Epic Heist in Tucson

Charlie Virgil, the janitor, was waiting in the parking lot for Manager John ("Bud") Grainger to arrive and open the bank. Then a man in a mask put a gun to Virgil's head and forced him into a white van crudely painted and taped to look like a Mountain Bell telephone service truck. Four gunmen warned Virgil to cooperate or they would shoot his wife. Grainger came, then David Harris, branch operations supervisor. The gunmen needed both to unlock the vault. Less than 20 minutes later the thieves had driven away with $3.3 million in cash, which the FBI believes is the biggest bank heist in U.S. history.

The brick and stucco bank branch on East Broadway in Tucson has only four tellers' windows. But it is the Tucson cash center for the First National Bank of Arizona, the state's second largest bank. Nearby branches holding more cash than their prescribed limits send the surplus there, and any enterprising robber could have learned the branch's role.

The four who did--and who also learned Virgil's first name, Grainger's nickname and nearly every vital detail about the bank--left the van in a shopping center a mile away. Tucson police and the FBI started with nothing more than vague descriptions and a tip received five days before--not passed along to local banks--that two convicted bank robbers and murderers might have arrived from California.

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