In 1976, thieves tunnelled from the sewers into a Nice bank vault, leaving a cryptic 'no weapons, no violence' message on the wall.
Albert Spaggiari, a smiling photographer-turned-criminal-mastermind, pulled off the heist, but escaped from court, living the rest of his life on the run.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a robbery.
[00:00:25] But not any robbery.
[00:00:28] It has been called the greatest bank robbery in history, and involves the sunny seaside city of Nice, sewers, red wine, suave Frenchmen, gangsters, the far right, daring escapes, motorbikes, South America, plastic surgery, and more.
[00:00:47] So, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:53] If you have ever been in France during the weekend of the 14th of July, you will know that it is one of national celebration.
[00:01:04] It is a reminder of the events of the French Revolution. There are fireworks, parties, and, of course, many people take the opportunity to have a few days off work.
[00:01:18] 1976 was no exception.
[00:01:21] Bastille Day, the 14th of July, fell on a Wednesday that year, meaning many people would have partaken in the time-honoured French tradition of “le pont”, the bridge, taking the Thursday and Friday off so as to enjoy a five-day holiday.
[00:01:41] The following Monday, Monday 19th July, as people dragged themselves back to their places of work, and shops and offices opened again, a rumour started to gain momentum in the city of Nice, on the south coast of France.
[00:01:58] There had been a break-in at the Société Générale bank.
[00:02:03] This wasn’t the classic bank robbery of Hollywood movies, when someone strolls into the bank, pulls out a gun, tells everyone to freeze, and then orders the cashiers to fill up a suitcase with banknotes.
[00:02:18] No, the rumour was that there had been a break-in in the vault, in the private deposit boxes deep underneath the bank.
[00:02:27] There were thousands of security boxes, containing, well, the bank didn’t know exactly.
[00:02:34] Everything from jewels to secret documents to family heirlooms, and of course, cold, hard cash that someone might have wanted to keep at the bank “unofficially”.
[00:02:47] Journalists started calling up the bank asking for a statement. Customers started queuing up outside, demanding access to their security box, demanding to speak with the manager.
[00:03:01] The thing was, the bank employees couldn’t get into the vault containing the security boxes.
[00:03:08] The twenty-tonne door seemed jammed shut.
[00:03:12] It simply wouldn’t open. Eventually, they were forced to drill a hole in the wall of the vault, finally allowing them to see inside.
[00:03:24] And what they found was nothing short of chaos. Hundreds of security boxes had been prised open, their contents all over the floor.
[00:03:36] On the wall were scrawled the words, “Ni armes, ni violence et sans haine”, “No weapons, no violence, and without hate”.
[00:03:47] And it was true. Nobody seemed to have been harmed, there had been no hostages taken, no guns brandished; it looked to have been a clean job.
[00:03:59] So, how did they get in?
[00:04:01] Well, as the police looked around the vault, the answer was right in front of them.
[00:04:08] They found a large hole in the wall, leading to a tunnel. They followed the tunnel for eight metres and found themselves coming out in the municipal sewer system, the system that takes away wastewater.
[00:04:25] It was an ingenious plan. The thieves had somehow entered the sewer system, got to the point closest to the bank, and tunnelled all the way through to the wall of the vault, timing it perfectly for a weekend they knew would be particularly quiet.
[00:04:46] As the police made further inspections of the raided vault, it became clear that the criminals had spent some considerable time there.
[00:04:57] The reason that the bank employees hadn’t been able to open the vault was that the door had been welded shut, completely closed to the outside, giving the men time to escape if they'd been discovered.
[00:05:13] They were not, and they had clearly managed to spend a long time in the vault.
[00:05:19] There was a table, which it seemed that the criminals had used to sort through the contents of the security boxes, pocketing anything of monetary value and discarding anything that wasn’t.
[00:05:34] There were even bottles of wine, paté, a portable gas cooker, tins of ravioli, and bread crusts. It seemed like the thieves had spent the night, perhaps several nights, in the vault before escaping with their loot.
[00:05:52] And how much had been taken?
[00:05:56] Well, the bank wasn’t exactly sure. The thieves had managed to open 371 safety deposit boxes out of a total of 4,000. Alongside this, they had managed to break into the bank’s central reserve and had taken gold bars and cash.
[00:06:17] The haul was estimated at 50 million francs, equivalent to approximately 40 million Euros in today’s money.
[00:06:28] It had all the hallmarks of a professional job. Drilling the tunnel and ensuring it was adequately supported, lit, and structurally sound was no mean feat. And as for breaking into the security boxes, sure, the thieves hadn’t managed all 4,000 of them, but still, it was the work of people who knew what they were doing.
[00:06:54] What’s more, they hadn’t left fingerprints or clues.
[00:06:59] As you can imagine, the newspapers went crazy, giving the criminals a name, “le gang des égoutiers”, or “the sewer gang”.
[00:07:09] But as for the identity of the perpetrators, the police were still at something of a loss.
[00:07:17] All eyes first turned to a local organised crime boss called Gaetano Zampa, but he had a watertight alibi. It wasn’t him.
[00:07:29] What’s more, the message on the wall, “no weapons, no violence, and without hate”, this didn’t sound like Zampa. He was all about weapons and violence.
[00:07:42] It wasn’t until several weeks later that the Nice police got their first clue.
[00:07:49] In the countryside around 15km north of Nice, in fact, a week before the raid on the bank, local police had been called by a neighbour who had reported a group of men acting suspiciously outside a countryside villa. The police arrived to see what was going on. The men had made up some excuse; they were going to rent it from a restaurant owner in a nearby town, but something smelled fishy.
[00:08:22] The police took their IDs, but because they weren’t committing any crime, they were released without charge.
[00:08:30] And there was another piece of the puzzle.
