Crime Heist

It’s no secret that hundreds of companies have been slashing pensions and health coverage earned by millions of retirees. Employers blame an aging workforce, stock market losses, and spiraling costs - a perfect storm of external forces that has forced them to take drastic measures. But this so-called retirement crisis is no accident. Award-winning investigative reporter Ellen E. Schultz reveals how large companies and the retirement industry - benefits consultants, insurance companies, and banks - have all played a huge, hidden role in the death spiral of American pensions and benefits.

Malcolm Macarthur was a well-known Dublin socialite. Suave and urbane, he passed his days mingling with artists and aristocrats, reading philosophy, living a life of the mind. But by 1982, his inheritance had dwindled to almost nothing, a desperate threat to his lifestyle. Macarthur hastily conceived a plan: He would commit bank robbery, of the kind that had become frightfully common in Dublin at the time. But his plan spun swiftly out of control, and he needlessly killed two innocent civilians.

In 1907, the revolutionary Joseph Djugashvili - who would later take the name Joseph Stalin - met with an old friend, a clerk at the Tiflis branch of the State Bank of the Russian Empire, for a glass of milk. Over talk of national pride, the spirit of the new century and Djugashvili's poetry, they agreed on the beginnings of a plan. With the aid of the Outfit, Djugashvili's hardened crew of 'expropriators', they would pull off the biggest, bloodiest and most daring robbery in Georgia's history, and ruthlessly change the direction of the Bolshevik revolution forever.

On July 2, 2022, two criminals set out to rob a jewelry shop in Geneva. But even with a foolproof plan, their “perfect” heist will prove far from uneventful. . . .Twenty days earlier, on a luxurious estate along the shores of Lake Geneva, Sophie Braun prepares to celebrate her fortieth birthday. Her life seems perfect: she has a fairytale marriage, two perfect children, and lives in a stylish modern mansion surrounded by lush forest. But her idyllic world is about to crumble. Her husband is becoming embroiled in petty schemes.

Over Easter weekend 2015, a motley crew of six English thieves, several in their 60s and 70s, couldn't resist coming out of retirement for one last career-topping heist. Their target: the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit, in the heart of London's medieval diamond district. Perhaps not the smoothest of criminals - one took a public bus to the scene of the crime; another read Forensics for Dummies in hopes that he would learn how to avoid getting caught - they planned the job over fish and chips at their favorite pubs.

Master storyteller Bill 'Swampy' Marsh has travelled the length and breadth of the country to gather their tales of adventure and misadventure, drama and mayhem, and larrikinism and laughter, to create this memorable collection of real-life stories about those on the front-line in the heart of Australia.

One hot Monday morning in 1976, Albert Spaggiari engineered the European crime of the century. A bank president in Nice, France found his vault welded shut—from the inside. Spaggiari and his gang of 20 men had dug a 25-foot tunnel from the city's sewer system into the bank, where they spent a weekend cooking meals, drinking wine, and clearing millions of dollars in gold, jewelry, gems, and cash. Here is the breathtakingly compelling story of Spaggiari, his “sewer gang,” and the most daring, outrageous theft of the 20th century.

Before she was a thief, Blair Morgan was an FBI agent...and her corrupt former boss sent her to jail as a scapegoat. Now, she’s got all the evidence needed to take him down. She just needs to steal it first. But when her heist reveals that a master thief has beaten her to the punch, Blair finds her evidence up for sale in a bidding war between her crew, her enemy, and a mysterious figure known only as Fixer. With 10 days until the auction, Blair’s crew must find a way to determine Fixer’s identity and join forces before the man who put her in jail goes free forever.

Absinthe, an elixir made of alcohol and herbs, is a booming business. Yet it is still an underground culture, associated with mystery, romance, and bohemian lifestyles, in keeping with its popularity among the writers, artists, and other ne'er-do-wells. First produced in eighteenth century, the spirit, known as "the Green Fairy," was banned worldwide by 1914 before the bans were gradually overturned beginning in 2005, the year Switzerland relegalized absinthe.

In the predawn hours of a gloomy February day in 1994, two thieves entered the National Gallery in Oslo and made off with one of the world's most famous paintings, Edvard Munch's Scream. It was a brazen crime committed while the whole world was watching the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Baffled and humiliated, the Norwegian police turned to the one man they believed could help: a half English, half American undercover cop named Charley Hill, the world's greatest art detective.

