$1.1 Million in gold stolen from house near Belleville

Who says that you have to travel to an exotic location to pull off a major heist?  According to the Ottawa Citizen $1.1 million in gold was stolen from a house in eastern Ontario.

About $1.1 million in gold bars and coins and a further $4,000 in American currency were stolen, apparently in April, from a home in Cramahe Township. The rural municipality is between Brighton and Colborne.
“It’s kind of a bizarre situation,” said Northumberland OPP Const. Kimberly Johnston. “This type of theft is not something we come across every day.”

Vjeran Tomic, French catburglar

The Atlantic has a long article about Vjeran Tomic a French art thief.

Tomic generally worked alone, scaling walls, leaping between rooftops, and picking locks. Once inside an apartment, he looked first for jewelry, because it was valuable and easy to sell. A burglary that took less than two hours often yielded enough cash to support him for six months on the French Riviera. In his letters, he recounted robbing various Parisian luminaries, including the French-Caribbean singer Henri Salvador and the Egyptian royal family. 

Armoured car attacked by diggers

Boing Boing has a post - mostly a series of tweets with pictures - about an armoured car in Italy that was stopped by thieves and then ripped open with two diggers.  They got away with over 2 million Euros.

$100 million painting on back of bedroom door

Illicit Cultural Property has an article about a $100 million painting that was recovered after the death of a couple from New Mexico.  The painting was stolen, by an unknown couple, in 1985.

Also mentioned on Kottke.org

Theft of Swedish Crown Jewels

According to an article in the Ottawa Citizen (also Yahoo News and the BBC ) thieves smashed the case of a display holding the Swedish crown jewels and then fled the area in a waiting speedboat.

On Tuesday, two thieves stole one 17th century golden orb and two crowns from a cathedral near Stockholm where they had been on display in an alarm-locked glass box, before escaping by speedboat into the Mälaren lake that spans 120 kilometres and is filled with hundreds of small islands.

Houston Armoured Car Robbers

Texas Monthly has an article about the ringleader of a gang of Houston based armoured car robbers.

The gang were caught after police received, and paid for, an anonymous tip which named the leader.  The police then spent months following the gang members waiting for them to strike.  I think this illustrates the downside of the gang's particularly nasty technique of deliberately shooting the armoured car worker carrying the bags of money.

Convict escapes with tool dropped from drone

USA Today has an article about a criminal who escaped from prison using wire cutters dropped into the prison by a remote controlled drone.

via Slashdot