[00:08:33] A month before the raid, police in Nice had stopped a car one evening after seeing a pair of men loading the boot with workman’s tools, the kind of tools you might use if you were planning a break-in.
[00:08:50] When questioned, the men’s response didn’t make much sense. Again, fishy, but acting suspiciously isn’t a crime in itself.
[00:09:01] The police realised that the two men who had been stopped that evening in Nice were the same as two of the men who had been acting suspiciously outside the villa, Daniel Michelucci and Gérard Vigier, two known criminals.
[00:09:18] The problem was that there was no sign of Daniel Michelucci and Gérard Vigier. They seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
[00:09:29] The police decided to search the villa to see if it held any clues.
[00:09:36] When they entered, they found traces of the same mud and soil found in the Nice sewers, as well as the same cigarette butts and bottles of wine that were found in the vault.
[00:09:49] Bingo. It seemed like the villa had been used as a sort of staging house when planning the raid, then the criminals had come back there to divide their spoils.
[00:10:02] The problem was that there was no sign of the men.
[00:10:07] The first breakthrough came three months after the raid. A man walked into a branch of Crédit Agricole, casually trying to sell a handful of gold ingots.
[00:10:21] But these weren’t just any ingots; they were numbered, part of the stash lifted from the vault in Nice. The police closed in, arrested him, and the net began to tighten. Within two days, two other men, Francis Pellegrin and Alain Bournat, were also behind bars.
[00:10:44] The police were pleasantly surprised that these men seemed happy to talk. But the person they named surprised them.
[00:10:53] They said that their boss, the mastermind of the entire heist, was someone called Albert Spaggiari.
[00:11:03] You can imagine the detectives’ first reaction. “Who? Albert Spaggiari?”
[00:11:10] The name wasn’t known to the police. He wasn’t some high-level gangster, he wasn’t a bank employee, he was…no one.
[00:11:20] He was a photographer, and owned a small photography studio in Nice.
[00:11:26] And the police couldn’t see any links to organised criminals. Spaggiari had spent time in prison for a burglary in Vietnam, French Indochina at the time, but that was 25 years before, when he was 21 years old.
[00:11:43] He seemed to be a changed man. Married. A popular local wedding photographer. An upstanding member of society. Not a criminal mastermind.
[00:11:55] What’s more, if Spaggiari was indeed the mastermind of this great crime, he wasn’t acting like it.
[00:12:04] At the time of the discovery of his supposed involvement, he was in Japan on a trip with the then mayor of Nice and secretary of tourism, Jacques Médecin.
[00:12:17] The police waited for him to return, and when he arrived back in France, on October 27th, 1976, Albert Spaggiari was arrested while he was having lunch at a bar outside the airport.
[00:12:33] He acts surprised. Me?
[00:12:37] And the police have to admit, he doesn’t seem like the type.
[00:12:42] If it was him, how did he manage to control a bunch of serious thugs? Spaggiari was more of a flaneur, a cigar-smoking, sunglasses-wearing, smiling local businessman, not some hardened criminal.
[00:12:59] He denies all involvement, but there’s something about his answers that seems suspicious.
[00:13:07] As if there’s something he’s keeping under wraps.
[00:13:11] Still, there is no evidence, nothing actually linking him to the crime.
[00:13:18] This all changes when the police search his isolated countryside house, more like a small farm.
[00:13:26] Inside, they find a veritable weapons cache: dynamite, guns, and ammunition. Suddenly, it seems that this honest, law-abiding photographer might not be quite what he seems.
[00:13:44] Still, he doesn’t talk.
[00:13:47] It’s only until the police tell him that if he doesn’t confess, they’ll charge his wife as well for possession of the small arsenal of weapons that they found at their farmhouse.
[00:14:00] For Spaggiari, this is too much.
[00:14:03] He says, “OK, you’ve got me”, and agrees to collaborate with the police.
[00:14:09] He was charged and thrown into jail, awaiting trial.
[00:14:14] And he starts talking, he reveals that he got the idea for the crime a couple of years beforehand, after he had heard from a neighbour who worked at the bank that the vault didn’t have an alarm or motion detection system.
[00:14:29] It was deep underground, its walls almost 2 metres thick. The bank simply didn’t think it was necessary, the neighbour said.
[00:14:39] Spaggiari wanted to test whether this was true, so he rented a deposit box at the bank. As a genuine, paying customer, he was allowed into the vault, where he secretly took pictures and made detailed notes and drawings of the interior of the vault.
[00:15:00] He also used his lockbox, but not for cash or jewels; instead, he placed an alarm clock, setting it to go off in the middle of the night. This would allow him to verify the neighbour’s claim.
[00:15:15] He also revealed that the reason for the heist was more than personal enrichment; he said that he wanted to raise money for a relatively unknown far-right organisation called La Catena, so the crime took on this political angle too.
[00:15:36] Now, whether he was simply inventing that to add to the legend and make himself sound less like a simple thief, I’ll let you be the judge.
[00:15:46] The one thing he never does is reveal the names of his accomplices, the other members of the crew.
[00:15:55] In March the following year, after four months behind bars, Spaggiari is at the courthouse in Nice, in the prosecuting judge’s office.
[00:16:06] He has a police escort, of course, but when he tells the judge that he has important information regarding the involvement of local politicians, the judge asks the police officers to leave. He knows that policemen talk, and if he wants to have a confidential conversation with Spaggiari, he needs to have it alone.
[00:16:31] Spaggiari brings out a few sheets of paper with sketches of a map of the bank area, names and arrows. The judge can’t quite understand what is written there, and he takes a closer look.
[00:16:48] But it's all a ruse.
[00:16:50] While the judge is trying to make sense of what Spaggiari has written, Spaggiari seizes the moment. He opens the window and jumps out, falling 8 metres onto a parked car, then he rolls off, runs across the road, jumps onto the back of a motorcycle, and speeds off through central Nice.
