6 The Great Train Robbery took place on 8 August 1963 on the Bridego Railway Bridge, Ledburn in the UK. The Royal Mail train moving from Glasgow to London was robbed by a gang of 15 robbers. The total loot amounted to $3.6 million.

There was solid and careful planning involved in the heist. There was an insider involved in the process who fed all the integral information to the gang. He was known as “The Ulsterman.” His original name was Patrick McKenna.

The name of the leader of the troupe was Bruce Reynolds. The looted train was a Royal Mail train moving from Glasgow to London on the West Coast Mainline and was robbed on Bridego Railway Bridge, Ledburn, near Mentmore.

The members did not use any firearms, but they beat the train driver, Jack Mills, on the head with a metal object. The poor driver never recovered from the incident and never showed up for work ever again. The cash which was stolen was also never recovered.

The planning was so subtle that they used one, two, three, and so on as their code names for carrying out the robbery with ease. They also had a 16th unarmed man who was a retired train driver. After removing the cash from the train, the gang hid at Leatherslade Farm.

The police soon found out their locations by gathering all the evidence and almost all of the members were arrested and convicted. The leader was sentenced to prison for 30 long years. (source)

7 A 200-year-old unused church in a remote area near the village of Komarovo, Russia was totally dismantled and taken away during the course of a couple of months. 

The church had been near the village of Komarovo since 1809. The area was 186 miles away from Moscow and was totally abandoned by the people and the government. This gave the thieves a perfect opportunity of slowly breaking down the church, brick-by-brick, and stealing it.

Officials say that it was in a good condition until July 2009, and within the time period of just three months, the only remains on the scene were some few standing walls and the foundation.

The thieves might have made a good sum of money by selling the religious icons and the sorted church structures, which were still useful for building purposes.

The church authorities were looking forward to resuming services soon, but the thieves made the church disappear before they could even take the first step. (source)

8 The sum of $139 million worth of gold bullion, cash, and diamonds were stolen from The Heathrow International Trading Estate, London. The infamous incident is known as the “Brink’s-Mat robbery”. 

On Saturday, 26 November at 6:40 AM, a gang of six thieves crashed into the Brink’s-Mat warehouse. The robbers gained entry to the vault bypassing the security system. Once they were inside, they poured liters of petrol on the entire staff and asked them the numeral combination to open the vault.

If they wouldn’t tell them, the robbers asserted that they would not hesitate to light a matchstick and set them all on fire. The robbers didn’t expect to find diamonds and gold along with the cash.

The majority of gold was never recovered, but two of the criminals were convicted, and the insurers, Lloyd’s of London, paid for all the losses. It has been found that the case was the cause of many murders afterward and is also somehow linked to the Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary in April 2015.

The robbery was so popular that it gained the title of “The Robbery of the Century.” (source)

9 An armed police officer in New Orleans tried to rob a restaurant’s cash and in the process, murdered one policeman and two of the restaurant’s employees. She returned to the crime scene and pretended to investigate the crime but was unsuccessful.

Antoinette Renee Frank committed this crime accompanied by a drug dealer and her lover named Rogers Lacaze. The crime took place after midnight on 4 March 1995 in a Vietnamese restaurant run by the Vu family.

Ronald Williams, the officer who was a colleague of Frank, had just finished his work as a security guard for extra money and was receiving his payment when Frank appeared on the scene with the two men.

Frank shot Williams and the two family employees, but she couldn’t find the third person who hid inside the fridge.

Frank returned to the restaurant after some time and pretended to investigate, but the third survivor instantly recognized Frank and spoke out that she was the shooter.

The criminals were indicted on 28 April 1995 and were sentenced to death. (source)

10 Japan’s most ingenious robbery of 300 million yen ($2.75 million) was done by a man posing as a police officer on the streets of Tokyo on 10 December by lying to four bank employees that their vehicle in which they were carrying the cash had planted dynamite. When the employees ran for their lives, the policeman ran with the vehicle and the cash inside it.

Four employees of the Kokubunji branch of the Nihon Shintaku Ginko Bank were carrying bonuses for the Toshiba factory workers when suddenly a young uniformed police officer on a motorcycle stopped the car.

The policeman went to the four bankers and uttered an absurd lie that their branch manager’s home had been blown up, and not just that, he told them that the police had been informed that dynamite had been planted under their vehicle.

The four men responded in a way that a normal person would react after hearing such news, and they stepped out of the vehicle.

The police officer bent down to pretend he was checking for the dynamite and smoke and flames came out from under the car. The police officer shouted that the explosion was about to happen and the panicked employees started to run away. Then, the policeman hopped into the driver’s seat and drove off.

The man left no evidence, and the police haven’t been able to catch anyone yet. (source)