The Most Notorious Bank Robberies in History

Bank robberies have fascinated the public for centuries, partly because they combine crime, planning, risk, and enormous sums of money. In the United States, one of the earliest major bank robberies took place in 1798, when money was stolen from the Bank of Pennsylvania at Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia. Since then, bank robbers, organized crews, and professional thieves have targeted vaults, armored vehicles, safety deposit centers, and other places where large amounts of cash or valuables were stored.

Some robbers became famous names, including Willie Sutton, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid. Others were part of lesser-known crews that pulled off carefully planned heists involving tunnels, explosives, disguises, inside information, or months of preparation. While a few escaped with fortunes, many were eventually caught, and in some cases, much of the stolen money was recovered.

Tempo reviewed historical reports, news accounts, and crime-history sources to identify some of the most notorious bank robberies and cash heists of all time. The list focuses mainly on robberies involving banks, armored vehicles, safety deposit centers, and similar targets, rather than art thefts, train robberies, or home burglaries.

These cases stand out because of the money involved, the planning behind them, the fame of the criminals, or the lasting place they hold in crime history. Some became legendary because of the robbers themselves. Others remain memorable because of how bold, strange, or carefully executed they were.

• Location: Lakewood, WA
• Date: February 10th, 1997
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $8.5 million
• Ray Lewis Bowman and Arthur “Billy” Kirkpatrick, the so-called “Trench Coat Robbers”, are believed to have stolen money from some 28 banks, often disguising themselves with trench coats, glasses, and wigs. They pulled off the Seacoast heist by prying open the locked bank door at night, tying up three women still working there at gunpoint, and helping themselves to duffel bags full of cash.
• Both men were later captured and sent to prison.

• Location: Tucson, AZ
• Date: April 22, 1981
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $11.1 million
• Four robbers wearing Halloween and stocking masks got away with the sum of $3.3 million, setting a new record for U.S. bank heists at the time. The men claimed to have positioned associates armed with high-powered rifles outside the home of bank manager John Grainger with orders to kill his wife and children if he did not cooperate.
• All four, who were also accused of jewel thefts in Phoenix and Walnut Creek, CA, were later arrested. No accomplices at the bank manager’s home were ever found.

• Location: London, England
• Date: September 11, 1971
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $22.6 million
• Known as the Baker Street robbery, after the branch of Lloyds that was hit, this heist was inspired by a story featuring that thoroughfare’s most famous (if fictional) resident, Sherlock Holmes. In “The Red-Headed League,” burglars tunneled into a bank from the basement of a shop nearby. One Anthony Gavin decided to emulate the technique, renting a shop two doors down from the bank and starting to dig. Reaching the bank wall, Gavin’s gang blasted their way in and stole money and assorted valuables from 268 safe deposit boxes.
• Gavin and four members of his team were quickly arrested and sent to prison, but other members of the crew were never caught.

• Location: New York, NY
• Date: January 2, 1972
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $23.3 million
• Samuel Nalo and Robert Comfort had a particular penchant for hotel robberies around Manhattan. Among other thefts, they took an estimated $700,000 worth of jewelry at gunpoint from Sophia Loren while she was staying at the Hampshire House on Central Park South. At the Pierre, Nalo, and Comfort, along with three associates, entered the Pierre in disguises, handcuffed staff members and any guests they encountered — treating them politely, it was said — and broke into numerous safe deposit boxes, taking cash and a fortune in jewelry.
• Nato and Comfort were arrested and given four-year sentences. A friend of Nalo’s turned in about $750,000 worth of jewels, but the other robbers fled to Mexico or Europe and the cash was never recovered.

• Location: West Hartford, CT
• Date: September 12, 1983
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $23.6 million
• Victor Gerena, an employee at a Wells Fargo branch near Connecticut’s state capital, eluded co-workers, loaded $7 million into a rental car, and drove off. It was later discovered that he had acted on instructions from Segarra Palmer, head of a pro-Puerto Rican independence group called Los Macheteros (“The Cane-Cutters”).
• Palmer and his associates in Puerto Rico were arrested and convicted but neither Gerena nor the money were ever found.

