The Copenhagen Job
The Copenhagen Job
The inside story of Denmark’s biggest heist.
By Line Holm Nielsen
The Atavist Magazine, No. 36
The screen has gone dark. The video camera flits around in the murky night; only the microphone is picking up anything. “Someone’s coming,” a voice whispers over a walkie-talkie.
“OK, Marco, lemme work, lemme work…,” another voice answers from close to the camera. A foreign accent comes through clearly on the recording. “I’ll be down in ten minutes.”
A picture emerges from the darkness: an arched window of plastic reinforced with wire mesh. The image slowly comes into focus, and it’s clear that the camera isn’t pointed horizontally; it’s pointed down. The person filming lies hidden on the roof of a building that houses an unusual workplace.
A white van is parked 12, maybe 15 feet below the man on the roof. Its open side door faces the large storeroom. The room is filled with bags, cardboard cartons, and stacks of blue and orange plastic boxes.
The driver removes several tall boxes from inside the van, stacks them on a hand truck, and wheels them into the storeroom. The camera follows the driver as he passes below and disappears inside. There are 20 or so boxes to unload. He has no idea he’s being watched.
The radio crackles. “What’d you say?” the man with the camera asks.
“There are three or four people getting off work. They’re coming out now.” The voice on the radio sounds nervous.
“Yeah, OK, OK,” the man on the roof answers. Now the driver down below is rolling out blue metal cabinets on wheels, containing gray cartons. The man on the roof knows exactly what’s inside.
The cartons are filled with money: millions of Danish kroner and euros. On a busy day, the business receives 200 million kroner—over $37 million—in unmarked, untraceable bills. The money down there isn’t really anybody’s. It belongs to the anonymous masses who have so much. The man on the roof knows a lot of people who could use just a tiny fraction of that money.
To get a share of the fortune down in the storeroom requires only the perfect plan, the right co-conspirators, and a certain daredevil attitude. It’s said that Danes aren’t willing to do what is necessary. To go all the way. The man with the video camera doesn’t have that problem. He wants it.
Wealth and respect are waiting right below him. The man on the roof has just begun.
One
Stine is lost, and it’s her own fault; she didn’t bother to turn on the GPS. It’s only 18 miles home from the pub in the western Copenhagen suburb of Måløv, where she just finished working the night shift. Under normal circumstances she could drive that stretch in her sleep, but she ran into some road construction, and now she’s on a long detour. She has no idea where she is.
A freeway sign pops up; at least she’s headed in the right direction. Stine is pulling the Toyota Corolla onto the entrance ramp when she sees a large blue truck in front of her, parked sideways on the ramp: a garbage truck belonging to the M. Larsen trucking company. A white van has stopped on the freeway’s emergency lane, too. What’s going on? she thinks. Must be an accident.
Then the truck’s cab explodes into flames. In the glow of the fire, she sees a man in a white hoodie emerge from behind the truck holding a gas can. He crosses the freeway, pouring from the can. His hood has slid back; Stine sees that he is light skinned and has short hair. The man leans over and flicks a lighter, and a line of fire shoots across the two lanes. He hurries back to the van, the driver revs the engine, and the two men are gone.
Stine calls the police, but a squad car is already on the way. She still has the phone to her ear when she hears a crash behind her. A green Mazda 323 has a flat tire, and the driver tried to stop. Behind it a Suzuki also gets a flat tire and crashes into the Mazda.
Stine looks at her phone. It’s 4:37 a.m. on August 10, 2008.
At 4:30 a.m., a squad car calls in to Copenhagen’s Western District police headquarters in Albertslund, a suburb just down the highway from Måløv. The patrolmen are outside the station’s underground parking lot but can’t get in. “There’s a truck on fire blocking the parking-lot entrance,” one of them says over the radio.
Peter Grønbek Nielsen, the supervisor on duty, studies the station’s surveillance-camera feeds. They’re right: An M. Larsen garbage truck is on fire outside, and it’s not alone. A blue garbage truck is parked sideways at the station’s main entrance, illuminated by flames. The station’s emergency phones begin ringing all at once; the two dispatchers can’t keep up. Trucks are on fire throughout the district, approach roads and freeway entrances are blocked, scores of cars have flat tires.
