Stop Banque! Albert Spaggiari & 'The Riviera Job': Real-Life Bank Robber The Inspiration For European Banque Stop
Jean-Paul Rouve as Albert Spaggiari in the film Sans Arme ni Haine ni Violence.
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By Dr. Pitchfork
Eric Cantona’s Banque Stop! protest set for today, December 7, may not bring down the banks, but in the era of Wikileaks and Crash JPM Buy Silver, it’s worth taking a look at the origins of Cantona’s injunction of “No weapons, no blood.”
The alleged inspiration for all this is one Albert Spaggiari (1932-1989), who at various times in his life was a French paratrooper, a mercenary and a highly successful bank robber. The victim of Spaggiari’s greatest heist was the Nice branch of Société Générale (who did Spaggiari one better in 2008-2009 by robbing the American taxpayer of 12 billion dollars through Tim Geithner’s AIG back-door bailout scheme). Anyhow, sometime in the 1970’s, Spaggiari had figured out that the Nice sewers ran right under the vault at Soc Gen. From that point, the plan was hatched. He knew he could dig a tunnel from the sewer up to the vault with little trouble, but he feared that the vault was equipped with some kind of motion-detector or vibration-detection system. So, Spaggiari rented a safe deposit box in the vault and then put an alarm clock inside. He set the alarm to ring at night so that he could test for any sort of detection equipment. As it happens, there was no alarm system whatsoever. The door to the vault was impregnable and no one had ever considered the possibility of someone tunnelling through to the floor or to the back walls.
Together with a 20-man gang of professional mobsters, mercenaries and assassins (no, he never worked for Goldman Sachs), Spaggiari spent two months digging a tunnel from the sewer pipe to the floor of the bank vault. Finally, after completing the tunnel, Spaggiari planned to make his move on Bastille Day weekend, 1976. Because of the holiday, the bank was closed. On July 16, they broke through the floor of the vault and began picking through the loot – hundreds of safe deposit boxes filled with cash, gold, jewelry and paper securities amounting to more than 60 million Francs ($8-$10 million).
Knowing that the Bastille Day festivities provided them good cover, Spaggiari and his men brought wine and pâté with them, welded the door shut and sat down on the vault floor for a “picnic” lunch. When they left a couple of days later, one of the gang had scrawled a message on the wall: sans armes, ni haine, ni violence (“without weapons, nor hate, nor violence”).
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Post Script: At his trial a few months later, Spaggiari complained of the heat in the courtroom, went over to open a window and leapt out of the courtroom, crashing onto the roof of a parked car before hopping onto the back of a motorcycle that was waiting to whisk him away.
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I think this is Spaggiari with a fake beard...
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Video - Masterminds - The Riviera Bank Job - Part 1
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More photos:
This is a great story.
Dec 7, 2010 at 12:15 PM
Reader Comments (3)
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