Fifty years ago today, staff arriving at the Société Générale on Nice's avenue Jean-Médecin discovered the vault ransacked and empty, the moment the "heist of the century" became public and Albert Spaggiari's name entered French criminal legend, according to France 3 Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur.
Spaggiari's gang broke through the wall of the bank's safe deposit room on the night of July 16 to 17, 1976, having spent months digging an eight metre tunnel from the city's sewers. Over the long weekend that followed, the crew worked undisturbed, emptying 371 of the vault's roughly 4,000 boxes and making off with an estimated 46 million francs in cash, gold and jewellery, worth around 38 million euros today. None of it was ever recovered. Didier Caulier, one of the gang's accomplices who was never convicted, recalled the operation's scale. "We dug for three and a half months without stopping. We dug every night," he said.
Spaggiari was arrested that October but escaped custody in a leap from a window at Nice's Palais de Justice, going on to give interviews to journalists throughout his years on the run before dying, reportedly in poverty, in 1989. His lawyer, Jean Peyrat, later reflected on the gang's own signature, a note left behind reading "no weapons, no violence, no hate." "A refined robbery, without hatred, without weapons and without violence, is still preferable," he said, "to using weapons and killing someone."
To mark the anniversary, ICI Azur journalist Laurent Vareille has released a podcast episode on the case, while Nice illustrator Virginie Broquet has published a graphic novel on the heist.