Feared Remmo Clan Listed as Suspects in Dutch Heist
Spectacular robbery at a bank in Berlin
In October 2014, a member of the Remmo clan, along with several accomplices, broke into a Sparkasse bank branch in Berlin. To eliminate any potential evidence of the heist, the criminals set fire to the branch.
However, this caused an explosion, injuring the clan member and allowing his DNA traces to be identified at the crime scene. Wanted internationally with an arrest warrant, the man was arrested in Rome in January 2015 and handed over to German authorities.
That same year, he was sentenced to eight years in prison. Since December 2017, he has been serving an open detention regime. Neither the accomplices involved in the robbery nor the stolen goods, valued at 9.16 million euros, have been recovered, according to the local newspaper B.Z. from Berlin.
The theft of the “Big Maple Leaf” coin
One of the most famous robberies attributed to the Remmo clan took place in March 2017 when a 100-kilogram gold coin, known as the “Big Maple Leaf,” was stolen from the Bode Museum in Berlin.
Ten years earlier, the “Big Maple Leaf” was recognized by the Guinness World Records not only as the largest gold coin in the world but also for its 99.999% gold purity. A set of five such coins was produced by the Royal Canadian Mint (RCM) in 2007 at its Ottawa facility, where the first BML coin produced remains in storage.
The stolen coin from the Berlin museum, valued at approximately 3.75 million euros, has never been recovered and is believed to have been melted down to be sold on the black market. In 2017, a prosecutor attributed over 1,000 crimes to the Remmo family, primarily burglaries and thefts, with a total damage value exceeding 28 million euros.
On February 20, 2020, the Berlin Regional Court found brothers Wissam and Ahmed Remmo guilty of theft, each receiving a sentence of four and a half years in prison. Another defendant, a former security guard who accompanied Ahmed Remmo, was sentenced to three years and four months in prison, according to Die Welt.
The Remmo Clan Involved in the “Heist of the Century”
In November 2019, members of the Remmo clan carried out another large-scale robbery, this time at the Grüne Gewölbe Museum in Dresden, the administrative capital of the Saxony region.
Numerous pieces of jewelry, adorned with over 4,000 diamonds and other precious stones, were stolen, causing an initial estimated damage of over one billion euros, according to museum representatives.
“It wasn’t just the gallery that was robbed, but all Saxons,” Michael Kretschmer, visibly upset, told reporters at the time. Grüne Gewölbe has 10 rooms displaying over 3,000 objects, ranging from jewelry to renowned masterpieces.
The German press referred to the theft as “the heist of the century,” with the damage being unprecedented for museums since the end of World War II.
To cover their tracks, the thieves set fire to an electrical distribution box in the Old Town of Dresden, as well as the car they used to flee the scene. The car was set on fire in an underground parking lot of an apartment building, causing total damages of over 1 million dollars.
In the years that followed, however, the value of the stolen goods was revalued significantly downwards, to 113 million euros. Most of the treasures were recovered in December 2022 at an address in Berlin.
In May 2023, five members of the clan were sentenced to prison terms of up to six years for this theft. Some of the jewelry was recovered following an agreement between the convicts and the authorities, but much of it still remains missing.
According to German prosecutors, the perpetrators of the robbery had previously cut the grille of a window and then reattached it to the form, in order to be able to enter the museum building and exit it as quickly as possible.
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