 | Jacques Cassandri, 73, had boasted about being the mastermind of the “heist of the century” — a £24 million robbery by a gang who burrowed into the Societe -Generale bank in central Nice, southern France, from the sewers. On July 16 1976, after two months of drilling through the underlying sewers, a commando group of 13 robbers finally broke into the vaults of the bank. They spent the next six days clearing 317 coffers of gold ingots, jewellery and cash amounting to 50 million francs before making their getaway just as the rising sewage waters began to flood the bank.
In 2010 Cassandri published his book, in which he set himself up as the mastermind behind the job — safe, he thought, that the robbery took place too long ago for him to be tried under French law. |  |
