The Great Train Robbery was the robbery of £2.61 million, from a Royal Mail train heading from Glasgow to London on the West Coast Main Line in the early hours of 8 August 1963 at Bridego Railway Bridge, Ledburn, near Mentmore in Buckinghamshire, England.
Bank robbery is the criminal act of stealing from a bank, specifically while bank employees and customers are subjected to force, violence, or a threat of violence. This refers to robbery of a bank branch or teller, as opposed to other bank-owned property, such as a train, armored car, or (historically) stagecoach. It is a federal crime in the United States.
Bruno Richard Hauptmann was a German-born carpenter who was convicted of the abduction and murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., the 20-month-old son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The Lindbergh kidnapping became known as "The Crime of the Century". Both Hauptmann and his wife, Anna Hauptmann, proclaimed his innocence to his death, when he was executed in 1936 by electric chair at the Trenton State Prison. Anna later sued the State of New Jersey, various former police officers, the Hearst newspapers that had published pre-trial articles insisting on Hauptmann's guilt, and former prosecutor David T. Wilentz.
On March 1, 1932, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of colonel Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was abducted from his crib in the upper floor of the Lindberghs' home, Highfields, in East Amwell, New Jersey, United States. On May 12, the child's corpse was discovered by a truck driver by the side of a nearby road.
The Great Brink's Robbery was an armed robbery of the Brink's building in the North End of Boston, Massachusetts, on January 17, 1950. The $2.775 million theft consisted of $1,218,211.29 in cash and $1,557,183.83 in checks, money orders, and other securities. It was at the time the largest robbery in the history of the United States and has been called "the crime of the century". The robbery remained unsolved for nearly six years, until estranged group member Joseph O'Keefe testified only days before the statute of limitations would have expired.
Twenty Bucks is a 1993 American comedy-drama film directed by Keva Rosenfeld and starring Linda Hunt, Brendan Fraser, Gladys Knight, Elisabeth Shue, Steve Buscemi, Christopher Lloyd, William H. Macy, David Schwimmer, Shohreh Aghdashloo and Spalding Gray. The film follows the travels of a $20 bill from its delivery via armored car in an unnamed American city through various transactions and incidents from person to person.
A home invasion, also called a hot prowl burglary, is a sub-type of burglary in which an offender unlawfully enters into a building residence while the occupants are inside. The overarching intent of a hot prowl burglary can be theft, robbery, assault, sexual assault, murder, kidnapping, or another crime, either by stealth or direct force. Hot prowl burglaries are considered especially dangerous by law enforcement because of the potential for a violent confrontation between the occupant and the offender.
Following the historic Lindbergh kidnapping, the United States Congress passed a federal kidnapping statute—known as the Federal Kidnapping Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1) —which was intended to let federal authorities step in and pursue kidnappers once they had crossed state lines with their victim. The act was first proposed in December 1931 by Missouri Senator Roscoe Conkling Patterson, who pointed to several recent kidnappings in the Missouri area in calling for a federal solution. Initial resistance to Patterson's proposal was based on concerns over funding and state's rights. Consideration of the law was revived following the kidnapping of Howard Woolverton in late January 1932. Woolverton's kidnapping featured prominently in several newspaper series researched and prepared in the weeks following his abduction, and were quite possibly inspired by it. Two such projects, by Bruce Catton of the Newspaper Enterprise Association and Fred Pasley of the Daily News of New York City, were ready for publication within a day or two of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Both series, which ran in papers across North America, described kidnapping as an existential threat to American life, a singular, growing crime wave in which no one was safe.
Harvey John Bailey, called "The Dean of American Bank Robbers", was an American criminal who spanned a long career and was one of the most successful bank robbers during the 1920s, walking off with over $1 million.
Racketeering is a type of organized crime in which the persons set up a coercive, fraudulent, extortionary, or otherwise illegal coordinated scheme or operation to repeatedly or consistently collect a profit. Narrowly, it means coercive or fraudulent business practices; broadly, it can mean any criminal organization with ongoing profit, as defined in the 1970 U.S. RICO Act, which aimed to curtail the power of the Mafia and other organized crime.
The kidnapping of nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser occurred in 1935 in Tacoma, Washington, United States. The son of prominent lumberman J. P. Weyerhaeuser, George was successfully released for ransom and eventually succeeded his father as the chairman of the Weyerhaeuser company. The four participants in the kidnapping were apprehended and sentenced to prison terms totaling 135 years.
Luke Elliott Sommer is a former US Army Ranger and bank robber. After almost two years under house arrest in Canada, he pleaded guilty on May 27, 2008 to the August 7, 2006 robbery of a branch of the Bank of America in Tacoma, Washington. Sommer is currently serving his sentence at Coleman II United States Penitentiary.
On Sunday 19 August 1962 a group of six men, with help of a bank’s safe-keeper, robbed a local branch of the National Bank of Poland, located in the town of Wołów in Lower Silesian Voivodeship. Altogether, 12,531,000 złotys were stolen, which in late 2000s (decade) prices, would make some 18 million złotys. It was the biggest bank robbery in the history of the People's Republic of Poland, to the point that the Polish government for a while considered withdrawing all 50-złoty and 100-złoty bills from the market, which would help find the robbers.
Marking bills is a technique used by police to trace and identify money used in illegal activities. The serial numbers of the bills are recorded, and sometimes markings are made on the bank notes themselves.
The 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, also known as the Erivansky Square expropriation, was an armed robbery on 26 June 1907 in the city of Tiflis in the Tiflis Governorate in the Caucasus Viceroyalty of the Russian Empire. A Bolshevik group "expropriated" a bank cash shipment to fund their revolutionary activities. The robbers attacked a bank stagecoach, and the surrounding police and soldiers, using bombs and guns while the stagecoach was transporting money through Erivansky Square between the post office and the Tiflis branch of the State Bank of the Russian Empire. The attack killed forty people and injured fifty others, according to official archive documents. The robbers escaped with 241,000 rubles.
Ridin' on a Rainbow is a 1941 American Western musical film directed by Lew Landers and starring Gene Autry, Smiley Burnette, and Mary Lee. Written by Bradford Ropes and Doris Malloy, based on a story by Ropes, the film is about a singing cowboy whose investigation of a bank robbery takes him to a showboat, where he finds that a teenage singer's father has been working with the robbers to provide for her future. The film received an Academy Award nomination for best original song for "Be Honest with Me".
Denmark Bancshares was a U.S. regional bank holding company based in Denmark, Wisconsin. It was the parent company of Denmark State Bank and existed for 115 years.
Bank of England £1,000,000 notes, also referred to as Giants, are non-circulating Bank of England sterling banknotes that were used to back the value of Scottish and Northern Irish banknotes in 1948. They were cancelled after six weeks, and only two are known to still exist.
The Piggy Bank Bandit is a serial bank robber, who is responsible for at least 6 bank robberies in the Phoenix, Arizona area. The FBI believes the Piggy Bank Bandit is responsible for four bank robberies in December 2020 and two robberies in February 2021. The Piggy Bank Bandit was dubbed by the FBI as one of the robberies ended in the robber taking rolls of coins as the loot.
The Too Tall Bandit is an unidentified serial bank robber who is thought to be responsible for at least sixteen bank robberies in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee dating back to 2009. His nickname is derived from his height, which is estimated to be between 6'0 and 6'8.
