went out to local police at 12:38 PM that Banco Rio was being robbed.

Located in a serene, rich neighborhood in Argentina's capital, the prestigious bank

contained a fortune in its vaults.

Police officers arrived at the scene to discover that four thieves and twenty three hostages

were inside.

They secured the perimeter, guarding the only two possible exits from the bank.

After communicating and negotiating with the robbers throughout most of the afternoon,

the thieves suddenly went silent.

At 7 PM, police officers broke into Banco Rio and found a confounding scene: the hostages

were alive and well, almost one hundred and fifty safety deposit boxes were forced open

and emptied of their contents, and the robbers...were gone.

No sign of the thieves could be found, no windows were broken, and the exits had been

watched by police the whole time.

How did these thieves get away with what has become known as “the robbery of the century”?

How did they disappear under the careful watch of more than one hundred police officers?

We dug deep into this infamous Argentinean bank heist to find out.

Banco Rio, now known as Banco Santander Rio, was one of Argentina's leading financial

institutions, with branches throughout the country.

One of its branches was nestled in the calm, wealthy neighborhood of San Isidro, in Buenos

Aires' northern suburbs.

How well off was San Isidro?

Well, the neighborhood now has two golf courses, a sailing club, and a jockey club.

You can almost see the residents clutching their pearls.

In 2006, Argentina was already no stranger to infamous bank robberies.

In fact, a heist that had happened a few years earlier had left the nation reeling, and as

it turns out, inspired the heist of Banco Rio.

In 1999, thieves had broken into a bank in Ramallo, Argentina, and taken hostages in

order to negotiate their freedom from police.

The robbers tried to leave the bank using the hostages as shields and police opened

fire, killing one of the robbers, but also two innocent hostages.

As though the tragic event wasn't enough of a PR nightmare for the police, the whole

bank heist had been shown on live TV via the many news cameras at the scene.

Most Argentinians had seen both the robbery and the killings go down in real time.

The nation was in shock.

As a result of the Ramallo case, police in the 2006 Banco Rio heist were more reluctant

to take drastic action when they arrived at the scene of a bank robbery in progress.

That warm January day, with even more news cameras trained on the hostage situation at

Banco Rio, police were trying to move as carefully as possible.

Then again, they weren't in a rush, because they thought they had the thieves trapped

and surrounded.

Over 100 officers had shown up at the scene, and every vantage point to the bank that wasn't

occupied by a news photographer was occupied by a sniper.

The two bank exits were covered.

Where could the thieves go?

One of the robbers inside, who bypassed several cool Argentinian names to codename himself

Walter instead, was negotiating the release of hostages with police.

The thieves let the bank's security guard walk out the door unharmed, then a young man,

then a young woman as well.

It seemed like things were going well and the robbers were playing along with the cops.

Walter, who had been given the nickname of “The Man in the Gray Suit”, seemed to

be in a strangely happy mood given the gravity of his situation.

He and the other thieves were treating the hostages well.

At one point, they sang “Happy Birthday” to one of the bank employees after discovering

it was the man's birthday, which is more than you remembered to do for most of your

friends last year without Facebook reminding you.

Later on, around 3:30 PM, Walter called police to complain that the 23 remaining hostages

were hungry and they'd like some pizza.

After this call, the line went silent.

What was happening inside Banco Rio?

For three hours, with Walter having ghosted them, the police had no idea what to do.

Do they barge in, putting hostages in danger and risking another Ramallo-like situation?

Like a needy ex, they kept trying to contact Walter even after several missed calls.

Finally, special forces lined up and forced their way in to discover a truly unbelievable

situation.

Twenty three hostages were being held or had been locked into three separate floors: the

lobby, the mezzanine, and the basement conference room.

The thieves were nowhere to be found.

Police even double checked to see if they were hiding among the hostages, but could

not find them.

When they entered the basement, they realized what the thieves had really been after.

Out of the 400 reinforced-steel safe deposit boxes in the basement, 143 had been cracked

open.

Why didn't the thieves steal cash from the bank instead?

Well, most Argentinians at the time were pretty distrustful of the country's banking system.

During the 2001 economic crisis in Argentina, the banking system had collapsed, wiping out

the fortunes of those who had most of their money in bank accounts.

