Original subtitles

A mastermind and his crack team of robbers.

This was definitely a robbery that had been well executed. It was well thought

out. It was very sophisticated.

He had a tremendous amount of knowledge. And that's the only way they would have

been that successful.

He planned it for months and took less than 30 minutes to pull it off.

It was the largest cash heist in US history.

Los Angeles, California.

Money is everywhere.

Making sure it gets into the right hands safely and efficiently is the job of

companies like Dunbar.

But armored car companies don't just transport money.

They also store it for banks and businesses that don't want the risk of

keeping it themselves.

The amounts they store every day are staggering.

Most of them would carry anywhere from 5 million to 50 million, and some of them

carry even up to 100 or 200 million.

That's why there are multi-layers of security surrounding armored car depots.

Even if you could get past the alarm systems, surveillance cameras, and gun

-toting guards, you'd still have to face an impregnable vault.

Like Fort Knox, there's a fortune inside, but you just can't get at it.

But on the night of September 13, 1997...

The impossible happened.

At least four men wearing ski masks and armed with shotguns and handguns forced

their way into the Dunbar Armored Company Depot.

Using military precision and meticulous planning, the robbers escaped with $18.9

million, the largest cash robbery in American history.

The police find virtually no evidence.

None of the Dunbar employees could identify the assailants. There were no

fingerprints. Even the recorders to Dunbar's video surveillance system were

stolen.

The only piece of evidence they find is a yellow plastic taillight they

determined doesn't come from any of the Dunbar vehicles.

This robbery is a criminal masterpiece.

We immediately began trying to determine exactly what did happen during the

course of the robbery.

It quickly becomes clear to investigators how elaborate the robbery

had been.

This was definitely a robbery that had been planned very well. It was well

executed. It was well thought out.

It was very sophisticated.

These people were in and out in 30 minutes.

And that's when we formed the opinion that someone had had prior knowledge of

the workings inside the facility.

The authorities suspected it was an inside job.

All current and former employees of Dunbar were considered suspects.

When Dunbar officials were questioned about any particular employees that

they felt, you know, might be involved in this, the name Alan Pace just came up

continuously. Alan Pace was an employee of the Dunbar company.

It worked with them approximately a year and a half.

He was actually the regional safety director for the company.

But what no one realizes his pace had been doing a lot more than safety

inspections He'd been masterminding one of the most amazing robberies in

American history

Alan Pace is the mastermind behind the greatest cash robbery in American

history. The question is, how does he do it?

Alan Pace was a very normal individual. He had no criminal record.

He had grown up in a middle-class family.

At work, he was famous for pranks, like unscrewing taillights and reporting the

drivers for safety violations.

His coworkers liked him. He had none of those qualities that you think of when

you think of someone who could pull off a robbery of this sort.

Getting everyone to believe he couldn't pull off a robbery was the first step in

his master plan.

Alan Pace was determined to be the overall organizer of the robbery itself.

He first recruited some of his old childhood friends.

These are friends he can trust. Friends without police records who know how to

use firearms and would quickly form an effective team.

Alan and his friends moonlighted doing sort of bouncer-type jobs at various

nightclubs in the area.

And so they were friends, they'd grown up together, they worked together.

It was a group that trusted one another.

They actually stated to each other that should any of them be arrested, they

would take the fall and not say anything or implicate the others.

Pace instilled in his men his golden rule.

It's all for one and one for all.

Alan Pace was a natural born leader.

He was someone that everybody just naturally followed and trusted.

He was a nice guy.

If he said that this robbery could be pulled off, people believed him. And

they thought, yeah, you know, this is a great opportunity. We'll do this one

time, you know, criminal activity and we'll be set for life. And they start

meeting to plan the robbery.

Pace has done his homework.

He provides them with exact diagrams of the depot.

Pace showed them Polaroid pictures of the facility, showed them what the

facility looked like from the outside, the inside, what to expect.

And he would have been able to capture the location of those internal video

cameras in the hallways.

And he used that so that the robbers could visualize what these doors and

these hallways would look like.

Pace outlines the steps they'll have to take. Enter the locked facility.

Avoid the cameras and the security alarms.

Take down the armed guards.

Gain control of the security command post.

Enter the vault.

Move a half-ton of cash to a waiting getaway vehicle. And do it all in less

than 30 minutes.

Pace even provides photos of key employees.

But how could he take these critical photographs?

without raising suspicion he had total access throughout the facility and being

a regional safety person he could take him and he could wander around in the

entire facility without arousing any suspicion really pace left

nothing to chance weeks in advance he and his crew did several drive-bys of

the dunbar facility

They knew all of the entrances and exits to the facility.