[00:17:14] This was the 10th of March, 1977, and Spaggiari is never seen again, or at least, not by the authorities.
[00:17:25] But by this point, he has grown accustomed to the fame and glamour that come with being the country’s most famous bank robber, a sort of real-life Arsène Lupin, the fictional gentleman-thief.
[00:17:41] Journalists love him and his story, and he revels in the attention.
[00:17:47] He even decides to send 5,000 francs to the person whose car he landed on after the jump from the magistrate’s office, as compensation for the damage.
[00:18:00] And he went on the run. To Italy, to Spain, and then to South America.
[00:18:07] He changed his appearance, having plastic surgery and growing a beard, but he still couldn’t resist the public eye.
[00:18:15] He did a series of interviews from Madrid in 1983, where he talked about how he planned to spend his time smoking cigars and drinking champagne, surrounded by beautiful women.
[00:18:29] He also explained in detail how he planned and executed the bank heist. He got the idea, he said, after reading a novel about a similar crime in the UK.
[00:18:43] He had the idea, scouted out the sewage works, and when he realised he would need a team to get the job done, he connected with a local organised crime gang and offered them half the spoils.
[00:18:58] And it was a huge job. The men worked every night for three months, taking the equipment for several kilometres through the sewer system, wading through human excrement, waste water, and rats, before starting the back-breaking work of digging the tunnel itself.
[00:19:18] And the plot, he revealed, was almost uncovered at the last moment. Just before the heist was scheduled to take place, the then-president of France, Giscard d'Estaing, came to Nice. Spaggiari feared that the police would do a sweep of the sewers along the president’s route and discover the tunnel, but they didn’t.
[00:19:43] He also revealed how the criminals almost never got out of the tunnel. It had rained very heavily that weekend, and the sewers were very full, practically overflowing.
[00:19:58] The men had to make several trips back and forth from the vault to carry off all their ill-gotten gains.
[00:20:06] The sewage water was up to their necks, and it was flowing so fast that it was quite a task to walk against the current, back to the vault, to get the booty.
[00:20:18] Now, despite this playboy, gentleman-thief image, Spaggiari had clearly committed a serious crime. In 1979, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, in absentia, so if he was ever caught by the police, he knew that this was the sentence that awaited him.
[00:20:41] In fact, he didn’t live for long.
[00:20:44] He had been a heavy smoker his entire life, and on June 9th, 1989, lung cancer got the better of him. He was 56 years old.
[00:20:57] Now, since his death, theories have emerged suggesting that Spaggiari might not have been the criminal mastermind he made out to be.
[00:21:07] In 2010, a well-known Marseille gangster called Jacques Cassandri published a book claiming that he was the mastermind behind the heist, and that he made the equivalent of €2 million from the raid, which he quickly spent.
[00:21:25] But as the statute of limitations had passed, he could no longer be charged with the crime. Instead, he got 30 months behind bars for a different crime, money laundering.
[00:21:38] As for Spaggiari, he is remembered in popular culture both as this successful robber, but also as something of a Narcissus, a vain man who craved attention and fame more than anything else.
[00:21:55] And the irony of it all was that, after becoming something of a celebrity and getting addicted to it, he had to stay out of the limelight to survive.
[00:22:06] According to one of his former friends, and one of the men who helped him escape on the motorcycle, he was actually quite lonely and bored.
[00:22:16] Behind the headlines, the glamour, and the mystery, what remained was a rather sad figure.
[00:22:24] A man who pulled off one of the most audacious bank robberies of the 20th century, but who spent his final years hiding, sick, and alone.
[00:22:36] It is, perhaps, not such a glamorous ending after all.
[00:22:42] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Albert Spaggiari.
[00:22:47] I hope it was a fun one and that you’ve learned something new.
[00:22:50] If you like these types of episodes, there are actually quite a few others about famous criminals: there’s one on Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, and the Kray Twins. I’ll put the links to those in the show notes, in case you’re interested.
[00:23:03] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:08] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a robbery.
[00:00:25] But not any robbery.
[00:00:28] It has been called the greatest bank robbery in history, and involves the sunny seaside city of Nice, sewers, red wine, suave Frenchmen, gangsters, the far right, daring escapes, motorbikes, South America, plastic surgery, and more.
[00:00:47] So, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:53] If you have ever been in France during the weekend of the 14th of July, you will know that it is one of national celebration.
[00:01:04] It is a reminder of the events of the French Revolution. There are fireworks, parties, and, of course, many people take the opportunity to have a few days off work.
[00:01:18] 1976 was no exception.
[00:01:21] Bastille Day, the 14th of July, fell on a Wednesday that year, meaning many people would have partaken in the time-honoured French tradition of “le pont”, the bridge, taking the Thursday and Friday off so as to enjoy a five-day holiday.
[00:01:41] The following Monday, Monday 19th July, as people dragged themselves back to their places of work, and shops and offices opened again, a rumour started to gain momentum in the city of Nice, on the south coast of France.
[00:01:58] There had been a break-in at the Société Générale bank.
[00:02:03] This wasn’t the classic bank robbery of Hollywood movies, when someone strolls into the bank, pulls out a gun, tells everyone to freeze, and then orders the cashiers to fill up a suitcase with banknotes.
[00:02:18] No, the rumour was that there had been a break-in in the vault, in the private deposit boxes deep underneath the bank.
[00:02:27] There were thousands of security boxes, containing, well, the bank didn’t know exactly.
[00:02:34] Everything from jewels to secret documents to family heirlooms, and of course, cold, hard cash that someone might have wanted to keep at the bank “unofficially”.
[00:02:47] Journalists started calling up the bank asking for a statement. Customers started queuing up outside, demanding access to their security box, demanding to speak with the manager.
