Storming The Fortress | The Story of Brazil’s Most Brazen Bank Heist
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Four years. That's how long it took Democrats to ruin our economy and plunge our southern border into anarchy. Who helped them hurt us? Ruben Gallego. Washington could have cut taxes for Arizona families, but Ruben blocked the bill. And his fellow Democrats gave a bigger break to the millionaire class in California and New York. They played favorites and cost us billions. And Ruben wasn't done yet.

We'll be right back.

Carrie and the Republicans will secure the border, support our families, and never turn their backs on us. Carrie Lake for Senate. I'm Carrie Lake, candidate for U.S. Senate, and I approve this message. Paid for by Carrie Lake for Senate and the NRSC.

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On Saturday, August 6th, 2005, more than 20 sophisticated thieves broke into the central bank of Brazil and Fortaleza. They never tripped an alarm, they never appeared on camera, and motion sensors never picked them up. They made off with over 164 million Brazilian reais, or roughly 70 million dollars. Employees didn't discover the robbery until Monday morning,

When they opened the vault, all they found were crushed cans of energy drinks and empty cartons of fruit juice. Money was scattered on the floor. The whole scene was pure chaos. Then, they noticed something strange on the floor. There was a hole, seemingly too narrow for anybody to climb inside. When police arrived, they shined their lights into its depths and discovered a tunnel dug beneath the bank vault.

They climbed down and followed it for 80 meters until they appeared in a first floor bedroom. They were about a block away from the bank now, and the scene inside the bedroom matched what they'd found in the vault. The only things missing were our 20+ thieves and their fingerprints. They were long gone, having pulled off the largest bank heist in Brazilian history.

At the time, it was among the largest robberies worldwide. It surpassed the $65 million threshold set by Knightsbridge Safe Deposit robbers in London, though it didn't compare to the billion-dollar robbery of Iraq's Central Bank in 2003. Nevertheless, the Banco Central robbery put these Brazilian thieves up there with names like Valerio Vici and Saddam Hussein.

To this day, only a fraction of the 70 million has ever been recovered. Some of the robbers escaped. Many were ultimately arrested. Others, including the ringleader, were killed in a post-robbery kidnapping spree. How did they pull it off? Who was involved? And where did all that money go? Part 1: The Fortress Fortaleza, which means "fortress" in Portuguese, is the fourth largest city in Brazil.

It's the state capital of Ceará, and home to about 2.4 million people. According to Brazil's Ministry of Tourism, Fortaleza is among the country's most popular tourist destinations, behind places like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. It's also a crucial financial hub within the Southern Common Market, a prominent South American trade bloc between Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

Most people in South America simply call it Mercosur. Technically, Fortaleza is the closest Mercosur trade port to mainland Europe. Its northeastern tip is just under 3,500 miles away from Lisbon, Portugal. All this is to say that money flows through Fortaleza like water. Much of it passes through the Banco Central branch at 273 Heraclito Graça Avenue.

Unfortunately, Brazil is among the most lopsided countries in the world in terms of wealth inequality. According to the Gini Index, which measures a country's income distribution, Brazil ranks near the bottom. As of 2021, they were on par with countries like Kuwait, Colombia, Haiti, and Nicaragua, where the ruling class controls most of the wealth.

To put that wealth gap in perspective, look no further than the favelas or slums of Rio de Janeiro and other major cities. Their inhabitants live in extreme poverty, with many turning to crime and drugs to make a reasonable living. Fortaleza is no different. In fact, it's one of the worst. According to the United Nations, Fortaleza is the fifth most unequal city in the world in terms of housing.

The crisis peaked shortly after Brazil won its bid for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. The country launched an aggressive infrastructure campaign to accommodate athletes, games, and tourists. Hotels, stadiums, and high-speed railroads practically went up overnight. Since free space was limited, the government decided to bulldoze the favelas.

The impoverished folks living there couldn't produce official proprietary documents because no such documents existed. Nobody came to appraise their land, and the government basically bought their homes for pennies on the dollar. Things weren't any better in the mid-2000s. Gangsters and drug lords defined the ruling class. Robbery and murder were just your average Tuesday and Thursday. One gang, however, set their sights on a bigger prize.

Instead of robbing the poor folks in their neighborhoods, they'd rob the very people who cast them out of polite society. Banco Central may have been a fortress in its own right, but these criminals knew its greatest weakness. Storming the front door was a suicide mission. Even if they made it out alive, the smash and grab would only yield a few million dollars. They decided to play the long game, a three-month long game to be exact. Part Two: Tunnel Vision.

