The Nice sewer heist on the Société Générale
Nice, France, 1976
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
Over the long mid-July weekend of 1976, a gang of about ten men entered the vault room of the Société Générale branch in Nice from underground. For about two months the group dug a tunnel of roughly 8 meters from one of the city's sewer galleries, bringing their equipment in a van and an inflatable boat, and finally broke through the concrete wall of the room.
Inside, the thieves spent days opening safe deposit boxes, ate and slept on the spot, and left with cash, bonds and jewelry valued at around 46 to 50 million francs, the biggest bank robbery up to that time. On the wall they left the phrase "without weapons, nor hatred, nor violence". The break-in was only discovered on Monday, July 20, when the manager entered the room and found 317 boxes open and empty, the remains of meals and photos pinned to the walls.
Sources
In the game
The Collector Grate
Nice, Monday, July 20, 1976, 9:00 am. At 8:30, the manager of a large bank on the main avenue, Edmond Varenne, could not open the vault room door: it was jammed from the inside by a welded iron brace.
In October 1976, a tip from an ex-girlfriend led to the arrest of one of the thieves, who ended up giving up the group. The man named as the leader, a Nice photographer, was arrested and, on March 10, 1977, escaped through the window of the investigating judge's office, landing on a parked car and vanishing on a motorcycle; he was never recaptured and died in 1989. The loot was never found, and in 2010 another man said in a book that he had been the real mastermind of the job, when the crime was already time-barred.
