1980s
The Postcard Bandit
Australia
Australia
1931-1934
Old West
Wild Bunch Gang
1933-1934
Most notorious Depression-era bank robber
James-Younger Gang
2007
USA
U.S. most successful robber
Brazil, 2005
One of world's largest burglaries
Canada
leader of the notorious "Stopwatch Gang"
Canada
Canada
Escaped from Kingston Penitentiary
Machine Gun Molly
1963 - 1970
2007
Largest bank robbery in Chinese history
1911-1912
France
The Man of a Hundred Faces
1976
France
If your henchmen do not have these qualities, you might want to think about getting some different henchmen! These are essential qualities in the people who are going to be accompanying you on your heist. Make sure you choose your lackies wisely!
Congratulations, you've made it to the vault! Don't worry about that wounded henchmen or that security guard creeping towards the alarm button. You are almost there.
It's time to dig into that bag of supplies. They say that modern vaults are virtually impenetrable, and that any blast big enough to open a vault would also be enough to level the entire building with you and your henchmen inside it. But don't let that phase you! That's what the bank manager is for.
Some bank managers will actually have codes to the vault and be able to open it for you. Now is a good time to get one of your henchmen to put the barrel of his M16 into the manager's spine and ask him politely for the code. If the manager is not trusted with the codes, as it is with some larger banks, he will undoubtably know where to get the codes.
Well, there is only one thing to do in this situation: GO QUIETLY. What happens after you are caught is up to you. People have escaped from jail, become FBI and police informants, and kept their money hidden for when they are released. Don't worry too much! You'll be back on your feet in no time.
Brenden James Abbott (born 8 May 1962) is an Australian bank robber who was branded the Postcard Bandit by the Western Australian Police to attract news media attention. The bank robberies he has been attributed as masterminding, yielded as much as A$6 million, though a significant proportion of that amount was unrecoverable.
He is currently detained in the Woodford Correctional Centre and is often moved between this facility and the Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre and has been moved between mainstream and Supermax several times over the last 12 years.
Darcy Ezekial Dugan (1920–1991) was an Australian bank robber and New South Wales' most notorious prison escape artist.
Gregory David Roberts (born June 1952) (born Gregory John Peter Smith) is an Australian author best known for his novel Shantaram. He is a former heroin addict and convicted bank robber who escaped from Pentridge Prison in 1980, and fled to India where he lived for ten years.
The Banco Central burglary at Fortaleza was a burglary of the Banco Central in Fortaleza, a city in northeastern Brazil. It is one of the world's largest burglaries, along with the 1987 Knightsbridge Security Deposit robbery in London.
On the weekend of August 6, 2005 and August 7, 2005 a gang of burglars tunneled into the Banco Central in Fortaleza. They removed five containers of 50-real notes, with an estimated value of R$164,755,150 (as on December, 2009 US$94.3 million) and weighing about 3.5 tons. The money was uninsured; a bank spokeswoman stated that the risks were too small to justify the insurance premiums. The burglars managed to evade or disable the bank's internal alarms and sensors; the burglary remained undiscovered until the bank opened for business on the morning of Monday, August 8, 2005.
Patrick Michael "Paddy" Mitchell (26 June 1942 - 14 January 2007) of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, was leader of the notorious "Stopwatch Gang" of bank robbers. Mitchell was regarded to be North America's most famous, most successful and, especially, most likeable bank robber of our time. Paddy Mitchell was on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's most wanted list[1] for the Stopwatch Gang's bank robberies across the U.S.
Mitchell, working with fellow Canadians Stephen Reid and Lionel Wright stole approximately $15 million, mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, from more than 140 banks and other sites across Canada and the U.S. He escaped from prison three times, and moved to the Philippines for a period of 15 years, where he re-married and had a son who was named Richard. During that time, he often flew back to the U.S. to visit banks. Finally, in 1994, he was convicted for a solo robbery in Mississippi and put in prison for the last time to serve a 65-year sentence.
