Rififi, To Catch a Thief, The Italian Job, The Pink Panther—Europe has been the setting for some of the best heist movies of all time. And when it comes to real life robberies, well, it’s had its fair share of those too, as these cracking true crime books reveal.
Flawless
It’s said that all of the world’s diamonds at some point pass through the Belgian port of Antwerp. The city’s World Diamond Centre employs 32,000 people, and has what many believed was the tightest security outside Fort Knox. But in 2003, thieves broke into a supposedly air-tight vault and escaped with over $100 million in gems and jewelry. No alarm was tripped and no people were hurt.
Related: 5 Bizarrely Nicknamed Bandits Wanted by the FBI
Immaculately planned and executed, this was a classic caper. The robbers were members of the so-called School of Turin, an elite band of professional thieves from Italy. Lead by the suave and handsome Leonardo Notarbartolo they boasted nicknames straight out of Hollywood: The Monster, Speedy, the King of Keys. Selby and Campbell bring the crime and the police investigation breathlessly to life. It’s a fast moving story of what could have been the perfect crime, if only somebody hadn’t gotten sloppy…
Stealing the Scream
Dolnick tells the riveting story of the 1994 theft of Edvard Much’s iconic masterpiece from Norway’s National Gallery by a couple of thieves armed with not much more than a ladder. With the Norwegian police baffled and embarrassed (the theft took place on the opening day of the Lillehammer Olympics), pursuit of the thieves was entrusted to Scotland Yard’s celebrated undercover art detective, Charley Hill—the son of a ballerina and a US Air Force captain who’d considered becoming a priest before joining the police.
Related: Best True Crime Podcasts To Debut In 2021
Along with the eccentric Hill, Dolnick introduces us to a cast of characters straight out of a Coen Brothers movie. There’s the Bohemian British aristocrat, the Marquis of Bath, who lives on a country estate with a harem of women (or "wifelets" as he styles them), a whale-sized fence named David Duddin who sues the British Government when a prison guard has an affair with his wife while he’s in jail, and Munch himself, the troubled genius whose priceless work lies at the centre of this wild and often comic tale.
Vanished Smile
Scotti’s stranger-than-fiction book tells the story of the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in August, 1911. It was a crime that created an international sensation and made Leonardo Da Vinci’s portrait the most famous painting on the planet. French police were baffled. At first they concluded the crime was the work of a bitter modern artist and arrested the avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire. After his release, suspicion fell instead on Pablo Picasso. Two years after the crime, the Mona Lisa was finally recovered by Italian police, hidden in the false-bottom of a suitcase belonging to petty thief and handyman named Vincenzo Perugia. Scotti tells her story with panache and humor, exploring all the theories about the theft, which, despite Perugia’s confession, still remains shrouded in mystery.
Heist
Based on extensive interviews with criminals and police, Sounes’ is a razor-sharp and compelling account of the biggest cash robbery in history, the theft of £53 million ($70 million) from a high security warehouse in Kent, England by a gang armed with assault rifles. The robbers—an unlikely blend that included a used car salesman, two Albanians, and a former mixed martial arts fighter—might have got away with a lot more. They had to leave behind another £154 million ($210 million) simply because it was too heavy to carry. British police eventually tracked down and arrested thirty people in connection with the crime, but huge sums of cash have never been recovered, and some of the key players undoubtedly slipped away. Sounes’ is a rip-roaring tale that’s slated to be made into a movie by Darren Aronofsky.
Related: Hands Up! 10 Heists that Netted Millions (and Billions)
Ballad of the Whiskey Robber
If Wes Anderson made a movie about Eastern European bank robbers, it couldn’t end up being any wilder or more surreal than Rubinstein’s stylish and hilarious account of the life of Attila Ambrus, a Transylvanian-born former-fur smuggler and gravedigger who combined a career as professional hockey goaltender in Budapest with that of a master thief. Priding himself on being a gentleman, Ambrus didn’t hurt anyone in his 27 raids on banks, post offices, and travel agents, and soon became a modern Hungarian folk-hero when it emerged he sent flowers to his victims and expensive bottles of wine to the detectives hunting him. Eventually jailed in 1999 after apparently netting close to half-a-million dollars, he escaped from prison using a rope made from bed sheets. Recaptured, Ambrus took up pottery in prison, and since release has run his own highly successful ceramics business in his native Romania. Rubinstein tells this bizarre and oddly uplifting tale with wit, warmth, and gusto.
The Irish Game
Hart’s skillfully crafted book tells the story of the 1984 theft of a priceless collection of art (including a Vermeer valued at $200 million) from Russborough House in County Wicklow, Ireland. The man behind this daring heist was Dublin gangland kingpin Martin Cahill, A.K.A. “The General” (played by Brendan Gleeson in the movie of that name). Cahill was ruthless and cunning. For years he’d outwitted Irish police, openly taunting them in the media about their inability to convict him. The massive art theft took him into uncharted territories, however. After trying unsuccessfully to ransom the paintings, he opted to sell some to a violent group of Protestant terrorists in Belfast. It was a decision that would have fatal consequences. Hart is a sharp-eyed writer with a gift for portraying the characters involved in this murky tale of the darker side of The Emerald Isle.
Turning Money into Rebellion
Between 1972 and 1989, a highly skilled and ruthless gang carried out a series of armed robberies of post offices, banks, and armored pay-roll trucks across Denmark. The thieves got away with close to 10 million dollars during their spree, which also saw one police officer killed and several more wounded. So far, so standard.
Related: How the Pierre Hotel Robbery Went Off Without a Hitch but Then Ended in Tragedy
What lifts Kuhn’s brilliant forensic investigation out of the ordinary is the fact that Bleking Street Gang were hardcore communists who gave away the cash they’d robbed to liberation organizations around the world. If the operations seemed to be planned with military precision, that’s because the gang had been trained in terrorist camps in the Middle East. It’s an eye-opening investigation into old school radical activism that calls to mind recent movies The Trail of the Chicago 7 and Judas and the Black Messiah.
The Helicopter Heist
In 2009, in what may well have been the first livestreamed heist in history, a gang of heavily armed robbers used a stolen Bell Jet Ranger helicopter to land on the roof of the G4S cash deposit building in the suburbs of the Swedish capitol, Stockholm. Smashing through the reinforced glass windows with a sledgehammer and blowing the doors off various safe rooms with plastic explosives, they made off with $5.3 million in cash. Having thwarted pursuit by placing bombs in the hangars containing Sweden’s police helicopters, the gang made their getaway landing at a remote airstrip. Despite their cunning, the robbers were quickly apprehended, though the money was never recovered. Jonah Bonnier’s scintillating account of the daring and meticulously planned heist is lightly fictionalized, but based on hours of interviews with four of the robbers.