Three months before the Banco Central robbery, our thieves rented a small house about a block from the bank vault. This house served as their base of operations. From a bedroom in the rear, they began work on an 80-meter tunnel that ended directly under their prize. Our robbers painted the home green to hide in plain sight and opened a fake gardening and landscaping business called Grama Sintetica, also known in English as AstroTurf.

Neighbors didn't think anything of it when they saw trucks bringing tools and heavy equipment to the scene and then leaving with buckets full of dirt. They reported over a dozen men coming and going, all dressed like they worked for a landscaping company. To them, our robbers looked like an honest band of hardworking men trying to make it in an unfair world. As the saying goes, never judge a book by its cover. We don't know much about the individual robbers themselves,

The only person to appear in national headlines was 26-year-old Luiz Fernando Ribeiro. Brazilian police have always believed that Ribeiro was the mastermind behind the Banco Central heist. He was a known drug dealer and is rumored to have killed people before. We can speculate that he grew up poor in the Brazilian favelas and turned to crime with the rest of his friends.

Like other young men in his shoes, Hibero met a violent death, which we'll talk about later in the story. For now, know that Hibero and over 20 other men worked day and night to dig under the bank vault. They must have had some prior training, as police were stunned when they finally discovered the tunnel. The tunnel itself measured 80 meters long, or just over 260 feet. It was a straight line for the most part,

other than a slight curve to avoid some underground piping. Now, don't go picturing a tunnel one could easily walk through. The Banco Tunnel was only 70 centimeters wide or about 27 inches. To put that in perspective, the average shoulder width for an American male is between 14 and 17 inches.

So, assuming these were average-sized men robbing the central bank, they'd only have between 5 and 7 inches on each side to crawl in the tunnel. Talk about claustrophobia. Our robbers installed lights and an airflow system inside the tunnel to make the journey easier. They used water lines for digging and drinking and wooden panels to fortify the inside. The design leaned heavily on two prison breaks in 1996 and 2001.

During those escapes, tunnels from the outside were dug under the Karandiru prison complex in Sao Paulo. In 1996, the tunnels helped 51 prisoners escape their cells. In 2001, over 100 men crawled through the narrow path to freedom. Two men who participated in both prison breaks were brought to oversee the Banco Central tunnel. Their primary job was to overcome the gang's most significant obstacle:

the vault floor, and its 3.5 feet of steel-reinforced concrete. Our robbers used a high-powered drill, an electric saw, and a blowtorch to bore through. Upon discovering the tunnel, the police found all three items, which were probably still hot.

Ribeiro and his gang made off with $70 million in 50 real notes. According to the police, the stolen bills had already been in circulation, making them challenging to track. For example, if they'd stolen newly printed bills, police could easily track the serial numbers to find where the missing cash was spent. Because these bills were old and out of sequential order, it'd be like finding 70 million needles in an infinite number of haystacks.

before our robbers left their fake landscaping business. They covered the place in burnt lime to conceal their fingerprints and DNA. When police finally made it through the tunnel, all they found was a ransacked home covered in white dust. Headlines ran wild. The Brazilian central bank was embarrassed beyond belief. Lucky for them, a few of our crooks let all the cash go to their heads.

A series of bad choices and worse luck helped the police capture a few of them and recover a fraction of the money. They would have liked to catch the ringleader, but somebody else got to Ribeiro first.

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Remember, these thieves were poor men from poorer backgrounds. The sudden cash infusion must have put a massive target on their backs, not only from police but rival gangs too. A few days after the robbery, police in Fortaleza drew an interesting connection between the bank job and all the new car resellers in the city.

On August 10th, they stopped a car carrier with two men inside and three pickup trucks on the back. In those trucks, they found over 2.13 million reais worth of stolen money. About a month later, police arrested five more suspects carrying around 5.2 million reais of stolen loot. The men claimed it was their cut for helping build the tunnel. It's unclear if they took place in the robbery itself.

Next, a former bank security guard confessed to helping them plan the robbery, which explains why the alarms didn't trip when our robbers entered the vault. His confession proved what everybody had already assumed: that the Banco Central heist was, somehow, an inside job. By October, seven of the 20+ robbers had been arrested.

Only a tiny fraction of the money had been recovered, and the gang's ringleader, Luis Ribeiro, was still at large. Unfortunately for him, he wouldn't be for long. On October 9th, police in Camanducaia, a city about 200 miles west of Rio de Janeiro, found Ribeiro's bullet-riddled body on the side of the road.

