The Led Zeppelin Heist | 4
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In the spring of 1973, Led Zeppelin was the biggest live act in the world. On May 4th, they started a two-leg, 34-day tour of North America, their ninth time on the continent, and they began to break records. There were 53,000 fans at the first show in Atlanta. The second show, played at Tampa Stadium in Florida, 58,600 fans showed up, breaking the attendance record for a gig by a single band

set by the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965. The tour wound its way through the US South, out to the West Coast and then back through the North, popping up to Vancouver for one Canadian show. The final three shows were booked for Madison Square Garden in New York City on July 27th, 28th and 29th. These nights were also reserved for the filming of a concert film that would become The Song Remains the Same. The first two shows, A Friday and Saturday, went off without a hitch.

All they had left was one more concert on Sunday night and then they could all go home. The band was exhausted. They were performing three hours a night. Drugs and alcohol and groupies and dealers were everywhere. They had their own private jet which allowed the parties to continue between gigs. Meanwhile, the money flowing in was unlike anything any other act had ever seen. Peter Grant, the band's scary manager, insisted that Zeppelin be paid in cash.

Only he and road manager Richard Cole ever saw the money. So, who stole nearly $200,000 from the band's hotel on the night of that final gig? I'm Alan Cross, and have I got a story for you. This is Uncharted, Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry, Episode 4, The Led Zeppelin Heist. In 1973, Led Zeppelin was the biggest band in the world. Who would dare rip them off?

And how could you even plan a job like this, let alone get away with it? Yet it happened. And it remains a major mystery in the history of rock and roll. In the 1970s, the concert industry was still the wild, wild west.

Promoters battled for the right to bring shows to cities and venues across the continent. Contracts were flexible, if they existed at all, and it was largely a cash business. It was up to the manager or road manager to collect the money, again, in cash, at the end of the night. In the case of Led Zeppelin, promoters had to deal with Peter Grant, the band's manager. He changed the fundamental relationship between an act and a promoter.

He realized that fans were coming to see Led Zeppelin, so they deserved a better split on the box office gross. Before Led Zeppelin, that split might have been 50/50 at best. But Grant demanded and got a 90/10 split in favor of the act. No skimming, no bootlegging tickets, no weird accounting. Grant saw to that.

And whatever the final total, 90% went to the band. Again, often in cash. Let's look, for example, at that night in Tampa on the first leg of Zepp's 1973 tour. Tickets were $6, tax included. That seems cheap today, but adjusting for inflation, that would be $41 today, which, come to think of it, is still cheap.

Attendance, like I said, was $56,800. That meant an overall gross of $309,000, which works out to just over $2 million today. Again, small potatoes by current standards, but you have to remember that bands didn't tour back then to make money. All the revenue came from album sales. You went out on tour to promote your record, which people would then buy. That's where you made all your cash.

But by the standards of 1973, Led Zeppelin was making an insane amount of money on the road, more than anyone, thanks to Peter Grant's way of negotiating. And believe me, you did not mess with him. Grant was a big, mean guy. 6'2", over 300 pounds, with a big belly.

He was a former bouncer and stuntman for TV and movies. He was also a former professional wrestler who appeared in the ring as Count Massimo and Count Bruno Alassio of Milan. He was shrewd and he was ruthless. And he had experience running UK tours for people like Chuck Berry, a guy who also wanted to be paid in cash. In 1963, he was hired by Don Arden, the legendary manager and future father-in-law of Ozzy Osbourne. Arden was also mean and violent.

If you crossed him, Arden would send a group of what he called minders over to your office to maybe teach you a lesson and have a discussion. More than one such person was dangled out of a window unless they promised to pay up, behave, stay out of Arden's way, or whatever. Peter Grant learned a lot from Arden, how to deal with artists and promoters and venues and money.

This led him to working with the Yardbirds in 1966, and when they morphed into Led Zeppelin in 1968, he became their manager. Jimmy Page really liked Grant, largely because, under his supervision, the Yardbirds were able to make money from playing concerts for the very first time. Grant and Page got along famously because Grant delivered and was intensely loyal. He always put the band first.

It was never a contract. It was all a handshake gentleman's agreement between him and the band. Grant had a long-term plan for Led Zeppelin, and unlike other managers, he wasn't looking for short-term personal gain. Costs were carefully monitored, and the band always got paid in full, on time. And unlike a lot of managers, who would never bother going with a band to a gig or on a tour, Grant was there, hands-on, all the time.

