On March 1, three armed men stole $4.9 million in gold bars from two guards who had pulled over on the side of I-95 with car trouble — it was the eleventh-largest gold heist in history. Details were sparse at the time although a local CBS affiliate was able to provide the following color:
The sheriff's office says the guards reported that three armed men in a white van approached them, ordered them to the ground, tied their hands behind their backs and forced them to walk into some nearby woods. Investigators, who responded to the scene shortly before 7 p.m., said the men then reportedly took several barrels of gold and left while the guards were in the woods.
For our part, we suggested [5] Simon Gruber (or someone else whose relatives had been killed by John McLane) may have been behind the plot.
This morning, further details about the ongoing case were released after one of the missing bars turned up in South Florida. Here’s more via ABC [6]:
One of the gold bars stolen in a highway heist last month has been found in South Florida, according to the FBI.
"We believe that additional gold bars from the robbery may still be in South Florida and we continue to need the public’s help in solving this crime,” the agency says.
Two suspects made off with approximately $4.9 million in gold bars after holding up an unmarked van on March 1 in North Carolina, authorities have said. The van was transporting about $10 million in precious metals from Florida to Massachusetts...
Days after the robbery, Wilson County, North Carolina, Sheriff Calvin Woodard Jr. said the suspects placed a traffic cone behind the van while they unloaded the gold from the trunk. That cone had the marking of a company that only does work in Florida.
[7]
“This confirms that there is a South Florida nexus to this crime,” said supervisory agent Jeff Fleck, proving yet again that nothing gets by an FBI agent.
In another example of how — through a careful examination of the facts and via the use of uncanny deductive reasoning skills — police are putting the pieces together to form a hypothesis about the heist, ABC says authorities believe it might be pertinent that the drivers apparently changed their story regarding why they pulled over and furthermore, the fact that they were robbed immediately upon stopping seems to suggest that someone knew something ahead of time.
Three suspects allegedly stole $4.8 million-worth of gold after one of the two armed guards -- the driver and another man, both inside the truck's cabin -- said that he felt sick and prompted the driver to pull over, Wilson County Sheriff Calvin Woodard Jr. told reporters today.
That account is different from what was presented in the first police report on the case, which said that a mechanical issue caused the truck's driver to pull over.
“There is suspicion at this time that this could be an inside job due to the circumstances of the robbery," a Wilson County Sheriff’s Office detective wrote in a search warrant application to get access to one of the guards' cell phones, one of two search warrants in the case obtained today.
"The fact that the truck was robbed immediately upon it pulling over at an unannounced stop is suspicious in and of itself," the document added. "It is also suspicious because there are no markings on the side of the truck that would indicate the type of cargo contained therein. The suspects also went directly to the trailer and found the gold which was in unmarked five gallon buckets. It is not believed that this is a random act due to the nature and facts of this robbery."
That sounds like a reasonable assumption to us as well.
Fortunately, police have sketches depicting two of the three perpetrators:
So if you see two men of completely indeterminate race one of which may have a goatee while the other has short hair and appears to be wearing some manner of lipstick, you can report them to the FBI and, if the information you provide leads authorities to any buried treasure, you will receive a generous reward of $25,000.
We doubt that reward will be sufficient to cause any of the suspects to turn on their compatriots however, given that each bar is apparently worth nearly $500,000.
ABC Breaking US News [8] | US News Videos [9]
