The plane slowed and levelled out about a mile above ground. Up ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairytale palace. When the pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard looked down, checked his parachute straps and jumped into the darkness. He plummeted for a second, then pulled his cord, slowing to a nice descent toward the tiled roof. It was early June 1998 and the evening wind was warm.
If it kept co-operating, Blanchard would touch down directly above the room that held the Koechert Diamond Pearl. He steered his parachute toward his target.
A couple of days earlier, Blanchard had appeared to be just another twenty something on holiday with his wife and her wealthy father. The three of them were taking a six-month grand European tour: London, Rome, Barcelona, the French Riviera, Vienna. When they stopped at the Schloss Schönbrunn, the Austrian equivalent of Versailles, his father-in-law's VIP status granted them a special preview peek at a highly prized piece from a private collection.
And there it was: in a cavernous room, in an alarmed case, behind bulletproof glass, on a weight sensitive pedestal -- a delicate but dazzling ten-pointed star of diamonds fanned around one monstrous pearl: the Koechert Diamond Pearl, better known as the Sisi Star.
Five seconds after laying eyes on it, Blanchard knew he would try to take it.
The guide described the piece but Blanchard wasn't listening. He was noting the motion sensors in the corner, the type of screws on the case, the large windows nearby. To hear Blanchard tell it, he has a savant-like ability to assess security flaws, like a criminal Rain Man who involuntarily sees risk probabilities at every turn.
And the numbers came up good for the star. Blanchard knew he couldn't fence the piece, which the guide said was worth $2 million. Still, he found the thing mesmerising and the challenge was irresistible.
He began to work immediately, videotaping every detail of the star's chamber. He surreptitiously used a key to loosen the screws when the staff moved on to the next room, unlocked the windows, and determined that the motion sensors would allow him to move -- albeit very slowly -- inside the castle. He stopped at the souvenir shop and bought a replica of the Sisi Star to get a feel for its size. He also noted the armed guards patrolling the halls.
But the roof was unguarded, and it so happened that one of the skills Blanchard had picked up in his already long criminal career was skydiving. He had also recently befriended a German pilot who would help him procure a parachute. Just one night after his visit to the star, Blanchard was making his descent to the roof.
Aerial approaches are a tricky business and Blanchard almost overshot the castle, slowing himself just enough by skidding along a pitched gable. Sliding down the tiles, arms and legs flailing for a grip, Blanchard managed to save himself from falling four storeys by grabbing a railing at the roof's edge. For a moment, he lay motionless. Then he took a deep breath, unhooked the chute, retrieved a rope from his pack, wrapped it around a marble column and lowered himself down the side of the building.
Carefully, Blanchard entered through the window he had unlocked the previous day. He knew there was a chance of encountering guards. But the Schloss Schönbrunn was a big place, with more than 1,000 rooms. He liked the odds. If he heard guards, he figured, he would disappear behind the massive curtains.
The nearby rooms were silent as Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn't register that the weight above it had changed. Of course, he had that covered, too: he reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth's bejewelled hairpin with the gift-store fake.
Within minutes, the Sisi Star was in Blanchard's pocket and he was rappelling down a back wall to the garden, taking the rope with him as he slipped from the grounds. When the star was dramatically unveiled to the public the next day, Blanchard returned to watch visitors gasp at the sheer beauty of a cheap replica. And when his parachute was later found in a rubbish bin, no one connected it to the star, because no one yet knew it was missing. It was two weeks before anyone realised that the jewellery had disappeared.
Later, the Sisi Star rode inside the respirator of some scuba gear back to his home base in Canada, where Blanchard would assemble what prosecutors later called, for lack of a better term, the Blanchard Criminal Organisation. Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of surveillance and electronics, Blanchard became a criminal mastermind. The star was the heist that transformed him from a successful and experienced thief into a criminal virtuoso.
Blanchard pulled off his first heist when he was a six-year-old living with his single mother in Winnipeg. The family couldn't afford milk and one day the boy spotted some bottles on a neighbour's porch. "I snuck over there between cars like I was on some kind of mission," he says. "And no one saw me take it." His heart was pounding and the milk was somehow sweeter than usual. "After that," he says, "I was hooked."
