by Dan Moren
Inside the Robbery of the Century
Fascinating and fun read by Josh Dean at GQ about a cinematic bank robbery in Buenos Aires in 2006:
Finally a team of special-forces officers took up position outside the bank. At 7 p.m, they burst inside. But there was no shoot-out, no commotion. And no sign of the thieves. The hostages were dispersed on three floors–the lobby level, a mezzanine space, and down in a basement conference room, which had been locked from the inside. They were all unharmed.
It wasn’t until detectives reached the basement that they discovered what the robbers had truly been after. There, in the expanse of the bank’s subterranean level, hundreds of reinforced-steel safe-deposit boxes lined the walls. And in a place like San Isidro, at a time like 2006, those boxes represented a veritable treasure trove.