• Location: New York, NY
• Date: December 12, 1978
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $27.8 million
• A gang of armed men took hostages at the Lufthansa cargo terminal and made off with a fortune in untraceable cash and jewelry (known as the Lufthansa Heist). The only person ever charged in the theft was an airport worker who’d been an inside man. Law enforcement officials suspected James Burke of organizing the heist, who worked for the Lucchese crime family, but he was never charged.
• Most of the robbers were later killed, probably by Burke to prevent them from implicating him. Convicted later in a college basketball point-shaving conspiracy, Burke died in prison. Neither the money nor jewelry were ever recovered. Robert De Niro played a character inspired by Burke in the 1990 Martin Scorsese film “Goodfellas.”

• Location: Maiden, NC
• Date: October 4, 1997
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $32.4 million
• Just seven months after an armored car driver for the company absconded with millions of dollars in Florida (see below), the company’s Charlotte, NC, office was robbed by a vault supervisor, David Ghantt, with the help of numerous associates — including a married former employee with whom he was having an affair.
• Ghantt was arrested the following year in Mexico. Another 23 people were charged with either aiding in the theft or helping to launder the proceeds, and all served time in prison.

• Location: New York, NY
• Date: December 12, 1982
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $35.4 million
• Bronx-based Sentry, an armored car company, was the victim of a massive theft when a company security guard, Christos “Chris” Potamitis claimed to have been overpowered by two masked men who handcuffed him and pried open the vault door, making off with $11 million. Authorities soon realized that Potamitis himself, along with several associates — including father and son Stever and Eddie Argitakos — were responsible.
• All three were arrested and sent to prison, while a fourth man was acquitted. Sentry didn’t survive the theft and went out of business.

• Location: Boston, MA
• Date: January 17, 1950
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $36.2 million
• Sometimes referred to as “The Great Brinks Robbery,” this heist was pulled off by somewhere between five and seven men in full disguise who snuck into the Brinks building just as employees were returning bags of cash and other valuables to the company safe, tied them up, and fled with the bags. The FBI’s main suspect was a known burglar named Anthony Pino, but a local crime figure and liquor store owner, Joseph McGinnis, was suspected of involvement.
• Eight participants in the robbery, either directly or as support staff — including McGinnis and Pino — were all eventually brought to justice, receiving life sentences (all were paroled except McGinnis, who died in prison), while two others died before being convicted.

• Location: Jacksonville, FL
• Date: March 29, 1997
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $36.6 million
• As the driver of a Loomis Fargo armored car laden with cash, Philip Noel Johnson was the ultimate inside man. He surprised the two guards in the vehicle, handcuffed them, and dropped them off in two different places. He took his haul to a small town in North Carolina and hid it in a shed, then escaped to Mexico City.
• A few months later, he was apprehended while attempting to cross back into the U.S. Most of the cash was recovered from the shed and Johnson served 22 years of a 25-year sentence.

• Location: Los Angeles, CA
• Date: September 12, 1997
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $36.9 million
• A former employee at the Dunbar Armored facility in downtown L.A., Allen Pace III, orchestrated this robbery, enlisting a group of his old friends for assistance. The men gained admittance to the place easily, as Pace had kept his keys. Avoiding security cameras, they duct-taped all the employees and loaded bags of cash into a rented truck. With the help of a local attorney and one of his employees, Pace subsequently established a complex system of shell companies and investments to launder the money.
• Pace and the others, as well as the two who had helped launder the take, were all caught and served jail time.

• Location: Paris, France
• Date: March 28/29, 2010
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $49.2 million
• A gang broke into the basement of a Crédit Lyonnais branch in central Paris, then drilled a hole in a two-and-a-half-foot-thick wall, entering the vault and opening about a hundred safe deposit boxes. They tied up a security guard, amassed their haul, and then set a fire in the vault, apparently in an attempt to cover their tracks. Bank officials arrived thinking that the only problem was the fire and didn’t discover the theft until the following day.
• A week after the robbery, a gang that police believe may have been the same crew attempted to enter another bank by the same method, whom they nicknamed “The Termite Gang,” but the alarms went off and they retreated before they could get into the safe deposit room.

