The Heist of the Century — Twenty Men Working Rotating Shifts in the Sewers
Spaggiari opened a safe deposit box account at Société Générale to scout the vault. He confirmed it held large cash reserves and no permanent on-site guard.
To test whether alarms existed, he placed loud alarm clocks inside his rented safe deposit box, set to ring after hours. Night after night, the clocks blared, and no security responded. Bigu had told him the truth.
His plan was set: dig a tunnel from the sewer into the vault.
But massive obstacles stood in the way. Central Nice was densely populated; digging anywhere risked discovery. Excavating from a rented house would leave traces. Buried utility lines were everywhere, and breaking a pipe would bring maintenance crews running. To pull this off, he needed municipal sewer blueprints.
Spaggiari contacted the city council, claiming he planned to build a nightclub and renovate a basement, afraid of damaging underground pipes. Officials, happy for new investment, handed over 1:1000 scale sewer maps.
For two years, he made on-site surveys. Finally he found his perfect spot: a sewer access next to a bicycle shed. It sat in a busy district yet drew little attention. No buildings sat directly above, and the sewer connected to the river, so kayaks could move loot in and out.
Three major challenges remained:
- Hand digging only, no power tools, to avoid noise. This required many workers.
- The tunnel sat over seven metres underground. Oxygen was thin. Acetylene torches used to crack safes would consume oxygen, risking suffocation.
- Water levels. Only May to August had low enough sewer water. They had a three-month window to finish digging.
By winter 1975, Spaggiari had finalised his whole plan. Recruit roughly twenty men, dig the tunnel by hand over two to three months, rotating shifts underground. Supplies and food would be brought in by kayak.
They would strike on Friday night. The bank closed for the weekend, giving them two full days and three nights to work. An industrial exhaust fan would maintain oxygen; the fan would be stolen, not bought new, to avoid tracing. Once the tunnel broke through, some men would crack safes, others clean the tunnel. Everyone wore double gloves; anything that could hold fingerprints would be removed.
The plan was brilliant, but the hardest part: finding twenty reliable men. They needed tunnel diggers, welders, safe crackers, disciplined enough to endure months underground.
He first considered underworld gangs, then ruled them out. Gang members were undisciplined; one troublemaker could ruin everything.
Stuck, he met Alain Bournat, who connected him to Marseille crime boss Gaétan Zampa. Spaggiari pitched the whole heist, asking for manpower.
Zampa admired the plan, but said the money was not worth his involvement. He offered one critical tip: skip the underworld. Recruit ex-soldiers, especially combat engineers.
The advice clicked. Spaggiari tracked down veterans, many Vietnam paratroopers, and assembled his twenty-man crew.
He sourced supplies with extreme caution. Bags bought in Italy; steel cutters, hammers and chisels from Belgium. Wheelbarrows and buckets homemade. Cable scavenged from scrap yards. Welders and the exhaust fan stolen from construction sites via Zampa’s contacts. Food and waterproof suits bought in small batches across France and Italy, never returning to the same shop twice.
This meticulous caution explains why police later recovered piles of evidence yet could trace none of it.
May 7, 1976, late night. Seventeen men, most unaware of each other’s real names, carried supplies to the sewer site. Digging began.
Work progressed smoothly. Spaggiari’s logistics were top-tier: good wine, meat, first aid kits. The crew stayed motivated.
July 14. Spaggiari brought cigars and wine down the tunnel. The crew’s tunnelling expert told him: tapping the wall, they could tell they were centimetres from the vault’s outer concrete. They were ready for the final push.
Spaggiari ordered them to pause and rest. They set the breakthrough for 9:30 p.m., Friday July 16.
Late July 16. A dull thud. The tunnel punched through into the vault. Thirteen men entered with tools, others ran the exhaust fan and cleaned the tunnel. Spaggiari even propped a “Work in Progress” sign at the tunnel entrance.
Welders lit torches and cut through the vault reserve chamber door. Inside lay stacks of fresh banknotes and rows of gold bars. The room fell quiet, then erupted in cheers.
“Pack cash, bonds, gold and jewellery. Work fast.”
Cracking individual safety deposit boxes was slower than expected, but the reserve vault’s riches were staggering. They pried open boxes one after another, like opening blind treasure boxes. The looting continued until the morning of July 18.
Then the lookout warned: sewer water was rising. A storm was coming.
Spaggiari ordered full evacuation before dawn.
Before leaving, proud of his historic crime, Spaggiari scrawled the famous line on the vault wall: No weapons, no violence, no hate.
A crew member warned handwriting analysis could identify him. Spaggiari grabbed chalk and blacked out the words. The gang welded the inner vault door shut to delay discovery.
At 2 a.m. July 19, the tunnel and vault were cleaned, and the whole gang withdrew. That morning, the group gathered one last time. Spaggiari split the haul of at least 50 million francs, and the men scattered. The heist of the century was complete.
After the robbery, Spaggiari waited nervously. He never expected Nice police to hit a dead end. No warrant, no suspicion fell on him.
Relaxed, he travelled to Chile to spend his loot. There he met American agent Michael Townley, who brought him to the United States. Watching the agent work, Spaggiari thought: if this man could work for intelligence, so could he. He learned of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and decided to apply.
He got an interview. During the conversation, he bragged: he could open any safe, even embassy vaults.
The interviewer said there was no way to verify his claims and rejected him. Annoyed, Spaggiari slammed a newspaper article about the Nice heist on the table. “I did that job.”
The interviewer did not believe anyone would confess so recklessly, and sent him away. Later, the interviewer could not stop thinking about the story and alerted French police. The report reached Commissioner Murat, who dismissed it.
To Murat, Spaggiari was the town hall’s trusted photographer, wealthy, famous for tall tales, including his near-assassination attempt on de Gaulle. The story sounded like empty boasting. Even when Spaggiari returned to France, police took no action.
Then October 12, 1976. Marseille police arrested Alain Bournat in an unrelated bank robbery case. Under interrogation, Bournat cracked. He told investigators the mastermind of the Société Générale heist was Albert Spaggiari.
This time, Murat could not ignore the confession.
📚 The Great Riviera Bank Heist
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