The Nation: Chicago’s Great Bank Heist

One of our millions is missing, says the mighty First National

For 24 hours the officers of Chicago’s First National Bank could not believe its calculating machines. Precisely $1 million in $50 and $100 bills was missing from one of the bank’s subterranean vaults, and auditors kept combing the records to see if a bookkeeper had erred or a computer had skipped a digit. Finally, with much embarrassment, the bankers called the FBI to report that someone had made off with their greenbacks over the long, languid Columbus Day weekend.

On Friday night, as the weekend was beginning, the chief teller—standing in a cage behind a series of locked and guarded doors in the vault area two floors beneath ground level—had counted the money. It was resting on cart T-12, and the bundles of cash added up to $4 million. He wheeled the cart through another heavy door into the main vault. At the end of work on Tuesday, after the bank had reopened, the chief teller counted the money again. This time the tally was $3 million.

Whodunit? The FBI and bank officials could only assume it was an inside job. First, the thief had to get by several sets of guards (who log all comings and goings in the vault area) as well as TV monitors over the entrance. Then he presumably had to have one of the cart’s four keys, to which supposedly only the chief teller, his supervisor and a few bank officers had access. The thief must evidently have been so familiar a figure in the bank that he was able to leave unnoticed with a haul that weighed a mere 20 lbs.—just right for a banker’s briefcase. The FBI believed too that the thief had deliberately ripped off an even $1 million, knowing full well that bank officers would waste precious time attributing the loss to an accounting error. They just could not believe the yawning cavity amid the remaining bundles on the cart.

By last week’s end the FBI appeared near a break on the case after administering lie detector tests to bank employees. (The chief teller and almost all of the 100 other bank workers passed the test with no trouble.) Said an FBI agent cryptically: “The pieces are beginning to fall together. We do have some suspects; we have narrowed it down.” One theory was that someone with access to the vaults had walked off with the cash and turned it over to a confederate, who had flown it out of the country. The prospect of an arrest without recovery of the money was cold comfort to officers of the bank. Its theft insurance policy covers losses only above $1 million.