🏛️ True story · 50 years in 2026
The Nice heist of the century (1976): the true story
One weekend in July 1976, a gang went through the sewers of Nice, dug a tunnel to the vault of the Société Générale bank and left with a haul that was never found. On a wall, a message that became famous: “Sans armes, ni haine, ni violence” (“Without weapons, hatred or violence”). Here is what we know about this case, fifty years on.
Monday, July 19, 1976: the vault is ransacked
At the Société Générale branch, on the corner of avenue Jean-Médecin and rue de l'Hôtel-des-Postes, the staff discover the disaster when they open the vault: 371 boxes forced open out of about 4,000. The thieves didn't come through the door. They came from below.
A tunnel dug by hand from the sewers
The gang dug a tunnel about 8 meters long, entirely by hand, in two to three months according to the sources. They moved around the sewers in inflatable dinghies, had laid hundreds of meters of electric cable to light the site, and cut the boxes open with a blowtorch, using about thirty cylinders of acetylene. Air mattresses and picnic tables were found on site: the thieves slept and ate their meals in the vault.
The haul is estimated at between 46 and 50 million francs depending on the sources. It was never found.
Albert Spaggiari, the “mastermind”
A photographer from Nice and a former paratrooper, Albert Spaggiari was arrested at the end of October 1976 and presented as the mastermind of the heist. By October 1976, 22 people had been taken in. The gang had many more members, from about ten to about twenty depending on the sources, and they were never all identified.
The escape through the judge's window
On March 10, 1977, during questioning in the office of investigating judge Richard Bouaziz, Spaggiari jumped out of the window and fled on a motorbike. His lawyer, Jacques Peyrat (later mayor of Nice), said he saw “a motorbike speeding off with Spaggiari on the back, turning towards us, apparently unhurt, smiling and waving goodbye” (INA). He was never caught again and died in 1989.
The 1979 trial
On October 23, 1979, Spaggiari was sentenced in his absence to life imprisonment. Five members of the gang, from the Marseille underworld, were sentenced to 8 years in prison: Pellegrin, Bournat, Poggi, Michelucci and Vigier. The sources only give their surnames.
And the real mastermind?
In 2010, Jacques Cassandri claimed in a book to have been the true mastermind of the heist, before taking back his words. Tried in 2018 for money laundering (the 1976 crimes were time-barred), he was sentenced to 30 months in prison. He died in 2022. The exact part each of them played remains a mystery.
Your turn to investigate
In Enquetix's famous case, you find out who was convicted for this heist, by pure deduction: twenty people, ten places (from the vault to the sewers) and the gang's equipment. Each file shows what is documented 📚 and what is a guess made by the game 🔎. Only the people whose names were never published have a made-up name.
🔎 Solve the heist of the century The other famous cases
Sources: INA; Wikipedia (“Albert Spaggiari”, “Casse du siècle”).