Garden,
and only 4.2 million is recovered.
If there is still some loot stashed away,
one can only hope the long game isn't too long
for these old farts.
(suspenseful music)
Today, the security measures around banks, vaults,
and museums have gotten too advanced for most heisters.
The main criminal intelligence now
goes into cyber crime.
It's just a bloke sitting as a laptop,
transferring money into his bank account.
On August 10th, 2021,
hackers stole $613 million in cryptocurrency.
The largest heist of its kind to date.
Cyber crime is not nearly as exciting a story to tell,
but it's the future of great heists.
Using new and more sophisticated ways
of sticking it to the man.
The evolution of a criminal
is like the evolution of any other industry.
So if you're not scared of the number,
then there's nothing different.
It's just a bigger take.
The difference is just how big you could think.
(notes rustling)
Sometimes people can just jack crazy amounts of money,
go full Robin Hood, just to give the finger to the system.
If I was gonna be on the run,
I'd probably go somewhere tropical.
Just because if you're gonna on the run,
you might as well do it with a tan.
I bet it seems pretty important to have an inside man,
'cause most of the stuff that you want is on the inside.
So it will help to have a man there.
What kind of getaway car would I drive?
Uh, I would say a souped up Dodge Caravans
with a couple of baby seats.
Yeah, you wanna definitely confuse the police.
(bright music)