‘Ninja Turtles’-inspired bank robbers pulled off ‘the heist of the century’ — but a thief’s wife blew it
nypost.comreported $20 million in cash and valuables from safety deposit boxes.“We use[d] [a] tunnel, not to break in, but to break out,” says the robbery’s mastermind, Fernando Araujo, in the new Netflix documentary “Bank Robbers: the Last Great Heist,” which debuts on Wednesday. “No one [had] ever planned to do a heist this way.”Araujo, an artist and small time pot grower, started concocting the plan in 2003, when he rented a house near the bank and began exploring the sewage tunnels beneath.
Inspired in part by the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” he dubbed his scheme the “Donatello Project.” Posing as an architecture student, he called the public works agency in Acassuso to get information on how the ground might handle tunnels.
Then he convinced Sebastián García Bolster, a local motorcycle mechanic to join his team as a civil engineer. They calculated how to drill 15 meters diagonally into the bank, essentially making their tunnel a triangular hypotenuse between the building’s basement and the sewer.
Doing so would require some heavy machinery. “To make a hole the size of a soda bottle [with pickaxes] took one hour. It was impossible.
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