The Five Largest Bank Robberies Ever
Stealing is wrong. It’s right there in the Ten Commandments, along with murdering your neighbor’s wife or whatever.
That said, there’s something about a bank heist that piques human curiosity. Maybe it’s the fact that it almost always involves a very cool plan and that despite not technically being victimless, the victim is an establishment that most people don’t have empathy for.
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So, in the interest of firing up the excitement centers in your brain the way your job clearly isn’t, here are the largest bank heists ever — specifically banks, and not armored trucks, or cash depots, because where’s the romance in that?
British Bank of the Middle East
Any good heist planner knows that to pull one off, you need a distraction. And you know what makes a really good distraction? A full-blown civil war.
Obviously, you don’t want to be the one inciting it, as I imagine that would carry some hefty bonuses on possible jail time, but if it just so happens to be happening? A horrible window of opportunity is wide open, as it was in Lebanon in 1976. With explosions being not all that unusual given the unpleasant times, these particular opportunists blasted into the bank from a church next door, then spent two days cracking the vault and emptying the safe deposit boxes to the tune of $50 million.
Northern Bank of Ireland
This next bank robbery didn’t involve any violence in the bank itself, but the details behind it show that it wasn’t for the squeamish. The robbers, who still haven’t been caught or identified, didn’t exactly rip off the bank with the people involved unharmed. Their plan started 24 hours beforehand, when they took the families of two employees hostage. With their families at risk, they were forced to show up to work the next day and try their very best to be normal until closing, when they allowed the robbers into the bank after everyone else had left.
With the bank open to them and only them, they took 26.5 million pounds and disappeared.
Banco Central
The robbery of Banco Central in Fortaleza in Brazil followed a plan that’s cliche even in fiction. The criminals showed up to the bank after hours dressed as workers, here to help with the renovation of the bank, a renovation that wasn’t only actually happening but had a crew on the books for that night, making it seem thoroughly unfishy. Unfortunately, the lack of raised hackles led to them spending the night emptying the bank’s security deposit boxes and making a tidy $58.5 million in profit.
The investigation ended up more suspicious than the arrival of the robbers, as the police took almost a week to begin investigating, and didn’t seem to have a high degree of urgency at any point.
Knightsbridge Security Deposit Center
The perpetrator of this robbery isn’t shrouded in mystery whatsoever. It was headed by a man named Valerio Viccei, who was well-equipped for a heist of this scale, given that he was already wanted for 50 armed robberies at the time in his native Italy. Feeling the heat in his homeland, he took a trip to London to practice his chosen profession, most notably targeting the Knightsbridge Safe Deposit Center.
When you’re committing felonies with that frequency, the scheming leaves something to be desired, and this wasn’t a master plan by any means. They simply stopped by, said they wanted to rent one of the center’s safety deposit boxes and then pulled out guns once inside. The firepower allowed them to pick through the no-longer-protected possessions willy-nilly and leave with valuables estimated to be worth up to $64 million.
Dar es Salaam Investment Bank
The Dar es Salaam Investment Bank in Baghdad was screwed from the very get-go. First, they were smack-dab in the middle of an active war zone in Iraq in 2007, meaning that authorities had about a billion bigger fish to fry. Secondly, though they weren’t caught, the thieves are thought to have been the bank’s security guards themselves, so the bank’s only hope of stopping the robbers was praying for a sudden change of heart.
It didn’t occur, and these thieves took a total that dwarfs every other payday on this list, and still holds the Guinness World Record for a bank robbery: 282 million British pounds, and given the 2007 exchange rate of roughly $2 to one pound, that put them well above the half-million mark in USD.
