Quote:
Originally Posted by HossC
Here are Julius Shulman's photos of the Security Pacific Bank Building. They are a selection from "Job 4991: William L. Pereira and Associates, Security Pacific Bank Building (Los Angeles, Calif.),1973".
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A blast from the past :-)
In 1978 I was working computer security for Honeywell Information Systems and an employee of one of our subsidiaries took that very office of that bank for $10.8 million dollars, which at that time was the largest bank heist in history. It was billed as a computer crime but it wasn't, as I found out as the techie on the team that was trying to stay ahead of the press and keep Honeywell's name out of it.
The perp is litigious as hell so you'll have to find out his name on your own. He was installing a network in the Security Pacific wire room and noticed that the wire transfer clerks wrote the password of the day on a post-it and stuck it on a bulletin board. Our perp did some research and discovered that the most compact and liquid form of money (then) was uncut diamonds. A big source of diamonds was the Soviet Union, with whom trade was embargoed, and who sold uncut diamonds on the black market to get hard currency.
Our perp made the necessary arrangements (not hard, given the enthusiasm the Soviets had for a sale) and one fine day he memorized the password of the day, walked out of the wire room, into the street, around the corner, and from a pay phone called the wire room masquerading as a trader and had $10.8 mil wire transferred to a Swiss account of the Soviets.
He then flew to Zurich to collect. And this is part I loved: after identifying himself, the Soviets gave him a Swissair ticket (I can't remember where to) and a baggage claim check. At his destination he picked up a checked attache case with the diamonds in it. Those were indeed simpler times.
Anyhow, our perp sort of went to pieces, made some desultory attempts to sell the diamonds and finally went home to L.A. and confessed to his lawyer, who dropped the dime on him. What an idiot. I often thought that if I found myself in Europe with a valid passport and $10.8 mil in diamonds I could think of a hell of a lot more options than flying back to the scene of the crime and bragging to my lawyer.
After the legal kerfuffle was over, it turned out the diamond market had gone up, so when they were handed over to Security Pacific they were worth a little over $12 mil. So everybody but the our perp won: Security Pacific turned a quick profit and the Soviets got a hard currency windfall. Our perp did his time and got an IT job with a major government agency, with a side activity of suing anybody who questioned his hireability.
And that, ladies and gentleman, was the strange, terrible and noirish story of what went on in the bowels of that building (and a nearby pay phone) one fine day in 1978.
Cheers,
Earl
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