As much as we like to be assured that our money is sitting safely inside a bank vault, there’s something about the audaciousness of a bank heist that captures the imagination.
Why else would there be so many successful films depicting them?
Spectators generally like to focus on superlatives: either the most massive robberies or the most fruitless ones. But the actual heist is only the beginning of the story. What happens afterward is just as important, which is why we rounded up some foreign bank robbers who were caught — or at least identified — but still managed to turn things around for themselves.
Georgia: Vladimir Lenin & Joseph Stalin
Known as the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, this heist was organized by a group of Bolsheviks that included Vladimir Lenin and Joesph Stalin.
These revolutionaries supported using robbery and other militant activities as a means to their end, and they stole approximately 341,000 rubles ($3.4 million in today's terms) from a bank stagecoach in Tiflis—now the capital of Georgia—as funds to purchase more weaponry. Sources dispute where exactly Stalin was at the time of the attack, but there's no doubt that both men went on to achieve great political success without having to answer for the crime.
Ireland: Kenneth Littlejohn
British-born Kenneth Littlejohn had quite a colorful career: After two Birmingham robberies and a brief stint in jail, he moved to Dublin in 1970 to start his own company and became a popular guy in town, even learning to fly and winning the affections of a local billionaire heiress.
He then moved back to England, and through the connections of his brother Keith, whose prison rehabilitation had become the pet project of Lady Pamela Onslow, Kenneth managed to convince MI6 to hire him as an agent to infiltrate the Official Irish Republican Army.
The two brothers subsequently robbed a Dublin bank of £67,000 in 1972—apparently at the behest of the British government, who of course denied the claims. The siblings managed to return to England, where they were caught two years later, but escaped two years after that. While on the run, Kenneth brazenly gave press interviews; he was inevitably imprisoned again but was let out early on the
England: Derek “Bertie” Smalls
By his mid-30s, Derek Creighton "Bertie" Smalls had already become a career criminal as well as a respected figure in the London underworld.
In 1970, he led a gang of thieves in robbing a Barclays Bank of a record £237,000. After he was caught, the clever robber offered to give up the name of every criminal he had worked with in exchange for full immunity, which was granted to him for the first and only time in British history.
Smalls' underworld cohorts were so inflamed by his snitching that they put a £1 million price on his head, forcing him to live under police protection until he died of natural causes in 2008 at the age of 73.
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