They knew all of the adjoining streets.

They knew the proximity to the freeways in downtown Los Angeles.

They were very well prepared.

On the morning of Friday, September 12th, Pace gets an unexpected call.

Dunbar officials, tired of his pranks, tell him he's fired and ask him to

return his keys.

For Pace, it's now or never.

The day that Pace was suspended, that caused him to contact all of his

accomplices and tell those individuals, hey, we're going to do this robbery

tonight. The day of the robbery, Eugene Hill goes out and rents a U-Haul truck,

which is what he had been told to do.

Pace and his crew arrive outside Dunbar and face their first hurdle.

There's no way into the depot without being seen by the camera guarding the

main entrance.

Or is there?

Weeks earlier, Pace had solved the problem by conning a fellow employee.

Now, one of those employees had a brand new truck that he was especially fond

of, and he sat at a desk in the vault area that actually had a television

monitor that reflected this external camera.

So he had positioned the camera to focus on his truck, which was always parked in

the same spot every night when he was working at Dunbar.

The robbers knew exactly where that camera was positioned from having been

told by Pace.

Therefore, they just actually hugged the wall as they came to the front.

And then all they had to do was use Alan Pace's key to get inside.

The individuals were all dressed in dark clothing. They had masks over their

faces, had weapons in their possession.

And they all have codes. They don't address each other by name, but by

numbers.

Now, once inside the facility, there were cameras in the hallways, but those

cameras can't.

Pace carefully timed the intervals when the camera changed direction.

He calculated that there was a narrow window of opportunity in which to slide

past undetected.

And so they were able to avoid being caught on the camera by taking turns

going down the hall when the camera was pointed in the opposite direction.

One false step and it's 20 years to life for Pace and his crew.

Alan Pace had a key to get into the facility. Now, he would not have been

able to get the key to get into the vault.

But Pace knows his former co-workers' habits.

He has timed the robbery to coincide with their break.

All he has to do is wait for them in the lunchroom.

Once he entered into the location, he knew that there probably wouldn't be

more than one, maybe two armed guards.

If he could control them, then he had the run of the facility.

Pace now has the keys to the vault prep room. But the problem is, it's monitored

by a camera they can't dodge.

He and his crew must rush the guards before they can sound the alarm.

They were at gunpoint, forced to get down on the ground.

They were told to look straight at the floor and not look anywhere else or

their heads would be blown off.

Hands were tied behind their backs, and there was always an armed robber

watching them, and so they were powerless to do anything.

A button was pressed. That's when the U-Haul truck was then brought inside.

The question now is, how

does Pace get into a vault with an 18-inch thick steel door?

He walks straight in.

Pace knows that on Friday nights the vault is always open, as staff moves

huge volumes of cash needed for weekend shopping.

Well, Alan was the mastermind, and so his job was to get into the vault area,

select the money that was going to be taken.

The money in the vault was sorted by delivery routes.

Pace had memorized which held the large denomination bills.

Those routes that involved smaller currency deliveries, like to smaller

businesses, that money was untouched.

They definitely cherry-picked.

They went directly to where the large amounts of cash were stored and removed

them.

Pace is also careful not to take any new sequentially numbered bills that could

be traced back to the robbery.

Although Pace and his men know that every minute they spend now risks their

being interrupted by the police or an army of incoming Dunbar trucks, he and

his crew have some unfinished business.

The robbers were able to locate the video recorders and actually took the

VCRs and the tapes with them.

One was fairly obvious in the supervisor's office. The other was in a

back office, not...

situated anywhere near the vault area, behind a locked door in a locked office,

in a locked cabinet.

I don't think I readily would have been able to find it within an hour or so,

and they were in and out of there in probably less than a half an hour.

But the question remains, how did Pace know about the secret backup recording

system? Pace had a girlfriend who used to work at Dunbar, and it was her job at

Dunbar to change the tape in this backup recording system. So it's entirely

possible that she communicated this information to him, and that's how he

knew where it was and which office it was in.

Without a shot being fired, Alan Pace and his crew have pulled off the largest

cash heist in American history.

Stealing the money, however, turns out to be the easiest part.

alan pace and his crew have masterminded an 18.9 million dollar robbery from the

dunbar armored facility in los angeles the problem they face now is what do

they do with it the night of the robbery the individuals had taken the money and

gone to a home down in the long beach area the initial plan

By all of those involved, as they were instructed by Alan Pace, was not to

begin spending money lavishly.