Blanchard moved to Nebraska, started going by his middle name, Daniel, and became an accomplished thief. He didn't look the part -- slim, short and bespectacled, he resembled a young Bill Gates -- but he certainly played it, getting into enough trouble to land in reform school. "The way I met Daniel was that he stole my classroom VCR," recalls Randy Flanagan, one of Blanchard's teachers. Flanagan thought he might be able to straighten out the soft spoken and polite kid, so he took Blanchard under his wing in his home-mechanics class. Blanchard "was an absolute genius with his hands," the teacher recalls. In Flanagan's class, Blanchard learned construction, woodworking, model building and automotive mechanics.
The two bonded and Flanagan became a father figure to Blanchard, driving him to and from school and looking out for him. "He could see that I had talent," Blanchard says. "And he wanted me to put it to good use."
By early in his high school years, however, Blanchard had already abandoned his after-school job stocking groceries to pursue more lucrative opportunities, such as fencing tens of thousands of dollars in goods stolen by department-store employees he had managed to befriend. "I could just tell who would work with me," he says. "It's a gift, I guess."
Blanchard began mastering the workings of myriad mechanical devices and electronics. He became obsessed with cameras and surveillance: documenting targets, his own exploits and his huge piles of money. Befitting a young tech enthusiast, he emptied an entire Radio- Shack one Easter Sunday. At age 16, he bought a house with more than $100,000 in cash. (He hired a lawyer to handle the money and sign the deal on his behalf.) When he moved in, Blanchard told his mother that the home belonged to a friend. "She looked the other way," Blanchard says. "And I tried to keep it all from her."
In April 1993, Blanchard was nabbed by the cops in Council Bluffs, Iowa, for a suspected car arson and brought back to police headquarters. "They kept me in the interrogation room past midnight," Blanchard says. "And at a certain point, I managed to sneak into the next room and slip through the tiles into the ceiling. "Undetected, he heard the cops run down the hall, thinking he'd gone out the fire escape. After waiting a couple of hours, Blanchard lowered himself down into the mostly empty station, and stole a police coat, badge, radio and revolver. After leaving a single bullet on the desk of his interrogator, he took the lift to the main floor and strolled right past the front desk on his way out of the station. He hitchhiked at dawn back to Omaha on the back of a motorcycle, holding his purloined police cap down in the wind. "Why are you wearing a uniform?" the driver asked. "Costume party,"
Blanchard said as the sun came up. "Really fun time."
The next day, Blanchard was reapprehended by a Swat team, which had to use flash grenades to extricate him from his mother's attic.
But he surprised the cops by escaping yet again, this time from the back of a police cruiser. "They got out of the car and left the keys," Blanchard says. "There was no barrier, so I fiddled with the cuffs until I got my hands in front of me, locked the doors, slipped up front and put it in gear." The authorities gave chase until Blanchard swerved into a steak-house car park, fled on foot and was finally recaptured.
This time, Blanchard served four years and his sentence came with a deportation order attached. In March 1997, he was released to his Canadian homeland and barred from returning to the US for five years.
"After that," Flanagan says, "I heard from Daniel once or twice a year, thanking me for what I had done for him." Blanchard sent pictures of himself holidaying around the world, on exclusive beaches, posing in front of Viennese castles. He said he had his own security business. "I wanted that to be true," Flanagan says. "But I had a hunch he was more likely in the anti-security business."
In 2001, Blanchard was driving around Edmonton when he saw a new branch of the Alberta Treasury bank going up. His internal algorithm calculated low risk and he began to case the target meticulously. It had been three years since the Sisi Star theft and it was time to try something big and new.
As the bank was being built, Blanchard frequently sneaked inside -- sometimes at night, sometimes in broad daylight, disguised as a delivery person or construction worker. There's less security before the money shows up and that allowed Blanchard to plant various surveillance devices in the ATM room. He knew when the cash machines were installed and what kind of locks they had. He ordered the same locks online and reverse engineered them at home. Later he returned to the Alberta Treasury to disassemble, disable and remount the locks.