The Stopwatch Gang, which was famous for its speedy heists — including the 1974 robbery of $700,000 in gold bars from the Ottawa Airport — took its name from the stopwatch worn by Reid. Known for their non-violent methods and for being polite to their victims, several television documentaries and books, including Mitchell's autobiography, This Bank Robber's Life, which he wrote from prison were produced.
The Boyd Gang was a notorious criminal gang based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, named for member Edwin Alonzo Boyd. The gang was a favourite of the media at the time because of its sensational actions, which included bank robberies, jail breaks, beautiful women, gun fights, manhunts, and daring captures.
Roger "Mad Dog" Caron (born April 12, 1938 in Cornwall, Ontario) is a Canadian bank robber and the author of the influential 1978 prison memoir Go-Boy! Memories of a Life Behind Bars. At the time of publishing, Caron was thirty-nine years old and had spent twenty-three years in prison.
Tyrone Williams "Ty" Conn (January 18, 1967 – May 20, 1999) was a Canadian bank robber. He was the only person in the last half century to escape over the wall from the Kingston Penitentiary, one of Canada's most secure prisons.
Monica Proietti (February 25, 1940 – September 19, 1967) was a Montreal bank robber and folk hero better known as "Machine Gun Molly" (in French: Monica la Mitraille).
The Front de libération du Québec (FLQ; English: Quebec Liberation Front) was a left-wing Quebecois nationalist and Marxist-Leninist paramilitary group in Quebec, Canada. It was active between 1963 and 1970, and was regarded as a terrorist organization for its violent methods of action. It was responsible for over 160 violent incidents which killed eight people and injured many more, including the bombing of the Montreal Stock Exchange in 1969. These attacks culminated in 1970 with what is known as the October Crisis, in which British Trade Commissioner James Cross was kidnapped and Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte was murdered by strangulation. Founded in the early 1960s, it supported the Quebec sovereignty movement.
The Agricultural Bank of China robbery was the embezzlement of nearly 51 million yuan (c.US$6.7 million) from the Handan branch of the Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) in Hebei province between March 16 and April 14, 2007. Perpetrated by two vault managers employed at the branch, it is the largest bank robbery in China's history.
The idea for the heist had begun when one of the managers, Ren Xiaofeng, stole 200,000 yuan (c.US$26,000) in October 2006 with the complicity of two security guards, Zhao Xuenan and Zhang Qiang. Ren then purchased tickets for the Chinese lottery, with the intention of winning a sufficiently large prize that he could return the missing funds before their absence was noted, and still have money left over for himself. Despite the unfavourable odds Ren was successful, and he was able to return the 200,000 to the vault.
The Bonnot Gang (La Bande à Bonnot) was a French criminal anarchist group that operated in France and Belgium during the Belle Époque, from 1911 to 1912. Composed of individuals who identified with the emerging illegalist milieu, the gang utilized cutting-edge technology (including automobiles and repeating rifles) not yet available to the French police.
Jacques Mesrine was the most famous criminal in modern French history. He was responsible for numerous bank robberies, burglaries, and kidnappings in France and Canada. Mesrine repeatedly escaped from prison and made international headlines during a final period as a fugitive when his exploits included trying to kidnap a judge who had sentenced him. An aptitude for disguise earned him the moniker "The Man of a Hundred Faces" and enabled him to remain at large while receiving massive publicity as a wanted man. Mesrine was widely seen as an anti-establishment 'Robin Hood' figure, in keeping with this image he was rarely without a glamorous female companion. A pair of films which came out in 2008 were based on his life.
Albert Spaggiari (December 14, 1932 – June 8, 1989), nicknamed Bert, was a French criminal chiefly known as the organizer of a break-in into a Société Générale bank in Nice, France in 1976.
Toni Musulin is a French man of Serbo-Croatian origins, and a former security van driver for the Loomis security firm.
