10 Smartest Criminal Masterminds In History.

When we think of criminal masterminds, fictional characters like Sergio Marquina popularly known as The Professor in the Netflix series Money Heist come to mind. Individuals who spent a lot of their time working out how to get away with what could be regarded as the most perfect crimes in history. What if I tell you people like that exist in history, without much ado, here are the 5 smartest criminal masterminds in history.

1. Leonardo Notarbartolo

Leonardo Notarbartolo is the leader of a ring of Italian thieves called “La Scuola di Torino” (The School of Turin). He was also responsible for organizing and leading the Antwerp diamond heist in 2003, the largest diamond heist of all time.

The group stole loose diamonds, gold, silver, and other types of jewelry valued at more than $100 million. The heist which took place in Antwerp, Belgium, during the weekend of 15–16 February 2003, was classified to be one of the largest robberies in history.

Although the heist was successful, Notarbartolo alone was caught after a member of the team identified as Speedy disposed of the evidence poorly. He was found guilty of orchestrating the heist and was sentenced to 10 years in prison but was released on parole in 2009. Also, none of the stolen diamonds was recovered.

2. Gerald Blanchard

Gerald Blanchard is a Canadian thief, described by the police as Canada’s ‘most sophisticated’ criminal mastermind and no doubt one of the smartest criminal minds in history.  He is best known for orchestrating complex frauds and heists on three continents, most notably the Star of Empress Sisi heist.

In 1998, Blanchard stole the Star of Empress Sisi, one of 27 diamond-and-pearl hair ornaments worn by Elisabeth of Bavaria, consort of Francis Joseph I, from the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, Austria. Police thought that accompanied by his wife and father-in-law posing as tourists, Blanchard disabled the alarm and replaced the jewel with a replica purchased at the souvenir shop.

It took two weeks before the swap was discovered. The loss of a priceless part of Austria’s history remained unsolved until Blanchard offered to turn the jewel over to police following his arrest in Canada on fraud and robbery charges for cleaning out financial institutions at night without using any violence.

Blanchard pleaded guilty at the Court of Queen’s Bench of Manitoba on 7 November 2007 to sixteen charges of robbery and fraud in Canada and elsewhere in the world. Blanchard faced a maximum of 164 years in prison for the sixteen charges to which he pleaded guilty but was sentenced to just eight years in a Canadian prison.

3. Carl Gugasian

Carl Gugasian is an American bank robber and probably the most educated criminal of all time, with a Ph.D. in probability and statistics. He is considered by many the most prolific criminal in US history, having robbed more than 50 banks over a 30-year period for a total of more than $2 million.

According to Wikipedia, Carl has been notorious since he was a teenager. He was shot while attempting to rob a candy store at the age of 15 and was sent to the State Youth Facility for eighteen months. After his release in 1964, he did not attempt to live a normal life; rather, he took deliberate steps to continue with a life of crime and excel in it.

Carl’s robberies were meticulously planned and executed. He carried out the robberies on Friday nights just before closing time, believing this minimized the number of customers present and maximized the cash on hand. He was however arrested in 2002 after 2 boys found the plans and equipment for his robberies hidden in a concrete drainage pipe.

4. Victor Lustig

Victor Lustig was a highly skilled con artist from Austria-Hungary and no doubt one of the smartest criminal masterminds in history. He is widely regarded as one of the most notorious con artists of his time and is infamous for being “the man who sold the Eiffel Tower twice” and for conducting the “Rumanian Box” scam.

Lustig applied both his education and his fluency in several languages to embark on a life of crime, that involved conducting scams across Europe and the United States during the early 20th century, which provided him with property and money.

He was however arrested in 1935, after masterminding a counterfeit banknote operation so vast that it threatened to shake confidence in the American economy. Thanks to his mistress, Billy May, who learned that he was betraying her for a younger woman, and decided to take revenge by placing an anonymous phone call to the federal authorities.

5. Adam Worth

Adam Worth was a crime boss and fraudster. His career in crime, stretching from the United States to Europe and South Africa, included the infamous theft of Gainsborough’s celebrated Portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, which he retained for 25 years. Scotland Yard Detective Robert Anderson nicknamed him “the Napoleon of the criminal world”.

Worth began his criminal career as a pickpocket after serving in the American Civil War, he founded his own gang of pickpockets and then began to organize robberies and heists. When he was caught stealing the cash box of an Adams Express wagon, he was sentenced to three years in Sing Sing prison. He soon escaped and resumed his criminal career, working for Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum. With her help, he expanded into bank and store robberies around 1866 and eventually began to plan his own robberies.

Worth alongside  Charley Bullard, robbed the vault of the Boylston National Bank in Boston on 20 November 1869. The duo then moved to Europe, where they carried out numerous Criminal exploits. In London,  he formed his own criminal network and organized major robberies and burglaries through several intermediaries. Those who worked in his schemes never knew his name. He insisted that his subordinates not use violence.

In 1982, Worth improvised a robbery of a money delivery cart in Belgium with two untried associates. The robbery went badly, and the police captured Worth on the spot. He was tried and sentenced to was sentenced to seven years in Belgium prison for robbery. Worth was released early for good behavior in 1897. He returned to London, where he carried out a few robberies, before eventually settling with his children.