Grant negotiated a very sweet five-year record deal with Atlantic Records. He maximized the band's revenue by refusing to let Atlantic Records release any singles in the UK. You want their music? Buy the album. TV performances? Forget it. Want to see Led Zeppelin? Well then, buy a ticket and come to the concert. You feel charming I am good job About me to sit down and talk Oh

And woe to anyone who dared make a bootleg recording of a Led Zeppelin show. When a band stopped in any city for a show, Grant would tour the record stores looking for bootlegs. If he found any, you'd better hand them over if you knew what was good for you. At gigs, he'd walk through the crowd. If he found anyone with equipment recording a show, Grant would put a stop to that by throwing a bucket of water over the gear, if you were lucky. Unauthorized photographers, look out.

Someone selling fake Led Zepp t-shirts outside the stadium? You're in for a rough ride. Grant did everything he could to protect the band, and he was rewarded with a 20% split of the profits. Zeppelin focused on the music, Grant took care of everything else. The other character in this story is Richard Cole. By the mid-1960s, he was looking after bands like The Who and Vanilla Fudge when they were on the road. In 1968, he contacted Peter Grant about working with him.

When Led Zeppelin was launched, Cole became their road manager. Like Grant, he realized that the rock business was exploding in America and that's where Zeppelin should focus most of their attention. As a road manager, he made sure the band had everything they needed. He was especially good at introducing groupies into their circle. Cole was largely responsible for collecting the box office receipts from the production office after a gig and keeping that money safe until it could be deposited into a bank.

This brings us back to the night of May 29th, 1973. Let's start with where Led Zeppelin was in their career at the time. To put it simply, Led Zeppelin was as big as they'd ever be. The first album was released on July 12th, 1969. Critics, especially American ones, hated it. But Zepp had tapped into a new growing market for heavy blues-based rock. The album took 36 hours to record and cost a grand total of £1,782.

and sold in the millions. Led Zeppelin II appeared just seven months later. It was just as hated by the critics, but sold even more. Led Zeppelin III came out a year later. Another critical bomb, but another multi-million seller. Thirteen months later, the fourth album came out, and it would later become one of the biggest selling records of all time, with total sales somewhere around 40 million copies.

As the band set out on tour in North America in 1973, the fifth album, "Houses of the Holy," was selling in the millions too. Peter Grant's philosophy of "You take care of the music and I'll worry about the business" was working better than anyone could have dreamed. Throughout most of the 1973 North American tour,

Led Zeppelin flew to gigs in the Starship, a chartered Boeing 720B passenger jet once used by United Airlines. You've probably seen the iconic picture of the van posing outside by the wing. Instead of moving from hotel to hotel for every stop on the tour, the jet allowed Zeppelin to have a base of operations within flying distance of a number of tour stops.

They'd fly in the day of the show, play the gig, and before the audience left the venue, they'd be in a limo on the way back to the airport, where they'd get on the Starship and fly to their home hotel, such as the Hyatt Continental on the Sunset Strip, where they rented a couple of floors. Those days became so wild and crazy that the hotel became known as the Riot House. If you wandered the halls, you risked being run down by drummer John Bonham on his motorcycle.

At the end of the tour, July 27, 28, and 29, their base was the Drake Hotel on Park Avenue and 56th Street in New York City. That's where the band was staying during their three-night stand at Madison Square Garden. When the group checked in, Richard Cole and Steve Weiss, Peter Grant's lawyer, they made sure that the receipts for the shows were stored in a safety deposit box, number 51. The box was built into a wall in a cashier's area behind the counter, so in a secure, safe place.

Inside was $180,000 cash, along with some credit cards, a few legal papers, and five passports. Those of the band, and one belonging to Peter Grant. At 1.20 a.m. on July 29, 1973, right between the second and third shows at the Garden, Richard Cole checked on the box. Everything was there. Everything was accounted for.

But when he went back that evening at 7:30 to collect the money in preparation for the band's return to England, it was gone. When he opened the box, the only things inside were the passports. No cash. The credit cards, and more importantly, somewhere between $180,000 and $200,000 in cash that had been there 18 hours earlier was just gone. How is that possible? The only person with a key to the safety deposit box was Richard Cole.

