Seven Million - by Gary Craig (Paperback)

About the Book

Some died, some went to jail--who holds the key to the missing millions?

Book Synopsis

On a freezing night in January 1993, masked gunmen walked through the laughably lax security at the Rochester Brink's depot, tied up the guards, and unhurriedly made off with $7.4 million in one of the FBI's top-five armored car heists in history. Suspicion quickly fell on a retired Rochester cop working security for Brinks at the time--as well it might. Officer Tom O'Connor had been previously suspected of everything from robbery to murder to complicity with the IRA. One ex-IRA soldier in particular was indebted to O'Connor for smuggling him and his girlfriend into the United States, and when he was caught in New York City with $2 million in cash from the Brink's heist, prosecutors were certain they finally had enough to nail O'Connor. But they were wrong. In Seven Million, the reporter Gary Craig meticulously unwinds the long skein of leads, half-truths, false starts, and dead ends, taking us from the grim solitary pens of Northern Ireland's Long Kesh prison to the illegal poker rooms of Manhattan to the cold lakeshore on the Canadian border where the body parts began washing up. The story is populated by a colorful cast of characters, including cops and FBI agents, prison snitches, a radical priest of the Melkite order who ran a home for troubled teenagers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and the IRA rebel who'd spent long years jailed in one of Northern Ireland's most brutal prisons and who was living underground in New York posing as a comics dealer. Finally, Craig investigates the strange, sad fate of Ronnie Gibbons, a down-and-out boxer and muscle-for-hire in illegal New York City card rooms, who was in on the early planning of the heist, and who disappeared one day in 1995 after an ill-advised trip to Rochester to see some men about getting what he felt he was owed. Instead, he got was what was coming to him. Seven Million is a meticulous re-creation of a complicated heist executed by a variegated and unsavory crew, and of its many repercussions. Some of the suspects are now dead, some went to jail; none of them are talking about the robbery or what really happened to Ronnie Gibbons. And the money? Only a fraction was recovered, meaning that most of the $7 million is still out there somewhere.

Review Quotes

"If you talk to journalists who have worked in Rochester, many will tell you that Gary Craig is one of the finest news reporters ever to carry a notebook in that city."-- "Buffalo News"

"The book is divided into three sections -- an exciting police procedural start-off, as the robbery and its aftermath are detailed, and the long stakeouts involved in finding the right combination of men and missing money; then a detailed examination of the Irish and IRA connections that may or may not hold clues; and finally the story of Gibbons, a boxer on the skids whose saga carries undeniably romantic and bittersweet hues."-- "Democrat and Chronicle"

About the Author

GARY CRAIG is a reporter on the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle's Watchdog team, focusing on public safety and criminal justice. He has followed and written about the Brink's depot heist for over twenty years. He has won numerous state and national journalism awards. This is his first book.