Infamous America - BOSTON HEISTS Ep. 1 | Great Brink’s Robbery: “The Perfect Plan”

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

In the mid-1940s, career criminal Anthony Pino sets his sights on robbing Brinks security company. He recruits a team of thieves and they rob armored cars and Brinks clients, but Pino’s ultimate goal is to carry out the big score by robbing the vault at Brinks headquarters. He and his crew spend months planning the job, and, in January of 1950, they commit an historic heist. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.   On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage.   For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, the security profession in the United States is a multi-billion dollar industry. The cost of armored trucks, bank vaults, door locks, personnel, and alarm systems puts $430 billion into the U.S. economy every year. Over 2 million people work in some sectors of the industry, from highly trained guards to humble locksmiths. Many companies are household names, Wells Fargo, Master Lock, and Brinks. Brinks in particular has become one of the largest and most prominent security companies in the nation. Founded in 1859, the company earned a reputation for handling large amounts of cash using armored transportation, first stagecoaches and then fortified trucks. By the end of World War II,

the company was the top mover of cash and valuables under armed guard in most major cities in America. Of course, being a prominent name in protecting valuables doesn't mean Brinks was completely invincible. Wherever a security company like Brinks has something of value to guard, thieves have something they want to steal. In 1948, Brinks Boston headquarters moved into a residential neighborhood off of Prince Street on the north side of town. Many of the small shop owners in the neighborhood complained about the sudden onslaught of Brinks' trucks coming and going. They knew it invited an unwanted criminal element. One of the shop owners was an elderly Italian immigrant named Remo. Remo had a specific issue with Brinks.

Brinks cut into his business. Remo was a locksmith, and for decades, he fixed doors and padlocks for locals in the community. To him, Brinks represented the worst part of his industry, a giant firm running local security experts out of business. Luckily, Remo was able to keep his business afloat. In the fall of 1949, a customer came into Remo's shop with an odd request. Remo appreciated that the man was a fellow Italian immigrant, but quickly realized he had never seen the man in the neighborhood. Still, Remo was happy to hear the stranger out. The customer told Remo that he wanted to strike a deal with the locksmith. The customer was going to need keys made on short notice. If he paid

Rimo extra, would Rimo keep his shop open after normal business hours? Rimo instantly agreed. There were plenty of locksmiths in Boston, and Rimo didn't want his new client to take his extra cash to anyone else. Over the next month, Rimo saw the customer every week, and on each visit, the customer arrived after dark with a single door lock that required a car. key to be made for it. Remo complied and eventually made five unique keys for the customer. What Remo didn't know at the time was that the customer was a man named Anthony Pino, a crafty and successful thief who was well known in Boston's criminal underground. And the keys Remo made would lead to one of the largest heists in American history. From Black Barrel Media, this is

Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling the stories of two of the most infamous heist in American history, both of which happened in Boston, the Great Brinks Robbery of 1950, and the historic art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. This is episode one, The Great Brinks Robbery Part 1, The Perfect Plan. Remo the locksmith gave Anthony Pino the final key sometime in early December, 1949, and Remo had no idea he had just delivered the final item that was needed to pull off the biggest heist in American history up to that time. The Great Brinks robbery proved to be the culmination of a long career of larceny for Anthony Pino, a career that began when he was just a boy.

Anthony Pino was born in Sicily in 1907, but he didn't stay there for long. When he was eight months old, his family emigrated to South Boston. While his parents attempted to achieve the American dream legitimately, Anthony turned to crime. His first arrest was at eight years old. and his first time in court was less than a year later. For the next two decades, Pino devoted his life to crime. That was when he wasn't spending his days in prison. In 1938, he was sentenced to seven years in a Massachusetts state prison for robbery. By then, Pino had spent more than a quarter of his life behind bars,

and he had the literal scars to show for it. His body was covered in scars from gunshot or stab wounds. And it was during that seven-year stretch that the U.S. US government started applying the pressure that drove Pino to organize an historic caper. In 1942, while Pino was in prison, the government discovered that Pino had never formally applied for citizenship. Growing up, he just assumed he was an American citizen, but he wasn't. And as a convicted criminal, Pino was labeled an undesirable and ordered to be deported

back to Sicily. Pino immediately filed an appeal, but his lawyer told him the process could take years to resolve. On September 12th, 1944, Pino was granted parole and he left prison. However, he was still in the midst of his immigration appeal. The legal bills were piling up, and Pino's lawyer constantly reminded him that fighting the government wasn't cheap. Pino didn't want to go back to a place he didn't know, so he returned to a career of small-time

shoplifting to pay his bills. But it wasn't enough. He needed a big score. Unfortunately, big scores were tough to find and tougher to plan, even for someone with special skills like Anthony Pino. Pino had a growing reputation in the Boston underworld as a top case man. He had an excellent memory and a pension for scouting and detailing robberies. If a crew needed someone to case a joint, Pino was the go-to guy.

