1Quebec's Great Maple Syrup Heist
The largest theft ever investigated by Quebec police was the "Great Maple Syrup Heist," in which 3,000 tons of maple syrup, worth $18.7 million, was extracted from 9,571 barrels and replaced with water.
2. The demand for human teeth for dentures was so high in the early 1800s that, after the Battle of Waterloo, looters scavenged teeth from the dead soldiers on the battlefield. Looters stole the teeth in such high numbers that dentures made from them became known as "Waterloo Teeth."
3. S Route 666, nicknamed "The Devil's Highway," was renamed to Route 491 in 2003, and within days of the announcement, all the old signs containing the number 666 were stolen as souvenirs.
4. In 2014, police broke up a Lego heist ring in New York for stealing $40,000 worth of bricks and found that one of the suspects was also in possession of another $160,000 worth of bricks-18 pallets in total.
5. The town of Shitterton, England, kept getting its town sign stolen. In 2010, they finally solved the problem by installing a 1.6-ton concrete slab with the town name inscribed on it.
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6Orlov Diamond's Intriguing Journey
A French soldier stole the Orlov diamond from the Srirangam temple in India and sold it to a merchant, who smuggled it to Amsterdam. Count Grigory Orlov bought it and gifted it to Catherine the Great. She encrusted the diamond in the Imperial Sceptre in 1774.
7. Naples' 16th-century Girolamini library was systematically looted by the library's director. The library's director systematically looted thousands of rare and historically invaluable books, including the works of Galileo and Kepler. Many are still missing, and the director was sentenced to 7 years of house arrest.
8. An official in Russia's Komi region stole 50 kilometers (31 miles) of highway in 2016. Over 7,000 concrete slabs were dismantled and sold for private profit.
9. The Stopwatch Gang consisted of three Canadian bank robbers who were known for their brilliant planning of heists, politeness to victims, and non-violent methods, all while robbing banks within 90 seconds.
10. In 2015, a group of old men nicknamed the "Grandpa Gang," with the oldest member being 76, committed the biggest bank robbery in English history. After climbing down an elevator shaft and drilling through a concrete wall, they stole more than $200 million in cash and jewels.
11Winona Ryder's Shoplifting Scandal
A year after receiving her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, actress Winona Ryder faced arrest for shoplifting over $5,000 worth of merchandise from Saks Fifth Avenue. Los Angeles D.A. Stephen Cooley assembled a team of eight prosecutors for the case.
12. The Forty Elephants, or Forty Thieves, was an all-women crime syndicate in London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that specialized in shoplifting and pretending to be maids, robbing wealthy families who hired them.
13. Polish violinist Bronislaw Huberman lost a rare million-dollar Stradivarius violin in 1936. The thief, a café musician named Julian Altman, became famous and performed for presidents. 49 years after the theft, he confessed to the theft on his deathbed, and his wife received a $263,000 finder's fee.
14. Thieves stole 240,000 manhole and street drain covers in Beijing in 2004.
15. Unknown culprits stole a beach in Jamaica in 2008. The 500 truckloads of sand remain missing to this very day.
16Canada's Vanished Million-Dollar Coin
In 2017, Canada minted a $1 million dollar coin. It was a 100-kg discus measuring nearly 60 cm, made up of pure gold, and worth $5.8 million. Thieves promptly stole it, and it has never been found.
17. Master idiot Peter Scott was a burglar whose victims included Sophia Loren and the Shah of Iran. Disturbed during a heist by a woman, he shouted, "'Everything's all right, madam,' and she went off to bed thinking I was the butler." On other occasions, he would reassuringly shout, "It's only me!"
18. Someone stole Einstein's brain and chopped it into pieces, storing them in a cider box under the thief's beer cooler.
19. At 12:00 a.m. on New Year's Eve 2017, three men pulled off a $6 million jewelry heist only a half mile from Times Square and 7,000 NYPD officers. Police said the men waited until midnight, when the officers would be busiest to break into KGK Holding Jewelry.
20. In 1948, a man named Sadamichi Hirasawa robbed a bank in Tokyo by pretending to be a public health official. He then gave a fatal dose of cyanide to all 16 people in the bank under the pretense of a routine dysentery inoculation. He only took some money lying on the desks, amounting to 160,000 yen (about $2,000 US at the time), but left the majority behind, leaving his motive unknown.
21Texas Tire Shop's Canine Robbery
The owner of a tire shop in Fort Worth, Texas, bought a guard dog due to frequent robberies in June 2017. During the next robbery, the intruders managed to steal the dog.
22. In 2009, hundreds of brightly colored extinct bird specimens were stolen from a Natural History Museum in the UK. Later investigations revealed that a student had sold the feathers online for fly-fishing lures in order to purchase a golden flute. The perpetrator had Asperger's syndrome and therefore never served any jail time.
23. As a result of a staggering 1700% surge in bank robberies during the Great Depression, the Texas Bankers Association established the Dead Bank Robbers Reward Program, offering a $5000 reward to individuals who successfully neutralized a robber during the crime without any inquiries made.
24. Thad Roberts, a former intern at NASA, served a 6-year sentence in a federal prison after having sex with his girlfriend on a bed full of stolen moon rocks that were brought back from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission.
25. Sleight of hand artist Apollo Robbins was so proficient that he once managed to pick the pockets of two secret service agents assigned to former president Jimmy Carter. He stole the former president's itinerary, the keys to his motorcade, and the badges of the agents.
