Heist Facts

In 1968, a car driven by bank employees was pulled over by a motorcycle cop claiming the car had been rigged with a bomb. The cop got under the car to “defuse” the device. When the car started to smoke, everybody ran. Then the “cop” just drove the car away. The 300,000,000 Yen robbery remains unsolved to this day.

In 2009, thieves arrived by helicopter on a cash depot roof in Stockholm. They had placed a fake bomb at the police helicopter hangar. Scattered caltrops on every access road. Stole $5.3 million and escaped clean. Police caught them months later through DNA on a piece of duct tape someone had licked.

A mob-connected thief broke into the Judy Garland Museum in 2005 and took Dorothy's ruby slippers, convinced by an associate that the $1 million insured shoes were set with real rubies. A fence told him they were glass. He got rid of them in under two days. The FBI recovered the slippers 13 years later in a 2018 sting. In December 2024, they sold at Heritage Auctions for $32.5 million - a record for movie memorabilia.