NOW YOU SEE THEM, NOW YOU DON'T

An elite squad of criminals was convicted for the theft of $130 million in jewels. Was getting caught the cost of doing business or just the beginning of the Great Green Vault Grift?

- JESSE HYDE

The heist had been planned for months. They had run through the scenarios, studied the streets and bridges and tunnels, scouted the escape routes, purchased the burner phones, and secured the getaway cars. Most important, they had uncovered secrets about the museum. It was November 25, 2019, in Dresden, Germany. The night was dark and cold, the air carrying the musky scent of the nearby Elbe River. Three centuries earlier, Augustus the Strong had built his palace on the banks of the river and stuffed it full of jewels: mother-of-pearl goblets, gilded ostrich eggs, coconuts inlaid with gemstones, and knives of gold etched with wild boars and the heads of lions. Rooms and rooms of sapphires, emeralds, and rubies.

By 1723, Augustus, the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, had turned part of his Dresden castle into a museum, one of the first in Europe. He named it the Green Vault. During World War II the Allies bombed it to rubble, but the state of Saxony restored it in the 1990s to look the way it did during the reign of Augustus: a towering edifice of white stone and brick that was one of the richest treasure chests on the continent.

At 4:55 a.m. the lights went out around the castle. An electrical fire at the Augustus Bridge had plunged the neighborhood into darkness, dimming the view of the security cameras inside the museum. Two hooded men in black slipped through a window on the first floor. Using flashlights, they moved quickly through the shadows of the vaulted antechambers, past mirrored walls and a dizzying array of marvels-sea snails set in silver, bowls of amber and crystal, plates of turtle shells, and a golden owl with a diamond collar. And then: jackpot. They arrived at the Chamber of Jewels.