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Inside Canada’s Most Audacious Bank Vault Robbery

The heist that turned Montreal’s West End Gang into an underworld legend

Andy Easton began working as a custodian at the Vancouver Safety Deposit Vaults in 1976. On Friday, January 7, after checking the vault’s time lock, he shut the massive doors, confident they would still be locked when he showed up for work after the weekend. The vaults had been advertised as impregnable. (A banner outside the top floor read: “Safest Armoured Vaults in the West. Burglar and Fireproof.”)

Monday, January 10, began as a typical morning. Easton headed directly downstairs to the main vault and prepared to open its seven-inch-thick door at the programmed time. Easton noticed a slight discolouration around the door’s edges. This turned out to be a thin layer of rust. According to police, Easton immediately knew something was amiss. “It was this rust that tipped me off to the burglary.”

When Easton opened the vault door, he was stunned. There were two large cylinders, each approximately five feet high, standing in one corner. Doors on hundreds of deposit boxes were missing or hanging askew from their hinges, while a majority of the top nine rows of boxes appeared to be intact and locked. Discarded papers, including insurance documents, mortgages, and stock certificates, littered the floor, and empty deposit boxes were stacked haphazardly.

Easton immediately called the Vancouver Police Department.

Following the heist, five suspects were arrested at the Vancouver airport after a baggage handler noticed their suitcases were remarkably heavy. The Vancouver Sun ran several headlines about the dramatic crime a couple of days later, including one with the tagline: “Loot in ‘tens of millions.’” With over 1,200 deposit boxes ransacked, it is no wonder original reports suggested the robbery could be the world’s biggest. Police had estimated the take was “tens of millions in gold, jewellery, and cash.”

The heist was remarkable for its sophistication and audacity. To breach the vault wall, the thieves deployed a thermal lance. It’s was the first known criminal use in Western Canada of a powerful industrial cutting tool capable of melting through reinforced concrete and steel. As the caper required specialized abilities, authorities suspected Montreal’s West End Gang, who were renowned for their expertise in high-end bank jobs and safe-cracking.

Evidence was hard to miss. Four of the five men captured—Paul Bryntwick, Kenneth Fisher, Robert Johnston, and Talbot Murphy—were identified as prominent members or close associates of this organization. The suspects were all from Eastern Canada. Furthermore, Montreal police confirmed that several of the men were already prime suspects in a violent $2.8 million Brinks armoured car heist in Montreal that occurred just a year prior. Also, while out on bail for the Vancouver heist, Bryntwick and Fisher were arrested in Montreal during an attempted robbery of an armoured car company.

The first reference to the West End Gang’s involvement, however, didn’t appear in a newspaper until years later, on June 15, 1980. The headline read: “$1m is still missing in great vault raid.” The article quoted the special prosecutor, John Hall, and a Vancouver police detective, Jim Sparks, who recalled events this way: “Probably seven men, members of Montreal’s West End Gang, with a truckload of equipment, got into the vault building through a back-alley fire escape.”

Who were the West End Gang? According Montreal’s Irish Mafia: The True Story of the Infamous West End Gang by D’Arcy O’Connor, they began as a loose network of Irish Canadians that emerged in the 1950s. Known initially as Irish Gangs, by the late 1970s, the West End Gang name seems to have been adopted. O’Connor maintains that members, who lived in Montreal’s Pointe-Saint-Charles and Griffintown neighbourhoods, had one thing in common: most were English-speaking Irish descendants living in a city dominated by people who spoke French. Police estimated the gang held 125 to 150 individuals, with captains leading different factions. The gang’s ranks included petty thieves, shakedown artists, drug importers and distributors, money launderers, loan sharks, protection racketeers, enforcers, and hired killers.

But an elite crew boasted very different skill sets: truck hijackings, armoured car and bank robberies, safe-cracking. In his online magazine Coolopolis,........

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