On a freezing night in January 1993, masked gunmen walked through the laughably lax security at the Rochester Brink\'s depot, tied up the guards, and unhurriedly made off with $7.
Some of.
Seven Million is a meticulous re-creation of a complicated Heist executed by a variegated and unsavory crew, and of its many repercussions.
Instead, he got was what was coming to him.
Finally, Craig investigates the strange, sad fate of Ronnie Gibbons, a down-and-out boxer and muscle-for-hire in illegal New York City card rooms, who was in on the early planning of the heist, and who disappeared one day in 1995 after an ill-advised trip to Rochester to see some men about getting what he felt he was owed.
The story is populated by a colorful cast of characters, including cops and FBI agents, prison snitches, a radical Priest of the Melkite order who ran a home for troubled teenagers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and the IRA rebel who\'d spent long years jailed in one of Northern Ireland\'s most brutal prisons and who was living underground in New York posing as a comics dealer.
In Seven Million, the reporter Gary Craig meticulously unwinds the long skein of leads, half-truths, false starts, and dead ends, taking us from the grim solitary pens of Northern Ireland\'s Long Kesh prison to the illegal poker rooms of Manhattan to the cold lakeshore on the Canadian border where the body parts began washing up.
But they were wrong.
One ex-IRA Soldier in particular was indebted to O\'Connor for smuggling him and his girlfriend into the United States, and when he was caught in New York City with $2 million in cash from the Brink\'s heist, prosecutors were certain they finally had enough to nail O\'Connor.
Officer Tom O\'Connor had been previously suspected of everything from robbery to murder to complicity with the IRA.
Suspicion quickly fell on a retired Rochester cop working security for Brinks at the time--as well it might. 4 million in one of the FBI\'s top-five armored car heists in history.
On a freezing night in January 1993, masked gunmen walked through the laughably lax security at the Rochester Brink\'s depot, tied up the guards, and unhurriedly made off with $7