“What the hell…?” Grønbek says—but he has an idea of what’s going on even before the words are out of his mouth. He starts calling squad cars out on patrol. Not one or two; he needs every car in the district, and he needs them now. Meanwhile, one of the station’s direct lines is blinking. “Police,” an officer answers.
“Yes, hi, this is Rikke from G4S.” The Western District often receives calls from G4S, the world’s largest security company, which is responsible for protecting numerous stores and industrial facilities in the Copenhagen area. This call concerns Danish Value Handling, a cash-distribution center located on Kornmarksvej, a road running through an industrial zone in the suburb of Brøndby, east of Albertslund. “I’ve just received a duress alarm outside,” Rikke says, “and a few burglary alarms—”
“Duress alarm at Danish Value Handling?” The officer is paying attention now. “What time did it come in?”
“I got it at 4:38,” Rikke says.
“Zeeero-fourrr-thrrree-eight…,” the officer says.
“Mmm, actually that’s not right, because—”
“They’re out there now! They’re out there now! Confirmed!” The officer’s voice is shaking. “We’re on our way now.”
“Alright, thanks,” Rikke says. She hangs up, but the officer doesn’t, not immediately. The station’s system continues recording the phone call. After a moment, the officer shouts, “We have to get a car through that entrance!”
He’s talking to a colleague sitting in a squad car in the underground parking lot who can’t get out. The main exit is blocked by the burning garbage truck, and the alternative, a fire exit, is locked. The key isn’t in the cabinet where it should be.
The officers inside the headquarters, meanwhile, are staring at the live video from a building a few miles away: the Danish Value Handling facility. “Oh shit,” a female officer says. “Shit!”
A room comes into view on the live video: a white room with a few tables. A wall of metal bars divides the room. In the background, a thick steel door is open. Through it is a vault the size of a small garage. The air in the room is filled with brown dust; the floor is strewn with chunks of brick. The wall near the vault is in ruins. Large men in balaclavas, blue-gray coveralls, and bulletproof vests are working quickly. One of them holds up a Kalashnikov.
Two
René Rejnholdt Pedersen’s night shift is about to end, in the early hours of August 10, 2008. The veteran private security guard is sitting in G4S’s coffee room when he receives an alarm at a Brøndby warehouse belonging to Milton A/S, a manufacturer of gas furnaces and hot-water tanks. Pedersen gets in his white Toyota and races off toward Brøndby’s industrial zone.
There have been mysterious incidents at Milton for several weeks. The first alarm at the warehouse was early on the morning of Saturday, July 19. But Pedersen couldn’t find anything wrong or any sign of a break-in and deemed it a false alarm. That evening, however, the alarm went off again. This time the security guard noted that a motion sensor in one room had been smeared with a transparent substance—presumably silicone—but again, nothing had been stolen.
A week later, at 5:51 p.m. on Saturday, July 26, another security guard visiting the Milton warehouse found a window open. The next day, on Sunday evening, another alarm went off, then sometime later that night still another.
When Milton’s warehouse manager showed up for work the following Monday, he called Copenhagen’s Western District police. A number of enormous steel shelves, he reported, had been moved in the warehouse, exposing several yards of wall separating it from the neighboring building. Several boxes had been placed to block the view of a sensor by the door, and a plexiglass skylight on the roof had been damaged. The police came immediately when Milton’s manager happened to mention who the company’s neighbor was: Danish Value Handling.
Kornmarksvej, where the Danish Value Handling facility is located, doesn’t look like much—a broad street lined with faceless office buildings and warehouses. Kornmarksvej 8-10, a sprawling two-story brown building, is no exception. Three companies have facilities there. Facing the street is Faderberg, a valve manufacturer. Milton is in the middle. In the back, farthest from the street and protected by heavy double iron gates, is Danish Value Handling.
Today the company is a subsidiary of a Norwegian corporation, Nokas, which specializes in transporting valuable wares such as gold coins, paintings, and diamonds. But most of its business is picking up the money that stores have taken in each day, counting it, and putting it in the stores’ bank accounts. Millions in cash are also distributed from the center on Kornmarksvej to stock ATMs and cash registers throughout Copenhagen.