[00:03:01] The thing was, the bank employees couldn’t get into the vault containing the security boxes.
[00:03:08] The twenty-tonne door seemed jammed shut.
[00:03:12] It simply wouldn’t open. Eventually, they were forced to drill a hole in the wall of the vault, finally allowing them to see inside.
[00:03:24] And what they found was nothing short of chaos. Hundreds of security boxes had been prised open, their contents all over the floor.
[00:03:36] On the wall were scrawled the words, “Ni armes, ni violence et sans haine”, “No weapons, no violence, and without hate”.
[00:03:47] And it was true. Nobody seemed to have been harmed, there had been no hostages taken, no guns brandished; it looked to have been a clean job.
[00:03:59] So, how did they get in?
[00:04:01] Well, as the police looked around the vault, the answer was right in front of them.
[00:04:08] They found a large hole in the wall, leading to a tunnel. They followed the tunnel for eight metres and found themselves coming out in the municipal sewer system, the system that takes away wastewater.
[00:04:25] It was an ingenious plan. The thieves had somehow entered the sewer system, got to the point closest to the bank, and tunnelled all the way through to the wall of the vault, timing it perfectly for a weekend they knew would be particularly quiet.
[00:04:46] As the police made further inspections of the raided vault, it became clear that the criminals had spent some considerable time there.
[00:04:57] The reason that the bank employees hadn’t been able to open the vault was that the door had been welded shut, completely closed to the outside, giving the men time to escape if they'd been discovered.
[00:05:13] They were not, and they had clearly managed to spend a long time in the vault.
[00:05:19] There was a table, which it seemed that the criminals had used to sort through the contents of the security boxes, pocketing anything of monetary value and discarding anything that wasn’t.
[00:05:34] There were even bottles of wine, paté, a portable gas cooker, tins of ravioli, and bread crusts. It seemed like the thieves had spent the night, perhaps several nights, in the vault before escaping with their loot.
[00:05:52] And how much had been taken?
[00:05:56] Well, the bank wasn’t exactly sure. The thieves had managed to open 371 safety deposit boxes out of a total of 4,000. Alongside this, they had managed to break into the bank’s central reserve and had taken gold bars and cash.
[00:06:17] The haul was estimated at 50 million francs, equivalent to approximately 40 million Euros in today’s money.
[00:06:28] It had all the hallmarks of a professional job. Drilling the tunnel and ensuring it was adequately supported, lit, and structurally sound was no mean feat. And as for breaking into the security boxes, sure, the thieves hadn’t managed all 4,000 of them, but still, it was the work of people who knew what they were doing.
[00:06:54] What’s more, they hadn’t left fingerprints or clues.
[00:06:59] As you can imagine, the newspapers went crazy, giving the criminals a name, “le gang des égoutiers”, or “the sewer gang”.
[00:07:09] But as for the identity of the perpetrators, the police were still at something of a loss.
[00:07:17] All eyes first turned to a local organised crime boss called Gaetano Zampa, but he had a watertight alibi. It wasn’t him.
[00:07:29] What’s more, the message on the wall, “no weapons, no violence, and without hate”, this didn’t sound like Zampa. He was all about weapons and violence.
[00:07:42] It wasn’t until several weeks later that the Nice police got their first clue.
[00:07:49] In the countryside around 15km north of Nice, in fact, a week before the raid on the bank, local police had been called by a neighbour who had reported a group of men acting suspiciously outside a countryside villa. The police arrived to see what was going on. The men had made up some excuse; they were going to rent it from a restaurant owner in a nearby town, but something smelled fishy.
[00:08:22] The police took their IDs, but because they weren’t committing any crime, they were released without charge.
[00:08:30] And there was another piece of the puzzle.
[00:08:33] A month before the raid, police in Nice had stopped a car one evening after seeing a pair of men loading the boot with workman’s tools, the kind of tools you might use if you were planning a break-in.
[00:08:50] When questioned, the men’s response didn’t make much sense. Again, fishy, but acting suspiciously isn’t a crime in itself.
[00:09:01] The police realised that the two men who had been stopped that evening in Nice were the same as two of the men who had been acting suspiciously outside the villa, Daniel Michelucci and Gérard Vigier, two known criminals.
[00:09:18] The problem was that there was no sign of Daniel Michelucci and Gérard Vigier. They seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
[00:09:29] The police decided to search the villa to see if it held any clues.
[00:09:36] When they entered, they found traces of the same mud and soil found in the Nice sewers, as well as the same cigarette butts and bottles of wine that were found in the vault.
[00:09:49] Bingo. It seemed like the villa had been used as a sort of staging house when planning the raid, then the criminals had come back there to divide their spoils.
[00:10:02] The problem was that there was no sign of the men.
[00:10:07] The first breakthrough came three months after the raid. A man walked into a branch of Crédit Agricole, casually trying to sell a handful of gold ingots.
[00:10:21] But these weren’t just any ingots; they were numbered, part of the stash lifted from the vault in Nice. The police closed in, arrested him, and the net began to tighten. Within two days, two other men, Francis Pellegrin and Alain Bournat, were also behind bars.
[00:10:44] The police were pleasantly surprised that these men seemed happy to talk. But the person they named surprised them.
[00:10:53] They said that their boss, the mastermind of the entire heist, was someone called Albert Spaggiari.
[00:11:03] You can imagine the detectives’ first reaction. “Who? Albert Spaggiari?”
[00:11:10] The name wasn’t known to the police. He wasn’t some high-level gangster, he wasn’t a bank employee, he was…no one.
[00:11:20] He was a photographer, and owned a small photography studio in Nice.
[00:11:26] And the police couldn’t see any links to organised criminals. Spaggiari had spent time in prison for a burglary in Vietnam, French Indochina at the time, but that was 25 years before, when he was 21 years old.
