Biggest things Ever Stolen
Shoplifting, carjacking roband bankbery, are all the small minded matters of usual thieves with lesser imagination, it takes a truly daring thief to go bigger. Today, I’ll be sharing with you thieves who went above and beyond.
Join me as I explore some of the biggest things ever stolen.
12. The Boeing 727 plane
Once May 25th, 2003, an entire Boeing 727 was stolen right off the runway of Cuatro de Ferreiro Airport in Luanda, Angola. It did not have clearance to fly. It did not communicate with air traffic control and it has never been seen again. It just veered precariously onto the runway and took off without any lights on. The FBI and the CIA searched the globe for years and couldn’t find so much as an in-flight peanut. Two men were seen boarding the plane before it took off.
American pilot and flight engineer Ben Padilha and a mechanic from Chicago named John M. Atan2. Neither of the men were ever certified to fly 727, but both had been helping to carry out renovations on the plane in the months prior. Padilla’s sister has stated that she believes he was somehow coerced into stealing the plane and is now held against his will somewhere. Others have speculated, based on the fact that Padilla was previously found guilty of fraud, that the theft was a money making scheme.
The mystery to this day remains unsolved.
11. A bare bones operation (one Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton).
US. Vs Tyrannosaurus skeleton– T matter in question was a stolen dinosaur. The ordeal began when a Florida man, Eric Procopio, brought the fossilized skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus bataar, a relative of the rex we know and love from Mongolia to the UK and then to the U.S. in customs. He claimed that the bones came from UK soil on reaching the US per Copi auction off the dyno for over a million dollars. However, when the Mongolian government became aware of the dinosaurs true origin, they prevented the sale being completed. According to Mongolian law, fossils are culturally significant and their removal without official approval is illegal. As a result, Procopio was arrested on counts of conspiracy to smuggle illegal goods, possession of stolen property and giving false statements.
He went to jail for three months and the skeleton went back to Mongolia for something that’s been dead for millions of years. The Tyrannosaurus bataar had quite the trip.
10. Red cedar tree from Vancouver Island
No crime of the century. Stealing a tree is never an easy task. But if this perplexing case from 2012 is anything to go by, the older the tree, the harder it is to steal. Indeed, it took a lot of planning and patience for poachers to steal one particular red cedar tree from Vancouver Island just off the southwestern Canadian coast.
At 800 years old, the tree was a full nine feet wide at the base, and the high quality of its wood made it an unfortunate target for poachers. On a routine stroll, park rangers had been baffled to find the tree cut 80 percent of the way through. It seems someone had attempted to steal the giant tree but had given up rangers, brought in professionals and had the tree safely felled to avoid it, collapsing and crushing unlucky hikers, leaving it to decompose and feed the forest.
But this was all part of the thieves plan. With the tree felled safely, they returned and stole the whole thing. Speculation arose as to how the thieves were able to source the heavy duty machinery necessary to transport the colossal tree away. But however they did, it was never seen again.
9. A 12 foot tall copper monastery bell
enlightened by thieves for Buddhist’s at a temple in Tacoma, Washington, in 2015. Enlightenment came as usual by letting go of material objects. Only this particular type of enlightenment was much more literal than usual, as it involved the loss of a 3000 pound, 12 foot tall copper monastery bell. Police were baffled as to how thieves managed the theft due to the Bells enormous weight and size the temple. Abbott speculated that the people who stole it wanted to make money with no consideration for the significance of it and how important it is in the presence of Buddhism.
Indeed, bells are commonly used to signify the beginning of meditation, making them highly sacred to Buddhist monks. The thieves likely melted the bell down to sell the copper or may have turned to the black market for a buyer. I doubt a pawnshop would accept a suspicious 3000 pound religious bell. But sometimes a bargain is a bargain after all. You never know what is going to come through that door.
8. An entire church in Kemerovo city,southwest Siberia, Russia.
brick by brick, blasphemy. Christianity also experienced pious plundering in 2008, when thieves made off with an entire church, the holy building, it stood in the village of Kemerovo since 1899 and was hauled off brick by brick. Initially, the theft went unnoticed as the church wasn’t being used at the time and was located in a remote area of the town.
Church officials had been considering resuming use of the building, but that plan was dismantled before their very eyes. Of course, they can still gather in the open air foundations of the building every Sunday morning. In rural Russia, churches are targeted more often than you’d think as religious icons and building materials can be sold off for a profit. I like to think it all comes down to foul play between rival churches, but you’ll have to ask the pope.
7. Mustang fighter plane
A history of crime. In the 1980s, somewhere in Tel Aviv, Israel Major Ari Yitzhak was restoring a world war to Mustang fighter plane for the Israeli Air Force. The plane was parked up at a reserve airfield waiting for transport to Israel’s Air Force Museum. After fixing it up, its zachy develop plans of its own for the vehicle on an otherwise normal day. He flew the antique all the way to Sweden and sold it illegally for three hundred and thirty one thousand dollars. Six years later, the Israeli government finally tracked it down and retrieved it. So at least this plane story has an uplifting ending. High flyer Yazaki, on the other hand, had a much more grounded fate. The terrestrial confines of a jail cell.