The take at this bank was a modest $60,000, but the thrill mattered more than the money -- Blanchard had always wanted to beat the system. Now his ambition flowered, as did his technique.
He targeted a half-dozen banks over the next few years and assembled an arsenal of tools: night vision cameras, long-range lenses, high-gain antennas that could pick up the feeds from the audio and video recorders he hid inside a bank, scanners programmed with the encryption keys for police frequencies. He always had a burglary kit on hand containing ropes, uniforms, cameras and microphones. In the Edmonton branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia, which he hit in 2002, he installed a metal panel near the AC ducts to create a secret crawl space that he could disappear into if surprised by police.
Such evasive action was never required, however, in part because Blanchard had also memorised the mechanics of the Mas-Hamilton and La Gard locks that many banks used for their ATMs. (These locks are big, complicated contraptions. When police later interrogated Blanchard, they presented him with a Mas-Hamilton lock in dozens of pieces. He stunned them by reassembling it in 40 seconds.)
Blanchard also knew how to turn himself into someone else.
Sometimes it was just a matter of donning a yellow hard hat from Home Depot. But it could also be more involved. He used legitimate baptism and marriage certificates -- filled out with assumed names -- to obtain real driver's licences and would even take driving tests, apply for passports or enrol in college classes under one of his many aliases.
Over the years, Blanchard procured and stockpiled IDs and uniforms from various security companies and even law enforcement agencies. Sometimes, just for fun and to see whether it would work, he pretended to be a reporter so he could hang out with celebrities. He created VIP passes so he could go to hockey play-off games or take a spin around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway with racing legend Mario Andretti. He met the prince of Monaco at a yacht race in Monte Carlo and interviewed Christina Aguilera at one of her concerts.
That's where, in July 2000, Blanchard met Angela James. She had flowing black hair and claimed to work for Ford Models. They got along right away, and Blanchard was elated when she gave him her number. Blanchard liked having a sidekick. James was a fun, outgoing party animal who had plenty of free time. She began helping Blanchard on bank jobs. They'd tag-team on daylight reconnaissance, where her striking looks provided a distraction while Blanchard gathered information. At night, she'd be the lookout.
Though they were never involved romantically, James and Blanchard travelled together around the world, stopping in the Caribbean to stash his loot in off shore accounts. They camped out in resorts in Jamaica and the Turks and Caicos islands, depositing money in $10,000 increments into some of Blanchard's 13 pseudonymously held accounts. The money in the offshore accounts was to pay for his jet-setting lifestyle. The money back in Canada would bankroll his real-estate operations.
On Saturday May 15, 2004, as the northern prairie winter was finally giving way to spring, Blanchard walked up to the front door of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in the Mega Centre, a suburban development in Winnipeg. He quickly jimmied the lock, slipped inside and locked the door behind him. It was a brand-new branch, set to open for business on Monday, and Blanchard knew that the cash machines had been loaded on Friday.
Thorough as ever, Blanchard had spent many previous nights infiltrating the bank to do recon or to tamper with the locks while James acted as lookout, scanning the vicinity with binoculars and providing updates via a scrambled-band walkie-talkie. He had put a transmitter behind an electrical outlet, a pinhole video camera in a thermostat and a cheap baby monitor behind the wall. Blanchard had also taken detailed measurements of the room and set up a dummy version in a friend's nearby machine shop. With practice, he had got his ATM-cracking routine down to where he needed only 90 seconds after the alarm tripped to finish and escape with his score.
As Blanchard approached, he saw that the door to the ATM room was unlocked and wide open. Sometimes you get lucky. All he had to do was walk inside.
From here he knew the drill by heart. There were seven machines, each with four drawers. He set to work quickly, using just the right technique to spring the machines open without causing any telltale damage. Well prepared and well rehearsed, he wheeled out boxes full of cash, locked the door behind him, and headed to a van he had parked nearby.
