The Sewer Tunnel Heist That Cracked a French Bank Vault

Picture this: on trial for the biggest bank heist in history, you hand the judge a coded document, leap out the window onto a parked car, hop a waiting motorcycle, and vanish. Then you mail the car's owner a check to cover the dent. Every detail is true.This episode is a character study of Albert 'Bert' Spaggiari, the mastermind behind the July 1976 break-in at a Societe Generale vault in Nice. We trace how a paratrooper, militant operative, and small-town photographer assembled the skills and network to dig into a fortress, and how myth and reality blur around a man who wanted to be remembered as a gentleman thief.How military training and the OAS network gave Spaggiari a master class in compartmentalization, explosives, and underground logisticsThe two-month operation digging a 26-foot tunnel from the city sewers, complete with rubber rafts, air mattresses, picnic tables, and 30 tanks of acetyleneThe Bastille Day weekend break-in that netted an estimated 46 million francs and the wall message 'without weapons, neither hatred nor violence'How a scorned ex-girlfriend's tip unraveled the crew and Spaggiari's theatrical courtroom escape on March 10, 1977The bizarre 2010 twist when Jacques Cassandre claimed credit in a tell-all book and was busted for money laundering on a technicality