CultureNOW - Brink's Garage: Peter Vanderwarker

Brink's Garage

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Looking at this building is like looking at a book lying on a shelf. It may seem like thousands of others, but for those who can read it, it holds the tale of one of the most famous crimes in American history. We're looking down Hull Street toward
Commercial Street, in the North End. At the left, stepping down the slope, is what is,
today, an ordinary parking garage. But notice the truck emerging from it in the old
photo. It belonged to the Brink's armored car company, which was headquartered in
this building.

On January 17, 1950, at about 7 p.m., seven men wearing rubber Halloween masks
(Captain Marvel, among others) walked in, pulled guns, and tied up five employees. The door to the vault was open, as the invaders knew it would be at that hour. They stuffed their bags with $2.8 million in cash, checks, and securities - more than $17 million in today's dollars - and departed. It was the biggest armed robbery in US history. The FBI called it "the crime of the century." The police figured it had to be an inside job. The thieves possessed keys to everything, were familiar with every detail of the layout of the Brink's office, and knew the company's routines to the minute. But the
police were wrong. So incredibly lax was Brink's security that the thieves, during the
months before the robbery, visited the offices in the evening hours about 75 times without being discovered, rifling flies and working out their plans. They also spent a lot of time tracing employee movements by looking through the Brink's windows from a rooftop across from the office.

And they almost got away with it. Six years after the crime, just weeks before the
statute of limitations would have run out, a member of the gang named Joseph "Specs" O'Keefe, in jail for other crimes, broke down and confessed. As cities grow older, more and more of their buildings come to embody such stories. Eventually, much of the city becomes a coded text. If you're in the know, it often seems that every window is a clue to some memory of the past, some tale of mystery.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - The Brink's Garage", Boston Globe, 1998

map not available at this time.

Location

Commercial St & Hull St
Boston, MA 02113
United States

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