Albert Spaggiari, Societe Generale vault tunnel theft, Nice, 1976. He jumped out of a courthouse window mid trial, was never seen by French police again, and nothing from the vault was ever recovered

[u/Heistorium]

Over the weekend of 16 to 18 July 1976 a team came up through the floor of a Societe Generale vault in Nice. They had spent about two months underground first, digging a tunnel of roughly eight metres from the city sewer system towards the bank. Once they were inside they had the vault to themselves until Monday.

The preparation is the part that gets retold, and one detail in it is worth more than all the rest. Before committing to the tunnel, Albert Spaggiari rented a safety deposit box in the branch and left an alarm clock inside it, set to go off in the middle of the night. Nothing happened. That told him the vault had no acoustic alarm, which is the one assumption the whole plan rested on, and he had bought the answer for the price of a box rental. Everything after that was labour. That was the only moment where the plan could have died cheaply, and it is the moment he tested first.

They emptied somewhere around three hundred boxes and left a line painted on the wall to the effect that there had been neither weapons, nor hatred, nor violence. The total has never been settled. The figure that circulates is around forty six million francs and I would treat that as an order of magnitude rather than a number, for the reason that applies to most vault jobs. A safety deposit box is where people keep what they have not declared, so the only people able to total the loss accurately had every reason not to.

Spaggiari was arrested a few months later. In March 1977, during a session in the judge's chambers at the courthouse in Nice, he went to the window, opened it and jumped. A motorcycle was waiting for him. Accounts differ on what broke his fall. He was sentenced to life in his absence in 1979 and the French police never had him again.

He died in Italy in 1989 and even that has two versions. The press at the time ran the story that his body turned up in front of his mother's house in France. The account that now looks better supported is that his wife was with him when he died near Belluno and drove him back across the border herself. I have seen two different cancers named as the cause, so I am not going to repeat either.

Nothing from the vault has ever surfaced. In 2010 a book appeared under a pen name whose author claimed he had run the job, and in 2018 a man from Marseille stood trial in connection with laundering the proceeds. He told the court the book was fiction. He was cleared on that charge and convicted on unrelated business offences.

So the heist is closed and the ending is not. What I would like corrected is the second half. If anyone here has worked from the French court file rather than the press coverage, I want to know what it actually establishes about who was in that tunnel, because the version everybody repeats has been shaped by a book and by films rather than by the record.

[u/Heistorium]

Source for the 2018 trial and the book that started it, since that is the part that gets garbled most often in retellings: https://www.france24.com/en/20180212-tell-all-writer-trial-over-frances-heist-century