Shake Your Booty Trivia Quiz

Answer: Saddam Hussein

On March 18, 2003, the day before the initial bombing attacks on Baghdad, Qusay Hussein, son of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, marched into the Central Bank of Iraq with a handwritten note from his dad authorizing the withdrawal of $920 million. Over the next few days, Qusay continued the 'authorized withdrawals' and all in all the Husseins got away with $1 billion, effecting the biggest bank robbery ever! Qusay was later killed by US troops in a firefight. $650 million was found hidden in the walls of Saddam Hussein's palace, after the dictator had fled.

The remainder of the haul is still out there somewhere. Not that it would do any good to anyone who finds it - the Iraqi dollar was soon only good for lighting candles with.

Answer: Boston

At 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, two police officers knocked on the door of the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum in Boston. The night security guards let them in and within minutes found themselves bound and gagged in the basement while over the next 90 minutes the 'police officers' systematically looted the museum of its treasures.

In all they got away with three Rembrandts, a Vermeer, a Flinck, five Degas sketches, a Monet, a priceless Chinese bronze beaker, and a bronze eagle that had served as the finial of a Napoleonic flagstaff.

The price tag? $300 million US. To add insult to injury, none of the pieces stolen was insured, and none of them has been seen since!

Answer: Banco Central, Brazil

In May 2005 an empty lot in the centre of the city of Fortaleza in Brazil was rented by a group of men who put up a sign indicating that the property was the headquarters of a landscaping company. Neighbours assumed that the mounds of soil that appeared on the site soon thereafter were stock in trade, especially when trucks arrived to remove the soil.

In reality, the soil was the result of digging activities and the 'landscapers' were bank robbers intent on tunneling their way into the vault of the Banco Central two blocks away. On the weekend of August 6/7, the thieves broke through into the vault, managed to disable the security system and the cameras that were supposed to record all activity in the vault, and garnered $69.8 million US! The theft was not discovered until the bank opened for business on Monday. Because the bills were not numbered sequentially, they were not traceable. Furthermore, the money was not insured. On September 28 police arrested five of the gang members who had $5.4 million of the loot in their possession.

In all, the police recovered $7 million, but that still leaves approximately $63 million out there somewhere.

Answer: Belfast

The Northern Bank in Belfast was the target of bank robbers in December 2004, in one of the biggest bank robberies in the UK. The robbers, disguised as police officers, forced their way into the homes of a senior bank official and his supervisor, and held their families hostage.

The bankers were told to show up for work as usual on Monday, stay behind after the staff had left for the day, and then let the robbers into the bank. Fearing for the lives of their wives and children, the bank officials did as they had been instructed and the robbers got away with 26 million pounds worth of sterling, euros and US dollars.

At least the robbers were honourable enough to release the hostages as soon as they had made their haul.

Answer: JFK. New York

When a JFK employee found himself $20,000 in debt to his bookie, he got out from under by 'selling' the bookie a piece of valuable information. Once a month, money and other valuables used in exchange by American tourists and American servicemen were flown from West Germany to New York by Lufthansa.

The money and valuables were stored in a cardboard vault in JFK's cargo bay while waiting to be transferred to the bank. The bookie, who had contacts in one of the New York crime families, passed the information along to one of the bosses.

In the early hours of December 11, 1978 a van pulled into the loading dock nearest the Lufthansa vault. The robbers made short work of overpowering the security guards and other employees working in the cargo bay, and in just over an hour had cleaned out the vault and made off with $5.8 million in cash and $875,000 in jewels.

The Lufthansa heist was the largest cash robbery in the US up to 1978.

Answer: Dunbar

In 1997 Allen Pace worked as a regional safety inspector for Dunbar Armored in Los Angeles. His intimate knowledge of the Dunbar facility inspired him to recruit five childhood friends to join him in robbing his employer. Pace knew that on Friday nights the vaults would be open as cash was transferred to stores in the city to handle the weekend cash needs, so he planned the robbery for Friday, September 13, 1997. Pace and the gang subdued the security guards, and in half an hour they had loaded $18.9 million in high denomination, non-sequentially-numbered bills into a rented van and made their escape.

Police suspected Pace but could find no evidence against him. The robbers were careful not to flaunt their illegally-gotten gains, laundering the money through a series of real estate deals and via unsuspecting businesses. They might have got away with it completely had not one of the robbers, Eugene Hill, given a friend a wad of bills with the original bank wrapper still in place. The friend, suspicious, called the police and Hill was arrested. He named the other members of the gang and all of them are now languishing in prison. Only about $8 million of the haul was recovered, leaving over $10 million unaccounted for.

Answer: The brains behind the Knightsbridge Security Deposit robbery

On July 12, 1987, Valerio Viccei and a friend strolled into the Knightsbridge Security Deposit in London and announced their intention of renting a safety deposit box. Upon being shown into the vault, they produced handguns, and bound and gagged the manager and the guards. They attached a sign to the front door of the Deposit building, informing the public that the premises were temporarily closed, meanwhile admitting the other members of their gang. After breaking open many of the safety deposit boxes they got away with 40 million pounds worth of cash and valuables.