He is known for having stolen 11.6 million euros from the Banque de France while on duty. At the time of the theft, he had emptied his flat and bank account. His colleagues reported that he had complained about the security firm and poor working conditions.
Musulin became a hot topic of conversation on a social networking website, where he was praised for "the heist of the century" and for doing it without resorting to violence or guns.
Jaba (or Dzhaba) Ioseliani (July 10, 1926 - March 4, 2003) was a Georgian politician, bank robber and leader of the paramilitary Mkhedrioni organization.
Bonnie Elizabeth Parker (October 1, 1910 – May 23, 1934) and Clyde Chestnut Barrow (March 24, 1909 – May 23, 1934) were well-known outlaws, robbers, and criminals who traveled the Central United States with their gang during the Great Depression. Their exploits captured the attention of the American public during the "public enemy era" between 1931 and 1934. Though known today for his dozen-or-so bank robberies, Barrow in fact preferred to rob small stores or rural gas stations. The gang is believed to have killed at least nine police officers and committed several civilian murders. The couple themselves were eventually ambushed and killed in Louisiana by law officers. Their reputation was cemented in American pop folklore by Arthur Penn's 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.
Robert LeRoy Parker April 13, 1866 – c. November 6, 1908), better known as Butch Cassidy was a notorious American train robber, bank robber, and leader of the Wild Bunch Gang in the American Old West. After pursuing a career in crime for several years in the United States, the pressures of being pursued, notably by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, forced him to flee with an accomplice, Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, known as the Sundance Kid, and Longabaugh's girlfriend, Etta Place, first to Argentina and then to Bolivia, where he and Longabaugh were allegedly killed in a shootout in November 1908.
John Herbert Dillinger, Jr. (June 22, 1903 – July 22, 1934) was an American bank robber in Depression-era United States. He was charged with, but never convicted of, the murder of an East Chicago, Indiana police officer during a shoot-out. This was his only alleged homicide. His gang robbed two dozen banks and four police stations. Dillinger escaped from jail twice.
In 1933–34, seen in retrospect as the heyday of the Depression-era outlaw, Dillinger was the most notorious of all, standing out even among more violent criminals such as Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde. Media reports were spiced with exaggerated accounts of Dillinger's bravado and daring and his colorful personality. The government demanded federal action, and J. Edgar Hoover developed a more sophisticated Federal Bureau of Investigation as a weapon against organized crime and used Dillinger and his gang as his campaign platform to launch the FBI .
After evading police in four states for almost a year, Dillinger was wounded and returned to his father's home to recover. He returned to Chicago in July 1934 and met his end at the hands of police and federal agents who were informed of his whereabouts by Ana Cumpanas (the owner of the lodge where Dillinger sought refuge at the time). On July 22, the police and Division of Investigation closed in on the Biograph Theater. Federal agents, led by Melvin Purvis, moved to arrest him as he left the theater. He pulled a weapon and attempted to flee but was shot three times and killed.
Jesse Woodson James (September 5, 1847 – April 3, 1882) was an American outlaw, gang leader, bank robber, train robber, and murderer from the state of Missouri and the most famous member of the James-Younger Gang. He also faked his own death and was known as J.M James. Already a celebrity when he was alive, he became a legendary figure of the Wild West after his death. Some recent scholars place him in the context of regional insurgencies of ex-Confederates following the American Civil War rather than a manifestation of frontier lawlessness or alleged economic justice.
James Madison (born 1956/57) was the Mad Hatter who robbed 17 banks while wearing a variety of hats. He was apprehended on July 17, 2007 in Newark, New Jersey, shortly after police tracked his license plates. His modus operandi was to wear a different hat for each robbery.
Frank Nash has been called “the most successful bank robber in U.S. history,” but he is most noted for his violent death in what has become known as the Kansas City Massacre. Nash spent part of his childhood in Paragould, Arkansas (Greene County) and was arrested in Hot Springs, Arkansas (Garland County) the day before his death.
