Day: April 4, 2024

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• Thieves stole up to $30 million from a money storage facility in Los Angeles on Easter Sunday.
• This is one of the biggest cash heists in LA history.
• Sources told the LA Times that the thieves may have accessed the vault by breaking through the roof.

Thieves orchestrated one of LA’s biggest-ever cash heists on Easter Sunday, stealing as much as $30 million from a money storage facility in the San Fernando Valley.

The Los Angeles Police Department said a burglary occurred at an unnamed facility in Sylmar, according to the Los Angeles Times, which was the first to report on the incident.

Cash from businesses in the area was being stored there, and law enforcement officials told the Times that few people would have been privy to this information.

The thieves managed to breach both the building and the safe where the money was kept, the newspaper reported.

Though the specifics of how the break-in occurred are uncertain, sources familiar with the investigation told the Times that the thieves accessed the vault by breaking through the roof.

How they bypassed the alarm system remains a mystery.

According to the Times, the safe showed no signs from the outside of a break-in and the business owners did not become aware of the robbery until the vault was opened at some time on Monday.

Though the LAPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI, it released a joint statement with the FBI.

In the statement provided to CBS News, they said a joint investigation was underway into the burglary.

“No additional information related to the incident is being released,” the agencies said.

According to the LAPD, the city saw a 17% increase in thefts in 2023 on the previous year. Primarily driving this increase, however, was a rise in incidents of shoplifting, flash-mob robberies, and other forms of retail theft, an analysis by Crosstown LA of the LAPD statistics found.

While multimillion-dollar heists may be a relatively rare form of theft, their impact remains significant. LAPD commander Elaine Morales told the Times that the break-in was among the largest burglaries in LA’s history and surpassed the total of any of the city’s armored-car heists.

The city’s previous cash-heist record took place in 1997 when a group of men in downtown LA stole almost $19 million in under 30 minutes from a Dunbar Armored facility.

One of the men was arrested two years later, directing authorities to the other suspects.