With news breaking about a burglary of $30 million in cash from a Sylmar facility on the night of Easter Sunday, some are wondering - why is all that money being stashed at a seemingly random, nondescript building in the first place?
KNX News Chief Correspondent Charles Feldman spoke with Eugene Gerstein, a managing partner of INKAS, a firm that consults on how to move large quantities of cash safely.
"The reason is banks are loath to accept cash," Gerstein said..."Banks don't want your cash because banks are afraid of liability."
Gerstein believes many people would be surprised to learn that the Sylmar facility is just one of thousands of similar locations throughout North America.
Their purpose, according to Gerstein, is to "Collect cash from different locations, store it, and then move it into banks in smaller quantities."
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For example, INKAS currently manufactures armored vehicles and cash-in-transit vehicles, but at one point, it operated a facility like the one in Sylmar. Gerstein said during that time, the company would send drivers to collect from ATMs and bring the money to "one of those nondescript buildings."
Is this the most intelligent way to store large sums of money? Gerstein said, "The attitude is from an insurance standpoint, those nondescript buildings need to have, impregnable volts. It's got to be Fort Knox style," and evidently, Gerstein said, more often than not...it's not.
To pull off the heist, the thieves had to climb onto the roof, cut their way inside the building, and get into the vault ... all while avoiding tripping any alarms or raising any awareness in the surrounding neighborhood.
If this sounds like an inside job to you, you're in good company. J.J. Klaver, a 26-year veteran of the FBI, tells KNX News he believes there is likely an inside element to it.
Inside help or not, walking away with $30 million in cold, hard cash is no easy feat, but they did it. So, now out in the world with their ill-gotten gains, how do the criminals "clean" their dirty money?
To help answer that question Charles Feldman spoke with former financial crimes investigator for the FBI David Shapiro.
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