Inside the biggest heist in history
The headline may surprise you, but it isn’t clickbait. It is entirely factual and real: €7.4bn was stolen this weekend. Or rather, a little over 80K BTC.
Every so often, for a film or an article, someone dusts off the phrase “heist of the century”. In France it has been pinned on Albert Spaggiari (who, incidentally, greatly oversold his own role) and his 50M-franc raid on a Société Générale branch in Nice, on the 88M-franc robbery of the Banque de France, the French central bank, in Saint-Nazaire, and on the €11.6M that armoured-van driver Toni Musulin drove off with. But even the theft of thirteen masterpieces (Vermeer, Rembrandt, Manet, Degas and more) from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 is valued by the FBI at a mere $500M.
And yet the affair has stayed strangely under the radar, probably because plenty of general-news journalists fail to grasp the sheer scale of what has just happened. Which makes it today’s subject.