[00:11:43] He seemed to be a changed man. Married. A popular local wedding photographer. An upstanding member of society. Not a criminal mastermind.
[00:11:55] What’s more, if Spaggiari was indeed the mastermind of this great crime, he wasn’t acting like it.
[00:12:04] At the time of the discovery of his supposed involvement, he was in Japan on a trip with the then mayor of Nice and secretary of tourism, Jacques Médecin.
[00:12:17] The police waited for him to return, and when he arrived back in France, on October 27th, 1976, Albert Spaggiari was arrested while he was having lunch at a bar outside the airport.
[00:12:33] He acts surprised. Me?
[00:12:37] And the police have to admit, he doesn’t seem like the type.
[00:12:42] If it was him, how did he manage to control a bunch of serious thugs? Spaggiari was more of a flaneur, a cigar-smoking, sunglasses-wearing, smiling local businessman, not some hardened criminal.
[00:12:59] He denies all involvement, but there’s something about his answers that seems suspicious.
[00:13:07] As if there’s something he’s keeping under wraps.
[00:13:11] Still, there is no evidence, nothing actually linking him to the crime.
[00:13:18] This all changes when the police search his isolated countryside house, more like a small farm.
[00:13:26] Inside, they find a veritable weapons cache: dynamite, guns, and ammunition. Suddenly, it seems that this honest, law-abiding photographer might not be quite what he seems.
[00:13:44] Still, he doesn’t talk.
[00:13:47] It’s only until the police tell him that if he doesn’t confess, they’ll charge his wife as well for possession of the small arsenal of weapons that they found at their farmhouse.
[00:14:00] For Spaggiari, this is too much.
[00:14:03] He says, “OK, you’ve got me”, and agrees to collaborate with the police.
[00:14:09] He was charged and thrown into jail, awaiting trial.
[00:14:14] And he starts talking, he reveals that he got the idea for the crime a couple of years beforehand, after he had heard from a neighbour who worked at the bank that the vault didn’t have an alarm or motion detection system.
[00:14:29] It was deep underground, its walls almost 2 metres thick. The bank simply didn’t think it was necessary, the neighbour said.
[00:14:39] Spaggiari wanted to test whether this was true, so he rented a deposit box at the bank. As a genuine, paying customer, he was allowed into the vault, where he secretly took pictures and made detailed notes and drawings of the interior of the vault.
[00:15:00] He also used his lockbox, but not for cash or jewels; instead, he placed an alarm clock, setting it to go off in the middle of the night. This would allow him to verify the neighbour’s claim.
[00:15:15] He also revealed that the reason for the heist was more than personal enrichment; he said that he wanted to raise money for a relatively unknown far-right organisation called La Catena, so the crime took on this political angle too.
[00:15:36] Now, whether he was simply inventing that to add to the legend and make himself sound less like a simple thief, I’ll let you be the judge.
[00:15:46] The one thing he never does is reveal the names of his accomplices, the other members of the crew.
[00:15:55] In March the following year, after four months behind bars, Spaggiari is at the courthouse in Nice, in the prosecuting judge’s office.
[00:16:06] He has a police escort, of course, but when he tells the judge that he has important information regarding the involvement of local politicians, the judge asks the police officers to leave. He knows that policemen talk, and if he wants to have a confidential conversation with Spaggiari, he needs to have it alone.
[00:16:31] Spaggiari brings out a few sheets of paper with sketches of a map of the bank area, names and arrows. The judge can’t quite understand what is written there, and he takes a closer look.
[00:16:48] But it's all a ruse.
[00:16:50] While the judge is trying to make sense of what Spaggiari has written, Spaggiari seizes the moment. He opens the window and jumps out, falling 8 metres onto a parked car, then he rolls off, runs across the road, jumps onto the back of a motorcycle, and speeds off through central Nice.
[00:17:14] This was the 10th of March, 1977, and Spaggiari is never seen again, or at least, not by the authorities.
[00:17:25] But by this point, he has grown accustomed to the fame and glamour that come with being the country’s most famous bank robber, a sort of real-life Arsène Lupin, the fictional gentleman-thief.
[00:17:41] Journalists love him and his story, and he revels in the attention.
[00:17:47] He even decides to send 5,000 francs to the person whose car he landed on after the jump from the magistrate’s office, as compensation for the damage.
[00:18:00] And he went on the run. To Italy, to Spain, and then to South America.
[00:18:07] He changed his appearance, having plastic surgery and growing a beard, but he still couldn’t resist the public eye.
[00:18:15] He did a series of interviews from Madrid in 1983, where he talked about how he planned to spend his time smoking cigars and drinking champagne, surrounded by beautiful women.
[00:18:29] He also explained in detail how he planned and executed the bank heist. He got the idea, he said, after reading a novel about a similar crime in the UK.
[00:18:43] He had the idea, scouted out the sewage works, and when he realised he would need a team to get the job done, he connected with a local organised crime gang and offered them half the spoils.
[00:18:58] And it was a huge job. The men worked every night for three months, taking the equipment for several kilometres through the sewer system, wading through human excrement, waste water, and rats, before starting the back-breaking work of digging the tunnel itself.
[00:19:18] And the plot, he revealed, was almost uncovered at the last moment. Just before the heist was scheduled to take place, the then-president of France, Giscard d'Estaing, came to Nice. Spaggiari feared that the police would do a sweep of the sewers along the president’s route and discover the tunnel, but they didn’t.
[00:19:43] He also revealed how the criminals almost never got out of the tunnel. It had rained very heavily that weekend, and the sewers were very full, practically overflowing.
[00:19:58] The men had to make several trips back and forth from the vault to carry off all their ill-gotten gains.
