20 Daring Robberies From History That Stunned The Public

Vincenzo Peruggia was an Italian glazier who used to fit protective glass over the works of art in the Louvre in Paris. In August 1911, he sneaked into the museum and stayed there overnight in a closet. Early the next morning, he removed Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from its frame, swaddled it in his smock, and walked away with it. He stashed it in a trunk for two years, until he tried to sell it to an art dealer in Florence and got caught. The Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre unharmed.

In January 1950, 11 masked men in chauffeur caps and rubber masks used duplicated keys to sneak into a cash depot in Boston’s Brink’s building. They tied up the employees on duty and fled with $2.77 million in cash, checks, and securities, the largest cash robbery in U.S. history at that time. Their plan worked for years, until gang member Joseph “Specs” O’Keefe, upset over his share, ratted out the others to the FBI just days before the statute of limitations ran out. Almost no money was ever recovered.

Five members of the Dalton Gang, led by brothers Bob, Grat, and Emmett Dalton, attempted to rob two banks simultaneously in Coffeyville, Kansas, on October 5, 1892. Tellers stalled the robbers with a tale of a locked time vault, allowing armed townsfolk to retrieve rifles and wait in an alleyway as the gang fled. Four outlaws and four townspeople were killed. Emmett Dalton was shot 23 times, served several years in prison, and went on to work in Hollywood.

In late 1922, a black Buick containing three masked gunmen pulled up alongside a Federal Reserve delivery truck outside the Denver U.S. Mint. They exchanged gunfire with the two guards stationed inside the building. After a roughly 90-second shootout, the criminals made their getaway with $200,000 worth of freshly printed $5 bills, leaving one guard, Charles Linton, mortally wounded behind them. One of the bandits, Nicholas Trainor, was found dead in the getaway car. This robbery resulted in a permanent change to the way the Federal Reserve transported currency across urban streets.

On June 26, 1907, revolutionaries in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia) threw grenades at an Imperial State Bank stagecoach in Erivansky Square, killing roughly 40 guards and bystanders. The attack was organized by Joseph Stalin, who handled logistics, while field leader Simon Ter-Petrosian, known as Kamo, led the assault on the ground. The gang stole 241,000 rubles from the bank, money destined for Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik movement. But the level of bloodshed in the raid caused the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to later ban this type of robbery.

George Leslie, an architect turned crook, began planning a break-in at the Manhattan Savings Institution three years beforehand. He constructed a replica of the institution’s vault inside a Brooklyn warehouse and trained himself in breaking the lock. He was killed by rival gangsters in May of 1878, five months before the heist. His fellow robbers went ahead with the plan and executed his instructions exactly on October 27, 1878. They forced the janitor of the bank to give up the combination to the vault and escaped with $2.74 million, the largest bank robbery in America in that century.

In Telluride, Colorado, on June 24, 1889, 23-year-old Robert LeRoy Parker, along with Matt Warner and Tom McCarty, held up the San Miguel Valley Bank for about $21,000 in gold and currency at gunpoint, then escaped over the San Juans. The posse that pursued them lost their tracks. Parker had not yet begun using his legendary moniker. He started calling himself Butch Cassidy about a year later while employed in a Wyoming butcher shop.

Harvey Logan and some of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch companions halted a Union Pacific train at Wilcox, Wyoming, in 1899, and ordered the engineer to take the locomotive and express car over a wooden trestle bridge. When they were safely across, the gang blew up the bridge behind them and smashed open the express car safe with dynamite, riding away with $50,000 in cash. The railroad responded by creating mounted Super-Posse units that hunted down lawbreakers.

On September 7, 1876, eight members of the James-Younger Gang rode into the town of Northfield, Minnesota, to rob the First National Bank. When cashier Joseph Lee Heywood declined to open the vault, they shot him dead. Armed townspeople snatched up rifles and surprised the outlaws in the street. They killed two of the gang members and fatally shot a passer-by, Nicholas Gustafson. The three Younger brothers were wounded and captured two weeks later. Frank and Jesse James escaped unharmed back to their native state of Missouri, and the gang never rode together again.

The jeweled star and badge of the Grand Master of the Order of St Patrick were kept at Dublin Castle as ceremonial insignia. In July 1907, they disappeared from the Bedford Tower, stolen by someone with duplicate keys who left no evidence of any lock being broken or picked. The discovery was made a few days before King Edward VII was scheduled to come to inspect them. Sir Arthur Vicars, the official charged with protecting the jewels, was disgraced. The jewels were never found, and the case was never solved.

