Los Angeles, CA: The biggest bank robbery in Los Angeles history didn’t happen in a bank. It took place in a shed in a quiet part of Sylmar.
Early on March 31, thieves broke through the roof of a building on Roxford Street that was being watched over by the security company GardaWorld and stole up to $30 million from the vault.
Cash logistics is an industry that usually stays out of the spotlight but got a lot of attention after the Easter morning heist. They do some of the things that banks normally do, like store huge amounts of money.
A call-for-service log from the LAPD that The Times obtained shows that police responded to three different alarms at the Roxford property on the day of the theft and to a fourth around 11:30 p.m. on March 30. Even though the police were there, the crooks were not caught. At least one of the police cars called GardaWorld, but the company didn’t initially report the break-in, according to The Times.
There were two thieves with AK-47s who broke into a GardaWorld cash storage center in Riviera Beach, Florida, on September 15, 2012. They shot Hjalmar Towns, the boss of the company, in the back with a rifle and took his Ruger gun from his waistband.
In just a few minutes, the crooks were putting cash into a Chevrolet S-10. They stole roughly $3 million.
One of the thieves hit Towns in the head several times with the butt of an AK and then tied him up. However, FBI agents who were looking into the theft would soon find out that Towns had helped plan the job. Court papers show that the police learned Towns thought it was a good time to rob because GardaWorld was moving to a safer property. He also told his partners that no one at the company would risk their lives if they put on a show of force.
Not long after the theft, Towns tried to do it again in West Palm Beach. He tried to steal a GardaWorld armored vehicle holding $1.5 million while armed with a gun. After firing two shots, Towns almost hit a GardaWorld worker and then ran away without taking any cash.
Authorities caught him and he later pleaded guilty to charges linked to the attempted heist, according to court records.
Because Towns tried to trick police by saying that his attackers in Riviera Beach were Haitians speaking Creole, he got six and a half years in jail for the robbery and more than 14 years for the failed armored car job. His gun-toting accomplices in the storage facility heist also got long prison terms.
