History Spotlight, 1/17

One of the largest armed robberies in United States history, the Great Brink's Robbery took place today in 1950 in Boston.

It all started with Tony "Fats" Pino, a local burglar and low-level mafioso. After Brink's moved its vault to a new location in 1948, Tony began to quietly study the routes of the armored cars and the daily routines of the business. Pino realized from his studies that the famed Brink's reputation was just a facade. He move from observation to actively casing their Boston office. He would actually break in at night and study the procedures from the inside.

By now, Tony was no longer thinking small. A place this wide open was just asking to be hit and hit hard. During these almost-nightly recon missions, Tony and two associates, Joey "Specs" O'Keefe and Stan "Gus" Gusciora broke into the Brinks office and made duplicate keys for nearly all the locked doors in the building. He began to assemble a team of crooks of different skills to assist him in his big score.

At 6:55 PM on January 17, 1950, seven robbers, wearing Brinks uniforms, dark Navy pea coats and Halloween masks, entered the Brink's office. Using their forged keys, the robbers surprised five brinks employees on the second floor, bound and gagged them and started scooping up cash.

By 7:30 PM they left the building and went to a safe place to divide the cash. Each man got his cut and agreed to not spend any of the money for six years, at which time the statute of limitations would have run out.

At first, there were almost no clues. While Brink offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to arrest, all the cops could find was a length of rope used to bind the guards and a chauffeur's cap. Later on, several pieces of the getaway truck were found in a salvage yard in Stoughton, MA.

And that's about all there was in the way of leads for several months. The cops leaned on "all the usual suspects" for information, but nobody knew anything. It wasn't until June, when O'Keefe and Gusciora were picked up on a burglary charge in Pennsylvania that things began to unravel. With O'Keefe looking at at least 3 years and Gusciora looking at anything from 5 to twenty years, all that money began to look handy for a legal defense. Via an informer, the cops learned that O'Keefe and Gusciora had demanded money from from Tony Pino to hire a lawyer.

O'Keefe was in such a need for money that, after he was released on bail, he kidnapped another one of the robbers (Vincent Costa, who was also Tony Pino's brother-in-law) and held him for ransom. Pino paid a little ransom money, but soon decided that O'Keefe needed to be dealt with. He hired a hitman, Elmer "Trigger" Burke to kill O'Keefe, but Elmer only managed to seriously wound O'Keefe. It was while O'Keefe was in the hospital that the FBI approached him and pointed out that his friends weren't very friendly and maybe he should find a new class of friends. O'Keefe agreed to talk.

At the trial, eight of the gang members received life sentences and O'Keefe got four years - more time than he would have gotten had he just done his time from the Pennsylvania robbery. Of the $2.7 million, only $58,000 was ever recovered. The rest is rumored to be hidden in the hills north of Grand Rapids, MN.


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