The Banco Río “Robbery of the Century” — Toy Guns, a Tunnel, and a Tip-off

On the afternoon of 13 January 2006, a crew of about five men robbed a Banco Río branch at the corner of Avenida Libertador and Calle Perú in Acassuso, an affluent suburb of San Isidro north of Buenos Aires, looting more than 140 safe-deposit boxes — most accounts say 143 — of an estimated US$15 to US$19 million in cash, jewelry and valuables. The operation was conceived by Fernando Araujo, an Argentine martial-arts instructor and visual artist, and carried out with a negotiator, Luis Mario Vitette Sellanes, a tunnel engineer, Sebastián García Bolster, and accomplices including Rubén Alberto “Beto” de la Torre and Julián Zalloecheverría. The robbers used replica firearms, took hostages, and then vanished — not out a door past the police ringing the building, but down a tunnel into the storm-drain network, on inflatable boats. They left behind the toy guns and a typeset note: “En barrio de ricachones, sin armas ni rencores, es sólo plata y no amores” — in a neighborhood of rich folk, without guns or grudges, it is only money and not love.

The crime closed, and this file states the outcome plainly. The gang’s tradecraft was nearly flawless, but the case broke from the inside about a month later. Alicia Di Tullio, the partner of Beto de la Torre, went to prosecutors after a falling-out over money and his plans, naming the participants and the safe houses. Arrests followed. Between 2010 and 2013 the identified members were convicted: in a 2010 trial de la Torre received 15 years, Araujo 14, Zalloecheverría 10, and García Bolster 9; Vitette Sellanes, tried separately, was sentenced to roughly 20 years before being deported to his native Uruguay in 2013. None served their full terms. Of the haul, only on the order of US$1 to US$1.5 million was recovered, and at least two participants were never identified.

What makes the Acassuso job a durable teaching text is that it was solved not despite the perfect plan but entirely around it. The robbery defeated everything the authorities brought to bear in real time — perimeter, snipers, negotiators, the assumption that hostage-takers must eventually come out the front. The escape route had been engineered weeks in advance; the weapons were deliberately fake to keep the encounter non-lethal; the hostage standoff was, in part, theater to buy time. Police never caught the crew in the act or on the evidence. They caught them on a tip, because the one part of the operation no tunnel could protect was the loyalty of the people who shared the secret and the money.