Eight minutes after Blanchard broke into the first ATM, theWinnipeg Police Service arrived in response to the alarm.
However, the officers found the doors locked and assumed the alarm had been an error. As the police pronounced the bank secure, Blanchard was zipping away with more than half a million dollars.
The following morning was a puzzler for authorities. There were no indications of damage to the door, no fingerprints and no surveillance recordings -- Blanchard had stolen the hard drives that stored footage from the bank's cameras.
Moreover, Blanchard's own surveillance equipment was still transmitting from inside the ATM room, so before he skipped town he could listen in on investigators. He knew their names; he knew their leads. He would call both the bank manager's cell phone and the police, posing as an anonymous informant who had been involved in the heist and was swindled out of his share. It was the contractors, he'd say. Or the Brinks guy. Or the maintenance people. His tips were especially convincing because he had a piece of inside information: one of the bank's ATMs was left untouched. Blanchard had done that on purpose to make it easier to sow confusion.
With the cops outmatched and chasing red herrings, the Winnipeg bank job looked like a perfect crime. Then officials got a call from a vigilant employee at a nearby Walmart, which shared a large car park with the bank. He had been annoyed at people leaving cars there, so he took it upon himself to scan the space. On the night of the break-in, he spotted a blue Dodge Caravan next to the bank.
Seeing a dolly and other odd equipment inside, he took down the licence-plate number. Police ran it. The vehicle had been rented from Avis by one Gerald Daniel Blanchard. Soon the cops were on his tail.
The investigation fell to Winnipeg's Major Crimes unit. But Blanchard learned that he had become a suspect, so he stayed out of their sights. Two years passed and the case went cold until early 2006, when Mitch McCormick, a veteran officer in his fifties, decided to take a look at the unsolved robbery. He called his long time colleague Larry Levasseur, a wiretap ace who had been transferred to the Commercial Crimes division.
The case was overwhelming, but they soon began to untangle Blanchard's 32 false names, revealing him to be a person of interest in many crimes, including the unsolved theft of the Sisi Star nearly ten years earlier. They assembled roughly 275 pages of documentation, enough to persuade a judge to let them tap Blanchard's 18 phones.
Usually wiretaps are a waiting game. Cops will listen to crime syndicates for years, hoping for one little slip. But Blanchard was surprisingly loose-tongued. The second weekend the wires went live, McCormick and Levasseur heard him directing a team of underlings in a product-return fraud at a Best Buy. More scams followed. They heard him wheeling and dealing in property. They listened in as he planned his next bank job. They learned about a vast network of sophisticated crime. For a smart criminal, McCormick and Levasseur thought, this guy sure did talk a lot.
Then, on November 16, 2006, Blanchard received a particularly intriguing call. "Hello, Danny," said a man with a thick British accent. "Are you ready? I have a job for you. How soon can you get to Cairo?"
McCormick and Levasseur listened with astonishment as Blanchard immediately set about recruiting his own small team to meet up with another group in Egypt. Blanchard referred to his contact as the Boss and explained to his cohorts that there was money to be made with this guy.
Angela James was in but several of his regular guys couldn't make it, so Blanchard called his neighbour, a Congolese immigrant named Balume Kashongwe. When Blanchard explained the job, Kashongwe volunteered right away. Just a few hours after the Boss's call, Blanchard, Kashongwe and James were in the air, en route to Cairo.
Blanchard had first met the Boss a few months earlier in London at an electronics store. He could tell they were kindred spirits by a glance at the Boss's purchases: eight DVR recorders. Blanchard knew you didn't buy a load like that for anything but surveillance. The two struck up a conversation.
Later that day, a car arrived to take Blanchard to a London café, where the Boss and a dozen Kurdish henchmen, most from northern Iraq, were waiting in the basement, smoking hookahs. The Boss filled Blanchard in on his operation, which spanned Europe and the Middle East and included various criminal activities, including counterfeiting and fraud. The latest endeavour was called skimming: gleaning active debit and credit-card numbers by patching in to the ISDN lines that companies use to process payments. The group manufactured counterfeit cards magnetised and embossed with the stolen numbers and then used them to with draw the maximum daily limits before the fraud was reported. It was a lucrative venture for the Boss's network, which funnelled a portion of its take to Kurdish separatists in Iraq.
