Over the weekend of 6–8 August 2005, a crew of around 25 people removed roughly R$164 million — about US$70 million — from the vault of the Banco Central do Brasil branch in Fortaleza, the capital of Ceará in Brazil’s northeast. They reached it through a tunnel roughly 78 metres long, dug over about three months from a house they had rented a block away and operated as a fake landscaping business called Grama Sintética, “synthetic grass.” No alarm sounded, no guard was confronted, and no shot was fired; the theft was discovered only when staff opened the bank on Monday morning. By weight it came to about three and a half tonnes of used banknotes, and it remains the largest bank robbery in Brazilian history.
The case is closed, though its resolution is uneven and grim. No one was caught in the act, and most of the money was never recovered — of the roughly R$164 million taken, only about R$20 million was recovered by the end of 2005, rising to only around R$32 million years later. But the prosecution was relentless: the robbery generated dozens of criminal cases and more than 130 defendants, with over 100 convictions by 2015, including an 80-year sentence for Jussivan Antonio Alves dos Santos, known as “the German,” identified by the courts as a leader. The man widely regarded as the original mastermind, Luís Fernando Ribeiro, did not live to be tried.
What makes the Fortaleza job a permanent teaching text is the engineering and the cover. The tunnel was not a crude burrow but a built structure, shored with wooden panels and lined with plastic, lit with electric bulbs and ventilated, and driven on a calculated line to surface beneath the vault floor through a precisely cut opening. The front company gave the dig its alibi: a property generating noise, lorry movements and spoil was explained by a business that plausibly trucked earth and turf. The bank’s defences faced inward and upward, toward doors, alarms and the strongroom walls; the attack came from directly below, from a place those defences did not watch.
The robbery also exposed a brutal second economy that opens around untraceable cash. Used, unmarked currency rather than bullion or registered notes was almost ideal to launder — but its sheer untraceability made the people holding it targets. Several of the crew were themselves kidnapped for the proceeds, and Ribeiro was abducted within weeks and murdered after a ransom was paid. The vault was beaten by patience and engineering; the gang was undone by the predators its own money attracted, and by a prosecution that ground on for a decade.
Over the long Bastille Day weekend beginning 16 July 1976, a crew organised by Albert Spaggiari tunnelled out of the municipal sewers of Nice and into the strongroom of the local Société Générale branch, then spent days opening safe-deposit boxes at leisure. They left through the hole they had come in by, and left behind a phrase scratched at the scene — “sans armes, ni haine, ni violence,” without weapons, without hatred, without violence. Estimates of the haul in cash, securities and valuables run from about 46 million francs upward, a sum that ranked it among the largest bank thefts on record at the time. None of it was ever recovered.
The case closed in law but never in custody, and this file states that paradox up front. Spaggiari, a Nice photographer and former soldier with a far-right political past, was identified through an informant and arrested at Nice airport in late October 1976. He confessed in detail. Then, during a hearing before the investigating magistrate Richard Bouaziz on 10 March 1977, he leapt from a courtroom window, landed on a parked car, and rode away on a waiting motorcycle. He was never recaptured. Tried with his associates, he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life, while several accomplices were arrested and dealt with by the court. Spaggiari lived as a fugitive until cancer killed him in 1989; the money stayed missing, and the vault breach stayed unanswered by any prison term he served.
What makes the episode a permanent reference is the method as much as the escape. The crew did not assault the bank; they avoided it entirely, approaching the vault through the one route a strongroom is least built to defend — the sewer beneath it — and converting a long public holiday into uninterrupted working time. Reportedly over two months of preparation, they drove an eight-metre tunnel from the sewer to the vault floor and burned through the final barrier with acetylene torches, an operation said to have involved around twenty people.
The crime is also a study in the limits of closure. A conviction was entered, an organiser was named and confessed, accomplices were punished — and yet the central figure was never held and the proceeds never found. The record is complete on paper and unsatisfied in fact.
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.