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It’s a story worthy of a comic-strip layout, as comic strips are popular with youths.
Bloomberg Business this week artistically chronicled the saga of the great gold coin heist in Berlin, where one of The Royal Canadian Mint’s famed million-dollar coins lay encased in bulletproof glass in the Bode museum, on loan by its Düsseldorf-based owner.
Three young men, in the dead of night in March 2017, entered the museum through an open window while the internal alarm system was temporarily shut down as the guard did the last tour before rearming the system.
“They used a carbon-fiber-reinforced ax to break the glass, which was so heavy that shards left three deep dents when they hit the wood floor,” Bloomberg reported. The whole job took only 16 minutes.
And it was an inside job, as the perpetrators had knowledge of the timing of the museum’s security, the investigation would later reveal.
Investigators honed in on a new security guard hire, who as it turned out had connections to a Berlin family known by police to have links to organized crime.
In July 2017, police raided several locations linked to that family, and found cash, weapons, clothes with gold dust traces, notes on gold prices and weights, and suspicious email streams.
But not the massive coin, valued at several million dollars.
In January 2019, the trial began for the four young men accused of stealing the coin and cutting it into pieces.
They are identified only by their first names to protect their identities, as the suspects turned out to be so young the case is being tried in youth court.
Read the full story here