Exactly how this takes place is not something that Nokas wants to discuss; the company prefers to keep a low profile. “Let’s just say that we handle a lot of money,” Peter Junge, the company’s managing director, says. Before its acquisition in 2011, however, Danish Value Handling was not so reluctant to supply information. Anyone could visit the firm’s website and find photos of the company’s indoor video surveillance and the boxes used to transport valuables, the company’s location, a figure for how many billions of kroner it handled annually. After all, this was Denmark—a safe country.
A couple of miles east, across the Oresound Bridge that connects Denmark to Sweden, this openness would have been called naive. In the 1990s, when the number of simple robberies committed in Sweden began to fall due to improved bank security, Sweden experienced a mysterious increase in robberies of money transports. From 1994 to 1998, there were 30 to 40 of these robberies annually in Sweden. By 2002, the number had reached 66. When the European association of value-handling firms, ESTA, counted up the number of robberies in 2005, Sweden claimed the dubious honor of having had the most per capita of all European countries. Two hundred twenty-four transports and cash warehouses had been attacked in an organized manner between 1998 and 2004.
It wasn’t only the number of robberies that disturbed the Swedish people and drove the value-handling association to implore politicians to act. It was also how they were committed. In December 2002, an armed robber attacking a money transport in Tureberg, a suburb of Stockholm, shot at passersby and the police and placed a fake bomb in the transport vehicle. In August 2005, a vehicle smashed through the gates of a valuable-goods warehouse in Stockholm and got away with 26 million Swedish kronor. Several weeks later, the police were prevented from getting to the scene of a robbery because the robbers had placed burning cars all around the capital. A few months after that, heavily armed men attacked a valuables transport on a highway near the Stockholm suburb of Hallunda, forced the vehicle off the road, and blew it open with dynamite. Drivers and employees on the transports and in valuables centers went on strike to protest their dangerous working conditions.
No one has been able to explain unambiguously why the epidemic hit Sweden. Terrible security at the private transport companies, some claim. A certain type of immigrant with connections to Balkan organized crime, others say, pointing out the relatively high percentage of immigrants from the region and their descendants among those convicted. A third group—including some of the robbers themselves—believe it may simply be that success is contagious.
From 1998 to 2004, thieves had struck 93 cash transports and warehouses in Denmark, too—more than any country in Scandinavia besides Sweden. But the robberies in Denmark were mild-mannered compared with the paramilitary-style strikes in Sweden—until one day when, according to Bent Isager-Nielsen, the head of investigations for Copenhagen’s Western District, “Suddenly, they were here.”
On the night of Tuesday, April 1, 2008, half a dozen men armed with submachine guns forced their way into the Danish headquarters of Loomis, a value-handling company in Glostrup. They rammed the wall with a boom lift and broke through directly into Loomis’s vault, filled sacks with cash, and fled in dark Audis. Caltrops—clusters of metal spikes designed to puncture tires—were strewn over nearby streets, and a policeman in Copenhagen discovered a suitcase outside police headquarters containing two fake bombs. The take was 60 million kroner, and all clues pointed to Sweden. The Audis used in the theft came from Stockholm; their owners had been waylaid by armed men several months earlier.
The Loomis robbery was something new to Denmark. The size alone, plus the degree of organization and brutality, made it sensational. That was the investigation the Western District police were buried in when the report of uninvited guests in Milton’s warehouse reached a hard-pressed section at police headquarters, the division investigating organized crime.
The case of Milton’s rearranged shelves landed on the desk of Torben Lund, a 50-year-old chief inspector who was one of the few Western District investigators not already on the Loomis case. Lund had set out to be an office worker, not a policeman. He started as a junior clerk at the Danish Tax Administration, but the job lacked human contact and action, and when he was 22 he applied for a position with the police.
Lund is a neat, mild-mannered man, praised by his superiors for his patience, his dogged ability to motivate his detectives, and his obsessive grasp of details. When Lund went over the Milton case, everything looked suspicious to him. There had been eight alarms in nine days. That could be preparation for a spectacular robbery attempt. On the other hand, whoever had sneaked into Milton’s warehouse that summer had to know that the police were aware of it. Would they dare come back? Had they abandoned their plans? Were the break-ins actually failed robbery attempts?
The police discussed their next move. “We didn’t have the manpower or budget to sit out there 24-7 when they might never show up,” Isager-Nielsen says. “This type of robbery isn’t something that two officers in their slippers can handle. It requires specially trained personnel. But how long should these special forces sit there and wait? A week? A month or six months, maybe for nothing?”
