The suspected mastermind of France’s “heist of the century” has gone on trial more than 40 years after robbers tunnelled through sewers to snatch the equivalent of 29 million euros from a bank vault, reports The Guardian.
The 1976 robbery at a Société Générale branch in the southern city of Nice confounded the police for decades.
Only one person was ever charged with the crime, with most of the gang disappearing. The loot – worth 46 million francs – was never found.
But in 2010 the case took an unexpected twist when a career criminal wrote a book in which he portrayed himself as the heist’s mastermind.
He used a pen name, but investigators quickly concluded the writer was Jacques Cassandri, a key mafia figure in Marseille, where he went on trial on Monday.
He had assumed he was safe because the crime was too old to be prosecuted, but Cassandri is being charged with laundering the millions from the heist – a crime for which France has no statute of limitations.
Police found the manuscript on Cassandri’s computer, and his children later confessed that their father had often bragged about the robbery.
He eventually admitted to orchestrating the intricately planned job that involved at least six people and 30 tanks of acetylene to fuel the welding torches used to cut into safes and safety deposit boxes.
Cassandri said he got only the equivalent of about 2 million euros, which he quickly spent.
But an investigating magistrate was not convinced, saying Cassandri was broke in 1976 but now sits atop an empire that includes several businesses and real estate.
“This book is a novel, and a novel is not a piece of evidence,” one of Cassandri’s lawyers has argued.
Until his book appeared in 2010, police had assumed the Nice heist was the work of Albert Spaggiari, who was arrested a few months afterwards.
The team spent weeks preparing the robbery, using rubber rafts in the sewers to access the spot where they dug their eight-metre (26-foot) tunnel, installing hundreds of metres of electrical cables to provide lights.
Racy pictures of women were hung along the walls of the tunnel, which were reinforced with concrete, and police later found remains of meals, wine bottles and packs of cigarettes.
Breaking in on a weekend, they took their time going through nearly 200 safe deposit boxes in the vault as well as the bank’s five-tonne safe.