The Boss gave Blanchard a trial job: taking 25 cards to Canada to retrieve cash. Blanchard returned to London with $60,000 and the Boss was pleased. He found the younger man charming and steady as well. "We have something big coming," he told Blanchard over dinner at a Kurdish restaurant. "I'll keep you posted."
With that job now at hand, Blanchard's crew arrived in Egypt and checked into the Cairo Marriott Hotel & Omar Khayyam Casino, settling into a couple of suites with sweeping views of the Nile. They went from ATM to ATM for 12 hours a day, withdrawing Egyptian pounds and stuffing the bills into backpacks and suitcases.
Back in their bare-bones Winnipeg office, McCormick and Levasseur were monitoring Blanchard's email accounts and calls back to his girlfriend, Lynette Tien, who was managing travel arrangements and other administrative details from Blanchard's condo in Vancouver. The Canadian cops were stunned. They never imagined they'd come across anything this big: they heard that the loot was piling up four feet high in the suites at the Marriott.
In the course of a week, the team collected the equivalent of more than $2 million. But the individual ATM payouts were small, so after a couple of days Blanchard sent Kashongwe south to Nairobi, Kenya, with 50 cards to find more generous machines. Kashongwe had no cell phone and soon it became clear that Kashongwe was AWOL.
The Boss wasn't happy and nor was Blanchard. He was in over his head but quickly brought out his natural charm to stop the Boss doing anything rash. He took full responsibility, promised personally to pay back Kashongwe's share and the two decided to set aside the problem in the interest of business. The Boss's men would meet Blanchard back in Canada with a new batch of cards. "After all," Blanchard says, "why fight when there was more money to be made?"
But Blanchard's discomfort at Kashongwe's disappearance was compounding his mistakes. On December 3, 2006, as soon as he landed in Vancouver, McCormick and Levasseur picked him up live, discussing Cairo, his next bank job and the potential whereabouts of Kashongwe. They finally had all they needed to pounce.
At 4 am on January 23, 2007, more than a dozen Swat-team members swarmed Blanchard's Vancouver condo, where they found Blanchard and Tien. Several other search warrants were executed simultaneously across Canada, turning up half a dozen accomplices, including Angela James and Blanchard's cousin Dale Fedoruk.
Blanchard was busted. At his various residences and storage facilities, police confiscated ten pallets of material: 60,000 documents, cash in various currencies, smoke bombs, firearms and 300 electronic devices, including commercial card printers, card readers and surveillance equipment. In his condo, police discovered a hidden room stocked with burglary kits and itemised documentation of all Blanchard's fake identities. He was initially charged with 41 crimes, ranging from fraud to possession of instruments for forging credit cards.
Blanchard refused to make statements about any of his associates, but he eventually decided to co-operate with authorities about his own case. Finally, after some negotiations through his lawyer, he offered to take McCormick and Levasseur to the Sisi Star. "It's right here in my grandmother's basement in Winnipeg," he said.
In handcuffs and leg shackles, Blanchard hugged his grandmother at the door and took the two police officers into the house. He disappeared into a basement crawl space with Levasseur. It was quiet except for the sound of them grappling with the insulation. Eventually, Levasseur removed a square of Styrofoam and pulled out the star.
Instead of the maximum of 164 years, Blanchard got eight. And then last summer, after serving less than two, he was released into carefully guarded probation. He now lives in a Vancouver halfway house, where he is prohibited from going anywhere near certain types of surveillance equipment and talking to any of his former associates. At his plea hearing, the judge said that the banks "should hire him and pay him a million dollars a year" to advise them on security. And right before sentencing, he turned directly to Blanchard. "I think that you have a great future ahead of you if you wish to pursue an honest style of life," said. "Although I'm not prepared to sign a letter of reference."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