[00:20:06] The sewage water was up to their necks, and it was flowing so fast that it was quite a task to walk against the current, back to the vault, to get the booty.
[00:20:18] Now, despite this playboy, gentleman-thief image, Spaggiari had clearly committed a serious crime. In 1979, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, in absentia, so if he was ever caught by the police, he knew that this was the sentence that awaited him.
[00:20:41] In fact, he didn’t live for long.
[00:20:44] He had been a heavy smoker his entire life, and on June 9th, 1989, lung cancer got the better of him. He was 56 years old.
[00:20:57] Now, since his death, theories have emerged suggesting that Spaggiari might not have been the criminal mastermind he made out to be.
[00:21:07] In 2010, a well-known Marseille gangster called Jacques Cassandri published a book claiming that he was the mastermind behind the heist, and that he made the equivalent of €2 million from the raid, which he quickly spent.
[00:21:25] But as the statute of limitations had passed, he could no longer be charged with the crime. Instead, he got 30 months behind bars for a different crime, money laundering.
[00:21:38] As for Spaggiari, he is remembered in popular culture both as this successful robber, but also as something of a Narcissus, a vain man who craved attention and fame more than anything else.
[00:21:55] And the irony of it all was that, after becoming something of a celebrity and getting addicted to it, he had to stay out of the limelight to survive.
[00:22:06] According to one of his former friends, and one of the men who helped him escape on the motorcycle, he was actually quite lonely and bored.
[00:22:16] Behind the headlines, the glamour, and the mystery, what remained was a rather sad figure.
[00:22:24] A man who pulled off one of the most audacious bank robberies of the 20th century, but who spent his final years hiding, sick, and alone.
[00:22:36] It is, perhaps, not such a glamorous ending after all.
[00:22:42] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Albert Spaggiari.
[00:22:47] I hope it was a fun one and that you’ve learned something new.
[00:22:50] If you like these types of episodes, there are actually quite a few others about famous criminals: there’s one on Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, and the Kray Twins. I’ll put the links to those in the show notes, in case you’re interested.
[00:23:03] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:08] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a robbery.
[00:00:25] But not any robbery.
[00:00:28] It has been called the greatest bank robbery in history, and involves the sunny seaside city of Nice, sewers, red wine, suave Frenchmen, gangsters, the far right, daring escapes, motorbikes, South America, plastic surgery, and more.
[00:00:47] So, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:53] If you have ever been in France during the weekend of the 14th of July, you will know that it is one of national celebration.
[00:01:04] It is a reminder of the events of the French Revolution. There are fireworks, parties, and, of course, many people take the opportunity to have a few days off work.
[00:01:18] 1976 was no exception.
[00:01:21] Bastille Day, the 14th of July, fell on a Wednesday that year, meaning many people would have partaken in the time-honoured French tradition of “le pont”, the bridge, taking the Thursday and Friday off so as to enjoy a five-day holiday.
[00:01:41] The following Monday, Monday 19th July, as people dragged themselves back to their places of work, and shops and offices opened again, a rumour started to gain momentum in the city of Nice, on the south coast of France.
[00:01:58] There had been a break-in at the Société Générale bank.
[00:02:03] This wasn’t the classic bank robbery of Hollywood movies, when someone strolls into the bank, pulls out a gun, tells everyone to freeze, and then orders the cashiers to fill up a suitcase with banknotes.
[00:02:18] No, the rumour was that there had been a break-in in the vault, in the private deposit boxes deep underneath the bank.
[00:02:27] There were thousands of security boxes, containing, well, the bank didn’t know exactly.
[00:02:34] Everything from jewels to secret documents to family heirlooms, and of course, cold, hard cash that someone might have wanted to keep at the bank “unofficially”.
[00:02:47] Journalists started calling up the bank asking for a statement. Customers started queuing up outside, demanding access to their security box, demanding to speak with the manager.
[00:03:01] The thing was, the bank employees couldn’t get into the vault containing the security boxes.
[00:03:08] The twenty-tonne door seemed jammed shut.
[00:03:12] It simply wouldn’t open. Eventually, they were forced to drill a hole in the wall of the vault, finally allowing them to see inside.
[00:03:24] And what they found was nothing short of chaos. Hundreds of security boxes had been prised open, their contents all over the floor.
[00:03:36] On the wall were scrawled the words, “Ni armes, ni violence et sans haine”, “No weapons, no violence, and without hate”.
[00:03:47] And it was true. Nobody seemed to have been harmed, there had been no hostages taken, no guns brandished; it looked to have been a clean job.
[00:03:59] So, how did they get in?
[00:04:01] Well, as the police looked around the vault, the answer was right in front of them.
[00:04:08] They found a large hole in the wall, leading to a tunnel. They followed the tunnel for eight metres and found themselves coming out in the municipal sewer system, the system that takes away wastewater.
[00:04:25] It was an ingenious plan. The thieves had somehow entered the sewer system, got to the point closest to the bank, and tunnelled all the way through to the wall of the vault, timing it perfectly for a weekend they knew would be particularly quiet.
[00:04:46] As the police made further inspections of the raided vault, it became clear that the criminals had spent some considerable time there.
[00:04:57] The reason that the bank employees hadn’t been able to open the vault was that the door had been welded shut, completely closed to the outside, giving the men time to escape if they'd been discovered.
[00:05:13] They were not, and they had clearly managed to spend a long time in the vault.
[00:05:19] There was a table, which it seemed that the criminals had used to sort through the contents of the security boxes, pocketing anything of monetary value and discarding anything that wasn’t.
[00:05:34] There were even bottles of wine, paté, a portable gas cooker, tins of ravioli, and bread crusts. It seemed like the thieves had spent the night, perhaps several nights, in the vault before escaping with their loot.
[00:05:52] And how much had been taken?