But you can imagine what's going on in the minds of these people who are

stuffing their garbage bags full of 20s and 50s and 100s. They're thinking about

all the stuff that they're going to buy with this money. They're not really

thinking about lying low.

I think the biggest challenge that these robbers had was...

What do we do with this money, and how do we use it, but not really leave a

trail of how we're using it?

After giving each of his crew a hundred grand, Pace stashes the remaining 18.2

million in a Gardena, California storage facility.

From the very beginning, we looked at Alan Pace. He seemed to have the best

abilities to commit the crime.

But we didn't know that.

He was, in fact, the person that had committed the crime. We suspected that

maybe a U-Haul truck had been involved because a taillight was found on the

loading floor of Dunbar.

So we look for U-Haul rentals around the time of the robbery in the name of Alan

Pace because we don't have anybody else's name.

And not surprisingly, that search is fruitless.

He had no real physical evidence.

We had put surveillance on Alan Pace, both from LAPD and the FBI, trying to

see where he was going, who he was meeting up with, if he had any money,

how he was actually spending this money, and just his constant whereabouts.

But Pace skillfully avoids incriminating himself.

He doesn't go near the stolen cash, lives quietly at home.

and avoids all contact with his accomplices.

Six months later, when the heat has died down, he hatches his plan to launder the

money.

Pace provides over a million dollars in cash to purchase numerous properties in

and around Los Angeles.

He went out of his way to make sure that none of his assets could be traced to

him. And he spent a lot of money in cash.

Alan Pace didn't even have a bank account.

He assumed

that within 10 years' time, no one would really be looking at him as a suspect in

this crime, and then he could just sort of retire with the wealth he'd

accumulated from his investment in real estate.

Pace realizes that they had inadvertently taken a stash of

sequentially numbered bills that could link them to the crime.

Alan Pace had told the robbers that this brand new money had to be destroyed.

And so a couple of the robbers went to a home with a fireplace to burn this

money. But they discovered that stacks of money burn very slowly.

So when they got tired of seeing this money burn, they thought, well, you

know, we'll just take it to Las Vegas and spend it there.

But they discovered that crisp new bills jam in the slot machines.

So they end up tossing them in a washing machine to make them usable.

So months pass, and basically the investigation comes to a grinding halt.

Meanwhile, Pace rents office space and sets up bank accounts for a new company

called Extreme Entertainment.

On the surface, it rents party equipment, jet skis, and limousines.

In reality, however, it is a front to pay themselves enormous monthly

salaries. with the stolen money.

So if you simply looked at the paychecks being deposited by these men, it would

appear that they were working for a legitimate company.

But what Pace doesn't know is that Eugene Hill has given a middleman $100

,000 of stolen cash to buy property, but has failed to remove the cash straps.

The middleman contacts the authorities.

We were able to determine, based on the stamps and the handwriting and the dates

on those straps, that those straps had been on money that was taken from the

Dunbar vault on the night of the robbery.

Hill was now under constant surveillance.

Authorities subpoena his bank and telephone records, but they didn't stop

there. They even subpoenaed tens of thousands of U-Haul records in an

attempt to link Hill to the robbery itself.

It turns out that Eugene Hill had rented a U-Haul truck on September the 12th, so

that put him in possession of a U-Haul truck right at the time that this

robbery took place.

After we arrest Eugene Lamar Hill the following morning, Hill elects to

cooperate and assist us in the investigation and totally admits his

involvement in the robbery and then names his accomplices in the robbery.

The police offer Pace a deal. Unlike Hill, he remains true to his word and

refuses to finger any of his crew.

The case finally proceeded to trial in February of 2001.

And the robbers who pleaded guilty received sentences that ranged from

seven and a half years to 11 years.

Alan Pace was found guilty and was sentenced to 24 years in prison. To this

day. Alan Pace denies any involvement in the robbery.

The Los Angeles division of the FBI carries the distinction of bank robbery

capital of the world. This particular instance, the robbery of the Dunbar

Armored facility itself was a unique type of robbery. This was the largest

cash takeover style robbery in the history of the United States.

Alan Pace planned this very well.

Now, here were these guys that had grown up together with the closest of friends.

They pulled out this heist. They were all sworn to secrecy.

But when one of them was arrested and confessed, implicating the others, then

it was just a matter of time before everybody else followed suit.

Had these individuals been responsible for the theft of maybe one or two or

three million dollars, that obviously would have been easier for them to hide

and disperse and spend.

We were able to account for how $7 million was spent.

So obviously there's $10 million out there that's completely unaccounted for.

$10 million.

And only mastermind Alan Pace knows where it is.

Bye.