6. Bridge of over 100 years in China
, for a bridge too far. Some people build bridges. There’s burn them. In rare cases, some steal them. This was the case in 2012 when two men, with little respect for history were arrested for stealing a 100 year old bridge in China. The bridge was an easy target as far as stealing an entire bridge goes, because it was surrounded by construction sites and received very little foot traffic.
Eventually, one of the bridges few regulars attempted to stroll over the bridge and found that it no longer existed. A police investigation ensued, and after an eyewitness described seeing the culprits lingering near the bridge with a truck one night, the police were able to track them down.
The thieves confessed that they’d use two cranes and two trucks to pick up and move this 16 huge stone pieces that made up the bridge. I just wonder if the bridge was set pretty in a billionaire’s garden before the thieves were car
5. A fully loaded Oil tanker ship (Irish 13)
You wouldn’t steal a ship. Some people just have a taste for the biggest loot. And I don’t just mean kids stealing their parents credit cards to pay for upgrades on Ford and 2017, Somali pirates would take on the large side managed to hijack a fully loaded oil tanker. The ship, called the Irish 13.
The Irish 13 had decided to take a time and fuel saving shortcut through what’s known as the Socotra gap. They soon regretted the shortcut after their ship got hijacked by local pirates in a scenario reminiscent of a certain Tom Hanks found.
Ransom discussions soon began regarding both the crew and the ship’s contents once the pirates realized the tanker was under the employ of prominent Somalian businessmen who Somali pirates tend to avoid tussling with, they release the crew and later the ship without ransom, despite being one of the biggest staffs of all time. The payout was nothing but deep water for the pirates.
4. A Soviet submarine K1 29
 The USS Underwater Heist in 1968. For reasons still unknown, Soviet submarine K1 29 sank 16000 feet to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean sixteen hundred miles northwest of Hawaii. At the time, Russian technology was unable to locate or retrieve the warhead laden wreckage. But their Cold War rivals in the USA soon got wind of the submarine’s fate. The Americans weren’t going to miss this opportunity to get their hands on a Soviet submarine laden with potentially useful documentation, not to mention intact nuclear weaponry to keep things hush hush. They assigned the CIA rather than the Navy to the case in 1974 with an inflation adjusted equivalent of four billion spent. The CIA had built a huge Glomar Explorer. |
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| Submarine K1 26 |
This essentially involved grafting a giant scale crane onto a ship to drag the submarine up to the surface. The procedure wasn’t perfect, and parts of the submarine broke off during recovery and sank back down. But the chunk the CIA caught on their expensive fishing trip did indeed contain nuclear torpedoes, as well as some of the sailors bodies.
Inquiries about the operation, which was initially presented to the public as nothing more than a manganese mining operation, have a surprising cultural outcome to covering the tracks of the operation led to the development of the phrase neither confirm nor deny. This is now known as the Glomar response after the name of the recovery vessel.
3. A hat made of Eggs
a special hat belonging to
Greg de Silva of Cape Town, South Africa was the largest of its kind made using a thousand eggs. Greg owned the largest egg hat the world had ever seen. Tragically, Gregs eggs were stolen during a 2011 trip to Germany while he was hospitalized with heat stroke.
2. Tall Gorilla statue
In twenty seventeen, a 12 foot tall inflatable gorilla with stylish shades designed to lure customers into a car dealership was deflated and stolen in Texas. Well, undoubtedly, humor is the gorilla cost 10000 dollars and the thieves were never caught. This wasn’t the first theft of its kind in the world of American dealerships. With an even bigger 35 foot tall inflatable gorilla being stolen in 2006, Harambee frowns down upon us are finally, there’s the great Canadian maple syrup heist. This robbery took place over several months at a facility in St. Louis that blanford Quebec between 2011 and 2012. In total, 3000 tons of maple syrup, or eighteen point seven million Canadian dollars worth was stolen. Adjusted for inflation, the suspected insider job was the most valuable heist in the Canadian history.
1. An Entire Mountain of Rocks
Things don’t get much bigger than mountains. So for thieves who take the phrase go big or go home a little too seriously, stealing a mountain is the logical conclusion.
Locals from the village in eastern India are slowly but surely bringing the aforementioned phrase to life by stealing the peak of the nearby mountain. But locals chip away the rock to sell to property developers and use the earnings to feed their families. The village doesn’t have much else in terms of industry, so people work 11 hours a day hewing the peak from a point into more of a stub. While this is in fact illegal, local authorities tend to turn a blind eye as the mountain is one of the few sources of work in the area.
A local businessman has even laid a claim of ownership upon the mountain in an attempt to remove the criminal edge from the operation. But the authenticity of the claim is questionable at best. Unless something changes, the locals will eventually have stolen an entire mountain.
Were you shocked or impressed by any of these sizable crimes? Let me know in the comments section below. Thanks