Wyatt steals $ 50,000 and a sought-after piece of jewelry in a burglary of a politician's house. Wyatt snatches the cash easily enough. He bypasses the alarm system, eludes the cops, makes it safely back to his bolthole in Hobart. It’s the diamond-studded Tiffany brooch—and perhaps the girl—that brings him undone. Now some very hard people want to put Wyatt and that brooch out of circulation. But this is Wyatt's game and Wyatt sets the rules—even if it means a reckoning somewhere far from home.

A security van heist goes disastrously wrong, and three women are left widowed. When Dolly Rawlins discovers her gang boss husband's plans for the failed hijack, an idea starts to form. Could she and the other wives finish the job their husbands started? As the women rehearse the raid, it becomes clear that someone else must have been involved. But only three bodies were found in the wreckage. Who was the fourth man? And where is he now?

For former FBI-agent-turned-thief Blair Morgan, the world’s most unbreakable vault is her most irresistible target. Blair Morgan has embraced her second career - as an elite thief. Her heist crew has set their sights on their latest target: the Sierra Diamond, an 872-carat stone worth $27.3 million. It will be encased in a new vault known as the Sky Safe, a revolutionary strong room built into the side of a Los Angeles high rise. The FBI says the Sky Safe is impenetrable. Naturally, Blair and her crew think otherwise...and if they succeed, it will be the greatest heist ever pulled.

On July 24, 1964, 24-year-old Matthew Kerry Smith disguised himself with a mask and a Beatle wig, hoisted a semi-automatic rifle, then held up a bank in North York, Ontario. The intelligent but troubled son of a businessman and mentally ill mother, Smith was a navy veteran with a young Indigenous wife and a hazy plan for violent revolution.

Gideon Sable—master thief, con artist and self-proclaimed vigilante—faces a challenge he can't refuse. His client, the former Head of the British Rocketry Group, Professor Neil Sharpe, wants him to break into the Preserve. Once inside, Gideon and his crew of supernatural misfits can get any mystical artefact they desire out of the Preserve's collection. The catch? To reach it, they must go through the treacherous Box Tunnel complex and not only face trained guards and booby traps but steal something that can't normally be stolen—a ghost!

A string of high-level jewel heists up and down the Pacific Coast Highway has gone unsolved for years, mostly because the perpetrator has lived by a strict code he calls “Crime 101”. Police attribute the thefts to the Colombian cartels. But Detective Lou Lubesnick’s gut says it’s the work of just one man. Now the lone-wolf jewel thief is looking for that fabled final last score, and Lou breaks all the rules of "Crime 101".

Shotguns and Stagecoaches tells the true stories of the Wild West heroes who guarded the iconic Wells Fargo stagecoaches and trains, battling colorful thieves, vicious highwaymen, and robbers armed with explosives....

Linc Jackson and his buddy Rick Weaver thought they'd seen it all on the brutal battlefields of Desert Storm, but found themselves displaced and forgotten men when they came back to the States. Now, a year later, the opportunity of a lifetime suddenly drops in their laps.... That is, if they don't mind tiptoeing on the dark side to make the score. During a freak flood that causes havoc in the downtown business hub of Chicago, Linc and Rick put everything on the line as they execute a heist that they hope will put them on Easy Street for the rest of their lives.

On May 3, 2010, an Irish national named Jeffrey Lendrum was apprehended at Britain’s Birmingham International Airport with a suspicious parcel strapped to his stomach. Inside were 14 rare peregrine falcon eggs snatched from a remote cliffside in Wales. So begins a tale almost too bizarre to believe, following the parallel lives of a globe-trotting smuggler who spent two decades capturing endangered raptors worth millions of dollars as race champions - and Detective Andy McWilliam, who’s hell bent on protecting the world’s birds of prey.

The tempestuous Riley and seductive Lulu are beautiful thieves on a mission to save the financially strained academy they once called home. Their determination to complete their goal is rivaled only by their passionate love for each other. But when their final heist meets a snag in the form of the striking knight Sir Hawkwood, will everything they've worked for fall apart?