Masterminds

Eddie Antar is the father of electronics super store chains... and the mastermind behind the biggest retail fraud in American history.

Blane Nordhal was a sterling silver expert... especially when it came to stealing it. Cutting a swath all over the northeastern seaboard of the United States, he targeted the wealthiest homes and plundered their silver heirlooms to the tune of millions of dollars.

There is some doubt that Jonathan Tokeley-Parry was the swashbuckling, British Army cavalry officer he claimed to be. But there is no doubt that he was the world's most successful smuggler of priceless Egyptian antiquities.

Steven Hadley was a John Deere Credit Union branch manager in the folksy community of Waterloo, Iowa. A devoted family man, respected employee, and mild mannered gentleman, he was the last person anyone could imagine robbing a bank.

Jerry Clemente was a brave and decorated officer on the Medford, Massachusetts police force. He was also the mastermind behind the most audacious bank heist the country had ever seen.

Hoa Lam Ong wore an ever present grin on his face; hence the nickname "Smiley." Police suggest the fifteen million dollars worth of goods he stole from the cargo warehouses of Toronto's Pearson Airport gave him plenty to smile about.

While a kid growing up in a low rent Kansas neighborhood, Aaron Rogers was the guy all his buddies looked up to. As an adult, Rogers recruited these same childhood buddies to help him rob credit unions throughout the city and make off with millions.

In the early 1980's, Rik Luytjes gained two sterling reputations. One was as an upstanding businessman and pillar of the community in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The other was as the most successful cocaine smuggler in US history.

Rail freight is a forty billion dollar a year industry. But in the late 1990's, trains pulling into New York discovered millions in freight missing, thanks to Edward Mongon and his criminal posse.

A former Chinese intelligence officer posed as a struggling immigrant in Brooklyn and led the most successful car theft ring the city had ever seen, and lined his pockets with over forty million dollars.

Gilbert Galvan was known as a charming traveling salesman living in small town Ontario. No one - not even his wife - suspected that he was really the slickest and most successful bank robber Canada had ever known.

Steven Jory was the most successful counterfeiter England had ever seen. Starting in the late nineties, he flooded the British market with fifty million pounds-the equivalent of one hundred million American dollars. Never had authorities seen such perfect forgeries.

Philip Noel Johnson was paid seven dollars an hour as an armored car driver for Loomis Fargo in Jacksonville, Florida. He gave himself a significant raise on March 29, 1997, when he stole nineteen million dollars from the Loomis Fargo cash depot.

On the morning of June 27, 1995, German police responded to a hostage taking at the Commerzbank in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf. Sixteen people were being held by four gunmen, who demanded $17 million in ransom and a helicopter to escape in.

The obsession that led to Stephen Blumberg stealing $40 million worth of rare books from libraries.