Cole freaked out. The cops were called, the FBI was called in, the newspapers descended. And as Led Zeppelin took the stage at Madison Square Garden, the Drake Hotel became a major crime scene. Who ripped off Led Zeppelin? And how? By the time Led Zeppelin's 1973 tour of North America wrapped up, they'd brought in $4 million in ticket sales, or about $27 million in today's money.

Having $180,000 stolen wasn't exactly going to break them, but that is not an insignificant amount of money. Again, factoring for inflation, that would be a theft of $1.4 million today. When road manager Richard Cole discovered that the money was missing from the safety deposit box in a secure area at the Drake Hotel, he immediately reported the theft. Hotel detectives were the first contacted. Then the NYPD was called. Then the FBI was called.

And while Led Zeppelin played the final show at Madison Square Gardens, the Drake turned into a crime scene. And that attracted the attention of the press and the paparazzi. After the show, the members of Led Zeppelin were spirited away from their 17th floor rooms to an apartment on East 68th Street owned by a woman named Shelly Kay. She was the assistant to lawyer Steve Weiss. Back at the hotel, the investigation began.

Cole, meanwhile, started rifling through the band members' rooms, clearing out any drugs or other things that might make life even more difficult. Here are the facts. Like I said, Richard Cole was apparently the only person with a key to that safety deposit box. The box itself showed no signs of being tampered with. No one at the hotel had any explanation.

The box was designed so that it could only be opened if the guest with their key and a hotel employee with another key both used them at the same time. In other words, they had to be present together to open the box. Cole opened the box with a hotel employee on both Friday and Saturday night, depositing a whack of fresh $100 bills. At 1:20 a.m. on the Saturday night, Sunday morning,

He withdrew $1,200 in cash from the box to pay for what he called various band expenses. That might have been for a new guitar, an unexpected drug score, or money for a groupie to be sent home to her parents. Mostly, though, these withdrawals were used to cover the costs of filming the Song Remains the Same concert movie. Normally, anyone who had access to the hotel's safety deposit boxes had to sign for it. You couldn't just walk in, open the box, and have a rummage around on your own.

But weirdly, there was no record of any signature of anyone associated with the Led Zeppelin box coming in to take a look after 1:20 a.m. on that Saturday night, Sunday morning. And why was that money there in the first place? Why cash? Why store $1,800, $100 bills this way? The cops and the FBI were most interested in that. Someone, either Grant or Cole, we're not sure,

had cashed the check from Madison Square Garden when they came into the city earlier in the week, saying that the money was needed to pay off some debts. The banks were closed on the weekend, so the only way to complete any transactions would be in cash. "It's how we do business," said Cole. As the scene around the hotel got crazier and crazier, Peter Grant arrived. He stepped in. He got into a fight with a photographer from a New York newspaper. Grant grabbed his camera, smashed it,

and apparently messed up the photographer's face too. He was arrested on charges of assault and taken to jail, leaving Cole to deal with the mess at the hotel. Meanwhile, the band didn't seem too upset about anything. They were just too exhausted and, let's face it, too strung out from two months on the road ingesting copious amounts of weed, coke, heroin, alcohol, speed, the whole buffet of drugs, to really be too concerned about anything. Jimmy Page looked like hell.

and claimed at the time of the robbery that he hadn't slept for five days. Everyone was, well, dazed and confused. The four guys and Led Zeppelin were not concerned about the theft. They were supposed to focus on the music, remember? Besides, these sorts of things weren't their problem. Best just leave it to Grant and Cole to work things out. Attention then turned on who might have stolen all that money.

Let's go through all the theories. Theory number one. Richard Cole did it. As the keeper of the strongbox, the cops made him the primary subject. He was interrogated and fingerprinted. He volunteered for a lie detector test, and he passed. Even though the idea of Cole stealing from the band was crazy, he was just as loyal to Zeppelin as Peter Grant, he remained the cops' and the FBI's top suspect. Theory number two.

Cole's safety deposit box key was stolen and returned without anyone noticing. There was a big party at the hotel after the second show, so that would have been the Saturday night into the Sunday morning. Lots of groupies and hangers-on and strangers. Could someone have surreptitiously taken the key from Cole, taken the money, and then returned it? Seemed unlikely, but the idea was considered. Theory number three, it was an inside job.

was the lock picked. Did a hotel employee with access to all the master keys help themselves sometime after 2 a.m. Sunday? Along with Richard Cole, an unnamed bellman was considered as a possible thief. Or maybe it was someone else. No clue. And theory number four, and this is my favorite, the person who took the money was Peter Grant. But he didn't exactly steal it.