The investigators met with executives from Danish Value Handling on July 30, 2008. The police explained what they had seen, how the Loomis robbery had taken place, what could happen to Danish Value Handling. The police had already increased their patrols on Kornmarksvej and asked G4S to contact their control center immediately if alarms went off in the building. The police also made the unusual suggestion of hooking up surveillance cameras with a direct link to the police station’s control center less than two miles away.
The managing director and the head of security at Danish Value Handling listened. They would set up the additional security equipment, they said. But they didn’t seem particularly nervous. They assured the police that they had the situation under control.
Three
There are eight or nine people at work at Danish Value Handling the night of Saturday, August 9. They are taking in boxes of money from drivers, registering the contents, and sending them on to the counting room and the vault, the door to which is wide open. For a long time now, they’ve been talking about the robbery of their Loomis colleagues in April. They’ve been joking about it. “Just wait, at some point someone is coming here, too,” they’ve said to each other. Some of them know about the break-in at their neighbors, Milton, two weeks ago. They’ve talked about how they should be careful, that they should be on the alert, whatever that means.
The first activity outside is registered on a surveillance recording at 2:52 a.m. A camera mounted in Milton’s warehouse, newly installed by the police, looks out across the warehouse interior toward a garage-style overhead door and a smaller door to its left, opening out onto the parking lot. Two figures in hoodies are visible through the overhead door’s windows, approaching cautiously. For several minutes, they scan the inside of the warehouse with powerful flashlights. A small forklift is illuminated. Then the men are gone, and a grainy darkness settles over the screen.
At 4:32 a.m., a light appears again through the windows of the overhead door. Searching. Curious. Two minutes later, a hoodie-clad man swings a crowbar and breaks the door’s lowest window. Two men squeeze through, and one of them examines the doorframe with his flashlight, then pushes a button and the door rolls open.
It’s been raining, and the men’s shoulders are wet. One of them walks near the surveillance camera. He is wearing grayish-blue coveralls with a marine blue bulletproof vest. A balaclava covers his face, and ski goggles are pushed up on his forehead. He has a submachine gun in his hand. He pulls the goggles down over his eyes and walks farther into the warehouse, over to the wall where the shelving was removed two weeks earlier.
At 4:35, a yellow front-end loader rolls into the warehouse. It is a 22-ton diesel Ljungby Maskin 2240, 282 horsepower, designed for logging and construction; it was stolen from a construction site a few hours earlier. It is 11 feet tall and 26 feet long. The shovel alone looks as if it could eat the little forklift outside in one greedy bite. The driver turns sharply to the left and maneuvers the machine into position. The exhaust pipe snorts black diesel smoke when he guns the engine. Twenty-two tons of steel crashes into the wall.
On the other side of the wall, in the Danish Value Holding facility, Niklas, the night-shift supervisor, hears a deep thunk—the kind that shakes a building and carries right on into a body. After a second thunk, he gets up to find out what’s going on. Plaster is falling from the wall separating the counting-room from Milton. The entire room seems to be moving. The Danish Value Handling employees start to run. “They’re coming!” someone yells.
The front-end loader thunders back and forth, slamming into the wall, coughing black smoke. A man in gray coveralls, black balaclava, and white sneakers stands behind it. He’s a big man, not tall, but his coveralls stretch so tightly out over his stomach that his fly is open. Dust fills the room as the loader rams into the wall for almost a minute. On the other side, ceiling tiles, plaster, and chunks of cement fall into the counting room. The 50-ton, cement-and-steel bank vault is being pushed to the right, bit by bit.
In the Milton warehouse, the three robbers look at their identical watches. At 4:39, the man in the middle lifts his automatic rifle into firing position and aims at the wall. Another man hops and claps his hands. The wall has been breached.
A red light shines in the blackness outside. Two dark Audis back up to the open overhead door, so close that one of the license plates, RY 34 265, is visible. The men, including the black-clad driver of the first Audi, grab hockey bags from the car, run past the loader, and squeeze through the hole in the wall.
The Danish Value Handling employees are now in Niklas’s supervisor’s office and watch the robbery unfold on a computer screen. They set off all the alarms and called the police. At the Western District station, the watch commander, Peter Grønbek Nielsen, and the others on duty follow every move the robbers make on their own screens. All the squad cars Nielsen has at his disposal are sent to the scene of the crime, though several of them have to find detours; as far as two miles away, burning garbage trucks block intersections. Some squad cars report flat tires from caltrops.
