When we think of criminal masterminds, fictional characters like Sergio Marquina popularly known as The Professor in the Netflix series Money Heist come to mind. Individuals who spent a lot of their time working out how to get away with what could be regarded as the most perfect crimes in history. What if I tell you people like that exist in history, without much ado, here are the 5 smartest criminal masterminds in history.
1. Leonardo Notarbartolo
Leonardo Notarbartolo is the leader of a ring of Italian thieves called “La Scuola di Torino” (The School of Turin). He was also responsible for organizing and leading the Antwerp diamond heist in 2003, the largest diamond heist of all time.
The group stole loose diamonds, gold, silver, and other types of jewelry valued at more than $100 million. The heist which took place in Antwerp, Belgium, during the weekend of 15–16 February 2003, was classified to be one of the largest robberies in history.
Although the heist was successful, Notarbartolo alone was caught after a member of the team identified as Speedy disposed of the evidence poorly. He was found guilty of orchestrating the heist and was sentenced to 10 years in prison but was released on parole in 2009. Also, none of the stolen diamonds was recovered.
2. Carl Gugasian
Carl Gugasian is an American bank robber and probably the most educated criminal of all time, with a Ph.D. in probability and statistics. He is considered by many the most prolific criminal in US history, having robbed more than 50 banks over a 30-year period for a total of more than $2 million.
According to Wikipedia, Carl has been notorious since he was a teenager. He was shot while attempting to rob a candy store at the age of 15 and was sent to the State Youth Facility for eighteen months. After his release in 1964, he did not attempt to live a normal life; rather, he took deliberate steps to continue with a life of crime and excel in it.
Carl’s robberies were meticulously planned and executed. He carried out the robberies on Friday nights just before closing time, believing this minimized the number of customers present and maximized the cash on hand. He was however arrested in 2002 after 2 boys found the plans and equipment for his robberies hidden in a concrete drainage pipe.
3 Victor Lustig
Victor Lustig was a highly skilled con artist from Austria-Hungary and no doubt one of the smartest criminal masterminds in history. He is widely regarded as one of the most notorious con artists of his time and is infamous for being “the man who sold the Eiffel Tower twice” and for conducting the “Rumanian Box” scam.
Lustig applied both his education and his fluency in several languages to embark on a life of crime, that involved conducting scams across Europe and the United States during the early 20th century, which provided him with property and money.
He was however arrested in 1935, after masterminding a counterfeit banknote operation so vast that it threatened to shake confidence in the American economy. Thanks to his mistress, Billy May, who learned that he was betraying her for a younger woman, and decided to take revenge by placing an anonymous phone call to the federal authorities.
Read More:
- Craig Price: The Youngest Serial killer In the History of The United States
- A Brief History of Nigeria During Buhari’s Military Regime
- History of the Royal Niger Company
4. Natwarlal
Natwarlal born Mithilesh Kumar Srivastava was an Indian fraudster known for his high-profile crimes and prison escapes, including selling the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, the Rashtrapati Bhavan, and the Parliament House of India repeatedly.
According to a report, He is said to have duped hundreds of people using more than fifty aliases to disguise himself. Natwarlal was also proficient in forging the signatures of famous personalities. He is said to have supposedly cheated a number of industrialists including the Tatas, the Birlas, and Dhirubhai Ambani, taking from them huge sums of money.
He often used novel ideas to cheat people, such as one instance in the 1950s where he swindled the Punjab National Bank out of 6.5 lakhs of rupees in a scam involving rail freight and bags of rice. By the time of his death, he was wanted in more than 100 cases of identity theft and forgery.
5. Albert Spaggiari
Albert Spaggiari was a notoriously clever French bank robber. He is popularly known as the organizer of a break-in into a Société Générale bank in Nice, France, in July 1976. After hearing that the sewers were close to the vault of the bank in, he began to plan a break-in into the bank by digging into the bank vault from below.
On 16 July 1976, during the long weekend of Bastille Day, Spaggiari’s gang broke into the vault itself. They opened 400 safe deposit boxes and stole an estimated 30–100 million francs worth of money, securities, and valuables. It was the largest heist in the history of bank robberies to that date
Spaggiari eventually got caught, thanks to the implication from one of the team members, who got exposed by his former girlfriend. He however managed to escape by confusing the judge with a fake piece of evidence, before jumping out of the window onto a planted motorbike. He was never seen again!