6. Natwarlal

Natwarlal born Mithilesh Kumar Srivastava was an Indian fraudster known for his high-profile crimes and prison escapes, including selling the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, the Rashtrapati Bhavan, and the Parliament House of India repeatedly.

According to a report, He is said to have duped hundreds of people using more than fifty aliases to disguise himself. Natwarlal was also proficient in forging the signatures of famous personalities. He is said to have supposedly cheated a number of industrialists including the Tatas, the Birlas, and Dhirubhai Ambani, taking from them huge sums of money.

He often used novel ideas to cheat people, such as one instance in the 1950s where he swindled the Punjab National Bank out of 6.5 lakhs of rupees in a scam involving rail freight and bags of rice. By the time of his death, he was wanted in more than 100 cases of identity theft and forgery.

7. Albert Spaggiari

Albert Spaggiari was a notoriously clever French bank robber. He is popularly known as the organizer of a break-in into a Société Générale bank in Nice, France, in July 1976.  After hearing that the sewers were close to the vault of the bank in, he began to plan a break-in into the bank by digging into the bank vault from below.

On 16 July 1976, during the long weekend of Bastille Day, Spaggiari’s gang broke into the vault itself. They opened 400 safe deposit boxes and stole an estimated 30–100 million francs worth of money, securities, and valuables. It was the largest heist in the history of bank robberies to that date

Spaggiari eventually got caught, thanks to the implication from one of the team members, who got exposed by his former girlfriend. He however managed to escape by confusing the judge with a fake piece of evidence, before jumping out of the window onto a planted motorbike. He was never seen again!

8. Anthony Curcio

Anthony Curcio is a former American criminal and one of the smartest Criminal masterminds in the world. He is responsible for one of the most elaborately planned armored car heists in U.S. history. After running an unsuccessful gambling business, Anthony decided to live a life of crime, a decision further influenced by his drug addiction.

By his mid-20s, Curcio had already organized several high-dollar thefts, scams, and loan-sharking schemes, and was also behind a sports memorabilia counterfeiting ring. A report has it that Curcio continued to maintain an outward appearance that resembled a successful business owner and family man while carrying out his illegal activity.

His most notable exploit of robbing the Bank Of America took place after observing a Brink’s armored car as it made deliveries to the Bank of America branch in Monroe for three months. As part of the heist, Curcio placed an ad on Craigslist a few days before the robbery. His ad instructed the workers to assemble close to the bank around the time of the heist. Anthony then robbed the bank and fled the scene disguised as a construction worker himself!

Curcio was eventually arrested after a month when a homeless man reported to police that several weeks before the robbery he had seen a man drive up to the Bank of America parking lot and retrieve a disguise from behind a trash bin. The man found it suspicious enough to write down the license plate number of the car which he later provided to the police. The car was registered to Curcio

9. Jonathan Wild

Jonathan Wild, was a London underworld figure notable for operating on both sides of the law, posing as a public-spirited vigilante entitled the “Thief-Taker General”. He simultaneously ran a significant criminal empire and used his crimefighting role to remove rivals and launder the proceeds of his own crimes.

Wild exploited a strong public demand for action during a major 18th-century crime wave in the absence of any effective police force in London. As a powerful gang leader himself, he became a master manipulator of legal systems, collecting the rewards offered for valuables that he had stolen himself, bribing prison guards to release his colleagues, and blackmailing any who crossed him. Wild was consulted on crime by the government due to his apparently remarkable prowess in locating stolen items and those who had stolen them.

Wild was responsible for the arrest and execution of Jack Sheppard, a petty thief, and burglar who had won the public’s affection as a lovable rogue. However, Wild’s duplicity became known and his men began to give evidence against him. After a suicide attempt, he was hanged at Tyburn before a massive crowd.

10. Jeffrey Allen Manchester

Jeffrey Allen Manchester is an American convicted spree-robber and former United States Army Reserve officer known as the ‘Rooftop Robber’  due to his modus operandi of entering his targets (most commonly McDonald’s locations) by drilling through the roof and dropping in. He began his criminality in November 1998, robbing chiefly McDonald’s locations across the United States.

His modus operandi consisted of meticulous planning and observation before drilling, hacking, or sawing through the roof of the target building during the night or the early hours of the morning and waiting, often in a restroom, for the morning shift workers to come in. Once Manchester believed normal activities had begun, he would storm out of the bathroom carrying a firearm and hold up employees before ushering them into the freezer, locking them inside while he robbed the cash registers

Throughout his robberies, Manchester would maintain a very gentle and cordial demeanor, almost never resorting to violence throughout his estimated 40–60 robberies across the country, with some victims stating he had suggested donning a coat before entering the freezer. He was apprehended by North Carolina police officials on May 20, 2000,  and was sentenced to sentenced to 45 years in prison after being convicted of two robberies

He however escaped from incarceration at the Brown Creek Correctional Institute in North Carolina. The following year  Manchester devised an elaborate plan to take over and rob Toys “R” Us in his biggest robbery to date. On the morning of December 26, Manchester robbed the Toys “R” Us, taking an unknown amount of cash before being forced to flee after two employees escaped to call the police. Manchester was however recaptured and was sentenced to upwards of 40 years in prison after he was found guilty of numerous charges.