[00:05:56] Well, the bank wasn’t exactly sure. The thieves had managed to open 371 safety deposit boxes out of a total of 4,000. Alongside this, they had managed to break into the bank’s central reserve and had taken gold bars and cash.
[00:06:17] The haul was estimated at 50 million francs, equivalent to approximately 40 million Euros in today’s money.
[00:06:28] It had all the hallmarks of a professional job. Drilling the tunnel and ensuring it was adequately supported, lit, and structurally sound was no mean feat. And as for breaking into the security boxes, sure, the thieves hadn’t managed all 4,000 of them, but still, it was the work of people who knew what they were doing.
[00:06:54] What’s more, they hadn’t left fingerprints or clues.
[00:06:59] As you can imagine, the newspapers went crazy, giving the criminals a name, “le gang des égoutiers”, or “the sewer gang”.
[00:07:09] But as for the identity of the perpetrators, the police were still at something of a loss.
[00:07:17] All eyes first turned to a local organised crime boss called Gaetano Zampa, but he had a watertight alibi. It wasn’t him.
[00:07:29] What’s more, the message on the wall, “no weapons, no violence, and without hate”, this didn’t sound like Zampa. He was all about weapons and violence.
[00:07:42] It wasn’t until several weeks later that the Nice police got their first clue.
[00:07:49] In the countryside around 15km north of Nice, in fact, a week before the raid on the bank, local police had been called by a neighbour who had reported a group of men acting suspiciously outside a countryside villa. The police arrived to see what was going on. The men had made up some excuse; they were going to rent it from a restaurant owner in a nearby town, but something smelled fishy.
[00:08:22] The police took their IDs, but because they weren’t committing any crime, they were released without charge.
[00:08:30] And there was another piece of the puzzle.
[00:08:33] A month before the raid, police in Nice had stopped a car one evening after seeing a pair of men loading the boot with workman’s tools, the kind of tools you might use if you were planning a break-in.
[00:08:50] When questioned, the men’s response didn’t make much sense. Again, fishy, but acting suspiciously isn’t a crime in itself.
[00:09:01] The police realised that the two men who had been stopped that evening in Nice were the same as two of the men who had been acting suspiciously outside the villa, Daniel Michelucci and Gérard Vigier, two known criminals.
[00:09:18] The problem was that there was no sign of Daniel Michelucci and Gérard Vigier. They seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
[00:09:29] The police decided to search the villa to see if it held any clues.
[00:09:36] When they entered, they found traces of the same mud and soil found in the Nice sewers, as well as the same cigarette butts and bottles of wine that were found in the vault.
[00:09:49] Bingo. It seemed like the villa had been used as a sort of staging house when planning the raid, then the criminals had come back there to divide their spoils.
[00:10:02] The problem was that there was no sign of the men.
[00:10:07] The first breakthrough came three months after the raid. A man walked into a branch of Crédit Agricole, casually trying to sell a handful of gold ingots.
[00:10:21] But these weren’t just any ingots; they were numbered, part of the stash lifted from the vault in Nice. The police closed in, arrested him, and the net began to tighten. Within two days, two other men, Francis Pellegrin and Alain Bournat, were also behind bars.
[00:10:44] The police were pleasantly surprised that these men seemed happy to talk. But the person they named surprised them.
[00:10:53] They said that their boss, the mastermind of the entire heist, was someone called Albert Spaggiari.
[00:11:03] You can imagine the detectives’ first reaction. “Who? Albert Spaggiari?”
[00:11:10] The name wasn’t known to the police. He wasn’t some high-level gangster, he wasn’t a bank employee, he was…no one.
[00:11:20] He was a photographer, and owned a small photography studio in Nice.
[00:11:26] And the police couldn’t see any links to organised criminals. Spaggiari had spent time in prison for a burglary in Vietnam, French Indochina at the time, but that was 25 years before, when he was 21 years old.
[00:11:43] He seemed to be a changed man. Married. A popular local wedding photographer. An upstanding member of society. Not a criminal mastermind.
[00:11:55] What’s more, if Spaggiari was indeed the mastermind of this great crime, he wasn’t acting like it.
[00:12:04] At the time of the discovery of his supposed involvement, he was in Japan on a trip with the then mayor of Nice and secretary of tourism, Jacques Médecin.
[00:12:17] The police waited for him to return, and when he arrived back in France, on October 27th, 1976, Albert Spaggiari was arrested while he was having lunch at a bar outside the airport.
[00:12:33] He acts surprised. Me?
[00:12:37] And the police have to admit, he doesn’t seem like the type.
[00:12:42] If it was him, how did he manage to control a bunch of serious thugs? Spaggiari was more of a flaneur, a cigar-smoking, sunglasses-wearing, smiling local businessman, not some hardened criminal.
[00:12:59] He denies all involvement, but there’s something about his answers that seems suspicious.
[00:13:07] As if there’s something he’s keeping under wraps.
[00:13:11] Still, there is no evidence, nothing actually linking him to the crime.
[00:13:18] This all changes when the police search his isolated countryside house, more like a small farm.
[00:13:26] Inside, they find a veritable weapons cache: dynamite, guns, and ammunition. Suddenly, it seems that this honest, law-abiding photographer might not be quite what he seems.
[00:13:44] Still, he doesn’t talk.
[00:13:47] It’s only until the police tell him that if he doesn’t confess, they’ll charge his wife as well for possession of the small arsenal of weapons that they found at their farmhouse.
[00:14:00] For Spaggiari, this is too much.
[00:14:03] He says, “OK, you’ve got me”, and agrees to collaborate with the police.
[00:14:09] He was charged and thrown into jail, awaiting trial.
[00:14:14] And he starts talking, he reveals that he got the idea for the crime a couple of years beforehand, after he had heard from a neighbour who worked at the bank that the vault didn’t have an alarm or motion detection system.
