‘Apparently, they were prepared to stay in the vault all weekend but had to leave in a hurry.’

It was not your run-of-the-mill burglary.

Whoever broke into the Bank of America branch near Beverly Hills last August did it the hard way: They tunneled about 60 feet to a point underneath the bank, then drilled upthrough nearly 4 feet of concrete flooring to get to the money vault.

The burrowing burglars made off with $91,000. The detectives assigned to catch them have not been so lucky.

“We’re still not without things to do on the case; it’s still active,” said Los Angeles Police Lt. Doug Collisson, but he added that there have been no promising leads in a while.

Investigators, he said, have no real suspects in the case.

The burglars apparently dropped through a manhole and into a storm drain beneath La Cienega Boulevard, from which they tunneled toward the bank at 8501 Pico Blvd. Once inside, they ransacked several cash carts, then jumped back into the shaft after setting off alarms Saturday morning, Aug. 22, 1987.

When bank security personnel responded and opened the vault, they discovered the hole in the floor along with tools, food and clothing.

“Apparently, they were prepared to stay in the vault all weekend but had to leave in a hurry,” a bank spokesman said. “There was money scattered all over the place.”

Inside the vault, investigators found lighting equipment, a generator and assorted cutting tools, including a diamond-tipped drill that chewed through the bank floor to produce a perfectly round 18-inch hole in the center of the vault.

One sanitation worker said the tunnel was tall enough for a man to walk through upright and was shored up with wood planking.

“This was no wormhole,” Collisson said at the time.

Four days later, while combing nearby storm drains for evidence, LAPD detectives found another tunnel--this one 100 feet long--leading toward a Union Federal Savings & Loan Assn. branch at Wilshire and La Cienega boulevards.

The shaft apparently had been abandoned several feet before it reached the savings and loan building.

Detectives have speculated that the burglars who tunneled into the Bank of America vault may have been responsible for a similar 1986 heist in which $190,000 was taken from a First Interstate branch in Hollywood.