But his parole complicated things. As a condition for his release, Pino was required to get a legitimate job. A cousin got him an overnight stocking job at a grocery store. The job was fine because it pleased the parole officer, but it ate up precious time that Pino could have used to plan a big score. Ironically, the dead-end job led to Pino's jackpot. About a week into the grocery store job, Pino left his overnight shift at 5 a.m. Since his train wasn't scheduled to arrive until 6 a.m., Pino had some time to kill,

and he took a walk. As he aimlessly strolled around, he found himself near the Boston Chamber of Commerce. Pino rounded the corner and stopped in his tracks. There, in the middle of the street, was a man holding a shotgun. Pino thought he'd stumbled into a robbery. But after the sudden burst of adrenaline, he looked more closely at the scene in front of him. Pino noticed an armored truck parked in an alley next to the Chamber of Commerce. The man with a shotgun was a guard, not a thief.

Pino watched as more guards emerged from the building. They pushed and protected a huge metal box on wheels. The guards loaded the box into the truck, hopped in, and drove off. As the armored truck passed by, Pino saw a name printed on the side, Brinks. Pino was about to walk to the train station when he heard another truck rumbling down the street. It too belonged to Brinks. Then another one passed. Pino ducked into an alley and watched armed guards.

loads seven Brinks trucks with the day's cash deliveries. He assumed there were seven trucks worth of cash in the building that housed the Boston Chamber of Commerce. Anthony Pino had just found his big score. My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night with my mind racing from one thing to another, and then of course I have a brainstorm about something new. That lights the fire and then I'm in real trouble. To calm my mind, the only things that have ever worked with any consistency are sleep gummies. Sleepy Time Advanced Gummies from Mood.com come in various combinations of THC, CBD, and CBN.

So you can get something that's very low in THC, but higher in CBD, which helps turn off the stress, and CBN, which is the thing that makes you sleepy. The brain shuts up, the racing thoughts stop, and it's off to sleep. Mood is federally compliant. The gummies are leaving. and delivered right to your door. At mood.com, get 20% off your first order with our promo code

infamous. Go to mood.com and use the code infamous to get 20% off your first order. And they have a 100-day satisfaction guarantee. Mood.com promo code infamous. The headquarters of the Boston branch of Brink's security company was in the same building as the Boston Chamber of Commerce. Somewhere in that building, Brinks stored money and valuables that it collected from banks and other facilities and then distributed to other banks and other facilities. At the end of 1944, Anthony Pino dedicated himself to robbing it. He knew it was going to be a major job, which meant he was going to have to put together a solid crew. Luckily, Pino had plenty of contacts in Boston's criminal underworld.

He quickly put together a short list of crooks. some guys he had done jobs with in the past, some he met in prison, and some were names he had heard from Boston Street gossip. At the top of the list was Sandy Richardson, an experienced thief and gunman. Pino and Sandy had been friends since they were teenagers, and they had carried out many stick-up jobs together. Pino trusted Sandy implicitly, and he respected Sandy's instincts for casing a job almost as much as his own. Pino approached Sandy about the job and described how they could snag at least a million dollars. Sandy was suspicious. It seemed absurd that so much cash would be so vulnerable. Sandy thought Pino had visions of grandeur.