In 1928, Jake and Ralph Fleagle, leading the Fleagle Gang, held up a bank in Colorado for $218,000. The bank president pulled out a concealed gun, and the Fleagles killed him and his son. Then they shot a doctor who had treated one of their wounded men and abandoned his car. One latent thumbprint on the door of the doctor’s car was enough to catch Jake Fleagle, marking the first time in FBI history that a single fingerprint was sufficient to solve a bank robbery. The Fleagle brothers were caught and executed.

Over a span of about eight years, Black Bart (real name Charles E. Boles), a Union Army veteran, robbed 28 Wells Fargo stagecoaches throughout northern California. Dressed in a duster and flour sack mask, he was always alone, telling the driver to “throw down the box” and never loading his shotgun. On his last job, he left a handkerchief marked with his laundry service, which Pinkerton agents traced back to him. He served four years at San Quentin.

In 1924, brothers Willis, Joe, Jess, and Willie Newton of the Newton Gang robbed a Milwaukee Road train at Rondout, Illinois, using submachine guns and tear gas. They took mail sacks containing $3 million in cash, bonds, and jewels, which is still the largest train robbery in U.S. history. The robbery was possible due to a corrupt postal inspector, William Fahy, who colluded with the gang. Willis inadvertently wounded Jess during the escape, leaving forensic evidence that agents used to identify and capture the group.

Jules Bonnot and his cohorts, part of the French anarchist Bonnot Gang, shot a bank courier in the street in Paris, robbed him, and drove away in a stolen 1910 Delaunay-Belleville limousine on December 21, 1911. Foot and bicycle police couldn’t keep up. It was the first known time a car was used as a getaway vehicle during a bank robbery and spurred police agencies worldwide to begin motorizing.

Shortly after midnight on January 26, 1876, seven masked men entered the Northampton, Massachusetts, home of bank cashier John Whittelsey. They tied up his wife and children and forced him to tell them how to open the bank’s vault. While guards watched the family, accomplices made off with $1.6 million worth of cash and securities from the vault. Pinkerton detectives followed the trail to the two men who had organized the job, Robert Scott and James Dunlap. They were arrested and given 20-year prison sentences.

A dozen or so armed ex-Confederate raiders held up the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri, a bank owned by former Union militia officers, in February 1866. They forced a teller named Greenup Bird to hand over $60,000 in cash, gold and bonds. A bystander, a teenage student named George Wymore, was killed by gunfire as the gang fled. The robbery is regarded as the first peacetime daylight bank robbery in U.S. history. Frank and Jesse James are often linked to the gang, though no record proves either was there.

For months, master thief Edward Agar took wax impressions of the keys to the iron safes on trains that carried gold bullion from London to Paris. Then, in 1855, with an accomplice and a bribed guard, Agar opened the safes while the train was in transit, removed more than 200 pounds of gold valued at £12,000, and replaced it with lead shot of the same weight. No one noticed the substitution until the safes were opened in Paris. Agar confessed when arrested for another crime, and his accomplices were convicted.

Convicts Farrell and Rous spent several weeks digging a 60-foot-long tunnel from a public drainage pipe that ran under a Sydney street up through the floor of the Bank of Australia’s vault. They stole more than £14,000 in cash, gold and banknotes by September 15, 1828, before their theft was discovered when the clerks at the bank noticed a hole in the floor. Farrell and Rous were eventually convicted of their crimes, and the incident led to a wholesale change in how convicts were overseen and how bank vaults were built.

In 1866, members of the Reno Gang, headed by brothers Frank and John, boarded an Ohio & Mississippi Railway train near Seymour, Indiana. There they donned their masks, busted into the train’s express car, and heaved a 10,000-pound safe over the side of the moving train. They forced the express employee inside to open up another safe. They got away with more than $10,000. It was the first train robbery in U.S. history that took place during peacetime, years before Jesse James would rob his first train, and triggered an explosion of copycat rail heists.

When an epidemic of yellow fever swept through Philadelphia in 1798, a bank employee, Isaac Davis, was able to take $162,821 from the temporary vault of the Bank of Pennsylvania by using a set of duplicate keys. Suspicion quickly fell on a blacksmith named Patrick Lyon, who had recently made the doors for the vault. Davis eventually turned himself in, and Lyon, having spent three months in jail, sued the bank’s directors for malicious prosecution and was awarded $9,000. The case became one of the first successes in the struggle against arbitrary arrests.

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