Viewing money held in bank accounts as suspiciously as most people view bitcoin today, Argentinians

instead decided they would only use banks for their safe deposit boxes, which couldn't

be wiped out in the event of a crisis.

In these safeguarded boxes, Argentinians piled in their cash, jewelry, and other valuable

items that they could always reclaim in the event of an emergency.

Given that San Isidro was an exceptionally rich neighborhood, the safe deposit boxes

of this particular branch of Banco Rio contained an immense amount of wealth.

After officers found so many of the boxes forced open, they also found the only few

pieces of evidence the thieves had left behind: a battery pack, a tool that police assumed

had been used to crack open the boxes, and a row of toy guns.

That's right; the robbers had conducted this epic bank heist without even using real

weapons.

The last item police found was perhaps the most perplexing and obnoxious piece of evidence.

The robbers, trying to make some sort of poetic statement, left behind a note that read, “In

a neighborhood of rich people, without weapons or grudges, it's just money, not love.”

Argentinians throughout the country, lacking Netflix at the time, had been watching the

whole robbery unfold for hours from their televisions, and now saw that the thieves

had pulled off an impossible escape as well.

Public opinions and rumors in Argentina almost immediately depicted the robbers as Robin

Hood-like folk heroes.

After all, they had stolen from the rich, hadn't harmed anyone, and given the money

to…(pause)...well, it seemed they'd given it to themselves.

But still; their heist was somewhat ingenious.

So who was at the center of it all?

And how had they executed and gotten away with such a perfect heist?

Well, the mastermind behind the robbery of the century turned out to be a man named Fernando

Araujo.

You see, the Ramallo bank heist had made an impression on Araujo, who thought the robbers

had almost pulled off the perfect heist, but botched it all up when they tried to leave.

One day, when Araujo was a few bong hits deep and talking to a dear friend, he thought of

the obvious: what if the robbers never had to leave?

What if, instead, they disappeared through a hole?

Araujo's friend, Sebastian Garcia Bolster, agreed that this sounded like a crazy, yet

perfect plan.

However, he didn't pay his friend's theory much attention, as Bolster was neither a criminal

or in any dire financial straits.

Also, most people don't take grand stoned plans seriously.

Araujo and Bolster had grown up together in an upper middle class neighborhood, also located

in the northern suburbs of Buenos Aires, and while Araujo sometimes dabbled in hobbies

on the wrong side of the law, Bolster enjoyed a completely legal lifestyle.

Bolster had a wife and child and was mechanically inclined, repairing mostly small engines for

money and tinkering around with inventions.

Araujo, on the other hand, had a very impulsive and somewhat eccentric lifestyle, teaching

martial arts occasionally to pay the bills while also cultivating marijuana for money.

He was a free-spirited artist who was dealing with a recent break up as many free-spirited

artists do: melodramatically.

He decided he needed to remove the world from his personal space, so he blacked out the

windows of his loft.

According to others, Araujo ate relatively little and slept whenever the mood hit him.

Frequently high on weed, permanently underfed, and presumably lacking a whole lot of Vitamin

D, Araujo was drawn towards stranger and stranger ideas.

His biggest obsession?

Bank robberies.

Apparently, Araujo voraciously consumed any and all media involving bank robbers, from

movies and shows to documentaries of real-life heists.

His goal was to observe the mistakes other fictional and real robbers made, and use these

observations to plan out the perfect heist.

In 2004, Araujo finally realized he had not only figured out a plan, but also needed his

friend Bolster's mechanical and technical knowledge to help him.

Bolster wasn't too happy about the idea, and he knew banks were harder to break into

than most people thought as he had worked part-time in a bank for a while.

However, he was also furious that his father and grandfather had entrusted money to banks

and then lost it all during economic downturns, so like many people, he ended up hating bankers.

When Araujo guaranteed Bolster that no one would get hurt - in fact, they wouldn't

even have real weapons - Bolster agreed to the plan and got to work.

So what exactly IS the prep work for the robbery of the century?

Thanks partly to its temperamental weather, Buenos Aires has plenty of storm drains underneath

its streets that lead directly out to the river.

The robbers would enter one that ran close to the bank and then dig up a tunnel to connect

it to the bank itself.

However, bypassing the bank's nighttime alarm system would be a huge challenge, much

more difficult than digging a hole.

