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犯罪与劫案
1950年1月17日 · 波士顿北角
抢劫与盗窃状态: 已侦破
详细档案目前仅提供英文版本。
图片: Tim Pierce · CC BY 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
$2.7 millionhaul in cash and securities; more than 1.2 million of it was cash
Brink's carried and counted money for banks and businesses in Boston and kept it in the evening in a vault room on the first floor of a parking garage in the North End. From 1948 a group of professional criminals around Tony Pino kept the building under observation. They slipped inside dozens of times at night, removed the cylinders from five doors, had keys cut by a locksmith and put the locks back. They also rehearsed the route and the guards' timetable.
On 17 January 1950, shortly after seven in the evening, seven men in navy pea coats, with chauffeur's caps and rubber Halloween masks, let themselves in with their keys. In the counting room they forced five employees to the floor at gunpoint and tied them up. They filled bags with more than $1.2 million in notes and coins and over $1.5 million in cheques, money orders and securities. After about twenty minutes they drove off in a stolen lorry; nobody was hurt.
The FBI and the Boston police found few traces: pieces of rope, adhesive tape and a chauffeur's cap. Suspicion soon fell on known Boston burglars, but there was no evidence and the gang kept to their agreement to leave the money untouched for six years. The break came when Joseph 'Specs' O'Keefe, who was in prison in Pennsylvania for another offence, felt cheated over the division of the loot. After a hired gunman tried to kill him in 1954, he made a full confession on 6 January 1956.
The confession came eleven days before the crime would have become time-barred in Massachusetts. Eight gang members were sentenced to life in October 1956; two had died before the trial, and O'Keefe received a short sentence. About $58,000 of the cash was found in 1956 in an office in Boston; the rest has never surfaced. The investigation cost the government many times the value of the loot. For years the case was known as the 'crime of the century', and it was filmed in 1978.