• Location: Lincoln, NE
• Date: September 17, 1930
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $51.0 million
• About half a dozen armed men in business suits walked through the front door of the bank, commanded everyone to lie on the floor, and looted the premises of cash, Liberty Bonds, and jewelry. Three members of the gang were arrested, but only two were convicted.
• The man who allegedly planned the robbery, Edward Doll, ended up in prison for other crimes but was never charged with the Lincoln heist.

• Location: Nice, France
• Date: July 16, 1976
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $60.2 million
• Albert Spaggiari served as a French paratrooper in Vietnam in the early 1950s and later joined the right-wing OAS, which opposed Algerian independence from its French colonial masters. In both roles, he was found guilty of various crimes and served time in jail. Ending up in Nice, he plotted to break into the supposedly burglar-proof vault at the Société Générale by tunneling upwards from the sewers below the bank with the help of former OAS associates.
• Once inside, the gang took their time, remaining in the bank for two days after welding the vault door shut and rifling safe deposit boxes, from which they took jewelry, cash, and other items of worth. Spaggiari was arrested but escaped from the courtroom during his trial and was never recaptured, though he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia.

• Location: Belfast, Northern Ireland
• Date: December 19 and 20, 2004
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $69.0 million
• With members of their families held hostage by armed men, two bank employees were told to arrange to work late at the bank. Following instructions from the robbers, they loaded boxes of cash onto carts and, pretending to be dumping trash outside, left them to be picked up by the robbers. The IRA was widely believed to be behind the theft but officially denied it.
• Several arrests, including those of IRA members, were later made, but the charges involved laundering the stolen money, not the actual theft. A former IRA member named Ricky O’Rawe later published a novel called “Northern Heist,” which detailed a robbery very similar to this one.

• Location: London, England
• Date: November 26, 1983
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $83.2 million
• With the help of a security guard, six men entered the Brink’s-Mat warehouse (run by the Brink’s security company and the MAT Transport shipping company) on the Heathrow International Trading Estate, a few miles from the Heathrow Airport cargo depot. Expecting to find just cash, the robbers happened upon almost 7,000 gold bars and a cache of precious gems to add to their haul.
• The six thieves and another six associates were all arrested and sent to prison for varying amounts of time.

• Location: Laguna Niguel, CA
• Date: March 24, 1972
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $88.8 million
• A group of professional thieves from Youngstown, OH, found their way to this Orange County community, where they used explosives to blow a hole in the roof above the safe deposit vault, then ransacked the boxes, taking cash, jewelry, and other valuables. The FBI found the perpetrators as a result of their carelessness: They had all flown from Ohio, where they’d committed a similar robbery, to California under their real names, and later neglected to wash the dishes at the apartment they’d used as their headquarters, allowing agents to lift their fingerprints.

• Location: New York, NY
• Date: October 27, 1878
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $91.4 million
• George Leonidas Leslie, who studied architecture at the University of Cincinnati, founded his architectural firm in the city. But it was after moving to New York City that he found a more lucrative line of work – robbing banks. He was dubbed “The King of Bank Robbers” by police and the press and is said to have played a part in more than three-quarters of all bank heists in America from 1869 to 1879.
• His masterwork was the robbery of the savings institution, which he is said to have planned over three years, and which got underway when his gang kidnapped the bank janitor and forced him to hand over the keys to the bank and reveal the combination to the vault. Leslie, however, missed out on the action, disappearing before the robbery.
• His body was later discovered; he had been shot to death, apparently by one of his gang, with whose wife he was having an affair. The gang profited little from the escapade, in any case. The bulk of what they stole was in the form of stocks and bonds, which they couldn’t cash in, and these were returned to the bank. Their total take was an estimated $372,000.

• Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Date: January 16, 2006
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $113.2 million
• Five robbers in various disguises took more than 20 hostages at this bank. Police surrounded the building and began negotiations with a man who called himself Walter. But it was the mastermind of the heist, Fernando Araujo, who devised a way to enter and exit the bank via a tunnel underneath it. When the police finally entered the bank, the robbers had disappeared, as had the contents of some 143 safe deposit boxes.
• The men were found and sent to prison for various periods. When he got out, Araujo co-wrote the screenplay for a movie about the robbery, “El robo del siglo,” “The Heist of the Century.”

• Location: Fortaleza, Brazil
• Date: August 6, 2005
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $117.9 million
• A team of about 15 men targeted this branch of Brazil’s central bank, which controls the country’s money supply. The men were said to have spent three months digging a tunnel that ran for two city blocks from a house they’d rented, then breaking through three-and-a-half feet of steel-reinforced concrete into the bank vault. They took approximately three-and-a-half tons of Brazilian currency.
• Marcos Antonio Gonçalves has been named by some sources as the mastermind of the operation, but police centered their suspicions on another man, Luis Fernando Ribeiro — who was kidnapped and murdered after the robbery, possibly by police.

• Location: Tonbridge, England
• Date: February 21 and 22, 2006
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $132.9 million
• A gang led by former UFC fighter Lee Brahim Murray-Lamrani kidnapped the manager of a branch of the Swedish-based Securitas security company, along with his family, then forced their way into the company depot in a town in Kent, tied up the workers, and made off with a haul of cash awaiting distribution to banks around the country.
• Five of the robbers were arrested and convicted. Murray escaped to Morocco with another gang member. He avoided extradition back to the U.K. but served a prison sentence in Morocco.

• Location: Beirut, Lebanon
• Date: January 20, 1976
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $250.8 million
• Early in the Lebanese Civil War, which began as a power struggle between Muslim and Christian factions and eventually involved Israel and Syria, a group of Palestinians associated with Yassar Arafat’s PLO used explosives to breach a common wall separating the bank from a Catholic church. They brought locksmiths with them to open the vault and the safe deposit boxes and made off with truckloads of gold bars, various currencies, jewelry, and other valuables.
• No arrests were made.

• Location: London, England
• Date: July 12, 1987
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $278.1 million
• Italian-born Valerio Viccei, who’d fled his homeland where he was wanted for committing numerous armed robberies, pulled off this heist with the help of a Center employee and several associates. Pretending that he wanted to rent a safe deposit box, Viccei and one of his crew entered the vault, pulled guns, hung a “Closed” sign on the Center door, let more robbers in, and pried open the safe deposit boxes.
• Several of the men were arrested and convicted, but Viccei fled England and escaped justice — until he returned to pick up a Ferrari Testarossa he’d bought and was nabbed.

• Location: Baghdad, Iraq
• Date: August 7, 2007
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $444.3 million
• While the war in Iraq raged, two guards at the private Dar Es Salaam bank walked away with $282 million in American dollars. Why the institution had that much U.S. cash on hand was never satisfactorily explained.
• The guards are believed to have had connections with the local militia and were never found, though most of the money was subsequently recovered.

• Location: Baghdad, Iraq
• Date: March 18, 2003
• Amount stolen, adjusted for inflation: $1.6 Billion
• Some argue that this wasn’t exactly a robbery because it was committed at the direction of Iraq’s then-head of state, the notorious Saddam Hussein, but this record-breaking theft has been called “The Great Bank Robbery”. On the eve of the first wave of bombings in the U.S. “shock and awe” campaign against Hussein and his government in March, the dictator sent his personal assistant, Abid al-Hamid Mahmood, and his own son Qusay on the mission, which resulted in the removal of three truckloads of $100 bills and euros, then worth a total of about a billion dollars.
• The haul was then spirited across the border to Syria. All that money didn’t buy Hussein safety, however. He was arrested in December and later tried and executed — not for the theft but for crimes against humanity. Hussein has the dubious distinction of being one of 26 rulers who were killed by their own people.