Police Recover $8 Million Stolen From Plane in Rio

Brazilian police today arrested four men and recovered virtually all of the $8 million that disappeared last month from a Brink’s shipment en route from New York to Argentina.

A Brink’s official said the men thought they were stealing videocassettes when they took two bags from a Brink’s shipment Feb. 4 and that police accidentally found the stolen money while on a drug case.

“We have the men and we have the money,” Police Inspector Jorge Jose Marques said.

Marques said the men in custody are four Brazilians in their early 20s.

The suspects worked for a baggage-handling company at the Rio airport where the shipment changed planes Feb. 4, Marques said. The robbery occurred as Brink’s was transporting $52 million in cash from the New York Federal Reserve to the Central Bank of Argentina.

“It wasn’t really a planned job,” Marques said. “They didn’t know what was in the bags when they stole them and they spent very little of the money. I think they really didn’t know what to do with it all.”

Marques said the four men “all lived in reasonable houses and drove cars,” indicating that they are middle-class Brazilians. They have no previous criminal record, he said.

Asked whether the men have confessed, Marques said, “They hardly need to. We caught them with the evidence red-handed. Where else is someone going to get $8 million?”

Brink’s spokesman Marvin Moss said the men thought they were taking two sacks of videocassettes when they stole the money.

A Brink’s guard was on the plane and a Brink’s security detail was there to transfer the bags of cash to another jet for the flight a couple of hours later to Buenos Aires.

Somehow, two sacks of money were separated from the rest of the shipment, but the loss was not discovered until the plane touched down in Argentina.

Brazilian drug agents, alerted by reports that several people were using crisp $100 bills to buy narcotics in Rio, raided a home there early today thinking they were onto a big drug ring.

What they found, however, was nearly $8 million in cash, Moss said.