But a week later, Pino decided he needed to prove he wasn't lying. They went down to the Chamber of Commerce Building so that Sandy could see it for himself. As they watched the armored trucks line up, Sandy became uneasy. He told Pino it was nuts to try to rob Brinks. The company almost certainly spent lots of money on guards and other security measures. He told Pino that what he was proposing wasn't like walking into a business after hours and cracking a safe. But Pino told Sandy to just wait. Over the next few hours, they watched and counted the Brinks guards,

carrying locked canvas satchels and metal boxes in and out of the building. They noted how many Federal Reserve packages were in transit, and how those packages were full of cash fresh off the presses. Sandy saw that the score could be huge. They personally witnessed hundreds of thousands of dollars passed by that morning. But the risk was also huge, and that made Sandy nervous. Pino assured Sandy they would do it right. They'd study every detail until they could pull it off within minutes,

even if it meant taking months to plan. Finally, Sandy agreed. He was in. Over the next several months, Pino and Sandy carried out a series of smaller robberies to bankroll the big one, including cracking a parking garage safe and robbing a woman's lingerie store. In the meantime, they also started adding more men to the crew. The first man they brought in was Pino's brother-in-law, Vincent Costa. Next was an aloof bookie named Adolf Maffy, who went by jazz. He was a friend of Sandys who had a keen eye for detail and cracking safes. Another was a

skilled lock picker named Mike Geegan. In early 1944, thanks to Geegan's skills, the crew pulled off 10 jobs in six days. By the end of the run, they had stolen over $40,000, today worth about $750,000. The money allowed Pino to start buying tools for the big job, hydraulic jacks, welding torches, portable lockpick sets, and tools for breaking windows or wedging open doors. Meanwhile, the crew cased the big score and wore different disguises every time. They were able to scour every floor in the Commerce Building except the heavily guarded fourth floor. They realized that the fourth floor was the Brinks floor, where all the money was stored. The problem was that they could never get inside. Pino called the Brinks Vault the Golden Duff.

and he was dead set on hunting it. But then, things hit a snag. On a dreary Saturday in November 1945, Pino took a shot at looking for the vault. At the time, the second floor of the Commerce building was under construction. So Pino disguised himself as a painter and snuck in. He made his way up the emergency stairwell to the fourth floor doorway and cracked the door open to peek inside. What he saw horrified him. Pino's eyes quickly landed on a guard with a shotgun sitting in a thick glass security box.

The guard was just two feet from the stairwell door. Pino immediately bolted out of the building. Pino had discovered a major setback. With guards so close to the doors, the crew had no way to access the Brinks floor unseen. And if they couldn't get into the Brinks floor, they'd never find the vault. After a year of casing the joint, it looked like the big score was gone. gone. A year had passed since Pino saw the parade of armored trucks that inspired him to commit the big heist against Brinks. Now, in November 1945, it appeared as if it wasn't going to happen.

But Pino couldn't shake it. Beyond the fact that he still needed money for his deportation case, Pino was obsessed with taking millions from Brinks. He just needed to find a new way. The answer came in January 1946. Pino hoped to find a weakness. in Brink's security that he could exploit. One night, he decided to tail an armored truck. Pino followed the truck back to the motor pool garage, and to his surprise, he discovered that the garage was virtually wide open. The only man on site was a janitor cleaning the trucks.

Pino snuck in through the open garage door. As he crept through the garage, he found a rack of keys on the wall. He couldn't believe it. They were the keys to every Brink's armored truck in Boston. If Pino and his crew couldn't take down the big score, they could at least take down a multitude of smaller Brinks scores. After making copies of the keys, Pino and his crew began to case the armored Brinks trucks down to the minute. They followed the trucks from the Chamber of Commerce to the ends of their delivery routes. They identified the number of money packages, guards, and route times.

They also identified which businesses made the most lucrative money drops and then targeted those businesses. For the next two years, Pino and his crew lived large by doing a mix of late night and brazen daylight robberies. The scores piled up, which meant Pino needed to add more men to his crew. Eventually, Pino settled on a rotation of eight men he considered his go-to crew. Two noted thieves who figured heavily into the rotation were Joseph O'Keefe and Stanley Guskiora. The two crooks were known as brutal gunmen and helped with the same. the armed part of armed robberies. Between 1945 and 1947, Pino's robbery business boomed and turned into a well-oiled machine. Sure, it wasn't the Chamber of Commerce job, but he was pulling

in thousands of dollars in cash with little blowback. And by the time Halloween, 1947, seven rolled around, Pino was feeling confident, so confident that he decided to risk large back-to-back robberies. At dawn on October 30th, Pino and three men snuck into the Sturdivant Manufacturing Company, a factory in South Boston's Hyde Park neighborhood. They waited in a stairwell until the Brinks truck made its cash delivery. When the truck arrived and unloaded, Pino's crew burst into the manager's office. With pistols shoved into the faces of nervous employees, Pino and his men seized the payroll. The take was $109,000, or $1.5 million today. At the time, it was the largest robbery ever committed in Boston. But they weren't done.