The counters in Niklas’s office exchange a few nervous words. “These men must have known where the vault was,” one woman says. “They couldn’t have broken through any closer.” She turns away from the monitor in fright; a masked man is on the screen carrying a Kalashnikov.
The men in coveralls work quickly in the dust-filled room in front of the vault. They lay their guns down and stuff cash into the hockey bags, which they haul out to the cars two at a time. A million kroner in 100-kroner bills weighs 11 pounds; the bags look as if they weigh 80 or 100 pounds each. One of the men looks at his watch again. Twelve minutes have passed since the first window was broken. It’s time. The man in the ski goggles and bulletproof vest picks his automatic weapon up off the floor and squeezes through the hole and back into the Milton warehouse. The Audis take off. It’s 4:46 a.m.
Patrol commander Brian Holm Larsen is in the first squad car to arrive at Danish Value Handling. On the radio he hears other officers curse burning trucks and flat tires. By now, Larsen thinks to himself, the robbers have been here so long that they must assume the police have arrived or at least are nearby; they must have a plan for this situation. There’s no sense in playing Rambo now. He slips into a bulletproof vest and turns on his flashing blue lights. The officers in the other squad cars that have made it to the scene do the same. “They’re leaving now,” says a scratchy voice over the police radio at headquarters. Brian looks up and spots a light moving close to Danish Value Handling.
When the G4S security guard, René Rejnholdt Pedersen, pulls into Danish Value Handling, he thinks for a brief moment that the police must have beat him here. Three cars with lights on are coming toward him from the opposite direction as he pulls in behind the Milton building. He steps halfway out his car door to greet them, but Pedersen quickly realizes he’s mistaken. A stocky man in the passenger seat of the leading Audi points a gun at him; he’s parked in their way.
Pedersen nudges his car into reverse, and the Audis drive past him and out onto Kornmarksvej. They hesitate a second. At one end of the industrial zone, to the right, flashing blue lights are visible. Pedersen hears the cars rev their engines. The Audis peel out and turn left. And then they’re gone.
At 4:49 a.m., Nielsen walks into the Milton warehouse alone, illuminated by a squad car’s headlights, gun drawn. He can neither hear nor see anyone. All he sees is the back end of a front-end loader, resting in a chaos of smashed-up bricks, plaster, and torn money wrapping.
Torben Lund is awakened by the phone at his home in the Copenhagen suburbs. It’s happened—they took down DVH, an on-duty officer tells him. The robbers and their getaway cars vanished; several squad cars pursued the two Audis when they drove onto the freeway heading west, but when speeds reached 120 miles per hour, the police in their Ford sedans were forced to abandon the chase. The Audis haven’t been seen on any of the bridges leading away from Copenhagen. The robbers have disappeared.
The counting room is more or less destroyed. The money counters, in shock, aren’t much help. Technicians in white coveralls use tweezers, brushes, and plastic bags to comb through the mess of dropped bills and cement dust, hoping to find even a single clue to help the police get started.
Lund sighs deeply. The investigation now starting, which he has been placed in charge of, could mean months or even years of detective work. Early on this Sunday morning, the police don’t even know how much the robbers have stolen.
Four
The men sit in a living room, counting money. There are several of them, seated around a coffee table in a house they don’t own on Sealand, Denmark’s largest island, early on the morning of August 11. They took over the house simply because they could. The owner, Bjarne, didn’t dare say no to them.
The living room is filthy. The furniture and floors are sticky, the corners are filled with trash, and the smell is nauseating. Bjarne is in his sixties, thin and grubby, with a long beard. He drinks—a lot, as much as three cases of beer a day—and forgets about everything else. The men know that, these men who came busting into the farmhouse early on a Sunday morning.
Bjarne has retired to the kitchen to do his morning drinking. He doesn’t dare do anything else. He barely knows this gang of muscular young men, and now they’re sitting in his living room with their hockey bags like they own the place. One of them comes into the kitchen and grabs the television. He hauls it into the living room, and they turn it on to the teletext news-bulletin station. Bjarne doesn’t let himself hear what they talk about or see what they do. This is not good company, he thinks, not for him and not for John, his almost 40-year-old son.
