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How Lenin’s regime turned Russia’s priceless cultural patrimony into armored cars, trains, planes, and machine guns Historians have never resolved a central mystery of the Russian Revolution: How did the Bolsheviks, despite facing a world of enemies and leaving nothing but economic ruin in their path, manage to stay in power through five long years of civil war? In this penetrating book, Sean McMeekin draws on previously undiscovered materials from the Soviet Ministry of Finance and other European and American archives to expose some of the darkest secrets of Russia’s early days of communism. Building on one archival revelation after another, the author reveals how the Bolsheviks financed their aggression through astonishingly extensive thievery. Their looting included everything from the cash savings of private citizens to gold, silver, diamonds, jewelry, icons, antiques, and artwork. By tracking illicit Soviet financial transactions across Europe, McMeekin shows how Lenin’s regime accomplished history’s greatest heist between 1917 and 1922 and turned centuries of accumulated wealth into the sinews of class war. McMeekin also names names, introducing for the first time the compliant bankers, lawyers, and middlemen who, for a price, helped the Bolsheviks launder their loot, impoverish Russia, and impose their brutal will on millions.
"Tells the story with the gripping pace of a true-crime 'Ocean's Eleven.'" The New York Post • "Like a diamond, this true-life caper is clear, colorful, and brilliant." Publishers Weekly ★Starred Review★ The Antwerp Diamond Center was one of the most secure buildings in the world. With hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of diamonds stored in its subterranean vault, it had to be. Located in the heart of Belgium's ultra-secure Antwerp Diamond District, it benefited from two police stations, armed patrols, extensive video surveillance, and vehicle barriers securing an area where 80 percent of the world's diamonds traded hands. But on February 15, 2003, a band of skilled Italian thieves — fronted by the charming Leonardo Notarbartolo, who spent over two years clandestinely casing the building — subverted every one of the Diamond Center's defenses and made off with a record amount of loot. Experts estimate they got away with nearly half a billion dollars in diamonds, cash and other valuables. They'd pulled off the biggest heist in history--everybody loves diamonds and they now had more than any thief before them. The robbers did it with stealth and smarts; no one was hurt or even threatened during what was quickly labeled the largest diamond heist in history. The bandits — members of a group of professional thieves known as "The School of Turin" — used cunning in lieu of violence, successfully evading security cameras, thwarting an array of electronic sensors, and penetrating a vault protected by a double-locked foot-thick steel door. Even when the police zeroed in on who committed the crime, how it was done remained a mystery, like something out of a heist movie or TV show. Flawless is a fast-paced global scavenger hunt uncovering the truth behind the daring Valentine's Day weekend heist. Tracking clues, sources, and documents throughout Europe — from seedy cafés in Turin, Italy to sleek diamond offices in Antwerp, Belgium — authors Scott Selby and Greg Campbell retrace Notarbartolo's careful discovery of the building's security flaws. They recreate the heist and its aftermath — detailing how the thieves brilliantly neutralized each element of the security protecting the Diamond Center's vault while inviting the readers into the secretive world of diamonds and diamond dealing. The result is a thrilling ride through the better-than-fiction heist of the century. "Fans of caper books and movies will be in seventh heaven." Booklist ★Starred Review★
On a sunny September morning in 1930, six men entered the Lincoln National Bank in Nebraska's capital city armed with revolvers and Thompson submachine guns. In eight minutes they emerged with more than 2.7 million dollars, the largest take of any bank heist in history. A nationwide search for the bandits would lead Nebraska authorities through the rough, gangland streets of Chicago and East St. Louis, and deep into the heart of the Capone organization. The Great Heist not only chronicles the search for the bandits and the trials that followed, but the incredible story of how they got the money back.
Crime does pay. At least for a while. You’ll see that quickly in these nine compelling and true stories of brilliant plans and guile. The thieves awaiting you seem to have it all. They are clever, cool, and determined with icy resolve. It took a lot of guts and nerves of steel to do what they did and not fold under the pressure. After all, if those hard-wrought plans had failed, they would have had plenty of time to think about what went wrong in prison. Hijack an airplane, demand a ransom and two parachutes, then disappear? Invent a device that allows you to record the combination of any bank vault, then break into bank vaults twice? Steal from a secret mob depository run by a boss known for his brutality? Rob a small-town bank in midday and ride off without a second thought? Piece of cake. The Greatest Heists Stories Ever Told will allow readers to appreciate the efforts that go into a truly magnificent heist. It is a celebration of stunning, well-planned and audacious capers that left police and armies of investigators looking for answers and scratching their heads. Among the stories included are: The Lufthansa Heist The Northfield Bank Robbery The Last Good Heist Hijack! DB Cooper’s Great Escape and many others
As heard on NPR's This American Life “Absorbing . . . Though it's non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air “One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever.” —Christian Science Monitor A rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief. On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.