So how would the thieves turn off the bank's alarm?

Simple: by not tripping it at all.

The thieves would rob the safe deposit boxes in the bank's basement in the daytime, when

the alarm wasn't set, but the bank was swarming with people.

How would they enter a bank during the workday and not draw attention to themselves emptying

the safe deposit boxes?

In Araujo's mind, the answer was even simpler: stage a fake bank robbery upstairs, to cover

the real bank robbery going on in the basement.

Some say the phrase “it's so crazy it just might work” was born that day.

The duo then proceeded to assemble a crew of experienced thieves, financiers, and misfits

they'd need to pull off this job, presumably in an “Ocean's Eleven”-style montage.

Enter: an experienced bank robber named Doc and his associate Ruben Alberto de la Torre,

nicknamed Beto.

They were former members of an Argentinian group of armed bank robbers known, unimaginatively,

as “Super Banda”.

Another fixer and a getaway driver were added to the crew.

Araujo also found a financier and problem solver in retired rich Uruguayan thief Luis

Mario Vitette Sellanes, who invested $100,000 into the operation.

What did they need the money for?

Well, Bolster had to come up with a way to get into the bank, spend a lot of time and

energy tunneling through, and find a relatively unobtrusive way to get the safe deposit boxes

open so they wouldn't be heard from upstairs.

Bolster decided to rent a safe deposit box at another Banco Rio branch, noted down the

brand name, and ordered a few boxes himself to find the best way to open them.

He concluded that a jackhammer punching through the locks would do the job, and could be kept

to a reasonable noise level.

He built a jackhammer that could be transported in pieces to the bank, assembled there, and

then taken apart.

However, as anyone who's seen “The Italian Job” or almost any heist movie knows, getting

a lot of valuable, heavy goods out of the location you're robbing presents its own

challenge.

Since the thieves were going to drop back down into water-filled drains, getting the

goods into Zodiac boats seemed like a good idea, but the water level was usually too

low to hold up the loaded-down boats.

Since Bolster couldn't make it rain - no more puns, we swear - he naturally decided

he'd build a wooden dam in his shop, disassemble it, and reassemble it in the storm drains

over several days.

The morning of the heist, the seven men met for coffee - because apparently even bank

robbers need caffeine to start their day - and then dispersed to start the heist of the century.

Bolster headed to the storm drains to make his way towards the bank underground.

Julian Zalloecheverria drove the getaway car to a pre-arranged meeting spot.

Vitette and a mystery man named Luis the Uruguayan drove a stolen car to the garage under the

bank, while the rest of the men drove another stolen car to the bank itself.

Beto and Doc headed in first, with Beto waving around a toy gun he had stolen from his nine

year old son that morning.

Shockingly, this worked, and everyone in the bank immediately dropped to the floor.

Araujo left another stolen car outside the bank purposely to make it look like a getaway

vehicle, so police would think they had found the robbers' escape plan.

Araujo walked into the bank in a baseball cap, ski mask, long blond wig, and sunglasses;

how he managed to avoid weird looks on the sidewalk before entering is anyone's guess.

Meanwhile, Bolster had reached the end of the tunnel he had dug and was just chilling

in the dark underneath the bank.

Doc went down, broke the basement wall separating the bank from Bolster's tunnel, and let

Bolster in to help with the robbery, unbeknownst to anyone inside the bank.

This was because Luis and Beto had already subdued and isolated the hostages.

Vitette then took on the persona of Walter to deal with the cops that had just arrived,

in order to make police believe that the robbers had been caught in a heist gone wrong.

Araujo's plan was somewhat brilliant: the thieves were basically staging a visible botched

bank robbery upstairs to cover up the invisible robbery happening in the basement.

Vitette even released a few hostages one after the other to make the police think that they

had the upper hand, and could get the rest of the hostages through negotiation alone.

The whole crew had been told they had two hours to get in and get out.

Bolster assembled his jackhammer-like contraption in 20 minutes and spent another hour and a

half opening safe deposit boxes.

After Vitette got the signal from Araujo to come downstairs, he told the cops to order

pizza and then went down to the basement, telling the hostages if they moved they'd

be killed.

Beto and Vitette helped Bolster stuff the valuables into bags, while Araujo and Doc