The next morning, on Halloween, four men from Pino's crew stuck up the American sugar plant in South Boston. Minutes after the Brinks truck made its delivery, the crew kicked in the doors and robbed the place. The hall was only $29,000, but the job was clean and fast. The two brazen robberies became known as the Halloween robberies, and they brought a lot of heat onto Pino and his crew. Despite being so successful over the previous two years, Pino and his guys were well known to Boston police. In fact, the police brought in five of the eight men involved in the Halloween robberies, including Pino. But authorities had no hard evidence to connect them. men, and they were released. Still, it was clear that they were on Boston PD's radar.

With the heat on them after the Halloween robberies, many in Pino's crew didn't want to risk the run-and-gun approach. Most of the easy scores had already been taken, and the last lucrative targets would require more daytime robberies. Besides, most of the guys were happy with the successful string of truck robberies. They pulled in between $600 and $700,000 over $2,000. two years. So throughout 1948, some of the guys refused to work. But Pino wasn't ready to call it quits just yet. He wanted to do one more job, the big one. He still wanted to kill the golden duck. But Pino knew it wasn't going to be the Chamber of Commerce job that he had first envisioned. Instead, he made a different pitch to the crew. Pino wanted to take down the most lucrative

armored truck Brinks had. General Electric's payroll, a score worth over over $2 million. Anthony Pino and his crew knew all about the General Electric payroll, but never bothered going after it because it would have sparked a statewide manhunt. The job was too big and not worth the risk. Just as important, they knew Brinks would certainly change every aspect of their security and the truck routes if it was taken down. Essentially, going after GE's payroll meant early retirement. But that was what Pino was now pitching. Go after the GE payroll and call it quits on robbing Brinks trucks. With $2 million on the line, the crew agreed to one last Brinks heist.

So at the end of 1948 and the beginning of 1949, Pino and his guys cased the GE payroll truck. For two weeks, they followed and took notes and made sure they knew every detail. Finally, at 5.15 a.m. on January 7, 1949, the crew, took their pre-arranged positions and waited near the Chamber of Commerce building for the truck to arrive. They waited and waited and waited, and the truck never showed up. The crew aborted the heist and retreated to its escape vehicle. None of them could understand what had gone wrong. Angry and annoyed, Pino went back to the Brink's motor pool garage to figure out where the GE truck was. When he got there, he discovered that every armored truck was gone. Then he went

went to the Chamber of Commerce building, and he didn't find a single guard in sight. He realized that the Brinks company had moved its entire operation somewhere else, practically overnight. But Pino also knew that while the company may have moved, its customers hadn't. All he had to do was wait for a Brinks truck to make a delivery to a known client, and then follow the truck to the new location. So that's what he did. One day, he trailed a Brinks truck after it made a delivery. When the truck got a to its final destination, Pino discovered the opportunity of a lifetime. The armored truck ended up in a huge garage on Prince Street in Boston's north end. Pino hopped out of his car and climbed a nearby

fence for a better vantage point. From there, he could literally see the Brinks fault. It was on the second floor just above the garage and it was fully visible through the windows, along with the money accounting room. For the next three weeks, Pino cased the garage and building by himself. He hovered in nearby doorways and watched for hours. One day, Pino noticed that the large garage doors had been left open, and he decided to sneak in. He took careful notes about each wall, door, and light fixture. He checked each door for alarm wires, and he noted which doors were locked and which were not. Finally, he took a risk and went up the stairs to the third floor, just above Brinks. As Pino climbed the stairs, he was shocked at how light the security seemed to be.

He didn't see a single guard or garage attendant. But the lack of security also made him nervous. He didn't understand how the top security company in Boston could move into such an unsecure location. Even more surprising, he noticed that the door locks were a bargain brand, the cheapest on the market and easily picked. Pino escaped without being detected. After another month of solo casing, he returned to his crew with a full report. Many were skeptical. They knew he'd been obsessed with Brinks for years, and most were convinced that they didn't need to

take down the vault. But Pino was adamant. He said the list of security weaknesses was staggering. cheap locks, very few guards, dim lighting that cast huge shadows which the robbers could use for cover, and every door was unlocked or wide open all the way up to the vault. But Pino didn't want to take any chances. Throughout in 1949, the crew watched the Prince Street building and the Brinks operation. They learned the schedules of the guards and the secretaries. They clocked shift changes, personnel habits, and the precise moments of the big and the biggest. security lapses. They consistently snuck in and examined the offices. Nearly all of their