[00:14:29] It was deep underground, its walls almost 2 metres thick. The bank simply didn’t think it was necessary, the neighbour said.
[00:14:39] Spaggiari wanted to test whether this was true, so he rented a deposit box at the bank. As a genuine, paying customer, he was allowed into the vault, where he secretly took pictures and made detailed notes and drawings of the interior of the vault.
[00:15:00] He also used his lockbox, but not for cash or jewels; instead, he placed an alarm clock, setting it to go off in the middle of the night. This would allow him to verify the neighbour’s claim.
[00:15:15] He also revealed that the reason for the heist was more than personal enrichment; he said that he wanted to raise money for a relatively unknown far-right organisation called La Catena, so the crime took on this political angle too.
[00:15:36] Now, whether he was simply inventing that to add to the legend and make himself sound less like a simple thief, I’ll let you be the judge.
[00:15:46] The one thing he never does is reveal the names of his accomplices, the other members of the crew.
[00:15:55] In March the following year, after four months behind bars, Spaggiari is at the courthouse in Nice, in the prosecuting judge’s office.
[00:16:06] He has a police escort, of course, but when he tells the judge that he has important information regarding the involvement of local politicians, the judge asks the police officers to leave. He knows that policemen talk, and if he wants to have a confidential conversation with Spaggiari, he needs to have it alone.
[00:16:31] Spaggiari brings out a few sheets of paper with sketches of a map of the bank area, names and arrows. The judge can’t quite understand what is written there, and he takes a closer look.
[00:16:48] But it's all a ruse.
[00:16:50] While the judge is trying to make sense of what Spaggiari has written, Spaggiari seizes the moment. He opens the window and jumps out, falling 8 metres onto a parked car, then he rolls off, runs across the road, jumps onto the back of a motorcycle, and speeds off through central Nice.
[00:17:14] This was the 10th of March, 1977, and Spaggiari is never seen again, or at least, not by the authorities.
[00:17:25] But by this point, he has grown accustomed to the fame and glamour that come with being the country’s most famous bank robber, a sort of real-life Arsène Lupin, the fictional gentleman-thief.
[00:17:41] Journalists love him and his story, and he revels in the attention.
[00:17:47] He even decides to send 5,000 francs to the person whose car he landed on after the jump from the magistrate’s office, as compensation for the damage.
[00:18:00] And he went on the run. To Italy, to Spain, and then to South America.
[00:18:07] He changed his appearance, having plastic surgery and growing a beard, but he still couldn’t resist the public eye.
[00:18:15] He did a series of interviews from Madrid in 1983, where he talked about how he planned to spend his time smoking cigars and drinking champagne, surrounded by beautiful women.
[00:18:29] He also explained in detail how he planned and executed the bank heist. He got the idea, he said, after reading a novel about a similar crime in the UK.
[00:18:43] He had the idea, scouted out the sewage works, and when he realised he would need a team to get the job done, he connected with a local organised crime gang and offered them half the spoils.
[00:18:58] And it was a huge job. The men worked every night for three months, taking the equipment for several kilometres through the sewer system, wading through human excrement, waste water, and rats, before starting the back-breaking work of digging the tunnel itself.
[00:19:18] And the plot, he revealed, was almost uncovered at the last moment. Just before the heist was scheduled to take place, the then-president of France, Giscard d'Estaing, came to Nice. Spaggiari feared that the police would do a sweep of the sewers along the president’s route and discover the tunnel, but they didn’t.
[00:19:43] He also revealed how the criminals almost never got out of the tunnel. It had rained very heavily that weekend, and the sewers were very full, practically overflowing.
[00:19:58] The men had to make several trips back and forth from the vault to carry off all their ill-gotten gains.
[00:20:06] The sewage water was up to their necks, and it was flowing so fast that it was quite a task to walk against the current, back to the vault, to get the booty.
[00:20:18] Now, despite this playboy, gentleman-thief image, Spaggiari had clearly committed a serious crime. In 1979, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, in absentia, so if he was ever caught by the police, he knew that this was the sentence that awaited him.
[00:20:41] In fact, he didn’t live for long.
[00:20:44] He had been a heavy smoker his entire life, and on June 9th, 1989, lung cancer got the better of him. He was 56 years old.
[00:20:57] Now, since his death, theories have emerged suggesting that Spaggiari might not have been the criminal mastermind he made out to be.
[00:21:07] In 2010, a well-known Marseille gangster called Jacques Cassandri published a book claiming that he was the mastermind behind the heist, and that he made the equivalent of €2 million from the raid, which he quickly spent.
[00:21:25] But as the statute of limitations had passed, he could no longer be charged with the crime. Instead, he got 30 months behind bars for a different crime, money laundering.
[00:21:38] As for Spaggiari, he is remembered in popular culture both as this successful robber, but also as something of a Narcissus, a vain man who craved attention and fame more than anything else.
[00:21:55] And the irony of it all was that, after becoming something of a celebrity and getting addicted to it, he had to stay out of the limelight to survive.
[00:22:06] According to one of his former friends, and one of the men who helped him escape on the motorcycle, he was actually quite lonely and bored.
[00:22:16] Behind the headlines, the glamour, and the mystery, what remained was a rather sad figure.
[00:22:24] A man who pulled off one of the most audacious bank robberies of the 20th century, but who spent his final years hiding, sick, and alone.
[00:22:36] It is, perhaps, not such a glamorous ending after all.
[00:22:42] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Albert Spaggiari.
[00:22:47] I hope it was a fun one and that you’ve learned something new.
[00:22:50] If you like these types of episodes, there are actually quite a few others about famous criminals: there’s one on Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, and the Kray Twins. I’ll put the links to those in the show notes, in case you’re interested.
[00:23:03] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:08] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
