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It was a Tinseltown heist that belonged in a movie.
A gang of audacious thieves struck at night, dodged security measures like ghosts in the night and disappeared with a staggering $30m in cash in a record-breaking robbery that played out for real on Los Angeles’s streets, not the fevered script of a thriller writer.
But now – weeks after the Easter weekend sting – investigators appear to have few leads on the remarkable crime, or if they do they’re not saying.
The heist – technically a burglary, not a robbery, since there was no aspect of force or fear – has left the public stunned and in some cases secretly celebrating a professional and highly sophisticated operation that was only discovered when workers at GardaWorld, a nondescript warehouse in Sylmar, a sleepy, suburban area of the San Fernando Valley, entered the safe to find $30m in cash missing.
The thieves had been able to breach the warehouse, apparently through the roof but perhaps through a hole cut in the side of the building, break into the safe and swipe the cash without triggering security systems. Police received a call for service at 4.30am on Easter Sunday, but by then the largest cash burglary in city history was already executed.
Based on records obtained by the celebrity/crime website TMZ, police had made more than a dozen callouts to GardaWorld in the past year that were logged as false alarms, including the day before the heist.
As investigators set about unpicking the crime, the Canada-based cash security giant GardaWorld has yet to comment. The LAPD and FBI have said only that they are jointly investigating the theft “to determine the person or group responsible”.
Joan Renner, an investigative crimes historian who runs a blog, Deranged LA Crimes, said Los Angeles has a unique relationship with crime, and...