recon missions occurred in the evening after the trucks had made their deliveries. On each visit, Pino pulled the lock out of a door and took it with him for about an hour. He had found a local locksmith named a Remo who was willing to stay open late and make keys for the locks for little extra money and no questions asked. Rimo was happy with the business, especially since Brinks had been taking some of his business since moving into the neighborhood. In September, as the recon operation progressed, Pino learned his deportation case had been thrown out. He was no longer in danger of being forced to leave America. He had started robbing armored cars in order to raise money to fight his case, and now that reason was gone. But there was no

way he was going to call off the Brinks robbery. By December 1949, Anthony Pino had keys for every door between the street and the vault room. There was nothing standing in their way, and it was time to do it. Around 7 p.m. on January 17, 1950, Pino and seven members of the crew arrived at a predetermined location in Roxbury, a neighborhood about four miles south of Prince Street. Awaiting Pino and the others was a green Ford truck, and inside the truck was Joseph Banfield,

a recent addition to the crew who would be the truck driver. Once everyone was ready, they hopped into the back of the truck and Banfield drove toward the Brinks building. While heading to 165 Prince Street, Pino handed out 38 caliber revolvers and disguises. Each man wore a navy peacoat, a chauffeur's hat and gloves, and a rubber Halloween mask. One of the Halloween masks was a recreation of DC Comics character Captain Marvel, but on the robber, it looked like something out of a horror film. When the crew arrived at Prince Street, the truck parked at a nearby playground. There, the robbers waited for the signal.

Across the street from the Brinks building, Vincent Costa sat on a roof and watched the offices. Sometime around 7.10 p.m., Costa liked what he saw. He turned to the men below and signaled them with a flashlight. Seven thieves walked through the park toward the Brinks building. Pino and Banfield stayed behind. From a distance, Pino won. watched as the men approached the door to the building, unlocked it using one of the keys from Remo, and disappeared inside. In the building, the masked robbers quickly and quietly made their way through the first floor and up the stairs to the second floor.

Their knowledge of the layout and the keys from Remo allowed them to move with lightning speed. When they got to the door that led them into the Brinks office, they paused. A few of the men readied their pistols, while the others prepared rope and tape to secure. the employees. When they were ready, the seven robbers burst into the office and found five employees who were finishing the day's work. The employees, including a cashier named Thomas Lloyd, were lugging sacks of cash and checks into the vault. They were completely taken by surprise, and the vault door stood wide open. The robbers aimed their guns at the employees, tied their hands with rope, gagged them with tape, and shoved them to the ground. In a matter of seconds,

Everyone who could have stopped the robbery or sounded the alarm was out of action. With the Brinks employees subdued, the thieves quickly filled several canvas bags with cash and other loot. As they filled the bags, one of the thieves stumbled upon a metal box, which contained General Electric's payroll, the prize that was supposed to signal early retirement a year earlier. The men attempted to break it open, but they didn't bring the proper tools. Once the robbers had their canvas bags filled, they rushed out of the building. When they got to the street, Pino and Bannfield were waiting for them with the truck. As quickly as possible, the robbers loaded the bags into the back of the truck, hopped in,

and drove off. From start to finish, the robbery had taken roughly 20 minutes. In 20 minutes, Pino and his crew set a record. They stole about $1.3 million in cash and about $1.4 million.4.4.5.5. $25 million in checks and other valuables for a total of $2.8 million worth of loot. The cash alone would be the equivalent of stealing $17 million today. As the gang of thieves rode off into the Boston night, their work was only half done. They would need to get rid of the evidence, hide some of the money, and scatter across the

city to start setting up alibis in case the police came knocking. The robbery had been shockingly easy, even with the extensive planning. But the getaway would be much, much harder. Next time on Infamous America, as the thieves lay low, the FBI launches the biggest manhunt for a gang of robbers since the days of John Dillinger. Eventually, time and pressure eat away at the robbers, and they begin to turn on each other.

It all comes crashing down, though the FBI can't celebrate a complete victory as a mystery still hangs over the case to this day. That's next week on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com.

Memberships are just $5 per month. This episode was researched and written by Andrew Messer. It was produced by Joe Garrow, original music by Rob. Villeer. I'm Chris Wimmer. Thanks for listening.