On Aug. 14, 1975, eight daring thieves ransacked 148 massive safe-deposit boxes at a secret bank used by organized crime, La Cosa Nostra, and its associates in Providence, R.I. The crooks fled with duffle bags crammed full of cash, gold, silver, stamps, coins, jewels and high-end jewelry. The true value of the loot has always been kept secret, partly because it was ill-gotten to begin with, and partly because there was plenty of incentive to keep its true worth out of the limelight. It's one thing for authorities to admit they didn't find a trace of goods worth from $3 million to $4 million, and entirely another when what was at stake was more accurately valued at about $30 million, the equivalent of $120 million today. It was the biggest single payday in the criminal history of the Northeast. Nobody came close, not the infamous James "Whitey" Bulger, not John "The Dapper Don" Gotti, not even the Brinks or Wells Fargo robbers. The heist was bold enough and big enough to rock the underworld to its core, and it left La Cosa Nostra in the region awash in turmoil that still reverberates nearly 38 years later. "The Last Good Heist" is the inside story of the robbery and its aftermath.
The definitive story of the greatest art theft in history. In a secret meeting in 1981, a low-level Boston thief gave career gangster Ralph Rossetti the tip of a lifetime: the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was a big score waiting to happen. Though its collections included priceless artworks by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and others, its security was cheap, mismanaged, and out of date. And now, it seemed, the whole Boston criminal underworld knew it. Nearly a decade passed before the Museum was finally hit. But when it finally happened, the theft quickly became one of the most infamous art heists in history: thirteen works of art valued at up to 500 million, by some of the most famous artists in the world, were taken. The Boston FBI took control of the investigation, but twenty-five years later the case is still unsolved and the artwork is still missing. Stephen Kurkjian, one of the top investigative reporters in the country, has been working this case for over nearly twenty years. In Master Thieves, he sheds new light on some of the Gardner's most abiding mysteries. Why would someone steal these paintings, only to leave them hidden for twenty-five years? And why, if one of the top crime bosses in the city knew about this score in 1981, did the theft happen in 1990? What happened in those intervening years? And what might all this have to do with Boston's notorious gang wars of the 1980s? Kurkjian's reporting is already responsible for some of the biggest breaks in this story, including a meticulous reconstruction of what happened at the Museum that fateful night. Now Master Thieves will reveal the identities of those he believes plotted the heist, the motive for the crime, and the details that the FBI has refused to discuss. Taking you on a journey deep into the gangs of Boston, Kurkjian emerges with the most complete and compelling version of this story ever told.
A detail-driven account of how a gang of criminal misfits pulled off the world’s biggest cash robbery, from the bestselling author of true crime classic Fred & Rose. The target was a regional counting house for the Bank of England, a fortified concrete bunker located within a triangle of police stations, one only three hundred yards away. When former UFC cage fighter Lightning Lee Murray discovered that this cash centre held hundreds of millions of pounds, he assembled a team of mates including a mechanic, a roofer, and a used car dealer. A hairdresser made disguises for the men so they could pass off as police officers. In an Ocean’s Eleven–style robbery, the gang succeeded in hauling away a lorry-load of cash—a staggering £53 million (worth $87 million at the time)—a world-record sum. That’s when their problems began. By turns thrilling and hilarious, Heist is the compelling true story of this mind-blowing crime, including background on Lee Murray, the build-up to the heist, the robbery itself, and its aftermath. The subject of Catching Lightning, as seen on SHOWTIME.
In 1945, as Allied bombers continued their final pounding of Berlin, the panicking Nazis began moving the assets of the Reichsbank south for safekeeping. Vast trainloads of gold and currency were evacuated from the doomed capital of Hitler's 'Thousand-year Reich'. Nazi Gold is the real-life story of the theft of that fabulous treasure - worth some 2,500,000,000 at the time of the original investigation. It is also the story of a mystery and attempted whitewash in an American scandal that pre-dated Watergate by nearly 30 years. Investigators were impeded at every step as they struggled to uncover the truth and were left fearing for their lives. The authors' quest led them to a murky, dangerous post-war world of racketeering, corruption and gang warfare. Their brilliant reporting, matching eyewitness testimony with declassified Top Secret documents from the US Archives, lays bare this monumental crime in a narrative which throngs with SS desperadoes, a red-headed queen of crime and American military governors living like Kings. Also revealed is the authors' discovery of some of the missing treasure in the Bank of England.