And this is where we encounter a pretty wild theory. This is the story of the great Led Zeppelin hotel heist of July 1973. And if we're going to at least try to solve this mystery, we have to begin by looking at government policy of the United Kingdom back in those days. In 1973, high-income British citizens were obligated to pay a lot of tax. How much?

Well, the tax rate could be up to 90%, and this included a lot of successful British musicians who were making millions. Tax exile became a thing for some acts. In the spring of 1971, the Rolling Stones were so in hock to the government that they were in danger of having their assets seized. That's when the Stones moved to France to escape British taxes and asset forfeiture.

Mick and his new wife Bianca loved France. Keith found a villa near Nice where he set up a recording studio in the basement using the Rolling Stones' mobile recording truck. This is why their 1972 album is called Exile on Main Street because they were literally exiled. And they weren't alone. In 1973, Jethro Tull also decamped to France. David Bowie took up residence in Switzerland while his friend Mark Boland spent almost three years in Los Angeles.

Same thing with singer Tom Jones. In 1973, he bailed for California rather than give up 90% of his income to taxes. In 1975, all the members of Bad Company moved from Britain to Malibu, California to escape paying huge levels of tax. Rod Stewart moved to LA the same year for the same reason. Shirley Bassey moved to Monte Carlo. And everyone in Pink Floyd left the country for a year in 1978.

The list of tax exiles during this period included Michael Caine, Roger Moore, Sean Connery. In fact, a ton of people involved in the James Bond franchise also had to move to avoid handing over almost their entire salaries to the government in taxes. Led Zeppelin was, of course, in the same income bracket. Actually, probably higher than all these people. But no one in the band actually wanted to leave the UK. So...

This created a problem for Peter Grant that he needed to solve. Here is the theory. Various sources allege that Grant had a series of suitcases with false bottoms designed specifically to hide things from customs, like, oh, huge amounts of cash. The thinking goes is that he took the money, perhaps with Richard Cole's help,

stuffed it into one of these suitcases for transport back to Britain, where it could be properly laundered and therefore remain outside the reach of the British taxman. The New York shows were the final stop on the North American tour. Everyone was due to fly back home as soon as the gigs were over. Seems rather interesting that all this money disappeared right then, doesn't it? So maybe no one stole from Led Zeppelin. The theft was from Inland Revenue in Britain.

This doesn't, however, entirely explain Richard Cole's freakout when at 7.30 p.m. on July 29th, he discovered that $180,000 was missing from the safety deposit box. That is, unless Peter Grant somehow got Richard's key to the box, opened it, took the money, and then returned the key, conveniently forgetting to tell Richard what he'd done. Okay, so what about the need for a second key needed from a hotel employee to open the box?

still could have happened. Him signing the security log for the box? Listen, Grant was a big, mean, intimidating guy. Think convincing an overnight weekend hotel employee to do something would be a challenge for him? And remember how the band wasn't too concerned about the robbery? Could it be that they weren't worried because they knew how Grant worked? One other thing,

Bob Spitz, the author of a 2021 biography on Led Zeppelin, says that no fewer than five people told him that Peter Grant told them that he'd taken the money. Or maybe Richard took it. Or maybe they were both in on it. Whatever the case, the money disappeared and ended up where exactly? Like I said, this explanation still leaves some loose ends.

But after more than 50 years, it's the most likely explanation, especially since the great Led Zeppelin heist of 1973 is still on the books as unsolved. The odds of us or anyone ever finding out who took Led Zeppelin's money on that summer Sunday in 1973 are pretty much zero. Peter Grant died of a heart attack in November 1995 at the age of 60. Richard Cole died of cancer in December 2021. No one at the Drake Hotel was ever charged.

This is a case that has been and will remain very, very cold. It's a great rock and roll story, though. If you have any questions or comments, shoot me an email at alan at alancross.ca. You can also meet up on all the social media sites along with my website, ajournalofmusicalthings.com. And it's updated with music news and recommendations every day. There's also a free daily newsletter that you should get. Join me for more stories of crime and mayhem for the world of music with Uncharted.

Technical Productions by Rob Johnston. I'm Alan Cross.