Anyone can walk into a bank with a gun and demand some money, but this list is about the biggest bank heists in history, and those take a little more thought. To really make your mark as a bank robber, you've got to go above and beyond just putting on a little black mask and handing a teller a note to put some cash in a sack with a dollar sign on it.
You've got to think big, both in terms of how much you steal and how you do it. And the bandits on this list have thought big in both of those categories. They've dug tunnels under banks, blown up walls and safes with bombs, and landed on cash vault roofs in helicopters. Not only that, but they haven't just knocked off a few thousand dollars, but they've stolen millions of dollars in cash, gold and gems - in one case, they took close to a billion.
And forget going solo, these posses have multiple guys, in some cases, more than a dozen. A few of these heists may have even benefitted from the help of a dictator! Here are the biggest and most daring bank and cash heists in history. Upvote the heists you wouldn't even try in a million years, but are pretty impressed these people managed to attempt, or even accomplish!
http://www.ranker.com/list/most-daring-heists-in-history/mike-rothschild,
"DB Cooper"
On Thanksgiving Eve, 1971, a hijacker who called himself Dan Cooper (the name "DB Cooper" was bestowed on him by the media who mistook a suspect with that name for the real Cooper) boarded a Northwest Airlines flight in Portland, OR wearing a suit and tie. Once the flight was aloft, he ordered a drink and passed a note to the stewardess saying, "I have a bomb in my briefcase. You are being hijacked." He demanded $200,000 in unmarked bills, two parachutes, and a fuel truck.
When the plane landed in Seattle, "Cooper" exchanged the hostages on the plane for the money and parachutes and ordered the plane to take off again. 30 minutes into the flight, "Cooper" deployed the back stairs of the airplane, jumped out and neither he nor the money has been seen since. The crime remains unsolved.
The Billion Dollar Baghdad Bank Burgle
In what’s generally thought of as the biggest bank robbery in history, just before the American invasion of Iraq in March, 2003, one of President Saddam Hussein's sons stole nearly $1 billion in cash from the country's Central Bank - thanks to a note from his daddy.
Qusay Hussein had a handwritten letter from his father demanding to be given all of the cash in the Baghdad Central Bank (for "safekeeping), and his demands were met. Three trailers full of American cash were taken away over a five hour period and Qusay went into hiding. About two thirds of the cash was eventually recovered, found behind a fake wall in the palace of Saddam’s other son, Uday. The rest vanished.
The Great Train Robbery
A heist so brazen it permeated British pop culture for decades, the Great Train Robbery probably would have been a success if the robbers hadn’t been such idiots. Early morning on August 8, 1963, 15 men clad in ski masks and helmets held up a Royal Mail train, beat the engineer with a pipe and stole 120 mail sacks carrying over $2 million worth of cash, mostly old bills meant to be destroyed.
The crew retired to a farmhouse 120 miles away, drinking and playing Monopoly with the cash, then torching the place. But they did a bad torch job, and police found enough evidence to nab virtually the entire gang. 11 of the 15 men got 30 years in prison, though one, Ronnie Biggs, escaped and became a minor celebrity in England.
Brinks-MAT Robbery
Thanks to a tip from an insider, six men broke into the Brinks MAT warehouse at London’s Heathrow Airport in November 1983, expecting to find £3 million worth of cash. What they found instead was a massive haul, including three tons of gold and 100,000 diamonds. The gang beat up and hogtied the guards, poured gasoline on them and forced them to reveal the combination on the facility’s vault. Then they escaped in a van so weighed down that the bottom scraped the ground.
Two of the culprits were eventually arrested, and nearly 20 people with connections to the crime (including a man involved with the Great Train Robbery) were murdered in the decades that followed. Most of the gold was never found, and was probably smelted and sold back to dealers.
Bank of France Robbery
Using insider information from an employee of the Bank of France in Toulon, a gang of 10 men hit the bank hard in 1992. They kidnapped a guard's family and strapped explosives to the man’s body before forcing him to open the bank's vaults. Once inside, the gang emptied the vaults of 160 million francs and escaped in a group of vans. Most of the culprits were caught, but only about 10% of the haul was ever found. The mastermind of the crime hanged himself in prison.
The Banco Central Tunnel Robbery
A group of Brazilian burglars dug a 200 meter long tunnel under the vault of Fortelaza’s Banco Central in 2005. After three months of digging, the gang crawled beneath two city blocks to get to the bank, blasted their way through a meter of steel-reinforced concrete and emptied out the vaults. Nearly $65 million was stolen, and the money wasn’t insured. Some of the cash was eventually recovered, and one of the masterminds of the robbery was found dead a while later, but 18 other culprits were never brought to justice.
The British Bank of the Middle East Plunder
On January 20, 1976, a gang of PLO robbers working with a sect of fundamentalist Christians (robbery makes for strange bedfellows) broke into the British Bank of the Middle East in Beirut, Lebanon.
No skill or trickery was employed, as they simply blasted through a wall and burst in with guns. As Lebanon was engulfed in civil war, nobody really noticed or cared what was happening, and the group occupied the bank for several days while they tried to crack the main vault. They finally enlisted a group of Corsican safecrackers to bust in, and once it was done, they plundered its contents. The bandits made off with anywhere from $20 million to $50 million worth of gold bars, currency, stocks, and jewels. The vast majority of the haul was never recovered.
The Knightsbridge Security Depot Heist
The Knightsbridge Security Deposit Bank in London was well known for having famous and wealthy clients, so it had a large amount of cash and jewels on hand. Valerio Viccei and a small gang of robbers, using inside information from one of the bank's managers, got into a vault on the pretense of renting a safe deposit box. Then they pulled guns, tied up the guards and hung up a sign declaring that the bank was closed. Viccei and his crew ransacked the bank to the tune of nearly $200 million in cash and gems, then made a run for it. Viccei went into hiding and almost got away with it, but he was captured when he went back to England - to retrieve his Ferrari.
The Dar Es Salaam Bank Heist
Just four years after the Baghdad Bank was hit, the smaller Dar Es Salaam bank, also in Baghdad, was robbed – by the three Iraqi security guards working the overnight shift. When the bank’s employees came into work the morning of July 12, 2007, they found the front door open, the bank vault doors ajar and the bank's $282 million in American cash gone.
It's believed that the men had help from local militias in escaping the numerous checkpoints around the city, and neither the culprits nor the cash have ever turned up.
The Lufthansa Heist
Immortalized (though not actually shown) in the gangster classic Goodfellas, the Lufthansa Heist happened in December 1978 and was the largest robbery committed in the United States at the time. After getting into a cargo loading area at Kennedy Airport with a key provided by an inside man, Jimmy Burke and his crew burst into a lunch room and ordered the staff to open the vault at gunpoint. Within an hour, they made off with $6 million in cash and close to a million in jewels that had been flown in from Germany.
And, just like in the movie, Burke (named Conway in the film, and played by Robert De Niro) began killing off everyone involved with the heist to keep from being caught. Most of the money and all of the jewels were lost - and of the dozens of hoods involved in the heist, only one was ever arrested for it.