City bonds robbery

Common card · No. 356191

The City bonds robbery of 2 May 1990 was a heist in which £291.9 million (equivalent to £720M in 2025) was stolen in London, England, from a courier on his way to the Bank of England. The carefully planned operation made it seem at first as if the courier had been opportunistically mugged, yet the City of London Police soon realised that it was a sophisticated global venture which ended up involving participants such as the New York mafia, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), and Colombian drug barons. The robbery was one of the largest in world history. The robbery took advantage of the existence of couriers who moved vast sums of money around the City of London in order to ensure liquidity in the UK financial system. The money was in the form of certificates of deposit and HM Treasury bills. These bearer bonds were recovered in different places including Glasgow, New York, Miami (on their way to Peru), and Zürich. In a wide-ranging investigation, the police eventually recovered...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Oast House Archive, CC BY-SA 2.0