Heists

A heist, properly told, is never really about the theft. This book tells the story of fifty that got away with it - or almost did.

From the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, still missing half a billion dollars of art more than three decades later, to a hacking group that stole $81 million with nothing but a keyboard, Heists spans four thousand years of theft, planning, and the getaways that followed. The Great Train Robbery and D.B. Cooper sit alongside cases almost no one remembers - a thief who kept 230 stolen artworks in his childhood bedroom purely for love of the art, a jewel-smuggling network Interpol still can't fully map, and the empty frames that hang, on the Gardner Museum's own insistence, exactly where the paintings used to be.

Most heists fail. The fifty in this book didn't - not at first. What separates them isn't always genius. It's usually one advantage, exploited cleanly, before anyone had the chance to close it. And in a striking number of cases, the crime that seemed perfect left its perpetrators holding something they could never actually use: art too famous to sell, diamonds too traceable to move, a fortune with nowhere left to go.

Inside you'll find:

• Fifty full-page illustrations, one per heist
• Chronological entries grouped into nine thematic parts, from museum thefts to modern cybercrime
• The planning behind every theft - not just the crime, but what happened after
• The stories behind the Antwerp diamond heist, the Mona Lisa theft, D.B. Cooper, and the Bangladesh Bank cyber heist
• A closing section on the network, the career criminal, and the collector whose stories tie the whole book together