An hour after the robbers left, one of the guards managed to free himself and called the police. SOCO found a single fingerprint belonging to Valerio Viccei, who was not unknown to police in his native Italy and in the UK. Viccei was put under surveillance and a month later, on August 12, he and his accomplices were arrested in a series of co-ordinated raids. All of them were sentenced to lengthy stays in Her Majesty's prisons. On his release, cheeky Viccei wrote a best seller called 'Knightsbridge: The Robbery of the Century'.

Answer: Bruce Reynolds

I'll bet you thought it was Ronnie Biggs, right, because he's probably the best known of the Great Train Robbers? Wrong! The brains behind the 1963 robbery of the Royal Mail belonged to Bruce Reynolds, who planned and co-ordinated the project and recruited 14 others to join him. When the Royal Mail, on its way from Glasgow to London, was halted just outside Ledburn, Buckinghamshire, by signals that had been tampered with by the gang, it was boarded by the robbers. They quickly overpowered the postal clerks and guards, and took off with 2.3 million pounds in one pound, five pound, and ten pound notes.

Thirteen of the gang members were arrested in short order after police found their fingerprints at their farmhouse HQ. Biggs and Charlie Wilson were among the thirteen.Bigg served 15 months of his prison sentence before going over the wall, literally. He made his way to Melbourne and when police traced him there, Biggs hopped it to Rio de Janeiro (Brazil does not have an extradition treaty with the UK). In 2001, broke and in ill-health, Biggs voluntarily returned to Britain with his son Michael. Their fares were paid for by the Sun newspaper, which also coughed up 20,000 pounds for exclusive rights to their story. Biggs went back to prison but was released in 2009 on compassionate grounds because of his failing health.

Charlie Wilson also escaped in 1964 and fetched up in Montreal. He would probably still be there if his wife hadn't phoned her brother in the UK, inviting him to spend Christmas with the Wilsons, thus tipping police to Charlie's whereabouts! He was arrested in 1968, and returned to prison in the UK. He was released in 1978. He was found shot to death in his Spanish villa in 1990.

Following the robbery, Reynolds hightailed it to Mexico, then returned to the UK and took up residence in Devon, where he was finally tracked down and arrested in 1968. He was the last of the train robbers to be arrested. He served ten years in prison.

Jack Mills was the driver of the Royal Mail, and the only person hurt in the robbery. He was hit on the head and ended up with a black eye and a bruised face.

Answer: Police officers

At about 6:30 p.m. on February 21, 2006, the manager of Kent Securitas Depot in Tonbridge, Kent, UK was on his way home from work when he was pulled over by what he thought was a police car. It wasn't. The manager was abducted by bank robbers disguised as police and taken to a farmhouse somewhere in West Kent.

At the same time, other members of the gang, also disguised as police, arrived at the manager's home and informed his wife and son that the manager had been in a traffic accident and offered to take them to him.

They were then driven to the same farmhouse where the manager was being held at gunpoint. The manager was told that unless he co-operated and assisted the robbers, his wife and son would sustain harm. The family was then driven to the Kent Securitas depot, where the gang members overpowered the 14 staff members on duty and tied them up, and then cleaned out the safety deposit boxes for a haul amounting to 53,111,760 pounds in cash and valuables.

Answer: 26 million pounds worth of gold bullion

If you bought any gold jewellery after 1983 in the UK, you may well be wearing part of a major heist! In late November 1983, Anthony Black, a Brinks Mat security guard at Heathrow, told his brother-in-law Brian Robinson that there would be at least three million pounds in cash in the Brinks Mat vault on November 26. Robinson passed the information along to his gang boss, Michael McAvoy, and on the night of November 26, using a key provided by Black, and armed with information about security measures and how to circumvent them (also supplied by Black), McAvoy, Robinson and the rest of the six-member gang entered the Brinks Mat warehouse. In fact, there was no cash, but ten tonnes of gold bullion, worth 26 million pounds, more than compensated for that!

It didn't take Scotland Yard long to connect the dots that led from Black to Robinson to McAvoy and the gang was arrested, tried and convicted. McAvoy and Robinson got 26 years, Black got six years and served three.

Prior to his arrest, McAvoy had enlisted the aid of a friend to arrange to have the gold melted down for easier disposal. A Bristol bank, suspicious about the legitimacy of about huge amounts of money being deposited with them and later withdrawn, notified the Treasury who, in turn, notified the police. Seven tonnes of the bullion has been recovered, but the wheareabouts of the remaining three tonnes is unknown. It is thought to have been transformed into jewellery, hence the probability that the gold chain you're wearing is part of the Brinks Mat loot!