Another man arrives with food from McDonald’s for the whole gang. This is the man Bjarne knows best—the only one he knows by name, in fact. Marco, he’s called. He’s obviously the gang’s gofer; the others order him around. Nevertheless, Bjarne is afraid of him.
Once, when he was a teenager, Bjarne’s eldest son, Hans, went on a shooting spree at a carnival in Copenhagen. He was thrown in jail and charged with assault with intent to kill, but he escaped. While on the run, drunk and high on pills, he killed his girlfriend with an ax. Many years later, when Hans was out on temporary release and went to visit his parents, he brought along a friend from prison. That’s how the family met Marco.
Bjarne had reluctantly given Marco permission to store some things in a room at the farm. What it was, Bjarne didn’t know. Fishing gear, maybe? Marco seemed to like to fish down by the gravel-pit lake across the road. To repay the favor, Marco brought some cheap booze and strong beer from a low-price store across the border in Germany, and everybody was happy for a while.
Bjarne sees something light up in the yard. Marco has lit a fire, and one of the visitors, a dark-skinned man, comes into the kitchen and pulls some bills out of his pocket, hundred-kroner or maybe thousand-kroner notes. Bjarne doesn’t want the money.
Maxim Bar, near Copenhagen’s Central Station train depot in Vesterbro, the city’s old red-light district, doesn’t try to hide what business it’s in. Shapely women writhe on the facade’s posters facing the street. Inside, the dim lights illuminate a 1980s-vintage Asian-themed interior: a golden Buddha here, a gold lamé curtain there, flower-print sofas. If you look closely in the faint light, you’ll notice that the sofas’ upholstery has seen much better days, but the Maxim Bar is still one of Copenhagen’s most expensive strip clubs. If you have the money, regulars say, you have first dibs on taking a woman back to your hotel room.
Katarina is one of the women. She’s young, in her late twenties maybe, dark-haired, Polish, and doesn’t know many people in Copenhagen other than the girls and bodyguards from the bar. On the evening of Sunday, August 10, she strikes up a conversation with a man from Sweden. He and his three or four friends are hard to miss when they show up at Maxim early that evening. His name is Chris, he tells her in English. He’s very tall, around six foot eight and muscular, 28 years old with a blondish beard. He has a business back home in Sweden that’s doing very well, he says. Katarina thinks he’s a nice guy, and he says she’s the only good-looking girl in the bar. The others look like transvestites, he says.
His friends are less easygoing, and as he keeps knocking back the booze, Chris gets rowdier, too. They all behave as if they’re celebrating something. One of the men in particular, a big guy dressed in sports clothing and sitting on a sofa, is loud; he really doesn’t need any more to drink, Katarina thinks. One of the others, a Danish-speaking guy who’s high on coke and has a loose false tooth and a tattoo of a girl’s name on his arm, is talking to Samira, a champagne girl from South America. He’s buying her vodkas.
Money is flowing; the false-toothed man goes up to the bar and buys a magnum of champagne for 4,000 kroner. Everyone who comes into Maxim that night gets handed a glass of champagne—even complete strangers. Chris and his merry band pay with thousand-kroner notes and tip every time. Chris is wearing loose pants, bodybuilder style. No wallet. Bills begin falling out of his pockets as he gets drunk. A bundle of thousand-kroner bills lands on the floor and Katarina picks it up. At least 50,000 kroner, she thinks.
It’s late when they leave the bar. Katarina is with Chris, and Samira meets up with the false-toothed man later. They disappear into the night, each to their own hotel room for a few hours. The men have stopped looking over their shoulders. They have been reading the news online; the police hunting them, they know, have no leads.
Five
The Western District police station is awash in recriminations. Several investigators believe that a SWAT unit should have dug in at Danish Value Holding after the Milton break-in; at the very least, a police car should have been stationed on Kornmarksvej. Instead, the police have been thrown onto the field in a match where the robbers have already won the first half.
Judging from the known facts, the police are looking for at least 15 and in all likelihood 20 to 25 robbers. Besides the six men on the surveillance videos, the police reason that there must be at least one driver for every garbage truck and several others to help the drivers get away.
