[SIZE=6] [/SIZE][SIZE=6]“Without hate, without arms, without violence.”[/SIZE]
In 1976, Albert Spaggiari, a mild-mannered local portrait photographer, masterminded a spectacular heist of the Société Générale Bank on avenue Jean Médecin, which involved tunneling into the vault… from the sewers!
To check out the feasibility of his idea, Spaggiari first made sure there was no sound alarm by renting a safety deposit box and planting a loud alarm clock inside set for midnight.
Next he put together a team of Marseilles n’er-do-wells… and they headed into the sewers in the middle of the night, taking the rubble out in their pockets to avoid arousing suspicion. After 2 months of tedious nightly digging, waist-deep in human waste, they finally tunneled out the 8 meters and hit their target.
On a Friday night of a three-day weekend, they broke through, welded the vault door shut from the inside, and proceeded to open 371 safety deposit boxes before leaving early Monday morning with the equivalent of nearly 29 million euros in cash and jewels. When the bank finally got the vault pried open, they found the deposit boxes ransacked, and this phrase painted on the wall: “Without hate, without arms, without violence.”