A Cool Million

In a darkened building in Boston's old North End, five men worked behind a wire screen, piling up plump sacks of U.S. currency with the mechanical indifference of butchers stacking daisy hams into a cooler. It was 7 o'clock--time for the Boston office of Brink's, Inc. to tot up the day's armored-truck collections and lock them in the vault for the night.

"All right, fellows," said a hoarse voice. "Stick 'em up and don't move." The men looked up to see the business ends of six short-nosed revolvers. Behind the guns were six men in grotesque rubber Halloween masks, chauffeurs' caps and Navy peacoats. "Oh, my God!" groaned Cashier Thomas B. Lloyd. At the gang leader's command, Lloyd ordered a clerk to open a mesh door into the vault room.

The Brink's men were told to lie down, faces to the floor; they were bound with chandler's rope, and their mouths were taped with adhesive. Then the robbers went to work, scooped Federal Reserve sacks into big white cloth bags, kicked an occasional $1,000 in coins out of the way to get at the folding money. The bandits dragged the full bags downstairs to a black car waiting on narrow Prince Street, returned for fresh loads.

Who's Buzzing? Suddenly a buzzer rasped in the vault room. The leader looked at Cashier Lloyd. "He said, 'Who is it?' I said it's probably the night mechanic. He said, 'What'll happen if you don't let him in?' I said he'd probably think something was wrong." The robbers conferred, hurriedly grabbed a last batch of moneybags and glided away. In their haste they left at least $1,000,000 behind --but it had been a profitable 20 minutes anyhow. Their take was $1,000,000 in cash and $500,000 in checks, the largest cash haul in U.S. history.

Cashier Lloyd loosed his bonds in a few minutes and called Boston police. The first officers arrived in two minutes. The clues were thin--one of the robbers' caps, the rope used to tie the clerks, a fingerprint on a patch of adhesive tape. The holdup men had casually walked through five doorways, at least three of them locked and one supposedly guarded by a watchman behind bulletproofed windows. (It was his night off, police explained later.) The robbers were either very lucky, or had inside help, or both.

Preferably Dead. Brink's executives offered $100,000 reward for the bandits dead or alive, preferably dead. The Commercial Union Assurance Co., Ltd., of London prepared to make up all the losses, offered an additional reward of 5% of all money recovered. The FBI flooded the U.S. with serial numbers on $98,900 worth of the stolen bills.

At week's end all the cops and all the FBI men seemed to be getting nowhere, though empty Federal Reserve moneybags were turning up all over the eastern U.S. They had hope that the ancient enemies of the criminal would work to help them --the temptation to drink and brag, to spend conspicuously, to quarrel over shares, to tell their molls too much. But it might take a while before the boys got tired of just riffling their fingers through a million dollars in cool cash, or lighting cigarettes with $1,000 bills.

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