A burned-up Audi is found on Herstedøstervej, near the crime scene. No immediate clues there. It turns out it was stolen several months earlier from an auto-repair shop on the nearby island of Fyn. The trucks that were burned around the district hold more promise. All of them were stolen a few hours before the robbery from the M. Larsen trucking company on Vibeholmsvej, a couple of miles from Danish Value Handling. The torched vehicles are hauled into the police crime lab. In one of them, investigators find a pair of gloves that reek of gasoline but aren’t completely burned up.
Otherwise, the technicians get very little from the crime scene. There’s the front-end loader; it was stolen from a nearby construction site, but there are no fingerprints or DNA found on it. The surveillance tapes from Danish Value Handling and Milton show balaclavas, gloved hands, and coverall-clad male bodies that could belong to anyone.
Torben Lund and his investigators decide they must cast a wider net; they must go to the media. Someone out there must have seen something. As the fragments of information begin to pile up, the police can’t help but regard the robbers with a certain amount of respect. The organization, the planning, the details the thieves had to have known about—the building layout, the security company’s routines, how the garbage trucks were operated, the routes the police took to respond to emergencies—it must have taken months of preparation.
The robbers may have won the first half. But the second half is about to begin.
Six
Bo from Sengeløse, a small town near Copenhagen, could have ended up in the “irrelevant” pile of police leads. He is the 58-year-old manager at a small gravel pit 19 miles west of the city, located among green fields and horse pastures between Sengeløse and the freeway. You’d have to know it was there or you wouldn’t notice it. But on the morning of Monday, August 11, Bo’s workers call, saying they’re up on the road and can’t get in. The chain lock on the gate was changed, for the second time in two weeks.
It’s annoying and also quite bizarre. Material and fuel being stolen from work sites is nothing unusual, but this pit is almost worked out and seldom in use. And why would thieves lock it up? Even more questions pop up when Bo arrives at the gravel pit. Bo’s company has two 40-foot shipping containers on-site, temporary garages for smaller equipment. Two weeks ago, their chain locks were cut. Vandalism, Bo thought at the time, but it didn’t matter much; the containers were empty.
Now they have chain locks on them again. “This is damn strange,” Bo says to his boss.
Torben Lund doesn’t think the call from Sengeløse is important when a young detective brings it to his attention. It’s Monday, August 11, only 24 hours after the robbery, and many other things are more pressing. But—and this is what caught the detective’s attention—the man who called the police, Bo, mentioned that the chain locks had also been changed two weeks ago, the same weekend the shelving had been moved at Milton. “Send a few people out there,” Lund says.
His phone rings an hour later. The detectives in the gravel pit are on to something.
Hidden inside the containers are two Audis with stolen license plates. One of the plates matches the one visible on the surveillance tape from Danish Value Handling. The police also find empty plastic sacks, ripped-up cardboard boxes, and other packing materials from Danish Value Handling—and two bulletproof vests.
While forensics experts have the cars towed away, the detectives talk. Why didn’t the robbers torch the Audis? Were they planning to use the cars again? Will they come back to pick them up? Do they dare?
Before the end of the day, the investigators have a plan. The police put new chain locks on the containers, with the same combinations as the old ones. Twenty-four-hour surveillance will be put in place, and a SWAT team will sit at the gravel pit while others patrol the area and stay on the lookout.
It’s a long shot.
With the SWAT team in position in Sengeløse, the investigators try to make sense of the other leads. Several pieces of evidence point to Sweden, or at least to a Swedish connection. It turns out that the three Audis from the gravel pit were stolen near Stockholm in May, three months before the robbery.
A security guard at Nokia’s corporate office in Copenhagen’s Sydhavn district, meanwhile, reported seeing something strange on a security camera early on the morning of August 10. A white van with Swedish license plates rolled into the parking lot, and the driver turned off the engine. The security guard zoomed in on the van. The driver, a dark-skinned man wearing a white jacket, got out of the vehicle. A light-skinned man with short dark hair got out of the passenger side and looked around; noticing the surveillance camera, he lifted the plastic sack in his hand and held it awkwardly in front of his face. After abandoning the van, the two men left the parking lot, nodded to each other, and walked off in opposite directions.
When the police take a look at the van, they discover that it was also stolen in Sweden, from a cemetery in Malmö in July. It seems to be the same van that Stine—the bartender who ran into the flaming barricade on her drive home Sunday morning—saw the man in the hoodie climb into after he had spread fire and caltrops onto the freeway.
