The Rio Bank Robbery of the Century, in Acasusso, stands out for the ingenuity of the protagonists when robbing a bank. But the reality is that 30 years earlier, a very similar case had already occurred: The robbery of the Société Générale Bank of Nice. The thieves in this robbery also escaped through sewers.
The team was made up of 20 people and with Albert Spaggiari at the head. Between July 16 and 18, 1976, they managed to rob 371 safe deposit boxes, and ensure a riot of approximately 30 million dollars from that moment.
How the Société Générale Bank of Nice was robbed
Albert Spaggiari, Known as “Bertito”, he was French of Italian parents. He lost his father when he was not yet three years old and was raised by his mother in Hyères, a town on the Côte d’Azur.
He was in prison for crimes committed and ended up opening a photography business in Bezaudun-les-Alpes. But it didn’t last long: Normal jobs were not his thing. Therefore, he began to devise a plan to rob the branch of the Societe Generale in Nice. It was known that there were millions in his safe deposit boxes.
Due to his contacts in the municipality, he managed to obtain two fundamental plans to decide if it was possible to steal it: that of the bank building and that of the city’s sewage network.
His next step was to be bank customerrenting a safe deposit box. The employee who assisted him told him about the security that the bank had: a steel door, the location of the cameras, the material of the walls, so that he could stay calm.
But Spaggiari was struck by the fact that he did not mention anything about the chamber floor, so he began to devise a plan to enter through the sewers. To confirm whether the bank had seismic alarms, he set an alarm clock to ring at midnight. If the police did not go to the bank at that time, it was because the noise of the drilling in the floor would not alert them. Indeed it did not ring.
Spaggiari, thanks to his contacts, recruited a team of 20 accomplicesamong them, former mercenaries, welders, blacksmiths, bricklayers and a jeweler, to evaluate the pieces in the boxes and choose the most valuable ones to take.
Together and with a military routine, they dug the tunnel in three months. By the first days of July 1976 they were already below the floor of the chamber, just about twenty centimeters from the surface. They only had to choose the right time to enter: the celebration of the storming of the Bastille.
On that weekend of celebrations, the thieves were able to break the floor, open the boxes and put the bills and jewelry in waterproof bags, since it was raining.
371 boxes of the four thousand that were in the chamber were stolen. It is approximately estimated that they took loot from around 30 million dollars of the time.
They escaped through the tunnel to the sewer, over which they had a Land Rover truck parked to take the loot.
They escaped without problem and before leaving, they spray painted on the wall: “Neither weapons, nor violence et sans haine” (No weapons, no violence and no hate.)
robbery at the Société Générale Bank of Nice
The escape of the ideologue of the Nice bank robbery
The gang broke up and Bertito, after hiding his largest share of the loot, escaped to the United States. It is said that there he wanted to offer his services to the CIA, to destabilize leftist governments. Three months later, when he returned to France, the police were waiting for him.
Once arrested, he chose a French Legion veteran, Jacques Peyrat, as his defense attorney. Although he initially denied his involvement in the robbery, he later changed his mind and said that he had robbed the bank to finance a far-right organization, whose existence no one knew.
That alleged confession was part of the master plan of his escape. With that testimony, Spaggiari guaranteed that he would be taken to court to expand his statement before Judge Richard Bouaziz. He knew that his office was on the second floor with a window facing the street. Once inside the office and without handcuffs, Bertito began to talk until he found the right moment to get up, run to the window and jump on the roof of a car parked on the street. There a motorcycle driven by a former paratrooper was waiting for him, and they lost sight of him before the police could.
Spaggiari lived the rest of his days on the run: He left France with false documents heading to Argentinawhere it is said that he offered his services to the dictatorship’s task groups. After roaming around different Latin American countries, he bought, under a false identity, a villa in the Italian city of Belluno, where he lived with his last partner, Emilia de Sacco.
Over there died of cancer on June 8, 1989, at the age of 56 and until the last moment he deceived Justice. He was even able to publish his autobiography, titled Le Journal d’une truffe.
Source: Ambito
I am Pierce Boyd, a driven and ambitious professional working in the news industry. I have been writing for 24 Hours Worlds for over five years, specializing in sports section coverage. During my tenure at the publication, I have built an impressive portfolio of articles that has earned me a reputation as an experienced journalist and content creator.
