The Heist

Description

One Friday evening in October 1984, a security truck pulled into the car park of the Foodtown supermarket in the Auckland suburb of Birkenhead. It had already made a few stops at other supermarkets that day, so there was plenty of cash on board. A few minutes later, as the security guards emerged from the supermarket carrying the day's takings, a white van skidded to a halt, narrowly missing one of them. Three armed men piled out of the van, and within three minutes, they had stolen $294, 524 (the equivalent of over $1.1 million today). The investigation that followed the heist soon fanned out from the North Shore suburbs to greater Auckland, into Northland and then across the Tasman to Sydney. Along the way, it shined a light on the activities of several well-known figures in New Zealand's criminal underworld, wo between them had links to at last three unsolved murders. In The Heist, Scott Bainbridge recounts a classic true-crime tale drawn together from his extensive research and interviews with several of the key players - including both cops and robbers!

Author description

Scott Bainbridge is one of New Zealand's foremost investigative true-crime authors. His books Without Trace and Still Missing inspired the acclaimed TVNZ series The Missing, and his book The Fix was shortlisted for the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Non Fiction crime writing. The Heist is his tenth book.