29 July: a tale of two robberies — one successful, one… less so. The first was of $180,000 from Led Zeppelin — specifically, that amount in cash from a safety deposit box at New York’s Drake Hotel on the eve of the finale of their three-night run at Madison Square Garden.
Led Zeppelin’s 33-date 1973 US tour had broken attendance records, and featured a hired jet with
It was not the only way in which the tour was unrestrained. Far Out magazine says the band’s managers “told detectives that they kept the cash at hand because they had ‘a lot of expenses to pay’”, which is one way of putting ‘shitloads of drugs’, I suppose.
Anyway, road manager Richard Cole apparently told police he’d deposited the money “in new $100 bills” after the first two concerts, and “at 1:20 A.M. Sunday … withdrew $1,200 for [*ahem*] various band expenses”.
At 7.15 or 7.30pm, he discovered the money gone and called the police, who searched the hotel — presumably after “Cole, the FBI’s primary suspect, combed the band’s rooms, scrubbing them of drugs. There was plenty for him to worry about”
According to a contemporary report in the New York Times,
The boxes are made so that only a guest with his key and a hotel employee with a hotel key together can open the box.
Cole held the key.
Because there were no signs that the strongbox had been broken into, detectives theorized that someone might have taken Mr. Cole’s key at a band party early Sunday morning, used it to open the box and then surreptitiously returned the key.
The crime remains unsolved, and the equivalent of over $1.2m remains unaccounted for today. (Mind you, the tour brought in over $4m then — around $27.5m now — so I guess they got by.) And a 2021 book has a theory:
Now, you might think that’s obviously a very silly theory. A band ripped off by their own management? That never happens. But Grant was, apparently famous for being (a) quite scary, and (b) fiercely loyal to the band, so who knows?
The other robbery…
…took place — apparently — on this day in 2001 in the less glamorous surroundings of a York newsagent, when Thomas Rathbone and an unnamed associate pulled woolly hats over their faces and barged in brandishing a crowbar.
Unfortunately, they’d been drinking, smoking weed and taking ecstasy the night before and hadn’t… fully formulated a plan, let’s say. They couldn’t see through the hats, and
The shop’s CCTV camera footage … showed the pair bumbling around blindly
As the Guardian put it, they saved the best for last:
Finally, in frustration, they made the cardinal mistake of pulling off their masks to get their bearings in front of the security camera.
Otherwise, though, this crime did successfully pay. They left the shop with three packs of cigarettes, valued at £11.58. And each got 12 months.
(Full disclosure: I was told this was the date this happened by Sam Jordison’s Annus Horribilis — a chronicle of comic mishaps, but that is the only source I could find which gives this specific date, and I was unable to independently verify this. Still, it’s funny, so…)
