The Bank Job that Sparked The Bosch Series
You could argue that the Los Angeles Times crime story that changed Michael Connelly’s life was one he didn’t even write.
In fact, Connelly wasn’t even working for the L.A. broadsheet at the time. He interviewed for his job at the newspaper the day the story was published.
Years before he was one of the world’s great crime writers, Connelly left the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel in Florida to join the L.A. Times as a police reporter in September, 1987. On Aug. 22, just weeks before he moved to California, a group of thieves tunneled their way into a Bank of America vault in Beverly Hills.
It was an audacious caper, carried out by a team of skilled technicians who were familiar with the 3,000 miles of storm sewers that run beneath Los Angeles. Some of these waterways are big enough to drive ATVs through, which is what the crooks did.
Los Angeles police estimated the burglars – who they dubbed the Hole in the Ground Gang – spent four to five weeks cutting through a drain and building a 60-foot tunnel supported by timbers. The burglars dragged a gas-powered generator and special drill through the tunnel, positioning the drill directly beneath the bank’s vault. It produced a perfectly round 18-inch hole in the concrete-and-steel vault floor.
“This was no wormhole or anything,” Los Angeles Police Lt. Doug Collisson told the Times’ reporter David Freed. He added that the burglars “would have had to require some knowledge of soil composition and technical engineering. The way the shaft itself was constructed, it was obviously well-researched and extremely sophisticated.”
Two things were kept from reporters at the time. First, a bank manager had checked on the bank shortly after the burglars entered the vault, so they had to dash with only $98,000 of the bank’s cash. They hadn’t had time to go through the safe deposit boxes in the vault. The second thing was that investigators found a second tunnel leading to the vault of a neighboring savings and loan. The thieves were planning to hit two financial institutions in one weekend.
“We estimated that if they’d been able to pull off both jobs, taking the bank cash and hitting all the safe deposit boxes . . . they could have got away with a face-value take of anywhere from $10 to $25 million,” William J. Rehder, an FBI agent who was one of the investigators on the case, and veteran journalist Gordon Dillow wrote in their book, Where the Money Is. “It could have been the biggest bank burglary in the history of the world.”
What struck the half-dozen LAPD detectives and the FBI agents assigned to the robbery was how starkly it resembled a similar job a year earlier.
In June 1986, a group of burglars tunneled under a First Interstate Bank at Spaulding Avenue and Sunset Boulevard. Over the course of weeks or months, they had made a hole in a drain pipe (which they covered with plywood and fresh mortar each time they left) then tunneled 100 feet to the base of the vault. The cops estimated they had moved out about 1,500 wheelbarrows of dirt. They got rid of the 3,000 cubic feet of dirt by building dams in the storm sewers, creating little lakes. When they opened the dams, the rush of water was strong enough to carry away the dirt.
They cut a 20-by-25-inch hole in the bottom of the vault, escaping with about $172,000 in cash and the contents of more than 100 safe deposit boxes. The owners of the safe deposit boxes claimed the boxes contained about $2 million in bonds, cash, jewels and even a sketch of a young girl by the Fauvist master Henri Matisse. Of course, no one but the owners knew what was in the safe deposit boxes, so the cops and the insurers made them list the missing items in front of a representative of the Internal Revenue Service to encourage truthfulness.
When Connelly interviewed with the Times in August 1987, the editor handed the new reporter a copy of that day’s paper and gave him 15 minutes to devise a plan to follow the main story of the day. That story was the Bank of America tunnel caper, and they must have liked what Connelly said, because they hired him.
The crime positioned Connelly to report on the Los Angeles Police Department and planted the seed that would blossom into his first novel, The Black Echo.
“I’d had an epiphany: I would write about a detective who has a recurring dream of tunnels, who has experience in those tunnels and whose past informs his present,” said Connelly in his tiny ebook Hieronymus Bosch: A Mysterious Profile. “Now, the tendrils of my life were coming together, and I felt that at last I had the true baseline for a character and story that could travel the distance and be published, and live on in readers’ imaginations.”
Having already shelved two novels, Connelly spent evenings and weekends writing the tale of an LAPD detective investigating the murder of a Vietnam vet suspected of helping thieves to tunnel into a bank vault.
Though he had a clean slate for his new story, he borrowed heavily from the actual bank job. There was some scuttlebutt among the investigators that the gang that had ripped off the BofA and First Interstate were tunnel rats from the Vietnam war, and that became the pillar of Connelly’s story. As in the actual heist, Connelly had the gang coming back to hit the second bank a year after the first job. And in fiction and reality, the crooks went after safe deposit boxes as well as cash.
The big difference between the real and fictional gangs is that only one had Harry Bosch on their tail. Bosch, of course, cracked the case in his first book, but the real-life Hole in the Ground Gang was never caught. You’ve got to imagine, in some dive in L.A. in 1992, they had a good laugh about some guy from the Times using their caper in his cop novel.
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Hi, I’m Peter Moreira, author of The Haight Mystery Series, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you want to receive my blogs regularly, please sign up for the mailing list at my website by clicking here. As well as regular blogs about Michael Connelly and other crime fiction writers, you’ll receive The Ashbury Hideaway, a free novella in ebook format. In this prequel to The Haight Mystery Series, Jimmy Spracklin’s teenage daughter runs away to Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love, and he has to find her before she disappears for good.
The Haight Mystery Series is set in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in the late 1960s. Each book is a whodunnit with hippies. Described as ‘Gritty and Groovy” (Tampa Bay author George L. Fleming) and “Fabulous” (Pamela Callow, author of the Kate Lange series), the Haight books chronicle the investigations of SFPD Lieutenant Jimmy Spracklin into homicides in the hippie enclave. If you’re nostalgic for the 1960s, fond of San Francisco or just love great page-turners with strong characters, check out The Ashbury Hideaway. I hope you enjoy the novella enough to move on to the five novels (so far) in the series.
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