Big Stick-Up at Brink's!

A riveting and frequently hilarious insider account of one of the twentieth centurys most outrageous capers. On the evening of January 17 1950 armed robbers wearing Captain Marvel masks entered the Brinks Armored Car building in Boston Massachusetts. They walked out less than an hour later with more than $2.7 million in cash and securities. It was a brazen and expertly executed theft that captured the imaginations of millions of Americans and baffled the FBI and local law enforcement officials. But what appeared on the surface to be the perfect crime was in fact the end result of a mind-boggling series of mistakes miscalculations and missteps. The men behind the masks were not expert bank robbers but a motley crew of small-time crooks who bumbled their way into a record-breaking payday and managed to elude the long arm of the law for six years. New York Times bestselling author Noel Behn tape-recorded nearly one thousand hours of interviews with the surviving robbers including motormouthed mastermind Tony Pino a character so colorful he might have been dreamed up by a Hollywood screenwriter to tell the uncensored story of the heist forever known as the Great Brinks Robbery. Fun and suspenseful from first page to last Behns true-crime classic was the basis for The Brinks Job (1978) the Academy Awardnominated film directed by William Friedkin and starring Peter Falk and Peter Boyle.