According to the police, he'd been shot seven times. And there were marks on his wrists from where handcuffs were applied too tightly. One of the officers, who self-identified only as Corporal Leonino, said it was definitely because of the robbery. Corporal Leonino refused to give his last name while speaking to the New York Times for fears of retaliation. That's because many believe Ribeiro's murder was an inside job by Brazilian police.

As the story goes, Hibero fled Fortaleza en route to Sao Paulo immediately after the robbery. He was then kidnapped on October 7th and held for an $890,000 ransom. Even though his family paid the ransom, likely with the money stolen from Banco Central, the kidnappers refused to let Hibero go. They shot him dead and left him to rot on the roadside.

According to a document signed by four state prosecutors and published in O Globo, a popular newspaper in Brazil, several facts pointed to police involvement in Ribeiro's murder. Part of that document reads: "There are indications, not entirely proven, that the authors of the crime are police officers or people linked to them. Those indications may be based on witness reports from the moment Ribeiro was kidnapped.

On the night of October 7th, he and several others arrived at a nightclub outside of Sao Paulo. As the valet took the keys from Ribeiro's hand, four masked men surrounded the car, screaming, "Federal police!" They whisked Ribeiro away and fled in an unknown direction. Despite their best efforts, Ribeiro's friends never saw him again.

According to some sources, Hebero only died because he recognized one of the kidnappers as a police officer with the State Department of Criminal Investigations. That officer allegedly decided that killing Hebero was better than letting the secret slip. Between October and April 2006, police discovered six more kidnapping cases related to the Banco robbery.

They claim that all six ended in the families paying the ransom requests, though it's unclear if any arrests ever came of them. On September 1st, 2006, police in Fortaleza launched Operation Mole Faction, leading to the arrest of 26 people believed to be involved in the robbery. One of the alleged masterminds, Lucivaldo Laurindo, went down with them. It was all thanks to a prepaid phone card left inside the tunnel.

Police wiretapped the associated phone and obtained crucial information on the gang's behavior and whereabouts. Apparently, the Banco Tunnel wasn't the only one they'd been digging. The gang allegedly purchased another decoy home in Maceio, Brazil, the capital of Alagoas State. About 100 meters from the house was one of the largest branches of the Caixa Econômica Federal Bank.

This time, our thieves got lazy and used part of the rainwater network to rob the bank quickly. Thankfully, police in Maceo stopped them before they poked through the vault. Meanwhile, about 2100 miles south in Porto Alegre, the gang purchased a building for 4 million reais. From there, they dug two 100-meter tunnels, hoping to hit two banks in one day.

If they pulled it off, it would have been the single most extraordinary bank job in human history. Unfortunately for them, police obtained a warrant and swarmed the building on September 1st as part of Operation Mole Faction. In one fell swoop, police arrested most of the Banco Central robbers. It's the new Ghost Burger from Carl's Jr. It's a juicy char-broiled Angus beef burger.

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The last of the core Banco Central robbers were arrested in August 2009. In total, Brazilian police arrested over 50 people who were believed to be involved in the crime. Of the 160 million reais stolen from the vault, only 30 million has ever been recovered. Today, the operations house disguised as a landscaping company has become a tourist attraction in downtown Fortaleza.

According to local journalists, neighbors don't like talking about the property or the crime. "Everyone here is still afraid," said a store owner from whom the thieves bought supplies. To him, they seemed like honest men trying to make an honest living. He had no idea his goods were going toward the biggest robbery Brazil had ever seen. People remember the synthetic grass company popping up suddenly and becoming a staple in the community.

The gang members made hats and t-shirts and distributed them to the locals to win their trust. The leaders would buy drinks at the local bar. They were friendly and welcoming, but in the end, they were wolves in sheep's clothing. Nearly 20 years after the robbery, nobody claims to know where the rest of the money is. A lawyer representing some gang members believes most of it is long gone. They either spent it in a hurry or got rid of it when other members started getting kidnapped.

Some have called the stolen money cursed, as everyone who participated in the robbery is either dead, in jail, or on the run. Nobody's life improved. In fact, their lives and the lives of their family members only got worse. So if you ask them if it was worth it, tunneling under Banco Central and executing one of history's largest heists, they'll likely say no. "I regret it," said one of the robbers during a prison interview.

They took everything from me. Meaning his freedom, his family, and whatever stolen cash he had left. It's sad because an honest day's work doesn't get people like the Banco robbers very far in Brazil. On the flip side, a dishonest day's work will see you dead or in jail. When you're stuck between a rock and a hard place, it's easy to see why some people turn to crime and robbery. When you don't have much to lose, it's easy to risk it all.