Don’t try this at home. Or in court. (Obviously?) — Dan

How Gibberish Beat a Prison Sentence

In the early to mid-1970s, Albert Spaggiari, then in his forties, was a photographer by day, living in Nice, France, with his wife. They raised chickens, staying out of the public eye, which seemed reasonable: Spaggiari, a few years earlier, had gotten in trouble with the law and served two separate prison sentences. But Spaggiari was likely living a double life. He had previously gotten in trouble for joining a fringe group that fought to prevent Algerian independence from France. He would later be associated with the Chilean secret police and likely served as a clandestine operative for the group. And in 1976, he led a bank robbery that the New York Times once called “the heist of the century.”

But his greatest trick was nothing more than a scribble.

In the spring of 1976, Spaggiari organized an effort to rob the vault of the Société Générale bank in Nice. The vault of the bank was a fortress, mostly. A huge steel door barred entry into a three-room chamber. Even if thieves figured out a way to get through the locked steel door, they’d not be able to do much. The valuables in those three rooms were spread among hundreds, if not thousands, of individual lockboxes. An individual thief would need hours to open more than one or two; it would take a team days to go through all of them. And of course, then you’d need to escape. The steel door was the only way in or out, and there’s little chance that such a caper would go unnoticed.

Until it did.

On July 19, 1976, bank employees returned to work from a long weekend, having just celebrated Bastille Day. They did what they always did: they went to the vault to get cash, so that they could pay depositors who wanted to make a withdrawal. But they couldn’t get into the vault. As the Times noted in the above-linked article, “the main vault door wouldn't open. [ . . . ] The mechanism had stuck before, harried bank officials explained, and would be cleared in a moment.” Except this time was different. The vault mechanism wasn’t broken. The door had been welded shut from the inside. It took more than five hours for a crew wielding jackhammers to gain entry to the vault. And once they got inside, the bankers saw the damage: all the lockboxes had been opened and almost all the cash was gone. In total, the thieves got away with the equivalent of as much as $10 million — $55 million in today's dollars.

The problem with the vault was the floor. It was just a regular floor, and if you could somehow get underneath it, you could break in — and that’s exactly what Spaggiari did. A sewer line ran just a couple of dozen feet from the vault, and no one really pays attention to what happens in the sewers. As the Times would later report, “A team of 20 men, led by Mr. Spaggiari, burst into the vault of the Societe Generale bank from a 25-foot tunnel they had carved over the previous several weeks between the bank and a branch of the city sewer system. They worked from Friday to Sunday, emptying safe-deposit boxes and seizing most of the bank's cash reserves. The group, which became known as the ‘sewer gang,’ escaped with $8 million to $10 million in gold, cash, jewelry and gems. During their stay in the vault, they cooked meals, drank wine and used antique silver tureens as toilets.” And they welded the steel door shut, making it impossible to catch them in the act. The theives also saw this as a way to prevent a shootout — they left behind a note, scrawled on the wall, reading “sans armes, ni haine, ni violence” ("without weapons, neither hatred, nor violence”).

The theft was impressive. But they did not get away with it. After a lengthy investigation, police began making arrests in October. (Per some sources, the ex-girlfriend of one of the conspirators turned in her former beau.) Spaggiari was ultimately arrested and he confessed to being the mastermind. His freedom at risk, he had another trick up his sleeve.

Under French law at the time, a judge had to decide whether the prosecution had enough evidence to charge the accused with a crime. Per yet another Times article, “in such cases, the official explained, two police escorts stay behind the door when a suspect is taken from prison to an investigating magistrate's office.” Only the judge, the accused, and the accused’s attorney remained in the room. Spaggiari used this to his advantage. He was uncuffed, as was the norm for such hearings, and told the judge, Richard Bouaziz that not only was he going to confess, but he was going to implicate others — including, as Paris Match reported, “local political figures.” Spaggiari scribbled some names and what appeared to be a map on a piece of paper and handed it to the judge — but the judge couldn’t make sense of Spaggiari’s handwriting. So Spaggiari got up to explain to the judge what he had written, or so the judge thought.

With the judge focused on the document in front of him, Spaggiari made his move. Per Paris Match (via Google Translate, with some cleanup by me), “Quick and determined, he went behind the desk, opened the window, and jumped into the void. As a former paratrooper of the 3rd Colonial Parachute Regiment, he knew how to land a 6-meter jump. He aimed at a car parked in the street, whose roof, as it sank, cushioned his fall. A roll and, unharmed, he jumped onto the back of a powerful Kawasaki motorcycle ridden by an accomplice, and fled.” The names and map he claimed to have written were gibberish, intended to buy him that brief moment to make his escape.

Spaggiari was never caught. He lived out his life on the lam, surviving another decade. Cancer ultimately claimed his life — he was a heavy smoker and died in the summer of 1989, at age 56. After his death, associates of his brought his body to his mother’s home in France so that she could bury him.

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More About Bank Robberies

Today’s Bonus fact: Charles Arthur Floyd, better known as “Pretty Boy Floyd,” as a bank robber active in the United States in the 1930s. He topped the FBI’s Most Wanted list — but the general public probably didn’t see him as the villain the FBI teed him up to be. Floyd’s reputation was generally positive because he didn’t just take stuff for himself. Per his Wikipedia entry, “when he robbed banks, he allegedly destroyed mortgage documents” (although this has never been proven). As his thefts happened during the Great Depression, if Floyd did indeed destroy records of mortgages, he likely freed a lot of people from massive debt.

From the Archives: Operation Downfall: A bank robbery that was a secret government plot, except that it wasn’t.

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And thanks! — Dan